This Ain't the Summer of Love

I Want To Know About The Mystery Dance

Say hey, kids! Since I am in a very sophisticated mood indeed, it’s a very special week-end edition of This Ain’t The Summer Of Love. I just want to let those of you who dig vintage Elvis Costello know that there’s a must-have live boot of young Declan, recorded in 1978, over at jefitoblog. I have a vinyl copy of this one somewhere, and I’m here to tell you that the band is absolutely breathing fire throughout. Plus, it includes the coveted “Dallas version” of “Less Than Zero”. Go now and make your ears happy.

Do Death Dwarves Dream of Narcotic Sheep? Part One: Rock & Roll Animal Reconsidered

“Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock 'n' roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch.” -- Lester Bangs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or How I Slugged it out with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake," March 1975.

One of the things that spurred me to start This Ain’t The Summer Of Love was a sort of throw-away comment in this post from Timedoor: “Hey, people of 1970s Earth: how were you ever able to sit through the ‘Intro’ to Lou Reed’s Rock & Roll Animal to find out if the record was any good or not? I can’t last 30 seconds through that atrocity without turning it off. How in the sam hell did you do so when skipping ahead meant getting up, picking up the stylus, and putting it down again and again until you found where the lameness mercifully stopped?”

Rock & Roll Animal (recorded live at Howard Stein's Academy of Music, New York, on December 21, 1973 – the day before my thirteenth birthday, for you completists out there) was one of the touchstone albums of my teenage years. I played the hell out of it at home; on my show at the high school radio station, I don’t think I ever completed a shift without playing either “Sweet Jane” or “Rock & Roll”. It was just huge for me, a key album that led to exploration of things other than the hits of the day. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that it helped make me the musical idiot I am today.

Spirit - The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus

Editor’s note: This is a fairly drastic reworking of a piece I wrote back in 2002. There are enough untouched phrases left that I thought I should mention it, in the interest of full disclosure.

The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus is the album which I will happily proselytize to friends, relatives and complete strangers. “Good morning, m’am. I’m here today to share with you the good news about Spirit.” Having had one too many doors slammed in my face, I now turn to the intarweb.

The album, released in 1970, is the perfect blend of pop, jazz, and psychedelia, tight and focused and spacey all at the same time. Twelve songs, most of which clock in around the magic three-minute mark – as much as I love the more extended musings of, say, Can, it’s nice to see a little restraint employed every now and again. OK, there is “When I Touch You” (5:37), but it stays on topic, as it were, for the entire time. (I wouldn’t have known that it was that long if I hadn’t looked at the cover, and I’ve been listening to this album on a fairly regular basis since I was first turned on to it* in 1979.)

The Clash - Give 'Em Enough Rope

The time has come to re-assess, re-evaluate, re-examine, re-view – perhaps even rehabilitate – the underrated second album by The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope.

I’ve never been able to figure out why so many people are so quick to dismiss this album. Sure, there’s a bit of a drop-off after the full-on punk assault of The Clash (UK or US version* – and hey, CBS/Epic/whoever’s holding the copyright, when the hell are you gonna release those two on one disc?). So there’s no “White Man (In Hammersmith Palais)”, no “Complete Control”, no “Clash City Rockers”… well, that’s not entirely true; “Clash City Rockers" reappears here, in slightly slowed-down mode, as “Guns on the Roof”. Where “Clash City Rockers" was all brash punk braggadocio, “Guns on the Roof” is surly, menacing, downfall-of-western-civ. type stuff. Plus “CCR” was really just The Who’s “I Can’t Explain” dressed up in ripped shirt and spiky hair, so I guess it all evens out in the end.

I think a lot of scorn stems from the idea that for some (mostly those among the hyperbolic and impossibly fickle UK music press), this album was a “sellout”. If ever there was a band that nearly drowned in dogma and “correct ideology”, it was The Clash. How much was posturing and how much was philosophy? At times it seemed as if the rhetoric - the heavy-duty sloganeering (Sten Guns in Knightsbridge, Under Heavy Manners, etc.), the Brigate Rosse T-shirts, and so on – would eclipse the music.