1102. back in NYC

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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.

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1103. the bird

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“Nobody’s ever going to care that much about what happened in 1997 unless they were born or maybe they lost their virginity, or they saw God on some acid trip. But the rest of us were all fixed on the End by then – the turning of the millennium, the future if we had one.  Maybe that’s why Tranquility Bass’s mega double album Let The Freak Flag Fly made so much sense. Techno-hippie types getting lost in the music and likely a whole lotta drugs (a full thirty years after the Summer of Love) on some unnamed Gulf Island, mixing everything up, wondering what god must look like.  Someone had to.”  (Philip Random)

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1104. paint work

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The unfriendly passion of Fall main man Mark E. Smith finds weird perfection in a six and half minute riff that seems to have something to do with painting. The work of it. Shit happens, friends disappear, strangers interrupt, war is declared. You got to f*** it all off, keep at your work, else nothing ever gets finished. Which is rather how Paint Work sounds. Unfinished, yet nicely so.

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1105. Cortez the Killer

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Mr. Neil Young and his horse friends at the very peak of their shambolic grandeur.  We credit and/or blame the Bolivian marching power that was all the rage at the time if you were a certain class of rock star or movie director (or the kind of person that hung with them) way back when in that cultural depression between the death of the Elvis and the Sex Pistols and whatever the hell happened next. Some have argued nothing — the world ended and it’s all been a feedback loop every since.

1106. dog breath, in the year of the plague

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From the album Uncle Meat, wherein Mr. Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention mostly reject any notion of pursuing a consistent, definable direction, but settle instead for pretty much everything in all directions. And almost no one complained, except a few assholes in the back, but they all quit the freak scene soon anyway, and became Eagles fans.

1107. this is tao

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As the album cover put it, “Never retract, never retreat, get the thing done and let them howl.” Such is Tao. As for Sons of Freedom, we’re still waiting for their proper reckoning as one of the great ROCK bands of the 1980s, particularly on that first album.

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