cliff hanger (1985) - jimmy cliff: columbia records, FC-40002

Back in the early 70’s the explosion of Bob Marley resulted in the American music industry “discovering” reggae, and like a hunter stumbling across a rare albino tiger, they wanted to kill it. The mere idea of an untapped vein of profit made their mouths water and their avarice grow. So, they decided that reggae was the Next Big Thing and they tried to go all-in to capitalize on it and squeeze every last cent from the buyers.

Unfortunately, most of the American record company execs don’t really “get” reggae, and so throughout the 70’s and early 80’s they engaged in clumsy promotion and ineffective exposure. They treated reggae the way they treated all other music, as just another product to mass-produce, advertise and sell, no different than breakfast cereal or foot powder. It never dawned on them that reggae might have a unique appeal to a select group of music lovers, and when faced with something that didn’t fit their preconceived assumptions it’s no surprise that they fucked it all up.

They packaged reggae the same way they did soul or funk – as an ethnic niche only of interest to Black America. The result? Failure. In the US reggae never Caught A Fire (get it?) beyond Bob Marley, and when he died in 1981 the labels were left with the task of trying to actually raise interest in other reggae musicians.

So, the record companies, as they will do, concluded that the problem was with the music rather than their inept handling, and decided that they needed to “fix” reggae.

The result is the album Cliff Hanger.

Side 1: Hitting with Music American Sweet Arrival Brown Eyes Reggae Street
Side 2: Hotshot Sunrise Dead And Awake Now And Forever Nuclear War

This album is just awful. All of the songs sound like they were lifted from a soundtrack to shitty 80’s cop movie. Not only do they sound dated, they are also painful as well. It’s clear that the intent was to try to reinvent Cliff as some sort of island-born Michael Jackson, so they made an "accessible" reggae album where the actual reggae was almost completely erased leaving songs that felt like something a bad Off The Wall or Thriller cover band would play. In fact, this album was so bad, I almost wasn’t able to listen to the whole thing.

And the sad thing is that, by all rights, Cliff ought to have had more success in the United States. His resume certainly would lead one to believe so: great voice, engaging personality, and reggae bona fides. But Cliff just never resonated with audiences here the way Marley did.

Maybe that was because nobody could ever really connect the way Marley did. In any case, Cliff was a different sort of reggae singer than Marley. Marley was Roots, while Cliff was more pop. Marley brought the spiritual side of rastafari and the struggle to leave Babylon for Zion, while Cliff was more about the here and now. Marley sang about Jah, while Cliff sang about Joe (if that makes sense).

And maybe that’s why Cliff Hanger sucks so much. Because Cliff, being more a pop guy, may likely have been open to changing his music in order to make it more appealing to American audiences. Which, paradoxically, made it incredibly un-appealing.


As a punchline to all this, in what can only be called the irony of just how out-of-touch the Grammy awards are, Cliff Hanger ended up winning the 1986 Best Reggae Album award - despite the fact that there really is no reggae on the record at all. I mean, the Police and the Clash were doing more legit reggae than Cliff did on this thing..

Up next: Prog, soprano style.

clash, the (1977) - the clash: epic records 1979 US release, PE-36060

By the mid 70's music was suffering from a bit of a personality crisis (get it?).  Rock music was being suffocated by corporate mega-bands, while its sibling pillow of disco was smothering funk and r&b.

Something had to happen in order to save music from the suits.

As it turned out, something did happen.  Disco was confronted with rap, while corporate rock got kicked in the nuts by punk.

Although punk has its genesis in American bands like the NY Dolls and The Ramones, it was the British (much like in the 60's), who managed to take the flag and launch the assault.  The vanguard of which was The Sex Pistols, who unfortunately gained notoriety more for the antics and calculated PR stunts of creator Malcolm MacLaren than for their music.  But the band that really gave punk the gravitas needed to be taken seriously was The Clash.

Side 1: Clash City Rockers I'm So Bored With The USA Remote Control Complete Control White Riot White Man In The Hammersmith Palais London's Burning I Fought The Law
Side 2: Janie Jones Career Opportunities What's My Name Hate And War Police And Thieves Jail Guitar Doors Garageland

The Clash is the 1977 self-titled debut for The Clash, but it wasn't released in the USA because, in a perfect illustration of the total head-in-rectum dysfunction of the American music business at the time, the label was afraid that they would be too controversial and not "radio friendly" enough to warrant actually releasing their first album.  However, after the UK version became the best-selling import of the year, and Give 'Em Enough Rope  was voted the 1978 Album of the Year by Rolling Stone magazine, The Clash was finally released in America in 1979 - only with a different, more marketing determined track list. 

The songs are filled with raw energy, passion, and intensity.  The guitars mount a full-frontal audio assault on every song, while the lyrics display a sophisticated dissection of just how messed up the world was at that time.  For example, I'm So Bored With The USA features some pretty in-your-face critique of the ugly image America had around the world:

Yankee dollar talk / To the dictators of the world
In fact it's giving orders / An' they can't afford to miss a word

I'm so bored with the USA / But what can I do?

While White Man In The Hammersmith Palais brings about a pretty scathing condemnation of the malaise and cynicism of things going on in Merry Old England:

Punk rockers in the UK / They won't notice anyway
They're all too busy fighting / For a good place under the lighting
The new groups are not concerned / With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, ha you think it's funny / Turning rebellion into money
All over people changing their votes / Along with their overcoats
If Adolf Hitler flew in today / They'd send a limousine anyway

Listening to these songs it's clear why one journalist called The Clash "The Only Band That Matters."  That was true then, and in light of the sort of so-called music that's around at the moment, it is even more true today.

What stands out in the songs on this album, now almost 40 years later, is just how mature they are both musically and lyrically, and how even though the band were transitioning from original drummer Terry Chimes (who appears on all but five tracks) to new drummer Topper Headon, there is no drop in either intensity or consistency.  In fact, they would only get more intense as they went on.

But back in the late 70's when this album came out it was nothing less than getting hit square in the face with a shovel.  The lack of slick production, the genuine power of the lyrics, and the raw honesty of the music made people take notice.  Especially the suits in their offices promoting the mega bands.  Change was in the air whether they were ready for it or not, and it was riding a horse of grinding guitars and gravelly voices.

Up next: A reggae icon sells out in a Big Way

chronic town (1982) - rem: irs records, SP-070502

I remember hearing the song Wolves, Lower on KALX radio in 1982 during my freshman year at UC Berkeley.  There was something about the song that caught my attention so much so that I went down to Rasputin Music on Telegraph Ave the next day, snatched one of the records from the bin, and plunked down my $10 (or whatever it cost back then).  I can still remember it because the clerk - some totally Berkeley looking dude with the serenity of a guy in The Zone - validated my instinct by saying, "Good choice.  You're going to really like this."

In 1982 REM were still almost totally unknown outside of Athens, GA and a few select college campuses, but their name was getting around.  The Chronic Town EP was generating a lot of buzz with it's (at the time) unique musical blend of Southern jangle, rock, and folk.  The combination of unadulterated instruments with Michael Stipe's curiously mumbled singing created an immediate sensation among the cynuical college crowd. 

Chronic Town (Side 1): Wolves, Lower Gardening At Night Carnival Of Sorts
Poster Torn (Side 2): 1,000,000 Stumble

REM's music was uniquely American in the same way so much of the other stuff coming out in the early 80's was not.  So much of the new stuff had a distinct English, if not Euorpean sound.  Even bands like the Ramones, with their retro 'murrcn look of jeans and leather jackets had this whiff of England, especially with the slightly affected accent in Beat on the Brat.  But REM had none of that. They sounded as if they'd never even heard a British band.  More than that, REM (like fellow Georgians, the B52s) sounded Southern, just as Blondie and the Talking Heads sounded New York, and X and the Plimsouls sounded LA.


The other thing about REM was that they somehow had this weight of intellectualism not found in bands like the Plimsouls or Blondie or X or the Ramones or the B52s.  Maybe it was the subdued simplicity of the music, or maybe it was the fact that in 1982 REM was limited to college radio. Or, perhaps (and I think this likely) it was the introverted inflection and mumbled singing of Michael Stipe.  Listening this time around I tried to pay as close attention to the sound of the vocals as I did to the instruments and the actual lyrics.  Maybe it's just me, but the volume, inflection, and register of Stipe's singing sounds more like something you'd hear on an NPR discussion than on a rock song.  And it's a good thing, too, because the lyrics for these songs are, to put it plainly, kind of silly.  That, or so deep that I'm unable to dive far enough to grasp them.

Consider this from Gardening At Night:

We echoed up the garbage sound but they were busy in the rows
We fell up not to see the sun gardening at night just didn't grow The yard is nothing but a fence the sun just hurts my eyes somewhere
It must be time for penitence gardening at night it's never worked

 Or these from Carnival Of Sorts:

There's a secret stigma, reaping wheel / Diminish, a carnival of sorts
Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel / Stranger, stranger to these parts

If there is deeper meaning here I'd certainly like to know it, because it seems to me that clothing these lyrics in cautious muttering was a way to make the music match the mocking gargoyle on the cover.  And that's pretty cool, too.

Up next: The eponymous debut from "The Only Band That Matters"

cheap thrills (1968) - big brother and the holding company: columbia records 1970 reissue, KCS-9700

One of my favorite books is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and it contains a fantastically melancholy quote (heavily edited here):

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of [...] no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.

[B]ooming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end  [. . .] but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now […] you can go up on a steep hill […] and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

One of the things not explicitly mentioned in that quote, but made clear by the constant musical references within F&L, is that music played a huge part in the whole atmosphere by the Bay in those days. And putting Cheap Thrills on the platter while considering Dr. Thompson's words was like getting battered by the wave he described.

Side 1: Combination Of The 2 I Need A Man To Love Summertime Piece Of My Heart
Side 2: Turtle Blues Oh, Sweet Mary Ball And Chain

Cheap Thrills just feels like pure 100% summer-of-love San Francisco.  Geek up the volume, close your eyes, and open your mind to really feel as if I you're right there in the Fillmore grooving to the heavy acid-blues and Janis' vocals.

And what vocals.  Janis had some serious pipes, and I doubt there will ever be another singer able to belt out Ball & Chain or Piece of My Heart with the same insane power that she did.  She was a force of nature - a mutated super singer with a direct line to the very souls of her forebears. She could channel Etta and Big Mama and Bessie and others.

This is the music that tortured Spiro Agnew and kept him awake at night quaking with rage and fear.  To the squares, albums like Cheap Thrills were a soundtrack for long-haired freaks running wild, raping wives and daughters and feeding LSD to the family dog.  To them it wasn't music as much as the sound of the very foundation of America's moral purity being ground into a fine powder to be injected into a godless junkie's vein.  It symbolized an American Ragnarok - an age of chaos in which children are torn from their parents arms and forced to endure non-stop orgies, while Good, Decent, Law Abiding people are marched from their homes, shaved bald, stripped naked, tattooed, and made to harvest hemp or work in factories manufacturing illicit narcotics.

Of course, the paranoia was unfounded and in reality Big Brother & the Holding Company just played basic blues with a bit of embellishment and extra grindy guitar. The kind of stuff Zeppelin and Rory Gallagher and others would end up doing.  Something that could have come out of the juke joints and honky tonks of the chitlin' circuit. Nothing to threaten the American way of life at all.  In fact, the most subversive part of the entire album may have been the cover artwork (done by underground comic artist R. Crumb), particularly the stoned, one-eyed space Jeebus, or the crowd of hippies and heads (with a cameo by Mr. Natural) waiting for the show:

The funny thing is that today, Cheap Thrills is almost classical music.  The sounds that froze the blood of middle-class America in the late 60's now sounds as harmless and quaint as Vivaldi.  And all those stoners and smack-heads and revolutionaries and pinko anarchists that were in the crowd that night in 1967 to see Janis wail are now in their late 60's to mid 70's, worrying about the dangers of rap and complaining about the temperature of their soup. The record keeps spinning ...

But playing this album sure does remind one of what music meant back in the day.  And, with much apology, to paraphrase Dr. Gonzo himself, today you can put a disc of vinyl on a turntable and with the right kind of ears you can almost hear the crescendo—that place where the music finally broke and rolled back.

Up next: Four geeks from Georgia fire up College Radio

brain salad surgery (1973) - emerson, lake, and palmer: manticore records, MC-66669

Prog rock fans have always been easy to mock because a very select but vocal minority of them take it all so very, very seriously.  For these arrogant few, prog bands don't play "music" - they create ethereal artistic moments.  They don't write "lyrics" - they plumb the depths of human existence and greater universal truths.  And these annoying prog fans fancy themselves as having the depth and intellect required to be able to comprehend the subtleties and sophisticated nuances within the compositions (never songs, of course!) that normal nose-picking slobs could never grasp, giving them the attitude that they are better than the rest of us.

In short, these smug dingbats view prog rock as an exclusive domain populated by a bunch of intellectual elitists gathering together in a ritualized group jerk session.

And that totally sucks, because those folks give prog bands and fans a serious image problem. Sort of how that really aggressive Star Wars dork fan will engage in lengthy, pointless arguments regarding the defensive prowess of Imperial Star Cruisers when matched against the maneuverability and speed of Rebel X-Wing fighters, and the divergence of the Sith from the Jedi.

It sucks even more when prog bands themselves contribute to the perception that prog is nothing more than a pompous collection of pseudo-intellectual claptrap filled with self-indulgent musical conceit and gaudy lyrical grandiloquence. Sort of like this paragraph.

Enter Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and their pridefully flamboyant album with perhaps the single best title in all of music history, Brain Salad Surgery (although, to be fair Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy certainly merits consideration).

Side 1: Jerusalem Toccata Still ... You Turn Me On Benny The Bouncer Karn Evil 9 (1st Impression, Part I)
Side 2: Karn Evil 9 (1st Impression, Part II) Karn Evil 9 (2nd Impression) Karn Evil 9 (3rd Impression)

I actually really like this album but I can still see it for what it is, and I simply can never listen to it without just thinking that it is a parody of itself. Everything from the cover (which is an amazing HR Giger piece that simply demands lengthy and intimate examination) to the songs are so incredibly pretentious and overdone that I honestly do wonder whether the boys intentionally decided to go over-the-top on this one.

I mean, this album has all the trappings of prog parody: orchestral score, pipe organs as the lead instrument, ridiculously dramatic lyrics, and the toffee-nosed singing of someone who considers their voice and interpretive skill as being somehow touching the mind of god.

All that out of the way, however, this album really is good. There is quite a lot going on musically, ranging from the weird futuristic interpretation of Toccata (giving it the feel of a soundtrack to a cheezy 70’s B sci-fi movie), to the ragtime piano of Benny the Bouncer, to the soul/funk guitar driving the otherwise saccharine ballad Still … You Turn Me On. And all of it does showcase the fact that everything else aside, Messrs Emerson, Lake, and Palmer are very accomplished musicians. And their willingness to premier the Moog Apollo (the first polyphonic synthesizer) shows that the boys embraced new technology.

The centerpiece of the album is Karn Evil 9 – a 30 minute song rendered in three “impressions” spanning the last 9 minutes of side one and all of side two. Karn Evil is both the best and worst of prog in one go: a song about a dystopian future featuring complex musical passages fused with ludicrously ostentatious lyrics.  Just consider this excerpt from Karn Evil 9 - 1st Impression, Part I (I mean even their song titles drip with pretense!):

Cold and misty morning / I heard a warning borne in the air
About an age of power / where no one had an hour to spare
Where the seeds have withered / silent children shivered, in the cold
Now their faces captured / in the lenses of the jackals for gold.

Or this bit from the beginning of Karn Evil 9 - 3rd Impression

Man alone, born of stone / will stamp the dust of time
His hands strike the flame of his soul / ties a rope to a tree and hangs the Universe
Until the winds of laughter blows cold.

I mean, come on! These make the lyrics for songs like Supper’s Ready or Stairway to Heaven seem subtle and understated. But they save the best for last. The album ends with this musical dialogue between the machine-voiced overlord and the piteous but defiant human:

(Man) I am all there is
(Overlord) Negative! Primitive! Limited! I let you live!
(Man) But I gave you life
(Overlord) What else could you do?
(Man) To do what was right
(Overlord) I'm perfect! Are you?

That reads like the journals of some angst-ridden freshman philosophy major whose girlfriend just broke up with him and who now finds himself questioning the mechanics of the universe.

But still and all, this is a cool album with cool music, cool cover art, and a cool title.

Next up: Heavy acid-blues sung by one of the most soulful voices ever