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Review: The Rootin' Tootin' Luton Tapes by Split Enz (Mushroom Records, 2006)

Despite the fact that  the Rootin Tootin' Luton  Tapes (I hate the title) were rejects by the band in this fertile period, I think that it is one of their best albums. Many references  have been made tothe album's "edge" and "energy". It seems that on many of the songs, members of the band did not really know them that well and were flying by the seat of their pants or "blagging it" as Nigel Griggs put it. It's that spirit that gives the songs their edge and it's hard indeed to replicate that in a big fancy studio where a band must be cognizant of time and money. It all brings to mind Bob Dylan: Bob has been recording records and playing shows with backing bands who have no idea what song he's going to play or what key or tempo it will be in for decades in an attempt to capture this edge, and as we see from his career, sometimes it works spectactularly, sometimes it doesn't. Here it works. To me the  RTLT  represent some of th...
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Rock's Wasted Talents

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There are the obvious ones, the big burnouts everybody knows; the drug casualties, the victims of mental illness, the hapless passengers in plane wrecks, the suicides… Here I'll focus on two figures from the early seventies whose work I absolutely adore. BIG STAR : Chris Bell and Alex Chilton Chris Bell,  guitarist and leader of Big Star. It was Chris Bell’s vision — mid-sixties’ style rock music, amped up seventies style and with sensitive lyrics, that propelled Big Star. Though he only played on one album, it’s clear from subsequent albums that the band was still, in some way, following his template— and if there was any doubt, it was made absolutely clear in Alex Chilton’s r’n’b-flavored solo albums: Chilton was the pretty boy with the voice, but Big Star was Bell’s baby. The one record he did play on the (now-ironically-titled)  #1 Record  might be the greatest record of 1972 — and I will die defending it as the best-produced album of that ...
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What was the worst album by the Beatles?

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Help! It has more original songs than  Beatles for Sale  (as if that should be some measurement of quality — it isn’t), but the two stellar Lennon singles, “Yesterday” and “I’ve Just Seen a Face" aside, most of the songs are second rate. “You’re Gonna Lose that Girl” is good fun, but “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” is candy-floss Dylan that is saved only by the beautiful vocal in my opinion; the mid-tempo McCartney rockers are dull and the George Harrison songs are awful. “Tell Me What You See” is supremely annoying. All of these songs have interesting bits: the Beatles certainly always tried their hardest to make songs work. “Act Naturally” I kind of like but “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”—compared to the Beatles other Larry Williams covers, especially — is a sloppy mess. I think it would have been improved by taking off the Harrison songs, and the covers and adding the two B-sides, the pleasant enough “Yes It is” and the really rockin’ “I’m Down” which kicks “Dizzy Miss ...
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Beach Boys Backing Tracks: putting the pieces together

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Hi, this is my first blog entry on my new Blog. I plan to write on music I love. Hope you enjoy it.  On Which Album did the Beach Boys start using the Wrecking Crew, and when did they go back to playing on their albums themselves?  The simple answer would be that they started regularly using the Wrecking Crew on 1965′'s  Today  and started playing for themselves again on 1967’s  Smiley Smile . But with the Beach Boys  nothing  is ever that simple, actually. They started using session players earlier than 1965 and they continued to use the Wrecking Crew  sometimes  after 1967; while in the 65–66 period, the Beach Boys continued to play on  some  of their records. Also there were members of the Beach Boys touring band in the late sixties and seventies who were  de facto  members of the band but not official who also played on their records alongside the official share-holding members. Which must have seemed pretty n...
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