Month: June 2008

Shakespeare would have labeled them a tragicomedy. Rock and roll called them business as usual.

The Replacements were a quintessential rock and roll band – a lot of attitude, a lot of talent, and doomed to an early death. They also exuded their fair share of drama, which was all part of the fun. As they promised in one of their several swan songs, “Talent Show.” “With my waxed-up hair and my painted shoes, I got an offer that you can’t refuse…”

On offer now is the band’s first “best of” collection. Or their second, depending how hard-core you are.

Formed in the early 1980s, the Replacements came blasting out of Minneapolis with their volume knobs pinned at 11. Powered by Paul Westerberg’s songcrafting and Bob Stinson’s over-the-top guitar hooks, the band became famous for not giving a damn. They were known for falling down drunk more often then blowing the roof off clubs, yet between clunker shows of Kiss and country-western covers, everything might click to create a legendary performance. By 1991, the band fell apart, but not before inspiring countless indie acts, from the whole post-punk and grunge movement on.

In 1997, the Replacements released the compilation All For Nothing/Nothing For All, an enhanced two-CD greatest hits package including a handful of videos. Yet due to record-company wranglings, this set lacked anything from the band’s pioneering Twin-Tone days – arguably their wildest and coolest material.

That wrong has been set right on this new, single-CD distillation, comprising 18 classic tracks backed by two new songs cut by the remaining Replacements over Christmas 2005. Now for the first time, fans and newcomers have an idiot’s guide to the Replacements, tracking their history from 1981’s stellar punk debut Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash to 1990’s slickly dysfunctional All Shook Down.

So, did the “best of” editors pick the best? Yes, and no. If you’re new to the band, it’s perfect; finally, tunes like “Shiftless When Idle” and “Left of the Dial” are together on one disc. Rolling Stone raved over this new set and pinned it with five stars – yet the magazine also largely ignored the band when it was actually alive.

If you’re an old-time fan, you’ll already have these cuts, and they sound out of place grouped here. Color it commercial. The glory of the Replacements simply doesn’t fit onto a single greatest hits disc.

Yet old-time punkers aren’t buying Don’t You Know for nostalgia kicks; they’re after the much-bally-hooed new tunes, “Message to the Boys” and “Pool & Dive.” The Replacements’ revival has been hailed on the internet for months now, along with rumors that Westerberg, Tommy Stinson, and Chris Mars will reform for a tour.

So, were these new songs worth the wait?

They certainly sound like vintage Mats – from the Don’t Tell A Soul era, that is. Raunchy guitar, cool hooks, and shouted-out lyrics. Yet they’re also slickly produced, rocking without being too rocking, and popster lyrics without much depth of soul. Ideal for hip radio, in other words.

In the end, this greatest hits collection only gives a hint of how great the Replacements were.

Tony Trischka’s 35-year career has seen him play with Tony Rice, Mike Marshall, Darol Anger, Jerry Douglas, and David Grisman. He’s also Bela Fleck’s banjo teacher. And though he started as a bluegrass picker in the style of Earl Scruggs, Trischka grew past bluegrass into newgrass, jazz, and acoustic fusion. He’s a founding member of the band Psychograss, whose moniker says it all.

Here, Trischka has returned to his roots, more or less, by collaborating with nine banjo players, including Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck, Alison Brown, Tom Adams, Bill Emerson, Kenny Ingram, Noam Pikelny, Scott Vestal, and Steve Martin (yeah, the one with white hair and the arrow through his head). The band for this series of sessions included Sam Bush, Chris Thile, and Mike Compton on mandolin, and Kenny Smith, Tim Stafford, Dudley Connell, David Grier, and Tony Rice on guitar.

Although this isn’t the first time that two banjos have shared a stage, it is the first time in awhile that an entire CD was devoted to the exercise.

Trischka goes from traditional tunes such as “Farewell Blues” (with Earl Scruggs) to the outer limits of acoustic music with Bela Fleck on the original, “Ivory Toad of Catalan” and Fleck’s “Armando’s Children.” Although the CD’s title indicates a strong bias toward banjos, every song is far more about ensemble collaboration than continuous banjo noodling. Ample fiddle, mandolin, and guitar solos keep listeners from going banjo crazy. And every cut has natural, articulate sonics that highlight the personality of each player and instrument. Banjos often get a bad rap for their tone, but on Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular, you can hear how melodic, and even mellow, a banjo can be.

This disc is recommended for acoustic music connoisseurs, even banjophobes! It’ll cure what ails you.

Dovetailing off our yearly rant when the nominations for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame are announced, a fellow writer and I segued into our ritual of listing the glaring omissions who should be in the Hall and the questionable inductees who shouldn’t. When the Monkees entered the debate, my colleague argued, “They made great records – in the beginning with crack studio musicians, and later playing their own instruments and writing some of the songs themselves.” I agreed that some of those records (whoever made them) were mighty fine, but stopped just short of “over my dead body” at the notion of the Prefab Four being ensconced in the same institution as Clyde McPhatter, Duane Eddy, and the Everly Brothers.

The basic story behind the Monkees is by now well-known. Hollywood producers came up with the idea for a zany TV show about a rock and roll band and auditioned “folk & roll musicians” for the group. They didn’t spring organically out of some garage, and I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t even have much of a problem with the fact that the resultant band of musicians turned actors and actors turned musicians didn’t play the instruments on their early records; that was far from new in the music biz. I just think, for the most part, the producers picked the wrong guys.

The members were chosen for their small-screen talents, not their musicianship. Cuteness and marketability were more important than their singing and songwriting.

With the exception of some tracks produced by guitarist Michael Nesmith, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart or Jeff Barry (sometimes in tandem with Jack Keller) produced the early sides, and in the case of Boyce and Hart also provided background vocals. Again, with an occasional contribution from Nesmith, the producers wrote much of the material or enlisted established songwriters like Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond, David Gates, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, John Stewart, and Neil Sedaka. In the case of the band’s first two albums (now reissued in deluxe two-CD editions, each with mono and stereo mixes and outtakes), such studio greats as Gerry McGee, James Burton, Glen Campbell, Louie Shelton, Al Casey, and Mike Deasy were onboard – and that’s just the guitarists. (It’s Shelton you first hear on “Last Train To Clarksville,” followed by McGee’s fingerpicking.)

So what’s not to like? Drummer Mickey Dolenz and tambourine man Davy Jones had an abundance of comedic ability but weren’t strong enough lead singers. If you can get past that, this is a fun stroll down memory lane with a few new detours. But it will never belong in the same Hall as the real Fab Four.

When Columbia/Legacy released the single-disc Listen My Friends! The Best Of Moby Grape, the label made the mistake of dubbing a career overview a “best of” – when nearly everything the band did that can be termed best or essential was on its self-titled 1967 debut. In fact, for 1993’s infinitely better two-disc anthology, Vintage: The Very Best Of Moby Grape, the same label wisely devoted its first disc to that 13-track debut, along with outtakes and live tracks – condensing the best of the rest onto Disc Two. (Listen on the other hand, includes only six songs from Moby Grape.)

Vintage remains the best bang for your buck when it comes to the early-peaking Grape, but it’s nearly impossible to find, unfortunately. Sundazed’s expanded reissue of the group’s first album (with original cover art intact) neatly fills that void, while completists are advised to approach the remaining four discs cautiously.

Though part of San Francisco’s psychedelic scene, the band was equally adept at country-rock, soul, hard rockers, and beautiful ballads. Sporting a three-guitar arsenal, with Jerry Miller handling most of the leads, the band boasted five excellent vocalists, every one of them a fine songwriter. As that classic’s producer, David Rubinson, says, “They were the best American band I’d ever seen. And they were all great songwriters!”

Columbia perhaps shared Rubinson’s view too much, releasing five singles (10 of the album’s 13 songs) simultaneously. Whether it was enthusiasm, naivete, or arrogance – after all, the Beatles had crammed several singles onto the Top 10 – the plan didn’t work. While the LP reached a respectable #24 on Billboard‘s Pop Albums chart, only “Omaha” reached the lower regions of the Hot 100.

That spirited anthem was courtesy of Skip Spence, around whom the band was formed when he quit his gig as Jefferson Airplane’s original drummer to return to singing and playing guitar. Former surf guitarist Peter Lewis (of the Cornells) contributed the frenetic “Fall On You” and spacey “Sitting By The Window,” while bassist Bob Mosley’s “Mr. Blues” and “Come In The Morning” had a distinctly R&B feel. Miller and Don Stevenson, bandmates from the Frantics, a Seattle cover band, collaborated on the countrified “Ain’t No Use,” the lyrical “8:05,” and the album’s hardest rocker, “Changes.”

A variety of factors, from shady management to mental instability (the late Spence became increasingly erratic during the dates for the second album), contributed to Grape’s downward slide – not to mention the fact that they’d set the bar impossibly high. The followup, Wow/Grape Jam, was not one but two exercises in excess – not a double-LP as much as two separate concept albums packaged together.

Wow‘s otherwise good material is obscured by strings and other Sgt. Pepper’s ambitions – though Miller-Stevenson’s “Can’t Be So Bad” is a burning soul romp. Jam consists mostly of impromptu, improvised instrumentals, with Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield lending hands – presaging their subsequent (and superior) Super Session. Ironically, Bloomfield plays only piano, while some of Miller’s best guitar playing (obviously influenced by Bloomfield) appears on Wow‘s “Miller’s Blues.” (More ironically, this edition’s three bonus tracks reveal the band’s instrumental prowess more than the cuts on the original release.)

Moby Grape ’69 and Truly Fine Citizen saw the band shrink to a quartet, then trio. While not without merit, they’re uneven exercises in frustration for anyone whose hopes were raised after hearing such an auspicious debut.

In 1967, the 5th Dimension (Billy Davis, Jr., Marilyn McCoo, Florence LaRue, Lamonte McLemore, and Ron Townson) was launched into the Top 10 with “Up, Up And Away,” by then-unknown songwriter Jimmy Webb. The Summer Of Love may have been approaching, but this was neither rock nor soul; this was about as pop as you could get.

To say that the Dimension’s delivery could at times be stiff or downright square would be an understatement, and for every inventive piece of songwriting, like “Up,” there was Webb silliness like “Rosecrans Blvd.,” which would be hysterical were it not for the fact that it’s not a parody (“The girl was half crazy, the way she drove her little car, down Sunset Boulevard, at three in the morning, doing 90 miles an hour, in a 30-mile zone”).

The group’s first 10 albums and McCoo and Davis’s first duo album are now available on seven CDs, four of them twofers, beginning with Up, Up And Away paired with the nearly all-Webb concept album, Magic Garden.

What makes these records interesting is Bones Howes’ producing and engineering (following the Johnny Rivers-produced debut, engineered by Howe), utilizing a bevy of L.A.’s A-list session players. Tommy Tedesco’s gut-string flourishes soar over “Up,” backed by Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on keyboards, and Joe Osborne’s melodic, grooving bass. Al Casey provides additional guitar and “Eastern sounds” on the first album, while Dennis Budimir plays rhythm, with Mike Deasy sharing solos with Tedesco, on the second.

The material was gathered from several writers for the group’s third LP, Stoned Soul Picnic, whose title track was penned by Laura Nyro, as was “Sweet Blindness.” The same nucleus supplies the backing tracks, with arranger Ray Pohlman adding some guitar. That album is paired on CD with The Age Of Aquarius, for which Nyro supplied another hit with “Wedding Bell Blues.” Additional keyboards beef up the sound (Pete Jolly and Jimmy Rowles joining Knechtel), with the guitar trio of Tedesco-Budimir-Deasy once again joined by Blaine and Osborne, who really gets to strut his stuff on the medley from the musical “Hair” (“Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In”), resembling Motown’s James Jamerson in both technique and feel.

The double Live!! LP, from ’71, was both rousing and slick. Blaine, Knechtel, and Osborne are joined by bassist Andrew “Muff” White and guitarist Rudy Stevenson, veteran of Nina Simone’s band, in a program that included medleys of Nyro and Webb songs, before closing with an eight-minute workout on the “Hair” medley. At a time when singer/songwriters like Carole King and James Taylor were beginning to dominate the airwaves, and Marvin Gaye was pushing the soul envelope with “What’s Going On,” it’s significant that it was recorded at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, before the older demographic the act appealed to.

For music lovers and techno geeks, this seven-disc set by the Steely Dan front man is a match made in heaven.

It includes CDs of all three Fagen solo albums, The Nightfly, Kamakiriad, and Morph The Cat, as well as a trio of MVI discs. They play DVD audio that sounds incredible. You can also pop them into your computer to hear, or for fun and games. And they contain Fagen videos and an interview from his promotion of Morph the Cat. A disc of extras has rare stuff that has only appeared as B-sides if it has been released at all.

Fans will know the music. 1982’s The Nightfly had Fagen stepping onto his own, with tales of a kid growing up in the ’50s and ’60s told via great songs and inspired guitar playing from Larry Carlton. Kamakiriad was 1993’s science fiction tale that while having odd storylines sounded wonderful; Walter Becker and Georg Wadenius supplied sublime guitar on cuts like “Snowbound.” And Morph the Cat (from ’06) was a brilliant take on America today, with unflinchingly brilliant songs and lead guitar from Jon Herrington and Wayne Krantz. And it’s nice to finally have stuff like “Big Noise New York,” “Century’s End,” “Confide in Me,” and “True Companion” on the bonus disc.

Also nice is the inclusion of the recently-released “Rhymes,” which was used to promote a proposed tour with Fagen and Al Green that never did happen. They all sound great, but the real star here is the DVDA (audio) on the MVI discs. If you haven’t taken the step to DVDA, try it! For music as dense and complicated as Fagen’s, it’s the perfect format. Every note is brilliantly presented.

At first listen, you’d call Mark Newton’s music bluegrass, but it’s not just bluegrass. Sure, the affects are slathered on, but the drums give away the game – this is really honkytonk roots rock/pop masquerading as traditional bluegrass. Is that a bad thing? No, but it would be a mistake to assume that Hillbilly Hemingway is merely another Rebel Records bluegrass offering, since it is far more.

Newton’s fifth solo release, and his third with the current band, the album draws material from an array of writers, so it isn’t just one kind of music – there’s country and western (sorry, old joke).

On the album we hear Clay Hess on rhythm and lead guitar, Andy Ball on mandolin, John Wheat on banjo, and Beth Lawrence on bass. Additional musicians include Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Rob Ickes and Randy Kohrs on dobros, and Tony Creasman on percussion and drums. Unlike so many bluegrass albums where the touring band is shoved aside in favor of studio pros, Hillbilly Hemingway has the band handling most solos, and each band member gets to sing lead on at least one song.

Every song has as much finesse and polish as any big-budget Nashville hot-country release. The sound is clear, warm, and very natural, and epitomizes what modern acoustic music can sound like when recorded right.