The Box Tops - NonStop (1968)

This one got deleted a few times, which I think is kind of odd considering all of the other stuff on here. I don't feel like re-writing this, so here is what I wrote about a year ago:

Here is another Box Tops/Alex Chilton item - this one was released in 1968 just under a year after the chart-topping The Letter. Here, Alex Chilton is only about 16 or 17 years old, playing in a poppy-bluesy kind of outfit, and his voice is deeper and more gravelly than it is on anything else that I've heard by him. If you listened to that Big Star album below, you'll notice that he talks about The Box Tops leading a kind of 'scummy' existence and being controlled by their producers - Dan Penn and others, who wrote all of the songs for their album and often replaced the band members (except Chilton) with studio musicians during recording. However, Chilton managed to get a song of his own on Non-Stop, "I Can Dig It", which is one of my favourites. Other favourites include the darker "Yesterday Where's My Mind" and the classic sounding "I Met Her In Church".

Track Listing:
Side One
1. Choo Choo Train
2. I'm Movin' On
3. Sandman
4. She Shot A Hole In My Soul
5. People Gonna Talk
Side Two
6. I Met Her In Church
7. Rock Me Baby
8. Rollin' In My Sleep
9. I Can Dig It
10. Yesterday Where's My Mind
11. If I Had Let You In

NonStop - 320kbps

KJR 16 All American Hits (VA) (1967)

This compilation was made in 1967 for a radio station in Seattle, KJR, by a record company that seems to have specialized in making compilations, Take 6. In fact, it seems like Take 6 specialized in making many of the same compilation and putting different labels on them (sometimes). Like those custom wine-makers that have bad wine and put peoples' labels on them. What is that called? Private label wine? But these songs are actually pretty good, and a lot of the artists have either faded into obscurity over the years, have hits that have become dissociated with their names, or have members that have moved onto bigger and better things under different names. For example, here we have the original version of Gloria by Them, aka Van Morrison's old band. And also, despite the title, these are not all necessarily "All American Hits". About half of the artists are part of the British Invasion. For example, Them.

But I liked about all of the tracks. A lot of them are pretty garagey (The Seeds), and others totally fit the bill for 60's pop. Which is a lot of fun. My favourites were probably the tracks by the Association, B.J. Thomas, The Leaves, and the Shangri-Las. For a little trivia, See You In September by The Happenings was part of a list of songs that Clear Channel suggested be taken off the airwaves following 9/11. Which makes the song that much more intense, despite the obvious anachronism.

Track List:

Side One

1. Association - Along Comes Mary

2. Five Americans - Western Union

3. Royal Guardsmen - Snoopy vs. Red Baron

4. B.J. Thomas - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

5. Lovin' Spoonful - Summer In The City

6. Them - Gloria

7. Neil Diamond - Cherry, Cherry

8. The Happenings - See You In September

Side Two

9. Tommy James and the Shondells - Hanky Panky

10. The Leaves - Hey Joe

11. The Seeds - Pushin' Too Hard

12. Ian Whitcomb - You Turn Me On

13. Canibal and the Head Hunters - Lord of 1000 Dances

14. The Sonics - The Witch

15. Shangrilas - Leader of the Pack

16. The Standells - Dirty Water

KJR - 320kbps

The Box Tops - The Letter/Neon Rainbow (1967)

Another Alex Chilton post. This time, though, is the big stuff. This is the first album that the Box Tops made, and it is also their most famous - featuring the eponymous songs The Letter, and Neon Rainbow. Well, eponymous in the sense that the songs lend their name to the album. Not to the artists. This is the first time I've used the word, but I've seen it used in relation to music so often that I felt I had to. The Letter was #1 on some charts in US and Canada for a little bit. Neon Rainbow was a bit further down. Anyways, it's a pretty cool album. It's way hard to find, too, but it finally happened on a trip down to Burlington at Burlington Records.

The quartet is often classified as "Blue-Eyed Soul", a classification that I kind of like. It's not just saying that they're white, but that they're also...I don't know. And they are from Memphis, Tennessee and most of the music is written by their producer, Dan Penn, which is mentioned in an interview on the Big Star live album (below). Here, I think Chilton is only 16, but he died just recently (RIP). This record doesn't seem to feature his low growling voice as much as in Non-Stop, which is a little bit interesting. Another thing that's a little bit interesting is the way that Gonna Find Somebody was mixed. The vocals are way drowned out and echoey compared to the vocals on rest of the album.

See my other Alex Chilton posts:

Box Tops - Non-Stop

Alex Chilton - No Sex EP

Big Star - Live At Max's Kansas City (1973)

Track Listing:

Side One

1. The Letter

2. She Knows How

3. Trains & Boats & Planes

4. Break My Mind

5. Whiter Shade Of Pale

6. Everything I Am

Side Two

7. Neon Rainbow

8. People Make The World

9. I'm Your Puppet

10. Happy Times

11. Gonna Find Somebody

12. I Pray For Rain

The Letter (1967) - 320kbps

The Fleshtones - Roman Gods (1982)

I don't know much about these guys, I just bought them from some guy's record collection on the outskirts of the city. But allmusic says that they are often classified as a garage rock revival band, which seems to fit pretty perfectly with what they sound like. They seem like they could be from the 60's, but there's something that doesn't fit with that era, which makes sense because it was made in '82. Actually, it's kind of reminiscent of that newer 80's-ish kind of music like The Killers, which can sometimes be disconcerting, particularly in "Stop Fooling Around".

It's an okay album. These guys are still pumpin' em out, though, which is pretty cool. This is their first.

Track Listing:

1. The Dreg (Fleshtones '77)

2. I've Gotta Change My Life

3. Stop Fooling Around

4. Hope Come Back

5. The World Has Changed

6. R-I-G-H-T-S

7. Let's See The Sun

8. Shadow-Line (To J. Conrad)

9. Chinese Kitchen

10. Ride Your Pony

11. Roman Gods

Roman Gods - 1982 - 320kbps

Ennio Morricone Ringtones

Uck, this is a little embarrassing, but I just made some ringtones from a couple of Ennio Morricone's tunes. Namely, one from "Jokes on the Side" off of Duck You Sucker, and two from the main theme of "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly".

On the "Jokes on the Side" one, you can still hear the turntable rotating, it's pretty awesome.

I think that, for iPhones, you can just open them in iTunes and it will automatically add them to your ringtones. From there you just sync them up. But for other cell phones, I'm guessing that you have to convert them to MP3 first and then upload them to your cellphone. You can convert them by changing the file extension from ".m4r" to ".m4a" and then using iTunes or another program to convert the m4a file to an mp3.

In other news, I have moved out of Montreal and don't have my LP's yet and haven't been buying too many. Hence the lack of updates. But I found this weird one that I'm thinking of putting up soon if I get the time to hang out in my basement. I guess that putting records from Detroit on this blog would kill our mission statement, though.

Ennio Morricone Ringtones

Ennio Morricone - Duck You Sucker! [A Fistful of Dynamite] (1971)

Again, this picture isn't mine - I plan to be getting a real camera when I get back to the States over Christmas. They're a bit cheaper there. But to get to Ennio Morricone, he was born in Rome in 1928, and is apparently the most famous movie composer EVER, having scored over 500 films in a whole bunch of different styles. He is most famous for the western movies that he did, Duck You Sucker (Giu' La Testa in Italian) is one of those films, amongst others like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Duck You Sucker was also directed by Sergio Leone, who he worked with quite a bit and did some of his most successful work for. In fact, it marks the beginning of Morricone's relationship with Leone. I enjoy the soundtrack quite a bit, too, though I haven't actually seen the movie. There are some clips on youtube that make it look especially awesome, though. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49z2lDvelQQ, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVS6NQr0YP8&NR=1. It looks like there's some comedic and nonsensical elements to the soundtrack as well as some more atmospheric prettyness, and the two go together to provide a nice hybrid.

I just downloaded the movie. Hopefully that will put it in context.

UPDATE: I just saw the movie, and oh my goodness. The hilarity content of the soundtrack will have to be revised and increased. It's pretty funny, especially at the beginning of the movie where Juan meets Sean, and Ennio Morricone's song bursts in with "Shon Shon". I'm not sure if that was intentional, IMDB said it was pure coincidence, but I'm not sure if I trust that, or if I want to. It was so beautiful. Especially because of the scene that was playing when it appeared. But man oh man, the movie was so good. I highly recommend it. The ending was so much more satisfying than Nick Cave's "The Proposition"*, which I saw just a couple of nights ago and still garners the status of western even though it takes place in Australia. The epic ending of "Duck, You Sucker!" didn't detract from the film at all, whereas Nick Cave's silent and open ended "WHAT'S GONNA HAPPEN!!?" ending has become typical and, it seems, something of a cop-out from a more imaginative ending. What I guess I'm saying is: fuck post-modern film. It's all about cheesy westerns and doing away with certain main characters. And it's also all about this soundtrack, which you should download.

*Disclaimer: I still love Nick Cave.

Side One

1. Duck, You Sucker (Main Theme)

2. Love

3. Green Table

4. March of the Beggars

5. The Dead Sons

6. Addio

7. Jokes on the Side

Side Two

8. Duck, You Sucker (Main Title)

9. Inventions for John

10. Counter Revolution

11. After the Explosion

Ennio Morricone - Duck You Sucker! [A Fistful of Dynamite] (1971) 320kbps

DB #72 - Squares Blot Out The Sun (1990)

This is a compilation from DB Records that, according to allmusic, was scheduled for release in 1984, but didn't make it out until 1990. It features a bunch of bands from the Athens and Atlanta Georgia scene of the late 70's and all of the 80's. Some of the bands sound uncomfortably close to the B-52's. Or it's uncomfortable for me, at least. But it makes sense, because the B-52's were originally released on DB Records (or if not DB, a company by the same owner). I'm not sure if the record company is still active.

The stuff that doesn't sound like the B-52's is mostly really good - The Fans, The Brains, Pylon. It's pretty much just some solid new wave and 80's punk from the hometown of REM and, I don't know...The Allman Brothers? Definitely worth listening to. I particularly liked The Fans, Tim Lee, the Brains, and the Swimming Pool Q's.

Side One:

1. Pylon - Cool (1980)

2. The Fans - True (1979)

3. Jack Heard - Sex Machine

4. The Reivers - Bidin' Time

5. Tim Lee - Talked About It (1988)

6. The Side Effects - Neat In The Street (1988)

7. Pylon - Party Zone (Live - early 80's)

Side Two:

8. The Swimming Pool Q's - Home In (1980)

9. Jack Heard - Burnin' Love (1981)

10. The Skeeters - High Noon

11. OhOk - Random (1982)

12. The Coolies - Richard Cory (1987)

13. The Brains - Quick With Your Lip

14. Alfredo Villar, Rick and Tom Price - Y.O.U. Mistake (1978)

DB #72 - Squares Blot Out The Sun (1990) - 320kbps

- I hope that link works. The upload was acting kind of funny.

More To Come!

Alright, so I haven't really done much posting this summer, but that is soon to change. Well, soon as in after a couple of weeks. I'm in Detroit right now and have just picked up some interesting looking comps from Car City Records and Stormy Records and will be posting those after I get back to Montreal. I don't really know anything about them yet, but here is the list:

- From Twisted Minds Come Twisted Products - Noiseville #18 - 1990 - Apparently a noise-punk/garage compilation with only about 2000 copies. The internet has almost nothing about this album, but some of the individual artists have write-ups.
Featured Artists: Action Swingers, Unholy Swill, Bench, Bootbeast, Surgery, Bullets For Pussy, Pocket Fishrmen, ST 37, Coz The Shroom, and Jarmed Enecy

- Squares Blot Out The Sun - DB #72 - Originally scheduled for release in 1984, but delayed until 1990 - features material going back as far as the late 70's up until 1989. Allmusic calls the earlier stuff "particularly fascinating". The music here is all pretty southern and it looks kind of like a punk compilation with some southern/country influences.
Featured Artists: Pylon, Fans, Jack Heard, Reivers, Tim Lee, Side Effects, Swimming Pool Q's, Skeeters, Oh OK, Coolies, Brains, and Tom Gray with Alfredo Villar

- Live At CBGB's - Atlantic SD 2-508 - 1976 - Features the most happening artists that played at CBGB's back in the early days of New York punk. Interestingly, they didn't include Patti Smith, which I thought was intentional, but which allmusic called a serious oversight.
The artists featured here are: Tuff Darts, The Shirts, Mink DeVille, The Laughing Dogs, Manster, Sun, Stuart's Hammer, The Miamis.

- I also found a Sister Rosetta Tharpe album - Spirituals in Rhythm - OSL 31 - Not sure of the year.

Bloodstains Across Belgium Vol. II (1998)

I lost my camera, so I couldn't get any pictures of the album cover, and there was nothing good on the internet. But hopefully, one day soon, I will be able to add them to this post.

The past few months I had been eyeing one of the Belgium punk comps over at Pick-Up Records, but never picked up (eh?) because they were kind of pricey. Why have I been eyeing a Belgian record for so long? Because I too enjoy fries with mayo. But the other day I walked into the record store feeling confident and finally bought the compilation. And it's a pretty cool album, definitely worth the money, though the sound quality can be a little poor. I guess that was to be expected, as a lot of these are live takes.

The album, released in 1998, features a bunch of punk bands from the late 70's and early 80's. Some of them are well known, while others just disappeared. One of the well known bands is Elton Motello, who you may not know immediately, but he wrote the original version of "Jet Boy, Jet Girl" that Plastic Bertrand covered. Later The Damned also covered it, but I think that Elton Motello (the stage name for Alan Ward) is in The Damned or is somehow tied with them. The Kids are apparently also pretty famous, being the first punk band in Belgium, but I had never heard of them. Everyone else is pretty obscure aside from maybe Raxola, but I've never heard of them either. Aside from the Elton Motello track, my favourites were probably The Kids' "Do You Wanna Know" (1979), Raxola's "Wildcat" (1978), and De Brassers with "Kontrole" (1980). Apparently, De Brassers helped to start the cold-wave movement, which if the rest of the genre is like this song, is kind of droning and reminds me a bit of Joy Division (or someone...).

Track Listing:
Side One
1. Raxola - Kill Your Son (1978)
2. Chainsaw - What Goes On (1977)
3. Kids - Do You Wanna Know (1979)
4. Stagebeast - Working Man (1978)
5. Underdogs - Third World Image (1981)
6. Spermicide - Belgique (1979)
7. Contingent - Violence (1980)
8. Stress - My Father Is A Fascist (1978)
Side Two
9. Elton Motello - Jet Boy, Jet Girl (1977)
10. Raxola - Wildcat (1978)
11. Pinchers - Rape Her (1981)
12. Jeugd van Tegenwoordig - AOD (1984)
13. Chainsaw - Z'Heroes Guts (1977)
14. Cell 609 - Re-Pulsion (1978)
15. Contingent - Nuit Blanche (1980)
16. De Brassers - Kontrole (1980)

Bloodstains Across Belgium Vol. II (1998) - 320kbps

The Meatmen - We're The Meatmen...And You Suck! (1983)

If you thought that this blog had any self-respect, then you'll probably change your mind with this post. Rather than posting some Michael Jackson or The Seeds after the death of Sky Saxon, I'm choosing to post We're The Meatmen...And You Suck!

The Meatmen are a punk/hardcore band hailing from Lansing and Detroit, MI and have a reputation for having a really crude and offensive sense of humour. For example, the title of their second LP and a song on this album, is Crippled Children Suck. There is also Pope On A Rope. This is their first full LP, and it was released in 1983. The Meatmen also spend a fair amount of time making fun of homosexuals, as one might notice on the first track. I can't decide how serious all of this is, as they make fun of themselves quite a bit, too, like when Tesco Vee (the headman of the everchanging band) recites the lyrics to "I Sin For A Living" as if they are poetry, or on "Crippled Children Suck" where he is just screaming incoherently. Ironically, Tesco Vee was a fourth grade teacher. The lead guitarist in Rock and Roll Juggernaut was also my 11th grade history teacher. And the guitarists in War of the Superbikes are some ex-Minor Threat characters.

I don't really recommend any of the tracks. As a whole, it's a fun listen every now and again, but most of the charm of The Meatmen lies in their offensive jokes, horrible lyrics, and self-deprecation. The first side of the record is the Blood Sausage EP, while the second side is filled with "the jammin' live tunes recorded at The Mudd Club and other various holes". My favourite parts of these live tunes are the reluctant applause and the occasional lone scream from a man in the crowd. This is a really long write-up.

Lineup: Vocals - Tesco Vee; Guitar - Greg Ramsey, Rich Ramsey; Bass - Rich Ramsey, Mike Achtenburg; Drums - Mr. X, Berl Johnson;

Track Listing:

Side One

1. The Rap

2. Tooling For Anus

3. 1 Down 3 to Go

4. Snuff 'Em

5. Becoming A Man/Freud Was Wrong

6. Ive Got A Problem

7. I'm Glad I'm Not A Girl

8. Dumping Ground

Side Two

9. Meatmen Stomp

10. Mr. Tapeworm

11. Orgy of One

12. I Sin for A Living

13. Crippled Children Suck

14. Buttocks

15. Middle Aged Youth

16. Meat Crimes

The Meatmen - We're The Meatmen...And You Suck! (1983) - 320kbps

The Purple Toads - Love Songs for the Hard of Hearing (1988)

Finally! Some more Can-Con! The Purple Toads hail from the beautiful, the desirable, Oshawa, Ontario. They formed after their old band, Durango 95, fell apart in 1985 and then they recorded a self-titled album in 1986. Their only other album is this one, Love Songs for the Hard of Hearing from '88. They didn't get very good reviews, grouped in with the rest of Oshawa's drunken garage-rock scene, maybe because of lines like "Well you got the kind of body that makes me come alive, but I'd rather have my hand wrapped 'round a bottle of Colt 45", but I find them to be some good rock and roll. "Troubled Mind" is a particularly good track. Other than that, there are a couple of covers - one of John D. Loudermilk's "Tobacco Road", which isn't stellar, and a cover of "What A Way to Die" by The Pleasure Seekers, a 1960's female garage-rock band from Detroit. The singer also has a funny sounding lisp that comes out sometimes.

Lineup:
Guitar - Paul MacNeil and Rob Sweeney; Bass - Roger Branton; Drums - Mark Keigan; Vocals - Rob Sweeney

Track Listing:
Side One
1. Wildtime
2. All I Want
3. What A Way to Die
4. Troubled Mind
5. You Gotta Believe Me
6. Love's All Gone
Side Two
7. Don't Understand Your Love
8. Ain't No Friend of Mine
9. Love On Your Back
10. Too Much of You
11. Tobacco Road
12. Everybody

The Purple Toads - Love Songs for the Hard of Hearing (1988) - 320kbps

Alex Chilton - No Sex EP (1986)

Alex Chilton is a badass. Look at him, he's on his car. He's against a wall. I'm actually starting to think that this entire blog is an excuse to post Alex Chilton. He is the singer in The Box Tops and Big Star. He is a man.

"No Sex" is a pretty funny look at AIDS, far before AIDS was funny (1986). "No sex, not anymore" being the constant refrain. Chilton also maintains that "Pretty soon, we're all gonna get it". Very bleak. Very Serious.

You should also listen to "Under Class" and "Wild Kingdom". But I guess if you download this, you don't have much choice.

Track Listing

Side One

1. No Sex

2. Under Class

Side Two

3. Wild Kingdom

Alex Chilton - No Sex EP - 1986 - 320kbps

Mott the Hoople - All the Young Dudes (1972)

Some of you might think that you've never heard these guys before, but when the title track comes on, you'll realize that you've listened to them at least 20 times in a row whilst trying to destroy "All the Young Dudes" on expert in Guitar Hero. You may hate them for it. Or at least I did. Anyways, aside from all that, this album was produced by David Bowie in 1972. Actually, David Bowie is most of the reason that Mott the Hoople became successful at all. He is the one that wrote "All the Young Dudes", and he is also the one that transformed the bands image into that of glam rockstars, or so allmusic leads us to believe. On kind of a crazy note, though, David Bowie had originally given Mott the Hoople "Sufragette City", but they rejected it, and then Bowie had to go and make it a hit.

But "All the Young Dudes" shouldn't be the entire focus of the album. The rest of the songs are also pretty good. For example, there is a sweet cover of Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane". And "Momma's Little Jewel" and "Jerkin' Crocus" are rockin'.

Oh yeah, Bowie plays sax on this album, too.

Track Listing:

Side One

1. Sweet Jane

2. Momma's Little Jewel

3. All the Young Dudes

4. Sucker

5. Jerkin' Crocus

Side Two

6. One of the Boys

7. Soft Ground

8. Ready for Love/After Lights

9. Sea Diver

Mott the Hoople - All the Young Dudes - 320kbps

John Coltrane and Don Cherry - The Avant-Garde (1966)

This is probably my last jazz post for a bit, but regardless of that, John Coltrane and Don Cherry's The Avant-Garde was recorded in 1960, but wasn't released until 1966. The album also features John Coltrane's first recorded use of the Soprano sax on "The Blessing". Interestingly, The Avant-Garde just seems to replace Ornette Coleman with John Coltrane, as the other musicians are all from the Ornette Coleman Quartet and most of the compositions were written by Coleman. "Focus On Sanity" is my favourite track on the album, featuring a pretty cool bass solo at the end with some very faint cymbals in the background.

Lineup: On "Focus on Sanity", "The Invisible" and "Bemsha Swing" - John Coltrane, soprano sax or tenor sax; Don Cherry, trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums.
On "Cherryco" and "The Blessing", the personnel is the same, except that Charlie Haden, bass, replaces Percy Heath.
John Coltrane plays soprano sax on "The Blessing", both soprano sax and tenor sax on "The Invisible", and tenor sax on all other tunes.

Track Listing:
Side One
1. Cherryco (Cherry)
2. Focus On Sanity (Coleman)
Side Two
3. The Blessing (Coleman)
4. The Invisible (Coleman)
5. Bemsha Swing (Monk)

John Coltrane and Don Cherry - The Avant-Garde - 320kbps

Thelonious Monk - Solo Monk (1964)

Solo Monk, recorded mostly in 1964, features only Thelonious Monk playing piano compositions that are only about half his. I don't know a whole lot about jazz, nor am I a piano player, so I can't try to talk about the intricacies and genious of Thelonious Monk, but it's kind of cool to hear him just playing around on the piano by himself.

Track Listing:

Side One

1. Dinah (Akst, Lewis, Young)

2. I Surrender, Dear (Barris, Clifford)

3. Sweet and Lovely (Arnheim, LeMare, Tobias)

4. North of the Sunset (Monk)

5. Ruby, My Dear (Monk)

6. I'm Confessin' (That I Love You) (Daugherty, Neiburg, Reynolds)

Side Two

7. I Hadn't Anyone Till You (Noble)

8. Everything Happens To Me (Adair, Dennis)

9. Monk's Point (Monk)

10. I Should Care (Cahn, Stordahl, Weston)

11. Ask Me Now (Monk)

12. These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You) (Link, Marvell, Strachey)

Monk (1964) - 320kbps