Philadelphia power pop four-piece Hurry have shared a new song called ‘A Fake Idea’. It’s the latest offering from their upcoming LP “Fake Ideas”, which is out June 26th via Lame-O Records.
“The thoughts we have are only thoughts, and if you give them too much attention or make them too real, your entire grasp on your life can be distorted,” vocalist/guitarist Matt Scottoline said about the themes of the new album. “Mental illness can make you truly believe things that aren’t real, and those ideas can steer your life in directions that can poison a lot of relationships.”
Fake Ideas marks Hurry’s fourth full-length album following 2018’s Every Little Thought. Earlier this month, the group shared the album’s lead single ‘It’s Dangerous’.
Vundabar have released a new track called ‘Aphasia’, marking the Boston-based trio’s first song since last year’s Either Light. The single, which features guest vocals from Indigo De Souza, arrives with a new B-side, ‘Ringing Bell’.
“The creation of this song was sparked by my dad having a stroke that has resulted in global aphasia,” Vundabar singer and guitarist Brandon Hagen explained in a press release. “That happening, on top of quarantine, produced a crisis within a crisis. The song originated as being about having difficulty describing the world and yourself, and then my pops’ stroke happened and it felt uncanny and fated.”
‘Aphasia’ is accompanied by a video created by Hagen’s sister and her boyfriend. “My sister is a producer/director, her boyfriend is a cinematographer and I make songs so we took all of our sadness, nervous energy and fear of death and channelled it into making something light and fun something to counterbalance what we were dealing with,” Hagen said. “It feels fitting that the video is about vampires, your classic death creature, having a goofy romp – it reflects what we were trying to do – flip a feeling on its head, and that feels very Vundabar-ish.”
Lucy Dacus is releasing a new album, “Home Video” on June 25th via Matador Records, and she’s shared another new single from it, “VBS.” “VBS means vacation Bible school, and I went to tons of them,” Lucy says. “It’s where Christian parents send their kids over the winter, spring, or summer breaks from school to get closer to God, maybe learn some outdoor skills, and bring home useless crafts and totems like fruit of the spirit sand art and purity rings.”
“I wrote the song in the van on the way to Nashville to record Home Video after seeing one of those reader boards outside a church advertising a wholesome church camp for kids,” she continues. “I thought about my first boyfriend, who I met at VBS, the resident bad boy who loved Slayer and weed more than Jesus. I took it upon myself to save him, and make him stop doing drugs (with an exception for snorting nutmeg). God, I was so lame.
Watch the “VBS” video, animated by Lucy’s longtime collaborator (and Home Video creative director) Marin Leong, Dacus’ last album, “Historian” came out in 2018. The following year, she also released the EP “2019”.
Dacus’ regular touring band is Jacob Blizard (guitar), Dominic Angelella (bass), Ricardo Lagomasino (drums), and Sarah Goldstone (keys, background vocals).
Lucy will be touring this summer and fall, including headlining dates . “VBS” is taken from Lucy Dacus‘ upcoming album ‘Home Video’ out on Matador Records June 25th.
Famed for its cover of a man’s crotch in jeans designed by Andy Warhol that featured a real zipper in its first pressing – later withdrawn because it damaged the vinyl inside, but today an original is a prized collectors item – the 11th American album release by the reigning “World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band,” The Rolling Stones, was the first to feature new guitarist Mick Taylor throughout and no tracks with Brian Jones. It yielded the No#1 single “Brown Sugar” and Top 30 hit “Wild Horses,” and was eventually certified triple platinum (three million copies sold in the U.S.).
If “Exile On Main Street” is considered The Rolling Stone’s creative peak and it possibily is but then “Sticky Fingers” helped get them most of the way there.
Unlike Sticky Fingers, Exile was recorded piecemeal, using leftovers from the previous album’s sessions at Olympic Studios in London and at Mick Jagger’s Stargroves Manor in Berkshire. They added some druggy, somnolent stuff later recorded at Keith Richards‘ villa in France, then completed things in Los Angeles. But it was never meant to be a statement, like Sticky Fingers, and doesn’t hold together as well as a tight, focused song cycle. And without Sticky Fingers to provide a foundation of ideas – including “Tumbling Dice,” “Sweet Virginia,” “Shine a Light” and “Stop Breaking Down” – it’s arguable that Exile would be so critically celebrated
Not a moment is wasted on Sticky Fingers; every riff lands. And as the first Rolling Stones album recorded completely with Mick Taylor it heralds a new musical beginning for the band. His ideas sharpened, and broadly expanded, their sound. “Beggars Banquet” and “Let It Bleed”, the Rolling Stones‘ two preceding LPs, are no doubt brilliant. But in some very important ways, they sound nothing like this project. Here’s why, as we offer a track-by-track guide to the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers“.
Guest players on the album include guitarist Ry Cooder, keyboard players Nicky Hopkins, Billy Preston, Jim Dickinson and sixth Stone Ian Stewart, plus horn players Bobby Keys – whose sax solo on ”Brown Sugar” was one of his signature moments – and Jim Price. The album also saw the first use of the band’s soon-to-be iconic Tongue and Lips logo.
“Brown Sugar”
Mick Jagger’s instantly controversial “Brown Sugar” is the most popular song you’ve ever heard about drugs, rape, cunnilingus and slavery. Everything about its genesis happened in the blink of an eye. The Rolling Stones recorded “Brown Sugar” during a remarkably productive three-day session on December. 2nd-4th, 1969 at Muscle Shoals in Sheffield, Ala., with Jagger completing the lyrics over a 45-minute span then quickly stepping up to the mic. They debuted it two days later on December. 6th show at the now infamous Altamont Speedway.
But Let It Bleed had just arrived on store shelves, and the band was descending into legal wrangles with its soon-to-be former manager. So “Brown Sugar” didn’t finally arrive as the lead single from their long-awaited follow-up LP, Sticky Fingers, in the April 1971.
The track shot to No. 1 in the U.S. and Canada, while hitting No. 2 in Britain and Ireland, but certainly hadn’t gotten any less controversial. Along the way, “Brown Sugar” has been called “something out of a dystopian horror film or a tale of 19th century-era evil,” one of the most racist songs in current music history.
It’s complicated. “God knows what I’m on about on that song,” Jagger bluntly admitted in a 1995 talk with Rolling Stone magazine. “It’s such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go.” So, some editing has taken place over the years.
He’ll change the line “just like a black girl should” to “young girl in concert” though that’s somewhat problematic, too. He’ll also apologize when the subject comes up: “I didn’t think about it at the time,” Jagger told Rolling Stone. “I never would write that song now. I would probably censor myself. I’d think, ‘Oh, God, I can’t. I’ve got to stop.'”
“Sway”
Guitarist Mick Taylor’scareer-altering departure from the Rolling Stones can be traced back to this song, the first recorded at Jagger’s Stargroves home.
His five-year run included contributions to three of their very best albums – with 1972’s Exile on Main St. as the centerpiece but Taylor felt he was never given his due for creative contributions on tracks like “Sway,” where his outro pushes a slow, drawling Jagger-Richards blues to soaring new levels.
“Let’s put it this way: Without my contribution those songs would not have existed,” Taylor told the Guardian in 2009, while threatening to lawyer up. “There’s not many but enough things like ‘Sway’ and ‘Moonlight Mile’ on Sticky Fingers and a couple of others. Mick had promised to give me some credit for some of the songs, and he didn’t.”
Taylor’s simmering anger finally boiled over during sessions for 1974’s “It’s Only Rock n’ Roll“, which the guitarist said included two songs (“Till the Next Goodbye” and “Time Waits for No One”) with significant unacknowledged contributions. A sense of unfinished business would permeate his tenure, and that plays out in microcosm on “Sway.”
The song fades before reaching the four-minute mark, presumably leaving some choice Taylor asides on the cutting-room floor. He later offered a scorching guitar led seven minute version on a 1991 live collaboration with Carla Olson, Too Hot for Snakes. Taylor wouldn’t perform “Sway” with the Rolling Stones until their guest-packed “50 and Counting” tour in 2013, having apparently patched things up over song writing credits.
“Wild Horses”
Keith Richards had a melody, and the title. Jagger did the rest, walking a fine lyrical line that kept the melancholy country lope of “Wild Horses” from slipping into the banal. “I like the song; it’s an example of a pop song,” Jagger told Rolling Stone, adding that he was proud of “taking this cliche ‘wild horses’ – which is awful, really – but making it work without sounding like a cliche when you’re doing it.”
They actually finished composing the song in the studio bathroom at Muscle Shoals, Richards said in his autobiography Life, because they were unsatisfied with the way “Wild Horses” originally ended.
“If there is a classic way of Mick and me working together, this is it,” Richards later said. “I had the riff and chorus line, Mick got stuck into the verses. Just like ‘Satisfaction,’ ‘Wild Horses’ was about the usual thing of not wanting to be on the road, being a million miles from where you want to be.”
It immediately attracted the attention of one of music’s great country innovators Gram Parsons was around during the Alabama sessions and ended up releasing his own version of “Wild Horses” on the Flying Burrito Brothers “Burrito Deluxe” album before the Stones original arrived as the second Sticky Fingers single more than a year later.
“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”
“Generally, I tried to bring my own distinctive sound and style to Sticky Fingers, and I like to think I added some extra spice,” Mick Taylor said in 2013’s 50 Licks: Myths and Stories From Half a Century of the Rolling Stones. “I don’t want to say ‘sophistication’; I think that sounds pretentious. Charlie said I brought ‘finesse.’ That’s a better word. I’ll go with what Charlie said.”
Case in point: “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” As a lengthy instrumental segment begins at roughly 2:43, the session has become a rabble of interweaving, presumably song-closing sounds: Richards’ grubby open-G intro has given way to an extended turn on sax by Bobby Keys, some eruptive conga work by Rocky Dijon and a tangled conversation with Mick Taylor. Then the room quiets.
Taylor doesn’t so much kick down the door as slip in the back way at 4:40, playing with a serpentine, Carlos Santana nesque quiver. “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” then concludes with a metallic riff so infectious that soon his bandmates are rushing back in.
“Towards the end of the song, I just felt like carrying on playing,” Taylor said in 1979. “Everybody was putting their instruments down, but the tape was still rolling and it sounded good, so everybody quickly picked up their instruments again and carried on playing. It just happened, and it was a one-take thing.”
“You Gotta Move”
Their December 1969 visit to one of the Deep South’s legendary studio spaces perhaps inevitably led to an old blues – in this case, Mississippi Fred McDowell’s country update of the gospel favourite “You Gotta Move.”
“We’re down in Alabama, we’re in Muscle Shoals – we gotta cut some Fred McDowell stuff,” Richards said in the documentary “Muscle Shoals” “If ever I’m gonna do it, it’s gotta be here.”
But taping “You Gotta Move” was actually a long time coming. The Stones had been jamming around the song for years, picking up on McDowell’s version from a 1965 album of the same name. McDowell followed an arrangement very much in keeping with Walter Vinson’s “Sitting on Top of the World,” while retaining some more lyric changes from the Rev. Gary Davis.
Same here. What takes this update out of the realm of the ordinary is Mick Taylor. “‘You Gotta Move’ was this great Fred McDowell song that we used to play all the time in the studio,” Taylor said. “I used a slide on that – on an old 1954 Fender Telecaster – and that was the beginning of that slide thing I tried to develop with the Stones.”
They actually started off the Alabama sessions with “You Gotta Move,” rounding out this warm-up song turned Side One closer with a very unusual drum pattern from Charlie Watts, Jagger’s rustic yowl and a rare turn on a 12-string by Richards.
“Bitch”
The B-side to “Brown Sugar” didn’t shy away from controversy either. The difference was how much more difficulty they had completing “Bitch.”
The Rolling Stones struggled through multiple late-night takes across sessions at both Olympic Studios in London and inside the mobile studio at Jagger’s Stargroves estate before finally nailing it. A late riff contribution from Richards sealed the deal.
“When we were doing ‘Bitch,’ Keith was very late,” Sticky Fingers engineer Andy Johns says in 2016’s All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track. “Jagger and Mick Taylor had been playing the song without him, and it didn’t sound very good. I walked out of the kitchen, and [Richards] was sitting on the floor with no shoes, eating a bowl of cereal. Suddenly he said, ‘Oi, Andy! Give me that guitar.’ I handed him his clear Dan Armstrong Plexiglass guitar, he put it on, kicked the song up in tempo and just put the vibe right on it. Instantly, it went from being this laconic mess into a real groove. And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s what he does.'”
The honky brass – provided by Bobby Keys and Jim Price – was overdubbed at Stargroves. As with so much during this period of creative wonder, their presence was pure happenstance. “It’s a guitar song, but it’s also somewhat dependent on the horn lines; there’s a very heavy horn line on it,” Jagger recalled. “There was an upstairs apartment in my house, and we put them up there. I don’t know why, but there they were, and they did the part over and over.”
“I Got the Blues”
“I Got the Blues” isn’t really a blues at all. Instead, the Rolling Stones approached this original with a feel – both in emotional import and musical build up – that recalls classics like Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Keys and Price return, this time with a sighing sense of heartbreak, while The Stones ace in the hole was Billy Preston adding a Stax-y Hammond gurgle.
That the Stones were able to maintain this unhurried tempo is no small thing. The tendency, never given into by the old Memphis greats, was to begin to rush – in particular as a song like “I Got the Blues” reaches its stirring climax. But Watts and Bill Wyman hold ever steady, allowing Jagger’s barking pain to cut through.
“Sister Morphine”
The Rolling Stones’ lengthy contractual disagreements with Allen Klein meant that, once again, a Sticky Fingers cut followed another earlier-released version – this time, cowriter Marianne Faithfull’s take on “Sister Morphine.” They’re substantially similar, with the Jagger-Richards sessions also including Ry Cooder on slide and bass guitar and Jack Nitzsche on keyboards. (Jagger and Watts appear on Faithfull’s version, too.)
There followed yet another legal disagreement about songwriting credits: The U.S. version of the single omitted her name; Faithfull wasn’t initially credited on the album either. She was finally added to reissues following the Rolling Stones’ ’90s-era deal with Virgin Records.
Jagger blithely dismissed the whole thing years later: Faithfull “wrote a couple of lines; she always says she wrote everything, though,” he said in 2017’s The Singer-Songwriter Handbook. “She’s always complaining she doesn’t get enough money from it. Now she says she should have got it all.” He argued that the phrase “cousin cocaine” amounted to her entire contribution.
Faithfull recorded her version during sessions for Let It Bleed, long before the dark pull of illicit drugs that moves through “Sister Morphine” became painfully true: She was an addict by the time the Rolling Stones version appeared.
“Dead Flowers”
Unlike so many Stones songs that found their footing through in-studio collaborations, “Dead Flowers” arrived fully formed. Jagger had been working on it at home for some time.
Such was his familiarity, in fact, that Jagger had set-in-stone ideas about how things should go: He demanded they play the country-infused track a step or two faster than the rest of his bandmates would have preferred. He also affected an over-the-top country accent. The finished song tends to make a deeply vulnerable moment anything but.
“I love country music, but I find it very hard to take it seriously,” Jagger confided in the 1995 Rolling Stone interview. “I also think a lot of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue in cheek.”
The setting is actually note-perfect: Richards happily riffs against Jagger’s hound-dog warble in the verses, while Taylor draws gorgeous lines through his chorus. The wounded backing vocals also make clear what’s at stake, no matter how quickly Jagger tries to turn away from heartbreak. He later admitted that Richards might have been better suited to sing “Dead Flowers,” the closest the Rolling Stones ever get to a stumble on this album.
“Moonlight Mile”
Another largely solo Jagger composition closes out Sticky Fingers, and – unlike “Dead Flowers” – it’s an unfettered triumph. “As far as I can remember,” Richards said in Life, “Mick came in with the whole idea of that, and the band just figured out how to play it.”
It wouldn’t be easy, as Jagger’s novice-level guitar talents led him to what he once called “this vaguely Oriental guitar line.” He was finally convinced to show the others how “Moonlight Mile” went, after first feeling that the unusual structure and lonesome lyric weren’t appropriate for the Stones. Listening as they rode inside a first-class railway compartment on the way from London to Bristol, Taylor quickly followed Jagger’s musical train of thought then built on it.
In fact, Taylor said a subsequent riff that he’d developed inspired string arrangements from Paul Buckmaster that billows up to give “Moonlight Mile” its remarkable power. Watts adds to the spooky atmospherics by switching to mallets, adding a rich and subtle rhythm.
Continuing a theme, the Rolling Stones’ second guitarist would be given no credit on the track. Still, the results became “a real dreamy kind of semi-Middle Eastern piece,” Jagger told Rolling Stone. “Yeah, that’s a real pretty song – and a nice string arrangement.” Somewhere, Mick Taylor is smashing a perfectly good Gibson Les Paul right now.
The album was reissued in 2015 in a variety of editions – original vinyl, CD, Deluxe 2-CD and box set, Super Deluxe box set and double vinyl LP – with alternate studio takes and live tracks from 1971 shows at London’s Roundhouse venue and Leeds University.
One of the first times Gram Parsons played an open-mic night at the Palomino, a dive in North Hollywood that, in the late 1960s, was patronized mostly by hippie-hating country-music fans, a bar regular approached him right after his performance. “I want you to meet my three brothers,” the man said to Parsons, who was wearing his favourite pair of satin bell-bottoms and whose chestnut hair was longer than pretty much anyone else’s in the place. “We were gonna kick your ass,” the man continued, “but you can sing real good, so we’ll buy you a beer instead.”
No response could have flattered Gram Parsons more. The grand aim of what he would come to call his “Cosmic American Music”—an aural/spiritual fusion of country, R&B, gospel, rock, and good ol’ Southern charisma was to find subcutaneous common bonds between people who, on the surface, seemed to be at odds. And in the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War raged and the generation gap widened, that kind of unity was hard to come by. He wanted to convince more conservative folks that unshorn draft-dodgers couldn’t be all bad if they could appreciate, say, the bottomless pathos of a George Jones ballad or the glittery grit of Buck Owens. And on the flip side, as the writer John Einarson put in his 2008 book Hot Burritos: The True Story of the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons was also interested in “educating the hippie masses on the wealth of wonderfully authentic American music hidden right under their noses.” Parsons had lofty goals for his art. A superstar in his own mind before almost anybody knew who he was, he believed fervently that his Cosmic American Music could deliver nothing short of salvation.
Throw these two perspectives together the idealist and the pragmatist toss in no small amount of drugs, as well as a pedal steel virtuoso who never quit his day job as a claymation animator on Gumby (!), and you get all the tension and late-’60s weirdness that resulted in an imperfectly near-perfect record, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ 1969 cult-favourite country-rock touchstone, “The Gilded Palace of Sin”.
The production on Gilded Palace is especially rich. (A&M’s house producer Larry Marks, assigned to helm the debut album of his label’s newest signees, later described his role on Gilded Palace quite humbly, as more of a “hall monitor on the job [to] make sure the album got finished and things didn’t get out of hand.” In that sense at least, mission accomplished.)
But there’s a strange vitality to this record that makes its supposed imperfections feel charming, even meaningful. Many people close to the band believed Marks never got the vocals to sound quite right. Certainly one of the strangest and most polarizing choices he made was, on the many songs that employ the Burritos’ Everly Brothers-inspired two-part harmonies, to split the frontmen’s voices into separate stereo channels: Parsons’ high lonesome drawl on the left, Hillman’s earthy croon on the right—and your impressionable skull in between. But that means listening to the record on headphones gives the intimate and uncanny feeling that you’ve got a little devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, each murmuring their conflicting advice right into your ears before joining together in the mellifluous conclusion that maybe they’ve both got some pretty good points after all.
Parsons was born, infamously, into a wealthy family that controlled one-third of the citrus crop in Florida. Both parents drank prodigiously and neglected their kids’ emotional needs. Parsons’ father killed himself two days before Christmas, when Gram was 12. He left his son a generous but haunting Christmas present: A reel-to-reel tape recorder a rare thing to own at the time on which Gram’s father had left a recording telling his son he’d always love him.
Around the same time, across the country in San Diego County, Hillman’s idyllic middle-class childhood had become saturated with cowboy imagery and country music. He learned to play mandolin as a teenager and gigged with bluegrass bands like the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and the Hillmen. But then Hillman’s own father died when he was 16, and unlike Parsons, that meant he had to transfer to night school and work a day job to help support the family. From that divide came the lopsided work ethic that would later define their band.
In mid-1968, though, Parsons and Hillman found themselves with quite a bit in common. They’d both just exited serious relationships and they’d both quit the same band, the Byrds. Hillman had been a Byrd since his late teens, and he’d been around for the band’s sudden success. Parsons was a late-comer. His stint in the group lasted less than a year, but he had helped steer them in a new, countrified direction on 1968’s prescient country-rock landmark “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”. Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn was never sure that was the right direction. “He turned out to be a monster in sheep’s clothing,” he notoriously said of Parsons, “And he exploded out of that sheep’s clothing. Good God! It’s George Jones in a sequin suit!”—but now in their own band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons and Hillman were finally free to be as twangy as they damn well pleased.
One of the first and finest songs they wrote together was “Sin City,” a mournful ballad that blends Biblical imagery and vivid psychedelia; a smoggy cast of late-’60s-California impending doom holds the whole thing together. “This whole town’s filled with sin, it’ll swallow you in, if you’ve got some money to burn,” the boys begin in tandem. In this song at least, “Sin City” is not the town of latter-day Elvis and roulette tables, but Los Angeles, the dreamscape that each of them had migrated to, hoping in vain to satisfy their earthly desires.
Parsons and Hillman wouldn’t always get along, but they did then. When they were writing some of the songs that would appear on “Gilded Palace of Sin”, Hillman described them as “two heartbroken bachelor guys sharing a house together.” They rented a three-bedroom rancher in Reseda, far enough from the Sunset Strip to stay focused on writing and relatively out of trouble. Hillman has called it the most creatively productive time of his and Parsons’ lives. “We woke up in the morning and would write as opposed to the usual being out until five in the morning,” he said. “We were writing every day on a spontaneous schedule. I’ve never peaked like that, working with other people.”
With Parsons and Hillman both playing rhythm guitar and splitting up lead vocals, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ sound had room for a lead instrument. Enter “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, a visual effects animator who moonlit around L.A.’s country bar circuit as a well-respected pedal-steel player. He joined the Burritos shortly before they hit the studio in late 1968. Parsons and Hillman had both wanted Kleinow to join the Byrds on the “Sweetheart” tour, and McGuinn’s refusal was one of the many reasons they both left. Putting such emphasis on Kleinow’s instrument was certainly a gamble. To rock audiences of the time, pedal-steel was the cilantro in the soup—a single element with the dubious potential to overpower everything.
“Sneaky” Pete was no ordinary pedal-steel player. He used unique, unorthodox tunings and ran his instrument through a fuzz-box as though it were an electric guitar. The 16-track console at A&M Studios allowed Sneaky to experiment with space and time more than he ever could on stage, overdubbing lacerating licks and layered textures at the forefront of songs like “Christine’sTune” and “Hot Burrito #2.” “Country is a music of traditional forms; Sneaky Pete played a classically country instrument in an entirely new way,” Meyer notes. His distinct signature blazes through “Gilded Palace of Sin” like wildfire.
Mississippi-born bassist Chris Ethridge rounded out the band’s original line-up. (They had trouble finding a drummer in the beginning, and a handful of different session players contributed to Gilded Palace.) He, too, was a fruitful writing partner for Parsons: Together they composed two of the record’s most beloved songs, “Hot Burrito #1” and “Hot Burrito #2.” .
The Burrito suite contains Parsons’ only solo lead vocals on the album, and taken together they’re two sides of the same coin the glinting fool’s gold of human desire.
“Hot Burrito #1” is a swooning, barroom-piano ballad that Parsons animates with a wrenching vocal performance. “I’m your toy, I’m your old boy, but I don’t want no one but you to love me,” he croons, grasping in the direction of something—someone—just out of reach. Then a song later—as Ethridge’s melodic bassline kicks off “Hot Burrito #2” he’s got the girl he wanted and now he’s restless as hell, dissatisfied with the sudden demands of domestic life. “When I come home/Carrying my shoes/I’ve been waiting/To tell you some news… And you want me home all night?!” he hollers, in passionate disbelief. It would seem that the burrito is always hotter on the other side.
For a wannabe rock star, Parsons innately understood the power of spectacle. Before the album cover shoot, he took the band to be outfitted for custom Nudie Suits, by the legendary country-spangled tailor Nudie Cohn. Each member’s outfit reflected something of his personality: Hillman looks regal, if a little stiff, in blue velvet, Ethridge plays Southern gentleman in a long floral-embroidered jacket, Sneaky Pete asked for a velvet sweatshirt with a huge pterodactyl on it, because why not. The pièce de résistance was Parsons, who, ever the purveyor of self-mythology, requested a personalized collage of all his vices: Marijuana leaves, pills, pin-up girls, and sugar cubes dotted with acid proudly besmirch the pure white sleeves of his suit.
One good thing about discovering “Gilded Palace of Sin” long after its 1969 release is that it was not really one of those “you had to be there and see ’em live” things.“I cannot recall one performance that the original band did where I wasn’t embarrassed to tears,” Sneaky Pete told an interviewer in 1999. It was difficult to replicate all those pedal-steel overdubs on stage, yes. But also quite often various band members would be… well, “high” goes without saying, but sometimes high on different drugs, which makes staying in rhythm a real adventure. (A coked-up lead singer and a bassist on downers is what we call a complicated time signature.) This original incarnation of the Burritos was generally a mess on the road, which did not do much to put them in their label’s good graces. Slashed promotional budgets followed, and though it earned some critical acclaim and coveted co-signs “Gilded Palace” sold only about 40,000 copies in its first run.
When he co-founded the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons already had a reputation for leapfrogging unceremoniously from band to band. He left the International Submarine Band before their first album even came out to join the more successful Byrds, and an accelerating factor in his abrupt departure from the Byrds was the fact that he’d suddenly befriended members of the even-cooler Rolling Stones. When “Gilded Palace” flopped and it became clear that the Flying Burrito Brothers weren’t going to be his ticket to overnight stardom, he veered sharply into self-sabotage until, inevitably, Hillman kicked him out of the band. They continued releasing tighter, if less soulful, records with various revolving-door line-ups; a version of the band with no original members and only vague connections to the original name is still making music. Parsons’ drug problems, on the other hand, worsened. He continued to live hard, fast, and impatiently; he died of a morphine overdose in a Joshua Tree motel room when he was just 26 years old.
“Gilded Palace of Sin” would not have existed without Chris Hillman, and for that he deserves infinite credit. It was no small feat to keep Gram Parsons out of his own way for a few focused months in the fall of 1968; the unfortunate failures and tantalizing what-if’s that marked the rest of his recording career are a testament to that. But it’s also true that on this wonderful record Parsons is clearly able to access a current of emotion and vulnerability that still remained elusive to Hillman. “They did the same thing,” Byrds producer Jim Dickson reflects in Meyer’s biography, “but Gram was willing to put feeling into his songs and Chris never was.”
GramParsons’ mid-’70s solo records, “GP” and the posthumously released “Grievous Angel,” have an almost talismanic power, Such is their cult appeal. “Gilded Palace of Sin” is different: The last track on the record, “Hippie Boy,” captures that. It is at once the least and most serious song in the Flying Burrito Brothers’ arsenal a spoken-word imagined conversation between a long-haired youth and the sort of seemingly close-minded guy Parsons might have encountered at the Palomino bar. Hillman plays both parts, though Parsons directed him accordingly (“He has to drink a fifth of scotch before he does it to feel the whole thing,” he insisted at the time. “He can’t smoke an ounce of grass.”) “Hippie Boy” is a utopian vision of togetherness, so sincere it has to be played a bit ironically. As the song, and the record, concludes, a drunken chorus of off-key voices join together to sing a few quick lines of the old hymn “Peace in the Valley.” It’s a beautifully stirring moment, and it ends too soon. The cosmic promise of a better world streaks momentarily across the sky, and then in an instant it’s gone.
Country Westerns have announced new EP featuring covers of Jad Fair and Norman Blake, Richard & Linda Thompson and Dead Moon as well as a new original song. The record will be on the street on June 18th Listen to Jad Fair & Norman Blake’s cover of ′′Undeletable“
Even if you don’t know their names, you likely know their work. Drummer Brian Kotzur starred in Harmony Korine’s film Trash Humpers and was a member of Silver Jews. Singer, guitarist, and songwriter Joseph Plunket led Brooklyn legends The Weight, with a bass-playing side-hustle for Atlanta’s Gentleman Jesse. Plunket relocated to Nashville ten years ago and opened a bar. It was there, in a town teeming with solo artists and hired guns, that the two bonded over their shared desire to be in an actual band.
On their debut album, Plunket delivers his words with a cool, raspy bravado and a hint of twang, summoning the spirits of the cities in which the tracks were made. The lyrics bend towards poetry and punk rock sneer in equal measure and lines such as “Maybe I ain’t smart, but I ain’t lying” set the tone for the entire album. The songs are full of insistent guitar riffs played on an electric twelve-string, the jangle either mitigating the edge or pushing it further. Kotzur and Rush form a tight-knit rhythm section, alternately weaving around and syncing up with one another. They build the foundations of the songs with dynamic tempo, creating a full sound with Plunket—one that is bigger than you might expect for a three-piece.
Country Western’s new single ‘Undeletable’ is out now on Fat Possum Records. Taken from their new EP ‘Country Westerns’ out June 18th.
Open most books involving rock in Los Angeles over the last four decades and Bingenheimer’s name will no doubt be indexed. His Los Angeles club Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco helped bring to prominence superstars including David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and was infamous as a centrer of rock star excess in the 1970s.
Bingenheimer ran an American radio show, who is best known as the host of “Rodney on the ROQ”, a radio program that ran on the Los Angeles rock station KROQ from 1976 to 2017. In the early 1970s, he also managed a Los Angeles nightclub called Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. His radio show strongly influenced the emergence of the Los Angeles punk scene in the late 1970s and was at odds with the prevailing country rock style that dominated the West Coast music scene at the time. The show featured the latest punk, new wave and glam releases from London and New York, and laboured to help celebrities build their careers.
Over the years his musical fetes have featured then-unknown acts such as the Sex Pistols, the Runaways, Blondie,the Ramones, X, the Go-Go’s, Black Flag, the Bangles, the Smiths and hundreds of others. For many musicians, spins during “Rodney on the ROQ” offered first glimpses of stardom that eventually came to pass.
Barney Hoskyns, whose definitive book on Los Angeles music, “Waiting for the Sun,” documents the landscape that helped define popular music, calls “Rodney on the Roq” “part of a general revolt against what one might call the bloated Eagles-style superstar bands of the mid-’70s.”
“The timing was perfect,” writer Barney Hoskyns added on the phone from England. “Here was this little station in Pasadena. Then on Sunday nights, Rodney becomes a real kind of flag-bearer, a really, really important part all of that [do-it-yourself], indie 7-inch resistance to stadium superstardom.”
Why is it that records such as this first of three volumes of “RODNEY ON THE ROQ” have never been re-released (except for two best of volumes, one on vinyl in the UK, one on CD)? I mean, c’mon – hit after hit, from alpha to omega. Take this version of one of the very best songs ever written “Bloodstains” (AGENT ORANGE) blows away the other two version’s (on the first 7″ and on the fab “Living in Darkness” 12″). Same for ADOLESCENTS’ “Amoeba”! The CIRCLE JERKS, you know that, should have called it a day after the first “LP”, so their song is the weakest here. UXA we love, KLAN is great, BLACK FLAG deliver their most aggressive song ever (what a sound!) and RIK L RIK is out there in the “Outback”. The flip has poppier sounds, nevertheless they’re all smashers! CROWD, DAVID MICROWAVE, the invincible NUNS, FENDER BUDDIES, VIDIOTS plus an unreleased SIMPLETONES jump-a-rounder. But, frankly, the last song, listed as “Surprise” done by a band called NEW YORK. It’s actually a gal named Cristina covering Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is” and drastically changing the lyrics, turning the song into one dark dyonisian chant. Isn’t this exactly the kind of music Quentin Tarantino would use in one of his movie soundtrack’s?.
Track Listing: 1. Introduction – Brooke Shields 2. Bloodstains – Agent Orange 3. Amoeba – The Adolescents 4. Wild in the Streets – Circle Jerks 5. Tragedies – U.X.A. 6. Pushin’ Too Hard – The Klan 7. No Values – Black Flag 8. The Outback – Rik L Rik 9. Right Time – Crowd 10. I Don’t Want to Hold You – David Microwave 11. Wild – Nuns 12. Furry Friend – Fender Buddies 13. Laurie’s Lament – The Vidiots 14. TV Love – The Simpletons 15. Surprise – New York
Track Listing: 1 Target 13 – Rodney on the ROQ 2 Social Distortion – 1945 3 Shattered Faith – Right Is Right 4 Black Flag – Rise Above 5 Minutemen – Search 6 Redd Kross – Burn Out 7 CH3 – You Lie 8 Agent Orange – Mr. Moto 9 Red Rockers – Dead Heroes 1 Unit 3 + Venus – B.O.Y.S. 2 The Stepmothers – Where Is the Dream 3 Gleaming Spires – Are You Ready For the Sex Girls 4 The Little Girls – The Earthquake Song 5 Levi and The Rockats- Ready to Rock 6 Twisted Roots – Snaked 7 Geza X – We Need More Power
ROTR3: Kent State, Ill Repute, J.F.A. Channel 3, Catch 22, Pariah, Red Scare, No Crisis, Rudi, Unit 3 with Venus, Bangles, Action Now, Signals, Gayle Welch, Radio Music, David Hines – Produced by Robbie Fields / Compiled by Rodney Bingenheimer / Posh Boy Records
Track Listing: A1. Kent State – Radio Moscow A2. Ill Repute – Clean Cut American Kid A3. J.F.A. – Preppy A4. Channel 3 – Seperate Peace A5. Catch 22 – Stop The Cycle A6. Pariah – Up To Us A7. Red Scare – Streetlife A8. No Crisis – She’s Into The Scene A9. Rudi – Crimson B1. Unit 3 with Venus – Pajama Party B2. Bangles – Bitchen Summer (Speedway) B3. Action Now – Try B4. Signals – Gotta Let Go B5. Gayle Welch – Day Of Age B6. Radio Music – Johnny Angel / New Dance B7. David Hines – Land Of 1,000 Dances
Many bands knocked on the parking lot door of KROQ’s studio in Pasadena and handed Rodney a copy of their music. If he liked a track, such as Agent Orange’s 1979 hit “Bloodstains,” he would play that song within the hour. In 1978, guitarist Eddie Vincent and drummer Tad of The Hollywood Squares gave Rodney a copy of their just released 45 single at his studio door. Within minutes Bingenheimer introduced the mysterious group to his wide listening audience and played “Hillside Strangler.” The song promptly charted in Record World’s New Wave Hit Parade.
Power pop band Candy singer Kyle Vincent, who at the time was Kim Fowley’s personal assistant, tells a similar story: “We had just finished recording a few tracks with Kim producing. He told me to take one of the songs over to Rodney’s studio, knock on the door, and tell him that Kim says we’re the illegitimate sons of Rick Springfield and the Go-Gos. On the way back to my apartment Rodney talked about it and then played it. That was pretty historic for us.” Bingenheimer was credited for giving the group Broken Bottles a big break by playing their single Gothic Chicks.
His championing of punk continued through the ’80s, as he played a mix of early hardcore, retro-psychedelia, rockabilly, and pop at the station. This generous collection includes highlights from his three “Rodney on the ROQ” albums, with the bulk of the numbers being hardcore cuts from the late ’70s and early ‘8Os.
Yoo Doo Right from Montreal, Québec are Inspired by the pounding rhythmic improvisations found in krautrock, experimental trio Yoo Doo Right wed noisy, melodic guitar parts, effect-heavy synthesizer soundscapes, nonchalant bass grooves and patented percussive furies into a literal wall of sound. Solemn, chin-to-chest vocals dance in and out of the primordial sonic spectrum, creating a warm pillow to rest a weary head upon.
Part interstellar ear-worms, part sonic experimentations, their upcoming opus sees the trio relentlessly chase, and successfully capture, the very essence of their art, resulting in layered bombastic tracks ranging from mechanical krautrock to audacious space rock.
Named after a song by Can, Montreal’sYoo Doo RIght fall dead-center in the Venn diagram of komische, shoegaze and post-rock. They released a split with Acid Mother Temple last year and have collaborated with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Braids, and are set to release their debut album, “Don’t Think You Can Escape Your Purpose” on May 21st via Mothland.
The album’s new single is “Presto, Presto, Bella’s Dream,” a pounding blast of motorik interstellar overdrive. Yoo Doo Right say the title is “an ode to both the tempo and a good friend who indirectly influenced us, helped us write this song.
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The Fat Angel Sings 