Alt.country supergroup, anybody?

Pull up a chair, this could take some time...

Golden Smog started out as a studio min-joke goof-off for members of Soul Asylum, the Jayhawks, Wilco, Run Westy Run, Big Star and GeraldineFibbers.

The first EP "On Golden Smog" and LP "Down By The OldMainstream" were punctuated by hoary barroom covers (Thin Lizzy, Faces) and songs that sounded like The Jayhawks. They even gave themselves pseudonyms and fabricated sleeve artwork for previous releases - "America's Newest Shitmakers", "Temple of the Smog". So far, so average.

Which makes 1998s "Weird Tales" all the more remarkable - this is a great album, possibly one of the best "alt.country" albums ever.

Golden Smog - Until You Came Along 

Golden Smog - Please Tell My Brother 

Whereas on "Mainstream..." the bulk of the tunes sound like in-studio post-closing-time jams, on "Weird Tales" the band members (now going by their own names) served up some of their best material.

"Until You Came Along" sung by The Jayhawks' Gary Louris is simply one of the best American songs of the past 20 years, a glorious singalong to the redemptive powers of true love. I never really got the Jayhawks but then, they never recorded a song as good as this.

"Please Tell My Brother" is one of Jeff Tweedy's (Uncle Tupelo/Wilco) best songs, a gorgeously simple folksy amble.

Between "Mainstream..."and "Weird Tales", Wilco had released the incredible, horizon-expanding double album "Being There", which must surely have had some effect on the Smog musical landscape. There's a variety of tone and attack on the second album that is totally absent on their earlier recordings.

But whither Jeff Tweedy's erstwhile chum, grumpy Jay Farrar?

When Uncle Tupelo split, the sensible money was on him to rake in the glory. In Tupelo, he'd been responsible for many of their signature tunes, with Tweedy coming up with the frothier numbers.

When they split, Wilco (Tweedy's band made up of all the non-Jay Tupeloband members) served up "AM", a mostly uninspiring retread of past glories, whereas Farrar's Son Volt released "Trace", a truly great album, bookended by "Windfall", one of my favourite songs ever, and a great cover of Ron Wood's "Mystifies Me", featuring on bass... MarcPerlman of Jayhawks/Golden Smog fame. See how it all ties in together??

Son Volt – Windfall

Son Volt - Mystifies Me

Son Volt followed "Trace" with "Straightaways", which was... well, an uninspiring retread of past glories, and I stopped paying attention, really (if you have any suggestions of what I've missed out on, leave a comment).

Wilco released the amazing "Being There" and became one of the most exciting and interesting bands in the world today. Whod've thunk it?

Buy Weird Tales by Golden Smog
Buy Trace by Son Volt 
Buy Being There by Wico 
Visit Golden Smog 
Visit Wilco
Visit Wilko (arf!)
Visit Jay Farrar

talk about mud flaps...

Velvet Underground - Lisa Says (live 1969) 
Velvet Underground - Sweet Jane (live 1969) 
Velvet Underground - Rock And Roll (live 1969)

This post has been prompted by the excellent Kill All Artists mp3 blog, which recently featured a post a day based on each disc in the VU's Peel Slowly And See boxset. It made me realise that I haven't listened to them for AGES and sent me back to my favourite VU albums, the double "Live 1969" set.

One of the great things about the Velvets is that they're that rarity, a band whose stuff is worth hearing over and over again in different permutations and performances.The legendary "lost album" and numerous bootlegs add to the mystique(and marketing opportunities to saps like you and me), along with Lou Reed's seeming inability to sing a song the same way twice - he's a bit like Dylan in that way.

I always preferred the VU after they got rid of Cale and Nico - not the most popular opinion ever, but there you go. Don't get me wrong, I love the viola and the sturm und drang of the first two albums, but there is something (there's no other word for it) LOVELY about what they did in their final years, especially in these low key live recordings. You can hear what great songs they are and you can hear how fantastic Moe Tucker and Sterling Morrison (in particular) were.

This version of Lisa Says is particularly interesting - in it's "lost album" incarnation it's quite a slight but pretty song, but here it goes all over the place, slipping into bits of what sounds liken early version of "Satellite of Love" and stretched out to nearly six minutes.

In a classic bit of Reed revisionism, Lou claimed that the version of Sweet Jane was recorded on the day he wrote it, which Sterling Morrison refuted in Bockris and Malanga's "UpTight". But it sounds so fragile and simple - without the killer extra chord in the lick but with "heavenly wine and roses..." - that I almost believe the old bugger.


Rock And Roll is probably my favourite VU song and this version is great, gentle and yearning but driving at the same time. In the notes to the "Peel Slowly..." set, Sterling complained that these recordings didn't capture the live force of the band at the time. But the VU weren't just about what Lou Reed called "power- cubed",these were beautiful songs about the lost and the losing and they don'tcome across any better than on 1969.

Buy 1969: Live with Lou Reed, Volume 1
Buy 1969: Live with Lou Reed, Volume 2

hoopla! oink! oink!

So, it seems every time I turn on my TV it’s The Doves or Kaiser Chiefs or Coldplay or some bloke with an accoustic guitar singing “you’re so beautiful...”, doing their thing in front of an appreciative audience of Leisure and Tourism Students. Everything is wonderful with the world and it seems ‘real music ‘ is here to stay. There are a plethora of ’ nice guys with hearts as big as the sky, playing ‘real’ tunes with oh so real musical instruments. How wonderful for everyone. This surely is a era of massive cultural significance.

But why god why do they have to be all so damn repetitive with their repertoire? It seems like these guys have about half an album worth of songs between them. How can they bear to limit themselves to that rhythm and those chords and that pleading/ arch/ enigmatic (delete where applicable) sentiment, over and over again? The answer is of course that they are giving people what they want, deviation from the recognised brand sound is wrong and will alienate the mass entertainment audience.

Good luck to them I say, stick with it fellas! If you have one ounce of artistic spirit you should just smash the instruments into tiny pieces and move away from the mic.

Here’s some Frank Zappa and the Mothers live in concert in 1971...

Little House I Used To Live In - Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention


Mud Shark - Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention


I am currently stumbling blindly through the enchanted forest of Zappa’s recorded work. Don’t look to me for any guides as where to start. This album is by no means one of his best (too much talking) - but is still great.

Here the Mothers swerve from a lush and restless musical composition into an unnerving monologue over Funkadelic showband.

It seems to me that there are limitless possibilities to what your average line-up of a rock and roll band could sound like. Why do so many groups feel the need to define their sound so narrowly?

Buy The Mothers Live at Filmore East 1971

sensitive skins

Skinstorm - Bradford


Most people who recognise this song will know the rather perfunctory version that Morrissey put out as the B-side to one of those singles that he seemed to release every week in the '90's. No doubt a Mozzer completist will be able to tell me which one! Bradford were from Blackburn, their USP was that they were Harrington wearing, Ben Shermanned and Sta-prest Skinheads. They touted the kind of soulful guitar pop that got swept away by the Madchester thing. They were also saddled with that ultimate kiss of death, Morrissey endorsed them in the music press!

This song is that rare thing from a white guitar band....it's about making lurve! Let's drop the imaginary inverted commas, it's about sex. You could chuck a stick in the late '80's and hit an Indie band singing romantic subject matter but it was usually David Gedge banging on about some stranger's hands on his favourite dress..ohhhhh!

This to me is a bit different, sure it's sensitively handled and idealised but it has a soul like Dexy's or The Jam which makes it a cut above a comtemporary band like, say, The Bodines. It certainly takes me to another time and place.

getting our oates

Hall & Oates - Rich Girl
There is something vaguely amusing about Hall and Oates, well they make me laugh anyway especially the rather 'oily' clip of them schmoozing through 'She's Gone' on the Old Grey Whistle Test. Is it Daryl's immaculately blow dried hair? Is it the way they glance coyly at each other? Neither...it's obviously John Oates...a small man with a big moustache! Once again I have my Dad to thank for my rather guilty pleasure in digging Hall and Oates.

Both of these tracks are from their 1976 album 'Bigger than the both of us'one of Dad's favourites to blast through the mono cassette deck in the Talbot Sunbeam. As we queasily sweltered on our way to the car ferry I would bitch about his crap muzak and wish I'd had the good sense to record 'Back in Black' before leaving the house. My pubesecent metalhead self couldn't recognise that this was and is great pop music. It's really 'thought through' and produced and slick but damn...can they write a chorus!

Hall & Oates - Back Together Again


The cover of this album probably explains the problem a lot of people have with old Daryl and John, it's blue eyed soul, it's over-produced. There they sit, crafting another pop-soul meisterwerk, their stylised apartment is immaculate and you can almost smell the over-powering 70's cologne. I care not for such quibbles, I played their Greatest Hits in the car recently and could not stop singing along with it....badly!

Buy 'Bigger than the Both of Us'
Hall and Oates.com

pretending to see the future

OMD - Bunker Soldiers

The cool bands of the post-punk Liverpool scene are well documented. The Bunnymen had all the classic guitar rock credentials, the love of Television and the Velvets and in Mac a lead singer brimming with lippy attitude. The Teardrop Explodes were the classic 'out there' psychedelic band with an 'ever so English' fruitcake lead singer in Julian Cope. OMD and Dalek I were never cool, OMD looked like junior bank clerks performing for the works 'do'. However this music made on the most basic electronic gear is both strange and beautiful. The fact that these songs sound like Kraftwerk equipped by the Early Learning Centre is part of its charm.

I find this early synth music really appealing. It is truly DIY, it doesn't conform to the structural rules of most guitar based music and it sounds like the people who made it are really excited about the possibilities of their archaic synths and drum machines. It is minimal, naive but truly different. When I heard first heard music like this I thought...wow, this is the future.

Dalek I - Destiny (Dalek I Love You)


Unfortunately as technology has advanced the ability to smooth out every musical wrinkle has made machine based music increasingly bland...though I am willing to be corrected in future posts! Another conundrum, why does a city as hard nosed and assertive as Liverpool often produce some of the most pretty and fey music? Dalek I's albums are long deleted (I think) but OMD's first album is an essential purchase and if you want to sound like them buy a Korg Micro-preset synthesizer and get a tank-top.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

Vintage Synth Explorer

dance this mess around

The B-52's - Whammy Kiss


As Marc-o said in his DEVO post, Johnny Domino operate in a broad musical church with only a few meeting points for all of us in between. DEVO are one, but the absolute motherlode of Johnny Domino consensus is The B-52's in general, and this song in particular.

After releasing three great new wave art-pop albums (plus their remix album, "Party Mix"), "Whammy!" was the band's 1983 drum-machine-and-synthesizer experiment and was the first album of theirs I bought - mostly because I had a vague memory of hearing 'Queen of Las Vegas" on the Annie Nightingale show a couple of years previously. Like all of their albums it's a mixture of trashy dance music and camp melodrama, often all at once. "Whammy Kiss" is melodramatic trashy dance music. It's also a bit camp.

This song is so exciting - the relentless pounding dum machine, rumbling synth bass and the incredible playing of the late, great Ricky Wilson, the single biggest influence on the way I play guitar.

Pretty much every band I've ever been in has sounded a bit like The B-52's in some way, Johnny Domino most of all. We borrowed the synth sounds and the pummeling beatbox, as well as Ricky's guitar playing and the inimitable barking vocal style of Fred Schneider, and wrote our tribute to them, Ricky And Fred.
Unfortunately, we don't know ANYONE that can sing like Kate Pierson or Cindy Wilson...

Visit theb52s.com
Buy Whammy!
Buy Nude On The Moon
Read The B-52's Universe
Visit johnnydomino.com