Technical Ecstasy (Black Sabbath, 1976)

It is well chronicled that many Black Sabbath fans only consider the eight albums with Ozzy Osbourne to be canon, but this album, along with Never Say Die! (1978) can be challenging to the purists, who clearly lose interest after the fast part of "Symptom of the Universe" dissolved on Sabotage (1975). The band has actually been showing signs of fatigue and strain as far back as Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973) but the paradigm shift hit somewhere during the Sabotage recording sessions, when the classic "Sabbath sound" that launched entire genres from stoner rock to doom metal gave way to a more standard hard rock sound, with softer moments and more keyboards. While Sabotage is still beloved by the purists (a "true" Sabbath album with a few weak spots), Technical Ecstasy is not (a "phony" Sabbath album with a few flashbacks of brilliance). Suddenly, the band that extolled "Iron Man" and "Children of the Grave" was playing homages to rock and roll ("Back Street Kids", and the tepid single "Rock and Roll Doctor") and even ballads ("It's Alright", "She's Gone"). Sure, there were a few moments to remind listeners this was still Black Sabbath ("You Won't Change Me", "Dirty Women"), but they are in the minority and none really are true throwbacks to the early days.

Reading over the above paragraph makes me sound like one of these purists. I am not. In fact, I am so not pure that I am confessing right here that Technical Ecstasy was the first album by Black Sabbath I ever bought. Keep in mind this was 1993 and I didn't work for the Department of Defense, so the Internet wasn't a part of my life and my friends weren't much into 1970's metal, so things boiled down into a bit of a guessing game as to what album to try out. I think my 17 year old mind thought I should just pick up something from the year of my birth. Beside all of this, I enjoy Black Sabbath is all of its different forms: the Ozzy, Dio, Gillan, and (somewhat) Tony Martin eras. None of them are perfect. For example, the Dio stuff is technically far more proficient than any of the Ozzy albums, but they are more representative than groundbreaking for the music of the times.

Turning back to our featured album, it would seem that the main liabilities are the lightweight material and the poor production work. The production is really quite bad, leaving everything sounding a little muddy. It seems like if you see Robin Black as the producer, proceed with caution. Black was primarily involved with Jethro Tull in an engineer capacity and fell in with Sabbath around 1975, also as an engineer. Stuff with Black credited as "engineer" seem fine, but the two Sabbath albums where he is the producer, this one and 1983's Born Again, have some of the most hideous production I have ever heard at the professional level. As for the material, sure it's a bit light. Bill Ward makes his singing debut on "It's Alright", as mellow as old "Changes" from way back when, but even more laid back. While light, the material is also fairly adventurous compared to what came before and most definitely compared to what lay ahead in the 1980's. There is a lot of keyboards going on, something that had become more a part of the band since Rick Wakeman lent his services to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. They are used to great effect on "You Won't Change Me" and "Gypsy" in particular and tastefully enough on "Back Street Kids" and "Dirty Women". On the other hand "Rock and Roll Doctor" is honky tonk to the point of almost putting Dio's old band Elf to shame. There is still a great deal of emphasis on the riffs, something Sabbath did very well on the previous three albums, but Tony Iommi was getting more frisky in his soloing and would continue to create solo-dominated songs well into the next decade and simply the riffs. If the "Freebird"-esque "Dirty Women" wasn't a sign of things to come, I'd be hard-pressed to point out another song.

Ozzy people cite this album as the reason he quit, emphasizing his "refusal" to sing on "It's Alright" and being moved to stage left, putting Iommi in the center. True, it wasn't a happy time for Ozzy or the band in general, soured by drugs, con-men, constant touring, and other rock and roll hardships. In fact, he did quit the band after the album, which continued with ex-Fleetwood Mac singer Dave Walker. Neither side was happy with the new order and the old band was quickly reassembled. Never Say Die! is a far better album with better production and more exciting material, but it was only a stopgap measure and Ozzy left again (or was fired? - it depends on who's talking) and even Geezer Butler threw in the towel, albeit very briefly. The music obviously took a new direction under Ronnie James Dio. Although the Dio era itself was quite short, it established Black Sabbath as Tony Iommi's band going forward all the way into the 1990's.

Then Everything Changed (Jeff Greenfield, 2011)

The "what if?" game gets played out in both fiction and non-fiction. This book falls firmly into the latter category. While the three timelines presented in this book didn't actually happen (ask President Hart if you don't believe me), Greenfield uses actual historical quotes to illustrate what could have been and, in the scale of all things, doesn't veer too far away from our own timeline.

In brief, the jumping off points are:

(1) A suicide bomber takes out President-elect John F. Kennedy in Palm Beach, propelling LBJ to the Oval Office three years sooner than in our timeline. (In reality, the bomber called off his plans at the last minute.)

(2) Bobby Kennedy exits through the kitchen, but with brother-in-law Steve Smith in front of him, who notices and takes down Sirhan Sirhan before he can carry out his plot. (In reality, you know what happened.)

(3) In the most unlikely of the three divergences, President Ford corrects a horrific gaffe during a debate with Jimmy Carter, allowing him to close the gap in the 1976 election. (In reality, said gaffe was widely credited with killing his comeback momentum and paving Carter's path to victory.)

I won't spoil things anymore than I already have for prospective readers, but the first one was the most horrifying, the second, bogged down in convention minutiae, was the least interesting (C'mon, Jeff! It's RFK!!), and the third was the most speculative and, frankly, humorous. Again, nothing drifts too far from reality. No President Hulk Hogan or Amerika type scenarios. For those who think Greenfield made everything up from scratch, he provides "real" context for each story element in the appendix. All in all, well worth reading, especially if you read more politics than fiction, oddly enough.

12 X 5 (The Rolling Stones, 1964)

The Stones followed up their least-original-titled first album with a cleverly-named sophomore release for the American market with 12 X 5, released in the latter days of 1964. (Meanwhile, the British market had to endure a far more boringly titled Rolling Stones No. 2 that had almost nothing in common with this album except for the cover.) Being an early Stones album, it's still more covers than original stuff, and even among the originals "Nanker Phelge" represents about as much as the embryonic Jagger/Richards partnership here. While some are more jams than songs ("2120 South Michigan Avenue") or fairly primitive stabs at songwriting ("Congratulations"), others show clever synthesis of their bread-and-butter covers ("Grown Up Wrong"). However, this early in the game, it's probably better to have more covers anyway because the Stones were still just so good at bashing them out, fast and powerful. The only one the seems a little awkward, being more of pop provenance than R&B or blues, is "Under the Boardwalk". "Time Is On My Side" and "It's All Over Now" are veritable classics in the Stones' repertoire, however.

12 X 5 is one of three albums that had no proper UK counterpart (the others being Rolling Stones Now! and December's Children). As indicated often before, the early Stones catalog confuses the $%^& out of me. Every album through Between the Buttons is either a UK or US album, many sharing the same title with different tracks, and frequently sporting different mixes. As is well-known from the Beatles mono mix analyses, many early British artists mixed in mono for the UK and stereo for the US. When the re-releases hit for the Rolling Stones catalog, some titles like Aftermath appeared in both forms, while others omitted the UK versions. Although I would need complicating graphing software to be sure, I think at the end of the day the 5 UK albums and 7 US albums fairly well cover everything except maybe the earliest singles.

The Ghosts of Cannae (Robert L. O'Connell, 2010)

It didn't get much worse for the Roman Republic than Cannae. This is saying a lot considering about a century earlier the city was sacked and damn-near terminated by angry Gauls. But this is the Roman Republic, which can take a licking and keep on ticking.

Readers hoping for an intensive study of the battle, complete with charts, maps, and other essential data may find the book a bit lacking in this department. I know the extensive Osprey military book series can help with his. While Cannae is the main event of the book, the subject matter is more accurately described as a narrative of the Second Punic War. However, O'Connell doesn't forget that "Cannae" appears in the title of the book and puts a special emphasis on the role of battle's survivors, who transform from notorious pariahs to unsung avengers. Since O'Connell is a military history first and classicist second, or at least his bibliography would indicate such, the battle descriptions and analysis are given somewhat more attention than the basic historical narrative. This is fine though, as he never dives so into the minutiae of battle that readers get lost. However, readers more interested in the political and social aspects rather than the battles themselves may be better served by many of the fine books written about the period.

Duet (Illinois Speed Press, 1970)

It turns out that I chronicled the Illnois Speed Press fairly well in my post from July of their first, self-titled album. So I won't delve into band history much here, other than to say that Illinois Speed Press and Duet sport two mostly-different lineups. Whereas the first album was the band Illinois Speed Press, Duet, as the name insinuates, is singer/guitarists Paul Cotton and Kal David backed by session musicians, including Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine.

Throughout the album, listeners will notice not just the instrumental shift from "band" style tracks to more of a solo artist with a session backup band sound, but also that the vocal emphasis is far more centered on Cotton than David. This probably has much to do with the songs of the album being more suited to Cotton's more country-style delivery. David's approach is more bluesy; think of label-mate Chicago's Terry Kath. He gets his turn with "The Visit", but the day belongs to Cotton here, probably peaking with "Dearly", sporting an achingly emotional string section paired with what sounds like Chicago's horn section. One should probably keep in mind that the explosive success of Chicago was probably heavy on their common producer's mind. Also, bands like Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Flying Burrito Brothers were clearly making an imprint on the band at this point in ways not evident on the previous album.

I go back and forth on which album is the better of the two. If you like adventure, I'd recommend the first album with its mix of late-era psych and lush acoustic numbers. However, Duet is a more polished and consistent effort. That consistency, mind you, is a good deal more rural in flavor, so it isn't necessarily an across-the-board improvement. Unlike many bands of the period, however, the very fact they even released a second album is a remarkable fact in itself!

Soon after Duet was released and did not chart, Paul Cotton was drafted into Poco, where he would spend most of the next forty years (he would import this album's "Bad Weather" to their third album). Kal David mostly vanished. As noted above, these career trajectories were well in place during the recording of this album.

The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack (The Nice, 1967)

If you stumbled upon this looking for the short-lived Australian band Nice (1991-1994), then I'm sorry to tell you that this is about the short-lived English band The Nice (1967-1971) and their first album. I don't know anything about the former band other than the fact they have a similar name to a band I know a bit more about. Anyhow.....

Like most people, The Nice appeared on my radar because it's the band that contributed Keith Emerson to Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Unlike Greg Lake in King Crimson and Carl Palmer in Atomic Rooster, Emerson was no side player in The Nice, but the main attraction. The band initially was assembled as a backing band for singer P. P. Arnold, which seemed to be a big thing to pair American female singers with British rock bands at the time. The instigator was none other than Andrew Loog Oldham, of Rolling Stones fame. None of the band members were particularly well-known, except maybe guitarist Davy O'List who had freakbeat credentials from The Attack. The experiment with backing Arnold seemed to work for a few seconds before the band took on a life of its own, mainly driven by Emerson.

The first album, The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack, was recorded and released in 1967 but hit the markets so late in the year it often gets a 1968 release credit. This in turn led a number of critics to feel that The Nice came to the psych-rock party too late to be much of a player. Nicer critics (no pun intended) looking back from a later time, however, cited the album as a herald of the nascent prog rock movement. Listening to it closely, one can see valid points in both arguments. For those familiar with the band's entire output and early ELP, the first Nice album stands apart from the rest. The obvious difference is that Emerson is sparring with an actual guitarist, not a guest guitarist or the bass player moonlighting on lead. O'List is certainly a weird foil. He never really dominates Emerson on any song, though he is always present. He has a really wild style, clearly of the Hendrix school. If Emerson sometimes gets a little crazy in his solos, then O'List with about the same frequency plays calmly. It actually works strangely well, hearing a neo-classical lick from Emerson followed by a distorted scattershot reply from O'List. Lee Jackson (bass) and Brian Davison (drums, replacing Ian Hague right after the split with Arnold) serve as the nothing-special-but-not-bad-either rhythm section. They tend to shine more on the later albums. About half the songs on Emerlist Davjack are more pop-orientated ("Bonnie K", "Tantalising Maggie"), with the most pop-leaning being credited to Jackson/O'List. The others are extended works with heavy avant-garde and classical leanings ("Dawn", "War and Peace"), though relatively restrained compared to Emerson's later work. "Rondo" is an great early example of what Emerson would use to great effect later in his career, turning a classic piece, in this case Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk", on its ear. The cool jazz standard is ripped out of its time signature and put into a straight 4/4 giving it a gallop that sounds like something more akin to a Western scene where the cavalry is riding to the rescue, and a fire that one would never think of as "cool" anything.

One matter which would ultimately lead to the collapse of the band was the fact that nobody could really sing. Since they were originally designed as a backing band, I don't think vocals were very high on the list of requirements when they formed. Emerson, Jackson, and O'List all try their darnedest (Davison knew his limitations), but, man the singing here is pretty bad and it's saying something that the strongest numbers ("Rondo" and "America", the A-side single release that appears in the bonus tracks) are instrumentals. When O'List quit the band after this album, reducing The Nice to a trio, this didn't help matters at all, as he was probably their strongest voice. To spare Emerson and particularly Jackson from singing much, the band retreated to even longer mostly-instrumental tracks.

Although Emerson's prowess continued to grow over the next few albums, none of them have quite the balanced feel of the first album. Ultimately it drove Emerson to seek new musical sparring partners and, rather than sacking Jackson and Davison, he left his own band and formed ELP. Jackson and Davison went off to relatively obscure projects like Refugee and Jackson Heights. Meanwhile, O'List, who never returned to the band, not even for reunions or to help out, had one of the weirdest journeys in rock history, almost Zelig-esque. He had already filled in once for Syd Barrett in Pink Floyd, and post-Nice would appear in Roxy Music, Jet, and The Misunderstood (three bands I usually don't think of at the same time) though never in their most famous arrangements. In 1997, a full thirty years following this album, he made his solo debut. According to his website (long gone - go to the archived one if you're curious), he split with The Nice because he didn't feel they were commercial enough. True, each successive Nice album would take the band further away from pop and more toward classical. Then again, O'List also very boldly takes credit for his frankly minimal contributions to the aforementioned bands and takes credit for the naming of the band Yes.

A final word on the album itself. My version is culled from the box set Here Come the Nice, a great and comprehensive overview of the first three albums, recorded for the Immediate label. My only issue is that the arrangement of tracks was a little confusing. In other words it's neither chronological, nor are all album tracks necessarily together. Therefore the second song (the title track) of the original album is now the first on my version, followed by its B-side, the non-album track "Azrael (Angel of Death)" and then a John Peel narrated sampler advert that was too good to remove. The rest of the album follows in original track order, but without the already-played title track. After that is both sides of the "America" single, a couple live cuts, an extended version of the title track, and alternate versions of some other tracks. Did you catch all of that? In the end I managed to expand a slight 8-song album into a beefy 21-song extravaganza!

How Google Works (Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg, 2014)

There's been a lot of Google-lit over the past ten years, all of it trying to explain what makes the company tick. Generally I've been immune to reading about it, but it was mentioned as a good book by my mentor for thinking about how a library operates (or could operate), so I decided to give it a whirl. It also doesn't hurt that the book it written by actual "Googlers", not outside journalists (though there is a shadow third author, Alan Eagle).

Overall, my biggest takeaway was that hiring the right people is important. I also appreciated the discussions on decision-making and communication, both areas where my current workplace could use serious revamping. I liked the idea of "failing well", knowing that not everything is going to be a runaway success and knowing when to pull the plug, as well as learning from the experience.

The book can be treated as either a handbook or pleasure reading. If you are going for the latter, I recommend reading the footnotes because, more often than not, they make the entire work much funnier. I found that once I stopped trying to draw direct comparisons between Google and the library and just let the text flow, I enjoyed it a lot more. I didn't write in the margins or highlight because (a) it was a library book and that would have been disrespectful, and (b) I tend to mentally store the data and it comes back to me as I need it. I know not everybody thinks this way, but it works best for me.

Safe As Milk (Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, 1967)

On a scale between 1 and Trout Mask Replica, Safe As Milk comes in at around a 5 or so, maybe 6 or 7 if you include the bonus material. It is definitely not a casual listening album and not for all tastes. Up until recently all I had heard of Captain Beefheart was the "Diddy Wah Diddy" single featured on the Nuggets box set and "Her Eyes Are Blue a Million Miles", a track featured on the Big Lebowski soundtrack. These songs are very tame in comparison, so Safe As Milk was a jarring experience upon first listen.

It's tempting to say the album is called Safe As Milk because the next three albums illustrated an increasingly "unsafe" direction as the music became more manic and deconstructed. By this logic, you are either using hindsight, or you somehow gained access to the secret master plan of Don Van Vliet (a.k.a. Captain Beefheart). If anything, if you were at that moment, it was more likely you'd consider the album ironically titled, since the needle moved a great deal further in the crazy direction since the "Diddy Wah Diddy" single from 1966. While most of the songs here remain coherent from start to finish and have some kind of consistent groove, Captain Beefheart was clearly heading away from the fizzling garage rock scene in Los Angeles. In spite of the weirder direction, it's still as good a place as any for new listeners to start.

The Beefheart story takes an amusing turn in the 1970's. Culminating with Trout Mask Replica two albums later, then holding for another album or two, the band had gotten so bizarre that they were doomed to a lifetime of panhandling, critically acclaimed or not. This resulted in decision to consciously take things in a more commercial direction and by mid-decade the albums are surprisingly "safe" compared to the earlier albums. I haven't heard anything after Clear Spot, but the commercial shift was enough to keep the band from being homeless, yet not so dramatic that the brand name adulterated.

Captain Beefheart frequently garners comparisons to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, though fans of each are quick to point out the differences. I'm not too invested in either, so I don't have a lot to add to the discussion. Both bands' debuts feature traditional and avant-garde elements side by side. In the case of Captain Beefheart it's like "weird garage" or "weird blues", while Zappa is "weird doo-wop" or "weird pop". Zappa seems to have a much greater concern over what defines commercial pop, while Beefheart just throws caution to the wind. Then again, to use album titles, if Zappa was Strictly Commercial, then Beefheart is Strictly Personal. But that's a different album.

The Technologists (Matthew Pearl, 2012)

There is sort of a cottage industry of literature based on classic literature. Right away the author Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair) and Matthew Pearl (The Dante Club) come to mind. For a lot of people this provides an immediate connection to a work they love (or maybe revile). Having not read either Jane Eyre or The Divine Comedy, I never saw any appeal in reading these books or the sequels and/or related books they spawned. On the other hand, having read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I couldn't resist checking out Finn by Jon Clinch, so I'm not completely immune to the attraction of the sub-genre (call it "meta-classics"?).

When I added The Technologists to my to-read list, I didn't even make the connection that it was the same author as The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens. While there isn't a connection to a literary figure, Pearl still keep grounded to a real-life historical entity, this time the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Of course this isn't the MIT of 2015, or even 1915. No, Pearl takes readers all the way back to the days before the graduation of the first-ever MIT class, the Class of 1868. Even the very word "technology" causes society to shudder, and a recent string of "unnatural" disasters pushes Boston to the edge and, in their resulting understandable suspicion, threatens the very existence of MIT. The enemy, naturally, is the well-entrenched, well-heeled Harvard College (Pearl's alma mater and sometimes-employer, oddly enough), whose administration and faculty believe the whole "technology" fad will be passe by 1870. The heroes are a team of nerdy misfits, ranging from the bookish Edwin Hoyt and Asperger's-before-it-was-called-that afflicted Chauncy Hammond, Jr. to "charity scholar" and Civil War vet Marcus Mansfield and Boston Brahmin inheritor Bob Richards. Rounding out "The Technologists" is the only female MIT student, Ellen Swallow. Since this isn't a weird deconstructed novel, it's pretty clear that it's up to the team to reveal who the real villain is and save MIT.

As I was reading, I got a little annoyed by what seemed like "steampunk-lite" elements. (For the record, I find steampunk super-overrated and irritating.) Also, I was getting a little itchy over what I call "awesome-name syndrome" where the characters all sport awesome names you would normally award to D&D characters, though it wasn't the worst I've read. Pearl indeed does revel in the stylized college and upper-crust speak of high society Boston. Fortunately, without giving much of anything away, I did like the "triple-reverse-axle" fake-out ending that left me guessing until the final pages. Finally, the afterword is a must-read, especially if you found the book's style a little off-putting. It turns out Pearl really did his research and most of the characters (even the "awesomely named") are either actual people or closely based on actual people. So, in the end the book really is a decent piece of historical fiction and not a boilerplate mystery novel placed in an idealized setting with no bearing on reality. I appreciate that and have always contended that history is interesting enough that there is no need to re-write it in fiction. Simple tweaks suffice.