Moving on to 2015

And here ends the project. While I failed to read 52 books this year, I nearly killed myself to write at least something each day about a different album in my possession. I now close the book on that project and leave it as a digital scrapbook to be preserved somewhere in Google world headquarters until the next electromagnetic pulse. If you are visiting from a future year (and about 13 hours from now that will be a fact), please enjoy a big slice of random music and book reviews.

I'm not going away, but I've come to realize, especially in the past month, that this blog thing can consume your life if you aren't careful. However I like to put down my thoughts from time to time, so I'm going to scale back the music to weekly and continue the books as I finish them. I've still got plenty of thoughts on plenty of things around me.

To anyone reading this, have a wonderful 2015 and thanks for stopping by.

The Process of Belief (Bad Religion, 2002)

We started the year with Rock Aid Armenia and we end with Bad Religion. If that's not random, then I have no idea what is.

I'd probably be better off letting my wife guest-blog this one since she was into Bad Religion back in high school and I think had every album of theirs up through Stranger Than Fiction when I met her. My Bad Religion experience is not nearly as sentimental, stumbling upon them when one of their singles from The Gray Race was accidentally filed under "metal" at the radio station, got some unexpected airplay, and it turned out I liked their sing-songy style. It probably wasn't the best time to get into them as the "true" fans were annoyed that they had ditched their home label Epitaph and were estranged from one of their founders.

A few years later I saw this album in a freebie bin and work and figured what the heck. Well, it turns out this is the album where everybody got back together, buried the hatchet and moved on. It sounds just like Bad Religion from before, and that's a good sound, so there's no harm in that. However, I really haven't seen or heard of any progression in the band, even something like four albums later. But then again, I haven't been listening aside from what squeaks on to the radio. Aside from the recent departure of Greg Hetson, the band has had a stable lineup and regular recording history since this album, something I'm sure a lot of other bands would envy a great deal.

The Mask (Roger Glover, 1984)

Among the various solo careers spawned by the immediate and greater Deep Purple family, Roger Glover is a bit of an outlier. His first solo album, Elements (1978), defiantly threw out the guitar-bass-drums ethic that defined his entire career and musician and producer, as well as standard song structure. Little did he realize he would soon be brought into the orbit of Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, serving as bassist and producer for the guy who fired him about five years earlier.

The Mask bookends the Rainbow experience and couldn't be more different from Elements. Somehow he managed to find a little time to borrow Rainbow's final rhythm section and a few friends to record an album on the eve of Deep Purple's Perfect Strangers and Rainbow's Bent Out of Shape, all of them Glover productions. Not only does it follow a conventional structure and instrumentation, but it also features Roger himself on vocals. Aside from maybe a stray Purple outtake (and I think once on stage when Gillan took ill), the last time he fronted a band was in Episode Six, and that was just one voice among six. Even though they were to remain colleagues, you can almost hear the relief in the music of getting away from the commercial metal of Rainbow and any kind of vocal acrobatics from Gillan to Joe Lynn Turner. It is also devoid of classical influences that colored the music of Blackmore and Lord, while also avoid the raunchy blues of David Coverdale and friends. It's definitely the softer side of Purple, but still enough heft to keep fans interested, especially those who like 1980's era Deep Purple.

For being such a different album, this was packaged on the same disc as Elements. Thanks to the power of iTunes I was able to surgically separate them back into the original albums. At the time I heard it was on the verge of going out of print, though I think over the years there have been proper reissues, so if that's the case, go check it out!

Run Devil Run (Paul McCartney, 1999)

Paul McCartney had a lot on his mind around 1999. His wife Linda has succumbed to breast cancer and it was clear that there was not going to be any kind of Beatles reunion, in spite of the success of the Anthology project a few years earlier. While he could have "quit music" or coughed up some sad music, he chose a back-to-basics therapy, bashing out classic rock and roll standards (plus a few stealthy originals) with a completely over-the-top crack band of veteran musicians with minimal takes or studio trickery.

Run Devil Run is totally stacked with talent. It's the only album I know of that combines members of Pink Floyd (David Gilmour), Deep Purple (Ian Paice), and the Beatles (you know who). The other guys were no slouches either: Mick Green, Pete Wakefield, and Dave Mattacks, most all of which make their only McCartney album appearance ever. And while I'm sure McCartney has nothing but the greatest reverence for the music being played, the band just blows things out of the water. Their take on "All Shook Up" doesn't even compute with the original, and I mean this in a good way. "Honey Hush" and "I Got Stung" also benefit from explosive new interpretations. Meanwhile songs like "No Other Baby" and "Party" are pulling from the back alleys of Paul's mind and given fresh, exciting run-throughs. In addition to the originals, which include a scorching title track, Paul gets a little of his trademark sound here and there, such as the accordion bit on "Brown Eyed Handsome Man".

I picked this album up right away when it came out. It was irresistible to hear members of all of my favorite bands coming together and jamming hard. I was a little disappointed when Driving Rain was released a couple years later with a different supporting band and different approach, but I've come to realize this isn't the kind of music that needs to go on album after album and it was probably for the best to go out on top. There is an accompanying DVD where the band plays many of these songs at the Cavern Club. While the music is still very good, the camera work is awful, with too many quick-cut takes.

Finn (Jon Clinch, 2007)

Well, boo hoo. I've come to the stark realization that my quest for 52 books read this year is going to be more like 49 and this will likely be the last one. However I will keep logging books in 2015, so maybe I can chronicle my vindication of those missing three books!

Finn has been on my list a long time. In fact it somehow came to my attention when I was reading Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn back in 2010, the books that inaugurated my era of classic reading. While Finn itself doesn't qualify for that category, it's part of a venerable tradition of tapping into the "great conversation" creating by classic books and adding original thought that enhances the original work. In this case, author Jon Clinch turns all attention on Huck's father, the cruel and abusive (and nameless) man who meets a mysterious end. Clinch employs a non-chronological narrative that vacillates between a parallel to the Huckleberry Finn story and the backstory of his father. It is interesting and I love the idea. However, in the end, the whole book left me a little cold.

Here are the "mainstream" fiction books I read this year, not including the classics, science fiction, and mystery titles:

• Under the Eagle by Simon Scarrow - The first book is a long series of ancient military fiction. While not blown away, I'm good for another.
• In God We Trust (All Others Pay Cash) by Jean Shepherd - The book that inspired the hit movie A Christmas Story. Quaint but fun.
• Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore - Amusing but just OK novel by the very funny author. I still love Lamb too much to give up on him.
• Finn by Jon Clinch - see above!

Obscured By Clouds (Pink Floyd, 1972)

Obscured By Clouds is a weird detour in the Pink Floyd road from the loss of Syd Barrett to their ultimate accomplishment, The Dark Side of the Moon. From around 1968 to 1970 the band was in a kind of sonic wilderness, untethered from Syd Barrett's psychedelic visions, yet not finding any strong new direction. In hindsight, one can see the pathway, though I'm sure it wasn't clear to anyone, least of all the band, during that period. In that 20/20 vision of Pink Floyd, it is evident that something near a masterpiece was just over the horizon with the release of Meddle in 1971. Yet that was not the immediate pre-Dark Side album. That honor goes to this album, a soundtrack to a French film most people probably haven't seen.

Pink Floyd wasn't new to soundtrack work, having provided music for the films More and Zabriskie Point, art house films of the day. While the band wasn't destitute, I'm sure the extra income from these projects was appreciated, and the music, particularly in the case of More, was likely more enduring than the films themselves. While the non-soundtrack Meddle raised the profile of the band to heights not seen since 1967, the road to the next album took one last trip back through soundtrack work.

Obscured By Clouds certainly isn't the greatest Pink Floyd album by anyone's definition. It starts with two instrumentals that I frequently cannot tell apart from each other, though they are using synthesizers like never before. The closer is equally aimless, with a bunch of "native" music at the end which might make more sense if I had seen the movie. It's what between these songs that makes the album worth checking out, although some of the titles are...strange. "The Gold It's In The..." is a genuine early 1970's straight ahead rocker which makes later songs like "Money" seem dreamy. But then you get something like "Wot's...Uh the Deal", a relaxing folksy number with some of the sweetest vocals David Gilmour has ever laid down. Richard Wright is busy too, with slow but powerful songs like "Burning Bridges", "Stay", and "Mudmen", an instrumental reinterpretation of the former song. Finally of note is the last song Gilmour would write all by himself until 1987, "Childhood's End", probably the star of the album.

The story continues with The Dark Side of the Moon, of course. The roles of Wright and drummer Nick Mason would greatly diminish from that album onward, while Roger Waters would continue to capitalize on the success of his songwriting. While Waters has plenty of assists from Gilmour and Wright on this album, he largely took on the bulk of the writing going forward from here, including all of the lyrics.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (Black Sabbath, 1973)

This is one of my favorite Sabbath albums and it marks the culmination of the first "re-invention" of the band. As I had mentioned earlier, the history of Black Sabbath in the 1970's can be explained as an constant attempt to get away from a certain undesired reputation. The first three albums share a similar sound, sometimes called "black blues" or (using Ozzy's recent terminology) "Satanic blues". It was their manner of distorting the British blues boom, just another style among heavy (Deep Purple), and progressive (Fleetwood Mac) approaches. Although incredibly influential and frequently credited with launching heavy metal, the band itself was feeling uncomfortable with their situation in the wake of the release of their third album, Master of Reality, in 1971.

Easing off of their manic recording pace, took some time off following 1972's somewhat different Volume 4 and returned with a sound that was still unmistakably Black Sabbath (I mean, look at the cover), but fully employing the new approach that diminished the role of Tony Iommi's solos and used a series of Zeppelin-grade heavy riffs to progress the songs along. The approach is particularly evident on surprisingly thoughtful songs like "A National Acrobat" and "Spiral Architect". The use of keyboards is also stepped up, notably on "Sabbra Cadabra", which features Rick Wakeman on piano (his only credited role, though rumor has it he was all over the album), and "Who Are You", an eerie guitar-less song.

Just as they "grew" into this new sound, they quickly grew out of it on the next album, Sabotage. Another result of taking some time off, it is sort of the last "classic" Ozzy-era album, they showed signs of returning to the solo-dominated sound. On stage, Tony would literally push Ozzy to the side. The following albums had a less doomy sound, which may have been what the band was seeking, but it would ultimately result in an essentially permanent split of the original band and launch the "best singer" debate that rages on to this day.

Best of Semisonic (2003)

Semisonic is one of the more high-profile flameout acts of the 1990's. They enjoyed some justified local success in the mid-1990's, which was enough to parlay into a major record deal that yielded one huge album with one very huge song, "Closing Time", which will be forever burned into the zeitgeist of modern American culture. Sadly, it never got any better than that for Semisonic, and the hotly-anticipated following album was a crushing disappointment, placing the band on a permanent hiatus that exists to this day.

I hadn't heard any of the other songs here other than the ones from Feeling Strangely Fine, of which "Closing Time" is actually one of the weaker ones. The earlier stuff still stands the test of time, with a little wisp of grunge apparent in songs like "The Prize", while stuff like "Across the Great Divide" deserve a lot more attention than they ever got. It isn't hard to see why the later stuff didn't catch on with the fans, feeling very lackadaisical and lethargic in places.

Usually these Millennium Collection discs are too thin to be of much interest to anyone other than the most casual fans, but I feel like this disc is all the Semisonic I need for the foreseeable future.

Ike's Bluff (Evan Thomas, 2012)

Evan Thomas is always a good bet, so I had no problem getting him into my US history reading queue as I progressed chronologically through the 20th century. This isn't a straight-up Eisenhower biography, but more focused on the foreign-policy aspects of his presidency. Although most Eisenhower books have already made it clear that he was not the same man as the image cultivated by the media and his own handlers, Thomas focuses specifically on the "bluff": his outward assertion of willingness to use nuclear weapons, while internally abhorring ever pursuing such a course. Thankfully for the world, the bluff wasn't called, though things were not easy during the 1950's Cold War. I saw Thomas at a booksigning event last year and he teased that his next book would center around Nixon and Vietnam, so I am looking forward to that story.

Here are the US History books read in 2014, stretching over about 90 years:

• Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard: Probably the best book about President Garfield out there, centered on the dark comedy of errors that ultimately led to his death.
• The Greater Journey by David McCullough: An unusual topic for the famed biographer, tracing the experience of Americans in Paris, mostly during the latter half of the 19th century.
• A Fierce Discontent by Michael McGerr: A good overview of the still not well-explored Progressive Era.
• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson: Fantastic look at a truly misunderstood chapter of American history, the "great migration" of African-Americans from the South to the North.
• Ike's Bluff by Evan Thomas: see above!

Outsideinside (Blue Cheer, 1968)

Blue Cheer was kind of the soundtrack of my immediate post-college life. People kept talking about them like they were some great undiscovered gem of proto-metal, so I finally broke down and picked up a simple greatest hits package to see what the fuss was all about. About half of that compilation is very heavy, and the second half more laid-back. Outsideinside captures the band in their "heavy" phase, rocking the fashionable "power trio" sound that artists like Cream and Hendrix were making all the rage in the late 1960's.

The band's first album, Vincebus Eruptum, made a big splash locally in the SF Bay Area music scene thanks to an over the top version of Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues (predating the Who's version by a couple years!) that was far heavier than anything coming out of that music scene and instantly making the band the "darkest" element of a still red-hot "Summer of Love" vibe. As with many bands featured here, they wasted no time heading back to the studio to replicate the success, though with more mixed results. The second album kept the sledgehammer originals and super-charged cover songs, but added a little bit of extra keyboards here and there. This is done to great effect with the opening track "Feathers From Your Tree" and more subtly on the closer, "Babylon". While there's plenty of straightforward hard rock numbers here, one can sense the psychedelia creeping over many of the tracks. They generally handle the transition pretty well, though its clear that playing hard and stripped-down is their forte.

Nevertheless, the band would continue to shy away from the Vincebus Eruptum style. A former co-worker of mine saw them live around the time of this album and revealed a little secret that isn't as apparent to younger listeners like myself. Bassist/founder/leader Dickie Peterson was a perfectionist. As raw as everything sounded, it was not spontaneous. Any doubt of that should be cleared by the later albums, in which the original trio dissolved. In its stead, Peterson expanded the band with new membership, even bringing in Gary Lee Yoder to handle most of the vocals. Clearly the old scene was consolidating by the early 1970's, as the two were such bitter rivals in the 1960's that Peterson stole Yoder's drummer from the Oxford Circle, basically killing that band with only a single to its name.

Two-thirds of the old trio would come back together intermittently from the 1980's onward. In 2006 I was fortunate enough to see them on what would be their last tour (Peterson died a few years later). The entire setlist was from the first two albums and the band has for a long time embraced the notion that they helped found metal, and have always played in a much harder style than any of their four albums that follow this one.

Scandinavian Nights (Deep Purple, 1970)

The Deep Purple live show of the 1970's was undoubtedly an epic experience. For most fans, such as myself, the initial exposure came from one of the finest live albums by any band, Made In Japan, released in the glow of their best-selling album Machine Head, and featuring live versions of fan favorites like "Highway Star", "Space Trucking" and of course "Smoke on the Water". Every song was stretched well beyond its studio running length, resulting in an experience that at time was more jazz than rock.

Scandinavian Nights didn't get a proper release until the 1990's and features a slightly younger band. Since the "new" Deep Purple had only released a single album, the set list is quite different from Made In Japan. For those who delighted in the expansion of their studio songs, this show took things to near-ridiculous extremes, to the point where it's hard to recommend to the casual fan. The two lingering numbers from the original lineup, "Wring That Neck" and "Mandrake Root", are each blown out to nearly half an hour each, a full ten minutes over anything Made In Japan delivered. The tracks even dwarf the chronologically closer first disc of Deep Purple In Concert, released in 1980.

With songs like "Speed King" taken about as heavy as they could go, I can understand why the next album Fireball was a letdown to many. At that point it was becoming clear that the band on stage and the band in the studio were becoming two different animals altogether. The live show would scale back a little in the ensuing years, though always more adventurous than any setlist the band has done since the mid-1980's. "Speed King" would be replaced by "Highway Star" and moved to the encores, while "Child In Time" stayed as long as Ian Gillan was in the band. "Into the Fire", the shortest track here (yet two minutes above the studio length) vanished quickly to the likes of "Fireball" and "Strange Kind of Woman". "Wring That Neck" would ultimately be replaced by "Lazy", while "Mandrake Root" was dropped for "Space Trucking", although the ending 15 or so minutes wouldn't change (and by dropping these songs, Rod Evans and Nick Simper would no longer have their names in the credits...naturally). The instrumental version of "Paint It Black", basically just a vehicle for an Ian Paice drum solo, would be replaced by a similarly-structured, band-authored "The Mule", though very different from the Fireball version.

Siren (Roxy Music, 1975)

Some would say that all musical roads of the 1970's lead through Roxy Music. I once saw a family tree diagram showing the connections between Roxy Music and various other bands and, to say the least, it was tangled. Most of the focus is on the blustery showman/frontman Bryan Ferry or his enigmatic bandmate from the early albums, Brian Eno. However, they were just two members out of a much larger cast, with ties reaching into other bands, such as Curved Air, the Nice, Concrete Blonde, King Crimson, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and more.

On this, their fifth album (as well as the previous two albums, Stranded and Country Life), the traditionally unstable bass player role is handled by John Gustafson. Gustafson was a sort of Zelig figure in rock music, popping up in the weirdest places. His earliest appearances were literally adjacent to the Beatles in their Cavern Club days in Liverpool, playing in an outfit called The Big Three. In 1970 he lent his vocals to the original Jesus Christ Superstar album, while playing bass in a rapidly dying Episode Six, Jesus/Ian Gillan's old band. Gustafson never recorded with Episode Six, but he appears on the weird spinoff band Quatermass's first and only album. From there he would team up with ex-Atomic Rooster guitarist John Du Cann to form the band known as either Bullet or Hard Stuff. By 1974 he was a part of Roxy Music, a sort of different experience for him being more glam than hard rock. Following this album, he committed full time to the Ian Gillan Band, a fairy jazzy kind of rock band. He had already been working on some of Ian's early post-Purple recordings, so, in addition to running in the same circles, it wasn't too far-fetched that they would end up working together. By 1978, Gillan severed their working relationship by quitting his own band. Gustafson never really recovered from the demise of IGB, unfortunately. Just this year he passed away, as did Roxy Music, which formally disbanded after 13 years of not releasing another album.

Unfortunately I don't have a lot to say about Roxy Music. They aren't nearly the sensation they were in the UK, so beyond "Love Is the Drug", this album's big hit, and maybe early hit "Do the Strand", they aren't very well known over here. Ages ago I was warned by die-hard Eno fans to avoid any Roxy Music album without him, but Siren works just fine for me. Bryan Ferry doesn't bug me like he does some folks, I suppose. Gustafson's bass is impeccable and easily recognizable, making many of the tracks groove as hard as ever. I certainly look forward to discovering some more of their music.

...And Justice For All (Metallica, 1988)

Whether viewed as the last "golden age" Metallica album, or the beginning of the Newsted era, ...And Justice For All occupies a unique spot in the band's history. It was literally released in the shadow of death, that of bassist Cliff Burton. While Burton didn't exactly play the standout role in the band's sound (he was, as was his successors, routinely buried underneath Jame Hetfield's forceful rhythm guitar), he played an enormous part in crafting the band's early image and served as a mentor figure to the other three. The result is an album that is alternatively sad and angry album in both lyrics and music. While none of the tracks address the Burton matter directly (except maybe "To Live Is to Die" whose only lyrics are from a dark poem written by Burton), all are extremely pessimistic even for a band not exactly renowned for writing "happy" songs. On top of all of this, the production is raw and tinny, with newbie Jason Newsted utterly buried to inaudibility in the mix and Lars Ulrich's drums pop and click in ways they probably shouldn't.

Nevertheless there is still a lot of "classic" Metallica on the album. Throughout the 1980's the band enjoyed messing with tradition by pushing album running times to the limit of a 12 inch vinyl record and with Justice they went ahead and broke it. While the compact disc easily holds the entire album on a single disc, the vinyl package transformed into an awkward two record set since no machine was capable of carving such fine lines into the vinyl. The album structure also follows a familiar structure, putting the long-running title track in the second position, the even-longer instrumental in the second-to-last slot, and the most thrashing tracks in the opening and closing spots. The band would pretty much throw this entire structure out the window for their smash-hit (and successful rebranding effort) self-titled album three years later.

While I was familiar with the albums following this one, until I finally broke down and got Death Magnetic, I had not acquired a Metallica album in over twenty years, stopping after this one. To me, Metallica after this album wasn't really Metallica anymore. Furthermore, their increasingly lazy manner of releasing albums eventually convinced me they were phoning it in since the mid-1990's, even if the albums were as long as a single CD would permit. It took another production/personnel nightmare, the album St. Anger, to help them turn the page and make a return to form, though it was quite a 20 year diversion. Welcome back, Metallica!

Raw Power (Iggy & The Stooges, 1973)

Raw Power is an iconic crossroads of the old garage movement of the 1960's and the still-being-born punk movement of the 1970's. However it wasn't the most natural of albums. It was effectively born from the ashes of one of the most combustible proto-metal bands of the age, the Stooges. The Stooges managed two albums before finally collapsing in a heap of personal, professional, and substance-abuse issues. While not generating a whole lot of output, their two albums got them well-connected with bigger names in rock, such as the Velvet Underground and David Bowie. While bassist Dave Alexander and the Asheton brothers were good musicians, undeniably all the attention was on the antics of vocalist Iggy Pop. After a few years of who-knows-what, Iggy prepared to launch his solo career with a new guitarist, James Williamson, and production courtesy of Bowie. However, the search for a rhythm section brought the Ashetons back aboard (with Ron on the bass instead), and pretty soon it was clear this wasn't going to be a solo album, but the third Stooges album, albeit one with just Iggy on the cover and properly credited to "Iggy and the Stooges".

The passage of time (three years had elapsed since Fun House) was certainly a factor, along with the lineup configuration, in the stepped-up aggressiveness of this album over its predecessors. There aren't a lot of "extras" beyond the vocals-guitar-bass-drums configuration, and most of the songs don't mess around. I mean, one of the titles is "You're Pretty Face Is Going to Hell", miles removed from the detached-sounding names like "We Will Fall" and "Dirt" that peppered the first two albums. The production, of which a few mixes exist, is fairly awful, way mixing up Iggy and Williamson and squashing down the Ashetons, to the point where a number of the old fans, who saw the Ashetons as much "the Stooges" as Iggy Pop, cried foul. It's pretty clear that they were just a band-aid of sorts for this album and they were gone by the release of Kill City (co-credited to Iggy and Williamson), and Iggy Pop's "actual" solo albums that followed. The Stooges (minus Alexander, who was unceremoniously fired in 1970 and died in 1975) reunited a little while back, complete with the Ashetons. As if history was repeating itself, Williamson rejoined the band, after many years away from the industry, to keep things going following the death of Ron Asheton. Scott Asheton followed his brother into the hereafter a couple years later, leaving Pop and Williamson to continue an Asheton-less Stooges to the present.

Along with Fun House, this album was loaned to me by a friend who was barely able to squeak into one of their small-venue shows around the time of the reunion with the Ashetons. Lucky bastard!

It's Even Worse Than It Looks (Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein, 2012)

I'm harboring some doubts I'm going to make it to 52 this year. It's all my fault since I took on the mighty REAMDE, which was the length of three books. However, there's this slim volume, checking in at just over 200 pages, to counterbalance it. Sort of.

I generally don't care much for "current affairs" books since their shelf-life is ridiculously short, kind of like pre-season NFL predictions. This one was featured a few years ago on the Dan Rather Reports program. I thought it was interesting because it was essentially written by two guys who are fiscally conservative and has generally voted Republican. In this book, they discuss the concept of "asymmetrical polarization" in politics. This means that while both sides of the aisle are gravitating more to the wings, it is far more problematic on the Republican side. Therefore attempts by the media to give "equal time" to each side results in a far more ludicrous amount of time spent on fringe thought like the "legitimacy" of Obama and contributing to the obnoxious gridlock that characterizing modern politics.

Mann and Ornstein are very good at laying out the groundwork about how messed up everything is, but I felt they came up a little short in the solutions department. First off, I don't see any of it working for the very reasons they give for dysfunction. All of the proposals would be DOA once they reach any area controlled by the GOP. Second, and not their fault, is the nature of current affairs books getting outdated. The results of 2012 were still unknown at the time the book was written. I don't think they saw another "wave" election hitting in 2014 either. However, I do agree that an all-Republican controlled government would be a Very Bad Thing, especially when the party has gone so far to the right that even George W. Bush couldn't get their nomination anymore without changing his own platform (as we witnessed Romney and McCain do, to the disgust of "old-school" Republicans).

The "nonfiction - other" shelf has been fairly active for the year. Here are the titles read this year in that category:

The Prince - Machiavelli's classic of how to be a powerful person
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson's history of science and how we really got to know about really early Earth history
A Thread Across the Ocean - a book that had been on my mind forever about the trans-Atlantic cable
The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson's dramatic change of focus from men who stare at goats to sociopaths, including ones that run corporations and companies
Born to Run - picked up on a whim to inspire my new running habit; I will never run like those guys
Collapse - Jared Diamond's OK sequel to the iconic Guns, Germs and Steel
It's Even Worse Than It Looks - see above!

Also, three that didn't really fit anywhere else:

Strengths-Based Leadership - required reading for the program I'm in, but insightful. I created a "bizlit" category for future similar titles.
Carlos in Gonna Get It - the second-to-last title on my YA list, written by a fellow Colby alum.
The Dead and the Gone - the last of my old YA reading list, which I've since collapsed into whatever genre those books feel most comfortable being part of

You Could Have It So Much Better (Franz Ferdinand, 2005)

 

The Randomness better end its love affair with Franz Ferdinand soon or there isn't going to be anything left to love. Well, the year's a week from over, so if we're going to finish the quartet it better happen pretty soon.

Franz Ferdinand's debut album was so sensational that, in hindsight, it seems only natural that the sophomore slump would hit with the next one. At the time, however, it was hotly anticipated and timed very well, released just a year later. Unfortunately, the album, with a strangely apt title, left the listener a little cold. The music was good, but clearly recycled from what worked on the first album. The lyrics are pretty awful, and at times it just seemed too phoned-in to be serious. There are a few "slow" songs on this album, something the band didn't attempt previously, and it kind of shows why they avoided them in the first place.

The band clearly got the message that they were not going to get away with this approach again and took a little time off to retool their style. While the third album wouldn't put them back to the heights of their debut (and truth to tell, the band is still subject to some "whatever happened to...?" chatter), it definitely shook off some of the shortcomings of this album.

Yellow Submarine (The Beatles, 1969)

With all due respect to the Beatles, this is a real throwaway album. The popularity of Yellow Submarine (both the album and the movie) have always been a mystery to me, even though I adored the song as a kid. The film, which the Beatles had nearly zero involvement in, was sort of an aimless children's cartoon movie. All of the music was previously released except for four songs. Of those four, only "All Together Now" has a childlike spirit. The others were largely "homeless" songs that never found their way on to an album or single, and at one point were supposed to be part of an EP that was never released.

Except for the George Martin "score" songs (the last seven that sound like classical music), all of the songs here have been re-homed. "Yellow Submarine" is and always has been a track off the classic Revolver album from 1966. "It's Only a Northern Song" (a Sgt. Pepper era outtake), "All Together Now", "Hey Bulldog", and "It's All Too Much" ended up in mono form on the Mono Masters collection (primarily to sub in for the Past Masters material that had no mono equivalent), and "All You Need Is Love" is the closing track of Magical Mystery Tour. All of the songs, plus a bunch more previously released numbers, appear in stereo on the score-less Yellow Submarine Songtrack, which has the strange distinction of being the first Beatles "remaster", although they are also remixed a little, which may irritate the purist.

In the great Beatles remastering of 2009, this album, in original form with the seven score tracks, was still upheld as a canon release, which is appropriate. However "appropriate" and "great" should not be confused in this particular situation.

Space Oddity [Man of Words/Man of Music] (David Bowie, 1969)

First, a little program note. I'm calling this album Space Oddity even though the proper name is just David Bowie. However, to avoid confusion with the previous album of the same title, I'm sticking with the re-issue name (though not posting the re-issue cover). And, just to really mess with everybody, this album even sports a third title, Man of Words/Man of Music, which almost nobody uses anymore. Until 2009, pretty much everybody referred to the album as Space Oddity, which started with the re-issue version designed to capitalize on both the Ziggy Stardust era as well as the fact that the song of the same name was really his breakthrough hit. All was well and good until yet another re-issue reverted the name back to David Bowie. So, just to be absolutely clear, this is about the album featuring "Space Oddity", not the far more obscure self-titled album from the 1960's.

All right then! "Space Oddity" was one of those songs I had known for a long, long time, but I never bothered to check out the rest of the album until much more recently. By the time I got around to it, I was quite familiar with the album released the year after, The Man Who Sold the World, a much heavier album, and some live versions of these songs recorded for the BBC. Because of the runaway success of "Space Oddity", it may be tempting to think of this as Bowie's "space rock" era, but it's far more of a folk/country/singer-songwriter album, with a few nods to the "old" Bowie from the 1960's and a little foreshadowing of what was to come. Even a song like the brilliant "Cygnet Committee" is really only a spacey name for an elaborate, mostly-folk, multi-part song. Other than the title track, though, most of the songs are not standard classic rock radio fare. A lot of it could be fairly described as a more lucid Syd Barrett, an early idol of Bowie's. Songs like "Memories of a Free Festival" have an unmistakable "Hey Jude" vibe, and of course the Beatles were still very much a driving force in music in 1969.

As they say with Bowie, if you don't like the album you're currently listening to, you will certainly love the next one. While I couldn't bring myself to choose one over the other, the change of direction is obvious with The Man Who Sold the World, a heavier album that also gives the members of his band (an embryonic Spiders of Mars) more exposure and identity. But even that album would have it's own reaction in Hunky Dory, and within just a few years Bowie would leave it all behind to pursue blue-eyed soul and electronic music later in the decade.

Free Jazz (Ornette Coleman, 1961)

It will blow your mind. It will stress you out. It may do both. That's the beauty of Free Jazz! This really isn't the kind of album you put on for the heck of it, but since I am honor bound to report whatever I dial up in the morning, here it is.

On the surface of things, it seems kind of preposterous to name your album after the genre you are playing in, especially when the genre is still in its infancy. However, Ornette Coleman realized that to truly free jazz, one had to be freed from the confines of structure, abolishing even the "song" structure and even titles. Coleman also took advantage of stereo recording to create a double-quartet, meaning four guys were playing on each channel, and each channel was its own entity, meaning rather than a classic octet with a spread of instrumentation, the double-quartet features two drummers, two bassists, two brass, and two wind instruments.

Thanks to the CD format, the two parts of Free Jazz have been reunited into a complete 37-minute experience. The bonus track, nominally called "First Take", shows that it wasn't entirely a free-for-all, as it is clear the double-quartet is following the same progression of loose "movements". I think that "First Take" was tossed because the band was moving too quickly and didn't end up with an album-load of material, which was the intention of Free Jazz.

Satori (Flower Travellin' Band, 1971)

It would make sense to assume that if you know and like everything on a list except for one thing which you've never heard of, you'll probably like that as well. That would be the case here. Earlier this year, Ian Christe listed a number of essential hard rock albums. I'm looking over it now and here were the bands cited alongside Flower Travellin' Band as the creators of landmark hard rock: Alice Cooper, Blue Cheer, Blue Oyster Cult, Cream, Deep Purple, Hawkwind, Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Rush, The Stooges, The MC5.

With company like that, how could I ignore FTB? And furthermore, who were these guys? It seems terribly insensitive to say this, but they were working under the stigma of being Japanese. This is not to single out Japan, but, except for maybe ABBA, bands from non-English speaking countries, and especially non-white countries generally never received the recognition they deserved. Even a "diverse" box set like Nuggets II is probably 85% English-speaking countries and very few of the remaining 15% are from non-white countries (and out of 100-something tracks, there is exactly one song from Japan). Of course there is the matter of a non-English speaking group singing in English and playing western-style music, which illustrates what an incredible sway rock and roll was holding over the entire planet.

Anyway, back to FTB. They began life as a 1960's cover band called the Flowers, with an almost entirely different lineup (I think FTB and the Flowers shared a drummer). Early FTB was a primarily covers-driven outfit, ranging from hard rock standards like "White Room" to more surprising selections like Big Brother & the Holding Company's "Combination of the Two". With the demise of the hippie scene and the distortion of the British blues boom around 1970, FTB wisely saw which way the wind was blowing and adopted a very Black Sabbath approach to their music, both in vocals and instrumentation. Satori, consisting of five songs all named "Satori", is the first fruits of the new FTB. It is impossible to deny that FTB had absorbed a ton of Tony Iommi guitar and Ozzy Osbourne vocal influence. However, you if pay close attention, you will hear a Cream/Clapton-style fuzz guitar in places that defies the "all-Sabbath" theory.

Generally I don't like bonus tracks that just graft on stuff from other albums, but in this case they were helpful for indicating the direction the band would take on future albums. "Anywhere" and "Make Up" are almost entirely different then the "Satori" tracks, with the former being a very short acoustic blues piece and the latter being primarily keyboard-driven. The song "Hiroshima" is actually the vocal version of "Satori, Part III" with a tighter arrangement that cuts the running time in half. As for the fate of the band, they kind of tapered off around mid-decade due to their inability to develop a popular fan base, but thanks to their good relationship with critics and other musicians, they remained in one form or another until just a few years ago, when Joe Yamanaka died of cancer.

Cypress Grove (James Sallis, 2003)

I'm reading at "ramming speed" now, so get ready for a lot of end-of-year book posts. James Sallis has been on my to-read list for way too long. A year or two back I read Long Legged Fly, the first in the Lew Griffin series. This is the first of the Turner Trilogy. I'm not sure if he's planning on expanding beyond three volumes, but everything seems to indicate he's tied everything up (the series has been dormant since 2007 and was recently repackaged omnibus style). It was James Sallis's book reviews that referred me to one of my favorite authors, Jack O'Connell. I can't thank him enough for that, so I figured it sort of made sense to read his books too, especially since O'Connell has been pretty quiet these days.

Sallis is as much a poet as a mystery author, so the pacing of the prose and the organization of the narrative is unusual. I had to reread certain passages because they didn't lend themselves well to my "ramming speed" pace. Some other readers were put off by the non-chronological every-other-chapter flashbacks. I am far more forgiving; it's all part of the poetic expression. Joe Turner is a fascinating character and I look forward to continuing to read his story.

On a side note, Sallis is the author of Drive, which was recently made into a movie. Hopefully this will continue to raise his profile as an author, which I feel is richly deserved.

Typically in a year I'll read more mysteries than any other genre, though of late it hasn't been quite as dominant. In summary, these were the mysteries for 2014:

• The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly - the fifth (depending on what you count) Mickey Haller book, now being branded as "Lincoln Lawyer novels".
• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson - the first of the Jackson Brodie mysteries, recently made into a mini-series aired on PBS.
• Ovid by David Wishart - a novel of ancient Rome, a series better known in the UK
• The Germanicus Mosaic by Rosemary Rowe - another novel of ancient Rome, but set in ancient Britain (of course), and also a series better known in the UK
• Cypress Grove - see above

Music from Vanilla Sky (Various Artists, 2001)

Yep, that's a picture of Tom Cruise on my perfect little blog. Yay, randomness. I'm seriously amazed by anyone who can sustain a daily blog posting rate for longer than a year. By gum, the year has just two weeks to go and we are going to finish this beast!

As you probably know, I consider most soundtracks composed of pop songs (as opposed to original scores) to be glorified mix tapes. In fact, I would call them unsolicited mix tapes, given to you by somebody who doesn't know you very well as inevitably includes multiple WTF songs that you hate and routinely skip over. The Vanilla Sky soundtrack, which tries to be all weird things to all people, weird or not, is guilty as charged here.

I was a little surprised to read the overwhelmingly positive reception of the soundtrack, with Wikipedia even citing it as a reason for the success of the film (an English language remake of Abre los ojos). Maybe I need to see the movie for it to make sense, but it just seems like an uncomfortable mix of classic rock (Peter Gabriel, Todd Rundgren), "modern" rock (REM, Radiohead), and full-throated electronica (Leftfield, Looper). Maybe they are hoping that it will encourage people to diversify their listening interests, but it seems like fans of these genres like to keep to themselves. As in full evidence here, I obviously veer about different styles, though I have particular preferred flavors. I'm not sure the rest of the world consists of such diverse listening behaviors.

Possibly of interest is the "original" song included here by a certain Julie Gianni, which is the character played by Cameron Diaz. At least one other song (Paul McCartney's, the title track) probably was recorded expressly for the movie. It sounds like a bonus track to his album Driving Rain and is fairly standard Paul fare.

I swear someday I'll watch all the movies I have the soundtracks for. Most of them were plucked out of freebie bins. Compared to the others, this one is probably not too bad.

Deep Purple (1969)

For being the band's sole eponymous album, it is one of their least well-known and most unusual releases. The "original" Deep Purple formed in 1968 from prominent session musicians (Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Lord, and Nick Simper) joining forces with singer Rod Evans and drummer Ian Paice of the quasi-obscure Oxford group the Maze. Such impressive musical talent was nearly squandered by extremely limited and rushed studio time for their debut, but, against all odds, they yielded a major hit ("Hush") in the United States. Owing to the success of that single, the album didn't do half-bad either. The next two albums would prove a continuous uphill battle against anonymity in the UK and a train-wreck of a record label in the US, with increasingly diminished returns.

In spite of the haphazard "Garden of Earthly Delights" cover concept, Deep Purple shows a lot more polish than the previous two albums. They earned enough credibility from their debut to allow for more quality time in the studio, which especially worked wonders for Blackmore, who plays as aggressively as ever here. However, as is the case with all three "Mark I" albums, Lord still carries the band. His name is on every original piece, including "Blind", which is his alone, and "Chasing Shadows", which bears the unusual "Lord/Paice" credit. This would be the last album until 1974's Stormbringer to feature original material not credited at least in part to Blackmore. You can sort of understand how Evans and Simper aren't exactly "progressing" with the rest of the band. More on that in a moment. For being the album released right before their heaviest moments, it's a tame affair, though they sometimes find room for a little bit of shredding, particularly on the "alternate" version of "Bird Has Flown" and the bluesy jams "The Painter" and "Why Didn't Rosemary". The loping rhythm of the latter would find its way into the live extended versions of "Wring That Neck", a staple of their setlist until around 1971.

The band had sunk so low by this album that I don't think they even gave it a proper release in the UK and it charted very low in the US. By the time anyone got around to hearing it in the UK they were probably already getting familiar with a "new" Deep Purple that was starting to build a groundswell of excitement at long last in their home country. Evans and Simper were out; the former was considered too much of a crooner and out of touch with hard rock to stay aboard, while the latter, somewhat controversially, was deemed "old fashioned". In their stead were Ian Gillan, who had actually turned them down the previous year, and his long-time colleague from Episode Six, Roger Glover. The new lineup would prove far more than the sum of its parts, especially in heaviness, to a level both bands had only flirted with before. As for Evans and Simper, they would turn out to be a little heavier themselves. Almost right away, Simper was demonstrating his own hard rock credentials on the first Warhorse album. Meanwhile, Rod Evans reappeared in the United States around 1972, teaming up with two ex-Iron Butterflies (and superdrummer Bobby Caldwell) in the debut of Captain Beyond. Of course, neither one would overtake Deep Purple (and all three might as well not exist according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Shame), but it was pretty cool to see that even the Purple castoffs were capable of generating their own style of hard rock.

Phones Calling (Getaway Cruiser, 1997)

This is a pretty weird one. Getaway Cruiser broke big in 1998 and promptly cracked up soon after. They had been around in some form or another most of the decade with minor releases such as WhirlingRoad (recorded under that name) and Instrumentals. Nothing really explosive beyond the Ann Arbor/Detroit scene, though. Phones Calling throws in some past elements alongside what was to come. Three of the songs would be somewhat/heavily reworked and re-released in their 1998 eponymous album. Another four are 1-2 minute mini-instrumentals, much in the spirit of their earlier experimental efforts. Finally, two of the tracks don't appear anywhere else, and one of them sports a substantially different lineup.

Not long after their following full-length album, the band announced the sacking of lead singer Dina Harrison and the band soon folded, then reorganized as Six Clips, which I know nothing about. There is little substantial information about the band beyond what was written around 1998 and they still don't have a Wikipedia article to at least eulogize them. From what I can deduce, the Peters Bros. were more involved in the production side of the business, which I think included some early involvement with Kid Rock for whatever that's worth. One of the Peters brothers and the bassist on most of this EP (Mark Dundon) adopted requisite silly pseudonyms and joined the Electric Six for a little while. Beyond this, everything is pretty much a big question mark.

Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866)

For some reason I never experienced the Russian novel in high school, so here we have, just 20 years later, my first taste of Dostoevsky. Thanks to War and Peace (and Leo Tolstoy in general), Russian literature may seem like a collection of large, impenetrable works. While Crime and Punishment is hardly a short story, it isn't endless and it's setting is quite confined, not an epic sweep. Most of the action happens in small apartments, taverns, and, on occasion, the streets of St. Petersburg. Although not something to speed read, the translation is modern, fresh, and clear.

This wraps up my "classic" reading for the year. For the sake of my own personal classification, I have only applied that label to books in the Novels for Students series, which is a little misleading in that I read books that are classics in spirit, but just not included in that series, and the series itself includes some books that are arguably yet to the be classics. For example, Starship Troopers, a 65 year old work, was placed with science fiction, but Annie John, a mere 29, is here with the classics.

The books in review:
Wuthering Heights - an equally challenging/rewarding reading experience
Animal Farm - easy to read, but important and timeless. I read it in high school and it was totally worth a second reading.
Annie John - the debut novel of Jamaica Kincaid, perhaps a "classic of the future"?
The Awakening and Other Stories - once daring, now dated/quaint tale of a woman struggling within the confines of her "role" in society
Crime and Punishment - see above!

Greatest Hits (Whitesnake, 1994)

Perhaps more accurately called "Greatest Hits from Whitesnake's Last Three Albums", this is functional yet uninspiring collection for the casual American fan base and their unexplainable interest in "hair metal". I myself picked it up from a record club back in college, so I got my money's worth.

As I just indicated, other than a single bonus track from around 1990, all of the songs appear on three albums: Slide It In (1984), Whitesnake/1987, and Slip of the Tongue (1989). The first of these is the "remixed" version, which was the start of the "new" Whitesnake, a different kind of animal than what the band had been up to that point. The "old" Whitesnake enjoyed an unusual closeness to its Deep Purple roots, and at one point half the band was ex-Purple. Even the non-Purple membership wasn't too far removed from that band; Mel Galley, Bernie Marsden, and Cozy Powell (for starters) were already part of the family tree prior to joining. In 1982, the band nearly dissolved as David Coverdale's interest in the band faltered due to personal issues which quickly became personnel issues with an acrimonious split with guitarist Micky Moody, with the rest of the band except for Jon Lord quickly following him out the door. Oddly enough Moody returned for Slide It In, but his working relationship with Coverdale was on life support by that time, and his contributions were removed from the US released and replaced with John Sykes'. That's sort of the point where the band turned into something else, with Lord's return to Deep Purple cementing that notion. In fact, Jon Lord was so mixed down on the album it was a joke, sort of like buying a giant drum kit and only playing the hi-hat cymbal. The other material here is completely over-the-top 1980's excess at its finest. In fact, even Coverdale has recoiled from the Slip of the Tongue material, though the sentiment of that decade being some kind of "golden age" has done wonders for his career in recent years.

The rest I will explain in pictures, from the last "old" Whitesnake lineup to the first "end" of the group around 1990. All pictures are courtesy of my friends at the Deep Purple Appreciation Society and their fantastic family tree project. Observe the increasing amount of hair care product being used....

The 1980's had consequences.

Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 1 (Nortec Collective, 2002)

Another one selected from the freebie pile that was a pleasant surprise. It turns out remixing drum rims, tubas (and other horns), accordions, and other distinctly south-of-the-border features is pretty cool. Sometimes referred to as "tech-Mex", the Nortec Collective merges Norteño and techno, as their name suggests. It's a combination of individual artists (Bostitch, Fussible, etc.) working under a common name in various arrangements, so it's sort of an compilation, but not quite. I honestly don't know a whole lot about how exactly it works and when the Collective is in effect or spread out among its constituents, which seems to be more the case in recent years.

The first track, "Polaris" by Bostitch, has been used in at least a couple TV commercials, and I was probably one of the few watching that said "hey! I know that!" It's probably the most illustrative of the style of the album overall, though many of the other tracks favor a more techno sound with extra synthesizers, whereas on "Polaris" you can really get a feel for the source material. If you don't like it, then the album is probably not for you.

The Köln Concert (Keith Jarrett, 1975)

The Köln Concert isn't one of those cliche "jazz" records. First off, it's just Keith Jarrett and a piano, with no band or sidemen to be seen. Second, it's part of the ECM family, best known for exploring the spaces in-between jazz and classical. Finally, it has a really odd history behind it.

This isn't an easy album to get into it. It really shouldn't be something you randomly select in the morning. There are no "songs"; the concert is structured more like movements of a classical piece, and all of them are officially without titles. Each movement drifts about from the ethereal to more tightly syncopated parts. Also, at certain times it sounds like there's a vocalist. That's just Jarrett with his trademark humming, moaning, and grunting along with the music, kind of like the guy at the gym bench-pressing twice his weight and making sure everybody around him knows how heavy it is. Doubly weird is Jarrett's notorious intolerance for any audience "participation", right down to the errant cough. So for God's sake, don't perceive this as an invitation to start singing along!

As previously mentioned, there's quite a few stories buzzing around this particular recording. Most interesting is that the piano itself was certifiably awful, due to some confusion beyond Jarrett's control. Amazingly, he adapted his style to compensate for the instrument's liabilities. In the end, he got the last laugh, as this album would end up being the biggest-selling solo jazz performance album in history and probably one of if not the landmark ECM recording.

High Voltage (AC/DC, 1976)

Here we have the very beginning of the AC/DC catalog, outside of Australia anyway. Last time AC/DC showed up around here I was pretty ho-hum about it, mainly because I've never warmed much to anything since Back in Black. The chronology is a little twisted since until 1978's Powerage, there was no consistency between Australian releases and the rest of the world. Therefore the Australian High Voltage and this album only share a few tracks.

The moment of pure genius on this album is "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)", which features quite possibly the most clever use of bagpipes in rock history. Ironically, Bon Scott had never actually played bagpipes before. Producers George Young and Harry Vanda (ex-Easybeats, the former the brother of Angus and Malcolm) got their wires crossed and just assumed that Scott's involvement with a bagpipe band involved him playing the instrument, when, in fact, he was the drummer for that outfit. Nevertheless, it adds a soaring quality to the song you just wouldn't otherwise get. Since bagpipes are a risky addition to any music, it remains the sole AC/DC song to feature them, which is probably for the best, just to go out on top and not beat it to death or turn it into a gimmick.

The rest of the album is pretty straightforward 1970's-era AC/DC. It doesn't have a lot of flash, but plenty of raunch. For the mid-1970's, when many bands were sporting sophisticated instrumentation, elaborate solos, or complicated arrangements, it was a bold statement. That's what they were going for, and it's a common theme across all of the band's albums.

Incidentally the only common personnel thread left between this album and AC/DC today is poster-child Angus Young himself. Original bassist Mark Evans is long gone, Bon Scott's story is well-known, and more recently Malcolm Young has retired due to dementia, while drummer Phil Rudd, never the most permanent aspect of the band, has had some...ahem...legal problems keeping him busy. I suppose the fact they are even still around releasing albums is nothing short of a minor miracle.

Coda (Led Zeppelin, 1982)

Coda is the Pluto of Zeppelin albums. It is the ninth album, the least of the nine, the last of the nine, and probably shouldn't even be considered a proper album. While the analogy fails in that it is not the favorite of album of most 8 year olds, I was fairly impressed how well it holds up.

The problem of Led Zeppelin that gives us Coda is the band's distaste until very recently to include bonus tracks on their regular albums. For example, any copy of Houses of the Holy will have eight tracks with around 40 minutes worth of music, even though a compact disc can hold way more than that. Even the "deluxe" version just includes alternate mixes of the seven of the eight tracks, all relegated to a "bonus disc". Ironically, a single version of Coda on CD for a long time for the only Zeppelin album that actually had bonus tracks.

So here was my great idea. Some of it is a little crazy, so bear with me. Step one is to make Physical Graffiti a single album and eliminate Coda. I'm treading on dangerous ground, I know, as many love the former way more than the latter, but keep in mind that the only reason Physical Graffiti was two discs is that they had enough scraps lying around from the previous five albums to bulk up number six. Step two is to delegate bonus tracks as follows:

Led Zeppelin: "Baby Come On Home"
Led Zeppelin II: "Travelling Riverside Blues", "White Summer/Black Mountain Side"
Led Zeppelin III: "We're Gonna Groove", "Poor Tom", "I Can't Quit You Baby", "Hey Hey What Can I Do", "Bron-Yr-Aur"
Led Zeppelin IV: "Down By the Seaside", "Night Flight", "Boogie With Stu"
Houses of the Holy: "Walter's Walk", "The Rover", "Houses of the Holy", "Black Country Woman"
Presence: "Bonzo's Montreux"
In Through the Out Door: "Ozone Baby", "Darlene", "Wearing and Tearing"

Everybody gets a little something, and some fringe benefits include a much tighter, guttier Physical Graffiti, and the reunion of "Houses of the Holy" with its namesake. Just so the first two albums didn't feel left out, I gave them Coda's bonus tracks. You're welcome.

As a final thought, the songs on Coda really are pretty terrible, even if you aren't going by Zeppelin standards. Some of the songs start off well enough ("Darlene", "Ozone Baby") and just kind of wander away. Others like "Wearing and Tearing" and "Walter's Walk" are complete messes from start to finish. The older stuff is a bit stronger, but feels like a bad match next to these other songs. So there you have it, another Coda-hater. I hope you weren't expecting a grand re-evaluation, because I just don't have it in me.

Rush (1974)

Long ago, I decided I was going to get into Rush big time, but for some reason I never got past the first album. I can't put my finger on why I stalled out so quickly, but I don't really think it was anything Rush did wrong. So, ironically, the one Rush album I have is the first one, before drumming legend Neil Peart signed on, which is probably full-on blasphemous to true Rush fans. Oh well, I am what I am.

The first album, released six years after the formation of the band, shows its influences, which are about 80% Led Zeppelin and 20% Black Sabbath. Not surprising, seeing that both bands were incredibly influential on bands recording in North America in the early and mid 1970's. While Geddy Lee channels Robert Plant here and there (especially on the opening track), Alex Lifeson wavers between Page and Iommi, sometimes employing a lower sound more stylistically closer to the latter. Since Peart would handle most of the lyrics on future albums, the trademark Rush lyrics aren't here, but there's a lot of "ooh baby", especially in the opener.

If you like a lot of band drama, don't look here. Rush is almost as boring as ZZ Top! While the band has musically been through a lot of changes, not all of them appealing, if you've found any of the stuff reviewed here even remotely interesting, they are worth checking out.

Rumours (Fleetwood Mac, 1977)

I've chronicled a number of bands that spawned during the British blues boom that would evolve into substantially non-bluesy territory. There was no dominant trend; these artists would move into prog, hard rock, proto-metal, folk, and pop. The usual pattern was that most of these bands earned a little extra success denied to their former purist colleagues, but would quickly destabilize and implode. For example, take a band like the Groundhogs or Jethro Tull, which was rapidly consumed by a single member, rendering the "band" irrelevant. Some, like Pink Floyd or the Moody Blues, would suffer debilitating personality conflicts. Fleetwood Mac, one of many bands born in the cradle built by John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers, took a somewhat different path and soared to startling success, with this album, Rumours, being the apex of the "reborn" band.

By 1974, it was clear the old Fleetwood Mac was tottering on the edge of irrelevancy. Original leader Peter Green was mentally unstable and left the band in 1970. The band then sifted through a number of singers and guitarists, some as edgy as Green, while bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, hardly "leaders" sat in the middle of the vortex. In 1975 they went in a boldly different direction by adding Lindsey Buckingham on guitar, along with his girlfriend Stevie Nicks. And the rest was history. Like its predecessor, Rumours sounds nothing like any of the older Fleetwood Macs since two of the three major contributors were new to the band and given full latitude to write songs in their own style (Christine McVie would continue to serve as the other third of the band's creative outlet, while Fleetwood and John McVie historically wrote little to nothing).

Most (not quite all) of the songs on this album still get regular airplay on the radio and other outlets. "Don't Stop" of course was a huge hit in the 1992 as the official anthem of Bill Clinton's successful presidential campaign, and I think "Go Your Own Way" was in Forrest Gump. I can even remember as a kid hearing these songs on the "modern" radio station, circa 1982 or so, while Buckingham's "Never Going Back Again" was used for some children's programming segment on PBS back in the day. Even more than the previous album, Rumours became the soundtrack of a generation, not bad for a band that started life as a particularly pure vein of British blues. Of course the band around this time was experiencing quite a storm in the media and among themselves, hence the apt title of the album. That's well chronicled elsewhere and I don't have the stamina to dissect all of that.

Rumours was also a high point for the irreversibly changed Fleetwood Mac. In spite of high anticipation for 1979's double-album Tusk, it was clear the band was showing signs of overheating, like everything swirling around this album finally started to catch up with them. The 1980's are better known for Stevie Nicks' solo work than that of Fleetwood Mac and although the band was technically still "together" more than officially disbanded. Aside from 2003's Say You Will, they haven't been much of an active recording unit, though the live The Dance did wonders to resuscitate their image and they have no problem selling out arenas to this day.

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (Traffic, 1971)

To employ an obvious anachronism, this is Traffic 2.0. The three core members (Steve Winwood, Chris Wood, and Jim Capaldi) restarted the band in the wake of the dissolution of Blind Faith (the same supergroup that killed off the original Traffic). The new Traffic, born out of a Steve Winwood solo project than "transformed" back into Traffic, featured an expanded lineup around the core three and sported a more laid-back jazzy sound than the old band.

Apparently the CD I have is all honked up and the track listing is wrong (only 1, 2, and 6 are in the correct place), but this doesn't necessarily require a certain sequence to be properly enjoyed. However, the CD isn't the special version, which includes a six-minute version of "Rock 'n Roll Stew", a minute-and-a-half more than the album version. While it was the title track that probably remains one of the best 10+ minute songs of the era, "Stew" drove me crazy for a period of time a few years ago, when I heard it playing in a casino in South Lake Tahoe and I could not for the life of me identify it (and I already had it!!). Needless to say, typing "gone gone gone" into a search engine will lead to some pretty crazy results. I felt so silly when I realized it was Traffic all along. One does not simply memorize 10,000 songs, however.

Aside from Winwood, every performer on this album is either dead or incarcerated. Unless you count Mike Kellie who played drums on "Rainmaker" and wasn't really part of the band, that's enough to make one think twice about have musicians having it easy!

Lock Up the Wolves (Dio, 1990)

In the wake of the cataclysmic split of Black Sabbath in 1982, it seems like Ronnie James Dio and Vinny Appice got the best end of the deal. While the Butler/Iommi faction kept the Black Sabbath name, the band spiraled to near-oblivion by 1990, consisting of Tony Iommi and whoever he could recruit (Geezer Butler cut his ties around 1984). Meanwhile, Dio created a band with his own name on it, released his first "solo" album since 1963 and somehow managed to maintain a solid lineup devised from his Rainbow and Black Sabbath roots through most of the decade. Except for one personnel hiccup (Vivian Campbell exiting, Craig Goldy entering), the same lineup bashed out four albums in five years. In spite of a little fresh blood on 1987's Dream Evil, it was becoming clear that the band needed to evolve or be condemned to releasing increasingly weaker reflections of Holy Diver. When Goldy turned out to be a more temporary than permanent fix, the rest of the band (Appice, bassist Jimmy Bain, and keyboard player Claude Schnell) soon exited by decade's end, and Dio (the man) was tasked with rebranding Dio (the band) for a new decade.

The Lock Up the Wolves lineup was far more session-men than permanent band members, either by design or by accident. Certainly bassist Teddy Cook, Jens Johannsen (keyboards) and drummer Simon Wright (ex-AC/DC of all bands) were better known as hired guns. Meanwhile new axe-man Rowan Robertson was an out-of-left-field selection, only about 18 years old, literally of another generation. The resulting album still rests very much in the shadow of 1980's Dio, though some conventions were finally tossed, such as the nine-song array with the title track in the second position. I think the 11 song approach may be more due to the CD overtaking the vinyl record and allowing longer album running times. In spite of an entirely new band, the overall sound is not a huge deviation from Dream Evil, though, like that album the energy is pretty good, showing a healthy amount of influence from the surrounding music scene, by now dominated by speed metal and glam rock, with grunge still a couple years away.

Whether this was meant to be a "Dio for the 90's" band may never been known. Between the "session" orientation of the lineup, plus Dio and Robertson never really clicking, it may have been for the best that a chance encounter with Geezer Butler resulted in Dio's return to Black Sabbath, putting Dio on indefinite hiatus. Although the resulting Dehumanizer (which owes more than a little to what Dio was doing here) was a big career resuscitator for all parties, personalities once again split the band the same way as before. The next Dio albums, Strange Highways and Angry Machines, would finally reveal a really different-sounding Dio, though financially dark times would haunt Dio for most of the 1990's.

On a personal note, this was one of the last Dio albums I bought, around the time of his illness and death. I was kind of embarrassed to call myself and fan and have skipped over it. Thankfully CD's were getting pretty darn cheap around this time. There's still a few later albums I've never bothered to track down, but maybe the completionist in me needs to assert himself once and for all!

No Answer (Electric Light Orchestra, 1971)

This is a great album. Don't let the bleak title fool you (read the story here). It's the culmination of everything Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood had been working toward through the 1960's in the Idle Race and the Move respectively. By decade's end the two joined forces in the Move, and redesigned the band as the cello-centric Electric Light Orchestra. (Meanwhile the Lynne-less Idle Race would disband in 1972.) Playing cellos and other bowed string instruments in rock music wasn't a new thing. In fact a whole subgenre, "baroque pop" was alive and well through the latter half of the 1960's. The cello would appear in unusual places like Beatles albums and songs by the Spencer Davis Group and the Hollies. ELO would take all of this as a beginning, and raise the cello profile to the next level, as the heir apparent to the electric guitar.

For those more familiar with ELO's larger-than-life era from the mid-to-late 1970's, this album is a considerable shock to the system. On no other album is the "orchestra" part of the name so heavily emphasized, be it in the hard-sawing cellos of the "10538 Overture" or through instrumental tableaus such as "The Battle of Marston Moor" or "Manhattan Rumble" (the former being so dense that drummer Bev Bevan refused to participate). In fact, the core trio of the initial ELO (Bevan, Wood, and Lynne) is all portrayed sitting behind cellos, rather than their regular instruments, leading one of believe they were forecasting Apocalyptica 25 years ahead of schedule. The main reason this album stands apart from the rest of the ELO catalog is Roy Wood. Although Lynne is fairly non-commercial on this album, Wood's compositions in particular don't seem particularly hit-oriented and are usually the darker, moodier ones, like the Eleanor Rigby-esque "Look at Me Now". On the other hand, his "Jumping Biz" (a more-than-obvious nod to "Classical Gas") is one of the most gleeful points of the entire album.

Like a precious substance made in the lab, the lifespan (half life?) of the original ELO was brutally short, "decaying" into Lynne and Bevan's more commercially successful ELO (which compartmentalized the "orchestra" and re-emphasized more tradition rock instrumentation), and Wood's Wizzard, a commercially disastrous quasi-solo venture he rode to oblivion. Maybe it was too good to be true to keep Lynne and Wood together beyond a single album. Nevertheless, as stated at the beginning this is a great album. You can't dance to it, but even some of the weirder songs will invariably get stuck in your head.