Boom goes the cannon: “List three books that have had an impact on you and why”
Days-old daily prompt? Week-late Volume 16? It must be an election year!
Two apostrophe-S authors drove much of the playlist this year. Joe Banks’s Hawkwind: Days of the Underground—Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia provides a sub-subtitle for our times, defining what it means to live among MAGA birdbrains, and spends too much time on a post-Space Ritual era that doesn’t shift as many of this reader’s units. Similarly, Jonathan Abrams’s The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop interviews a shitload of underground rappers I’ve never heard of to talk about post-The Chronic superstars I continue to not care about.
Hawkwind-adjacent influences waned as early iterations were whittled down to forty-eight fifty masterpieces—a temporary increase as I turn(ed) fifty this year—but bookends are bookends, and nine rap songs seems high compared to recent efforts.
That third book? How about Melissa Maerz’s Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, my most enjoyable read in years even if nothing from the soundtrack or Linklater’s own production mixtapes (see pages 294–295) is represented here. Alice Cooper checks in nonetheless and past volumes feature other Moon Tower All-Stars as well: ZZ Top, War, Kiss, Bob Dylan, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Black Sabbath (twice) and Led Zeppelin (also twice). Isley Brothers: you were so close.
Another contributor: fucking death. So many of my favorite musicians died since Volume 15, including one (Dead Meadow’s Steve Kille) who was younger than me. Drag. “Old” people like Tina Turner, Melanie Safka, Wayne Kramer, Damo Suzuki and even Steve Albini might not shock so smartly but this train will not slow down the longer I last. Carl Weathers? Come on.
Death, also, to another title track that wasn’t. “No Aloha” by the Breeders? Not this year, though Oh! All the Treats survives as Volume 16’s Christian name and also its Canva “AI image generator” keyword prompt that, with refinements and iterations, spit out a wonderful result that text would only ruin. Who do I think I am, Led Zeppelin? “Houses of the Holy,” indeed. Both ways!
1. Robert Calvert – Catch a Falling Starfighter
Once and future Hawkwind collaborator/frontman Calvert was the standout personality in Banks’s book. His relationship with the band is something else:
After becoming acquainted with Dave Brock, Calvert joined Hawkwind as a lyricist, performance poet and occasional lead vocalist in 1971. Following a two-year absence, he rejoined as the band’s principal lead vocalist in 1975 before leaving once again in 1979. Calvert co-wrote Hawkwind’s hit single “Silver Machine,” which reached number three in the UK Singles Chart. […] Calvert also directed the Space Ritual tour, which is widely perceived as the band’s artistic zenith.
1974’s Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters was his interim debut solo album and is a genuinely hilarious spin on the Lockheed bribery scandal, reeking of hip underground England with the presence of Hawkwind’s full imperial-phase roster plus Arthur Brown, Brian Eno, Paul Rudolph from the (Social) Deviants and Pink Fairies and Twink Adler from literally everything, with Viv Stanshall and Jim Capaldi performing character dialog:
Lockheed aircraft salesman: We’ll redesign the plane, right? And instead of just calling her the F-104, we’ll call her the F-104G.
West German Defence Minister Franz Josef Strauss: “G”?
Salesman: Yeah. [Whispers with colleagues.] Yeah, “G”… uh… Herr Minister… “G”… uh, “G” for Germany.
Strauss: “G” for Germany?
Salesman: Yeah. [Whispers with colleagues.] Yeah, “G” for Germany, Herr Minister. You know, uh, it’ll go well on the plane, we could do a logo around it and, uh… it would– it would look very tasty up in the clouds. We could illuminate it a bit so that on dark days you would see it, uh–
Strauss: “G” for Germany!
Salesman: –twinkling like a star.
Strauss: Also, “G” for “Gott strafe England.”
American colleague and German official: [Simultaneously.] Good!/Gut!
Strauss: This I am enjoying. [Chuckles.] “G” for Germany!
2. Cypress Hill – How I Could Just Kill a Man
1991’s Cypress Hill was about twenty-five percent of my senior-year soundtrack, thanks in part to recognizing many of its sample sources from oldies radio (Lowell Fulson’s “Tramp”), my dad’s record collection (the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Are You Experienced”) and freshman studio hall (Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized”). It is included as part of English editor Robert Dimery’s 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die—which must be good if a damn editor is willing to forgo the thousands-separator—and others from the same year are Ice-T’s OG Original Gangster,
Mudhoney’s Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, a Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory (stay tuned) and My Bloody Valentine’s overrated vacuum cleaner Loveless but not Black Sheep’s Creamy® A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Take me motherfuckin uptown!
3. Edgar Broughton Band – Out Demons Out
Audience singalong “Out Demons Out” improved upon the Fugs’ “Exorcising the Evil Spirits Out of the Pentagon” and rewarded a Spotify search after reading about this band in the Hawkwind book. Jesus! Every now and then a new (old) band has its way with me—Sonny Sharrock, Witch, Pentagram, etc.—and Edgar Broughton’s is another, to the point that “There’s No Vibrations, but Wait!” is already locked into Volume 17. In, demons, in!
4. Odetta – Hit or Miss
From 1970’s Odetta Sings, which presumably could have been the title of all of her albums? If Peter Gabriel and Jacques Dutronc can name all of their albums Peter Gabriel and Jacques Dutronc, respectively (der), then Odetta can do whatever she wants with a bunch of boring covers that get smoked by original “Hit or Miss” despite a cast of a dozen session hacks who always sound exactly the same.
5. Chain & the Gang – Mum’s the Word
6. Melanie – People in the Front Row
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars, “a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism and mass incarceration,” is the lone 2023 book I read in 2023. (So far this year: zero 2024s.) It was “generally well received by critics” and I guess I agree with that, having rated it four out of five on Goodreads—it was fiction, after all. Along those lines, “People in the Front Row” (RIP Melanie) played over a montage in the Black Mirror episode “Loch Henry,” in which someone sets out to film a true crime documentary, learns that his parents were behind the crime and then, no big whoop, releases it anyway. Let’s hope Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man doesn’t turn into a snuff film.
7. Edan – Emcees Smoke Crack
“I don’t smock crack, I smoke MCs.” Edan ain’t kidding—this space was originally filled by Eric B & Rakim’s “Know the Ledge.”
8. Alice Cooper – Killer
“Will you have order!” I struggled more with this playlist and its sequencing than I have with any in recent memory. Increasing the total to fifty was supposed to help and instead complicated things—these are the problems I create for myself. This opening twenty percent needed an anchor, an epic, a dirge… a killer. [Insert twenty-five seconds of distorted klaxon alerts.] Johnny Rotten called Killer the greatest rock album ever made—come on, Johnny, it wasn’t even better than Split in 1971. Pretty vacant.
9. Mary Timony – Dominoes
10. Grup Bunalım – Taş Var Köpek Yok
11. Ty Segall – Void
Timony’s Untame the Tiger and Segall’s Three Bells are the 2024 Creamy® nominees that will never be. I favorited them on Bandcamp long before their release dates only to be disappointed hearing them through for the first time, the second and beyond. In particular I wanted to love Untame the Tiger because I’ve been a fan of hers since Helium’s Pirate Prude in 1994 (even if her voice was too soft then) and especially since “The Revolution of Hearts” revealed what an amazing guitarist she is. That element is missing from Tiger. Drag. Meanwhile, Three Bells continues the downward turn that began with Hello, Hi and possibly earlier—I see a Volume 17 contribution from Twins or Slaughterhouse instead of what comes next. Drag. Oh, and Grup Bunalim? Oh, and Grup Bunalim! “Dominoes” and “Void” didn’t sound good back-to-back in either order so I spanned the void—har! har!—with some Turkish crunch from 1970. Years ago I read about an import compilation featuring cool typography and a grungy power trio on the cover and I was in. “‘Bunalım’? With no dot on the i? Who the fuck is this??” I never did find a copy but it turns out to have packaged singles by various combinations of players and solo performers with the flagship Bunalım, a.k.a. Grup Bunalım, at its center. Google translates “Taş Var Köpek Yok” as “There Is Stone, No Dog” even though there’s a goddamn dog barking at the end. Segall has written multiple songs about dogs so, sure, this transition suits.
12. Off! – Slice Up the Pie ✔️
“2022’s Creamy® Free LSD is eighty-sixed with no good reason other than I love this Wasted Years highlight.” What the hell was that about? I probably couldn’t choose between “Slice Up the Pie,” “Smoking Gun” and “Peace or Conquest” then, either.
13. Del the Funky Homosapien – Hoe!
From a 1999 compilation called Defenders of the Underworld, which had something to do with video games—was Del also playing a lot of Half-Life back then? I love how he bashes the very format he’s headlining:
What about your record label, man? You motherfuckers out there trying to have, you know, get all these big names so you can put that shit on the covers to sell your shit? Man, fuck that shit. You’re trying to play me like a straight hoe.”
Right. Someone has to speak for Gordon Freeman.
14. Discharge – Free Speech for the Dumb
This one is dedicated to MAGA shitheads. AllMusic (!) calls Discharge’s 1982 debut LP Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing “one of the most bleak, angry albums to ever grace the underground.” Tracks are “not only incredibly catchy and simple but pack their maximum impact because of this simplicity.”
Free speech! Free speech! For the dumb!
Free speech! Free speech! For the dumb!
Free speech! Free speech! For the dumb!
Free speech! Free speech! For the dumb!
Free speech! Free speech! For the dumb!
Free speech! Free speech! For the dumb!
Free speech! Free speech! For the dumb!
Free speech! Free speech! For the dumb!
15. Last Poets – The Courtroom
I regret to inform Norman Whitfield and the Temptations John Coltrane and his quartet Suliaman El-Hadi and the Last Poets that this kind of shit is still happening in 2020.
16. Donald Byrd – Cristo Redentor
Edwin “STATS” Houghton (um) writing for Pitchfork (um) to defend Byrd’s 1964 LP A New Perspective as the… one hundred ninety-fourth… best album… of the sixties– forget it with these clowns. “STATS”? All caps? Fuck off.
17. Unwound – Fingernails on a Chalkboard
RIP to my excellent WE MUST REPEAT shirt, purchased at the Middle East Downstairs on the Repetition tour. Its armpit stains practically wrapped all the around my shoulders. College gentlemen: white tee-shirts are a bad idea. The Boston Phoenix (also RIP), in reviewing the album and previewing said upcoming show (during which the band suffered major technical problems after being preemptively blown away by openers Blonde Redhead), namedropped Fugazi, Gang of Four and Captain Beefheart and argued (to whom?) that “the likes of Rancid and Green Day pale in comparison to the challenge of Unwound.”
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Gimme a break, Rancid and Green Day fans wouldn’t have lasted past the third utterance there. Fugazi, though: apologies. The Argument still rocks.
18. Love – Stephanie Knows Who
Mike Stax’s Ugly Things podcast is a wonderful resource for old timers like me who have no time for modern bands averse to distortion and, you know, clothes that don’t look like pajamas. Love’s Johnny Echols was a guest last year and told the story of 1967’s Da Capo—it’s a wonder Arthur Lee didn’t return from the grave to overdub his interview. Anyway, remember Stephanie? I wonder how she’s doing. And I wonder if that little shit ever found his shoes and/or got pinned underwater by a short-tempered adult in Celtics apparel. (Go Celtics!)
19. Wu-Tang Clan – I Can’t Go to Sleep
“Stop all this crying and be a man.” I guess Isaac Hayes would have gone easier on Ghost and RZA had they taken any Scientology courses.
20. Antonio Carlos & Jocafi – Quem Vem Lá
a.k.a. Antonio Carlos Marques Pinto and José Carlos Figueiredo. Google Translate: “Who Goes There With Them Bitchin Horns.”
21. Eddy Current Suppression Ring – All in Good Time
Eddy Current Suppression Ring makes their second appearance after a thirteen-volume gap, which must be a record, right? I’ll put my team on it. 2019’s All in Good Time capped off the band’s own nine-year album gap (since re-capped)—during that time, “That’s Inside of Me” appeared in the Amazon show Patriot, which I finally got around to watching late last year. Watching? No, adoring. It rivals Better Call Saul as the best thing I’ve seen in years and, of course, was canceled after two seasons. Drag. Nice soundtrack though, which I’ll talk more about in fifty minutes—I understand the Ring’s (not a real nickname) Australia and lead Patriot actor Michael Dorman’s New Zealand are not the same country but, you know, maybe they kind of are?
22. Sleater-Kinney – Surface Envy
How is this a mere second appearance by Sleater-Kinney? I had my problems with The Hot Rock but come on.
No Cities to Love is the eighth studio album by American rock band Sleater-Kinney, released in 2015 through Sub Pop. It is the first album following a decade-long hiatus and the band’s 2005 release The Woods.
Smart—no one follows The Woods without a break.
It was accidentally streamed three weeks early by Sub Pop.
Intercepted message!
In the Observer, Kitty Empire said the band had executed “pretty much the most perfect comeback of recent years.”
“Kitty Empire”? The fuck?
Writing with high praise for Exclaim, Chris Bilton called the record “a thoroughly raging collection of post-punk anthems that nudges up the powerful perfection of The Woods at least another notch.”
“At least another notch”? Are there tangible rating notches in Exclaim critics’ cubicles?
Personnel: Corin Tucker (guitar, vocals), Carrie Brownstein (guitar, vocals), Janet Weiss (drums).
Nuff said.
23. Osees – Die Laughing ✔️
24. En Attendant Ana – Wonder
Osees and Intercepted Message beat out Yo La Tengo’s This Stupid World, En Attendant Ana’s Principia and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s… unrepresented?… PetroDragonic Apocalypse for the goods—not often, at my ripe age, to have four legitimate options, especially a relatively new one in France’s “Waiting for Ana” quintet. The now-paywalled Aquarium Drunkard wrote a hundred words about the album in October—two (three?) of those words were “mid-period Stereolab” and seven others were “crafting a towering motorik anthem on ‘Wonder.’” J’étais impuissant à resister.
25. Pretty Things – Scene One
More—a lot more—Ugly Things with the group that inspired the name. First it was Dick Taylor discussing 1965’s Get the Picture? followed by John Stax (no relation to host Mike) for the same year’s self-titled album and Wally Waller for 1970’s Parachute. (Another episode dropped a couple of weeks ago in which Mark St. John paid tribute to Phil May, whose passing I somehow missed four years ago. RIP. Drag.) The inner sleeve of my “Numbered Limited Edition Gold CD” reissue is pictured.
In 1975, Rolling Stone critic Steve Turner wrote that it had been “a Rolling Stone Album of the Year…”
“Typical!”
“…though in fact Parachute did not place among the magazine’s Albums of the Year for 1970 or 1971, and indeed was not mentioned in Rolling Stone until Stephen Holden called it an “obscure underground classic” in his [1973] review of Freeway Madness.
I like how there’s no doubt it failed to sell a million copies.
26. Gang Starr – Brainstorm
“1994’s Hard to Earn was the duo’s first album to carry the PARENTAL ADVISORY label.”
So what the fuck you gonna do?
I know I used to act relaxed but now I’m cuckoo.
Hard to earn!
27. Boris – Furi
“Nice, Freegal has Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter! Oh wait.” [Later.] “Nice, Freegal has Boris’s Akuma No Uta!”
28. Emily Robb – Rolling Electric Ball
Vocals are overrated and Emily Robb’s If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection plays on repeat inside that pastry alien-scape van.
29. PJ Harvey – Evol (live)
It’s not that I’m ever over PJ Harvey—this is her second straight appearance out of five total—but her charming March appearance on the Broken Record podcast reminded me how much I’ve enjoyed her music since being introduced to Rid of Me in Oskar’s kitchen. She plays Boston in the fall. WE MUST THREE-PEAT.
30. Archie Shepp – Attica Blues
Attica! Attica! AllMusic!
The up-tempo funk cuts recall the way Sly Stone’s arrangements ping-ponged many different elements off each other in a gleeful organized chaos. That’s especially true on the gospel-inflected title song, a monster of a groove that later became a hit on the acid jazz revival circuit.
I’m sure the “acid jazz revival circuit” was a vast improvement on Black American originals. Has Europe invented anything in three hundred years?
31. Vashti – Train Song
English singer-songwriter Vashti (Bunyan)’s 1966 A-side served as the theme song to Patriot’s first season (second season: “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys), in addition to being featured in a 2008 Reebok/NFL commercial that is every bit as ridiculous as could be:
In an unprecedented showcase of Reebok’s association with the National Football League, “Join the Migration” features twenty NFL stars—the most to ever appear in a single TV ad. Each player—Eli Manning…
Eli Manning can eat a bowl of dicks.
…Peyton Manning, Kevin Boss, Jerricho Cotchery, Greg Ellis, Matt Hasselbeck, Madison Hedgecock, Chad Johnson, Thomas Jones, Mathias Kiwanuka, Nick Mangold, Laurence Maroney…
…Jeff Saturday, Bo Scaife, Derrick Ward, DeMarcus Ware, Ty Warren, Benjamin Watson…
Belichick let three players appear in this??
Reggie Wayne and Vince Young—is wearing his team’s NFL Equipment Speedwick Tee, an anti-microbial, moisture wicking shirt with a unique, soft cotton hand.
They can’t all have been traveling north, right? Were they in Mexico or Cuba? Recast this shit using the “17 Pink Sugar Elephants” demo and I’m pumped for Jacoby Brissett and Drake May to combine for three or four wins next season.
32. Shellac – Mouthpiece
RIP to the shiniest bastard of them all and former Biff! Bang! Pow! contributor Steve Albini. Shellac’s new To All Trains is a shoe-in for Volume 17—“Girl From Outside”? “Scrappers”? “Chick New Wave”?—and an early favorite for a Creamy® checkmark but I’ll take my time with it. So in steps 1998’s Terraform and up yours, Oscar! Tributes and obituaries have notably excluded Rapeman and the short-term (and atoned-for) Run N______ Run from Albini’s discography but the universal respect seems genuine, as is my fandom—seven annual blather appearances (one for Big Black and now six for Shellac) are matched or surpassed only by Six Finger Satellite, Can and varieties of John Dwyer, Ty Segall and Ian Svenonius. Anyway, “Mouthpiece” is a song Steve wrote about you, me and everyone on Earth minus Kim Deal—the call and response really sells it:
Blockhead! (Blockhead!)
You’re a dummy! And a mouthpiece! (Blockhead!)
You’re a soulless creep! (Dummy!)
Blockhead! (Blockhead!)
This one is also dedicated to MAGA shitheads. High five! High five!
33. Boogie Down Productions – The P Is Free
I don’t know a thing—and, frankly, don’t give a shit—about the Drake/Kendrick Lamar feud. I never gave a shit about Tupac/Biggie either because they had no prolonged skill or art compared to the Public Enemy, Ice-T, De La Soul, et al that I grew up with. Grrr! All these contemporary frauds—Mr. Lif and Edan are exceptions, though not really contemporary anymore—can’t hold a candle to the real shit. Supposed GOAT (to anyone under forty-five) Jay-Z might have been the fourth best rapper on “Pass the 40” and that’s generous. Generous! No, real feuds were Boogie Down Productions versus the Juice Crew (summarized nicely on The Battle for Rap Supremacy and well documented in Abrams’s The Come Up) and Ice Cube versus NWA—that beef was on record, no social media retractions, no Canadians. “The Bridge” answered by “The Bridge Is Over”? That’s how it’s done.
34. Sands – Listen to the Sky
“Buddy Baker was an ordinary guy…” Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile (five stars) may be a you-are-there account of the Blitz but Chris Bishop’s Garage Hangover is a goddamn labor-of-love miracle repository. Want to look up garage bands by US state? By thirty-six other countries? By “Unknown/mystery bands”? Jesus!
[NEMS impresario Robert] Stigwood was focusing on the Bee Gees and insisted that Sands record “Mrs. Gillespie’s Refrigerator.” Top DJ Pete Murray opined that it “needed de-frosting.”
Love that.
With carte blanche for the B-side, however, Sands chose one of the highlights of their live shows, a three-part piece named “Listen to the Sky” [after the song’s opening verses]. This proceeded into a middle section of hair-raising guitar and bass feedback effects, with staccato snare-drum strokes, all simulating an aerial dogfight, complete with air-raid sirens and pyrotechnics. It concluded with a savage rendition of a section out of “Mars” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets.
Rate Your Music goes further with contemporary context:
The political commentary of the lyrics communicates an anti-war message far more earnestly than a lot of psych bands, who (the American ones in particular) were prone to getting preachy. It’s a song that leaves an impact, and then some.
Finally, the Nuggets II boxed set liner notes misidentify our hero as “Freddie” Baker but are right on nonetheless:
Everything trots along rather merrily until the air-raid sirens sound. It’s a sensational piece of English psychedelic storytelling.
“…and he vanished in the haze.”
35. Bo Diddley – Power House
36. Iron Maiden – Powerslave
Did Bo Diddley hate 1970’s The Black Gladiator as much as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf hated their own Electric Mud (’68) and The Howlin’ Wolf Album (’69)? At least The Black Gladiator had colorful artwork. Speaking of colorful artwork, you can’t get much more so than Iron Maiden’s entire career—man, did the poster with the Killers illustration scare the shit out of me at Strawberries when I was a kid. Powerslave was featured on the Discord and Rhyme podcast and its “Aces High” is in regular rotation on Ozzy’s Boneyard, at least when they’re not playing something by Black Sabbath, Ozzy solo, Rainbow, Dio solo, Metallica or… Def Leppard? “I caught you banging your head to Iron Maiden last week” and that hasn’t stopped, thankfully, to the point that whenever they come on with G. in the car I say “Hey, it’s your favorite band.” Her social studies teacher even played all eight-plus minutes of “Alexander the Great” in class one time and that checks out—“Is there a single Iron Maiden song that isn’t about some mythical, historical or classic fictional character?” Even The Hard Times managed this observation—“Just like how Maiden sings the praises of historical events”—in one of their non-satirical clickbait exercises. It’s not all crust punks and gutter cigarettes.
37. Ngozi Family – Kumanda Kwa Bambo Wanga
“Riff from… ‘War Piiigs.’ Rip off… ‘War Piiigs.’” And when the distortion pedal kicks in at 2:27? And when the distortion pedal kicks in at 2:27! The Google-Translated “My Father’s Grave” missed The Brothers Karamazov by two years as brain fever swept south:
Paul Ngozi was a Zambian musician who first became popular as the band leader of Ngozi Family, a top local rock group which was one of the first groups to have its music classified as Zamrock.
Zamrock!
Zamrock has been described as a fusion of traditional African music and psychedelic rock, garage rock, hard rock, blues and funk, taking influence from popular bands like Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer, the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple and Cream.
Holy shit!
Counting Crows is an American rock band from the San Francisco Bay Area, California.
38. A Tribe Called Quest – Everything Is Fair
“You don’t have to say a word.” Thanks. I don’t know how I manage this every year.
39. Sonic Youth – The World Looks Red
Talk about insufferable—Sonic Youth outdoes even Jefferson Airplane, adding “despicable” as another descriptor. Look at these privileged Geffen poseurs literally pulling poor Nardwuar’s shirt over his head. “You fucking piece of shit! That was a present!” Fuck the band and their handlers for never giving a shit about anything and enabling this middle school cafeteria bullshit. Fuck Lee Ranaldo and his bad skin for seizing an opportunity—at the age of thirty-five—to bully and humiliate someone weaker. And, most recently, fuck Kim Gordon for going on the Broken Record podcast a couple of months ago to brag about never learning to type “because that would mean submitting to corporate culture.” Lovely people in real life, I’m sure.
40. Fairport Convention – Who Knows Where the Time Goes?
Without getting into the “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” debate (answer: who cares), I might have to start cutting back on non-Christmas Christmas songs. “Before the winter fire,” “so come the storms of winter”… am I too far gone? Check back around NFL week fifteen, which will arrive before we know it, for who knows where the time goes? On that subject: we’ve had Jazzy almost two years, two wonderful years. We love her no matter how much she scratches the expensive new heating system, how closely she comes to killing us on the stairs, how often she jumps up on the new TV stand bought expressly because “it’s too narrow for her to fit.” Two wonderful years, mostly wonderful years.
(Secret white belly not pictured.)
41. Ike & Tina Turner – I Idolize You
Boss Hog’s self-titled 1995 album introduced me to this Ike & Tina deeper cut (and even updated it with “I Dig You”). I prefer this re-recorded 1966 version over the original 1960 single even if they’re not as different as six years would suggest. RIP Tina—I apologize for telling my mom when I was ten that Van Halen should sue you because they already had a song called “1984.” (Yusef Lateef on line one.)
42. Sonny Sharrock – Many Mansions
43. Dead Meadow – Beyond the Fields We Know
Two songs coming in at nine and a half minutes—more cream, please! Sharrock’s return was basically foretold a year ago, though it’s an impressive catalog that can travel twenty-two years from Black Woman and “Blind Willy” to Ask the Ages and “Many Mansions.” Pharoah Sanders and my man Elvin Jones join the band here so what did you expect? Dead Meadow will have its own twenty-five year gap next year with the inevitable inclusion of something from the album that was still being mixed when bass player Steve Kille passed away. RIP you loud motherfucker: my vital organs are still recovering from your “Beyond the Fields We Know” solo at TT the Bear’s Sonia six years ago.
Remember when I was afraid you’d gone pop? Gotta keep my head, baby.
44. Here & Now – This Time
Here & Now came together in 1974 (nice) “as communal living,” “were an integral part of the UK Free Festivals movement through the 1970s” (where they crossed paths with Hawkwind and collaborated with Gong’s Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth) and “continues to tour as a loose collective.” It all sounds very unstable. Their Wikipedia page’s member history reads like a list of European generals during World War I—thirty-nine people, including twelve drummers (!) and two people who played “?” early on. And the timeline? And the timeline! Again, it resembles a history of rule over Alsace–Lorraine, this time, all times.
45. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five – The Message
RIP to the Let It Roll podcast. Host Nate Wilcox discussed Grandmaster Flash’s memoir and mentioned in passing that “[Grandmaster Flash] was lucky enough to have his name on ‘The Message’ but he had no role in that.” Who knew! From the wonderfully monikered Creative Loafing:
The record never would’ve come about if not for [Sugar Hill Records co-founder] Sylvia Robinson’s insistence and pressure. Though it wasn’t widely known at the time, neither Flash nor four members of the Furious Five had any involvement in the creation of the song. Instead, it was written and performed by a Sugar Hill studio musician named Ed “Duke Bootee” Fletcher and lone Furious Five member MC Melle Mel. Fletcher and Robinson are credited as producers.
Flash talked about how the success of “The Message” was the beginning of the end for him and the Furious Five, and also about how relentlessly Robinson stayed on them to do the song. “‘The Message’ was a gift and a curse. She would ask us for a period of time about doing a record having to do with the real-life things that happen in the hood and we kind of ducked it for a minute.”
Rahiem still does a better job lip syncing Duke Bootee’s verses in the video than Melle Mel does his own. “We’re down with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, man!” Maybe, but was Sylvia Robinson down with you?
46. John Coltrane – Psalm ✔️
Consider it fully resolved. “Trane’s three wishes” from the coda to Chris DeVito’s Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews are as follows:
- “To have an inexhaustible freshness in my music.”
- “Immunity from sickness or ill health.”
- “Three times the sexual power I have now. ”
Elation, elegance, exaltation. Amen.
47. MC5 – The Human Being Lawnmower
RIP Wayne Kramer, who received specific direction from singer Rob Tyner:
Tyner: You start with that riff. [Hums the staccato intro.]
Kramer: Now I play that four times, right?
Tyner: No, then you play something else. You never come back to the chorus.
Chop-chop-chop-chop! Chop-chop-chop-chop! Chop-chop-chop-chop! Chop-chop-chop-chop! On that topic, here’s Kurt Vonnegut in Deadeye Dick. I have to get it in somewhere:
My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.
There is evil for you.
We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.
I give you a holy word: disarm.
48. Geto Boys – Mind Playing Tricks on Me
Isaac Hayes collecting royalty checks in heaven today! Who am I kidding, you know the Scientologists run his estate.
The [We Can’t Be Stopped] album cover is a graphic picture of member Bushwick Bill in the hospital. Bill was shot in the eye as he and his girlfriend tussled over a gun. [Scarface, Willie D] and the group’s management team took Bill out of the hospital room in order to take the picture, removing his eyepatch and intravenous drip in the process.
At least they left the eyepatch on for the single sleeve. Today’s rap is basically adorable in comparison, right? I know Eminem has a new song out. It’s fine. Call me when he pronounces the W in “sword.”
49. Can – Turtles Have Short Legs
RIP to the real Damo Suzuki. In October, my good friend Ignacio left work (on his terms) to pursue another opportunity. Occasionally he and I would have the office to ourselves on Fridays and, naturally, collaborate on Spotify playlists—he goes, then I go, etc. Our eight playlists (“Latter Convulsions,” “Misappropriated Credits” and other modified nouns) are mainly half good and he would agree, just not about the same halves, because my taste is that of a seventy-year-old man while his is a fourteen-year-old girl’s. Three colleagues joined us his final Friday for a burger-and-beers lunch on The Compnay and we compelled them to join the playlist fun. Fun? Well… the end result—“Undo Umbrage”—was twenty percent good. This one guy nicknamed the Doctor (for reasons too obvious to matter) preceded me each go-round and either didn’t take it seriously, doesn’t like music or, most likely, asked ChatGPT for “colleague resignation generic silly playlist songs,” and so I had follow shit like “The Secret of My Success,” “Iko Iko” and the goddamn main theme from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Terrible. “Turtles Have Short Legs” was my bewildered answer to “Iko Iko” and a decent transition even though I admitted to my friend afterward that “I finally included a Can song in one of our playlists and it was friggin ‘Turtles Have Short Legs.’” Fuck that, I apologize for nothing. Turtles do have short legs.
50. Hawkwind – Paradox (live)
I told you, bookends are bookends! And here’s Stacia to make up for Adam “Really?” Duritz last year—I don’t even remember what that was about. “The cursed variety of SiriusXM’s Spectrum counters [the Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s “Fire”] with Counting Crows and goddamn ‘Mr. Jones.’” Well shit—consider interpretive nudity a course correction. Hawkwind’s “Paradox” was “recorded live at the Sundown, Edmonton” (and “remixed at Olympic Studios”) and this B-side edit is punchier than the proper Hall of the Mountain Grill closer. Post-Space Ritual slopes downward but 1974 remains a wonderful year.
Forty-eight songs and the truth, plus two: only seven from the sixties (fewest of the common era with, notably, zero from ’68 for the first time); sixteen from the seventies (six from ’70); five—five!—during a hip-hop exercise!—from the eighties; eight from the nineties (four from ’91); five from the aughts; three from the teens; and six from the twenties (two from ’24). Bless you, daughter. Keep out of that godforsaken van.
More furious madness
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