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