Rare Earth being Motown’s best ever band of white guys, their 1971 double live album being one of the all-time greatest concert sets ever put to vinyl. You get pretty much all the big deal hits in pumped up, oft extended form, plus some lesser heard gems like this Ray Charles cover. A band that just loved to play and a rowdy audience that wouldn’t have it any other way.
Paul McCartney (and Wings) still seemed to matter in 1974. No, he wasn’t cranking out Hey Judes anymore, but the stuff was still sounding better than most of the other pop dreck on the radio. Picasso’s Last Words, the last song from Band on the Run, is a loose stumble through various angles and forms which is probably supposed to reflect the great painter’s cubist form. “As with pretty much any post-Beatles McCartney or Lennon track, I can’t help thinking it would be better if the other guy was still involved, calling bullshit, throwing in ideas and whatever. But it’s still fun in a sad sort of way. Feel free to playlist it at my funeral.” (Philip Random)
A much loved Rolling Stones nugget gets eviscerated by Eugene Chadbourne, one of those unique geniuses who started out with rock and roll but quickly grew bored, thus free jazz, bluegrass, country, noise – everything really. And a huge discography in which, if you dig deep enough (often through limited run cassette releases), you discover that he’s probably covered every song known to man (and woman) at some point or other, and in doing so, he’s singlehandedly kept the world from ending.
In which the (comparatively) early Roxy Music remind us that among other cool and artful tricks, they could kick out rock solid power pop that was years ahead of its time. From 1974’s Country Life. Brian Eno is already gone but this remains one cool and strong and innovative band.
“The Soft Boys are one of those outfits I managed to miss at the time, but rather stumbled across maybe fifteen years late via a cassette I found lying around of their 1980 album Underwater Moonlight. I Wanna Destroy You was the track that immediately grabbed me – not quite punk but full of bile regardless. Dedicated as always to everyone who ever f***ed me over, big or small, deliberately or otherwise.” (Philip Random)
“You don’t truly own the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks unless you’ve stolen it. Such was the logic of a guy who called himself Limey Len, an English ex-pat who I remember for chiefly two things. 1. the marijuana he sold was always underweight. 2: he’d never shut up about how he’d been there, actually seen the Pistols in a small club in London, which was probably a lie, he lied about everything else. So anyway, one night, at the dog end of some shitty New Years party when he was passed out on his kitchen floor, I stole his copy of Never Mind The Bollocks. I’m not even sorry.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 