Foo Fighters - Back and Forth

I managed to catch one of the limited screenings of the new Foo Fighters documentary "Back and Forth" on the big screen on the weekend. It is coupled with a run-through of the new album "Wasting Light", played live in a band room, and shot with multiple cameras in 3D



It was a very candid film and a very informative and revealing. It begins with Dave Grohl joining Nirvana, working through their all-too-brief career and then onto the beginnings of a new project which he tentatively called "Foo Fighters"; a project he opted to explore and build upon rather than take on the job he was offered as the drummer in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers!

There's plenty of great music within, as you all know. It was interesting to see the growing pains that the band went through in their early days, including having to be compared to Nirvana at every turn, as well as being asked the most banal questions from rock journalists who all wanted to know about whether the songs were about Kurt. I was disappointed that they didn't spend much time talking about their music videos. Their videos are consistently entertaining and often very funny, with the band happy to take the piss out of themselves at will.

The documentary takes on the touchy subject of certain band member's addictions and overdoses, including those of Kurt Cobain, but it is curious how Dave's own battle with substances was omitted from the film. He is known for his wild drinking, and he even overdosed on caffeine during the making of the "Them Crooked Vultures" LP. Or the fact that he was picked up for driving over the prescribed alcohol limit in Australia circa 2006. It also overstepped the Beaconsfield mine tragedy in Tasmania, which resulted in the trapped miners having a song dedicated to them on the "Echoes Silence Patience and Grace" LP.

On the whole, it was a very entertaining watch, and even the most casual fan of the band can get a lot out of it. Those looking for gossip and mudslinging won't find much here, but at least this doesn't bear any of the tawdry melodrama of Metallica's "Some Kind Of Monster" - there's no public therapy sessions in this one!

The live set in 3D at the end just demonstrates how tight the band are as a unit and just how great the new material really is. The songs pack a punch, as well as being very hooky and melodic. The record flows well from start to finish and even the slow songs are worth a few listens. The 3D vision was impressive, with a camera set up close to Taylor Hawkin's drum kit. It looked close enough that you could almost reach out and grab the cymbals, or steal the picks from Dave Grohl's mic stand!

Highly recommended. Although it's a shame it won't be visible in 3D anymore though.

Below are a couple of highlights from new record: "Dear Rosemary" and "Bridge Burning", Live on Letterman

100 LPs Shortlist #7 - Extreme - "Pornograffitti"

Can it really be 20 years since I first heard this album? Sure enough, it was February 1991, six months B.N. (Before "Nevermind") when I was handed a tape of this by a friend on that hot summer's day at the very start of the school year....

What blew me away was not just how great sounding or technically proficient the guitar playing was, but just how melodic and inviting the music was. Guitarist Nuno Bettancort's playing was technical, to be sure, but it didn't sound or feel unapproachable, like, say, Yngwie Malmsteen was. The guitar parts were instantly singable, very cleverly played and memorable. I totally loved that about this album.

Lyrically the songs seem to lend themselves to a song cycle, on the themes of sexualisation of pop culture and media saturation and how they seem to be mutually benefiting one another. How prescient - not much has changed in the ensuing years. The ambition in this record was almost tangible, and so it should be. After all, Extreme's biggest musical influence was Queen.

Most casual listeners would remember the band's Mega-hit single "More Than Words", an edited version of which went to No.2 in Australia. I would have loved to have seen the faces of the people who bought this album on the strength of that song...they would have gotten the shock of their lives! The only other song that remotely sounds like that would be the follow-up single "Hole Hearted" (which was omitted from the vinyl LP because of space reasons). The album is mainly made up of highly charged rock music with funk and rhythmic leanings, with a few curly bits thrown in. The only real time the band hit a flat spot is on the track "When I First Kissed You". Intended to be an affectionate Sinatra tribute, it suffers from flat production and a bad synth-piano track and equally bad synth-strings. Then again, piano playing is not what this record is about - the guitars are the real winner here.

This is definitely a guitar player's album - Nuno is a musician's musician. He frustrates me because he can play far better than I can and he can't read sheet music....but I digress. This record is beautifully crafted and well played. It still sounds great today.

"Pornograffitti" seems to strike the perfect balance of intelligence, ambition, and song-craft. There is plenty to excite the musos, but there is still heaps for every other music fan to enjoy here as well. In 1992, with the LP "III Sides of Every Story", they over-extended themselves and tabled a concept so bloated that it ultimately was crushed under the weight of its own ambition, but that's another story...

Check it out...

Compilation albums? Good or bad?

This is a new style of post that I'd like to start writing - not all the time, mind you, just semi-regularly - called "Digest" where I discuss and opine on topics of note that I think are worth thinking about.

This post comes as a response to Don's comment from my recent Blondie post. Drop over to his site Try To Be Amused and say "Hi".

Tonight on Star 104.5 FM they have a regular series at 6pm called "Cover To Cover". The text from their website says: "Every Sunday night at 6 we play from start to finish one of the greatest albums ever made!"

The reason for this post is that I have strong opinions on this week's edition, where they are playing "ZZ Top's Greatest Hits".

Personally I have no issue with ZZ Top, or their greatest hits for that matter. If anything this 1994 release is missing many great tracks from their early career that can be found on "The Best of ZZ Top" released in 1977, but I digress.

Where I take issue is the labeling of "ZZ Top's Greatest Hits" as "one of the greatest albums of ever made". The issue is not the music (which is incendiary) nor the station and its programmers, but that the album in question is a compilation.

The album, from its inception as a long playing LP in 1948, was always about the creation of a long-form work; something that would have required a good deal of planning and thought in order to produce a work that plays well for an extended period of time, and something that would be considered worthy of a larger price tag than that of a single or an EP. Jazz and classical artists have always employed this principal, and if one was to study the book "1001 Albums you Must Hear Before You Die", a large portion of the albums in the section for the 1950s are jazz albums.

Popular music artists, usually by the hand of their record labels, didn't put a great deal of thought into the LP. Probably assuming that the teenagers of the time, if they could afford it, would buy anything with their idol's face on the cover, the albums that were churned out were often piecemeal affairs. The first few Elvis LPs were thrown together from newly recorded sessions with RCA and older tracks from the Sun Records vaults. Even the first Elvis LP in England wasn't even the same as the US version! This was largely the standard practice until the Beatles started to concentrate on the LP as a serious recording medium.

Starting with their second LP "With The Beatles", The Beatles worked to create albums as a great piece of work that could be played from start to finish and were always quite annoyed that the American record company would either alter the track lists of the British LPs to omit tracks, or they would cobble together tracks from various sources to create entirely new LPs altogether. Where the Beatles released 14 albums (counting two compilations) and 2 EPs and copious singles of unique material in the UK between 1962 and 1970, In America they released 21 albums. No album was identical on both sides of the pond until "Sgt Pepper..." in 1967.

In the days of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, it was highly common that singles were not present on the albums. As singles were only present on the market for about 6 months at most, once they were gone, they didn't return. The market then demanded some form of singles "collection" whereby all these stray tracks could be collected and thus the compilation was born.

Don't get me wrong - a compilation has its place. For example, it is a great place to get an introduction into a substantial catalog of works by a band or artist. If one likes what they hear they can delve into the albums to find many more hidden gems.

For some artists, the best albums they ever made were compilation albums. The dubious and checkered discography of James Brown is a classic example. Despite making LPs since 1959, he rarely ever thought about making a fully sequenced, cohesive statement on an LP. Every one of his studio albums (at least up until 1974's "The Payback") were albums thrown together from many different recording sessions. In some cases, no two tracks had the same personnel and were quite often dubbed with "canned" applause and reverb to make them sound live, when in fact they were recorded in a studio. His great singles, like "Hot Pants", "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag", "Super Bad" "Sex Machine", "Soul Power" among others, were actually long jams, sometimes as long as 15 minutes, but were released as singles with 3 minutes each side, and faded out to make a nice smooth ending. In some cases, the same faded endings were added to the LPs of the same name too, never giving the listener the benefit of hearing the full, unedited tracks. Thus, his compilation albums "In The Jungle Groove", "Funk Power 1970", "Make It Funky - The Big Payback" and "Foundations of Funk" are actually the best albums to listen to because they compile the tracks as they were recorded, with no dodgy studio fiddling or razor blade editing, and they ROCK! But again, they don't have the forethought of a proper album - they are each just a collection of previously recorded music thrown together on an album.

Johnny O'Keefe was the same - a "best of" album will always appear on a list of "Great Aussie albums" because he made vital, essential singles, but never a great album.

The album has evolved over a long period of time, but for contemporary/popular musicians, oftentimes it is a piece of work that captures an artist's work at a point in time. Once it's there, it cannot be changed. It captures the songs, the attitudes and the energy of the artist at that moment - they'll never be quite the same again. That's the great thing about it! The heart and soul of the music as it was, there and then, captured for prosperity. It is usually a conscious effort to create a full piece of work, when creating a studio LP.

A compilation album will never ever be what a studio LP was intended to be. How can a record that is slapped together from bits and pieces across a wide period of time ever hope to be? It can only ever be a summary, an overview, a mere window into a bigger body of work that can lead to bigger and more interesting things for the listener. Let's face it: "Queen's Greatest Hits 1" is brilliant from start to finish, but a listener is missing out if they never hear "A Night At The Opera". Taken as a complete whole, "...Opera" is mind-blowing and a totally essential listen, but only 2 of its songs appear on "Greatest Hits". By only sticking to "Greatest Hits" you make such amazing records like "...Opera" redundant and the listener does themselves a great disservice.

There's no denying, however, their importance in introducing many a new listener to some awesome music, and that's why in my personal list of 100 albums there will probably be a few of them because, in my view, the studio albums of the bands in question (such as Blondie or Joan Armatrading) overall just weren't all that great, but a compilation was killer!

Therefore it is my conclusion that a compilation can't necessarily be called one of the "greatest albums ever made". A more objective few of the greatest albums of all time, however, should not include compilations unless there is a very good reason for it.

My view is that if you wanted to play any ZZ Top record on "Cover to Cover",
choose "Eliminator", "Tres Hombres" or "Fandango", not "Greatest Hits".

Any comments, criticisms or anything, leave a comment at the bottom of this post. Cheers!

Mix Tape #1

Hi again, Inspired by the Friday Mixtape section of the awesome Hidden Track blog over at the Glide Magazine site, I thought I'd finally post this first mix tape that I had prepared ages ago.

I had prepared to upload this as long ago as September last year, but, as Ashley Naylor presciently once sang: "Life gets in the way", and it never happened. So here you go, better late than never.

Here is a bunch of awesome tunes that I was listening to at the time, but they are all great that I still think they should be shared amongst the music fans out there!

Here's the list, all sequenced to be two sides of a tape, roughly even in length with the same flow a good mix tape should have:

Side 1:
1. Sick as a dog - Brad Sucks - 3:14
2. Blue - The Jayhawks - 3:10
3. Couldn't I Just Tell You - Todd Rundgren - 3:22
4. Behind The Wall Of Sleep - The Smithereens - 3:24
5. Into Your Arms - Lemonheads - 2:45
6. Jessica Something - The Tearaways - 3:57
7. Star Sign - Teenage Fanclub - 3:54

total time 23:46

Side 2:

8. Back Against The Wall - Cage The Elephant - 3:48
9. Der Kommissar - After The Fire - 5:42
10. Fill My Eyes - Cat Stevens - 3:00
11. Junior's Farm - Wings - 4:20
12. Death Plunge - Glorious Mono - 1:36
13. Sign O' The Times - Prince - 4:57

total time 23:23

Track 1 is a great little tune from slacker pop (I really hate that term) artist Brad Sucks from his first record "I Don't Know What I Am Doing". It's available free at his website, along with a heap of remixes.

Track 2 is a great song from the Jayhawks. The parent album of this song "Tomorrow The Green Grass" is a classic and deserves a more than a few listens.

At the time this mixtape was created I was listening to a lot of Power Pop, so tracks 3-7 are classic power pop tunes that can all be found on the Poptopia! series of albums released by Rhino Records in 1997. Some are more well known than others, but each of them is a killer tune.

Track 8 is from another group, and a recent one, who have been lumped into a category called "slacker pop" like the aforementioned Brad Sucks. Cage the Elephant has an odd (on paper at least) hybrid of folk music, psychadelic, rock and hip-hop that is actually quite appealing. They have just released a new record, but this one is from their first, self titled LP released in 2008.

Track 9 is the 12-inch mix (remember those?) of a one-hit wonder from the 80s that gets quite a few spins in my house. My kids love it. It's a rocked-up cover of a dodgy pop song by Falco, called "Der Kommissar" or "The Commissioner" in English (Falco was obviously German). It's a great cover.

Track 10 is a deep cut from Yusuf Islam, aka Cat Stevens from his 1970 LP "Mona Bone Jakon". Where the hell does he get those obscure album titles from?

Track 11 is a single only release from Macca and Wings. I much prefer his rockers to his mushy love songs!!! (Note: The artist in the Grooveshark screen is labelled "Apollo C. Vermouth" which is one of Paul's many pseudonyms)

Track 12 comes to us from the vast archives of Songfight.org who have developed a highly competitive and fun weekly competition over the last 10 years. Their music archive is free to download and contains LOADS of great songs. Glorious Mono's "Death Plunge" is just one of many.

Track 13 is from one of Prince's many masterpieces. A good way to round off a nicely balanced set, in my opinion. Get into it!

The Cry Baby Wah Wah Pedal

The Cry Baby wah wah pedal is a device that is designed to provide a tone-shifting effect to an electric guitar signal. The device turns 45 this year, so in honour of this awesome device's birthday, there is a film that has just been released about the Cry Baby's history, which you can watch below.

Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World from Dunlop Manufacturing on Vimeo.

Also too, here you can check out the 45-song soundtrack of classic wah-wah recordings. Everything from Chicago blues, heavy metal, funk, soul, pop, folk ballads, you name it, have benefited from the use of the Cry Baby.

Here's the list:

1. Wah Wah Blues - Earl Hooker
2. Up On Cripple Creek - The Band
3. Tell me Something Good - Rufus (with Chaka Khan)
4. Tales of Brave Ulysses - Cream
5. Bulls On Parade - Rage Against The Machine
6. Man In The Box - Alice In Chains
7. Theme From "Shaft" - Isaac Hayes
8. Cloud Nine - The Temptations
9. Up From The Skies - Jimi Hendrix
10. Those Damned Blue Collar Tweekers - Primus
11. Dazed and Confused - Led Zeppelin
12. I'm The Slime - Frank Zappa
13. If - Bread
14. Enter Sandman - Metallica
15. Great King Rat - Queen
16. Crimson And Clover - Tommy James and the Shondells
17. Magic - Pilot
18. Funky Dollar Bill - Funkadelic
19. Alive - Pearl Jam
20. Stir It Up - Bob Marley & The Wailers
21. I Ain't Superstitious - Jeff Beck Group (featuring Rod Stewart)
22. Peace Frog - The Doors
23. Goodbye Stranger - Supertramp
24. Say What? - Stevie Ray Vaughn
25. 1969 - The Stooges
26. Unbelieveable - EMF
27. Seagull - Ride
28. Long Tall Sally - Cactus
29. Look At Yourself - Uriah Heep
30. We Used To Know - Jethro Tull
31. Too Rolling Stoned - Robin Trower
32. Stay - Pink Floyd
33. The Soapmakers - Clutch
34. Let's Get It On - Marvin Gaye
35. Love's Theme - Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra
36. Pictures of Matchstick Men - Status Quo
37. The Audience Is Listening - Steve Vai
38. Higher Ground - Stevie Wonder
39. Monster Skank - Infectious Grooves
40. 25 or 6 to 4 - Chicago
41. A New Way - Toe Fat
42. Paranoid - Grand Funk Railroad
43. What I Am - Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians
44. Electric Funeral - Black Sabbath
45. Yankee Rose - David Lee Roth

Unfortunately, these are all international artists and there's not much (at all) in the way of Australian artists. Can anyone suggest any local notable wah wah performances?

Cheers

100 LPs Shortlist #6: "The Best Of..." - Blondie

There's always some debate about whether a comprehensive list of the "greatest" albums of all time should include Compilation albums. After all, we are looking at a studio album as a creative endeavour; one that is created in a time and space relative to it's environment. Compilation albums really only summarise the supposed high points of recent works, right?

But what about those artists who were brilliant on 7-inch vinyl, but struggled to create a consistently satisfying LP catalogue? This is usually the justification for including compilation albums by Johnny O'Keefe and The Easybeats in lists of the greatest Australian albums (I'd argue against this for the Easybeats, but that's for another posting). True, Johnny O'Keefe, Elvis Presley and even James Brown were always wildly inconsistent on LPs, churning out albums seemingly only to have a new product in the marketplace to maintain career momentum.

To this writer's ears, Blondie never really achieved the "great" album ("Parallel Lines" comes close). Albums like "Eat To The Beat" and "Autoamerican" were so wildly inconsistent that they just don't hang well together as a listening experience.

On the other hand, their catalogue of 7-inch singles is totally brilliant. Most of which were collected together on "The Best Of Blondie" in 1981.

I discovered Blondie, on a 7-inch single at my next door neighbours house, around age 6. I was over there one day with my mum and while she was chatting to them I noticed a small collection of singles. I was allowed to borrow them to listen to and to make a mix tape of, if I wanted to. One of the singles was "Union City Blue", and I fell in love. It's still a great song now, and it's b-side "Living In The Real World" eclipses the a-side in it's intensity and firepower.

Discovering "The Best Of Blondie" a few years later was an amazing experience. It's a great listen from top to tail, and the songs that that the radio always play are probably the least inspiring from the album. I mean, "Heart of Glass" and "The Tide Is High" are great songs, but they are nothing compared to "Atomic", "Hanging On The Telephone", "Picture This", "Dreaming" and of course "Union City Blue". All the songs are great, but the album as listening experience really adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

As this was such an important listen to me growing up (despite the fact I first heard this album in full long after they had split up), I think I might include it on the grounds of historical importance. But the 100 LPs surely can't contain all compilations, as that would be cheating, right?

Anyway, here's a Grooveshark link to the original 14 track LP, plus "Living In The Real World" as a bonus. CRANK IT UP!!!

100 LPs Shortlist #5: "Meet Glen Campbell" - Glen Campbell

When I first heard that Glen Campbell was releasing a new LP in 2008, with covers of Foo Fighters and Green Day songs on it, I was horrified. I was totally prepared for this album to completely suck.

The pairing of an old contemporary country singer, with music originally by a punk rock band seemed incongruous. Was this going to end up as tragically bad as John Farnham's attempt to reclaim commercial success (a la Rod Stewart of late) with his atrocious LP "I Remember When I Was Young: Songs from the Great Australian Songbook"? Possibly...

...but then, it could be as cool as Johnny Cash became in the last few years of his life, with the release of his "American Recordings" series, when he took on the works of Tom Petty and Soundgarden with stunning results.

The old adage that "you can't judge a record by reading about it in Rolling Stone" certainly applies here. The proof is in the grooves (or the arrangement of the 1s and 0s in your mp3 files). Upon listening to it, it is apparent that this album is a triumph.

Granted, some tracks are not that far removed from their original arrangements. It's certainly the case on his versions of "Sing" by Scottish band Travis, and Green Day's "Time Of Your Life". However, that is not a criticism: Glen's warm and tender tenor suits these arrangements. These tracks, especially "Time Of Your Life", contain a certain type of emotional urgency in their performance that makes them exciting and appealing.

Not being a huge U2 fan, there are only a small handful of songs in their catalogue that I consider to be essential listening. I was nervous when approaching the version of "All I Want Is You" here, as this is one of my very favourites. The arrangement is very close to the original, with enough subtle changes in it to make it uniquely "Glen". He succeeds with his version, I'm glad to say.

His take on "Times Like These", a highlight of the Foo Fighters otherwise mediocre LP "One by One", is quite curious, as it seems to ape the sound and style of some of his classic works, most notably "Galveston". On paper, that sounds awful, but some reason the song is strangely endearing in this form. It forms a perfect soundtrack for driving in the desert on a hot summer day.

The version of the Jackson Browne-penned "These Days" (originally performed by Nico on "Chelsea Girl" in 1967) is not as cold as Nico's version, but actually suits the pleasant acoustic guitar treatment offered here.

Within a couple of listens, this album inspired fervent loyalty from me and I consider it to be a highlight in my music collection. I managed to score a limited edition vinyl copy of the album which features pristine sound and a bonus track - a remix of "Galveston", which is very out of place here. It somehow manages to detract from the greatness of the rest of the record. Not because it isn't a good song, because it is, but it's placement on this record is out of context and unnecessary.

Featured below is the album on Spotify, minus the Galveston remix.

Enjoy.



Here are the original artists of the tracks on this album:

1. Sing - Travis
2. Walls - Tom Petty
3. Angel Dream - Tom Petty
4. Times Like These - Foo Fighters
5. These Days - Nico (written by Jackson Browne)
6. Sadly Beautiful - The Replacements
7. All I Want Is You - U2
8. Jesus - Velvet Underground (written by Lou Reed)
9. Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) - Green Day
10. Grow Old With Me - John Lennon