Album 560.
The Jesus And Mary Chain...............................Psychocandy   (1985)












The cover of the album contains an image taken from the music video for the song "Just Like Honey"
In a 2015 Rolling Stone interview singer and guitarist Jim Reid said this about the band’s inspiration for their videos:

"We wanted to make videos like the Monkees."




 Psychocandy is The Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut album. The album was originally released on November 18, 1985, via Blanco Y Negro Records.

 Inspired by ‘60s girl groups, and The Velvet Underground, the band fused elements of these influences to create loud, chaotic, yet catchy noise pop. Traditional pop structures and melodies are used throughout the album, along with blasts of distorted, buzzsaw guitars and feedback.

 The album went on to receive critical acclaim, and is very influential in the Alternative Rock scene, especially in the development of the Shoegaze genre.



Sorry about the sporadatic posting, but mad busy with work and family stuff the now, but seeing as the match is the night, I'll try to catch up with these three over the weekend.

PatReilly wrote:

Hounds of Love: I think the tracks get less memorable on the first side of the album as it progresses. That Cloudbursting (last track side one): suddenly, after all these years, I've realised that it was sampled by the Utah Saints for their 'Something Good' single. Call me stupid, how had I not realised this before........?

See, this site and particularly this big long thread can be an education.

Side Two is full of moody stuff, for me: I reckon there will be situations in which you'll enjoy The Ninth Wave more some days than others, or even on particular times of day. The percussion captures me quite a bit on this side, and the repetitiveness of the musical tracks behind the signing.

The music is beyond categorisation. Clever lassie.

 

Always been a bit of a Bush fan.  An artist that does things on her own terms.  I think she's the English female equivalent to Bowie, just wish she'd been as prolific as him.  Perhaps there is an element of inequality in the music industry as women generally don't have the longevity of career that the blokes do.  

Last edited by Finn Seemann (08/11/2019 10:41 am)

Just a quick post, due to work commitments and working oot the toon, I wont be able to post up any music slavers 'til after Christmas, also where I'm working the signal is very ropey, so all in all best to knock on the head for a few weeks.



 

Chanter - take care bud.  This thread is not just unique but legendary.  I skipped teks security just to post on this thread.  Moved to Hong Kong for work - its a riot so can i review the best album ever?  JAMC - EKs finest.

Take it easy Mr Chanter

My favourite thread in the history of the internet.  Come back in the New Year refreshed and ready to go.  I'm looking forward to it already.  In the meantime, maybe a separate thread on our favourite albums and why?  Not one to take over this thread but I'm sure that the official book will have missed albums that we all think are important for our own reasons.  Going to start it and then take a few days to think which I would add!

Fucked up twice after 2 hours of writing, going to bed fuck it

PatReilly wrote:

arabchanter wrote:

Fucked up twice after 2 hours of writing, going to bed fuck it

Nonetheless, good to see you back arabchanter. 

Don't you write it up first on a word document or similar, rather than directly to the site?

Take care!
 

Thanks Pat, no I don't pre-write anything, as most people will have noticed I just write shit that comes into my head as I'm going along without any prep, although where I always come a cropper is opening tabs and bookmarks with my bits & bobs in them and losing all my previous work


Will try to do it without fucking up later tonight!
 

Tek wrote:

arabchanter wrote:

PatReilly wrote:

Nonetheless, good to see you back arabchanter. 

Don't you write it up first on a word document or similar, rather than directly to the site?

Take care!
 

Thanks Pat, no I don't pre-write anything, as most people will have noticed I just write shit that comes into my head as I'm going along without any prep, although where I always come a cropper is opening tabs and bookmarks with my bits & bobs in them and losing all my previous work


Will try to do it without fucking up later tonight!
 

I'm the same Mr C (with the music comps). Write it all up then and there and the amount of times my laptop has either crashed or as i press 'submit' the sites server goes down or some such thing. Well....let's just say it's been more than once and every single time is a mini tragedy 😢.

The Cat walking across the laptop and clicking stuff off is another one.

P.s. good to see you back on here btw 🖒
 

Can't explain the feeling when you've just lost a lot of work and yer pressing every button under the sun and praying to any cunt that will listen to try and get it back, but deep down, you ken yer fucked...............horrible.
 

"Meat is Murder"

Cassius Clay's deid? Forgot that one, this page IS an education.

And also, I didn't realise that The Smiths' singles weren't big chart toppers, just assumed they were as my interest in that type of feat waned over the years.

Generally, I never found The Smiths to be gloomy, I always thought they were trying to be humorous with many of the song lyrics and titles.

This, like the other studio albums by the band, will always be welcome on my playlists.

Album 559.
Tom Waits........................Rain Dogs   (1985)











Will make this bit quick, having gave my opinion on Tom Waits in three previous albums, all I can say is this an absolute belter,he serves a buffet of musical genres without being slapdash, maybe not so much lyrically incise more surreal with what could be considered cobbled together verses, but let me tell you my friends the more spins the more you get it.


For me this album is a smorgasbord of delights that even the most picky listener would find difficult not to have their auditory senses titillated, I enjoyed all the tracks and as such this album will be replacing "Nighthawks At The Diner" a great album but this one in my humbles beats it by a considerable length, though I might be greedy and buy both.


Do yourself a favour and open your ears to this classic.




Bits & Bobs;

Have written about Tom Waits previously in posts #1230, #1708 and #1899 (if interested)




Rolling Stone      November 21, 1985 5:00AM ET
Rain DogsBy Anthony DeCurtis



Tom Waits biggest problem has always been a tendency to romanticize the abyss. His claustrophobic night world — peopled with crusty old salts, whores with hearts of gold and three-time losers — is all margins and no center, a sentimental never land where grotesqueness isn’t merely accepted — it’s a badge of authenticity and hipness.Predictably, Rain Dogs, Waits’ first LP since 1983’s Swordfish trombones, indulges these flaws too generously. Dramatic bohemian rhapsodies on insanity, deformity, night, rain and irretrievable loss crop up here frequently enough to satisfy even the most demanding middle-class seeker of the edge.

 A handful of tracks emerge, however, from this nineteen-song, fifty-minute-plus mélange (sprawl being one of the perils of self-production) to take a place among the best work Waits has done. Prominent among these are the plaintive, accordion-tinged ballad “Time”; the nursery-rhyme-like Dr. John homage “Clap Hands”; “Downtown Train,” featuring G.E. Smith’s lovely, lyrical guitar; “Union Square,” where Keith Richards’ energetic rocking rescues Waits’ bluesy affectations; and the countryish “Blind Love,” which teams Keef (who also contributes some wailing background vocals straight out of the Appalachians) on guitar with Robert Quine.


When you add to these the touching “Hang Down Your Head” (cowritten by Waits’ Jersey-girl wife, Kathleen Brennan) and the straight, spare blues of “Gun Street Girl,” you have the core of what could have been the most consistent and wide-ranging record Waits ever made. But Rain Dogs insists on nosing its way around the barrooms and back alleys Waits has so often visited before. Until Waits can leash that impulse more successfully, he’ll have to be content to remain on the margins with his subjects.


 Masterpiece Reviews: Tom Waits – “Rain Dogs”You'll want to make yourself a drink before turning on this classic album


In 1984, following the release of his seventh studio album Swordfishtrombones, Tom Waits holed himself up in lower Manhattan for two months to write Rain Dogs. A fusion of rock, blues, and jazz, the album has been described as a story of “the urban dispossessed” with songs like “Clap Hands”, “Singapore”, and “Union Square” which features Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. Part of a trilogy that also includes Swordfish and 1987’s Franks Wild Years, it’s considered not just one of Waits’ greatest works, but one of the best in music history.



TOM WAITS // RAIN DOGS (1985)
 [img]https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_fit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto,w_728/v1555912878/shape/mentalfloss/tomwaitsraindogs.jpg[/img]Photo credit: Anders Petersen

 In the late ’60s, Swede Anders Petersen spent three years photographing regulars at Café Lehmitz, a bar in Hamburg, Germany, that was frequented by prostitutes, drug addicts, and working-class locals. It’s easy to see a similarity between those outsiders and the ones described in Tom Waits’s music. Waits selected an image from Petersen’s book Café Lehmitz as the cover of his Rain Dogs. “I said yes when the record company asked, because I like Tom's music,” Petersen told The Guardian. The woman was a charismatic regular named Lilly and the bare-chested man is Rose, one of her many suitors.



Singapore



Tom Waits: “Sometimes I close my eyes real hard and I see a picture of what I want, the song. ‘Singapore’ started like that, Richard Burton with a bottle of festival brandy preparing to go on board ship. I tried to make my voice like his – "In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king” – I took that from Orwell I think. NME – Which book? TW – Mary Poppins, one of the big ones."

 Source: “Hard Rain”. New Musical Express: Gavin Martin. October 19 1985.


Tom Waits: “Nowadays, if you want a certain sound you don’t have to get it now, you can get it later. When you’re mixing, electronically. I wanted to get it now, so I felt I cooked it and I ate it. You can establish percussion sounds later electronically. But I ended up banging on things so I felt that it really responded. If I couldn’t get the right sound out of the drum set we’d get a chest of drawers in the bathroom and hit it real hard with a two-by-four. Things like that. That’s on "Singapore”. Those little things made me feel more involved that sampling on a synthesizer."

 Source: “Tom Waits for no man”. Spin Magazine: Glenn O'Brien. November 1985.



Tom Waits: “Singapore is kind of like Dick Burton in Taiwan and he can’t get a drink.”

 Source: “Rain Dogs Island Promo Tape” (taped comments on songs as sent to radio stations). Date: late 1985.




Tom Waits: “Ehm… I was thinking about what would happen if Richard Burton got stranded in Hong Kong somewhere or… y'know. He’s this burly English with… y'know? You know a sheet mantras of… somewhere in eh…somewhere off. y'know? Taiwan or Guam, Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai eh Philippines, somewhere over there y'know? So I tried to imagine what would be going through eh… Make it like a Richard Burton number.”

 Source: “Nightlines Interview” Nightlines on CBC Stereo (Canada) conducted by Michael Tearson. Date: New York. Late 1985.




Tom Waits: “It’s an adventure song. I like adventure songs and I always remembered that in the studio the drum sound that we used was a two by four attacking somebody’s chest of drawers and the whole song played and all the backbeats were played with a two by four hitting the chest of drawers repeatedly and on the last bar of the song the whole piece of furniture had collapsed and there was nothing left of it and the song was over but it was just a – That’s what I think of when I hear the song. I see the pile of wood and it excites me. Michael Blair was the percussionist. It wasn’t a very expensive chest of drawers – it was just one that we’d found out on the sidewalk.”

 Source: “KCRW-FM: Morning Becomes Eclectic (interviewed by Chris Douridas).” Date: March 31, 1998)



Cemetery Polka



Tom Waits: “Cemetery Polka – someone once said that the living are just the dead out on holidays and this is as if all your dead relatives came back from the grave and you owed them all money.”

 Source: “Rain Dogs Island Promo Tape” (taped comments on songs as sent to radio stations). Date: late 1985.




Tom Waits: “I want to do something about all my relatives – everybody’s relatives – actually, on my mother’s side we have all the professors and the attorneys and on my dad’s side we have all the psychopaths and the alcoholics. This is kind of a family reunion right in here, it’s the only time they’ve ever really spoken to each other”




Tom Waits: “Cemetery Polka” is a family album, a lot of my relatives are farmers, they’re eccentric, aren’t everyone’s relatives? Maybe it was stupid to put them on the album because now I get irate calls saying, Tom how can you talk about your Aunt Maime and your Uncle Biltmore like that? But Mum, I say, they did make a million during World War Two and you’ll never see any of it. It’s time someone exposed them."

 Source: “Hard Rain”. New Musical Express: Gavin Martin. October 19, 1985.




Tom Waits: “Never talk about your family in public! That’s… I learned my lesson, but I keep putting my foot in my mouth. And eh I’m gonna get calls from my auntie Mame. I gonna get calls from… uncle Biltmore, eh uncle William, uncle Vernon. All of them and eh… You know: "Your uncle Phil” y'know. It always happens, so… “Uncle Phil can’t live without his pills/ He has emphysema and he’s almost blind/ And we must find out where the money is/ Get it now before he loses his mind”. That’s something I heard from the dining room eh during a family reunion and I never forgot it…

 Source: “Nightlines Interview” Nightlines on CBC Stereo (Canada) conducted by Michael Tearson. Date: New York. Late 1985.




Tom Waits: “This is dedicated to all my dead relatives – who are still arguing from the grave with each other. On my father’s side we had all the psychopaths and alcoholics and on my mother’s side we had all the evangelists so they were finally united at the grave – this is a little family tree really.”

 Source: “WXRT-FM Radio Interview” Date: Chicago. July 11, 1986.




Tom Waits: “But that "Cemetery Polka” was ah, discussing my family in a way that’s difficult for me to be honest. The way we talk behind each other’s backs: “You know what happened to Uncle Vernon.” The kind of wickedness that nobody outside your family could say. That kind of stuff."

 Source: “Tom Waits Is Flying Upside Down (On Purpose)” Musician magazine (USA), by Mark Rowland. Date: Traveler’s Cafe/ Los Angeles. October, 1987.



Jockey Full of Bourbon


This song tells the story of a guy whose making a lot of bad decisions while drunk late at night.


 The refrain of this song is adapted from a nursery rhyme called "Ladybug! Ladybug!": "Ladybug! Ladybug! Fly away home Your house is on fire And your children all gone All except one, And that's Ann, For she has crept under The frying pan."


 
The chorus of "Jockey Full of Bourbon" strongly connects to the album's core themes of wandering and being lost with the line "Your house is on fire."


 
"Jockey" is American slang for a cab or bus driver - in this case one that is inebriated.


 
In the first verse, "Dutch Pink" is slang for blood.


 
Tom Waits starred in a 1986 movie called Down By Law in which he plays a disc jockey who ends up in jail with Roberto Begnini of Life Is Beautiful fame. This song opens the movie.



Big Black Mariah
Tom Waits himself said about this song:

 A Mariah is – originally it was the woman that ran some kind of a cathouse in New Orleans I guess and every time it got popped they figured she was the one that blew the whistle so the paddy wagon pulled up out in front and down through the years they started referring to it as the Black Mariah. Now it’s the hearse or whatever.
 So he’s likely talking about a hearse carrying a body.

 Alternatively he could be talking about a police van coming to get or already carrying a prisoner:

 Black Maria, a slang term for a police van used to transport prisoners, originally these were horse drawn and so could take some time to arrive at a crime scene. “Black Maria” was a famous racehorse of the day, born in Harlem USA in 1826. The name was sardonically applied to the police carriages (which were also usually coloured black).



Time
 
"Time: time is a precious commodity," Tom Waits said on the introduction to this song on the Rain Dogs Island Records promo tape. That sums up the essence of the story here.


Each verse of "Time" deals with a street character and the hardships they're facing. It's followed by the chorus, which repeats the word "time" over and over but is just saying "it's time that you love." This line can have multiple meanings. The obvious assumption is that it means "it's time that you find someone to have a romantic relationship with." However, the song and the turn of phrase are ambiguous enough that it could also mean "you love time itself," or simply that "you love" in the broader spiritual sense of loving life broadly.


 
The third line places the character in East St. Louis. St Louis is also mentioned in Waits' "Train Song," "I Beg Your Pardon," and "Hold On."


East St. Louis is generally a rough place with a lot of crime. Tom Waits Fan suggests that East St. Louis may be "a Waitsian metaphor for being in the worst part possible of any town."


Waits has said he has no particular reason for using St. Louis. He told Jonathan Valania of The Magnet in 1999, "No, never lived there. It's a good name to stick in a song. Every song needs to be anatomically correct: You need weather, you need the name of the town, something to eat - every song needs certain ingredients to be balanced. You're writing a song and you need a town, and you look out the window and you see 'St. Louis Cardinals' on some kid's T-shirt. And you say, 'Oh, we'll use that.'"


 
The term "smart money" generally just means a safe bet or good investment.


"When they're on a roll" probably has a double-meaning, considering it's followed by the line "she pulls a razor from her boot." To be "on a roll" means to have a lucky streak, but "to roll" someone can also mean beating them down and taking their money.


"And pay the fiddler off" refers to the Middle Age legends of the Pied Piper of Hameln, who rid the town of Hameln of a rat infestation. The mayor refused to pay the piper, so he then used his mystical musical ways to draw all the children off with him, just as he'd done with the rats. In some versions of the tale he killed the kids, in others he returns them upon receiving payment.



Rain Dogs

The phrase "rain dogs" in this song refers to a habit dogs have of leaving home, then getting lost when it rains, because the rain has washed away the markers they have left to guide them. 


 
According to 1985 interviews, Tom saw the phrase "Rain Dogs" as metaphor for lost human beings, people in pain with no sense of direction. People who sleep in doorways, people who don't have a social or physical place to belong.


 
"The Rose of Tralee" mentioned in the lyric refers to an 19th century Irish ballad about a girl named "Mary, the Rose of Tralee."


 
This song is referenced in the lyrics of the Bush song Everything Zen.



9th & Hennepin

In a 1985 interview with Spin magazine, Tom states that the imagery found in this song is drawn mostly from his observations of New York, though the actual named location - Ninth Street and Hennepin Avenue - is in Minneapolis. The location "Ninth and Hennepin" understandably stuck with Waits because he was in an all-night donut shop when he was caught in the middle of a pimp war that involved live ammunition firing into his booth. Tom alludes to this with the line, "All the donuts have names like prostitutes."


 
In support of the album's lyrical themes, "Ninth and Hennepin" is presented as a place of transition, not a home or a destination of any kind. The lyric says of the song's characters: "They all started out with bad directions." The broken umbrellas symbolize failed attempts at shelter by the corner's inhabitants.


 
More symbols of travel and rootlessness found in this lyric: the smell of diesel, horses, the evening train, being lost.


 
The line, "Till you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin," is referenced in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
A spoken word track off Waits' 80’s classic Rain Dogs. While this song’s titular location is in Minneapolis, Tom Waits has explained:
 Most of the imagery is from New York. It’s just that I was on 9th and Hennepin years ago in the middle of a pimp war, and 9th and Hennepin always stuck in my mind. “There’s trouble at 9th and Hennepin.” To this day I’m sure there continues to be trouble at 9th and Hennepin. At this donut shop. They were playing “Our Day Will Come” by Dinah Washington when these three 12-year-old pimps came in in chinchilla coats armed with knives and, uh, forks and spoons and ladles and they started throwing them out in the streets. Which was answered by live ammunition over their heads into our booth. And I knew “Our Day Was Here.” I remember the names of all the donuts: cherry twist, lime rickey. But mostly I was thinking of the guy going back to Philadelphia from Manhattan on the Metroliner with The New York Times, looking out the window in New York as he pulls out of the station, imagining all the terrible things he doesn’t have to be a part of.

Gun Street Girl
Tom Waits on the Rain Dogs Island Promo Tape, 1985:


"Gun Street Girl is about a guy who’s having trouble with the law and he traces all of these events back to this girl he met on Gun Street right there on Centre Market right in Little Italy there."

 Tom Waits in a CBC Nightlines interview, 1985:


"I tried to make it a tale in a tale, y'know? Where is the end of this tale? Y'know? There’s: “Telling everyone they saw the went thataway”. There’s this girl tied to a tree with a skinny millionaire and a guy coming into Baker with a pistol and a… So I just tried to throw it all in there and make it like eh… “What the hell’s going on around here?!” Y'know? It’s like when you wake up in the middle of the night and you try to remember something that you don’t, you remember just pieces of things? Y'know?"



Walking Spanish


The expression of “walking Spanish” is bestowed upon condemned prisoners who are taking their final steps to their execution. The narrator of the song weighs up all the hard-bitten perceptions of a man going to the electric chair.



Downtown Train

 Tom Waits' “Downtown Train” became a Grammy-winning #3 hit for Rod Stewart in 1989, and has also been covered by the likes of Mary Chapin Carpenter, Bob Seger and Everything But The Girl.

 The Jean-Baptiste Mondino directed video for the song features former World Middleweight Champion Jake LaMotta, who was famously portrayed by Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull.



Anywhere I Lay My Head
 
Even by Tom Waits standards, this is a rather rough-hewn song with a yearning lyric about a man who has seen better days: wherever he lays his head is where he calls home. After about two minutes of misery, the song switches gears as a jaunty brass band plays.


 
The actress Scarlett Johansson recorded this song as the title track to her 2008 album, which was produced by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek; they cut the album over a period of five weeks. The set contains 10 Tom Waits covers along with one original Johansson/Sitek composition: "Song For Jo." The Waits covers bear little resemblance to the originals, apart from the lyrics.


David Bowie contributed vocals to "Falling Down" and "Fannin Street" on the album. He noted on his official site BowieNet: "The songs are great, really good Tom Waits stuff, and Scarlett's performances are mystical and twice cool. She creates a mood that could have been summoned by someone like (experimental American author) Margery Latimer or (British novelist) Jeanette Winterson."


 
Tom Waits' wife rang up Scarlett Johansson to say her husband liked the album of his covers. The actress told the New Musical Express, "I could hear him grumbling in the background."


This song is the perfect ending to the album Rain Dogs. It is a jazzy send off with a very strong vocal performance that serves as a warm goodbye to a very intense album




Tom Waits writes about his 20 most cherished albums of all time. So for the lowdown on Zappa and Bill Hicks, step right up...

Tom Waits   Sun 20 Mar 2005 10.38 GMT




 1 In The Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra (Capitol) 1955

 Actually, the very first 'concept' album. The idea being you put this record on after dinner and by the last song you are exactly where you want to be. Sinatra said that he's certain most baby boomers were conceived with this as the soundtrack.


 2 Solo Monk by Thelonious Monk (Columbia) 1964  (just nooooooooooooooo!!!)
 Monk said 'There is no wrong note, it has to do with how you resolve it'. He almost sounded like a kid taking piano lessons. I could relate to that when I first started playing the piano, because he was decomposing the music while he was playing it. It was like demystifying the sound, because there is a certain veneer to jazz and to any music, after a while it gets traffic rules, and the music takes a backseat to the rules. It's like aerial photography, telling you that this is how we do it. That happens in folk music too. Try playing with a bluegrass group and introducing new ideas. Forget about it. They look at you like you're a communist. On Solo Monk, he appears to be composing as he plays, extending intervals, voicing chords with impossible clusters of notes. 'I Should Care' kills me, a communion wine with a twist. Stride, church, jump rope, Bartok, melodies scratched into the plaster with a knife. A bold iconoclast. Solo Monk lets you not only see these melodies without clothes, but without skin. This is astronaut music from Bedlam.

  3 Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart (Straight) 1969

 The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that'll never be beat, it's a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.


 4 Exile On Main St. by Rolling Stones (Rolling Stones Records) 1972

 'I Just Want To See His Face' - that song had a big impact on me, particularly learning how to sing in that high falsetto, the way Jagger does. When he sings like a girl, I go crazy. I said, 'I've got to learn how to do that.' I couldn't really do it until I stopped smoking. That's when it started getting easier to do. [Waits's own] 'Shore Leave' has that, 'All Stripped Down', 'Temptation'. Nobody does it like Mick Jagger; nobody does it like Prince. But this is just a tree of life. This record is the watering hole. Keith Richards plays his ass off. This has the Checkerboard Lounge all over it.


 5 The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars (Point Music) 1975

 This is difficult to find, have you heard this? It's a musical impression of the sinking of the Titanic. You hear a small chamber orchestra playing in the background, and then slowly it starts to go under water, while they play. It also has 'Jesus Blood' on it. I did a version of that with Gavin Bryars. I first heard it on my wife's birthday, at about two in the morning in the kitchen, and I taped it. For a long time I just had a little crummy cassette of this song, didn't know where it came from, it was on one of those Pacifica radio stations where you can play anything you want. This is really an interesting evening's music.


 6 The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan (Columbia) 1975

 With Dylan, so much has been said about him, it's difficult so say anything about him that hasn't already been said, and say it better. Suffice it to say Dylan is a planet to be explored. For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter. I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in - so the bootlegs I obtained in the Sixties and Seventies, where the noise and grit of the tapes became inseparable from the music, are essential to me. His journey as a songwriter is the stuff of myth, because he lives within the ether of the songs. Hail, hail The Basement Tapes. I heard most of these songs on bootlegs first. There is a joy and an abandon to this record; it's also a history lesson.


 7 Lounge Lizards by Lounge Lizards (EG) 1980

 They used to accuse John Lurie of doing fake jazz - a lot of posture, a lot of volume. When I first heard it, it was so loud, I wanted to go outside and listen through the door, and it was jazz. And that was an unusual thing, in New York, to go to a club and hear jazz that loud, at the same volume people were listening to punk rock. Get the first record, The Lounge Lizards. You know, John's one of those people, if you walk into a field with him, he'll pick up an old pipe and start to play it, and get a really good sound out of it. He's very musical, works with the best musicians, but never go fishing with him. He's a great arranger and composer with an odd sense of humour.


 8 Rum Sodomy and the Lash by The Pogues (Stiff) 1985

 Sometimes when things are real flat, you want to hear something flat, other times you just want to project onto it, something more like.... you might want to hear the Pogues. Because they love the West. They love all those old movies. The thing about Ireland, the idea that you can get into a car and point it towards California and drive it for the next five days is like Euphoria, because in Ireland you just keep going around in circles, those tiny little roads. 'Dirty Old Town', 'The Old Main Drag'. Shane has the gift. I believe him. He knows how to tell a story. They are a roaring, stumbling band. These are the dead end kids for real. Shane's voice conveys so much. They play like soldiers on leave. The songs are epic. It's whimsical and blasphemous, seasick and sacrilegious, wear it out and then get another one.


 9 I'm Your Man by Leonard Cohen (Columbia) 1988

 Euro, klezmer, chansons, apocalyptic, revelations, with that mellifluous voice. A shipwrecked Aznovar, washed up on shore. Important songs, meditative, authoritative, and Leonard is a poet, an Extra Large one.


 10 The Specialty Sessions by Little Richard (Specialty Records) 1989

 The steam and chug of 'Lucille' alone pointed a finger that showed the way. The equipment wasn't meant to be treated this way. The needle is still in the red.


 11 Startime by James Brown (Polydor) 1991

 I first saw James Brown in 1962 at an outdoor theatre in San Diego and it was indescribable... it was like putting a finger in a light socket. He did the whole thing with the cape. He did 'Please Please Please'. It was such a spectacle. It had all the pageantry of the Catholic Church. It was really like seeing mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Christmas and you couldn't ignore the impact of it in your life. You'd been changed, your life is changed now. And everybody wanted to step down, step forward, take communion, take sacrament, they wanted to get close to the stage and be anointed with his sweat, his cold sweat


.12 Bohemian-Moravian Bands by Texas-Czech (Folk Lyric) 1993

 I love these Czech-Bavarian bands that landed in Texas of all places. The seminal river for mariachi came from that migration to that part of the United States, bringing the accordion over, just like the drum and fife music of post slavery, they picked up the revolutionary war instruments and played blues on them. This music is both sour and bitter, and picante, and floating above itself like steam over the kettle. There's a piece called the 'Circling Pigeons Waltz', it's the most beautiful thing - kind of sour, like a wheel about to go off the road all the time. It's the most lilting little waltz. It's accordion, soprano sax, clarinet, bass, banjo and percussion.


 13 The Yellow Shark by Frank Zappa (Barking Pumpkin) 1993

 It is his last major work. The ensemble is awe-inspiring. It is a rich pageant of texture in colour. It's the clarity of his perfect madness, and mastery. Frank governs with Elmore James on his left and Stravinsky on his right. Frank reigns and rules with the strangest tools.


 14 Passion for Opera Aria (EMI Classics) 1994

 I heard 'Nessun Dorma' in the kitchen at Coppola's with Raul Julia one night, and it changed my life, that particular Aria. I had never heard it. He asked me if I had ever heard it, and I said no, and he was like, as if I said I've never had spaghetti and meatballs - 'Oh My God, Oh My God!' - and he grabbed me and he brought me into the jukebox (there was a jukebox in the kitchen) and he put that on and he just kind of left me there. It was like giving a cigar to a five-year old. I turned blue, and I cried.


 15 Rant in E Minor by Bill Hicks (Rykodisc) 1997

 Bill Hicks, blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around. Pay attention to Rant in E Minor, it is a major work, as important as Lenny Bruce's. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he built. Long may his records rant even though he can't.


 16 Prison Songs: Murderous Home Alan Lomax Collection (Rounder Select) 1997

 Without spirituals and the Baptist Church and the whole African-American experience in this country, I don't know what we would consider music, I don't know what we'd all be drinking from. It's in the water. The impact the whole black experience continues to have on all musicians is immeasurable. Lomax recorded everything, from the sounds of the junkyard to the sound of a cash register in the market... disappearing machinery that we would no longer be hearing. You know, one thing that doesn't change is the sound of kids getting out of school. Record that in 1921, record that now, it's the same sound. The good thing about these is that they're so raw, they're recorded so raw, that it's just like listening to a landscape. It's like listening to a big open field. You hear other things in the background. You hear people talking while they are singing. It's the hair in the gate.


 17 Cubanos Postizos by Marc Ribot (Atlantic) 1998

 This Atlantic recording shows off one of many of Ribot's incarnations as a prosthetic Cuban. They are hot and Marc dazzles us with his bottomless soul. Shaking and burning like a native.


 18 Houndog by Houndog (Sony) 1999

 Houndog, the David Hidalgo [Los Lobos] record he did with Mike Halby [Canned Heat]. Now that's a good record to listen to when you drive through Texas. I can't get enough of that. Anything by Latin Playboys, anything by Los Lobos. They are like a fountain. The Colossal Head album killed me. Those guys are so wild, and they've gotten so cubist. They've become like Picasso. They've gone from being purely ethnic and classical, to this strange, indescribable item that they are now. They're worthwhile to listen to under any circumstances. But the sound he got on Houndog, on the electric violin ... the whole record is a dusty road. Dark and burnished and mostly unfurnished. Superb texture and reverb. Lo fi and its highest level. Songs of depth and atmosphere. It ain't nothin' but a...


 19 Purple Onion by Les Claypool (Prawn Song) 2002

 Les Claypool's sharp and imaginative, contemporary ironic humour and lightning musicianship makes me think of Frank Zappa. 'Dee's Diner' is like a great song your kid makes up in the car on the way to the drive-in. Songs for big kids.


 20 The Delivery Man by Elvis Costello (Mercury) 2004

 Scalding hot bedlam, monkey to man needle time. I'd hate to be balled out by him, I'd quit first. Grooves wide enough to put your foot in and the bass player is a gorilla of groove. Pete Thomas, still one of the best rock drummers alive. Diatribes and rants with steam and funk. It has locomotion and heat. Steam heat, that is.
Might check some of these out at a later date.

My favourite track from the album
 

Last edited by arabchanter (21/1/2020 10:38 am)

PatReilly wrote:

arabchanter wrote:

Just a quick post, due to work commitments and working oot the toon, I wont be able to post up any music slavers 'til after Christmas, also where I'm working the signal is very ropey, so all in all best to knock on the head for a few weeks.

 

arabchanter, take it easy when you can, man! Hope the work isn't too hectic and you can enjoy some of the lead up to the festive period.

Remiss of me not replying to a few posts from earlier, thanks fo your message Pat, always goods to hear from you, you've been a constant from day one, and can't stress how much I appreciate your feedback thank you 
 

Tek wrote:

Take it easy Mr C and enjoy your well deserved break (from this collosal thread).

Looking forward to reading your Mary Chain review when you return.

Thank you Tek, but if it wasn't for your superb site I wouldn't be able to slaver my pish, so once again thank you