In which Mr. Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention ditch the Junior High humor for three minutes or so and spit out the necessary truth about all the slime that was oozing out of folks’ TV sets and radios back in the early 70s (and it still is). Not just gross, perverted, vile, pernicious, obsessed and deranged, but a tool of government (and industry too) destined to rule and regulate. So why do we keep watching?
Masterpiece was the Temptations‘ first album post the mega success of Papa Was A Rolling Stone, and it’s truth in advertising, with producer-writer-arranger Norman Whitfield set free to make the most (in a widescreen sort of way) of the best all male vocal outfit ever. Law of the Land stands out for the way it thunders along, and the tough tale it has to tell.
“Are Can still the greatest band that most people have never heard? Probably. Which makes Future Days (song and album) always worth recommending, marking both the peak and the beginning of the end of their glory days. Not that they didn’t still have some great music in them post 1973, it would just never get back to such a strange and ethereal peak. Because singer, vocalist, lead madman Damo Suzuki was slowly fading away, not to return. Like a bittersweet dream of the future that actually came true, because there I was, a good ten or twelve years after the fact, hearing it for the first time myself, and it was perfect, it was exactly what the mid-80s felt like. Living in a future, ready or not.” (Philip Random)
“A road weary gem from a time when Van Morrison really could do no wrong (ie: the early 1970s). I definitely heard it on the radio when it was fresh (while FM was still cool) because I remember catching the Canada reference. But for some reason, I got it in my head that the name of the song was Seen Some Hard Times, which made finding it rather difficult, search as I might. So I finally stopped searching and found it anyway at a yard sale, early 90s sometime, hiding in plain sight as it were as the title track of an album that had been looking at me for decades.” (Philip Random)
“As I remember it, David Bowie hit the suburbs of the Americas in comparatively slow motion. First came Space Oddity (a big deal AM radio hit in early 1973, some three years after it had hit big in the UK), then Ziggy Stardust (various album tracks popping up on FM radio), by which point you were starting to see pictures of the guy. Beyond freakish. Which were backed up by the inevitable rumours (that he actually was an alien, that he and Elton John were secretly married). But by the end of the year, all that stuff was settling, and it was the music you couldn’t ignore. So Much Great And Strange Music. So much so that a track like Panic in Detroit didn’t get near the attention it deserved. If only for the riff. You could base a whole genre on that riff. Which, it’s arguable, the Rolling Stones already had. But that’s another story.” (Philip Random)
Gram Parsons was dead before the world ever heard his final album, Grievous Angel. Which made In My Hour Of Darkness, its final song (completely concerned with people who had died before their time) all too relevant, particularly the part where he sings his own eulogy: he was just a country boy his simple songs confess – and the music he had in him so very few possess. Who says there’s no such thing as ghosts? And angels, because that’s Emmylou Harris singing backup.
Randophonic 
