The purge
Future updates: c/o More Cream Please
CDs | LPs, EPs, 45s | Cassettes | Videos | Books
Do you like music? Used music? Do you like paying for it? Here is a list of stuff you can buy from me. All fair offers considered—everything must go!
Longtime readers (!) will recall I started this… process… back in 2010. I acknowledged, a few years too late (despite earlier stages of denial and remorse), that the "compact disc" was a dying format. The solution? Sell! Sell! The funny thing about owning way too many CDs, though, is that when you sell a big chunk of them you still have too many. So this is it, the big purge you've been waiting for—Frumpies for everyone!
This page will be updated as things are added and removed. There's a link on the right: bookmark that shit! Much more to come over the next several months. Storefronts are open for business on Discogs and eBay, with energy-efficient windows and sparkly shit everywhere. So call your congressman, drain your IRA and pack an extra pair of pants—this is all happening.
[Edit 1: This is everything. For the record—har! har!—The Argument is the last CD and, therefore, "Argument" the last song I listened to before declaring my entire collection available for purchase. It's a fitting end that appropriately honors the music—the physical music—I love. I'm a little sad.]
[Edit 2: Hold the phone! As it turns out, tangible music is sometimes cheaper (or outright more available, like vinyl-only stuff) than digital downloads. So—sporadically—more to come from Pere Ubu, Wu-Tang Clan and other bands that don't start with "the." And I still need to figure out how to transfer from my Mudhoney and Blues Explosion videocassettes.]
[Edit 3: A. is purging as well and I'll list her items that aren't terribly out of place. Sorry, Tori Amos. I'll throw some music videos and books on the fire too. For completists. You know how it is.]
[Edit 4: Fuck eBay. That fee-factory bullshit is closed.]
[Edit 5: Cassettes are back! Let's take an exhaustive inventory of my youth—notice an enviable lack of Bon Jovi.]
CDs
Psychedelic Sounds is the third greatest album of the album era. Not the third-greatest, the chronologically third greatest. Easter Everywhere, as I've stated before (along with the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle), is an immensely over-referenced album by crappy contemporary Brooklyn bands.
A collection of obscurities from the definition of an obscure band itself. "You Could Call Me Job" still brings it though. "When it gets to that part, fade it!"
Yes! The Bonfire boxed set takes no prisoners.
Originally not released in 1968. "Really Doesn't Matter" will be stuck in your head all morning.
"And the award for worst album title of 1999 goes to…"
I went through an AIS phase in the mid nineties for some reason, scooping up everything I could find (which wasn't much). Catchy stuff, sure, but not worth the effort.
Continue to screw yourself.
Slip inside my sleeping bag, baby.
As if the grunge explosion didn't occur during your senior year of high school and your freshman year of college.
I'm not sure what made me keep these for so long. I must have been really tired.
"Of the English kind." Double-disc set of most (all?) of the A-sides spanning all iterations of the band, including an awful reunion effort from 1983 called "The Night." Filled out with B-sides, including the ridiculously smoking hot "A Girl Named Sandoz," and EP-only tracks.
"A ground effect vehicle (GEV) is a vehicle that is designed to attain sustained flight over a level surface (usually over the sea), by making use of ground effect, the aerodynamic interaction between the wings and the surface. Among the best known are the Soviet ekranoplans, but names like wing-in-ground-effect (WIG), flarecraft, sea skimmer, or wing-in-surface-effect ship (WISE) are also used."
Automator – Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars and Sitars (1998)
Dan flushes out (with Kool Keith's assistance) his fine 1996 EP (below) and makes it "much better." He later mixes up some Bollywood soundtracks on Bombay, which Wikipedia (thanks again!) says "was eventually withdrawn, possibly due to copyright concerns." Truly amazing snippets of dialogue.
The Painkillers EP contains a re-recorded, improved version of early single "He's My Thing," as well as a live "Fontanellette" medley (as one CD track) of most of Fontanelle. As the old saying goes, if you can only buy one…
Black Dots contains demos recorded in 1979. It was previously bootlegged as The Zientara Sessions.
"What's yo name?"
An amalgamation of Chet Baker Sings, Chet Baker Sings and Plays and six newly recorded songs appended to the original reissue of Chet Baker Sings. Chet! Baker! Sings!
Kin of Tobi. "Death by Guitar" is great if a little slick.
Ask for Biffy®. Anthology is a career summary up through 1998's Hello Nasty, selecting liberally from the back catalog. They threw in the new "Alive" and a few unreleased songs to ensure redundant ownership. The accompanying eighty-page booklet features legitimately excellent song-by-song notes from the band. I appreciate that they didn't exclude the elephant in the room named "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)." Oh, and I won that "Pass the Mic" single from my college station. They were happy that somebody, anybody, called. I think they threw in some Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Corrosion of Conformity bullshit too.
Featuring non-croaking accompaniment by Bret Lunsford and Heather Lewis.
The albums are initial CD issues from the eighties. True-to-source mixes are superior to the recent controversial remasters. The Biffy®-winning A Hard Day's Night is their only album where all the songs are keepers. The second Anthology set is from Amy's collection and the "Rock on… anybody" during "If You've Got Trouble" is unfair—that riff is solid!
Beck's two best songs might be "Corvette Bummer," relegated to "Loser" B-side status, and "In a Cold Ass Fashion" from the Jabberjaw singles series. Scientology sure is strict.
"Jim, what?"
Sinister is probably their best album, as in their most consistent, but it doesn't contain one of their top ten (or even fifteen?) songs. Strange phenomenon. Arab Strap is the UK edition that A. picked up while studying in Scotland—can't get more authentic than that. (Oh sorry, it's not on vinyl.)Waitress includes the charming "Piazza, New York Catcher," which might be in the top ten, followed by the forgettable "Asleep on a Sunbeam," which most certainly is not.
"You have seen more of me already than I will ever see of myself."
I bought this in college because some friends and I always used the phrase "big-ass truck" to describe the hugeness of particular objects for some reason. (The album sucked.) One friend modified the wording as "bitch-ass trick" to much fanfare. Earlier, as freshman, the same dude rated Jews as slightly better than blacks because "well, at least they're the right color." Verbatim.
Shiny bastard. "Lyrical themes include South American killing techniques."
In which one begins to collect versions of "Rebel Girl."
In which "Enjoy" on a mixtape made a friend of mine uncomfortable.
This first full-length set the standard: excellent cover design (with texture), pretty solid album. Not sure that's the ratio they were shooting for. Ghost was signed by the band at Newbury Comics and I was annoyed that they got Sharpie all over it.
I saw the Black Crowes open for Robert Plant in 1990, hours after suffering a throat-swelling allergic reaction to apples. Now I'm selling my wife's By Your Side-skipping Black Crowes CDs using a Mac, which was invented by Rumeal Robinson in—yes—1990. I'm old so I had the first two on tape instead.
In related news, the Jimmy Page package is a nice recording. The dozen or so musicians aren't as good as Jones and Bonham (I think Steve Gorman graduated with honors from the Joey Kramer School of Shitty Drumming) but Chris Robinson sounds great. Oddly, the tray lists the cover of the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things" (which borrows the Jeff Beck Group's arrangement) as "Shapes of Things to Come." The subpar graphic designer must have been listening to Nuggets that day.
"I think I'm gonna just end it all with Black Flag tomorrow at the Fleetwood, and I hope all you punk-ass motherfuckers gonna be there too because… I just… I'm gonna end it fucking all, man! Tomorrow! I'm fucking damaged, I'm so fed up! Tomorrow night! I'm gonna end it all with Black Flag at the goddamn Fleetwood! Redondo Beach!" Eight-plus minutes of "The Process of Weeding Out" to kick off the live album? "I can't take it anymore!"
The first four albums, before they went all keyboardy batshit. Forty-eight tracks and not a bad one in the bunch, particularly number four.
The first album's "Druganaut" should have made Volume 1. The second album's "Tyrants" might make next year's Volume 6. (You too can own a piece of rock history!)
As if there weren't enough Brian Jonestown Massacre albums to own.
The first three albums are of the remastered import variety. How these haven't been properly reissued in the US, aside from the out-of-print Black Box collection, is beyond me. The 1996 collection is a three-disc set of all non-instrumental tracks from Black Sabbath through Sabotage. Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die! are not represented—weird, right? I guess Most of Several of the Ozzy Osbourne Years couldn't fit on the label. Past Lives explores reincarnation in the form of the bootlegged Live at Last and a kiboshed Live in 75. The second Paranoid set contains four discs with the album itself, a 1974 "quadradisc mix" from 1974 for some reason, two European concerts from 1970 and a bitchin' hardcover book.
"Wait a minute… do you call your mother, your sister or your grandmother a ho?" "Basically I do."
At the time I was torn between buying this and their Nia debut. Unfortunately both are uneven and make it difficult to pick and choose songs to keep because they all bleed into each other. Audacity and I still have a closer relationship than I'd like.
Art Blakey, Eric Dolphy, Lee Morgan… all with a single-album foot in the door, all otherwise ignored in favor of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Miles Davis.
As much fun as you can have with Italian twins and one or two Japanese women.
If this were only "Call Me" I'd be happy. That is truly the best of Blondie.
The two-fer contains the stereo mix of the first album. I don't have Vincebus Eruptum tattooed on my arm for nothing.
"Jack, who are these guys?" "That's my theme music. Every good hero should have some. See you around."
No nude Christina album covers? Fuck the heck!
I remember reading a review of 1969–1974 that was something along the lines of "Finally, a Bowie compilation where 'Space Oddity' isn't the first song. OK, so it's the second."
In a twist of ass-backwards fate, the Smack Bunny Baby CD excludes a song ("Velveteen Freak Scene") featured on the LP. I love these bands who cater to vinyl nerds. I am not one of them.
Some good shit, even if Jamalski and Tiger stick out like sore thumbs.
"And I Live in a Town Where I Ain't No Goddamn Son of a Bitch."
Dayton block! I once had an indie crush on Kelley Deal. At least I think it was her. Unfortunately, both sisters made the mistake of wearing red bandanas to 1990's Biffy® ceremony and got gaffled by JD.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Strung Out in Heaven (1998)
"Q: Anton, did you sell your soul? A: Well, I tried to, but the line was so long I said 'Fuck it!'"
Prepare yourself: this is amazing. Best-album-of-1975 amazing. Best-album-since-1975 amazing?
"It was acid that eventually made things extra crazy." In the jungle groove, woot! Features a bunch of songs like "Funky Drummer," "Get Up, Get Into It and Get Involved" and the extended bonus JB's track "Blind Man Can See It" that were sampled like crazy in the eighties and nineties. As for the live album… man, I've been blogging a long time. The Payback was supposedly rejected as "not funky enough" to be the soundtrack to cinematic touchstone Hell Up in Harlem. Revenge!
I bought this on a friend's recommendation and instantly regretted it. There's only so much whimsy I can take. "New Rock"? "No New Rock"? Make up your minds!
Christ, but I couldn't get enough of Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like a Secret in my mid twenties. Only now do I notice the whining.
Jon, Judah and Russell fully collaborate on the first (I know this album by heart) and on two songs on the second—presumably, Ass Pocket outtakes. Ass Pocket Outtakes now playing in back-alley theaters across the country.
"I used to follow, yeah, that's true. But my followin' days are over, now I just gotta follow through. Ohh-ohhhh!"
Title track. You're welcome.
As if I didn't get Locust Abortion Technician for "Sweat Loaf" and Independent Worm Saloon because it was produced by John Paul Jones.
I bought this for A. and hand-delivered it to her place in Somerville when she was home with the vapors or something. We later watched Shakespeare in Love and, truly, fell in love ourselves that day.
I discovered WZBC during a co-op assignment at an advertising agency in 1994. "Bum Leg" and others were the bread and butter of that station all Summer long. This is super rare, highly sought after and not even thirty minutes long.
Enough already. You are not "Louisville's answer to Unwound."
Sessions is essentially Mirror Man on shuffle with five bonus tracks. And when I say essential I mean essential. And, um, check back later on that trout-mask thingie. Some day?
How this doesn't include "A Boy Named Sue" is beyond me.
Myra Lee's "We All Die" is supposedly a Dear Sir outtake but it's better than that whole album. Community is represented by the 1996 smash hit single "Nude As the News" on Volume 4. I always held Moon Pix in such high regard and did play it quite often at my Fenway studio apartment, in between Woody's pizzas, Harp twelve-packs and Gordon Freeman headcrab massacres. Upon further recent listening, though, it's pretty mellow. "Cross Bones Style" is the clear standout (though the "Paul Revere"-sampling "American Flag" stands out as well) and, in conjunction with how goddamn cute the pre-problems Chan Marshall was on the front and back covers, made me think it was better than it was. The mellow vibe is given a welcome hard edge on the follow-up (after a five-year break) You Are Free, particularly on "Free," "He War" and "Shaking Paper," while the composed darkness is still present on the haunting "Names." It is Cat Power's best album and, unfortunately, her last good one.
Released on Peanut Butter Wolf's Stones Throw Records ten years after Charizma was shot to death during a mugging. Yikes.
Again with Matador. "Relaxed Fit" though?
A mid-period four-song EP is an odd commitment to a band.
I think it would have been easier to find an original 1967 release than this reissued disc. So I most likely turned around and sold it for less than a dollar. Pity my youth.
"Doll in a Dress" features the third-best riff of all time. The first- and second-best riffs are both featured in Led Zeppelin's "How Many More Times." Fourth-best, too.
I starve, feed me!
Call me crazy but I like this album better than anything Bratmobile recorded.
In which I was not yet ready for Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation.
John Coltrane – Both Directions at Once (2018)
The master. Clarification on those "seventies" releases: Transition was recorded between the 1965 sessions that produced The John Coltrane Quartet Plays… and Ascension. Its CD track listing was modified from the original LP release for some reason, borrowing two tracks ("Vigil" and "Welcome") from the posthumous Kulu Sé Mama and kicking one ("Dear Lord") over to the Dear Old Stockholm compilation. Sun Ship and First Meditations (an early effort subtitled "For Quartet") fall between Ascension and the later, sextet-ed Meditations. This music makes me a better man.
My mom bought this for me so I could copy it onto a cassette for her. Thanks mom!
Remember the whole cabaret rock thing in the mid nineties? Me neither.
The full album discography (plus the Don't Ask preview single) from a band with the most ill-suited name in rock history. The debut includes the "Fast Piss Blues"/"I Got the Blues" (Stones cover) single as a bonus.
Fuzz, howl, distortion, release.
"Politically active band that combined confrontational left-wing politics with self-deprecating humor and a sound that encompassed elements of hip-hop, hard rock, funk, industrial and dance music." Twenty-six tracks and only the PE knockoff "Tool and Die" was ever salvaged for a mixtape. Likely purchased and sold back within weeks. Yikes.
"The album received mixed reviews upon release, but drew more praise in later years." I don't know, I liked it at first (especially "Free Fall") but eventually sold it for probably a dollar. Fucking Matador.
The two Attractions sets each include a bonus disc and five thousand pages of liner notes.
The proper Psychotic Reaction LP (slightly shuffled) and a few contemporary A- and B-sides. Hearing "Psychotic Reaction" in 1994 might have more to do with my enduring taste in rock & roll outside of "Touch Me I'm Sick."
Purchased, as most newbies did, for "Bikini Girls With Machine Guns." In high school I couldn't understand how the song didn't make it onto Gravest Hits. It was on MTV, for crying out loud! The answers were simple: first, Gravest Hits was not actually a "greatest hits" collection but a proper EP; and last, as in no other explanation was necessary, Gravest Hits was released in 197-goddamn-9.
The Those Were the Days box is almost everything one of my favorite bands released in its lifetime and postmortem. "Almost"? "Almost"! Excluded are the proper Wheels of Fire versions of "Passing the Time" (a full jam replaces the fade-out before the last verse) and the live "Toad" (with extra Ginger goodness incorporated before Jack and Eric clear out), the Goodbye performance of "Politician," the Live Cream performance of "NSU" and the original (superior) mix of Live Cream, Vol. 2's "White Room." Christ, you even get the Falstaff "thirst-slaker" advert, sporting a riff that should have been reserved for a proper song. "Ehh-vree thuhst!"
Catch-all compilation that includes both mixes of "How Does It Feel to Feel." The American version is better. USA! USA!
The first four albums… and an everyone-had-it compilation. 1969 could not have been more successful for the band but I often wonder how much more satisfying it might have been had John Fogerty been more selective. The three albums from that year hover around a half hour each, but why not trim the fat and release two amazing forty-minute albums instead? Cut the four covers ("Good Golly Miss Molly," "Night Time Is the Right Time," "Cotton Fields" and "The Midnight Special") to maximize publishing royalties, ditch the weak "Lodi" and "Don't Look Now (It Ain't You or Me)" and you're set. You won't unseat Zeppelin but you're in the room.
"Don't you feel sorry for the poor little swine?" No. My attitude toward cops has not improved over the years.
There's no excuse to change the radio station in the middle of "Miserlou" even if you do land on "Jungle Boogie."
The hits just keep on coming. I like that they covered the Stooges' "1970," renamed it "I Feel Alright" (the Stooges' working title) and garbled the sung "nineteen seventy" into something like "nice and such-and-such."
This might just be called The Dandy Warhols. Whatever, it's the original issue of the first album.
I went a little overboard with garage stuff in the early aughts. Those drives between Northampton and Somerville required noise.
I don't know why but I love the "crocker" drop-ins that haphazardly censor the second album. Also: fuck the Turtles.
Thus begins a marvelous, ignored post-Fresh Fruit career.
Warble Womb-less Dead Meadow retrospective. I'm hanging onto Three Kings because of its DVD, even though I haven't watched it in three years (and even though I might get rid of my DVD player, too). [Edit: Here it is! Ripped to "Android Tablet" quality and still unseen.] The Nothing They Need contains the CD-only cover of "Tomorrow Never Knows," shitting all over vinyl absurdists to my delight.
"World Click" or "World Cleek"?
Del and Digable Planets fall into the category "Ignored the hoopla around the first album only to dive in with the superior and ignored second album."
I once showed up so late to a Blues Explosion show at Lupo's that I only heard half of the last song. Luckily my ticket stub got me into a smaller club up the street to see these guys. Soon after they fired the keyboard player.
Do you think we'll make it to 3030? I don't want to miss the 1,066th Annual Biffy® Spectacular.
I picked this up because Jon Spencer included the band in a space-filling series of shout-outs to Sleater-Kinney, RL Burnside and others toward the end of "Blues Explosion Attack" on Selector Dub Narcotic. I wish he'd yelled "Dirtbombs!" instead.
The Jesus Lizard's guitarist gets together with Mule's drummer and no one else to form a jazz "trio."
It bothered me in, yes, 1984 when Tina Turner recorded (though I didn't realize it at the time) David Bowie's "1984" on her Private Dancer mere months after Van Halen's 1984 and its cool-when-driving-through-a-carwash title track. As a result, I never bought Greatest Misses because I already owned Public Enemy's collection of the same name. RadioShack never had a chance.
How did they only make two albums? Were they too goddamn stoned or something?
Purchased at the Newbury Comics in Amherst center when I probably should have been selling books on campus across the common. I met zero Amherst College professors during my illustrious sales career.
DJ Shadow's first two CDs are essential—essential, what with Endtroducing overpowering Brainiac to slip a Biffy® to the prom queen (I'm running out of metaphors)—while the third, though not without its strengths ("Fixed Income" made the cut back in aught seven), points toward a less interesting club appeal fully realized on the later, lousy The Outsider. I mean, "The Right Thing/GDMFSOB" borders unlistenable territory. Strike, therefore, represents the true end of our love affair, even as the anachronistic bulk of its material (the "In/Flux" and "What Does Your Soul Look Like" singles) predates the first album. We'll always have Twin Peaks.
"Peace in Zaire," legitimizing Sublime against all odds since 1998.
It took a long time for me to appreciate this and I still think it's only pretty good. That west-coast sound is some weak sauce compared to Public Enemy and Wu-Tang.
Several songs "detail a list of services offered by Dr. Octagon, who claims to treat chimpanzee acne and moosebumps. Octagon also pretends to be a female gynecologist and often engages in sexual intercourse with female patients and nurses." I love Wikipedia.
Intense! I parted with this too soon and would probably appreciate it more now. Drag.
Feeding the flames (ignited by Fugazi's The Argument) of my thousandth struggle, whether or not to refer to "Hurdy Gurdy Man" as the title track of The Hurdy Gurdy Man. These are the problems I create for myself. Barabajagal is a remastered import with eight hundred bonus tracks. The title track, if "Goo Goo Barabajagal (Love Is Hot)" can be considered the title track, is currently rocking a Ford commercial.
Because one disc of instrumental math rock was not enough.
Not to mention the Best of the Doors and Classics cassettes (listed below) that I blew the fuck out in high school. The first album was—and remains—so good I bought it twice, despite the novelty "she gets high" and "fuck me, baby" remixes of "Break on Through" and "The End," respectively, included on the 1999 remaster. I still hear the skip at 1:52 of "Back Door Man" from my dad's record, echoing through the house, with or without Bruce Botnick's meddling. It's a shame that "the Doors" has devolved to Manzarek and Krieger (maybe Densmore doesn't deserve a pass) re-re-repackaging the same songs, albums and compilations to a point of satire.
"Oh… my god." So goddamn good.
Pink Moon's title track (see, Donovan, it's not difficult!) is probably the album's best known song after it was featured in some fahrvergnügen or other but I'll always favor the lovely "Road" following its appearance in Hideous Kinky. I feel like I should see that movie again now that I have a lovely, precocious daughter of my own.
CD EPs are the most dated format in all of commercialized performance media.
"Dub Narcotic Sound System meets the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in a dancehall style!" You had me at "Jon Spencer Blues Explosion."
"Judas!" "Play it fuckin' loud." The fifty-page booklet accompanying the live set offers an insightful be-there essay along with several terrific photographs, including one of "the offending instruments."
Let's go, Edan, we're going on eight years. Echo Party doesn't count.
A friend and I saw Brainiac shortly before Timmy Taylor died and we couldn't get over that sick low end in a new song they never recorded. I'm pretty sure guitarist John Schmersal took it with him for "Biofeedback."
Wikipedia says Rhythm is "one of only a few rap albums that has received a 5-mic rating when it was reviewed in The Source." Of course The Source employs a microphone-based rating system. Rakim's greatest legacy is announcing a the song's title at the beginning of every song.
Compiling seasonal tunes from The Merriest of Christmas Pops and others, plus the previously unreleased and decidedly secular "I Feel Merely Marvelous" for some reason. "We hope it will add to the spirit and cheer contained herein." However you define "filler," Combustible Edison's Brother Cleve.
What the fuck? It's a miracle I survived 1994 financially.
Somehow the only Fall CD I've ever owned. "Das Vulture Ans Ein Nutter-Wain" translates to "Really? The Light User Syndrome?"
Kurt Bloch was a name I'd heard somewhere so I dropped twelve or thirteen bucks on a CD I don't remember because it was nineteen ninety-fucking-four and that's all I did that year.
The Soft Bulletin is the "original" international edition without all the remixing. The others are straight-up America. USA! USA!
Floh de Cologne – Rockoper Profitgeier (1971/1998 reissue)
Translation: "Flea of Cologne – Rock Opera Profiteer."
I bought a quasi-legitimate version of this at Turn It Up! in Northampton. A good eighty-five percent of their stock is quasi-legitimate.
I wanted to play "Do You Want To" at our wedding but A. overruled me with the crowd-pleasing "Take Me Out" instead. She also nixed Destiny's Child's essential "Bootylicious" in favor of a solo Beyoncé song that was equally "not as dirty." What the! I did get my way with Andre Williams, as his "Sling It, Bang It and Give It Cab Fare Home" on repeat provided the dinner soundtrack.
Compiles all singles except for Frumpies Forever, which is only their best single for crying out loud.
13 Songs compiles the Fugazi and Margin Walker EPs. Repeater adds the 3 Songs EP. I like Steady Diet of Nothing more every time I listen to it. I parted ways with In on the Kill Taker a long time ago because it sounded a little desperate and forced: "We are Fugazi!" The last three proper albums (along with the Instrument soundtrack) bring it all back home for me, even if the strong End Hits is at a disadvantage between the experimental Red Medicine and the epic finale The Argument. They earned their Biffy® when it mattered.
Track the descent into parody!
With barely eight months left in the year it's looking like this or Wilco's Star Wars for the 2015 Biffy®. Naming your second album (x) II will always break a tie.
My baby not Beck. (Your baby ain't Beck like Beck.) She not Beck. (Your baby ain't Beck like Beck.) She not Beck. (Your baby ain't Beck like Beck.) She not Beck.
"Hey, yo, Premier. Thought you wanna hang out, go get a haircut or somethin', you know what I'm sayin'? Yo. Gimme a call later. Aiiight chill."
What's in the bag? I don't know, I didn't even keep that song and it was the only one I liked.
"We started talking about it and agreed that the title song, 'Trouble Man,' sung by Marvin Gaye, was a true classic." Thanks again for clarifying the name of the title song, Jorge.
Other albums have better songs but Luxure is their best album. Does that make sense?
Greatest Hits is all I ever wanted, minus "Can't Stop the World," "Skidmarks on My Heart," Speeding" and "Girl of a 100 Lists." The reunion album was purchased at a Wal-Mart in Michigan. Rental car: Chevy Malibu. I blame society.
What made the Goats great on the first album were boiled-over anger, clever expression and fantastic production. The MCs? The rhyming? Well… I did always like Swayzak's raspy voice. They obviously had a lot to say and they found ways to say it well (successful mostly via the between-song adventures of Chicken Little and Hangerhead) but the flow suffers from time to time, usually when Madd is on the mic. The Butcher's earthy production overcame much of this and left us one of the last great layered mixes before everyone copied Dre's keyboard minimalism (which took about fifteen years to grow on me). "Don't you boys have any respect for our uniforms?" "Uh, it's not that we don't respect you, we just seem to feel a lot better when you're not around." The Goats played my college in 1993 after Oatie left and they had fliers around campus using this picture with Oatie's left side just torn off. He must have been the brains—and the owner of the scissors—because 1994's No Goats, No Glory was as interesting as being the only sober guy in a room. Tricks of the Shade remains an artistic achievement most rappers never know.
Mighty. Trust. Krusher.
"Gossip"? "The Gossip"?
"The Message," relevant for thirty-plus years and going strong.
This album is a killer. Har! Har!
Grant's Last Stand was recorded in 1978 and used to round out Paul's, Gene's and Peter's solo Kiss albums that year. Ace needed no help.
"What should we call it when we reissue Dry As a Bone and Rehab Doll as one CD?" "How about Dry As a Bone/Rehab Doll?" "You've done it again, unpaid Sub Pop intern!"
You already have this.
Guided by Voices – Alien Lanes (1995)
Propeller was the assumed last album. Vampire was the assumed one-off. Bee Thousand actually did propel them and then Alien Lanes delivered a deserved level of quasi-stardom. I don't care what anyone says but they were never again as good—these four albums are the cream.
Junior high. Those were the days, I wanna hold your man.
I bought two volumes of Jazzmatazz and all I got was this lousy "Slicker Than Most."
I wonder what the Squeaky-Voiced Teen has been up to since Guv'ner broke up.
Calvin's croaking can't stop the bum rush.
"We want… information. Information. Information!" "Who are you?" "The new number two." "Who is number one?" "You are number six." "I am not a number! I am a free man!" "Hahahahahahahahahaha!"
For those without enough Father Guido Sarducci in their lives.
Oh, what "The White Album" could have been.
Hall is little underwhelming after the first three studio albums and the successful Space Ritual, but it's still Hawkwind. "The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear in Smoke)" and the live "You'd Better Believe It" bring the familiar drum-driven rock action.
"This and Air’s Moon Safari are what I play whenever I want to make my lady moan," said every straight man who's ever owned this album.
Begin with "Revolution of Hearts (Part 1)" and end with "Revolution of Hearts (Part 2)."
You see, helmets are things you strap on. RIP my old Meantime tee.
Two compilations of Experience, Band of Gypsys and solo tracks that should have been combined and edited. I struggle with the slick production of Hendrix's post-1968 studio recordings. Albums by the Experience are filed under J below—these are the problems I create for myself.
A. and I saw the Hives at Avalon on the Tyrannosaurus Hives tour. The Sox were playing the Yankees across the street and the singer said he hoped the Sox won. Little did he know. On the way out, A. bought a tight NULLA SALUS SINE THE HIVES T-shirt that she rarely wore, even though she was smoking hot in it. Too bad. Anyway, Veni Vidi Vicious is an enhanced CD with videos for "Hate to Say I Told You So," "Main Offender" and "Die, All Right!"
"Holly Golightly (born Holly Golightly Smith on Sep–" Hold the phone, it's her real name??
"Little thang… called… 'Two Live Albums on One CD.'" Soledad Prison is pretty good but Café au Go-Go is the keeper.
Happy birthday to me! Worth it just for the perfectly sustained guitar note—with bass riffage—behind a twenty-second drum solo in the early stages of "Ripped at the Seam."
Wikipedia says this album is actually called House of Pain. Someone might want to tell MTV's information bug writer like twenty years ago.
I don't understand why "The Rockin' Chair Album" is sequenced before Moanin' in the Moonlight on the two-fer. Because it's better? So I do understand.
"JD's Gafflin' (Part 1)" is funny alongside the hot shit that turned Most Wanted into a Biffy® runner-up. "JD's Gafflin' (Part 2)" is filler on an otherwise strong Kill at Will EP. I owned Lethal Injection for about thirty minutes after bringing it home from Newbury Comics, listening to the first few songs and heading straight back to Newbury Comics to return it. Paraphrased: "This is shit." "OK, here's your money back." "Thanks doll."
I was on the phone with my friend Ivan our senior year of high school, not long after OG came out. I liked the video for the title track and asked if he'd heard the album. He said he had and that it was good, and when I asked if it was as good as Mama Said Knock You Out he responded "Um?"
Come for the song titles, stay for the alternate song titles, leave for most of the songs themselves.
Dude is pretty dirty.
I always liked that old "667: The Neighbor of the Beast" joke. Have you heard it? It goes "667: The Neighbor of the Beast."
Perry Farrell's cock makes a cameo on the Nothing's Shocking insert in an overly coordinated arrangement of mirrors while the rest of the band is directed to look wistfully in different directions. Dave Navarro looks like a ten-year-old girl.
Here come the four-letter words! I wonder what ever happened to my autographed Down poster, signed at Tower Records of all places. Once, I owned the major-label Shot and was majorly (har! har!) disappointed. Perhaps it was the indie snob in me, but more likely Albini-less production left a lot of oomph on the table and revealed a lower quality of songwriting. (The earlier single version of its "Fly on the Wall" was stylized as "(Fly) on (the Wall)," reducing its actual title to "On" and beating the Makers' "(Are You on the Inside or the Outside of Your) Pants?" by a good five years.) Lucky for them, L-I-A-R continues to spell BIFFY®.
Filed under J. The 1997 Are You Experienced reissue is modeled on the US version, which is what I grew up with and superior in every way (cover included and despite misspelling "Foxy") to the earlier UK release that was the basis of the controversial '93 reissue I bought as a college sophomore. USA! USA! Axis has some great songs but feels rushed. And does "Bold As Love" qualify as the title track? These continue to be the problems I continue to create for myself. Had Hendrix not flown too close to the sun on wings of vomit I think he would have struggled—and failed—to even approach Electric Ladyland's masterpiece before settling on an artistically satisfying blues career.
For the ladies.
I will retire on my Crypt-Style! profits. Extra Width would be their best album if they didn't follow it up with one of my favorite albums ever. "Awrranj." The "lo-fi demonstrational" Experimental Remixes EP has the likes of Beck, Mike D, UNKLE, Moby and Killah Priest twiddling knobs on a handful of Orange favorites. The exception is Dub Narcotic's… effort… on "Typecast" (misidentified as "Soul Typecast") where they literally subtracted the Blues Explosion music and layered the remaining vocals atop Dub Narcotic's own "Typecast Sanction." Not every version of the EP has the full seventeen-minute "Tour Diary" as a hidden track but mine does. Xtra-Acme (made much cheaper in its non-import USA version, albeit a little late for me), yes, is a compilation of Acme outtakes and B-sides, complete with stills of Winona Ryder, Giovanni Ribisi and John C. Reilly in action during the "Talk About the Blues" video. A few of the songs ("Bacon," "Get Down Lover") should have replaced some ("Blue Green Olga," "I Wanna Make It Alright") on the proper album. Meat and Bone is consistently good and much better than the assumed final album Damage. They added "Jon Spencer" back to the name, and if you think (like I do) that the Jesus Lizard got worse after turning the "the" in their name right side up then you'll understand (like I do) that it's not a coincidence.
"I'm surprised they didn't name themselves Jonathan Color-Favor so they could spell it Jonathan Colour-Favour." Pow!
Kathleen Hanna rebooted Julie Ruin as the Julie Ruin… OK? I downloaded "Oh Come On" after seeing them on Jimmy Fallon. She's still got it.
The cardboard sleeve for Engine Takes to the Water was printed at Fireproof Press. I didn't believe them so I took a match to it.
The actual black sheep of my Native Tongues family tree.
Two mediocre albums from a mediocre group that never stopped rapping about the past.
I'm not proud of a lot of the 2003/2004 purchases I made after hearing bands on Little Steven's Underground Garage. Just about any "new music" he curates is overproduced and slick and I'm guessing he has a piece of them all. "If you don't already have a look…"
Critics lose their minds over the 1966's Face to Face. "Mature songwriting, beyond crunchy riffs!" Now forgive me for never paying attention to lyrics (actually, don't bother) but the previous year's Kontroversy has some great goddamn songs on there! It can't all be "Dandy." I think maybe ten Americans bought Village Green when it was released in 1968. This band was like cancer over here at the time. Now everyone gushes about it, of course—great songs but not without filler. Greatest Hits pulls together the band's untouchable A-sides and B-sides from 1964 to 1966 while The Singles Collection stretched to 1970, minus the B-sides. Few can match their consistent excellence.
a.k.a. Rahsaan Roland Kirk. To fill the "plays multiple saxophones simultaneously" void in one's collection.
Alive! might be the greatest album of all time, but somehow not the greatest album of 1975? What kind of blogging bullshit is this?
I don't know why I ever needed two Kustomized albums. Featuring Mission of Burma's Peter Prescott, who once sold me Mudhoney's Let It Slide EP (below) at Mystery Train on Newbury Street.
I watched Beware of Mr. Baker recently and it was a good hour-long documentary with about forty-five minutes of illustrative filler bogging it all down. Also, it should have been called Beware Mr. Baker because that's what the goddamn sign outside his compound actually reads.
The Smell reissue's bonus tracks barely round it out to LP length.
"A generally pleasant band." – Jarrod P. Biffington (Jr.), Founding Partner, Internet
Nice to see you again, Kathleen! You've put on weight but I still think yr dreamy.
The debut won the Biffy® and they could have retired right there on a high note. II is more of the same but not as good as Robert Plant begins to ruin the band. With III and IV (which I refuse to name "Untitled"), they all start taking record reviews too seriously and, as a result, hit everyone over the head with Crosby, Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell. (Career highlights overcome with "When the Levee Breaks" and "Since I've Been Loving You.") And so the improved Houses of the Holy and the brilliant Physical Graffiti are a giant middle finger to everybody. Presence followed the double album and feels half-baked. The triple-disc live set, recorded in '72 (and absolutely butchered in the years leading up to its release) is mostly excessive and mostly excellent. The 2014 reissues of the first three albums were secured the same way as the CCR LPs listed below, with this my third contest win in about a year. If you think I'm going to promote the source and decrease my odds of winning again you're nuts. Anyway, each of these includes a bonus disc of unreleased material. The first album contains a full October '69 concert of varying fidelity and sloppiness. I'm surprised Jimmy Page would admit it exists. II and III feature alternate mixes, backing tracks and outtakes. The second album's "La La" sounds like a late-era Small Faces rehearsal and the third album's "Key to the Highway/Trouble in Mind Blues" should have found a home on Physical Graffiti or even a re-jiggered Houses of the Holy. Big fan.
I got into Love in the nineties. Remember those days? Anyway, I always favored the rougher Da Capo over what I considered to be an overproduced Forever Changes. They're neck and neck now, with Da Capo possibly taking a slight edge due to Arthur Lee's seventeen-minute "Blowjob." Sorry, "Revelation."
Far Gone, which I loved, "received generally negative reviews from critics and fans, often described as a disappointment compared to their previous album, Dayglo." Hey, you can't always tip your hat to Blue Cheer with your own song called "Out of Focus." Meanwhile I have no memory whatsoever of Nehru Jacket other than it being a digipak.
The first five songs of the debut EP are great, then they went all full-band for the closing two and never fully recovered. Natural Ingredients still holds up but I wish Gabby Glaser's rough flow continued to dominate.
I turned thirty on a Saturday night. Amy took me to meet some friends see the Lyres at Johnny D's in Somerville, and it was so fun that I can only imagined she's lined up a full Pretty Things reunion for the big four-oh next year.
A standout album in a standout year: Law of Ruins, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Julie Ruin, Moon Pix, Strung Out in Heaven, Acme, The Messerschmitt Pilot's Severed Hand, In Mass Mind, Bombay the Hard Way… the soundtrack of my daily commute to and from an ugly building in Reading.
Make-Up – After Dark (1997)
Make-Up – Sound Vérité (1997)
Make-Up – In Mass Mind (1998)
Destination: Love is the band's first fake live album. After Dark is their first real one.
I Want Some pulls together all of this perfect band's singles, splits included, totaling twenty-three songs. "U R My Intended" is mysteriously rechristened "Walking on the Dune" here. Did Prince complain? Lead-off "Pow! to the People," along with the Creation's "Biff, Bang, Pow," were obvious inspirations behind me joining the internet. Save Yourself won some hot-shit internet Biffy®. Untouchable Sound is a classified live document from 2000. "WARNING: Hot and Highly Unethical!"
Witness the band's full-blown progression (digression?) from snotty garage punks to snotty glam bitches. Excellent use of parentheses across both eras, from "(Are You on the Inside or the Outside of Your) Pants?" to "Too Many Fuckers (on the Streets)."
Delete the ellipsis all you want… I will put it back.
Peter Green takes the reins from Eric "The Living Regret" Clapton, leaves shortly after to form Fleetwood Mac and chooses mental illness over recording with the USC marching band. A little from column A, a little from column B.
Curtis is his solo debut with several quality bonus tracks. Roots is the excellent follow-up with some of the same quality bonus tracks. What the! And Superfly? Yes. And a second time! With questionable subject matter appended!
Nothing as strong as "Housemate Troubles" but "Bleeding Brain Grow" is pretty great: "I'm building geodesic domes, calling Ric Ocasek 'homes.'"
The debut contains the infamous whine "I may be a white boy but I can be mad too!" Lotsa honky talk here.
The greatest album cover of all time?
I'm disappointed the CD debut of Ride the Lightning didn't hype the Biffy® honor. Don't they know taste-making inter-blogs when they read them? Maybe that's why Big Black wrestled one away from a potentially deserving Master of Puppets two years later. (Also because the proxy judging body of the Lower Galactic Biffy® Council is too spineless to reward a band twice.) Justice's closing "Dyers Eve" is the album's shortest song at a tad over five minutes—now that's my kind of excess!
I won the promo single from my college radio station (along with a bunch of other crap) and then bought the album like an asshole. No wonder I eventually preferred WZBC and WMBR.
"We are interrupted by your noise."
Ministry loves their puns, especially ones that involve violence, cannibalism and mutual oral sex. I await their career retrospective entitled Ministry Loves Cumpany.
Pearl Jam's celebrated second album!
I regret never seeing Mr. Airplane Man live.
The first two, as EP and LP, are an essential pairing. I already named I Phantom the best album of 2002, imagine if Emergency Rations had been included as its formal introduction? Sleepyheads compiles "unreleased and hard-to-find" tracks (hyphens mine) and was purchased for three bucks at moldy old Mystery Train Records in Gloucester.
Come for "Roadrunner," stay for "I'm Straight."
"Come on down if you got gummy hammers in your clavinet."
I don't get the Thelonious Monk hype.
It took awhile for me to face forward when exploring Coltrane's career arc.
This album is what makes America great.
Because "the Malcolm Damo" was taken?
The title track suffers some "Green Onions" backlash as Hollywood uses it to score every other movie trailer. I'd still sit through a ten-minute preview of The Billy Joel Story to hear it again.
Victimized by more hype. Jeff Ament is fan fiction come to life.
Mothers of Invention – Absolutely Free (1967/2012 reissue)
Phase one: Enjoy "Trouble Every Day." Phase two: […] Phase three: Enjoy "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet."
Fucking Mountain!
Mouse on Mars opened for Stereolab (supporting Dots and Loops, their final great album) at the Middle East in 1997 or 1998. I must have thought they were good/cool/interesting and so bought their most recent album… and that's the end of that story.
Mudhoney – Plays "Hate the Police" Plus Three More Songs They Never Want to Play Again, Ever! (1990)
Mudhoney Boxed Set! Pretty self-explanatory. Many tracks are included on March to Fuzz, which consists of two discs and some factual errors. Its droll song-by-song anecdotes from Mark Arm and Steve Turner are the gravy poured on top of the delicious turkey dinner that is Mudhoney. Deftly subtitled, it's hard to argue with either adjective. But where's "You're Gone," you're so smart? Four since-then studio albums ensure that a true career retrospective is in our future.
Twenty-two years!
"The difficulty lies not in our sound but in your supine head. Our noise is no more difficult than its epoch." Bonus tracks abound: the debut album contains all three songs on the earlier Nation of Ulysses EP while Pretty does the same with 1991's Birth of the Ulysses Aesthetic. Pretty is likely a top-twenty album of mine, but, unfortunate for its epoch, so is the Jesus Lizard's Liar.
Few albums are as good as In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, even though Six Finger Satellite's Law of Ruins barely beat it out in the squared circle. "Holy shit!" And On Avery Island is, surprisingly, almost as good. Like My Bloody Valentine, this band is one of those that just seemed to fizzle out after the braintrust went a little mental or something. Except Neutral Milk Hotel, unlike My Bloody Valentine, isn't an overrated pile of anabolic horse manure that people adore for some strange reason. It's been twenty years, folks, and Loveless, Part 2: Gz Up, Hoes Down isn't walking through that door! Jeff Mangum though? There's still hope, if 2009's "Sign the Dotted Line" is any indication.
Eric Davidson's exaggerated smile from that Middle East Upstairs show is forever imprinted upon my brain. Also, "TAS" stands for "The Anal Swipe." At least buy me dinner first, baby!
Second (and best) effort from the Girls Against Boys side project. Meatier spin on Morphine.
Never given a chance for some reason. This could have been an all-time classic right up there with Jungle Rot and Microminiature Love. Hey, I have different standards. Anyway, we're joined by Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane of the Small Faces on a couple of the stronger tracks in a crowd of stronger tracks.
"I ast for simpleecity, und zey cover eet un flutes!"
Remember Nevermind? You only think you do. No, OK, you do. Version with "Endless, Nameless" bonus track that is neither endless nor nameless.
One of the dudes from Adventures in Stereo splintered off to perfect the formula here. I seem to remember spending a fortune on this import after hearing "London" on WZBC. Bastards.
Things are so much better now!
"It's the march of the gay parade!" That's all I remember of this album, other than a labored Sgt. Pepper-referencing review I wrote for a friend's zine. I had to keep it under like forty words which I couldn't do now if I deleted all but adverbs.
Old Time Relijun is the closest any group has gotten to capturing Captain's Beefheart's essence.
Officially subtitled "Animation Music, Vol. 1" but I don't go for that kind of bullshit. Speaking of bullshit: "The Bark and Below It." Good album though, if you can get past the annoyingly short snippets of "Combinations" that for some reason had to be their own tracks (I'm not kidding, I do like this album).
I guess it's OK to call something "world music" when compilations edit out entire sections of songs as in
"Ando Meio Desligado."
The great lost Fleetwood Mac album. "Pop has freed us" is a perfect homonym.
"If I like jazz then I suppose I should like Charlie Parker. Otherwise, what will the community think?" Oh, youth. Oh, compilations.
I once read a review of a Pavement show that knocked them for opening the night with "Here," the guy writing something along the lines of "It would be like Mudhoney opening with 'If I Think.'" Years later, Matador Records made the live version of "Here" from the deluxe reissue of Slanted and Enchanted available as a free download. "I was dressed for suck!" The critic is still recovering.
Shouldn't a group's second album be called The Next Step? These are the problems I create for myself.
Presents "The Razor" (not to be confused with the proper single release of killer Patriots hype action The Razor) is basically a party mix compiling snippets from what I presume are full songs to be found elsewhere, as presented by DJ Rudy Pooh on the 1-and-2. Bought, like Mr. Lif's Sleepyheads, for three bucks in Gloucester. Black Dialogue remains the sole LP release from Lif, Akrobatik and Fakts One and delivers the real shit.
I wanted to name this the best album of 1978 but I'd never heard it all the way through. Why? Because you can't download it anywhere… legally. Worth the physical-media handout just for the two-minute "Life Stinks," even if it's not as good as Rocket From the Tombs's original.
I never understood Guyville's supposed "song-by-song response" to Exile on Main St. Because there are eighteen of them? It's a strong album regardless ("irregardless" is not a word), especially when skipping past high school alienation confessionals like "Never Said" and the shock-value "Flower." Whip-Smart, though, is better all the way around. That unexpected "fuck like a volcano" line? Classic. And even funnier when swapped out for a silent sideways glance in the video.
"In November 2010, Kanye West named the album as his 'favorite album of all time.'" Oh shit! I still like it.
A friend gave me Fook as a gift. I didn't like it (aside from "Auto Hag") and the album cover creeped me out so I bought two more. I was a real asshole in college.
Piper and Saucerful are the alpha and omega of of our man Syd's participation, and only because Saucerful's "Remember a Day" is a Piper outtake and "Jugband Blues" is basically an acknowledged favor. Too bad. Post-mortem More is the soundtrack to a 1969 film of the same name. It sounds like a real heart-warmer: mathematics, hitchhiking, burglary, intercourse, Nazis, heroin, infidelity, suicide. Outtake "My Girlfriend's Nazi Lover Got Us Hooked on Horse and All I Have Left Is This Lousy Overdose" is not included on this release. Meanwhile, Meddle's "Echoes" is only the band's greatest contribution to Western civilization for crying out loud. Lastly, I had to "contribute" this version of Cambridge Station to Discogs's database because it has a different barcode and that community is full of the world's loudest pedants.
Nudity! International edition of the first album features the Come on Pilgrim EP as a bonus. "You fuckin' die! (To her.)"
"Tell you my name: F-U-C-K." I have to think Polly Jean is very satisfied with her career. Rid of Me is the first I'd heard of her, after a friend recommended it in his parents' kitchen (it's funny, the things you associate with particular bits of music). I loved it instantly, and should Wu-Tang Clan… displease… the Lower Galactic Biffy® Council then Rid of Me will be deemed the greatest of 1993.
Lifestyles is the original issue, with the "lions" image they were later forced to remove from the cover. Busted! So This Eclipse sports a design created in Powerpoint.
Random European solo compilation picked up in Northampton. It can't all be Fun House.
I waited in line for this Jane's-lite bullshit the midnight it came out.
It was fun watching "Sour Times" evolve (the right word?) from a WZBC hit (that magical Summer of 1994) to a WFNX hit. And the follow-up is a much stronger album. "What's it sound like?" "It still sounds like Portishead, but more." "Great! Then let's call it Portishead." "I love you."
Pretty Things – Parachute (1970/2000 reissue)
The EP Collection covers 1964 to 1966 ("Plus" refers to a handful of 45-only extras). 1998's mono reissue of SF Sorrow and 2000's limited-edition "gold" stereo reissue each feature four bonus tracks consisting, more or less, of both sides of 1967's "Defecting Grey" and 1968's "Talkin' About the Good Times," so they pick up right where The EP Collection leaves off. (The insert is exactly the same in both versions, and despite its exclamation points only the mono contains an alternate version of "Defecting Grey" that was "mastered from the original acetate found in John Povey's loft." It clocks in at 5:14. The stereo disc is home to the actual single 4:31 mix. As far as I can tell—and I'm practically sober right now—"Mr. Evasion," "Talkin' About the Good Times" and "Walking Through My Dreams" are identical between the two.) Sorrow, of course, is a zenith recording, and if you can only get one then make it the sharper mono. According to its liner notes Parachute (also "gold") was Rolling Stone's album of the year in 1970. According to documented history it was not. According to me it most certainly was better than whatever bullshit they went with in its place.
Here they come. Here they come. Here they come! Here they come! Here they come. Here they come. Here they come! Here they come!
The plot: black guy shoots another black guy, crappy hit single ensues. High tension! Too many guest stars to name.
What do male readers (!) think of my idea of a removable wintertime kilt? Like, in extreme cold conditions you could just snap it on and off between home and office. Warm legs all around! You're welcome.
A nine ain't gonna stop the bum rush. A Biffy® just might.
Corpse Love is a compilation of early, live and unreleased material. Amusing doodles and liner notes. In the Red documents a 1989 gig at CBGB. Amusing photo of the Bob Bert's "drums." Can you find Steve Albini's cock ring?
Slip's "Dine Alone" might be the most clever song ever written. And there you have it, Decemberists, you can hang it up now. That disc was bendy like bologna.
What's up with the parentheses? I don't know if it's a subtitle before a main title or what. For proper usage, see the Makers' examples cited above or Six Finger Satellite's "Rabies (Baby's Got The)," which are the greatest instances of parenthetical clauses in Western culture.
My dad and I visited Cooperstown and Lake Placid in the Summer of 1995. I remember little of those destinations other than progressing through the first couple of Dark Tower books and thinking I was hot-shit cultured for listening to this "chamber music" on headphones. Fuck you, Rachel's, for doing that do a twenty-one-year-old.
I never got OK Computer because it is the most overrated album this side of Loveless. Kid A and Amnesiac practically assemble a double album. The former gets all the love but the latter, with a host of cold Kid A leftovers, holds up a lot better. I have a distinct memory of listening to Thief's "There There" on the radio while driving home from my Basic Drawing class at Holyoke Community College, after I'd quit my sales job (rant) and before I started the Mass Art program (rant). It was a very difficult time for me.
Go ahead, bang the drum! One Track Mind was hot shit in 1995. And remember that night with the third rail? We've had some good times, internet.
All the stuff… except for "Carbona Not Glue." What the!
Purchased at Newbury Comics in a moment of panic on my way to a Jesus Lizard autograph signing (!) at Tower Records (!!). David Wm. Sims threatened to rip the sleeve in half. He had a point, it's half-baked compared to Shellac. (And the Washington Redskins are criticized.)
Original self-released version. Gross!
The double set was remastered from your dad's grimy old LPs using equipment covered in oil and sand. Brief name change to "the Red Krayola" for the second album due to children everywhere coloring outside the lines.
This might be the first CD I ever bought. Ugh.
Pretty sure I bought Street Hassle just for the album cover. It was not for Springsteen's contribution.
Compilation of hits along with alternate mixes and unreleased tracks. Easy to wonder what might have been had he substituted for Led Zeppelin's weak link.
The first album is great, the second album is good, the third album is fair and nothing since has darkened my CD shelves. Not the direction most bands aspire to.
Harkening back to the days when bands actually covered each other on split singles.
"It is better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done." Wrong. I purchased Egg Fusion.
Featuring the humorless half of Fugazi, later paired with the other humorless half to form a wholly humorless Fugazi.
Humorlessness is: Rodan… June of 44… Rachel's… Retsin… Shipping News… Sonora Pine…
I'm never one to defend record-company fat cats for the way they chopped up British Invasion albums for the American market… but shit, I grew up on this Out of Our Heads! December's Children is its manufactured companion that housed "Get Off of My Cloud," a song later karaoke-d by yours truly at a biker bar in Somerville. "Detergent pack??" The UK gaps of Aftermath (overrated) and Between the Buttons (practically brilliant) were filled in by the Through the Past, Darkly compilation, another Loog poem title if I ever heard one. Sgt. Pepper taught us—or at least the fat cats—that albums are, you know, albums, and so everything from the zenith Beggars Banquet on was finally the same around the world. Let It Bleed brings more of the hot shit even though you never need to hear "You Can't Always Get What You Want" again. Sticky Fingers's "Wild Horses" made the later "Angie" possible, signaling the band's post-Exile on Main St. death knell, but "Can't You Hear Me Knocking"? "Can't You Hear Me Knocking"! I used to have both volumes of Hot Rocks on cassette (the CD is my wife's) and I still can't hear "Sympathy for the Devil" or "We Love You" without thinking of a supermarket parking lot in Fitchburg, which is weird because I didn't deal drugs out of my hatchback. I will always refer to Exile's "I Just Want to See His Face" as "Just Wanna See His Face" because that's the way it was written on the LP sleeve and that's what they sing in the goddamn chorus. "Tumbling Dice" is that album's most popular song and its worst. The Singles Collection (The London Years is a collection of singles released during the years the band was on America's (?) London records. Well done, ABKCO marketing assistant, though the accompanying booklet smelled like death.
With special guests Henrietta Collins & the Wifebeating Childhaters on the Drive-By Shooting EP. Chris Haskett would remain with the formal Rollins Band in 3… 2… 1…
Mondays through Fridays, my wife and I park on the former footprint of the Channel, an ex-club where I once saw Rollins Band set fire to everyone's balls. 1992, senior year, Biffy High. Penguins sweep the Bruins and I'm ridin' sky high. "Low S.O." is boomin' from the red Corolla speakers, RIP the Channel where they stick the parking meters." Old age is a bastard.
Part two (see Parker, Charlie) of the late-teens naiveté that is covering one's bases with mediocre single-disc collections of historically significant artists that weren't a tenth as interesting as John Coltrane.
It's just like me to have skipped over the "breakthrough" Thank You. It's just like decency to have skipped over the vomit/shit sleeve of Sweet Sixteen.
I bought this the same day as Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One. Returning home I put both on the CD changer, pressed play on No Way first and thought the opening "Something Sweet" was a lovely instrumental. It was followed by "Moby Octopad," a song I'd heard and liked on WZBC, outing the first song instead as "Return to Hot Chicken" and the album as the other one. And that's my Run On story.
Run-DMC's greatest hits, twice. It's right there in the titles!
My daughter's little plastic guitar (pictured here) features a snippet of Santana's arrangement of "Oye Como Va." It's another in a long line of steps toward her having amazing taste in music by the time she's old enough to get all smug about it.
1997: The Year I Bought Everything.
Ian Svenonius New Millenium Project Number (x). Weep o'er the corpse of the unmatchable Make-Up. (Make Up?) (Make*Up?)
I first saw Bullitt years ago and was underwhelmed. Sullen Steve McQueen is no fun. The soundtrack though? The soundtrack! This 2000 rerecording was the only version available on CD at the time and I snatched it up, never realizing until eventually reading the liner notes that it was not the original. Might as well be: it is The Real Hot Shit.
Music: Deadly Cupcake (members of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Tar and the Supersuckers), Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet and Six Finger Satellite. Production: Steve Albini. Hipster value: Infinity plus one.
"The album was neither a commercial nor a critical success and did not make it on any album charts." Releasing singles like "Pussy Ain't Nothin'" will do that.
I once saw Quicksand, Seaweed and Brainiac on the same bill. 1995? I thought Brainaic was totally ridiculous and the entire audience agreed. In retrospect they were miscast… and I can safely say I was too immature at the time to get it. A year or so later I heard "Go Freaks Go" on WZBC and then "Vincent Come on Down" not too long after that and it was love. Love! Meanwhile, Seaweed paraded five or six frat boys on stage and called it punk. I did get a good TACOMA ÜBER ALLES tee out of it though.
III, now over twenty years old, holds up remarkably well. I guess that's what happens when you never break through.
International two-fer of the first two albums, minus the debut's "Lose Your Mind" for some reason.
Ty Segall – Freedom's Goblin (2018)
Singles is a collection of Ty Segall singles released between 2007 and 2010. And there you have it. Singles 2 is, yes, its sequel. Live is credited to "The Ty Segall Band," a distinction I refuse to differentiate from "Ty Segall" in my music collection. Emotional Mugger sounds like a hate crime and might as well be awarded 2016's Biffy® in advance. (It did in a landslide, as Freedom's Goblin likely will for 2018.)
Much like Eric's toothy grin from the New Bomb Turks' performance, Z4-OBX (a.k.a. Birdstuff) thrusting his arm straight into the air after every snare hit at the same venue will always be with me.
Sex Pistols – Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977/1988 reissue)
Sex Pistols – The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle (Soundtrack) (1979/1993 reissue)
Swindle is true to the 1979 release before later reissues shuffled and substituted. The Archive liner notes expound upon an era of rock music that "was constantly glossed over, with huge budgets spent on studio polish for works that were otherwise devoid of substance." I've not read a better description of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. This collection of demo material (most of which ended up on the Spunk bootleg) and live tracks, featuring actual bass playing from an actual bass player, is the real deal.
Super-tight rock action. Back in the box! Back in the box!
"Smith and Jones Forever" and ever on WZBC in late 1998.
Russell breaks out of his supporting role in the Blues Explosion in order to freely express himself using samples of clinical descriptions of oral sex.
Starbucks put this album's "Feeling Good" on a holiday compilation a few years ago. What's that all about? Hey, I'm as desperate as anyone in wanting to find hidden gems for my Christmas playlist, but I'm not willing to make shit up and consider "Sister Ray" a song about blizzards.
"24-karat gold compact disc." Oh, Frank Jr.
Six Finger Satellite – Paranormalized (1996)
Six Finger Satellite – Law of Ruins (1998)
The pre-breakup long players, and the beginning of the end of my ears. Congratulations.
I bought Dig Me Out off of Corin Tucker before a show at the Middle East. The case was cracked so I asked, politely, for a different one. She made a riot grrl face and complied. Sleater-Kinney gradually transformed into a pretty band who wore lipstick and designer clothes. I first noticed it when I saw them at the Roxy on I think the Hot Rock tour (opening band: the White Stripes) and couldn't get over how cute they were trying to be. It was, like, wicked lame and stuff. That's why The Woods caught me totally off guard: it is a fucking non-cute rock album. I love it. Biffy® loves it, too. (Except for "Modern Girl." There's that cuteness again.)
Everyone needs to calm the fuck down about Slint.
Some people blame Sylvester Stewart's personal and professional downfall on cocaine and PCP. I blame it on green-lighting the lyric "There's a midget standing tall."
Small Faces – Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake (1968/2003 reissue)
The imported Decca Anthology is everything the Small Faces released before they jumped ship to Immediate, minus the disputed "I Can't Make It." It also includes, somehow, a couple of songs that ended up on the first Immediate release, 1967's Small Faces Small Faces Small Faces. You cannot live without this reissue, featuring five British A-sides and B-sides that helped fill out the butchered American There Are but Four Small Faces. Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake is not called Ogden's Nut Gone Flake and it will fuse your balls together into one hyper-masculine mega-ball. The Autumn Stone is a compilation of unreleased/unfinished material with some live tracks and hit singles mixed in. Fantastic band that ended too soon and splintered into the lesser groups Humble Pie and the Faces.
Amy gave Either/Or to me while I was in Northampton and she was in Somerville. I've got her blessing to sell it since we'll hang onto her adored copy. She's also willing to part with the two-song "Division Day" CD single because it's plain impractical (if excellent).
Lalo Schifrin arranges. Who knew my cat Chloe posed for album covers back in the sixties?
"This is whaaare the heaviness sets in!"
I was Matador's ATM and the PIN was 1-2-3-4.
Sister is the original SST release, so the band likely never saw a cent from it. The other pre-Geffen albums are reissues.
Copy/paste: "
I liked the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's "Television, the Drug of the Nation"—COLA jokes are in—and figured Michael Franti's next project would be just as exciting. "Red Beans and Rice"? I was twenty. Gimme a break.
"A special edition of the album was packaged in a box designed to resemble prescription medicine, complete with 'dosage advice' and a foil blister pack containing the CD." I was that sucker.
Telephono does not include the later-added Soft Effects EP. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a first-however-many-copies limited release that includes the studio-ephemera bonus EP Get Nice! and a free seven-inch single (a demo of "The Underdog") with an exclusive B-side.
Love this one. My dad had the LP—it and The Doors were my go-to albums when learning as a youth how much of a pain in the ass it is to get up after twenty minutes to flip a record.
Emperor Tomato Ketchup is Stereolab at its best. The band fell off pretty hard after Dots and Loops and I've long since parted with those discs (though they were not without good individual songs). I still await part three of the "Refractions in the Plastic Pulse"/"Puncture in the Radax Permutation" trilogy. My money's on "Penetration in the Centre-Phalanx."
Multiple editions of the complete discography, aside from the thousands of bootleg-quality collections that have been released since the birth of the compact disc format (like, say, Head On). Iggy slashes himself on stage and Biffy® Juice™ spills out.
Two seemingly random albums packaged (confusingly) as The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra. Shopping for Sun Ra discs is a pain in the ass because you never know if record clerks file him under S or R. I follow the Howlin' Wolf/Taj Mahal Sorting Principle of 1980 that exempts nicknames from following traditional "surname, given name" alphabeticalization standards.
"Diary captures the vague inner-turmoil [Edit: shudder] of Jeremy Enigk's lyrics and propels [Edit: shudder] those turbulent emotions [Edit: shudder] to the heavens [Edit: collapse]."
Superchunk has two songs, the fast one and the slow one. The fast one is pretty good but the slow one is a little whiny.
This album is dedicated to the good fuckers and those who want to be good fuckers.
Nudity! Silver paint be damned.
Boston's own! This is a good record if you can get past the artwork. Good luck.
Inhaler was released on October 19, 1993, the same day as Pearl Jam's Vs. How do I know this? Because at midnight my friends and I waited in a Tower Records line that crossed over the Pike and wrapped around to Boylston. Everyone else—everyone else—was there for Pearl Jam, a band I liked for maybe a month when Ten was all over the place, but I was there at midnight for fucking Tad. No wonder I went to so many great shows by myself. So we get inside and it's Vs. everywhere, Vs. posters, Vs. long-box displays, Vs. playing overhead. Sheep, indeed, but where were the dogs? Where was Tad's major-label debut?? I sought an employee, likely sporting a Vs. T-shirt and/or trucker hat, and politely requested "One Tad's Inhaler, please" only to learn that, if it wasn't on the floor already, it wouldn't be available until the next day, even though it was past midnight and already the next day. Drag. I watched my friends, one after another, drop thirteen bucks on that populist bullshit and probably spent my money on Southern Comfort and Snapple pink lemonade instead. It was the shittiest down-escalator ride of my life, and I used to commute in and out of Porter Square. (About a year later, atop that same escalator, David Wm. Sims would pretend to tear my Rapeman CD insert in half.) Eventually, when I did go back to Newbury Comics on Tuesday proper to pick up the new fucking Tad album, and when I did drop it in the CD changer for the first listen, I realized that it kind of sucked. For a while there, though, it was a beautiful night of possibility on the bridge, a night of infinite transparent-red future selves gazing down upon toll-paying suckers who (also, it turns out) would not be able to purchase Inhaler so soon.
Enough of my Eric-Clapton-embarassed-about-Cream/Harrison-Ford-embarassed-about-Star-Wars act. Volume 1 holds up OK despite its lack of grace, cohesion and anything from the eighties.
"Yup, it's a Tar song." – Anyone who's ever heard a Tar song before
A solid effort at picking and choosing the best psychedelic efforts of the Dennis Edwards era. My only beef is the inclusion of an inferior remix of "Ball of Confusion" over the proper single release and the exclusion of 1973's 1990's "You've Got My Soul on Fire." I guess it wasn't long enough?
Thee Headcoats – Conundrum (1994)
The English gentlemen of rock and roll. Filed under THEE.
Orc drops the "Thee" and becomes our inevitable Biffmaster General in a year when I finally read The Lord of the Rings.
Up your ass, Dyno Records in Newburyport.
Thanks for ruining Stereolab, assholes.
Midnight Marauders is pretty good, but The Low End Theory? The Low End Theory!
Sometimes I just bought stuff.
From "Wild Thing" to "66-5-4-3-2-1," every non-Troggs Tape song you'll ever need.
Teenbeat release with the original mixes and a hilarious picture of Jason Priestly. Naturally he was swapped out for an anonymous hunk on the later Elektra reissue.
Ur-kool Keith!
The band negotiates a richer stage-blood budget for their major-label debut.
Wikipedia says that Fake Train's "Valentine Card," "Kantina" and "Were, Are and Was or Is" were all grouped together as track four by accident due to a pressing plant error. I always wondered what that was all about. And now I know for sure because Wikipedia is never wrong. According to the CD's spine, a medium that is also never wrong, the band briefly changed their name to "Uwound" for New Plastic Ideas. It was back to "Unwound" for The Future of What, released in April 1995 and recorded (according to the liner notes) in December 1995, specifically "around Christmas time." Liner notes are never wrong either. Most importantly, Repetition is never wrong. Not for one second.
No single album is as good as Fuckin' Van Halen.
"Allo, ist mee agane. Ist Neeko." Well, on four songs anyway. She was gone by the second album where distortion filled the void. Love. 1968 was a bitching year at the Biffys® and who knows, on anther day the Velvets, the Small Faces, Cream, Hendrix or Blue Cheer might have won. But the Pretty Things (two versions of SF Sorrow for sale above!) had like eight really hairy guys in the band. Security didn't stand a chance. Absolutely maudlin. The Val Valentin mix is used for the reissue of the self-titled third album—I always thought Doug Yule looked like Harry Dean Stanton on its cover. "Parker!" Loaded is the "Fully Loaded Edition," which means you get to enjoy demos, alternate mixes and extended versions of songs from their worst album. Plus outtakes that didn't make the cut. The live set is split into two volumes for CD release, which I've combined in a double jewel case: the nice price. The Best was purchased as a college sophomore, of course, and presents six songs from the first album, three from the third, two from the last, three more from VU and only one from White Light/White Heat. Cowards!
"Ethnic Diversity Worthy of a Human Resources Orientation Video" was taken so they settled on "Versus."
"Seether" is a good tune that successfully encapsulates 1994 even as it spends three minutes telling you what something is not.
Pretty random, and probably due to a guest appearance by the Blues Explosion's Russell Simins.
Scene Creamers reverted back to Weird War for Bite 'Em even though Neil Haggerty was already in line for Knicks tickets. Turns out any idiot who can afford spray paint can also afford to copyright the name "Scene Creamers."
White Stripes – White Stripes (1999)
White Stripes – De Stijl (2000)
The first three are the original Sympathy for the Record Industry releases. White Blood Cells was bought off of Jack White before a show at the Middle East on the night John Lee Hooker died (I remember because he said something about it between songs) and that was a good week and a half before its street date. I should have known they were about to blow up. It's funny, I thought I'd be one and done with this band but they kept offering the sweet fuzz and crunch up through Elephant… until "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" was accidentally issued on the closing Icky Thump instead of a Raconteurs album. Anyway: early singles available below!
When Beavis and Butt-Head makes it look like it introduced you to a CD already in your collection.
The letter O in "Who" on the Sell Out CD spine is actually a zero. You can just tell looking at it. Good reissue nonetheless, seamlessly extending the concept through the bonus tracks. My Generation, on the other hand, approaches disaster: "This edition omits many overdubs that are prominent in the original mono mixes, notably the lead guitar parts in 'A Legal Matter' and 'My Generation' and the double-tracked vocals in 'The Good's Gone,' 'Much Too Much,' 'La-La-La Lies' and 'The Kids Are Alright.'" The all-caps violence favored by aging mods on Amazon's review page nearly crippled the internet.
I recently listened to Foxtrot for the first time in years, as part of my screening process to determine which MP3s to hold onto. Um, what was the big deal about it again? Not even close to unseating I Phantom.
Shepard and Rutland in Cambridge. That's what I think of when I hear this.
How did "Rumble" not make it onto the Pulp Fiction soundtrack album? Oh right, because everyone loves the Statler Brothers.
"Again and again!" Forever is no 36 Chambers but then again it couldn't be—that one eluded me so long before this happened. I put off downloading the third and fourth albums because… I don't know. Not as much ODB or something. But hey, the Newbury Comics at the Square One Mall (as small a store as it is, with as small a "music" section as I've ever seen displaced by teen/tween fad-crap) had them for $8 each—I should be able to make up the eMusic difference with resale profit.
For I, too, was once a poseur.
The BBC Sessions is a sterling set of radio dates from 1965 to 1968, featuring the two good guitarists in Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Brian Matthew steals the show, as usual. Cumular Limit is a two-disc collection of Jimmy Page-era odds and ends. The second disc is an enhanced CD containing performance footage of the band performing (tracks two through five on the audio disc) on German television. Watch as Jim McCarty chucks his drumstick into the audience only to watch it come flying back back a few seconds later. Oh, Germans.
I bought I Can Hear the Heart practically blind. "Moby Octopad" and especially "Autumn Sweater" were in heavy rotation on WZBC but otherwise I hadn't heard a lick, clever rhyme or head-whipping guitar solo from its fifteen other songs, never mind their seven previous albums and dozens of EPs and singles. No matter, it was on Matador Records Records and I was a weak twenty-two-year-old loyalist to the home of the Blues Explosion. Years later I still sing "Deeper Into Movies" in my head as I drive north on 128 through Beverly. Electr-O-Pura was acquired soon after as I wanted to broaden my Yo La Horizons and it was almost as good. Earlier and later efforts were never close to either of these but individual longer tracks like "Sunsquashed," "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" (Volume 1) and "Ohm" (Volume 5), plus the numerous memorable shows I've been lucky enough to attend, will always keep me interested in what they're releasing down the road.
Discogs calls this an "inexpensive sampler" so I don't feel bad about having retained only Love 666's "MDMA."
Various – Back From the Grave, Vol. 1 (1993/1996 reissue)
Two sets of "raw 'n' crude mid-60s garage punk!" My favorite moment between them is when a guy in the Rats yells "Part two!" during "Rats Revenge (Part 2)."
Features alternate versions of Kelly Affair/Carrie Nations numbers alongside several instrumental soundtrack pieces. Let the games begin!
The Jesus Lizard. Girls Against Boys. Seaweed. Soul Asylum?
Jake Holmes, screwed again!
I was twenty in 1994.
Link Wray, the Gypsies and a whole shitload of Los Lobos. In college, under an influence, we determined that a shitload consists of fifty-eight liters.
Because it takes eight or more volumes to reach the cream.
The "various" amounting to twenty-seven parts Combustible Edison and two parts Juan García Esquivel. No sex with the clientele.
Compilation of little-known funk gems from the late sixties and early seventies. It feels a little long at seventy-five minutes but there's not a weak song in the bunch.
Notable that Sebadoh's "Gimme Indie Rock" (or, I don't know, "Calling Yog Soggoth") is nowhere to be found here. Discogs says this came out in 2000 but I feel like it introduced me to a Black Flag world outside of Wasted… Again, which would have happened earlier. Capitalizing on Nirvana's love of the Vaselines' "Molly's Lips" also feels very mid-nineties. Otherwise, thanks for including a Pussy Galore song I already had with "Sweet Little Hi-Fi" from Sugarshit Sharp. I guess "Cunt Tease" was too expensive to license.
Various – Hip-Hop Classics, Vol. 1 (1996)
Various – Hip-Hop Classics, Vol. 2 (1996)
Exactly as advertised: two volumes of hip-hop classics (EPMD, Main Source, etc.) from the late eighties and early nineties.
I prefer the late-eighties/early-nineties era but if the old school is what you want then you can't get much better than "The Message" and "Roxanne, Roxanne."
Volume 5 should have been called In Yo' Nose! The History of Ur-Disco, Vol. 1.
"Magattraction" is the best thing Girls Against Boys ever recorded and, to this day, I can't understand why they relegated it to an obscure singles series (compiled here). Ditto Beck's "In a Cold-Ass Fashion." "Broken E Strings" is New Plastic Ideas-era Unwound at its finest. And who knew Ted Kennedy played bass in Hammerhead?
JB's, Lyn Collins ("The Female Preacher"), Maceo & the Macks, Bobby Byrd, Hank Ballard, Marva Whitney and Vicki Anderson/Myra Barnes. Now that's a stable.
In which Helmet and House of Pain pretend they were in the same area code while recording "Just Another Victim."
Jesus Christ, remember Rachel's?
The first three are fairly self-explanatory and game-changing compilations. Psych Out! is just that, featuring English groups like the Attack and John's Children. I Can See for Miles is its American response, collecting "lost tracks from America's psychedelic underground" with career highlights from the Chocolate Watchband, the Red Crayola and other modified nouns. Sgt. Pepper and Physical Graffiti Redrawn offer zero tantalizing minutes. Stooges Jukebox features some of Iggy's favorites (mine too) like "Surfin' Bird" and "Scorpio." The Roots of the Rolling Stones cherry-picks "fifteen Stones-approved classics"—I assume a Mojo intern wearing ironic glasses and body odor sat down for tea in a windowless London mail room and concluded "Alright, the Stones covered Muddy Waters, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Slim Harpo… this thing writes itself!" A well earned zero pounds for him. Blues Breakers! features "fifteen classic tracks as covered by Eric Clapton." What makes a trend? The Sub Pop collection is alright—most of the new stuff is lousy so bookending with Mudhoney was a good decision. Small Faces and Friends? Small Faces! And friends! Paint It Black invites you to "journey to the dark heart of sixties pop" in yet another psychedelic Mad Libs exercise. Likely more to come here.
"Artyfacts." The British set, more than anything or anyone, is responsible for all music I enjoy today. Thank god for small, lifelong favors as I'm now an out-of-touch forty-year-old who's stuck in his ways.
Cute Guv'ner B-side, decent Neutral Milk Hotel B-side and then a bunch of garbage. Oh, Merge.
Compilation of blaxploitation soundtrack highlights with ridiculous (short) liner notes by someone called Jorge Hinojosa. That's gotta be a phony name, right?
MCA Records Executive No. 1: "What do you think stands out better from the film, 'Rumble' or 'Flowers on the Wall'?" MCA Records Executive No. 2: "Definitely 'Flowers.' No one thought Bruce Willis would sing again after Hudson Hawk!" MCA Records Executive No. 3: "Go get me a chicken cutlet, you fucking maggots."
"Yeah-yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah."
Eric Clapton honors Otis Spann, Champion Jack Dupree, John Mayall and Peter Green mere days before discrediting their and his own contributions to rock & roll.
Includes an in-character "Bad Man" performed by Lite. "Hey… guess how many suits I got. Guess how many pair of shoes. Guess how many tiiies. Shit, I don't know. Must be twenty-five, at least. And you better believe they're allll silk. Every one."
Four AmRep Porn singles on one CD. Guv'ner has given us all chlamydia.
An excellent K Records compilation of exclusive songs with minimal obtrusive Calvin Johnson contributions. The Blues Explosion, the Make-Up and especially Old Time Relijun provide the cream.
Indie film dialogue and poorly recorded live tracks. Line forms to the left!
"The Source was originally started by David Mays, a Harvard University student in Cambridge, Massachusetts." Of course it was.
I submitted this to Discogs myself. You're welcome.
"Watchin' Soul Train on a Friday Night." Thai food and wine, I'll watch anything on a Friday night.
Because I'm a good dad.
Holy shit, did I give Matador Records a lot of my money.
Featuring several ridiculous Grace Slick proclamations! I ordered this set the day it came out and it had already been backordered. Then a few days later it showed up at my front door, somehow. Then everyone on Amazon gave it crappy reviews due to said unavailability. Then a substitute standard version, minus limited finery, was issued and World War III was averted. Anyway, this is that true out-of-print original, which is an extension of the original Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music boxed set, which was an extension of the original Woodstock and Woodstock 2 soundtrack albums, which were based on the actual Woodstock festival. You can practically smell the mud.
LPs, EPs & 45s
Also featuring Jack White. B-side "Lily White Mama and Jet Black Daddy" is pretty good but doesn't live up to the title. What could?
More of that "everything I could find (which wasn't much)."
Drummer John Steel apparently supplied his secondary school photograph for the inside gatefold.
Another highlight of my late-nineties commutes to and from Reading.
The original six-song release. Actually four songs, since side one is different takes on the title track. The "much better" reissue above makes room for more Kool Keith star time, so I eventually replaced this with the reissued CD because records are stupid.
Purchased in Canada, sold in America. NAFTA got nothin'.
"Legal Man" is possibly my favorite Belle & Sebastian song, even as most diehard fans probably despise it. But with "Jonathan David," Stuart Murdoch continued to loosen his iron grip on the band and resultant A-sides suffer from weak Stevie Jackson bullshit. Nice B-side though with "The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner."
I reviewed this for a friend's zine way back in aught two. I feel the same now as I did then: cut the fat and turn it into "I'm Waiting Round the Corner" b/w the Ramones cover "Somebody Put Something in My Drink."
Second album. No boys allowed.
Charming split, with Built to Spill covering Heavenly and Marine Research (featuring past members of Heavenly) covering Built to Spill. Precious sleeve design is K Records all over.
Lone release for the Cibo Matto side project, featuring Sean Lennon and the Blues Explosion's Russell Simins.
Pink Floyd cover? Check. Queen cover? Check. ZZ Top cover? Check.
Rolling Stones cover? Check. Moby Grape cover? Check. Cat Power cover? Check?
Lead Headcoat and co-lead Headcoatee together, sans Headcoat finery.
A mysterious, unnamed (by me here) website I frequent features a lot of interesting "making-of" interviews celebrating anniversaries of classic albums like Electric Ladyland, Bayou Country and… Morning in America? They also run several prize drawings over the course of a year and I've managed to buck the victory odds not once but twice, out of maybe eight submissions. That is some sweet action! First it was the Beatles' Help! on Blu-ray, which will come in handy when I eventually
Complete with step-by-step instructions for committing four types of suicide ("To begin, acquire sharp razor"). Three ex-Nation of Ulysses-ers and future Make-Up-ers plus one future short-term Delta 72-er. Basically, I feel like Ian, James and Steve wanted to fire Kim but instead they said "Fuck it, let's just break up and start a new band with one of the Frumpies."
There's no greater gimmick than the Donnas… except when the Donnas cover Ace Frehley's "Speeding Back to My Baby."
"Fuck Shit Up" is a career apex. "Hang with sluts! Spill your guts!" But what's with the slash in "Wasted/Groove"? José and Cormac are hanging out in the books section below and the superfluous punctuation is driving them nuts. Anyway, each single features a throwaway "dub" version on the B-side—way to provide value there, Calvin.
Babies and Bunnies has five songs, the others have four apiece. All tracks are included on the Frumpie One Piece CD above except, as noted there, "Frumpies Forever."
The long-awaited studio version of "Furniture" on clear vinyl. Great stuff.
Mike and Dan kill it on a two-song single. They also kill it on an EP of the same name that includes seven other songs but I never purchased that instead for some reason.
Ignore the fact that "Mynci" is apparently pronounced "monkey." You'll get over it because "Poodle Rockin'" is pretty great.
They dropped the "the" somewhere back there. I assume they needed more room on album covers to account for ever-growing Beth Ditto. Or, she ate it.
"We have a drum machine, don't make us use it!"
Formally credited to Al "He's the King" Hirt. You know your last name's an adverb?
The lead single from Tyrannosaurus Hives (available above) with an exclusive B-side, "Genepool Convulsions." On white vinyl.
Three weak-ass songs that do not live up to their excellent titles. These Swedes tried and failed to up the Nation of Ulysses's vitriol. Missing ingredients? No tongue! No cheek! No tongue in cheek!
I bought this LP somewhere for 99¢. Possibly never played.
Riding white vinyl comes a way-truncated version of the ass-scorching "Bellbottoms," the original of which might be the best song of the nineties (from the eternal Orange). (B-side "Miss Elaine" is not a Run-DMC cover, somehow.) Both sides of the jukebox platter are better than anything on the same year's Now I Got Worry. It rides green vinyl. Negro is a promo-only live album recorded in 1996. I won this in an online caption contest! I also won a video compilation (VHS!) that I will soon sell on eBay (once I figure out how to get it onto my computer) and a T-shirt that is so pitted out it's got its own clinic. Lastly, my lone memory of the Live!!… bootleg?… is the red and yellow sticker on the front. The vinyl might have been white? I'm not sure I ever played it (no turntable for me in '94) and I can't tell you where it is now. "I'm so lonely!!" Drag.
This EP was my introduction to J5's mission: "Let everyone know we're practically from the old school." It gets boring after awhile.
Songs taken from Boogie Down Productions' first album and MC Shan's first and second.
R U A Believer has a don't-bother remix on the B-side. What is it with remixes lately? Remixes, featured guests, boy/girl vocals, all this bullshit. The three songs on Substance Abuse are all really good. "Wade in the Water"? Again with the remixes! This time it's of a throwaway Sound Vérité track. Everything (except for the remixes) is included on the I Want Some CD above.
The Makers started out kinda punk, then went garage, then glam, then whatever they are now (if anything). Covering the Pretty Things post-psychedelic "Miss Fay Regrets" on the B-side confuses shit even further. I'll sell you Parachute instead.
"It's not even that interesting." How I disagree! The labeling implies they were afraid of being sued ("P. Swayze," the Etch-a-Sketched "Patric") but the song itself is all in: "Patrick Swayze, Hollywood actor." This song was all over WZBC in 1997 and I was all over it.
Two songs, neither of which is called "Ex Machina." And neither of which, unfortunately, is all that good compared to much of their output. It does come with a cool silkscreen poster though.
I'd cut out on this band before 2002's Electric Sweat hit but not before buying the lead single. Exclusive B-side "Say Man, What Time Is It?" encapsulates every pre-2003 song they ever recorded.
Let It Slide. Ten inches. Five songs. Blue vinyl. Australian. All but the non-Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge take of "Check-Out Time" are on the March to Fuzz compilation. The Third Man set was "recorded live to acetate" in September 2013 and contains the only available live version of "When Tomorrow Hits" that I'm aware of. Completist alert!
Two-song single, neither of which is called "Wet Circuit City." I wonder if that place went out of business too.
In which Stephen Malkmus goes solo.
I had this alarmingly pro-environment single when I was a kid. Pronounced "The Palooshkin Salooshkin."
Quivvver – "Mermaid" (1994)
She's one of them… she's a mermaid! The original version referenced over five goddamn years ago. (It is better.)
A single-sided record, both improving and mocking vinyl as a medium.
My let's-fleece-a-vinyl-hipster sense kicks into overdrive when an LP (with Amazon's "AutoRip" download) costs a few dollars more than the download itself. Vinyl hipsters are too vinyl-hipster to shop for hipster-vinyl on Amazon so enjoy my ten-percent markup, Discogs community.
I really hope that's not shit smeared across the front, as the legend says.
Six Finger Satellite/Green Magnet School – The Declaration of Techno-Colonial Independence (1992)
I enjoyed being lectured about proper needle care by the guy who sold me the Green Magnet School split after I let him know that "Sex Transistor" has a skip in it. He refused to consider that he sold me a flawed product rather than a "near mint" one and, without calling me a liar (to his credit), he basically went off. Here's part one: "I listen to all of my records before putting them up and didn't have any skip on my player. You may need a new needle. Needles don't last forever. Do you have a backup needle you can test the record with? I won't even sell any records that skip on my player." Needle! Part two, after I told him I wasn't having a problem with any other records and the skip was happening in the same spot every time: "Needles are delicate and can be damaged fairly easy. I suggest buying a replacement in the future for a backup. If this issue starts occurring more frequently with other records where you don't see any problem but it still skips then it is definitely your needle. It happened to me years ago and I had a stack of records that skipped. After I bought a new stylus I replayed the stack and two-thirds of them were perfectly fine." It is not my fucking needle. After cleaning up his typos should I lecture him about basic capitalization and spelling guidelines? Anyway, I have officially posted my turntable on Craigslist.
A. said I could sell these. I think it broke her heart a little.
WZBC's Psychotic Reactions program was a highlight of my late-nineties Wednesday-evening commutes, introducing me to such bands as the Sonics, the Pretty Things and Count Five. Hard to think there was a time when these weren't yet significant to me.
A Mary Timony/Carrie Brownstein collaboration that sounds like a Mary Timony/Carrie Brownstein collaboration. The title track and "Number One Fan" are keepers. The other two, including a soulless Who cover, are not.
"Polymer Records." How can I leave this behind?
I don't believe for a second that Spoon named themselves after the Can song.
In case you don't already have a Superchunk album. You only need one.
The idea of those giant killer bees scared the preschool shit out of me.
"I'm in with the in crowd, I go where the in crowd goes. The in crowd is teetering, a-teetering without no clothes."
I like Billy's extra "the" there. "The Rise and the Fall of a Double," not "The Rise and Fall of a Double."
I'm willing to bet Billy was listening to a lot of "A Quick One, While He's Away" in '95.
Are you one of the millions? I am. Peter Criss is too. Me and Peter, doing coke until the end of time.
Caterpillar was only partially compiled on A Single History, as the lock-grooved "Love and Fear" was excluded for some reason. Negated B-side "Census" is an early version of Repetition's "Sensible," which sounds as though it should be an early version of something. "MK Ultra" might be Unwound's best song. I once played it at 33⅓ by accident and it was the best Godflesh song I've ever heard, too. Live in London is a four-song Peel Session on tangerine-colored vinyl. Tangerine-peel-colored? "Torch Song" was not included on A Single History for some reason. It was released afterward, you say? Thank you, detective.
White Stripes – "Let's Shake Hands" (1998)
White Stripes – "The Big Three Killed My Baby" (1999)
White Stripes – Merry Christmas From the White Stripes (2002)
The first single, the third single and a holiday single. "Big Three" turned me into a fan when WZBC latched onto it upon release. I remember two DJs discussing the band before a concert later that night at the Middle East (before, but not by much, they hit it big with White Blood Cells). The first dude compared them favorably to Led Zeppelin and the other took it personally. "Led Zeppelin? What??" He was too wrapped up in his ridiculous, judgmental indie world to think anything he liked could be linked to such a dinosaur.
Double album, with each record in its own embossed sleeve. Includes a cool oversized picture and essay book as well.
Nudity! Andre messes up the title of "Lookin' Down at You Lookin' Up at Me" throughout the song. He was feeling generous with his partner that day.
The first and last remix record I ever bought. Kevin Shields makes an appearance to remind everyone "If you think six years is a long time to wait between records then you've seen nothing yet."
Tavares!
Cassettes
Phil Rudd MIA.
Featuring Bryan Adams on rhythm guitar.
1987 to 1989 (and a little beyond) was a transitional period for me. And what's up with Pandora's Box's inferior remix of "Draw the Line"? It's a good thing the liner notes are wicked awesome.
Sixteen versions of the one song the band ever composed.
Pierre rewriting "Feel Like Makin' Love" as "Slippin' in the Tongue" is the basis of our ongoing friendship.
"Black Sabbath," "The Wizard," "Warning," "Paranoid," "War Pigs," "Iron Man," "NIB"… side one is the greatest compilation ever.
My mom said "You know we already have this record" and I said "But mommm!"
"Cop Killer." Yes.
"After the 1987 murder of DJ-producer Scott La Rock, MC KRS-One moved away from the violent themes that dominated his debut, Criminal Minded, and began writing socially conscious songs using the moniker the Teacher." So take care of Jimmy cuz you know what's up.
I liked "My Prerogative" and ended up with an album of shit. Should have bought C+C Music Factory instead.
"Moving in Stereo" (and, alas, Phoebe Cates) not included.
Sure, let's call a best-of compilation Time Pieces and put a fucking pocket watch on the cover. I, too, was once counted among the bamboozled—Clapton wrote only three of the ten songs here and the worst of them, slow-dance anthem "Wonderful Tonight," definitely targeted underage girls.
Solid gold… once you separate the art from the artist.
A friend who clearly did not own this album tried to convince me that it contained a title track. I called bullshit on that and asked him to sing the song: "American foool." Nice try. Twenty-two years later a reissue included a bonus track entitled, yes, "American Fool," though it sounds nothing his subdued, deer-in-headlights improvisation. There is no stubbornness like that of a child, especially one who probably didn't live long enough to hear the reissue.
Parts three, two and one, respectively, of my introduction to an all-time favorite. I never got Fresh Cream (until Those Were the Days above, that is), which is strange because it's so under-represented on the compilation. As if "NSU" couldn't have replaced "Anyone for Tennis?"
What do you know? They're not actually called "Hall & Oates."
Def Leppard was somehow the first band I liked enough to own three albums. Thirty years later I saw them open for Kiss.
My friend's dad, 1985: "Listen to this 'faggot' part."
The first three albums were eventually upgraded to the second wave of CD remasters. The last three? Not so much, even though Morrison Hotel is better than Waiting for the Sun. Classics showed me that "the best" songs (like "Peace Frog" and "Wild Child") are not always included on "best-of" compilations.
Discogs describes the backing case as orange but that shit was hot pink.
I loved The Real Thing's "Epic" so I bought the album it's not on.
I'll take "Big Time" and "Sledgehammer" and leave "In Your Eyes," thank you very much.
That video for "Land of Confusion" was the sensation at my middle school in 1986. Bus rides and recesses were spent dissecting its epic.
Having randomly purchased Three Lock Box at my hometown Strawberries, I later added "the one with 'I Can't Drive 55'" to my birthday wishlist.
Sure, "upgrade" the four-song CD with a ten-song cassette.
Subjectivity, sure, but how could "Hey Joe" have been left off of the original volume? Maybe because Hendrix didn't write it (and his estate, therefore, couldn't cash in), though popular hits "Foxy Lady" (there is no E in "Foxy"), "Fire" and "Crosstown Traffic" were excluded as well. Volume 2 corrected the oversights and, in addition, blew my mind with the live Band of Gypsys epic "Machine Gun," though the truly essential deep tracks "Manic Depression," "Love or Confusion," "Spanish Castle Magic," "1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)" and "Little Miss Strange" were left for the real fans to discover outside of the aggregation model. (That "Little Miss Strange" bit was a joke.)
For some reason I'm transported to my seventh-grade classroom whenever I hear a Huey Lewis & the News song. My teacher's Mets played the Red Sox in the World Series that Fall. She was gracious.
What can I say? "New Sensation," "Devil Inside" and "Suicide Blonde" are great songs.
If Paul McCartney had any post-Beatles credibility left then it was thoroughly eliminated by "The Girl Is Mine."
The title track was my first favorite song ever. I suspect I owned the cassingle and not the album but I can't find that on Discogs.
I was never compelled to upgrade In Through the Out Door or Coda. I was right. The boxed set though, that was the real shit. I drove across (actually down) Texas once and specifically requested a rental with a cassette deck so I could listen to all four tapes on repeat. "Black Dog"/"Over the Hills and Far Away"/"Immigrant Song" is an inspired sequence but tape one is where it's at.
"Cult of Personality" forever! The only thing I remember about the second album is the wraparound sleeve (with the ovals cut out for the case's teeth or whatever those things were called) and that they got a new bass player.
My third real rap album after License to Ill and Loc'ed After Dark. That's right, I never bought Raising Hell even after contemplating (at RadioShack!) whether I preferred the green or the purple version. Two best-of-Run-DMC purchases later I stand by the assessment. "Dumb Girl"? Come on. ("Around the Way Girl"? Come on.)
This was actually my mom's but I chose it (for some reason) to put the eighties' backward-masking mania to the test. I spun out some of the tape, flipped it over, wound it back up and nearly destroyed our cassette player. Days later: "What happened to my tape?" "Hmm, yeah, weird. Is ALF on yet?" Teenage deviance and I will now admit ownership.
"Genre: Hip-hop/new jack swing."
The first album I ever bought. I asked the pretty girl at Strawberries for "the Men at Work tape" and she asked which one. "The one with 'Down Under' on it?" I'm sure I fell in love.
There was a time when I thought …And Justice for All was the band's first album and this was their second. Now I'm contemplating which of their Lovecraft-inspired songs to include in 2018's playlist. We've come a long way, guys, even if the track list here reads like a case study for antidepressants.
"Christian and conservative groups claimed the band was encouraging their listeners to worship Satan." A primped, gaudy Satan.
In which two-fifths of Green River decides against pursuing careers with Mudhoney or Love Battery.
"Pegboy is an American punk band from Chicago, Illinois with a relatively large cult following," one that apparently included me at some point.
Welcome to the In Through the Out Door/Coda Memorial Do-Not-Pass-Cassette Club! Wish You Were Here's title track is all that holds up and The Wall is one-hundred-percent unlistenable. Unlistenable.
I struggled with paying CD-money for EP-length. Later upgraded as part of the Surfer Rosa import.
"In response to the Beastie Boys' unauthorized sampling of some Led Zeppelin songs on their 1986 album Licensed to Ill, Plant also used samples from Led Zeppelin songs ("Whole Lotta Love," "Dazed and Confused," "Black Dog," "Custard Pie" and "The Ocean") on "Tall Cool One," additionally singing words from "When the Levee Breaks." Yeah, there's no publishing controversy with any of those.
Featuring a second stab at that horrible "Nabokov" lyric with "Don't Stand So Close to Me '86."
"All of the songs would eventually be released as studio recordings: "Tommy the Cat" on Sailing the Seas of Cheese in 1991, "Pressman" on Pork Soda in 1993, "Jellikit" on the Airheads soundtrack in 1994 and "The Heckler" on Antipop in 1999. All other tracks were included on the band's debut studio album Frizzle Fry in 1990." Sure, but I'm still waiting for Remo Williams: The Adventure Continues.
Apollonia…
I once bought an irregular Quiet Riot T-shirt at the Whalom Park flea market.
Let's move on.
I never got around to modernizing More Hot Rocks (or Hot Rocks, for that matter, though A. did it for me) because the album reissues above covered everything much more sincerely (if less efficiently). These are some quality deep tracks though: give any noob a tape—or, shudder, a Spotify playlist—with its first seven and last eight songs and he's a Stones fan for life. And Steel Wheels? You're not the only one with mixed emotions.
Two Sammy Hagar tapes against only one from Diamond Dave? Gimme a break.
This is pretty random. The definition of not committing.
"Conform or be cast out!"
My first experience with an eponymous album not being a band's first album. At least it didn't change these guys like Metallica.
In eighth-grade Spanish class—my name was "Manuel"—a friend translated this album title to "Nada gusta el sol." I corrected him with "Nada como el sol" because everything does like the sun. Except for Sting, who's in a dark room fucking all the time.
My introduction to Tone-Lōc was TONE LOC written in foot-high letters on my homeroom blackboard one high school freshman morning.
Megastardom was just a stepping stone. And I always liked "Exit."
"Let's just call the album 'FUCK.'" Let's just listen to the old Dave albums.
Redundancies are a problem when committing to multiple compilations. And notice a pattern with these older albums being phased out before I went CD berserk? Right. Who's Last, by the way, was purchased by accident and immediately returned when I realized it was a live album, an important distinction made clear on the graphical LP sleeve but not my plain-text cassette. Refund approved.
In which disco murders rock. There's nothin' left to eat.
I owned this on cassette and would contribute that version to Discogs if I had half the patience required to deal with the "Read the guidelines!" and "Don't source an image taken from the internet!" and "I mean, shame on you for trying to get away with selling a cut-out as 'Mint!'" (an actual quote) nonsense perfected by the bloated, virginal Discogs community.
If you slow down the closing seconds of Nine Inch Nails' cover of "Dead Souls" you will hear Ernie Hudson praying for another Ghostbusters sequel.
"You got the juice now?" "[Shakes head.]"
Glenn Frey fever dream.
My introduction to James Brown. "I! I!" "You! You!"
Videos
One of several hundred multimedia releases named The Best of the Doors.
Dig! (DVD, 2004)
I already wrote a thought-provoking review of this back in 2005: "If you haven't seen Dig! then check it out." So much blogging potential!
Help! (BRD, 1965/2013 "special edition")
I finally bought a Blu-ray player! Obsolete my ass. In my day we owned movies.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (VHS, 1997)
Thanks to the queue of students waiting to finish up their criminal justice papers while I put my captioning skills to use in the Mac lab. Matador rewarded me for not defaulting to "Bud," "Weis" and "Er" with this tape, the Controversial Negro LP above and a CONTROVERSIAL NEGRO T-shirt that earned several glares throughout my twenties. It and my Unwound WE MUST REPEAT shirt were in a contest to see which pair of armpits could turn the deeper shade of brown.
Led Zeppelin (DVD, 2003)
That moment when the Icelandic kid turns to the camera during the "Dazed and Confused" clip at Laugardalshöll.
Mudhoney – No. 1 Video in America This Week (VHS, 1995)
Mudhoney – Live: Berlin 1988 (DVD, 2012)
Mudhoney – I'm Now: The Story of Mudhoney (DVD, 2013)
The VHS was purchased at Newbury Comics in Nashua. As if its videos aren't good enough ("Good Enough" for the win!), the hotel interludes produce the biggest laughs. This and the Blues Explosion tape made me hang onto my VCR for as long as I did. Embracing the DVD format long after it became obsolete, I asked for "the new Mudhoney DVD," meaning I'm Now, for my birthday a couple of years ago and instead I got the Berlin show. Win–win!
Pink Floyd – Live at Pompeii (DVD, 1972/2003 "director's cut")
"In addition to the concert and interview footage, [the director's cut] includes more overlaid imagery including footage from the Apollo space program and computer-generated images of space and Pompeii."
Rolling Stones – Charlie Is My Darling: Ireland 1965 (DVD, 2012)
It drives me crazy that "is" is not capitalized on the cover. Always capitalize verbs in titles, people. Stop it with the "Oh, I know not to capitalize words with less than four letters, like is, me, Joe, cum." Also, it's fewer than four letters. Idiots.
Various – What's Up Matador (VHS, 1997)
Various – Everything Is Nice: The Matador Records 10th Anniversary Anthology (VHS, 1999)
Again with all my money. Flusssshhh!
Books
Michael Azerrad – Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991 (PB, 2002)
In which Azerrad uses Mudhoney as an excuse to exhaustively fellate Sub Pop.
Lester Bangs – Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic (PB, 1987)
Lester Bangs – Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader (PB, 2003)
Edited by Greil Marcus and John Morthland, respectively, these collect several dozen Bangs essays one thousand times better than anything Marcus has written outside of "What is this shit?"
Beatles – The Beatles Anthology (HC, 2000)
I wonder if I'll ever read this, like for real, cover to cover.
Victor Bockris/Gerard Malanga – Up-tight: The Story of the Velvet Underground (PB, 1996)
Was Bockris hanging with Stevie Wonder (who may or may not be blind) when he called this Up-tight instead of Uptight? When, as a society, did we lose the hyphen?
Keith Cameron – Mudhoney: The Sound and the Fury From Seattle (PB, 2013)
Love it! My takeaway is that Steve Turner took the band for granted and that he and Matt Lukin probably aren't on speaking terms.
Kevin Courrier – 33⅓: Trout Mask Replica (PB, 2007)
Oh right! Is this the year?
Stephen Davis – Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga (PB, 1985)
Read along as Richard Cole contradicts himself three times while telling of the shark episode.
Autumn de Wilde – Elliott Smith (HC, 2007)
Includes a five-song Live at Largo CD recorded in 1998: "Angeles," "Between the Bars" and "Clementine," plus covers of Quasi's "Clouds" and Hank Williams Jr.'s "All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)."
Mick Farren/Dennis Loren – Classic Rock Posters: Sixty Years of Posters and Flyers, 1952 to 2012 (HC, 2012)
It's right there in the title. Come for the artwork, stay for the hundreds of pages of additional artwork. Leave for the inside-cover short shrift given to Farren's music career.
This came out in October 2003. Are music writers on holiday during November and December? "A slog!" – Jarrod P. Biffington (Jr.), Managing Director, Capitalism
A journalist seeks out a man who, upon initial publication, had been dead for sixty years. He should have stayed home and listened to Cream's cover of "Cross Road Blues." "Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, please!" "Eric Clapton, please!"
Bordering on fiction. A college friend "borrowed" this and I will hunt the fucker down.
Bill Janovitz – 33⅓: Exile on Main St. (PB, 2005)
Exile on Main Street's a strange street to go down.
The Jesus Lizard – Book (HC, 2014)
Would the band have agreed to this project were "book" not a four-letter word?
Its tongue-in-cheek know-it-all-ism is at times undermined by pure error (Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, not Ogden's!). I resent that I am the target audience. Legitimately funny at times when discussing Nick Drake ("frequently photographed standing dolefully among trees") and the Fugs ("[who,] like Kiss, continue to play farewell gigs without actually going away") and presenting definitions for lazy defense mechanisms like "Rewards repeated listens." If only my snobbery were restricted to the medium of rock.
Light on story but great on photography and poster designs. My scissors and I ruined this.
No.
Candy Leonard – Beatleness: How the Beatles and Their Fans Remade the World (HC, 2014)
Were Beatlement and Beatlism already taken?
Dan LeRoy – 33⅓: Paul's Boutique (PB, 2006)
How was I not sourced??
Andrew Loog Oldham – Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s (PB, 2010)
Andrew Loog Oldham – Stone Free (PB, 2014)
The first and third volumes of Loog's "triography." He must have enjoyed the Alien Quadrilogy.
The bit about Trout Mask Replica should have instead been collected in Banished: Rock & Roll for a Galactic Outpost. That dude hated it. Fucking rock critics.
Don McLeese – 33⅓: Kick Out the Jams (PB, 2005)
An Amazon reviewer wrote "Could maybe have a had a little more analysis of the music." No shit! It's like Don was well satisfied after devoting a hundred pages to chapter one, "Radical Politics!!!"
Jimmy Page – Jimmy Page (HC, 2014)
Jimmy Page!
John Perry – 33⅓: Electric Ladyland (PB, 2004)
Proving, Don, that track-by-track analysis works best in this series.
Enjoyable for fans but overly technical—much of it went right over my head. Pretending to understand how 6/8 time differs from a regular waltz is an act of folly.
Keith Richards/James Fox – Life (HC, 2010)
Holy fucking drugs. I can't recommend this enough.
A much more encyclopedic account of Morrison and the Doors than the pulpy No One Here Gets Out Alive. Enjoyable for real fans who want to learn more about the recordings and performances. Spoiler: he still dies at the end. Spoiler: I lost this one too.
Andrew Schulman – Waking the Spirit: A Musician's Journey Healing Body, Mind and Soul (PB, 2016)
"Schulman expertly weaves cutting-edge research on neuroscience and medicine, as well as what he's learned as a professional musician, to explore the power of music to heal the body and awaken the spirit and bore the reader."
Nigel Williamson – The Rough Guide to Led Zeppelin (PB, 2007)
"Whatever you say, Nigel."
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