Landscape - Manhattan Boogie-Woogie

I took a chance on this one, not expecting much. Landscape was an early synth-pop group led by then-hotshot British producer Richard James Burgess (Adam Ant, Spandau Ballet, etc.), and their early stuff was full of inventive production techniques, smart lyrics, and black humor. On this, their third album, however, they succumbed to the slick, post-New Romantic Big Pop sound that plagued so many UK records released between '82 and '85. A disappointment, but I was half expecting it, and it was cheap anyway.

Taos - s/t

Other than saying that this band is the textbook definition of my self-invented acronym BTL (if you don't know, check my archives), I'll forgo all editorializing and simply let the liner notes of what I assume to be their only LP do the talking.

"We went to Taos because we heard that there was a lot happening up here, and we wanted to move into the country. The vibes are good here, and the people are groovy. There's a lot of honesty, people being really upfront, freedom, nakedness, a lot of love making, and people enjoying themselves. It's a rugged outlook, it's back to the old times--people have to chop their own wood, bake their own bread, and that's where it's at. We live on natural vitamins, bread, and vegetables.

We had been in New York, Woodstock, and then to San Francisco. We were in San Francisco for two years playing rock & roll like 'Louie Louie' and 'Midnight Hour,' which was a drag"

"After two weeks in Taos we wrote about fifty songs about the trees, mountains, people, and the mellowness here."

It goes on, and even gets better, but you get the idea.

The Inner Dialogue - s/t

This 1969 album was the Inner Dialogue's only release. Their sound is a cross between the Free Design and the Forum, if you're up on your obscure soft-pop. Basically a one-man/two-woman vocal group supported by a band that includes Jerry Scheff on bass (vet of a thousand sessions and member of Elvis Presley's '70s band). Excellent harmonies and a very "groovy" '60s sunshine pop sound. Most of the songs are very in-your-face commercial, a la the Association, but the vocal melodies seem very oddly composed, almost as if they were meant for interlocking instruments rather than voices, which produces some cool moments. Think of the Mamas & the Papas' "Dedicated to the One I Love" for a touchstone, but it takes off in its own direction from there.

Help Yourself - Strange Affair

Help Yourself was one of the earliest groups on the British pub-rock scene; they put out three or four albums in the early '70s. They get lumped in with the pub-rockers mostly because they shared management and at one point even a house with the members of Brinsley Schwarz, but in fact their music was closer to Californian hippy folk-rock, sort of like a British CSNY, with the tendency to jam heard on the latter's live album. This makes sense when you consider that the main singer/songwriter later joined the Welsh group Man, who were sort of Wales's answer to the Grateful Dead. Some folks apparently swear by this album, but I thought it was just OK.

Steve Reich - Four Organs/Phase Patterns

You don't really need me to tell you about Steve Reich, I'm sure, but this record was one of my best scores at the FMU fair, so I'll just throw it in briefly. It's one his best, most raw, bare-bones recordings, with him, Philip Glass (in pre-hack days), and two other musiciansns all playing electric combo organs while another player (I think it might have been Jon Gibson, I don't have the LP in front of me at the moment) keeps a dauntingly unchanging beat on maracas. Minimalism at its finest. The second piece is an equally fine variation on the same idea. This LP is pretty hard to come by, as it was on the French Shandar label, which was also home to some of La Monte Young's rare recordings.

Future - Down That Country Road

Thanks be to my man Bill Z., who pointed this one out to me at the record fair after noticing the cover, which just screamed BTL.* Three guys in dungarees and workshirts literally walking down a dirt road through the woods. For the most part, it doesn't dissapoint on that score. Future was an L.A. trio of guys whose names were all Jim (I swear), all of whom sing, and one of whom wrote most of the songs. This 1969 record was their one shot, but it's got some stellar players; James Burton, Dr. John, Jim Gordon, Red Rhodes, etc. They may not have been the Wrecking Crew, but they were the next best thing. Rhodes was pretty much THE pedal steel guy for West Coast country-rock, the guy's on every damn thing. These guys play it pretty straight up in a Burrito Bros.-ish style with a bit more of a pop-rock feel, though the former is very much their strong suit. The "rock" tunes fall pretty flat, but the rootsier ones work quite well, and the vocal harmonies are excellent, at one point even falling into a kind of Association-like vibe. PS - anybody who can enlighten me any further on Shamley Records (apparently a division of MCA) without resorting to the internet--that's cheating--is a better man than I.

*I explained this acronym of my own invention in a recent post, look it up.

Georgie Fame - Seventh Son

Georgie Fame is one of those guys whose sound I always love no matter what. The old cliche about listening to someone sing the phone book definitely holds for me with him. Maybe it's partly because he's so strongly influenced by Mose Allison, about whom I feel the same, but even more so. In the States, most people know him only for his sole U.S. hit "Yeh Yeh," but in England he was quite the sensation in the early-to-mid-'60s. Seventh Son came out in '69 and was sort of his "far out and groovy" album, or at least as close as he ever got. The cover is rather psychedelic, one cut features fuzz bass, and another has a trippy effect on his voice. Other than that it's pretty much the same blend of jazz, blues, R&B, and pop that was always his trademark. There are a couple of light-hearted tunes with funny lyrics that come off with varying degrees of success, the best being a lecherous Christmas song about Mrs. Claus, and the album closes with a Spanish guitar song of all things. Definitely for hadcore Fame fans only, but that means me.

Jerry Porter - Don't Bother Me

I've been looking for this one for ages, and finally found it for the right price at the record fair this weekend. It evokes all the classic collector buzzwords like loner/stoner/bummer/acid-folk/outsider, et al. God only knows how this thing got distributed through a major label, but I guess the '60s really WAS a different time. Mr. Porter is strictly solo with acoustic guitar and a touch of harmonica. On the album's centerpiece, the lengthy "LSD Fixation," he sings a "blues" that's quite literally about an LSD trip, accentuated by a psychedelic effect on his voice. On much of the rest, he plays some occasionally competent fingerstyle blues guitar (and kazoo on one tune!) and sings as though he still hasn't shaken the effects of the aforementioned experience. Did they have rehab clinics in those days?

The third and final day of the FMU record fair yielded only a scant few things for me, but it's the quality, not the quantity, and one of them was a major score:

LPs:
Steve Reich - Four Organs/Phase Patterns
Brinsley Schwarz - Silver Pistol
Norman Salant - Saxaphone (sic) Demonstrations

45s:
Milk 'n' Cookies - Tinkertoy Tomorrow
The Revox Cadets - Tony Goes to Tokyo/To Heaven a Jet - Airfields (split single)

Bob Siller - This Is Siller's Picture

This one's rather hard to find, a cult favorite. Siller was a singer-songwriter who, as far as I know, never made another album after this. It's quite similar to the first Paul Williams album, which I blogged about recently. Vintage orchestrated L.A. soft-pop. It's on Dunhill, the label that brought sunshine pop to the masses with the Mamas & Papas, et al, and there's a bit of that sensibility here as well. A quote on the inner sleeve from Jimmy Webb gives a further indication of the production aesthetic at work here. Nice stuff.

Alamo - s/t

What a boring piece of crap. I took a chance on it because it was cheap, it was an early-'70s Atlantic album, and it looked like a BTL* band. In fact, it's dreadfully boring bluesy hard rock, like some poor relation of Grand Funk with generous doses of Hammond organ added for extra sludge factor. God, I hate this kind of stuff.

*my own acronym for what's variously referred to as country-rock, roots-rock, or rural rock; it stands for "back to the land," which was the underlying aesthetic for all those groups. I've been urged by more than one person to write a whole piece about the more obscure end of this phenomenon. Once I get up a good head of steam, I'm sure I eventually will.

Paul Williams - Someday Man

Those who (if they even know who he is) think of Paul Williams as some MOR simp are in need of a reality check. Aside from the fact that he wrote some of the Carpenters' biggest hits that have been all the rage among hipsters ever since Sonic Youth said they were cool, he was the brains behind one of best CA psych-pop bands/albums of the '60s, the lone LP by the Holy Mackerel (about which I think I've already written). Following that, he went the solo singer-songwriter route (along with every other Moe with half a song) in 1970. This is his first album, co-written and produced by cult hero Roger Nichols (try getting near Nichols's own album for anything less than 50 bucks) and featuring the ever-reliable LA Wrecking Crew. The album is top-notch post-Beach Boys California soft pop somewhere in that Judee Sill/Margo Guryan/Jimmy Webb nexus.

Larry Coryell - Spaces

Though Coryell has made his share of them, and though his collaborators John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Miroslav Vitous, and Billy Cobham are no strangers to such things, it should be noted that this is NOT really a fusion album. It's simply post-bop jazz with electric guitars and piano. I happen to like Coryell's more fusiony stuff too, but this is an excellent divergence from that, with McLaughlin playing his ass off and giving LC a run for his money.

Jake Holmes - The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes

Oh my! No matter what turns up on Day Three of the record fair, this was surely the score of the weekend! I've been after this record forEVER, but I usually can't get near it because I'm not willing to pay the 80 bucks it usually goes for, but somehow a copy magically appeared for $12!!! Yes! After all that anticipation, I wasn't let down either. This record is mostly (only) known for containing the original version of "Dazed and Confused," which was written by Holmes and later stolen by Jimmy Page without any credit to Holmes whatsoever (Led Zep were notorious for this sort of thing, and have lost in court on a plagiarism suit over "Whole Lotta Love"). But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Basically, this is sort of like a manic-depressive version of early Tim Buckley, less pretty and more wierd/psychedelic, and slightly unhinged. Imagine if Buckley's first album had been overseen by Skip Spence. Alternately beautiful and twisted, with just Holmes, a bassist, and a lead guitarist making some funhouse-mirror folk-rock.

PS - don't feel too bad for Holmes about "Dazed and Confused;" apparently he wasn't as crazy as he seemed. He went on to write not only a concept album for Sinatra (!) but also some highly successful commercial jingles from which he presumably made some very nice money.

the bounty from Day Two of the FMU fair:

LPs:
Paul Williams - Someday Man
Jake Holmes - The Above Ground Sound Of...
Alamo - s/t
Pearls Before Swine - One Nation Underground
Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart - Test Patterns
Bobbie Gentry - Ode To Billie Joe
Wreckless Eric - The Wonderfol World Of...
Remi Gassman/Oskar Sala - Electronics
Barry Schrader/George Todd - Trinity; Voicemask; Emergence
Edgar Varese - Robert Craft Conducts Ionisation; Poeme Electronique...
Michael Sahl/J.K. Randall - A Mitzvah For the Dead; Lyric Variations for Violin & Computer
Help Yourself - Strange Affiar
Larry Coryell - Spaces

and a lone 78*
Ella Fitzgerald w/the Ink Spots - I'm Beginning to See the Light

*This marks my first-ever purchase of a 78. I'd been thinking for a while about diving into this deeper, darker level of record geekdom. I don't even have a player for them yet, but I figured if I bought a 78, it would force me to get a turntable to play it. So, against the advice of some of my friends, who are afraid of me turning into one of those wierdos with ratty sweaters and musty odors, who haunt flea markets forlornly in search of Nellie Lutcher records, I say look out below!