Category Archives: All Vinyl Apocalypse

1,111 greatest records you probably haven’t already heard

1037. Heavy Horses

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Jethro Tull main man Ian Anderson was nothing if not level-headed come 1978.  While many of his fellow formerly cool rock star types were scrambling (often pathetically) in attempts to reinvent themselves as somehow edgy and relevant in the face of punk rock etc, he just told it like it was — that he was more concerned about his farm up in Scotland than the state of the zeitgeist, the big horses in particular. The album in question may have seemed a throwback at the time, but over time, its mix of folk and rock elements has come to feel more timeless than anything.

1038. sitting in the rain

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John Mayall being the man whose former band members couldn’t seem to help launching mega careers back in the day. Sitting in the Rain being an obscure old track that eventually showed up on a 1969 compilation. Does it classify as a proper Mississippi Delta blues? Probably not. But it sure works on a rainy day.

JohnMayall-01

1039. the harder they come

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“In which Keith Richard stumbles through a reggae classic that no white man has any business even touching and actually delivers something halfway worthy, maybe because of all the heroin related calamity he’d recently endured in Toronto. Found on the  b-side of Run Rudolph Run, a 1978 Christmas single that went nowhere, except it eventually found me.” (Philip Random)

1040. ghetto defendant

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In which Allen Ginsberg drops in on the Clash during the Combat Rock sessions, the mike gets opened and he slam dances Metropolis, enlightens the populous. And so on, off into a mid-tempo ramble on the hungry darkness of living. Whatever evils were going down in 1981 – nobody in this crowd was looking the other way.

clash-ginsberg

1041. Babylon

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It’s 1969 and Malcolm John Rebennack (aka Dr. John) is deep into his Night Tripper phase with Babylon (both song and album) hitting as a strange and delirious warning of great trials and tribulations to come. Babylon being the great city-state of Ancient Mesopotamia that lasted more than two thousand years before finally dissolving into the sands of time. Babylon being the root of the word babble, that state in language acquisition, during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering all the weird and wonderful sounds of language, but not yet producing any recognizable words – confusion in a word, but not without a purpose.

1042. Room 101

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In which the Eurythmics, at the peak of their 1980s pop success, take a sideways step and deliver the soundtrack to 1984 (the movie), which was pretty good in a harrowing, all-too-faithful-to-the-book sort of way. But in the end, almost none of the Eurythmics music made it to the final cut. Not because it was bad. It just wasn’t what the director had in mind. Philip Random recalls Room 101 getting lots of play on his car stereo during the prophetic year in question, “A nifty little nugget about torture, propaganda, the malevolent destruction of human souls. What wasn’t to love?”

(Morrison Hotel Gallery)