DAY 315.
Richard And Linda Thompson..............................I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight   (1974)









Husband and wife duos are not usually the stuff of rock 'n' roll legend, but Richard Thompson, the only known Muslim guitar hero, has never played the game by the book.


He quit Fairport Convention, the pioneering folk-rock band he had helped found in 1971; Glaswegian Linda Peters had helped out on backing vocals on his unsuccessful solo debut "Henry The Human Fly." This duo effort has become a perennial critic's favourite.
 

DAY 314.
Supertramp...................................Crime Of The Century   (1974}









I found this album to be very much of it's time, some half decent tracks, I enjoyed "School," "Dreamer" but my favourite was "Bloody Well Right" which is also their best ever track in my humbles.


The production was of the standard you come to expect from Ken Scott, and the band didn't go off on a tangent, which always goes down well in my book. Unfortunately the stream on you tube that I listened to/watched had some live performances, and the lead singer really needs to polish up the mirrors in his hoose, there has to be a cut off point for long hair, he looked like one o' thon shrunken pygmy heads that used freak me out at the museum, ken that withered wrinkled fisog wi lang hair, that look was well past it's sell by date.



Anyways this album wont be going in my collection as although some of the tracks were alright, there wasn't enough on there that appealed, and to be honest I found it didn't age well, quite like it's lead singer.



Bits & Bobs;


The group formed in London when Rick Davies broke up his band The Joint and placed an ad in a UK music paper looking for musicians to form a band. The group was financed by a Dutch millionaire named Sam Miesegaes, who put up the money after seeing Davies play in The Joint. Singing with A&M Records, they released their first (self-titled) album in 1970, and also played the Isle Of Wight Festival that year. Miesegaes pulled his financing in 1972, and the band settled on a new lineup, with just Davies and Roger Hodgson remaining as original members. Their third album, Crime of the Century, was a breakthrough, making #4 in the UK on the strength of hits "Dreamer" and "Bloody Well Right"


 


Roger explained: "In terms of Rick and I, we were very, very different as writers. I think it's good having another writer in the band, because then you have the friendly competition which helps bring out the best in each other, and I think that was the case with the two of us."


 
In 1979, Supertramp became one of the most successful bands in America, thanks to an album (Breakfast in America) that explored the country from the perspective of an Englishman. The band moved to California in the mid-'70s; Hodgson loved it and lived there permanently. Davies was less enthusiastic about California ("I don't think that's a place where anybody wants to settle down, not even Americans," he said), and moved to Long Island. Moving to America allowed them to keep a lot more of their income, as they would have been heavily taxed in England.


 
The band was originally called Daddy, but they changed it at the suggestion of their original guitarist Richard Palmer, who got the name from a 1910 book by the Welsh author W.H. Davies called The Autobiography of a Super Tramp.


 
There was a lot of personal tension between Davies and Hodgson, which came out in the open in a 1979 Melody Maker piece where they were both interviewed. "We've never been able to communicate too much on a verbal level," said Hodgson. "There's a very deep bond, but it's definitely mostly on a musical level."



Hodgson left the band in 1983 and released the solo albums In the Eye of the Storm (1984) and Hai Hai (1987). With two children, he spent much of the '90s focused on being a parent, and in 2010 he started touring again, happy to perform the hits he wrote with Supertramp. "I'm not one of the artists who has to say, Okay, you have to listen to my new stuff now," he told us. "I'm in the service industry, and my job is to give people the most in the two hours that I'm with them."

Supertramp began as the wish fulfillment of a millionaire rock fan. By the late 1970s, the group's blend of keyboard-heavy progressive rock and immaculate pop had yielded several hit singles and a few platinum LPs.

 In the late 1960s Dutch millionaire Stanley August Miesegaes heard Rick Davies in a band called the Joint. When that band broke up, Miesegaes offered to bankroll a band if Davies would handle the music. Davies placed classified ads in London newspapers for a band. The first response was from Roger Hodgson, who was to split songwriting and singing with Davies in Supertramp, the name they took from W.H. Davies' 1938 book, The Autobiography of a Supertramp. Drummer Bob Miller suffered a nervous breakdown after their first LP's release; he was replaced by Kevin Currie for the next, but like the first, it flopped.


 After a disastrous tour, the band (except Davies and Hodgson) broke up. Davies and Hodgson recruited Bob Benberg from pub rockers Bees Make Honey, and John Helliwell and Dougie Thomson from the Alan Bown Set, and A&M sent them to a rehearsal retreat at a seventeenth-century farm. Their next LP, Crime of the Century, was the subject of a massive advertising/promotional campaign, and went to #1 in the U.K. but didn't take off commercially in the U.S., though it did sow the seeds of a cult following.


 In 1975 the singles "Dreamer" and "Bloody Well Right" from Crime achieved some chart success in both the U.K. and the U.S. Supertramp toured the U.S. as a headliner, with A&M giving away most of the tickets. Crisis? failed to yield a hit single, but was heavily played on progressive FM radio and solidified the band's audience base, as did Even in the Quietest Moments (#16, 1977), which included "Give a Little Bit" (#15, 1977). Supertramp's breakthrough was Breakfast in America, a #1 worldwide LP, which eventually sold over 4 million copies in the U.S. and contained hit singles in "The Logical Song" (#6), "Goodbye Stranger" (#15), and "Take the Long Way Home" (#10). The Paris live double LP hit #8; and ". . . famous last words . . ." included another hit, "It's Raining Again" (#11, 1982). In early 1983 Hodgson announced he was leaving the group for a solo career. His first solo release, In the Eye of the Storm (#46, 1984), contained his only charting single to date, "Had a Dream (Sleeping With the Enemy)" (#48, 1984). His subsequent work was not as well received.



Remarkably, Hodgson has never appeared with Supertramp since he left in 1983. The band has continued on with Davies at the helm (he owns the name), but any attempt to reunite Hodgson, even for a one-off performance, has always failed.


In 2010, Supertramp played Hodgson's songs on their tour, which Roger said violated a verbal agreement he made when he left. Hodgson says that he offered to perform some shows on the tour, but was rebuffed.




"School"

 The opening track off 1974’s Crime of the Century has a claustrophobic feel related to how formal schooling can crush gentle spirits, destroy creativity and enforce conformity above all. The student learns but loses all traces of personality/individuality.

 This song is one of their more progressive rock/pop songs since it has no clear verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus structure.

 It is said that Pink Floyd’s influences can be heard on this album of Supertramp.
The theme of the song is similar to Pink Floyd’s "Another Brick In The Wall ll" which was released about 5 years later. However, the thematic of fitting in society or failing to was the central message of The Dark Side Of The Moon (especially on songs such as "Brain Damage"), released one year prior to this song.



"Bloody Well Right"



"Bloody Well Right" was Supertramp's first charting hit in the US, while it failed to chart in the UK. One theory on why the song didn't chart in their UK homeland has it that Brits were still offended by the adjective "bloody" in 1975. These days it is considered a mild expletive at best all around the world.



  Davies sings lead on this one. The song deals with youthful confusion, class warfare, and forced conformity in the British school system (kind of like Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall (part ll)") This anti-establishment take was a theme of the album.


 
The song has a unique structure, with a 51-second piano solo at the start that meanders around, playing the "Locomotive Breath" trick of starting out vaguely recognizable and giving people plenty of time to guess who and which song this is before the more familiar parts kick in. Then a grinding power guitar riff thunders by, making you think this is going to be heavy metal. Nope, guess again - the light piano and suddenly chipper lyrics on the chorus take us back to pop rock.

 
"Bloody Well Right" is actually an answer song to the previous song on the album, "School." Crime of the Century is a concept album that tells the story of Rudy. In "School," Rudy has lamented that the education system in England is teaching conformity above education (boy, Rudy, you should see America). In "Bloody Well Right" he joins a gang believing them to be the organized resistance that he longs for; instead, they're basically apathetic punks who mock him for his higher aspirations. It's not that Rudy's wrong, it's that Rudy is galvanized by something that is common knowledge to everyone else. Hello, Occupy Wall Street? We have your theme song!



"Hide In Your Shell"



This song is about someone who goes to great effort to conceal his pain from the world, which does nothing to ease his suffering. This keeps others from getting close to him, which isolates him further.




"Dreamer"

This song is about a guy with big dreams who is incapable of acting on them, so they never come true. As was custom with Supertramp, it was credited to their founding members Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson, who wrote separately but shared composer credits. "Dreamer" was written by Hodgson, who also sang lead. When we asked Roger in 2012 if he was a dreamer, he replied: "I am, and I definitely was even more back then. I was a teenager, I had many dreams. And I feel very blessed that a lot of them came true. But that song flew out of me one day. We had just bought our first Wurlitzer piano, and it was the first time I'd been alone with a Wurlitzer piano back down in my mother's house. I set it up and I was so excited that that song just flew out of me."e original demo for this song had the band banging cardboard boxes and electric fires and anything that clanged. Though there are some drums in the final mix, Supertramp wanted to duplicate the tempo of their demo, so there are also some cardboard boxes being struck somewhere in the mix.


 
After Roger Hodgson left Supertramp in 1983, the band didn't perform "Dreamer" live until their 2010 tour, where it was part of a three-song encore of cuts from Crime of the Century. Saxophonist John Helliwell explained in a 1988 interview.

"It became a big number on stage. I used to frolic around and stand on the piano and try to make Roger laugh while he was singing it. We don't do that anymore, 'cause it was so much Roger that we really couldn't do another version of that."


 
Roger Hodgson came up with this song at his mother's house, which is where he recorded the demo, using boxes and various household items for percussion. It wasn't until about five years later that he recorded the song with Supertramp, using that demo as a guide. They couldn't duplicate the demo exactly, but they came as close as they could.


 

 

I

 

DAY 315.
Richard And Linda Thompson..............................I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight   (1974)









The only thing I found appealing about this album was the cover, I really didn't enjoy listening to this one, it was to dirgey, melodramatic, and the wiblee woblee folksy vocals sealed it's fate for this listener.


The title track if pushed (and probably sedated) could be listened to again, but the rest was just maudling mush. this album wont be going into my collection, but I wouldn't mind the cover.




Bits & Bobs;


How's this for an earliest memory? Linda Thompson is walking to school for the very first time in Finsbury Park. It's 1952. She's four. She falls in with some bigger children also on their way to St Mary's.

 "Constantinople is a very long word," they say to her, solemnly. "How do you spell 'it'?" It's the oldest trick in the book of playground lore. Linda attempts to spell Constantinople. "I felt such a fool," she says happily.

 This seminal episode has stayed with her ever since. What does that fact tell her about herself? Perhaps it tells her that, almost from the beginning, she has known she is always game for a mugging?
 "Ooo-er," she says. "I've never thought of that before."

 She isn't a mug at all, and never has been. But she has been through the mill. You can tell that just from listening to her new album, Versatile Heart, which is the best work she's done in more than 30 years: a sad, funny, wise, wounded but redoubtable record of a lifetime's-worth of seeing things for what they really are; or at least trying to.
 Not that there's been that much work to speak of since the start of the 1980s, when she separated from her husband of 10 years, Richard Thompson, and then embarked on a tour behind the album they'd made documenting the breakdown of their relationship, Shoot Out the Lights. The tour – it became fondly known as "The Tour From Hell" – achieved cult notoriety for its singular mixture of brilliant music and on-stage contumely. Back-stage fittings, Richard's shins, many, many bottles of whatever came to hand – they all took a battering in the gale of Linda's distress. But why not? By then, she had already been struggling for nearly a decade with the effects of Spasmodic Dysphonia – a neurological throat condition which periodically robs her of her voice – and with the consequences of trying to be a good Sufi Muslim wife.




Richard Thompson reflects on his personal journey from the frontiers of English folk to the haven of Sufi Islam, the tempestuous years with his ex-wife, Linda, and how it feels to be rubbished in song by his children.

 Richard Thompson thinks of music as a spiritual act and as soon as he picks up a guitar you don't doubt him. There is a great deal more than flesh and blood and bone about his fingers. Thompson, always the dark horse in those Rolling Stone polls to determine the greatest guitarist of all time, who John Peel liked to call the "best-kept secret in the world of music", is one of the few artists who derives inspiration from both Sufi mysticism and the back catalogue of George Formby.


 At the dining room table in his pretty pink house in the hills above Santa Monica in Los Angeles, in trademark Che beret, he tells me how he has spent the past few months running through fantasy line-ups for the summer festival. Thompson will debut a piece he has written called Cabaret of Souls. "I'm trying to think of the least pretentious way of describing it," he says. "It's like a song cycle with string orchestra, not quite an oratorio, almost a musical play, it's not quite a lot of things.

 The theme for the cycle is a talent contest in purgatory; Dante meets Simon Cowell. "I suppose you could say it was a satirical piece," he says.

 Which particular circle of hell are the songs concerned with, I wonder – the medieval torments of cruise ship singers, the perpetual self-flagellation of singer-songwriters?

 He smiles. "Well, there's an art critic in there, of course, and various other quite despicable types..." Thompson will also do a version of the show he is currently touring with the veteran American songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, entitled Loud and Rich ("We are, sadly, neither"). And a "family version" of his "1,000 years of popular song" which will be "more kid-oriented in that we will leave out most of the swear words". All in all, he says, he hopes that the event will be "a bit of an ear-opener".


 The latter phrase would make a good introduction to Thompson's career. Over the years since he first came to prominence in the late 1960s as the intense young guitar genius in the archetypal British folk-rock band Fairport Convention, through his years singing emotion-racked ballads with his ex-wife Linda and into his eclectic solo career, Thompson has probably done as much to reinvigorate the canon of – mainly British – traditional music as any man living.


 He has sometimes, inevitably, been called the English Bob Dylan, but the comparison never went much further than an interest in the indigenous roots of song structures, an unruly tangle of hair and a surprising way with a phrase. As a You Tube clip of the pair playing on stage together for the only time – in Seville in 1992 – reveals, Thompson has little of Dylan's rasping ego. To his army of devotees (a following that numbers Elvis Costello, Michael Stipe and Billy Connolly), he is prized as much for his modesty as his musical dexterity.


 Looking back, I wonder, at his sometimes tortured career, does it feel a curse or blessing to have been a guitar-obsessed 17-year-old in the summer of love?

 "Oh, I think certainly a blessing," Thompson says with a quick grin. "Music was all so wide open. You could play anything. You could be Dr Strangely Strange and have a career. You could be Hapshash and the Coloured Coat and make a record. I mean, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown were almost mainstream. The range of musical styles at that moment was fantastic and possibly unprecedented. And the record industry had no clue what was good so anyone could make a record."


 Thompson latched on early to the idea that a guitar might be a good way of expressing himself. He grew up in Muswell Hill in north London, a conventional child of the suburban 50s. As a boy, he had a pronounced stutter, which still inflects his speaking voice a little now. His father was a stern man from Dumfries, a detective in the Metropolitan Police; the guitar was their little patch of common ground. Thompson's father was a jazz fan who had seen Django Reinhardt play in Glasgow in the 1930s. "He was a bad amateur player himself," Thompson recalls, "with three chords, though, unfortunately, not C, F and G", but his record collection, particularly Django's crackling genius, entranced Thompson.


 Having plucked at his father's Spanish guitar, he first asked his parents for an instrument of his own for Christmas when he was five – "By that point, I remember studying the adverts for guitars at the back of the Radio Times, next to those for greenhouses and porcelain figurines" – but he was eventually granted his request aged 10. The instrument quickly became the surrogate voice for a desperately shy boy who, his sister has suggested, had seemed up to then likely to be most happy in the company of tin soldiers and model train sets.


 Six years later, through a friend of a friend, Thompson was invited to play his guitar with a group of grammar school boys who were practising in the front room of a nice arts and crafts house up the road, called Fairport. "We used to spend half an hour playing and four hours thinking of a name," Thompson recalls. Portentous polysyllables were a must: Fairport Convention was born. Within three months, largely on the strength of Thompson's other-worldly solos, they had a record deal and a touring contract.


 Over the following three or four years, the band, which also came to include the fabulous singer Sandy Denny and the pact-with-the-devil fiddle player Dave Swarbrick, invented their own genre, moving away from American influences and attempting to reconnect with indigenous jigs and airs. "By the time we got to doing electric versions of traditional music, or writing new songs in a Scots-Irish-English-rooted way, then I was pretty much set in what I wanted to do," Thompson says.


 He remains devoted to the philosophy of that project, which has informed both his playing and his prodigious songwriting. "If you sing something where the roots go back 1,000 years, and the song still has resonance for you, it must mean it is saying something fundamentally true about the human condition," he suggests. "It's been tested and not found wanting. Sometimes, as a culture, we pay more attention to imported styles. That was certainly the case in the last century, starting with minstrel music and ragtime and then jazz. All the romance and the mythology was coming from overseas. We wondered if there might be a way of reversing that a bit..."


 Thompson was never a hippie. "I always thought it important to be counter to the counterculture," he says. It was said that what the Grateful Dead did for LSD,  Fairport Convention did for real ale.


 As a songwriter, Thompson has tended to explore the force of the statement that happiness is the least interesting of all human states. His doom-drenched epic "Meet on the Ledge", written in 1969, tended to set the tone not only of the decade's end but also of his subsequent writing (a darkness which seemed to deepen after he survived a car crash on the way home from a Fairport gig, in which his then girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn, and the band's drummer, Martin Lamble, were killed).


 "The accident probably made me grow up faster," he says. "I was 20. Just having to deal with death and losing friends was a difficult thing. But even before that I just put down what I felt." English teachers, he suggests, with a laugh, have a lot to answer for. "I mean, coming out of a sixth-form English class where you were reading Wilfred Owen of a morning – 'Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead...' – you learn pretty early on that beautiful tragedy is really where language and music comes alive. And who wants to be thought of as fluffy?"


 There is rarely a danger of the attribution of fluffiness to Thompson's songs, or to a singing voice that can still spit out a good deal of anger about subjects that include Blair and Bush's wars. "As a songwriter, I think what you are aiming for is slightly to discomfort the audience, to get just below the normal consciousness at the things that are not quite talked about. To the feelings that the audience doesn't know it has yet..."


 He has never required mind-altering substances to access those emotions. "In '67, we were an innocent band, having half a lager before we went on stage," he recalls. "By 1970, we were a two crates of Newcastle Brown kind of band. But then I stopped drinking in 1974. I saw a fork in the road and I thought, 'I'm not going down that one.'"


 The path he followed was certainly the one less travelled, at least by electric guitar heroes. He left Fairport and struck out on his own. There were one or two false starts. Thompson's first solo album, Henry the Human Fly, was not a commercial success. It was only when he joined forces with the singer Linda Peters, who became his wife, that Thompson began to develop the full range of his lyricism.



 Some of that insight derived from a newfound spiritual direction. Thompson was raised a Presbyterian and though that never made any sense to him it did not stop him, in the spirit of his times, looking for answers. "By the time I was 20, I had worked my way through Watkins bookshop in Cecil Court [in central London], from A is for anthroposophy to Z is for Zen. In all that, I thought the Sufis [the "mystical poets" of Islam] had the right balance and the right connection. And at exactly the moment I arrived at that thought I saw there was a Sufi meeting two minutes from our house in Hampstead, at a church hall in Belsize Park. So I went down there and I'm looking round this circle of invocation and I realised I knew four of them, all musicians I had done session work with. And then there were all these gorgeous women and great food. So it seemed right..."


 Thompson has never fully left that circle, "a branch of a Sufi group from Morocco, led by a famous old sheikh"; he subsequently spent a few sabbaticals in the Sahara "listening to the wisdom of old guys", which he brought home to Linda and his two children. Thompson's 1975 album Pour Down Like Silver features a photograph of him in a turban, his eyes alight with the zeal of the convert.


 Given what must have been a chaotic family life – he and Linda as young parents and on the road – I wonder if the five-times-a-day prayer regime offered him some structure and peace as much as anything?


 He thinks for a moment. "What it was really," he says, "I had been waiting as long as I could remember for an appropriate way to thank God. Simple as that. I wanted to say thanks for life and creation for being here and I didn't know how to do it. It sounds pretty basic but as I prayed for the first time, I felt an overwhelming sense that this was what I had needed: to put my head down on the ground and feel I had submitted to something greater than me."


 To stop searching for meaning?


 "To stop using my brain for thinking and to start using it for reflecting."


 Partly, Thompson was uncomfortable with the key relationship of his performing life: with his audience. "You get up on a stage and you are literally higher than the audience and it is a funny position. Some people deal with it by expanding their ego. But in the past, musicians had gone through the tradesman's entrance of the castle and got fed the scraps from the kitchen; it's only our culture that has elevated musicians to heights and I wasn't sure then, and I'm not sure now, that it's a healthy thing. I wanted to be a bit humbler about who I was."


 This recognition coincided in Thompson with the growing sense that his marriage was unravelling. The intimations of that breakdown seemed to be contained in the songs he wrote in 1980 for what became his final – and best – album with Linda, Shoot Out the Lights. By the time the album came out, Thompson had met his current wife (Nancy Covey) and Linda had given birth to their third child. Even though they were separating, Linda insisted on embarking on an infamous tour with her husband in which she sang songs that appeared to unpack his depression about their relationship. By some accounts, Linda would sometimes take out her rage with Richard on stage (it became known as the "kick in the shins" tour).


 Listening to some of that record now, lyrics like: "I hand you my ball and chain, you just hand me that same old refrain...", it seems an act of quite scary honesty, if not cruelty, a demonstration of the truism that a writer's first loyalty is to his art. Is that how he hears those songs?


 Thompson flinches a bit when I suggest this. "You don't know the context," he says. "You could say this was a divorce album, but the songs were written two years before that."


 But it was all there in them?


 "Maybe. Subconsciously. Sometimes songs I wrote for myself to sing, Linda ended up singing. Thing is, if I sing those songs now they don't take me back to that time. I sing those songs a lot, I've sung them 2,000 times. I think of other things..."


 In what might look a little like poetic justice, Thompson has recently been the subject of some of the songs of his musician children, Teddy and Kamila. He is not always shown in a favourable light...


 "There is a song of Teddy's about me being a rotten father, just like there are songs by Martha and Rufus Wainwright about Loudon Wainwright being a horrible dad. And the question you have to ask is: Is it a good, honest song? If it is, then fine. I've talked to Linda about this. At some point, the specific circumstances of its writing become diffuse and it stands on its own. That is what songs are – little capsules of emotion. Divorce was hard and horrible and gruesome on the kids."


 Not long afterwards, Thompson went to live with Nancy Covey in LA. The day after I visit, they are off to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary in Big Sur. Their son, a guitarist, is 18. Thompson never intended to come to America; he seemed so rooted, and not only musically, at home. But it has proved liberating for him.


 "To start with, I was trying to be near my kids if they wanted me. But to earn a living at that time, and to rebuild my life after the divorce, I had to work here..."


 In some respects, it is only in exile that Thompson has learned to inhabit his voice, at least as a singer. His range and power have evolved since he became a solo artist, though he still enjoys his collaborations, not least with the "old regiment" of Fairport Convention with whom he plays most years at Oxfordshire's Cropredy festival organised by the band's stalwart, Dave Pegg. Does he sometimes feel on those occasions that there was another life he left behind?


 "Not so much. But it's good to know people are constant in their music. I don't think Fairport could be accused of pursuing fame and wealth, but the drawback to longevity is that your audience ages with you and you have to be vigilant not to end up playing for blue rinses in Cromer Pavilion..."



 His Californian life has not made Thompson much sunnier, at least in his songs, though he seems very much at ease with himself in person. "There is an inner landscape you carry around with you and that's where your songs live. For me, it's 50s or 60s suburban Britain, I guess. And I very much keep in touch. I open my laptop and there is the Guardian on the home page. In my car I've got the World Service and Test Match Special..."


 Alongside these more prosaic reference points, Thompson keeps up his faith, though being a Muslim has become a different thing entirely in the last decade in America. Has he encountered prejudice or problems?



 "I suppose I keep my head down a bit more. It is important to assert your belief obviously. But this country has a lot of ignorant people in it."


 Alongside his trenchant anti-war song "Dad's Gonna Kill Me", he also wrote, in 2002, "Outside of the Inside", which dismantles the jihadi's view of western culture in a subverted Taliban voice: "God never listened to Charlie Parker/ Charlie Parker lived in vain/ Blasphemer, womaniser/ Let a needle numb his brain/ Wash away his monkey music/ Damn his demons, damn his pain."


 It sounded like a hard-headed attempt to reconcile his faith in music with his Sufi belief. What was the response?

 He smiles. "I don't think anyone noticed, really. That song is imagining what these extremists, this fringe of so-called Islam, were saying of western civilisation and it's me thinking, 'Well, I like western civilisation. Charlie Parker. Einstein. Shakespeare. Not all bad...'"


 Can the two traditions ever be compatible?


 "Well, they certainly used to be," he says. "I'm not a scholar, but Islam certainly teaches tolerance of Christians and Jews, people of the book."


 What about non-believers?


 "Non-believers, you leave them alone. It's not your business."


 Thompson reads the Qur'an and visits the mosque "whenever I think I should". He believes that "before life was something and after life is something. I certainly believe there is another stage after this. If you want to think of that pseudo-scientifically, you might think of another dimension..."


 Does he believe that music is a way of accessing such other dimensions, of glimpsing them in life?


 "Music is very elusive," he says. "It is so airy. It can lift your heart and take your imagination to extraordinary places. You think of someone like John Coltrane or Charlie Parker; they maybe weren't successful in their lives, but when they played music that was an incredible expression of their souls."


 Thompson then picks up his guitar and you could believe you hear exactly what he means.


 

DAY 317.
Queen..............................Sheer Heart Attack   (1974)










After flirtations with funk, opera, and electro, it is easy to forget that Queen were a fantastic hard rock band, as heavy as Sabbath, as dense as Zeppelin, and as clever as Cream.


Sheer Heart Attack was their breakthrough on both sides of the Atlantic, courtesy of guitarist Brian May's gothic rock and singer Freddie Mercury's flamboyant pop.


And Mick Rock's water-soaked sleeve shot?  "God, the agony we went through to have a picture taken, dear," Mercury told NME. "We're still as poncy as ever."

DAY 318.
10cc.....................................Sheet Music   (1974)










Following 10cc's debut album, Sheet Music took a big step toward the sound that would become the groups trademark. The record typifies the eclecticism and breathless invention that characterised 10cc's earlier work, soft and fuzzed art-rock guitars, seamless harmonies, elements of spoof and parody, and shifts between musical genres (often within the same song)


Part of the albums strength lies in the fact all four musicians, were also song writers and multi-instrumentalists, (indeed, Gouldman wrote a string of major hits in the sixties, including The Yardbirds "For Your Love" and The Hollies "Bus Stop")

In a word, Inventive.


Schoolboy trivia I recall, They got their name from producer Jonathan King, he is supposed to have been the inventor of the name 10CC, convinced as he was that an average ejaculation yields about 9 cc semen and therefore that 10 cc is an enviable quantity.   Two comments need to be made on this subject. One is that later King came back on his words and claimed the name 'had come to him in a dream' (can happen to any man of course), the other is that the '9 cc-story' is wrong from a biological viewpoint: the end shot of an average man - whoever he may be - actually can not be estimated very well; it varies from 0.1 cc to (yes!) 10 cc.
 

DAY 317.
Queen..............................Sheer Heart Attack   (1974)










It's funny how your taste can change over the years, I used to like all of this album, but now find it bit samey and grating to be honest, everything seems to be over embellished and overpolished in my humbles, and as for the constant high-pitched chorusing of  "Waaaaaaaaaaaahs" at the end of most verses, they left me somewhat irritated.


 I know your mood at the time of listening can effect what you think of an album, and to be fair I've had a "hoor" of a weekend and now paying the price but apart from "Now I'm Here" I can't say I enjoyed it much,"Killer Queen" was for me when they started selling out, as mentioned before I really liked their debut album, and will more than likely stick that in my collection.


This album wont be getting purchased.




Bits & Bobs;


Have posted before about Queen  (if interested)

Under intense pressure, and with one band member in his sickbed, Queen still managed to record the album that laid the foundation for all the success that followed: Sheer Heart Attack...
“Darling, he’s far too busy in the studio. That’s what happens when you get sick in Queen – you have to make the time up.”


 In the South London offices of his band’s PR company, a characteristically flamboyant Freddie Mercury is entertaining the press. It’s the autumn of 1974, and Queen have almost completed their third album, Sheer Heart Attack. Almost. For Mercury’s bandmate Brian May there’s still work to do. It’s just a few months since the guitarist was felled by a virulent bout of hepatitis mid-way through their debut US tour, and subsequently hospitalised for a second time with a stomach ulcer, forcing him to miss initial sessions for the album. May is currently holed up in the studio, finishing off his guitar parts, hence his absence today.


 It’s typical of Queen’s ferocious drive that they haven’t let a pair of potentially fatal medical conditions get in the way of the job in hand. Their first two albums – 1973’s Queen and follow-up Queen II, released earlier in 1974 – set them up as a unique proposition: one part Zeppelin-esque rockers, one part glam dandies, one part fantastical Aubrey Beardsley illustration made flesh. Their music, along with their billowing silk blouses and Mercury’s outrageous, 1,000-watt personality, has earned them as much scorn as admiration. Both responses have only fuelled their ambitions.


 But now those ambitions are coming into sharp focus. Like its predecessors, Sheer Heart Attack is the product of an intense work ethic that stems from a desire to be bigger, bolder and better than everyone else. It’s a watershed for the band: this album will lay the groundwork for future success. There are solid economic factors, too. The album needs to be a success to boost their ever-decreasing finances. Their management, Trident Productions, have put them on a wage that barely pays the bills, while seeking a return on their hefty investments in recording and studio costs. Combined with May’s illness, it’s fair to say, there’s a lot riding on it.


 “The whole group aimed for the top slot,” says Mercury. “We’re not going to be content with anything less. That’s what we’re striving for. It’s got to be there. I definitely know we’ve got it in the music, we’re original enough… and, now we’re proving it.”


 “I first met Queen in November 1973, when Mott The Hoople were rehearsing for their tour,” recalls Peter Hince, then a 19-year-old Mott roadie (and later one of the key members of Queen’s crew). “We were in Manticore Studios in Fulham, a converted cinema. It was freezing cold, everyone in scarves and coats. Then Queen came in in their dresses, their silks and satin. Even then, Fred was doing the whole thing, running up and down and doing his poses. My first thought was basically, ‘What a prat.’”



 It wasn’t an uncommon reaction. Formed from the ashes of May and drummer Roger Taylor’s old band Smile in late 1970, Queen initially struggled to make a name for themselves. When eventually they did, they found themselves polarising opinion. While they had their admirers, they had also inadvertently become whipping boys for some sections of the British music press.



 “We were just totally ignored for so long, and then completely slagged off by everyone,” Brian May acknowledged. “In a way, that was a very good start for us. There’s no kind of abuse that wasn’t thrown at us. It was only around the time of Sheer Heart Attack that it began to change. But we still got slagged off a fair bit even then.”



 The opprobrium heaped on them may have hurt them individually, but it only strengthened their collective resolve. Where their first album owed a noticeable debt to Led Zeppelin, the follow-up raised the bar immeasurably. Divided between ‘Side White’ and ‘Side Black’ to reflect what Mercury called “the battle between good and evil”, it brought both operatic bombast and ballet-pumped daintiness to their heavy rock thunder – often in the same song.


 “They planned everything in their heads,” says Gary Langan, then an assistant engineer at Sarm Studios in East London, who worked on two Sheer Heart Attack tracks. “Nothing was left to chance. That’s what separated them from other bands. You had to earn Freddie’s respect to get close to him. He used to scare the pants off me. The aura around that guy was astonishing.”


 Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara, to Indian Parsi parents, on the island of Zanzibar, just off the eastern coast of mainland Africa. His formative years were spent at boarding school near Bombay, where he learned to play music and formed his first band, the Hectics. In 1964, when he was 17, civil war broke out in Zanzibar and the Bulsara family fled the island to settle in the altogether less dangerous environs of Feltham, Middlesex.



 It was here, in the chrysalis of suburbia, that Farrokh Bulsara would ultimately transform himself into Freddie Mercury. The latter was an entirely self-created character, as camp and outrageous in public as he was shy and driven in private. By the time of Queen II, Farrokh Bulsara was a ghost known only to his family and closest friends; to everyone else he was Freddie Mercury.


 Advertisement Not that the rest of the band were content to exist in Mercury’s shadow. Three very distinct personalities, they each brought a different aspect to the band: May the studios intellectual, Taylor the louche rock’n’roller, Deacon the quiet man whose musical contribution would often be overlooked. It was a frequently combustible combination, albeit one with a shared vision.



“Do we row?” said Mercury in ’74. “Oh, my dear, we’re the bitchiest band on earth. We’re at each other’s throats. But if we didn’t disagree we’d just be ‘yes men’. And we do get the cream in the end.”



Fittingly, it would be Mott The Hoople who taught Queen how to be a rock’n’roll band. In October 1973, the foursome embarked on a 24-date UK tour with Ian Hunter’s survivors. Queen had released their debut album the previous July; the follow-up was already recorded, although it wouldn’t be released for another four months (a source of growing tension between band and management).


 The two bands couldn’t have been more different. Mott were veterans of the rock’n’roll wars: they’d had their ups and downs, and had even split up before David Bowie threw them a lifeline in the shape of All The Young Dudes. They’d been there, done that, and rolled their eyes in wry resignation at the thought of it all. By contrast, Queen were young, hungry and at least striving for something approaching glamour. The rocks thrown their way hadn’t dented their drive for success in the slightest.



 It quickly became apparent that Queen weren’t the usual makeweight support band. “They were quite pushy from day one,” says Peter Hince. “They demanded more space on stage, they were quite arrogant. They’d got this very clear idea of what they were going to do: ‘We’re gonna go for it.’ But you could see that they were already very good.”




For Queen, the tour was an invaluable lesson. They studiously watched the headliners. One of the songs in their own set was a prototype version of Stone Cold Crazy, a song that would later appear on Sheer Heart Attack.


 “On tour as support to Mott, I was conscious that we were in the presence of something great,” said Brian May. “Something highly evolved, close to the centre of the spirit of rock’n’roll, something to breathe in and learn from.”

 Typically, Freddie Mercury found playing second fiddle harder to swallow. “Being support is one of the most traumatic experiences of my life,” he would later pout.


 The Mott tour finished with two shows at Hammersmith Odeon on December 13 and 14, but there was no rest for Queen. The next day they kicked off their own short tour at Leicester University. Shortly afterwards they flew to Australia to play their first show outside Europe; less happily, it ended with the band getting booed off by the roughneck audience.



 By the time Queen II was released in March 1974, the band were finally matching their own self-belief. With a following wind behind them from the Top 10 success of Seven Seas Of Rhye, they kicked off their first proper UK headlining tour, starting in Blackpool, taking in such glamorous rock’n’roll destinations as Paignton, Canvey Island and Cromer, and peaking with a prestigious gig at London’s famed Rainbow Theatre. There was a riot at a show in Stirling, when 500 audience members refused to leave the venue after the final encore, forcing the band to barricade themselves in the dressing room (the next night’s show in Birmingham was cancelled when the band were detained for questioning by the disgruntled Stirling police force).


 For Freddie Mercury it was proof that Queen’s destiny was in their own hands. “You have to have confidence in this business,” said the singer. “It’s useless saying you don’t need it. If you start saying to yourself: ‘Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I’d better settle for second place,’ it’s no good. If you like the icing on the top, you’ve got to have confidence.”


 While Queen’s star was rising in the UK, America was another matter. Barely known beyond a few Anglophile hipsters, they would need to start from scratch to build up anything resembling a Stateside following. Handily, their friends in Mott The Hoople were there to help them out again.


 Advertisement “We went out on tour with them. They were very nice people,” says Mott’s Ian Hunter. “Very intelligent. So we said, ‘Okay, do you want to come to America as well?’”



 On April 16, Queen played their first US show, in Denver, Colorado as support to Mott. Remarkably, despite the band’s name and Mercury’s stagecraft, the more macho sections of the American audiences didn’t take against them.


 “They were more like a normal group,” Hunter recalls. “They were playing rock songs, but with their own slant on it. They did say that they picked up a lot of their stagecraft from Mott, you know? You’ve got to pick it up from somewhere.”


 This big-brother-little-brother dynamic was evident off stage, as was the support band’s desire to be successful. At one point the two bands found themselves staying in a set of apartments owned by Spartacus star Kirk Douglas.


  “There was a bit of a do in my room,” says Ian Hunter, “and Fred’s marching up and down saying: ‘When are these silly bastards going to figure it out?’ Meaning the Americans. I said to him: ‘It’s a big country, you’ve got to go around three or four times before it happens. It’s not like England, where you can conquer it in a day!’ He was very, very impatient. It was hilarious.”



 The Olympian levels of debauchery that became synonymous with Queen were a few years away, but there were still some memorable moments. Not least when the tour crossed paths with Bette Midler, then a brassy singer who’d made her name on New York’s gay bath-house circuit.



 “She was doing a theatre in the same town as us,” Hunter remembers. “She latched onto Luther (Grovesnor, aka Mott guitarist Ariel Bender). And then we had Bette’s mob come back to the hotel with us. There was us, Queen, Bette and these seven-foot guys in feather head-dresses and what have you. Ha ha! It was so much fun.”



 On May 7, Mott and Queen began a triumphant six-night residency at New York’s Uris Theater. But disaster struck the morning after the final show, when Brian May fell ill. The guitarist was diagnosed with hepatitis, possibly picked up from a dirty needle when they were inoculated before that ill-fated Australian show. Distraught, the band were forced to pull out of the tour, and May, against doctor’s orders, was flown home. Their plan to conquer America had been derailed. At least for the time being.


 “To us it was out of the blue,” says Ian Hunter. “They were on the tour and then they’re not. Next thing we knew, they had the album out and it was doing extremely well.”


 “I felt really bad at having let the group down at such an important place,” Brian May said in 1974. “But there was nothing to do about it. It was hepatitis, which you get sometimes when you’re emotionally run-down.”



 Laid up in hospital after returning from America, May was feeling guilty and frustrated at inadvertently curtailing his band’s American ambitions. Understandably keen to rejoin his bandmates who had started work on their next album without him, he’d already begun writing while convalescing. One of the songs he was working on, Now I’m Here, reflected the disconnect between touring the US with Mott The Hoople and his living in a pokey bedsit in West London with his girlfriend. “It came out quite easily,” said the guitarist. “Where I’d been wrestling with it before without getting anywhere.”


  It was a six weeks before May recovered from his bout of hepatitis. After being discharged he immediately rejoined the others in the studio. But something was wrong. May was constantly being sick, and he couldn’t eat anything. He was taken back to hospital, where doctors discovered that he had an undiagnosed stomach ulcer, which had been aggravated by the hepatitis.



 “I was stuck in hospital for a few weeks, and they did some stuff to me which was like a miracle,” said May. “I thought I was dead. Being ill like that may even have been a good thing at the time, because although it was pretty hellish going through it, I felt glad to be alive and I became able to hold things in perspective more and not get so wound up and worried about them to make myself ill.”




By the time May returned to the sessions for the second time, work was properly under way on the new album. It was a strange experience for the guitarist, although not a negative one.



 “It was very weird, because I was able to see the group from the outside, and was pretty excited by what I saw,” he later said. “We’d done a few things before I was ill, but when I came back they’d done a load more, including a couple of backing tracks of songs by Freddie which I hadn’t heard, like Flick Of The Wrist, which excited me and gave me a lot of inspiration to get back in there and do what I wanted to do.”


 Sheer Heart Attack was recorded between July and October 1974. As with its two predecessors, the album was produced by Roy Thomas Baker, a larger-than-life character who could more than match Mercury in the charisma stakes.


 “Every one of our musical and production frustrations came out on Queen II,” said Baker. “The idea for the third album was to get together and do some ‘simpler’ songs for a change; real little, short songs. And it was very successful on that level.”




Unlike Queen and Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack was conceived in the studio, albeit through necessity rather than by design. “Nobody knew we were going to be told we had two weeks to write Sheer Heart Attack,” said Mercury. “And we had to – it was the only thing we could do. Brian was in hospital.”



 Despite the setback of the cancelled US tour, there was no doubt among the band that Sheer Heart Attack would take them to the next level. The black-and-white approach of Queen II had been reigned in, replaced by a kaleidoscopic range of sounds and styles. Leading this new approach was Killer Queen, an outrageously camp ditty that was closer to Noël Coward than to Robert Plant.


 “That was the one song which was really out of the format that I usually write in,” said Mercury. “Usually the music comes first, but the words, and the sophisticated style that I wanted to put across in the song, came first.”


 Many have claimed to be the inspiration behind Killer Queen, most notably Eric ‘Monster! Monster!’ Hall, the future football agent who then worked as Queen’s radio plugger. According to Mercury, the title chartacter was pure fantasy.


 Advertisement “No, I’d never really met a woman like that,” he explained after the album’s release. “I can dream up all kinds of things. That’s the kind of world I live in. It’s very flamboyant.”



 If Killer Queen was the best-known song, it was hardly representative of the album, largely because the band didn’t chain themselves to one style. No band other than The Beatles had dared throw as many different styles into the mix with as much confidence. That state of affairs in Queen was helped by the fact that all four members pitched in with the writing.





A convalescing May delivered the rockers, including Now I’m Here and opener Brighton Rock (working titles: Bognor Ballad, Southend Sea Scout and Happy Little Fuck). Bookended by a picaresque tale of two seaside lovers sung in high and low registers by Mercury, it was a showcase for an extended May guitar solo dating back to Blag, a song by his old band Smile. By contrast, Mercury threw in everything from waspish glam rock (Flick Of The Wrist, a reflection of their increasingly strained relationship with their management) to old-fashioned vaudeville (Bring Back Leroy Brown, complete with ukelele solo from May). Most prescient was In The Lap Of The Gods, a two-part, near-operatic epic that laid the groundwork for Bohemian Rhapsody the following year.




In this creative environment, the rhythm section also rocked up with material. Taylor, who had written a song for each of their previous albums, contributed Tenement Funster, a lachrymose salute to the rock’n’roll lifestyle, and an overlooked Queen gem. John Deacon chipped in with the slight but perfectly formed Misfire. The furious Stone Cold Crazy – an influence on the future members of Metallica, and hence a cornerstone of the thrash metal movement – was credited to all four members, even though it dated from Mercury’s pre-Queen band Wreckage.



For a band who were frequently mocked for being shallow, there were plenty of hidden depths, not least on Mercury’s delicate Lily Of The Valley. The singer’s sexuality was the subject of much debate in the press; apparent double-bluffs such as his famous proclamation that “I’m as gay as a daffodil, dear” deliberately clouded the issue. But while Mercury was still living with girlfriend Mary Austin, he reputedly told his closest friends that he was gay.


 “Freddie’s stuff was so heavily cloaked, lyrically,” Brian May said in 1999. “But you could find out, just from little insights, that a lot of his private thoughts were in there, although a lot of the more meaningful stuff was not very accessible. Lily Of The Valley was utterly heartfelt. It’s about looking at his girlfriend and realising that his body needed to be somewhere else.”


 All such personal distractions were kept out of the studio. “They worked 15 hour days,” says Gary Langan, who worked as tape operator on Now I’m Here and Brighton Rock. “When we finished work at Sarm, we’d meet them at a club called the Valbonne in Soho. That’s when they let their hair down.”





This drive for perfection ensured there was no fat on Sheer Heart Attack. Just two songs failed to make the final album. One was May’s imperious reworking of the national anthem, God Save The Queen, later resurrected for 1975’s A Night At The Opera. The other was the song that gave the album its title, the frantic, Taylor-penned Sheer Heart Attack. Little more than the bare bones of a song when they started, the drummer failed to finish it in time. They finally got around to recording it for 1977’s News Of The World album, underpinned with the sneering key lyric: ‘I feel so inar.. inar… inar inar…inarticulate’. The band in the next studio at the time? The Sex Pistols.



By the time Sheer Heart Attack was released on November 1, 1974, Killer Queen had already given Queen their first Top 3 hit. Now I’m Here followed a couple of months later, complete with touching nod to unofficial mentors Mott The Hoople (“It was nice,” recalls Ian Hunter, “but there was no money attached to it”). Between the two, Queen embarked on their first proper world tour, headlining. This time there were no illnesses or riots, though they were greeted by scenes approaching Beatlemania when they arrived in Japan in April 1975. The effort that went into Sheer Heart Attack had paid off.

 Decades on it stands as Queen’s most pivotal album. They had greater success later, but none of it would have be possible without the groundwork laid down here. “That was the album that showed the world what they were capabale of,” says Gary Langan. “If that album hadn’t been as successful as it was, then something like A Night At The Opera probably wouldn’t have been accepeted.”


 Freddie Mercury put it more succinctly. “We were in a prolific stage and so much was happening with us, dear,” he said afterwards. “We felt the need for a change of sorts and, as ever, we felt able to go to extremes. As usual, we put ourselves under pressure. That’s just us.”




"Now I'm Here"


This song, written by Queen guitarist Brian May, is about the hard, fast, good and bad times of extensive touring, which the band did during their first few years. As the band have been quick to note, their success did not come overnight - success in America particularly was laid by many years of touring there in the 1970s, and battling against the common "east coast" style rock of the Eagles and Steely Dan which was very much the sound of American Rock radio around that time.


 
In 1974 Queen supported the band Mott the Hoople in America. This tour provided the inspiration for this song, which contains the lyrics "Down in the city, just Hoople and me."


 
Queen had a great time on tour with Mott the Hoople, but unfortunately Brian May fell ill near the end of the tour with severe hepatitis and spent many of the sessions for Sheer Heart Attack recovering in hospital. He since admitted that he was nervous that the band would find a replacement, and he was determined to keep working to stop that from happening.




As it turned out, the band never even considered replacing May, and even left space in the songs they were already working on for him to add his parts when he was healthy enough. Even so, "Now I'm Here" is one of May's first songs that he wrote for the album once coming back to health, and the loud and strutting nature of the song suggests the tone of a man re-energised and ready to play again.


 
Clearly "Now I'm Here" is a song many in the band were fond of - including Brian May. Freddie Mercury said in a 1976 interview with Record Mirror: "It was nice. That was a Brian May thing. We released it after "Killer Queen." And it's a total contrast, just a total contrast. It was just to show people we can still do rock 'n' roll - we haven't forgotten our rock 'n' roll roots. It's nice to do on stage. I enjoyed doing that on stage." It holds the record as the Queen song which lasted in their live set the longest, from release in 1974 right through to their final stadium shows in 1986. It also regularly appeared on live compilations and B-side releases. May himself continued to play it long after Mercury's death, both solo (Live Brixton Academy 1993), guesting live with Def Leppard at the 1991 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, and with Queen+ tours - notably it became the spectacular intro song on their 2014 Adam Lambert tour of America and beyond.

Sheer Heart Attack: it does sound a wee bit dated or of it's time, but I've always liked the opening track, Brighton Rock. Generally, though, the album is just nice to listen to again without being something I'd be keen to play 'quite a lot', as the songs, although clever, have a similarity about them. That, of course, would be okay if you are a big Queen fan.

Aye the weather, telly World Cup and especially Perth Races have knocked me out this last few days too.....

DAY 318.
10cc.....................................Sheet Music   (1974)










Have got a good bit behind so gonna fly through these,


"Sheet Music was a good album, one which I had back in the day, as I was listening to it I found myself singing along to most of the tracks and remembering all the lyrics, I deffo preferred side 1 if I'm being picky, and never particularly liked "Silly Love,"  but "Wall Street Shuffle" and "Clockwork "Creep" were great tunes. 10cc always produced well crafted, witty and well produced work.



I always found them a very clever band, both lyrically and musically, and one who could change style several times in a song but not lose the listener, all in all a good album that was good to listen to again, buy one I can't see myself playing to often, so this wont be going into my collection but will be getting downloaded.




Bits & Bobs;






Among the most inventive and influential bands in the history of popular music, 10cc are one of the very few acts to have achieved commercial, critical and creative success in equal measure.
Gouldman puts the 10cc’s longevity down to the quality and individuality of the band’s songs. “They don’t seem to date; they are original, we never followed any trend we simple wrote for our own pleasure. The fact that the songs are being played as often on the radio today as they ever were shows how true that is,” he says.



 The missing link between The Beatles and the Gorillaz,10cc ruled the pop world at a time – the 1970s – when the charts were dominated by some of the most creative and colourful artistes in pop history.



 Unlike David Bowie, Queen, Elton John or Rod Stewart – all of whom they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with for a decade – 10cc worked not on image or celebrity-status, but on the art of making highly sophisticated rock masterworks into simple-sounding pop hits.



 As Gouldman says, “Our main influences were The Beatles and the Beach Boys. Then there was all the other stuff …



 “For me it was people like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Jimmy Webb, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. Eric [Stewart] was more rock ‘n’ roll, the blues and R&B; while Kevin [Godley] and Lol [Creme] were sort of Jacques Brel, more artistic and avant-garde.



 “It’s what happened when we put all those things together that made 10cc.” The result was some of the greatest pop records of the 20th century.



 From their breakthrough hit Donna in 1972 to their final No 1 – Dreadlock Holiday – in 1978, via such landmark releases as I’m Not In Love, their worldwide smash in 1975, 10cc stood for the kind of heightened pop sensibility achieved only by the very greatest music practitioners. As Rolling Stone put it in 1975, ‘There is more going on in one 10cc song than on the last ten Yes albums.’



 In truth, they could have come from any era. 10cc would have been as at home in the dynamic early days of pop in the 1950s, as they would have been in the instant-gratification download culture of today. As Gouldman points out, “It was all about the songs. Not the image or who the singer was or who played which instrument.”



 It wasn’t anything the group built towards either, it was all there on their very first record Donna. You didn’t have to be conversant with the doo-wop-channelled-through-Frank Zappa influence to appreciate its inventiveness.



 “We were just trying to amuse ourselves,” says Gouldman now. “That was why it worked. The fact was we had our own recording facility, Strawberry Studios in Stockport. We actually started writing together just for a laugh, really. We weren’t consciously trying to make hit records.”



 The early-’70s was an intense period of creative activity for the guys, on multiple fronts, with Gouldman having already notched up hit song-writing credits with groups such as the Yardbirds, Hollies and Herman’s Hermits.



 When the studio wasn’t being used, Gouldman and song-writing partner and studio co-owner Eric Stewart – a talented multi-instrumentalist and recording whiz, formerly of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders – along with Creme and Godley, who Gouldman had known since school days, would use the downtime, “to mess around and make our own sounds”.



 They also became the studio house band.



 Gouldman even spent time in New York, writing for bubblegum kings Jerry Kazenetz and Jeff Katz (“don’t ask …,” he says). But, fed up with being away from home, he returned to the UK to record the songs he had written Stateside, with his friends at Strawberry.



 Back in Stockport, Stewart, Godley and Creme had also been busy, with Stewart testing a new four-track recorder that lead to the recording of Neanderthal Man, a track that went on to enjoy 14 weeks in the UK charts in 1970, peaking at No 2. The band was called Hotlegs and comprised Godley, Creme, Stewart, and briefly Gouldman.



 As if that wasn’t enough, in 1972 Gouldman’s manager Harvey Lisberg (later to become the band’s manager too), met Neil Sedaka who was playing a residency at Batley Variety Club in Yorkshire. Sedaka’s career was in decline and Lisberg suggested he worked with the guys at Strawberry.



 The result was Sedaka’s hit comeback album Solitaire, with Top 30 singles in the UK and US, produced by Gouldman, Stewart, Godley and Creme, with Stewart acting as engineer.



 “We all learnt so much from those sessions,” says Gouldman. “Neil’s sheer professionalism, musicianship and song-writing were inspiring.”



 As the four worked together more, says Gouldman, “We’d done a few tracks and we needed a B side for Waterfall [a Gouldman/Stewart composition]. There was a possibility that it would come out on the Apple label, which we were very excited about, because any connection with the Beatles was great.”



 A Godley and Creme song, Donna, was chosen, “but as we were recording it, we sensed that we were doing something special. Really, all these things came together by chance. We didn’t even have a name for the band and weren’t bent on world domination or anything. But Donna made us sit up and notice ourselves, that we actually had something special here.”



 And so 10cc was born, Donna became the A side and reached No 2 in the UK charts. Right from the start it was obvious they weren’t like other groups. All four could sing, were adept in the recording studio, and were seasoned musicians more interested in pleasing themselves than writing to a formula.



 Not long after Donna was released, Sedaka returned to Strawberry to record a second album, The Tra-La Days Are Over, with the same team, and his career took off again.



 10cc comprised essentially two song-writing camps, Gouldman and Stewart, plus Godley and Creme, although they would sometimes intermingle. “Our principle was always the music,” says Gouldman, “whatever’s best for the song. That means if I can sing better than you on it, that’s what happens. Or if Lol can play lead guitar better than you, he’ll do it. Consequently we had four singers in the band, four instrumentalists and four producers, plus Eric also engineered the sessions.



 “The other thing was whoever wrote the song, it kind of became the property of the four of us. You couldn’t say, ‘That song is crap, I don’t want anything to do with it’. What you had to say was, ‘I don’t like that part of the song, but I think we could make it better by doing this’. You always had to come up with something positive.”



 “It was the combination of all four of us that made the difference, not only in the song-writing, but in the production values as well,” says Gouldman.



 No two 10cc records ever sounded the same. Gouldman chuckles, “There were so many influences flying around and they all found their way onto the records and we loved pastiche.”



 The result might be the eight-minute pop opera Une Nuit a Paris, which opened their third album, The Original Soundtrack (1975). Or it might be a landmark pop masterpiece, from the same album, like I’m Not In Love, which spent two weeks at No 1 in the UK and three weeks at No 2 in the US.



 “A very important element,” explains Gouldman, “was we were completely self-contained. There wasn’t even a producer. If Eric was singing one of us would work the board. We used to just give the tracks straight to the record company.”



 The only comparable situation previously had been with The Beatles – and they had producer George Martin to help them. “We didn’t even have an A&R man,” says Gouldman. “No one was going to tell us anything.”



 Indeed, they didn’t even have a recognisable frontman. “Eric was a very good-looking guy who took on the role quite often, and Lol was also brilliant out front. But you’d never know on the record who was playing guitar or even who was singing sometimes. We weren’t like Queen, where you knew instantly it was Brian May on guitar and Freddie Mercury on vocals.”



 The first time 10cc played live, at the Isle of Man Casino in 1973, they were taken aback at the response. “We went onstage and girls started screaming! It was like, what the f**k is going on? We imagined ourselves as professors of pop who were going to give a lecture on pop music, but it wasn’t like that at all.”



 The critical plaudits also rolled in. Rolling Stone calling The Original Soundtrack, “better than anything the Beach Boys have done of late”. The NME described I’m Not In Love as “a John Lennon song with a Paul McCartney vocal”. In an age where critics spent an inordinate amount of time trying to identify the new Beatles, 10cc increasingly seemed to fit the bill.



 “Because we existed in our own world, we didn’t need anyone to tell us how good we were. We listened to the records and went, this is everything we want it to be and more.” Even after the astonishing success of I’m Not In Love, they refused to play the game and followed it up with the acidic Art For Art’s Sake – and scored another Top 5 hit.



 “‘Art for art’s sake, money for God’s sake’, was something my late father used to say to me, although he wasn’t cynical like that at all – he was very artistic. But it’s such a lovely phrase. Eric had this riff and I just started singing that, and the song came.”



 The biggest surprise of all was the departure of Godley and Creme after their next album, How Dare You? “It was horrible,” Gouldman confesses. “It was an absolute disaster. Like getting a divorce.”



 Godley and Creme had become preoccupied with the Gizmotron – from the word ‘gizmo’ – a device they had invented which when applied could bring new sounds and textures out of an electric guitar. Obsessed with devising a showcase for it, they began recording a triple album together, Consequences.



 Says a reflective Gouldman now, “Kev and I, who stayed quite close, have talked about this since and have decided what should have happened; he and Lol should have gone go off and done their thing for a year or so, then allowed 10cc to resume.



 “But that’s just not how things were done in the ’70s. No one had a year off. Plus I think the record company were probably expecting another album, tours were booked and so on.”



 Instead, Gouldman and Stewart continued as 10cc and scored more notable successes with their next two albums, Deceptive Bends (1977) – featuring their next worldwide hit single Things We Do For Love – and Bloody Tourists (1978), which spawned another international hit, Dreadlock Holiday.



 “We were on a mission to prove ourselves,” says Gouldman, “This wasn’t like a couple of guys leaving the band who just played their instruments. This was two of the producers going, two of the singers going, two of the songwriters going. So it was a real 50 percent gone.”



 Ultimately, the split took its toll and when Stewart was badly injured in a car crash in 1979, the writing was on the wall.



 “It flattened me completely,” Stewart later recalled. “I damaged my left ear and damaged my eye very badly. I couldn’t go near music. I couldn’t go near anything loud and I love music and motor-racing. I had to stay away from both things for a long time [and] the momentum of this big machine that we’d had rolling slowed and slowed and slowed. And on the music scene, the punk thing had come in a big way.”



 As history now records, all four original members enjoyed very successful post-10cc careers. Godley and Creme continued as a partnership, recording their own hit records and becoming Grammy-winning video directors for acts such as Ultravox, The Police, Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hollywood.



 Stewart collaborated on three Paul McCartney albums in the 1980s and continues to record sporadically as a solo artiste, his most recent collection being Viva La Difference in 2009.



 Meanwhile Gouldman spent the 1980s concentrating on recording soundtracks for films such as Farah Fawcett’s Sunburn and the American animation Animalympics. He also worked as a producer with The Ramones and Gilbert O’Sullivan.



 He then formed Wax with American songwriter Andrew ‘Lonely Boy’ Gold and had hits with Right Between The Eyes and Bridge To You Heart.



 There were two final Gouldman-Stewart directed 10cc albums in the ’90s, the first …Meanwhile (1992), featured contributions from both Godley and Creme, while the last, Mirror Mirror (1995), despite featuring contributions from McCartney and Gold, was more a collection of Gouldman and Stewart solo songs.


 That same year, 10cc received a BMI citation for three million plays on US radio for I’m Not In Love (since risen to five million). This followed the BMI citation for two million plays (since risen to 3.5m) of Things We Do For Love,




"The Wall Street Shuffle"



 
Graham Gouldman in The Daily Mail, May 27, 2007: "We were crossing New York's Wall Street in a cab one day and someone said, 'Do the Wall Street Shuffle.' That song just built from there."




In a BBC Radio Wales interview, Eric Stewart added: "We were crossing Wall Street in New York in a stretch limousine, celebrating the fact that we'd got in the charts with Rubber Bullets, and we'd gone across the big financial district of America there, and just as we were going across the street, Lol said 'Wall Street! The Wall Street Shuffle!' And I said 'Do the Wall Street Shuffle,' the melody, I had the melody in my head. But it was Lol, Lol's words. Wall Street Shuffle. And by that time I'd started writing more so I was getting a little bit more competent in what I was doing in, in the writing partnerships. And those things stay with you, as I was saying earlier on, if someone says a nice line to you or you hear something on radio, there's a part of your brain suddenly locks it in if it's good, and you'll never forget it. Until you get into the studio and start to write. And we got to the studio to, to start writing our second album, Sheet Music, and I said to Lol, 'Remember that idea, Lol, Wall Street Shuffle?' He said 'Yeah, yeah, it's a great idea, great title, but I don't think I really, I don't feel right like writing. I don't think I have anything to put in that in terms of words.' So I said, 'Well, anybody else want to write? Is anybody gonna go for this?' and Graham says 'Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, let's try and write it.'"


 
This was inspired by the downfall of the pound that was happening at the time. Eric Stewart explained to NME in 1976: "It was a very heavy run and the mark and the yen were getting stronger, and all these words you could use in other ways. So it was just a comment really on the financial time."


 
The song was a breakthrough for Eric Stewart as a songwriter, even though he'd previously penned songs as a member of the '60s band, The Mindbenders. Graham Gouldman was an already established songsmith having written hits for the likes of The Hoillies ("Bus Stop") and the Yardbirds ("For Your Love"). Also, up to that point the other two band members Lol Crème and Kevin Godley had done much of the writing for 10cc. However, Stewart came up with a lot of the ideas for this song and its success gave him a lot of confidence as a writer.


 
 


 

DAY 322.
Steely Dan.....................................Pretzel Logic   (1974)











After carving their own sound with "Can't Buy A Thrill" and taking it further with "Countdown To Ecstasy"  the band returned to Tin Pan Alley. Using three minute pop as a framework, they decided to play ironic games with style and genre, the result was this platinum selling album.

DAY 320.
George Jones......................................The Grand Tour   (1974)









That was bleak breakfast listening, I don't get why anyone would want to listen to this morose album, and if you haven't listened to it don't, and if you have can I deeply apologise.

This truly was a morbid platter, and one that wont be coming anywhere near my postcode.

To try and lighten the mood a few old and corny C&W jokes;

Country singer George Jones was injured in a car crash.
Police say two factors contributed to the crash:
(1) Jones lost control while talking on a cell phone, and
(2) crap like this always happens to country singers."



What has 72 legs and 26 teeth?
The first row at a Willie Nelson concert!


How many country singers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two, one to do it and one to sing a song reminiscing about all
the good times he had with the old bulb.



What happens if you play country music backwards?
your wife returns to you, your dog comes back to life, and you
get out of prison.


A guy walks down Music Row carrying a guitar. A car pulls up and a tourist asks, "Excuse me, do you know how you get to the Country Music Hall of Fame?" "Yeah," the man spits out. "Practice til you're dead!"




These are seemingly real C&W titles;
 I don't know whether to kill myself, or go bowling.


I wouldn't take you to a dog fight even if I thought you could win.


Thank God and Greyhound you're gone.



My wife ran off with my best friend and I miss him.


Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth 'Cause I'm Kissing You Goodbye


If My Nose Were Full of Nickels, I'd Blow It All On You


Mama Get The Hammer (There's A Fly On Papa's Head)


You Were Only A Splinter In My Ass As I Slid Down The Bannister Of Life


You're The Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly


Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns In The Bed



Checked a few and they seem legit!




Bits & Bobs;



Country music legend George Jones was born in a log cabin in the small town of Saratoga, Texas, in an area known as "The Big Thicket." He was inspired by both of his parents: his father George Washington Jones played the guitar, and him mother Clara played piano. At age nine they bought him his very first guitar.


 
With his first guitar, started playing at social events and at church. Singing wherever he could, he could be found on street corners playing for tips like many aspiring musicians today. It was here on the streets of Texas that George got his start.


 
George had a rocky start in life and by the age of 24 had served in the Marines, been married twice and had already mastered the Texas world of honky-tonk bars throughout the state. In his early years George tried to sing like his idols, Hank Williams, Roy Acuff and Lefty Frizzell, but in 1955 his producer Pappy Dailey persuaded him to sing like himself. The result was his first hit song: "Why Baby Why."


 

Back in the 1950s George Jones sang the "Hits of the Day" on radio shows. This is where George got the opportunity to meet one of his heroes, Hank Williams, and play his guitar for him.


 
He has been married four times. In 1969, less than a year after divorcing his second wife, Shirley, he married the singer Tammy Wynette. After many separations and revivals of their marriage, George and Tammy finally divorced in 1975, but they still performed together.


 
After many invites, George finally joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1969.


 
The 1970s were very dark years for George Jones. In 1970 he parted with his producer/manager Pappy Dailey and started working with Tammy's producer at Epic Records, Billy Sherrill. His behavior took a dramatic dive, with many episodes of heavy drinking, drug use, shooting at friends and questions of physical spouse abuse. He earned the name "No-Show Jones" as his missed well over 50 performances. George appeared to be living the legend of his outlaw songs


. 
Jones was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame by MCA Nashville President Tony Brown in 1992.


 
In 1995, 20 years after their divorce, George and his ex-wife Tammy Wynette released a CD together titled One and also toured together. In 1998, Tammy died at age 55 after a series of health problems.


 
By 1996, Jones had lots of tales to tell, which he did in his book I Lived to Tell It All, which reached #6 on the Best Sellers List. He also released a CD with that title to accompany the book.


 
Jones had 168 songs that made the Country charts in his lifetime, counting his solo efforts and duets. He appeared on more charting singles than any other country singer.


 
The most notorious George Jones incident happened when he was married to his second wife Shirley. It seems Shirley took away the keys to his truck because George had been drinking for several days in a row. The nearest liquor store was about eight miles away, and George made the trip in about 90 minutes on the mower.




According to Tammy Wynette, he tried it again with her, taking a lawnmower ride to a local bar. She woke up about 1 a.m. to find her husband gone, and when she drove to the bar, there was the mover parked in front. This time, he even drove the mower on the highway.




George used the "lawn mower incident" jokingly in his 1996 release of the single "Honky-Tonk Song" as well as the music video where he showed an arrest for driving intoxicated, on a lawn mower. It looks like the arrest is poetic license, as in both incidents, Jones appeared to succeed in his creative quest for alcohol.


 
Jones was awarded the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors on December 7, 2008, which was hosted by President Bush and Mrs. Bush, which was taped in Washington, DC, and aired on December 30, 2008 on CBS.


 

Jones had a posthumous hit the week after his death in April 2013 when "He Stopped Loving Her Today"" re-entered the country chart at #21.


 
George Jones passed away of acute hypoxia at the age of 81 on April 26, 2013. He'd been admitted to hospital with a fever and irregular blood pressure a week earlier.


 
George Jones' fourth wife, Nancy Jones, revealed during the 2013 CMA Fest her husband's last words. "'Hi ya. I've been looking for you. I'm George Jones,'" she recalled her husband saying, before adding poignantly, "I believe he was introducing himself to God."


 
George Jones' nickname of "The Possum" arose from the shape of his nose and facial features.


 
George Jones is the only artist to appear on the Country chart in every decade up to and including the 2010s, since the list launched as a multi-metric survey on October 20, 1958.


 
George Jones married his fourth and final wife Nancy Sepulvado on March 4, 1983. They first met on a blind date in November 1981. The ceremony took place at the home of Jones' sister, Helen Scroggins, in Woodville, Texas. They remained together until his death in 2013.


 
 

DAY 321.
Gene Clark.................................No Other   (1974)










I'm sure the dick that wrote this has shares in this boy/the Byrds royalties, how he could put five Byrds albums and two of his solo albums in the 1001 beggars belief. This never gave any surprises, just churning out his same old downbeat country-rock guff, I personally wouldn't even want to listen to this as background music, this album wont be going into my collection.



Bits & Bobs;

Written countless times about this bloke (if interested)



If you’re searching for the perfect example of a cultish (and long-dead) singer-songwriter, Gene Clark likely won’t be the first name that comes to mind. His story is tragic but not like Nick Drake’s story is tragic. He wrote sad songs but not like how Townes Van Zandt wrote sad songs. He was a pioneer of mixing rock with country, but Gram Parsons is already the guy most associated with that. He had a lot of famous friends, but Harry Nilsson’s Rolodex was more impressive


 Old photos, captured during a flash of mid-’60s pop stardom when Clark briefly fronted the Byrds, show him almost too handsome to credibly play the antihero. He looks instead like a chastened former high school quarterback, all angular facial lines and perfectly mussed-up hair and mournful eyes. Some musicians are so singular they can only hope to ever be understood by a select number of people. Clark at first glance seems like he had it all and somehow screwed it all up.


 This assessment is uncharitable but not altogether inaccurate. Clark’s career, which launched in 1965 with the Byrds and ended in 1991 when he was found dead in his L.A. area home at the age of 46, is a series of short-lived peaks and long-suffering valleys. Lately, Clark’s legacy has been on an unexpected high. Earlier this year, members of Fleet Foxes, Beach House, and Grizzly Bear did a short tour playing songs from Clark’s lush and introspective 1974 LP No Other, which is sort of the downbeat Nixon-era answer to Pet Sounds. Clark also received the documentary treatment in 2014 courtesy of The Byrd Who Flew Alone: The Triumphs and Tragedy of Gene Clark, which was made in spite of a dearth of available Clark footage, a byproduct of his crippling stage fright. (All the better to enhance his enigmatic persona.) And just last week, in time for what would have been his 70th birthday, one of Clark’s best albums, 1977’s Two Sides to Every Story, was reissued after long being out of print.



 What is the cause of this Gene Clark revival? Maybe it was just Clark’s turn after indie musicians and music nerds exhausted the other icons of doomed ’60s and ’70s singer-songwriterdom. Clark has plenty of material for that crowd — his discography is composed exclusively of underappreciated masterpieces and “lost” albums. Of all the hard-luck sad bastards who have been granted a romanticized afterlife, I can’t think of a musician more snakebitten than Clark. He had the looks and talent to match the success of peers like David Crosby and Neil Young, but was hampered by manic depression, alcoholism, and plain old bad fortune. Few had more to gain, or farther to fall, than Clark, and he wound up losing far more than he ever gained.



 Cruel ironies abound in Clark’s career. In 1966, he exited the Byrds, then one of the most popular bands in the world, because he was terrified of flying; shortly after, the group scored one of its biggest hits, “Eight Miles High,” which he cowrote. A few years later, Clark teamed up with banjo player Doug Dillard and recorded a brilliant LP, The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark, that influenced the mellow, country-inflected L.A. rock sound of the ’70s. But when Dillard & Clark debuted at the Troubadour, the Sunset Strip club where future stars like Don Henley and Glenn Frey first hatched plans for world domination, Clark was too drunk to perform competently, and the group quickly fell apart.



 Later, one of Clark’s sidemen, Bernie Leadon, joined the Eagles, and a Dillard & Clark song, “Train Leaves Here This Morning,” ended up on the Eagles’ self-titled 1972 debut. That same year, Clark commenced work on a new album called Roadmaster with a promising set of songs and a relatively healthy and sober outlook. Unfortunately, this project was derailed spectacularly by another’s near-comical maleficence: The producer decided it was wise to invite Sly Stone to the studio when Clark was out of town, and Sly arrived with an entourage of 40 people and an RV full of cocaine. They proceeded to max out the record company’s production tab in a manner of days, ordering thousands of dollars’ worth of food from a neighboring restaurant. Work on Roadmaster was halted, and the tracks were dumped unceremoniously on a record released only in the Netherlands. (Roadmaster was later given a wider reissue.)


 Clark’s most celebrated album, 1974’s No Other, was similarly derided, then discarded by Clark’s benefactors. Signed by the top mogul of SoCal pop, David Geffen, on the strength of his songs for the ill-fated 1973 Byrds reunion album, Clark finally had at his disposal world-class musicians and a big budget topping out at $100,000. Clark and his producer, Thomas Jefferson Kaye, responded by swinging for the fences, creating dreamy, wide-screen soundscapes that stretched on for several minutes per track. Geffen, in turn, was pissed that No Other had only eight songs. “Make a proper fucking album!” Geffen screamed. Geffen subsequently released No Other with no promotional support, and cut Clark loose.


 Clark, once again, had lost. Perhaps No Other’s opener, “Life’s Greatest Fool,” was prophetic, though Clark played the unlucky fool in nearly all of his songs. Loss was his great theme. For the Byrds, he wrote breathtaking ballads about abandonment (“Here Without You”) and nobly walking away from those he would inevitably disappoint (“Set You Free This Time”). As Clark grew older, and his despair over the turns his life had taken deepened, romantic desolation gave way to spiritual yearning — on sweepingly meditative numbers like "Out On The Side," "Full Circle Song,"and "Silver Raven" he sounds like a man whose dignity derives from holding it together amid the wreckage of his life as he calmly addresses the heavens, looking for answers.


 Clark was weary but not exactly angry, at least not on his albums. He appeared to be seeking relief in the one place in his life that hadn’t been corrupted. Clark was a romantic at heart, and sentimental about the act of creating something luminous. My favorite Gene Clark song, and possibly the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard by anybody, is “For a Spanish Guitar,” from 1971’s Gene Clark, a.k.a. White Light, where he sings with heartbreaking purity about the restorative power of music in the face of constant hardship. Clark’s resolve in that regard held more or less firm for another 20 years.



 Two Sides to Every Story was made in the aftermath of No Other and the troubling repercussions the album’s failure had on Clark’s life. Forced to tour in order to support his wife and two sons, Clark played countless dives with a two-man backing band called the Silverados, self-medicating every night with speed and booze. The chemicals exacerbated Clark’s undiagnosed bipolar disorder, causing him to act erratically at home and eventually prompting his wife, Carlie, to take their boys to Hawaii (because she knew Clark wouldn’t fly) and file for divorce. Clark’s home life wound up being the album’s primary inspiration, starting with the cover, where Clark — his once-handsome face wrapped in a thick, autumnal beard — sits at a picnic table outside his Northern California home, joined only by one of his kids’ forgotten toys.


 Even without knowing the backstory, it’s clear just from the songs that Two Sides to Every Story is a breakup album. Eschewing the elaborate production of No Other, and adhering to a more traditional country sound than the stark White Light, Clark’s sensibility on Story’s best tunes — “Lonely Saturday,” “Sister Moon,” and “Past Addresses” — is one part George Jones and one part Blood on the Tracks. Clark presents himself as a man reduced to staring at the clock, poring over his past and trying to erase time. “Thursday night at six o’clock / I stepped into a world / of living all alone,” he sings on “Lonely Saturday.” You get the feeling that it was perpetually Thursday night at six o’clock in Gene Clark’s world.


 When Clark tries to be funny, like in “Home Run King,” it comes out bitter, a delusion of long-lost grandeur with the self-hatred baked in. “You either just a newspaper boy or you’re either Babe Ruth,” he sings, not at all sounding like the Babe. The folk standard “In the Pines,” an all-time favorite of sad boys from Kurt Cobain on down, is more Clark’s speed. He gives it an incongruously jaunty arrangement, but he’s otherwise in a familiar place: deep in the weeds, where the sun never shines. 



After unsuccessfully shopping Two Sides to Every Story around town — Clark had burned nearly every bridge in the music business by thenClark had a brief high when the biggest label of the late ’70s, RSO, agreed to release it. Then the prolonged valley: Two Sides was a nonstarter commercially, and Clark never had a major-label deal again. He put out more music in the ’80s, but Clark had aged far beyond his years. In 1988, painful ulcers required surgery that removed a large portion of his stomach and intestines. He could no longer drink without killing himself. But when he was diagnosed with throat cancer in early 1991, Clark decided to go on one last bender.


 When Clark’s bass player, Jon Faurot, found the body, Clark was curled up in a fetal position on the living room floor. It was a Friday. He saved himself from another lonely Saturday.
 

DAY 322.
Steely Dan.....................................Pretzel Logic   (1974)










"Pretzel Logic" is another in the line of solidly produced, tightly harmonised and well crafted albums that you can never doubt that it's Steely Dan you're listening to, and there's the rub for me, although this album mixes it up a little more than previous offerings, and thank god they haven't got as many overlong solos (Hallelujah,) it still feels like the same old same old to me.


"Rikki Don't Lose That Number" in my humbles is a top tune, and I also liked "East St.Louis Toodle-oo," and "Monkey in Your Soul" the last two probably as they were a departure from the Steely Dan norm.


Anyways, although this is a good album I don't think I could ever listen to it all the way through, it's just to samey,
this album wont be being bought.



Bits & Bobs;


Have written previously about Steely Dan (if interested)




I think that there are some people out there who have earned the right to be arrogant pricks.



 There aren't many, mind you, but they all have a few things in common. Firstly, they are the best at what they do. Second, collaborators or colleagues will rise in indignant defence of their arrogant and abhorrent behavior. And lastly, no matter the experience, an encounter with said arrogant prick is still held as a point of pride among anyone in the same field.


 I'm not necessarily calling Steely Dan a bunch of arrogant pricks. I'm just saying that if they are, I think they are utterly justified. After all, who is able to call in a top-rate, legendary session musician, have them roll through countless takes and endure intense scrutiny, then gut their parts without a shred of mercy, yet still have that musician come running at the next call? Becker and Fagen, that's who.



 Steely Dan had already become a successful and critically-lauded act before they started work on Pretzel Logic. They had produced two albums and had a hit single with 'Reelin' In The Years'. But having succumbed to a very stereotypical sophomore slump, the core songwriters of the band Walter Becker and Donald Fagen began their loathing for touring and the studio time it flushed away. They blamed the poor sales of Countdown To Ecstasy on the rushed nature of the recording process – a direct result of the band's touring commitments. The pair proceeded to set up camp in the studio with a rolling cast of session musicians and began producing music of such compulsive perfection that they alienated the other Dan members whose purpose as a touring band was quickly becoming redundant. "We could see that there was just too much of a lie involved at one point," Fagen told Mojo in 1995, "so they had to go". By the next album, Katy Lied, even founding member – and original recruiter of Becker and Fagen – Denny Dias would find himself relegated to the position of session guitarist among five others.


 Yet any bitterness, betrayal or wishes for reprisals felt by the players who Fagen and Becker replaced and subsequently sacked would be quashed by begrudged acceptance when the album was released. Pretzel Logic raked in the accolades, wooed the critics and gave the band the biggest hit of their career in 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number'.


 Pretzel Logic is arguably Steely Dan's template for their innovative and unparalleled mixing of the genres of pop/rock and jazz. Cramming intricacies previously only beholden to jazz musicians into succinct pop statements, Becker and Fagen seemed to have found their perfect format. No matter their jazz influence and harmonic complexity, the band always managed to stay within the pop lines. The reasons aren't clear, whether it be about personal preference, self-limitation or just-the-way-it-turned-out, their character and expression were perhaps better suited to those spaces rather than in the world of free-form limitless roaming jazz. In fact, the challenge of squeezing their cornucopia of peacocking into tightly formed pop nuggets probably keeps their true nature from scaring off a broad audience. There is no dilution of their musical messages, and only two of the tunes run over four minutes (coincidently these are the album's two singles that were later shortened for radio play).


 They would pick and choose the pop music conventions they followed only inasmuch as it served their very particular needs. And man! – were they ever particular. In fact, this seems to be the top trait that pervades both in every character assassination and glowing review the pair have ever received.


 Countdown To Ecstasy at least allowed the possibility of live replication, but Fagen and Becker were over the whole realistically-reproducible thing and would subsequently use every tool and every instrumentalist (and instrument) at their disposal.


 Drummers were a special obsession for Fagen and Becker. Though Steve Gadd's work on Aja might be the Holy Grail for many Danfan drummers, Pretzel Logic boasted two legends of can bashing. The album's main drummer Jim Gordon influenced the careers of many other greats including the prolific session master Jim Keltner as well as Jeff Porcaro who counts himself quite lucky to have played double drums alongside Gordon on Pretzel Logic's pairing of pop and bop 'Parker's Band'. Gordon was the writer of the famous 'Layla' coda and played on dozens of hit albums before his undiagnosed schizophrenia sent him to his mother's house with a hammer and a murderous rage. He is still serving time in a California psychiatric institution for her murder.


 Later indiscretions aside, Gordon plays a key role in the fantastic feel of the album. From the funkiness of 'Monkey In Your Soul' to the bossa nova of 'Rikki…', this album would not be what it is without Gordon's right-hand driven groove.



 Giving the record another interesting dimension is Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter, whose pedal steel slides in at unexpected moments and within very unexpected song-styles. A stand-out example would be the masterful reproduction of a ragtime trombone solo on the Duke Ellington homage 'East St. Louis Toodle-oo'. Its inclusion would likely cause confusion in any other setting, but its Gary Katz's bright production that instead gives a beautifully unified and warm sound to the songs, making sure that no particular instruments are coming off brash. There are no single stars in Gary Katz's vision of Steely Dan, just a seamless homogenous blend of understated virtuosity. Even Fagen's nasally voice is made to fit its container without spilling a drip over the instrumentation. Full, lush, thick, however you want to call it, no space is wasted.


 The lyrics are unabashedly pretentious and really must be chocka with phrases understood only by the band. The gibbering 'Any Major Dude Will Tell You' even introduces us to the mythical Squonk, an ugly wart-covered creature that dissolves in its own tears. Cheers for that, Dan.


 The title track is a particular fan favourite and probably contains the most clear genre shift on the album: one between straight blues and a rhythmically subdued jazzy swing shout chorus, complete with Gordon rounding the toms. Tellingly, 'Pretzel Logic''s first verse is inspired by the pair's disdain for touring while overall it draws from the concept of time travel. Other passages veer into politics, drugs, betrayal, and New York City sketches but for the most part are pretty impenetrable. While he has received kudos from the odd critic for the lack of defined interpretation, Fagen has mostly enjoyed scoffs and snorts from pop lovers who see him as a supercilious nobhead vogueing Dylan.


 Lyrics aside, Pretzel Logic represents a peak in the popcentric incarnation of Dan. Over the following albums the songwriting would slowly become more over-thought, then more overwrought in the studio, culminating in the comparatively cold and inaccessible Gaucho.


 No one could argue that Dan and their fans have a propensity for pretentiousness, but it is a position that they have earned. Despite the horror stories and suggestions of a mean streak that sent countless pros packing, many musicians reveled in the challenge of pleasing Becker and Fagen. The satisfaction of making the grade was delectable and the test itself was enough to make a session player's CV swell. Their pressure continually dragged the best out of the best and – with a track record like theirs – any player would have to be a fool not to endure.


 In a 2003 interview Fagen muses on the band's lack of visual presence. The group has never made a music video and has consistently downplayed everything that doesn't have to do with the music immediately being made. The reasoning behind this, explains Fagen, is to not give away a hint of their own true artistic interpretations. Arguably, it's not really possible to keep things in the abstract when you are doing interviews and writing memoirs that explain your art, but the conscious effort at keeping the music itself purely within its medium (especially at their level) is an admirable thing. However, most of all, the desire to keep their work concentrated and overlook indulgences shows how the egotism of Becker and Fagen is rooted firmly behind the mixing board – right where it belongs.


 It's been 40 years since Steely Dan's core hunkered down in the studio to create this melodic masterwork and refined a reputation for striking fear into the hearts of session musicians. You may love or you may hate their particular brand of jazz influenced pop/rock, or you might believe them to be the arrogant pricks their behavior may suggest. But you cannot deny that this pair's mutually fully realized vision is a marvel. In fact, Pretzel Logic in its complexity and concentration is a validation of every unpopular decision Fagen and Becker made and of every toe they trod upon.



"Rikki Don't Lose That Number"
 

The keyboard riff was taken from "Song For My Father," which was released in 1964 by the jazz composer and pianist Horace Silver. The opening of both songs is nearly identical.


 
According to a 2006 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Rikki of the title is Rikki Ducornet, a New York writer and artist. Steely Dan co-front Donald Fagen met her while both were attending Bard College, a small liberal arts school located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Ducornet said they met at a college party, and even though she was both pregnant and married at the time, he gave her his number, although not in the same context as the song. Ducornet was intrigued by Fagen and tempted to call him, but she decided against it. And it kind of sounds like it came straight out of a Doonesbury strip.


 
This is Steely Dan's highest charting single, reaching #4 on the Hot 100 in 1974.


 
Frank Zappa fans of course have a different context for this song. Go to your CD collection and get out You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore (volume 2), select Disc 2, and play Track 2: "Dupree's Paradise."


Zappa sings a couple of joke lines from "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," with a hilarious deadpan. It's just after the bass-player rant and just before Frank makes another crack about Suzi Quatro cassettes. Zappa and his gang around this time frequently commented on whatever music was popular at the moment.


 

Speaking on the subject of playing their hit songs in concert, Donald Fagen told Rolling Stone in 2013: "Walter and I aren't fond of 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number.' It's not a bad song. I think it's 'well-written,' but it's so simple. I just have listening fatigue. It's been played so much. Same with 'Reeling in the Years.'"


 
The beginning of this song features a flapamba, a rare and unusual instrument that is a variant of a marimba. Although the introduction, played by British jazz musician Victor Feldman, was cut from the original ABC single version, the MCA single reissue restored the flapamba intro but fades out just before the actual end of the track.


 
Jeff "Skunk" Baxter played the guitar solo on this track. Baxter, who joined the Doobie Brothers in 1975, later became a consultant in the audio industry and also leant his technical expertise to the defense industry.