Manfred Mann started with jazz in his native South Africa, switched to the blues in early 1960s Britain and eventually got some international pop success. But come the 1970s, the times they were a-changing again. Now it was Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and things were getting expansive, progressive even, with Pluto the Dog a funky little number that featured the the kind of wigged out synthesizer freakout that the free world has never had enough of, then or now.
“I knew nothing about Lindisfarne other than the fact that they were on Charisma, the same label that Genesis got started on. Which is why my friend Carl’s big brother bought Lindisfarne Live. He figured any album with that Mad Hatter graphic in the middle couldn’t be bad. He listened to it once, and (not being into ‘folk shit’) gave it to Carl, who didn’t think much of it himself, so it ended up with me, buried in the deep end of my collection, barely listened to for at least a decade before I dragged it out one sloppy, stoned 1980s evening, and holy shit, it was fun, it had edge, it had drunken British hippie folkies taking wets on the wall. Radical shit.” (Philip Random)
The Electric Light Orchestra still had a few things to work out come their third album On The Third Day, starting with that cover. What’s with the exposed navels, gentlemen? Is that really the best way to entice us all unto the mystical, magical musical wonders contained therein? Everything from fierce electrified rock to the resolutely Beatlesque expansions of New World Rising. Even John Lennon was proving a fan.
“Billy Preston had a pile of great moments from the late sixties through the early seventies. Fifth Beatle, sixth Rolling Stone, and a none too shabby solo careersolo career. Struttin’ gets the nod here because it’s a spaced out rip of total fun and funk, redolent of Saturday afternoons, bored, flipping through the channels, stumbling onto Soul Train, getting kicked into a whole new dimension.” (Philip Random)
In which the Alice Cooper Group knock it out of the graveyard with a stirring epic toward the pleasures of necrophilia found on 1973’s hugely successful Billion Dollar Babies. “No question, this would’ve been my favourite song for at least three weeks when I was thirteen, almost fourteen. Though it’s actual meaning eluded me for years, because it never occurred to me that necrophilia was a thing, that people would actually do such stuff to get their rocks off. I guess, I just didn’t know people yet. Who says Alice was down on education? He was just way over our heads.” (Philip Random)
“I’m pretty sure Toots + the Maytals were the first reggae band I ever consciously heard. It was their cover of John Denver’s Take Me Home Country Roads, which showed up on local radio in around 1976. I would’ve been sixteen or seventeen at the time, and I hated it. The man couldn’t sing and the rest of the band were just wrong somehow, seeming to have no idea how to play proper funk. But jump ahead to 1983 and I was naming Funky Kingston as one of my fave all time party albums. And I was right. It really is right up there. Which gets us to teenagers. When they’re wrong about something, they’re at least comprehensive about it.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 
