Woops!

Sorry for the delay, but I went away for the Fourth of July weekend and had no access to the internet. (I'm sorry, but if you spend $100 a night in a hotel the least they could do is give you free wi-fi!) I'll have to listen to On The Beach again before I can write about it, but it will be up...at least by the end of the weekend.

Album of the Day #158: TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT - Neil Young

While it is sad that Michael Jackson passed away, I have more important things to do...like talk about another Neil Young masterpiece. However, you can go back to my review on Thriller, done back in August.



Artist: Neil Young
Title: Tonight's The Night
Label: Reprise
Year: 1975 (recorded 1970-1973)
Songs: Tonight's The Night/Speakin' Out/World On A String/Borrowed Tune/Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown*/Mellow My Mind/Roll Another Number (For The Road)/Albuquerque/New Mama/Lookout Joe/Tired Eyes/Tonight's The Night - Part II
Written by: Neil Young, except *by Neil Young & Danny Whitten
Produced by: David Briggs & Neil Young with Tim Mulligan, except "Lookout Joe" by Elliot Mazer
Thoughts: Although recorded before On The Beach, Tonight's The Night was actually released after it in 1975, so it truly is the second part of Neil's "Ditch Trilogy". This was his plan to literally deconstruct his fame gained from Harvest, and while it sort of worked (none of the three could really be called 'financially successful'), Neil could never have completely destroyed his fame.
These albums were also a response of the death of guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. Tonight's The Night was this response to the extreme. The opening title track even mentions Berry by name, describing how he was a working man and all the things that he had done for Neil. All the stuff in between the two parts of "Tonight's The Night" is fantastic, but the album never seems to reach that high point again. It's not that they're all bad, though. I love most of the second half with "Roll Another Number", "Albuquerque" and "Lookout Joe" all of which could easily sit with his best work. The first half is severely lacking some liveliness, other than the 1970 live recording of "Downtown" with Whitten on vocals, which is bookended by the dull "Borrowed Tune" (from the Rolling Stones, so says Neil) and "Mellow My Mind".
However dull and slow some of these songs may be, Neil still gives an incredible vocal performance on every one.
The entire album together is really good, but the songs separately don't feel like they have much weight, aside from the title track(s). I wouldn't listen to it everyday, but you might have to revisit it frequently to remind yourself just how versatile Neil Young really is.

Next: The final part of the "Ditch Trilogy", "On The Beach".

Album of the Day #157: TIME FADES AWAY - Neil Young

Artist: Neil Young

Title: Time Fades Away

Label: Reprise

Year: 1973

Songs: Time Fades Away/Journey Through The Past/Yonder Stands The Sinner/L.A./Love In Mind/Don't Be Denied/The Bridge/Last Dance

Written by: Neil Young

Produced by: Neil Young & Elliot Mazner

Thoughts: In 1973, Neil Young found himself in a position he apparently really hated. He had become a 'popular singer' with his 1972 hit album Harvest, a collection of typical Young songs, but it also happened to have "Heart Of Gold". This song, which was so un-like anything Neil had done by himself, became his only #1 single. This, of course, was the Neil Young everyone was expecting to see when he went on tour the following year. Thankfully, for us music fans some 30 years later, that Neil Young did not go on tour. Instead, the one we all know and love did - the one that yells and screams barely audible lyrics behind a fury of guitars and piano.

Time Fades Away was the result of the tour and is probably one of the first live records released by a major artist that is made up of only new songs. Most of the songs were written in response to guitarist and friend Danny Whitten's death and that anger and disgust is apparent throughout the record. He would go into the studio and record a bunch of different songs that would result in Tonight's The Night, where the songs are much more focused on how someone has to deal with a friend's death. However, on the eight songs on Time Fades Away, Neil makes it obvious that he's pretty mad at the world. From the heated "Yonder Stands The Sinner" to the apocalyptic "L.A." (where Neil revels in the possibility of the city's destruction), Neil Young is obviously really pissed.

Some of the more intense stuff sits in the three songs on the second side, particularly the raucous eight minute closer, "Last Dance". Before rolling into the song, Neil yells "LAST DANCE!!!!" and then we get blazing guitars and drums (fantastically played on the rest of the album by Johnny Barbata). The song's lyrics, at least when you read them, appear to just be about a person getting up and going to work, but under the title of "Last Dance", we are given the sense that we should feel bad that on this person's last day, he still goes to work. Add in Neil's wrenching vocal, and we feel the pain and even suffering that this person must feel. He yells "LAST DANCE!" again and the crowd starts clapping (you can almost feel them saying to themselves "what the hell?!?") just before the album fades and closes.

Time Fades Away is truly one of the most intense and breathtaking live albums that you will ever hear...and you must hear it in order to believe it. I had read so much about it and considered waiting for the apocalypse - in other words, the day this album gets an official release on CD. However, I finally just got it off a blog that had uploaded a bootlegged copy of it and if you just do a Google search of it, you'll probably find hundreds of uploads of it.

Now, I really need to get a vinyl copy...

Next: I'll continue working on the "Ditch Trilogy" with Part II: "Tonight's The Night"!

Album of the Day #156: YARDBIRDS - The Yardbirds

Artist: The Yardbirds

Title: Yardbirds (officially); Roger The Engineer (unofficially)

Label: Columbia (UK)

Year: 1966

Songs: Lost Woman/Over Under Sideways Down/The Nazz Are Blue/I Can't Make Your Way/Rack My Mind/Farewell /Hot House Of Omagararshid/Jeff's Boogie/He's Always There/Turn Into Earth/What Do You Want/Ever Since The World Began

Written by: Chris Dreja, Jeff Beck, Keith Relf, Jim McCarty and Paul Samwell-Smith

Produced by: Paul Samwell-Smith & Simon Napier-Bell

Thoughts: The Yardbirds were one of those odd groups that had a swinging-door for guitar players, but thankfully for them, the men who walked through that door were Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

Yardbirds, or Roger The Engineer, was their first studio album after years of recording singles and releasing a live LP. By the time they got to recording it, Jeff Beck was sitting-in as lead guitarist and his mark is all over the record. From his funky "Jeff's Boogie" to the amount of experimentation, proving just how far you can take the sound of a guitar, Beck is all over and even sings lead vocals on "The Nazz Are Blue". The rest of the songs are sung by Keith Relf, who has this fantastic proto-hard rock vocalist sound. I particularly love his vocal on the opening track, "Lost Woman". Other fantastic tracks include the single, the incredibly catchy "Over Under Sideways Down", "He's Always There" and the rest of the first side. The second side is hampered by starting of with the bizarre chant of "Hot House..." and "Turn Into Earth" is pretty forgettable. "Ever Since The World Began" is one of the strangest endings you'll hear on a rock record as it preaches to us that we 'don't need money' as the first half dissolves into this scat sequence that finally ends the album on a sudden stop.

I really think it's a fun record and it really is an important step in the development of the hard rock bands that would come out of the ashes of the 1960's.

There are many versions of the album out there and the one that I picked up was released by Airline Records. It has the mono and stereo versions of the LP, the fantastic "Happenings Ten Years Ago" b/w "Psycho Daisies" single and the two Keith Relf solo singles all on one disc. I know there is a much more expensive version available on Amazon that has just the mono and stereo version plus the extra single spread over two discs. I wouldn't get that version, but rather get the single disc version that I got. Yes, the liner notes aren't that informative and the artwork isn't exactly the same as it was on the LP, but you still get all the fantastic music that sounds great. The mono and stereo versions are different enough to require listening to, although the differences in each track are much more than I could possibly figure out. I'm sure there's somebody on this world wide web of ours that has written about that extensively.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Paul!

Yesterday was Paul's 67th birthday! While I'm sure he doesn't want to be reminded of that, he probably had a good time with his family. So, again "Happy Birthday Paul!"

Album of the Day #155: 52ND STREET - Billy Joel

Artist: Billy Joel

Title: 52nd Street

Label: Columbia

Year: 1978

Songs: Big Shot/Honesty/My Life/Zanzibar/Stiletto/Rosalinda's Eyes/Half A Mile Away/Until The Night/52nd Street

Written by: Billy Joel

Produced by: Phil Ramone In Association With Home Run

Thoughts: Inside the bad album cover sits a good record, if a little disappointing after the grandiosity of The Stranger. What makes it disappointing is the fact that it copies its' predecessor, not quite exactly, but there are far too many similarities. Ramone's production is pretty much the same but at least he shows the knack of knowing which songs to over-do and which ones need an understatement.

One of the major stylistic changes though isn't in the musical sense, but it is in Joel's lyrical direction. On The Stranger, there are more personal songs, like "Just The Way You Are" and "She's Always A Woman". On 52nd Street, though, the songs are more character driven and obviously not about himself. These are characters and situations that might only find homes on 52nd Street in New York.

Aside from the hit singles, I think "Honesty" is easily a central masterpiece on the album. It's such a beautiful song (and ain't it the truth?) that balances out the harder stuff, like the excellent side two opener "Stiletto". Whenever I listen to the album, I still find that "Rosalinda's Eyes" and "Half A Mile Away" fall a little flat, but thankfully "Until The Night" has the ability to lift side two a little bit so it doesn't feel like the entire side is filler. However, the quick "52nd Street" ending is a little silly and I really think Joel would have been better off ending the LP with "Until The Night", even if it does only make it an eight-track album.

From a non-critical point-of-view, it is still an enjoyable album, but I still think The Stranger deserved a little bit of a better sequel.

The "Less-Than-10-Song" Phenomenon

This is a topic that I've wanted to touch on for awhile and with my latest purchase of Blind Faith, my interest in this topic resurrected itself.

As most of you know, I grew up a Beatle fan, so I was completely unfamiliar with the idea that an album could have less than ten songs. (In fact, there are only two solo albums with less than 10 songs, Wings' Wild Life and George's Dark Horse.) As I became more familiar with the world of music in the mid-to-late-1960s, it became pretty obvious that there was this strange movement of making rock albums with just eight or nine songs - sometimes even just seven. Jazz artists had been releasing albums with only a few songs on it for years (like Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue, which only has five tracks...and is something I desperately need to free up the cash to buy) but the idea of popular, main-stream rock artists doing this seems kind of odd to me. First of all, don't more songs mean more royalties? I mean, if you only have seven songs, don't you only get your royalty rate seven times? The rate for a three minute song is the same for a ten minute song (like how on iTunes you pay the same for a three minute track as you do a ten minute track). Of course, as writing became more and more important and as the focus went from the 45 to the LP, songs grew longer and longer, to the point where seven songs would fill up 42 minutes of vinyl.

Another reason why the idea is strange is that there would be less songs for a record company to take advantage of, so why record companies in the 60s and 70s allowed for this to happen is strange. Even stranger is that unestablished acts were even allowed to do it. One of the best examples I can think of is Springsteen's first three albums. Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ has nine depressing, heartbreaking songs although a few could easily have been singles ("Blinded By The Light" and "Spirits In The Night" particularly), but why Columbia let Springsteen release the seven song The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle is beyond me. Granted, it is one of the best albums ever, it sold poorly, with no singles issued. (Despite both "Sandy" and "Rosalita" on it.) Born To Run has the great title track, but that is the only obvious single, since practically all of the songs (especially those on side one) sound out-of-place when not surrounded by their neighbors on the album. It just seems a little bizarre that, in a part of music history when the record companies were so controlling (unless you were an established artist), they would allow for such a trend to take over.

Where did this trend start? As far as I know, probably one of the first successful nine-song album was Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited in 1965. The album lasts almost an hour, coming to a dramatic head with his eleven minute masterpiece, "Desolation Row". Now, by 1965, Dylan was clearly established, so I don't think there is any issue with Columbia releasing that. However, by 1967, acts like Vanilla Fudge were releasing seven-song debut records, even before they had a hit single. In 1969, Cream released their final album, made up of six songs (Goodbye, which I still don't have) and Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker left to Blind Faith, where they release just one album - of only six songs. That same year, Led Zeppelin releases their first album, which only has nine songs. In their entire career, they only released two albums with more than nine songs - LZIII (with 10) and the double LP Physical Graffiti (with 15) - and their last two records (Presence and In Through The Out Door) only have seven.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the trend was all but gone. Granted, there were still artists who did release nine song albums, but by the time the CD came around, it became a rarer and rarer sight. Album lengths didn't shrink, though, they just got longer. Artists began releasing hour long albums and putting out different single mixes for practically every song. On top of that, seemingly every song has to go over five minutes, even if it isn't really necessary.

I'm not saying that only albums with more than ten tracks can be good - in fact, some of the best albums ever only have seven to eight tracks. It's just that the artist should know how to do it right. For instance, if you only plan on eight songs or less, you have no room for error. Let's go back to The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, with it's seven songs. There is no filler. For close to 45 minutes, you are given a pure shot of adrenaline, with no point to say "Oh, this is a throwaway." Every single second is there for a reason, whether it be to set the mood for the song (David Sanacious's long piano piece that starts "New York Serenade" is not only beautiful, but an essential part to put you in a state of mind) or to call attention to the multi-faceted talents of Springsteen's writing that we have seen in the decades since the album was released. A good example of a bad album with just five songs is Steve Miller's horrid Circle Of Love. I'm not going to reiterate how terrible that is, so you can read my full review of it.

So, that's the good, the bad and the ugly parts of the "Less-Than-10-Song" Phenomenon. If there are other albums I didn't mention that have less than 10 songs that needs to be discussed, let me know. I probably haven't mentioned it because I either don't have it or forget to mention it.