Somewhere, there’s an alt-universe where Kissing The Pink stomped the world with their pop smart New Romantic stylings and insights. As is, they came, they had one minor hit in Britain (the song in question here), they failed to conquer. The upside being, we never got sick of them.
Come 1973, The Byrds were mostly past their sell-by (having even broken up for a while), but that didn’t stop them from taking a Neil Young + Crazy Horse monster jam and reinventing it as a spry country pop tune that, in a better world, might have topped the charts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erOcHXaIZhA
PFM (short for Premiata Forneria Marconi the name of a restaurant apparently) being the best damned prog rock outfit to ever come out Italy, Celebration being a playful rush of classically infused rock that’s so nimble and smart you don’t have time to realize how ridiculous it is.
Original San Francisco hippies Quicksilver Messenger Service lay it all out for us with the lead off track from their debut album, a cover of a folk tune written by a guy named Hamilton Camp which sees fit to condemn us all to perdition, or worse. For it is written in The Book.
“The popular argument is that the Alice Cooper Band peaked with Killer in around 1971 and were pretty much finished after 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies. But f*** the popular kids. Muscle Of Love had a bunch of cool and sleazy and deftly conceived highlights, including this little love letter to NYC, which was no playground in the 1970s, unless you were a rat. No idea who or what Hippo is.” (Philip Random)
Back in NYC‘s just odd and intense from beginning to end, and particularly in the middle, nothing really sounding like you think it should, but why would it? It’s Genesis (the earlier, better Peter Gabriel version) at the peak of their powers tearing all preconceptions to shreds. Found at about the one-quarter point of The Lamb Lies Down on a Broadway a double concept album concerning a Puerto Rican street punk named Rael who sees the world end one morning on Broadway, then somehow finds himself lost in a purgatorial netherworld wherein convoluted stuff happens that even Peter Gabriel (who wrote lyrics and sang the song) was probably never quite clear on. Which may just explain some of the rage here.
Randophonic 