Weekend Listomania (Special Honey, They Shrank My Masterpiece! Edition)

Well, it's Friday and you know what that means, Yes, my Oriental fille de boinquage Fah Lo Sue and I are off to...well, I can't tell you just yet, but it involves yet another amazing find here in the Paris of the Tri-State Metro Area. A couple of blocks down the street from The Record King, actually.

I will say that although the address seems to still exist, the establishment that used to be there is long gone. And said establishment once hosted a certain rock star who became world famous a year after he recorded a live album there.

The results of this little archaeological dig will be revealed next week, if all goes well.

In the meantime, because as usual things are going to be a tad quiet around here for a bit, please wile away the idle hours till our return by pondering the following little project:

LP-Era Rock Album Whose Cover Art Has Been Least Well Served by Reduction to CD Size!!!

And my totally top of my head Top Five are:

5. Led Zeppelin -- Physical Graffiti



It just doesn't work without the die-cut windows from the LP package.

4. The Rolling Stones -- Exile on Main Street



At LP size, this one looked really seedy and surreal. Reduced to a CD, it just looks seedy.

3. The Beatles -- Revolver



I think I need to have my eyes checked, because I can't make heads or tails out of this one anymore.

2. The Monkees -- Head



Seen on the LP racks in 1968, the silver foil packaging here was kind of interestingly trippy. As a CD, however, it looks like the cover of a Spinal Tap record.

And the Numero Uno reductio-ad-absurdum sleeve job of them all simply has to be....

1. Mark Levine -- Pilgrim's Progress



I discovered this extremely obscure little slice of vintage folk-psychedelia earlier this year, and I love it dearly, but jeebus -- that cover may have looked charmingly rustic on a 12 inch piece of cardboard, but on CD it just looks like some kid's scribbling.

Alrighty then -- what would YOUR choices be?

And Speaking of Gorgeous....

The Fabs in the studio, August 14th of 1964, working on "I'm a Loser."



Words fail me.

Oh, and speaking of the Fabs, there's a surprisingly good little making-of book on A Hard Day's Night just out.

I've been less than enthusiastic about some of the earlier entries in this series, but this one is a fun read. It's a clip job, of course, but author Ray Morton has done the research, and he also talked at length with David Picker, the visionary exec at United Artists who instantly grokked what a non-schlock Beatles movie might be like, and who provides some personal insights. In any case, there's all sorts of interesting bits of tid here, including background history even this Beatlemaniac hadn't previously been aware of, and once you've read the thing, I can pretty much guarantee you'll want to listen to the album of the same name and watch a video of the film ASAP.

You can order it over here.

And yes -- there will be a Listomania tomorrow, but the clue was yesterday's record store post.

Coelacanth Discovered in New Jersey!!!!

Actually, something even rarer, that I frankly didn't even know still existed.

An indie record store.



That's The Record King, at 303 Main Street in Hackensack, New Jersey, more or less just around the corner from where I grew up. I noticed it a couple of years ago when I moved back to the old neighborhood, and I've been meaning to stop in ever since, but it took me till yesterday to finally check it out.

Bottom line: I haven't seen so much vinyl in one place since the last time I was in John Swenson's loft. (An obscure rock critic reference -- sorry).

In any case, I chatted with the proprietor -- The Record King himself -- and he told me that he has been in residence at the place for 30 years, but that the store itself has been there since the early 60s. This blew my mind, because I don't remember it at all. And I spent a great deal of my teenage years on that very block, where the now vanished Fox and Oritani movie theaters used to be. (The Oritani, you may recall, was the venue where the young me first viewed The T.A.M.I. Show).



And my mind was blown yet again when I mentioned this to a certain Shady Dame of my acquaintance, who also grew up in the neighborhood, and she instantly remembered the place. In fact, she informs me that she purchased a (what would now probably be quite valuable) promo copy of The Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'" there a week or two in advance of the single's official release in the fall of 1966.

Anyway, a very cool establishment. If you're in the neighborhood stop by; besides more LPs and 45s than you can shake the proverbial stick it, they also have some very cool T-shirts [two words: Palisades Park] and all sorts of interesting vintage stereo gear and other obsolete technological marvels.

Or simply check out their website at www.therecordking.com for more info. And tell 'em PowerPop sent you.

Tuesday Mystery Track

The Beatles' classic "Baby's in Black." As performed at a jingle house demo studio in Manhattan, sometime between 1975-77 by -- guess who?




Hint: The artist in question is as close to being a powerpop god as anyone currently wearing shoeleather.

[h/t A Certain Unidentified Reader]

CORRECTION: A friend forwarded this post to the great Marshall Crenshaw himself.

His response:

"That ain't me.. I have no idea who it is, where it came from, nada..
Sometimes I pretend not to know what things are if they embarrass me but this really has nothing to do with me, honest..."

I regret the error.

Songs for the New Depression

Finally got around to scoring a copy of Del Shannon's 1964 country album Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams, which I've been curious about for years.




As you can hear from that version of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," it's remarkably authentic for a rock guy. In fact, it's easily as accomplished as anything that was done four or five years later during the initial country-rock boom, and I include the sainted Byrds and Gram Parsons in that assessment. Shannon, of course, came to his love of the genre honestly; country was the first music he listened to as a kid and the first that he played semi-professionally.

That said, you can also hear that the above version lacks the profound ache of Hank's original, but of course that can be said of just about every cover of the song by anybody.

I should also add that "Let's Dance," the final track on Shannon's gorgeous 1991 Rock On album -- recorded in 1990, just prior to its auteur blowing his brains out with a .22 caliber rifle -- has that haunted Hank vibe in spades.



On first encounter, it seems to be an upbeat country/zydeco hybrid, a party song. Listen to it again, however, and you can't miss a desperation behind the music that's almost scary. And Shannon's vocal is, unmistakably. the work of a guy with a hellhound on his trail.

Friday on (the Canyons of) My Mind

Attentive and/or long time readers may perhaps recall the story of my first high school rock band, The Plagues, and our 1965 adventures in the recording studio. Or not.

In any case, about two years after those epochal sessions -- during the fabled Summer of Love, if memory serves -- Allan Weissman, my old chum from The Plagues, and I were hanging out in his basement in sylvan Teaneck, New Jersey, when he informed me that he had just written a song in a style that might be considered Dylanesque. After he played it for me -- it was called "Cassandra," as in the Greek babe from the ancient legends -- I concurred, and we soon worked out a rudimentary arrangement; Allan was on bass and vocals, while I flailed around on a crappy Japanese guitar of some sort (I hadn't scored my fabled 1959 Les Paul goldtop at this point).



I decided that the song needed some kind of opening figure, a la the stuff Roger McGuinn did for The Byrds, and I finally came up with one. Unfortunately, given my limited guitar skills, what I came up was not merely lame, but in fact The Lamest Riff in History©. Which is to say a simple ascending and then descending single note sequence that was essentially...uh, just a G-major scale. And even that description overstates its level of inspiration.

Undeterred, Allan and I recorded a version of the tune, in mono, on one of those Wollensak reel-to-reel tape machines that everybody, including your high school AV department, had in those days, and I seem to recall thinking even then that my contribution to the track was vaguely cringe-inducing. What I would think now, I have no idea, because the tape itself has long since disappeared. And hopefully will remain so.

Anyway, cut to 2010. I had just reconnected with Allan and the rest of the high school chums with whom, as those same attentive and/or long-time readers mentioned above doubtless know, I had toiled for years in a subsequent garage/basement band called The Weasels. And Allan had given me a CD of (Weasel) The Other White Meat -- a home-made album the guys had recorded (without me, obviously) in 2004.

And suddenly, after I put the CD into my computer -- THERE WAS THE RIFF!!!!

Yes, nearly four decades after it was first committed to magnetic tape, the guys had done a remake, if that is the word, of "Cassandra." A song which is actually pretty cool, despite my...well, you know.

And here it is, exactly as my astonished ears first beheard it again.

The feeble contemplation that is going on inside
The mutilated warnings that they won't let you confide
Oh, ring the trumpets on their ears
The new Titanics come with years
Cassandra, turn your head to other people.

Hold your banner high until it stretches to the ground.
Shake the dead; the old, the buried recognize the sound.
Put yourself in ages hence
Glance, the foundlings never sense,
Cassandra, turn your head to other people.

Shout the call; the air is dead;
They'll never understand.
It echoes off the tired feet that walk upon their hands.
Deny the cradles, rob the graves,
The sirens drone, the prophet raves;
Cassandra, turn your head to other people.

I thought at the time, and still do, that "the tired feet that walk upon their hands" is one of the most, shall we say, remarkable lines ever.

I should also add that it is a mark of what a mensch I am that, despite the centrality of my riff to the entire "Cassandra" experience, I have never asked Allan for a co-writer credit.

Thursday Video Hoo Hah (An Occasional Series)

Okay, two interesting and alarming new titles have just crossed my desk from the invaluable MGM Limited Edition Collection, and I thought I'd share.

In case you're unfamiliar with the imprint, it's similar to what the folks at Warner Archive have been doing in recent years, i.e. they pick obscure but theoretically interesting films from the studio vaults -- films that wouldn't necessarily have enough admirers to warrant an official DVD rollout -- and make them available in bare-bones budget editions on a burn-on-demand basis.

The fly in the ointment -- or rather the factor that makes the whole venture economically viable -- is that the films in question are not remastered or restored; they're burned, instead, from whatever the most recent prior video master happens to be. Which means quality is hit and miss; some of them look great, some of them less so. And the widescreen entries aren't always letterboxed.

Exhibit A, in any case, is Captain America. Obviously, this isn't the not terrible 2011 extravaganza; rather it's a 1990 Cannon Films piece of crap (pardon the redundancy) directed by Albert Pyun.



Like millions of other folks, I didn't see this back in the day, but I must confess to a certain fondness for its auteur, who happens to be one of the four most heinous living filmmakers, after Jess Franco, Jim Wynorski, and the Spawn of Satan himself, Michael Bay (who at least isn't as prolific as the rest of them).

As for Pyun's Captain America, it has a pretty decent cast -- dependably hissable Ronny Cox, Ned Beatty, Michael Nouri -- and star Matt Salinger makes a believable pre-super powered Steve Rogers without the benefit of the CGI that converted Chris Evans into a 90 pound weakling in the 2011 version. Unfortunately, Pyun's film also features perhaps the least convincing mutant monster lab rat in film history, and after that I can think of very little else to say in its behalf.

Fortunately, Hickey and Boggs -- the 1972 urban film noir directed by Robert Culp and starring its auteur and his I Spy pal Bill Cosby -- is a genuine knock-out. Culp and Cosby, whose chemistry is if anything even more palpable than in their TV days, play a pair of down at the heels hard-drinking private eyes who get involved in a search for a missing girl. In classic noir style, nobody is who they appear to be, and the whole thing gets positively existential by the end, with a body count to rival a slasher movie and an extremely dark windup.

Fledgling scripter Walter Hill's screenplay didn't really click with critics in 1972, but in retrospect it's obvious he got the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles exactly right, and there are some fabulous character parts (a young Michael Moriarty is memorable as a small-time hood, and Rosalind Cash is aces as Cosby's ex-wife). This is, in sum, one of the most underrated movies of the 70s, and if there's a Cult Film God in Heaven, the occasion of this new DVD will bring it to the wider audience it so richly deserves.

Here's the trailer to give you an idea.



Alas, the new DVD version is not, as it claims on the box, in widescreen, but the print is otherwise fine.

In any case, you can order Hickey and Boggs -- and Captain America too, if you're somewhat perverse of eyes and ears -- over at the MGM/Amazon website here

And Speaking of Gorgeous...

...our chum Sal Nunziato, over at Burning Wood, discovered this quite seraphically beautiful mix of "Wendy," from the Beach Boys first great album All Summer Long (1964).

And he has an interesting critical perspective on it.

"Come down a bit on the reverb and vocals and turn up the bass, guitar and drums a tad higher, and what you have here may be one of the very first power pop songs. I've listened to 'Wendy' countless times, but it was always a fly-over tune, never a Beach Boys destination for me. Now suddenly, I actually hear it and I can't stop. The magic of music."

Obviously, I agree, although I've had a thing for this song since forever. In any case, as some of you may have already guessed, I'm mostly posting this as a big "I lurve you!" to a certain shady dame of my acquaintance.

UPDATE: I just found this live version from the Ed Sullivan show -- which I'd never seen before -- and the word "awesome" is inadequate.

The Machine Stops (Part "Feh!")

Oh lordy....Firefox insists that I update it.



Regular posting resumes on the morrow, the gods willing.

Thank God We Never Covered "Peace Train"!

Long-time and/or attentive readers are perhaps aware of my fondness for The Tremeloes' 60s classic "Here Comes My Baby," written by The Artist Formerly Known as Cat Stevens. They may also recall that my 80s skinny tie band The Floor Models used to cover it, but that no recording has survived.

However, amongst the artifacts I recently retrieved from a dank storage space in the Bronx was a rehearsal tape -- from 1989 -- of three of the four Flo Mos, plus guitarist extraordinaire Doug Goldberg, having a go at the song. In quite lovely stereo.

And here it is.




Lead singer Gerry Devine flubs the opening lyric, and my chum Glen "Bob" Allen is playing on an electronic drum kit, but I think it sounds pretty good none the less. That's me screwing up on bass and harmony vocals, of course.

In all seriousness, of all the songs I've ever played on stage, this has always been the one I enjoyed the most; I think it's something about the Buddy Holly-ish thing at the end of the choruses that gets me.

Given the year this was recorded, however, I can only assume that the then-current fatwah on Salman Rushdie was somewhere on our minds at the time.