960. fly on a windshield + Broadway Melody of 1974

Two songs that more or less fuse into one from that oft forgotten era when the band known as Genesis weren’t just considered cool and relevant, they had the keys to the underground. In fact, they had a whole concept album about the place called The Lamb Dies Down on Broadway wherein a Puerto Rican street punk named Rael gets caught up in a local apocalypse (like a fly on a windshield) and next thing he knows, he’s trapped in dense labyrinthine depths that will take him the better part of four sides of vinyl to reconcile. In other words, it’s the early Genesis at the absolute peak of their ambitions (if not their attainments) and Peter Gabriel’s final album with the band. Though both would go off to achieve mega levels of success on their own, neither would ever again come close to the sheer weird edge cutting heights (depths?) they achieved here.

961. I Robot

“The Alan Parsons Project were still pretty cool in 1977. In fact, if you were me, you were listening to a lot of I Robot (the album), digging the smooth and groovy and spacey hi-fi future it was suggesting. Apparently it was a concept derived from an Isaac Asimov book.  I just dug it as a better than average stoner option, and it never got better than the title track.” (Philip Random)

962. what’s going on?

Husker Du‘s 1984 double album Zen Arcade was one of those documents that changes everything forever. Here was a punk-hardcore-whatever that was simply, enormously MORE. Here was a band that was going to do whatever the f*** it wanted as long as the sound was sharp enough to cause bleeding at fifty yards. What’s Going On Inside My Head was my mantra for a while – less a question than a howl of purposeful confusionism. Don’t bow to the chaos of the age. Eat it. Let it nourish you.” (Philip Random)

963. toys in the attic

Aerosmith from when they were still a properly dangerous rawk band with sleaze spilling out of their eyeballs and no talk of re-hab or MTV, the title track from Toys in the Attic being about as grunge-infested as any commercial rock band ever got … before Punk.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard it once while wandering through some suburban living room, drunk, a house-destroying partying going on all around me, shards of glass everywhere, amazed that somehow nobody had messed with the record player.” (Philip Random)

aerosmith-1975

964. the bus

The Executive Slacks being one of those mostly forgotten yet essential industrial grade outfits who did their bit for the greater evolution of all mankind in the mid-1980s. The Bus being a wonderfully uptight little ditty about the horrors of crowded public transit.

ExecutiveSlacks

965. zoolookologie

Before 1984’s Zoolook, Jean-Michel Jarre was known mainly for his proto new age synth doodlings (appropriate as they may have been if the drugs and mood were right). But give a man a sampler (in those days profoundly expensive and generally known as either a Fairlight or a Synclavier) and groovy things start to happen.

JMJarre-Zoolook