“It’s true. I only started thinking of Supertramp as Stupidtramp after about their fifth album. Because they were actually pretty darned good for a while through the mid 1970s with 1975’s Crisis What Crisis? a standout because it really didn’t get overplayed, and the cover was a gem, and songs like Another Man’s Woman showing a genuinely strong band that could really work the dynamics, even show a little soul.” (Philip Random)
Straight outa Jamaica, 1975, Arthur Louis takes on Bob Dylan’s all-time greatest dying cowboy song and makes perfect sense of it, with a little help from a guy named Eric.
In which KC and his Sunshine Band remind us that all disco didn’t suck. In fact, most of it didn’t until Saturday Night Fever came along at which the powers that be suddenly seemed to decide it was something you could base an entire culture on, which sucked. Rather like putting too much cilantro in something. It’s just not good for you.
In which Emmylou Harris, who never found a song she couldn’t somehow make her own, takes one of the very few sweet, poignant, utterly beautiful Beatles songs that we’re not all allergic to and, if anything, improves it. “If I ever actually get married, I can imagine it will be prominent in the day’s proceedings.” (Philip Random)
Reginald Dwight (aka Elton John) was beyond huge through the first half of the 1970s – ten studio albums (plus one soundtrack) between 1969 and 1975 and none of them awful. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was the last truly good one though, with the title track working a sort of country feel that shouldn’t have worked coming from an English suburban kid, but it did. The 70s were like that. Lots of fantasies realized … until the cocaine took over.
“Aerosmith from when they were still a properly dangerous rawk band with sleaze spilling out of their eyeballs and no talk of re-hab or MTV, the title track from Toys in the Attic being about as grunge-infested as any commercial rock band ever got … before Punk. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard it once while wandering through some suburban living room, drunk, a house-destroying partying going on all around me, shards of glass everywhere, amazed that somehow nobody had messed with the record player.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 