“Uncle Max Radio Show” is now on Archive!

Going forward, all of my new UNCLE MAX RADIO SHOWs will be available (free) for listening and download on Archive.org

Call me slow, but… ever since I started doing the show again, I’ve sought a platform where I could provide not only downloadable versions of the show, but shows that are easy to stream with an online player.

I’ve been putting them on my google drive account (which is how the station gets them: I upload the mp3 file to my drive; the engineer at the station processes them and cleans them up and then puts them in the system so that it airs at 7 on Thursdays) but wanted to find another platform without jumping through hoops or paying licensing fees. It didn’t seem like I SHOULD have to pay licensing fees– I mean, whether it’s a podcast or not, it’s derived from a weekly show on a non-commercial college station, right?

Meanwhile, as I downloaded track after track from the audio section of Archive. org, the answer was right in front of my face and I didn’t even realize it.

Going forward, I’ll be uploading my new shows onto Archive. These will be available not only as mp3, but in lossless (flac and wav) formats… AND you can also listen easily via their embedded online player.

I’ve uploaded all of the 2023 shows and am going to work backwards to download the rest of them. Hopefully I might even eventually upload some of the old two-hour WDCV shows as well.

Going forward, new mp3 versions of the current week’s show (plus the current “bonus shows”) will still be in that tinyurl.com/uncle-max-this-week folder, but I’ll also upload the shows to this Archive page, where you’ll find their streaming player and links to downloadable mp3/ flac/ wav files, rich text files of playlists, the show’s meme for you who are into that, etc.

Archive.org is FREE, although your donations to their site are appreciated. But that’s between you and them.

HERE ARE ALL THE LINKS:

My uploads page on Archive: https://archive.org/details/@maxshenkwrites

An mp3 of the current week’s show is always available for download here: https://tinyurl.com/uncle-max-this-week

You can livestream the show on Thursdays at 7 am eastern time here: https://us2.internet-radio.com/proxy/wdcvfm?mp=/live

The Uncle Max Radio Show group on Facebook is here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/unclemaxradioshow

…AND IF YOU WANT TO SUPPORT THE SHOW FINANCIALLY…

…click here to become a one-time sponsor of my show (one-time sponsor shoutout on the show).

…click here to become a sustaining sponsor (monthly donation) of my show (weekly sponsor shoutout on the show).

…click here if you want to sponsor my show via WDCV FM (your underwriting script will be read during my show) or sponsor another show on the station or just become a general underwriter of the station (the station will create an underwriting announcement for you which will be aired throughout their broadcasting day).

As Lennon said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth…”

Dear Internet,

Could you please for the love of God STOP ATTRIBUTING QUOTES THAT ARE BLATANTLY NOT JOHN LENNON TO JOHN LENNON???

This one… and that one that says “Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears”… and that one that says “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life”… NO! No matter what the attribution you find on Twitter or Reddit, Lennon did NOT say it, nor did he write it.

Lennon did quite a few things in his short time on the planet, but he never worked at Hallmark Cards, which sounds like the source for these and other”John Lennon” quotes I see online.

The problem is, the quotes have been reposted with misattribution so often that it’s next to impossible to track down the original sources.

But as Lennon himself said, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step… because as he also said, love means never having to say you’re sorry… so, as he so wisely put it, let a smile be your umbrella and don’t get a mouthful of rain– GAHHHH!!!

Make… it… stop…

How much SOUL do you need??

This article originally appeared in issue # 16 of my print only ‘zine Metanoia…

The Beatles’ album Rubber Soul recently celebrated its 55th anniversary. Or should that be Rubber Souls: since its release in December 1965, there have always been two different versions ofthe album. The covers were identical, but the UK version contained fourteen tracks. That album was released worldwide…

…except in North America. Capitol Records, the group’s US label, habitually trimmed their fourteen-track UK LPs to twelve tracks (sometimes eleven!), and then further reshuffled the contents to make space for the UK singles (which were customarily not included on UK LPs). Reportedly, Capitol exec Dave Dexter wanted the US Rubber Soul to have more of a “folk music” feel than the UK version, so he snipped four “rock” songs from the UK track listing– “Drive My Car,” “What Goes On,” “If I Needed Someone,” and “Nowhere Man”– and replaced them with two “acoustic” songs– “I’ve Just Seen A Face” and “It’s Only Love” –cut from the earlier UK Help! album (which, in the US, was a soundtrack LP with seven Beatles tunes and five non-Beatles instrumental tracks).

The result was that, even though the two Rubber Souls shared ten common tracks, the US edition had a warmer feel than its UK counterpart, with acoustic instruments dominating the songs. Beatles fans are divided on which Rubber Soul they prefer, but many of them own a copy of both. I used to own both, and while the UK version has grown on me, I grew up with the US version, and that’s still the one that I prefer. As a Facebook friend of mine said, “If it doesn’t open with ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face,’ it’s not Rubber Soul.”

However, the Rubber Soul variations don’t end with the track lineups. Up until 1968, pop albums were issued for both stereo and mono phonographs. The Beatles directly supervised their mono mixes, leaving the EMI engineers to create stereo mixes based on those mono versions. This means that– guess what?– many Beatles collectors have not just two, but four different Rubber Souls: both UK and US releases, in both mono and stereo.

Right now I don’t have any vinyl copies of either edition, and so, spurred by this anniversary, I went to eBay to see if I could score a cheap copy of my favorite Rubber Soul: a US mono pressing. I bid on a copy…

…but then I found myself second-guessing. Buying a vinyl copy of an album I owned on CD and in digital form might seem excessive, if not obsessive, to many people.

Why did I NEED to not only have a vinyl copy, but that specific vinyl copy?

Then I saw this picture on Facebook, posted by a collector in a Beatles group.

These records are said collector’s FIFTEEN copies of the US Rubber Soul. From the top left, he has the original east-and west-coast pressings in both mono and stereo; then a late-‘60s stereo disc (the label almost identical to original issues save for some wording in the manufacturing disclaimer); next, a late ‘60s stereo disc with Capitol’s new label design; then a record club release, the 1973 Apple Records reissue, and, finally, three late 70s and early 80s reissues.

Oh… and, in the lower right corner, for good measure, in addition to those eleven vinyl pressings, he also has the 8-track and cassette releases, as well as two CD editions.

(No, I don’t know where his reel-to-reel tape went.)

The thing that might be astounding (if not confounding) to a non-collector is that musically, most of these eleven Rubber Souls are as identical as they appear! Two of them are mono mixes, while one of the early stereo pressings was a unique “east coast mix” that was never reissued. (Remember my distinction between “east coast” and “west coast” pressings? This was one of the few times that the pressing plant location equated to a musical variation.)

That having been said, the remaining eight albums are just musically identical reissues of the same twelve-track stereo album. Yes, granted: earlier pressings of these discs sound better than later pressings, but later pressings were made in smaller quantities, so, therefore, they’re technically “rarer” and perhaps more “collectible”…

…and as my character Margo might type at this point, “do you even care about any of this?”

I can’t sit here and type that I don’t indulge this sort of obsessiveness in my own way. Within slightly-more-than-arm’s length of my desk sits a crateful of Beatles 45s containing multiple copies of records which appear to be “the same” but are slightly different from each other in some way. I have four different US copies of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” that differ only cosmetically (mainly label variations), but then I also have two different pressings of “For You Blue” that look identical but differ musically; same with “I Feel Fine” and “I’ll Cry Instead” and “Love Me Do” and “Misery” and a bunch of other tunes.

When I lost my 2000+ disc record collection a few years back, I told myself that I now had the fun of acquiring those discs all over again if I wanted to. Label variations, stereo or mono mixes, album or single versions, country of origin, picture sleeves… sussing out these kinds of variations is part of the fun of collecting anything.

So even though I’m kind of mocking this collector’s bring-n-brag picture of his Rubber Soul library, in a way, it’s surprising that I don’t have even one vinyl copy of Rubber Soul.

I don’t think I want or need eleven, but at least that gives me a benchmark.

Whether that’s a benchmark of completeness or of obsessiveness is another question.

* * * * *

Metanoia is my biweekly print-only ‘zine, usually two, sometimes four, pages.

To receive the latest issue of it, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to
Max Shenk
39 South Main St, rm 138
White River Junction, VT 05001

OR
You can go to my shop at Ko-fi.com, where you can get either a subscription or back issues. Or both!

In the groove with vinyl…

I follow several record collecting groups and pages on Facebook, and one topic that comes up occasionally is: do we think that vinyl is ever going to “come back” at the level it did in the pre-digital days?

My answer is always the same.

No.

As I posted in reply to the latest iteration of this yesterday…

Most pop music consumers are wed to digital, and a true “comeback” of any physical format would require them to not only change their listening habits but to invest financially in all sorts of technology that simply isn’t compatible with their lifestyle-current tech.

Translated: in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, most kids (or at least most homes) had a home stereo with a turntable-CD player-tape deck. Those physical devices were not only wed to the “music as object,” but they required a physical place to use them. Portability (car stereo, walkman, boombox, etc) was always a goal but took a long time to integrate into the “music as physical object” system. 

Today, most kids either download music (by purchase or fileshare) or skip the acquisition and stream music without buying it. And they can take that music anywhere without adding in a tape deck or CD burner or whatever. So the problem of portability has been solved.

We should just be happy that 45s and albums have not been deepsixed altogether. They’re a boutique item now, and that’s OK.

A little bit further down the thread, someone commented that “I would like to thank RSD (Record Store Day) for ruining the 7″ single, just because of the ridiculous prices. What seemed like a good idea when they started. Ended up in a giant cash grab.”

I’m not sure how Record Store Day “ruined” the 7 inch single. As I replied to this person, Record Store Day hasn’t ruined anything for me. I still go to the same places I always went to find records: flea markets, yard sales, thrift shops, library book sales. Usually, I find stuff I didn’t even know I wanted for less than I would have paid if I’d proactively sought it. And when I proactively seek something, the internet gives me far more options than I had even 20 years ago. I’ve never participated in RSD, although –tying into what I typed above– I’ve found several great RSD releases marked down after the dust cleared.

“So,” I concluded, “I guess I’m happy with the way things are.”

Here’s a further case in point:

Recently, on one of the jazz stations I listen to online, they played “Misty” by Richard Groove Holmes.

Thirty years ago, my only option would have been to go to a record store and either pay full price for a new LP or cassette, or go to Goldmine (a record collector’s magazine which in its heyday was the best place to find used records) or some other source (flea market, used record store) hoping to score a used copy (at who knows what price?).

However, NOW I had these options:

* Download album or individual track from Amazon or iTunes (30 years ago, I would have had to buy the whole album)

* Stream the album or track online

* Order a new or used CD online

* Order a new or used LP online

* Download illegally via a fileshare site.

If I’d wanted, I could have gotten an MP3 of the whole album immediately … free, if my conscience permitted. For slightly more, I could have scored a physical disc (and not expensive, either: a mono original press in VG condition was listed on eBay for $3.99 plus shipping). If I didn’t want to buy, I could stream it free on multiple sites (which I did via YouTube).

And now, here’s the kicker:

After all that, I DISCOVERED THAT I ALREADY HAD THE ALBUM IN MY MEDIA LIBRARY!!!!

When I was a DJ a couple years back, I downloaded via fileshare a TON of classic jazz for airplay, including a zip file of a dozen Richard Groove Holmes albums in 320 kbps MP3 format!!! I own so much music that I lost track of it.

I’m eventually going to buy a used vinyl of it on eBay, but my point is… why do we pretend that the current system and the options it affords us isn’t better than anything we could have designed deliberately?

So really, the question is not “will vinyl ever ‘come back'”?

The question is “Why would we WANT it to?”

Not all the way there…

Question for discussion:

How important musically has Brian Wilson’s solo career been?

I made a BEST OF BRIAN WILSON SOLO playlist on my itunes, and it’s full of great music and songs, beautifully arranged and produced. But I’ve always detected a feeling of (for lack of a better term) non-presence in Brian’s solo work, like he wasn’t quite all the way there. It lends a sadness to some of his more poignant solo work. His solo SMILE, I think, is propelled by this feeling, as is THAT LUCKY OLD SUN, which, to me, is his best solo effort that, uhhh, isn’t SMILE.

Yeah… SMILE was originally supposed to be a Beach Boys record; yeah, the songs were almost 40 years old when he finally finished it as a solo artist. But the point was, SMILE was never a complete, unified piece of music before Brian and company put it together and performed it as such, then released it. And no matter how proponents of the original session tapes argue for the 1966-67 recordings, no matter how beautiful the Beach Boys’ voices were on those tracks, those tracks (a) weren’t a finished album, and (b) Brian’s age and experience in 2002 lent a melancholy and wistfulness to the music that simply could not have been present if he’d finished the album in 1967.

I’ve said it before: Brian had to live those intervening four decades in order to give SMILE the punch that it has. The Beach Boys’ sessions from 66-67 = beautiful and important in so many ways. But Brian’s solo SMILE = the definitive completed version of the work.

Brian seems to connect best as a solo artist with sadness; the hollowness and non-presence seems to come through most on uptempo tracks.

It’s hard to say that anything that Brian has done as a solo artist is as “important” as what he did with the Beach Boys, but then, that stuff was so groundbreaking, it’s almost not fair to make the comparison, so I won’t.

But I think it’s telling that the two best things Brian has done in the last 20 years are (a) the fulfillment and completion of SMILE (an unfinished Beach Boys record) and (b) THAT’S WHY GOD MADE THE RADIO, a Beach Boys reunion album. Something about his songs and their voices is a perfect combination. Their voices are missed on his solo records.

What I loved about THAT LUCKY OLD SUN was that it seemed to reflect where Brian’s head was really at NOW. “Midnight’s Another Day” might be the best song ever written about depression.

And that’s what I like about Brian’s solo career. Jeez, you know… the guy doesn’t NEED to keep cranking out new music, but he is. The extent to which that new music reflects his current state of mind and spirit is the extent to which I like it. So songs like “Midnight’s Another Day” and “Lay Down Burden” and “Southern California” and “Summer’s Gone” get to me at my core, at age almost-50, the same way that songs like “In My Room” and “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” did at age 15.

And for that reason, I think Brian’s solo work is VERY important.

So, again: thanks, Brian.

Rock and roll’s greatest pure ARTIST?

From a 2014 Facebook post:

I really think that Neil Young might be the greatest ARTIST that rock and roll has yet produced. Not that he’s always done great MUSIC or written great songs; he hasn’t. If any musician has been inconsistent, it’s been Neil.

But what makes Neil a great artist– the thing that I love about him– is that he’s always exploring and moving his work forward through the work itself.

So he explores these side roads through these album-length projects— “hey, wouldn’t rockabilly be cool? Why not go country? Wouldn’t an album about cars be cool? Wouldn’t it be cool to do an electronica album? How about an album-length novel? How about recording an album entirely on acetate discs?”

And so he does these things, and when you hear them, you think “Jesus…he’s lost his way… he’s lost his mind… he’s obsessed, what’s he thinking? How does the record company put up with him?” Etc etc. But through this work, he’s just doing what artists do: exploring, experimenting, except that instead of confining this exploration and experimentation to a notebook (IF the guy keeps a notebook, it’s gotta be the most interesting and fascinating thing ever. I mean, given what the guy releases , what does he think about and REJECT??) he releases it, puts it out there.

And the result, at least, as I’ve always said to people, is “Neil may not always be GREAT. But he’s always interesting.”

And the best part is that, every few years, he’ll come out with this grand STATEMENT of an album (FREEDOM, HARVEST MOON, RAGGED GLORY) where all of these insanely disparate pieces come together with other pieces you didn’t even know about, and you think “Damn, this guy’s brilliant. How did he THINK of this? He’s just as brilliant as ever.”

And people who weren’t paying attention wonder where it all came from, when, actually, if they’d been listening, he’d been moving ahead of them the whole time.

Amazing. I feel lucky to have been able to watch his career unfold.

“I was a mental drummer…”

Loving LOVE YOU… or… A fortieth birthday card to THE BEACH BOYS LOVE YOU

Today, April 12, 2017, is the fortieth anniversary of the release of one of my favorite albums of all time, The Beach Boys Love You.

The Beach Boys Love You might be the strangest album in the Beach Boys’ catalog: a synth-based collection of fifteen Brian Wilson originals, dominated by hoarse vocals and oddball songs about astronomy and Johnny Carson and a guy who has a crush on a girl but treats her like a baby and the first time I heard it I thought WHAT IS THIS SHIT???

And yet now it’s one of my favorite albums of theirs. I consider it not only their last great album, but one of their five best albums of all time, right up there with fan favorites like Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) and Pet Sounds and Sunflower. (Either Friends or Today round out my top five, depending on what mood I’m in or which one I’ve heard most recently.)

So how did an album that started out as a record I quite frankly HATED become one of my all-time favorite records, not just by the Beach Boys, but by ANYBODY?

I posted this today on my Facebook page…

This album taught me so much.

At the time, the Beach Boys were vying with the Beatles for title of “My Favorite Band,” and so I was really looking forward to this album… and shortly after it was released, I bought a copy, took it home, opened it up, played it through, and… I hated it. Hated almost every track. The vocals sounded harsh and coarse; the arrangements were sparse and odd. The songs seemed, on their surface, to be trite. I think I liked ONE track out of the fourteen: “Good Time.” The rest, I really just HATED…

…but…

…something told me to play it again, stick with it, give it another listen… and another…

…and slowly, track by track, everything I disliked about this album at first grew on me. Subtly complicated melodies unencumbered by “meaningful” lyrics… rough hewn vocals that fit the feel of the songs… guitars and synthesizers and percussion instruments being used in ways I’d never heard before.

What I learned was: when a favorite artist of yours takes his music in a new direction, TRUST HIM.

Thanks again, Brian!

It’s still one of my top five Beach Boys albums, and certainly, along with That’s Why God Made The Radio (their 2012 reunion album), the BEST new album that they’ve released in my years as a fan (1976-today).

That starts to explain it, but still…

A few years back, I frequented a Capitol Records-sponsored Beach Boys chat board, on which another member posted the following:

Now most of you guys know that I have had very little good to say about The Beach Boys Love You album in the past. A couple days ago I put the CD in my boombox while preparing dinner, and something incredible and unexpected happened: I loved every minute of it. I was jumping around the kitchen singing along with the likes of “Roller Skating Child” and “Ding Dang” and “Solar System” and “Love is a Woman” like it was the Beatles or something. All of a sudden, all of the great things the Love You aficionados have been saying all along made sense. I was in a euphoric state of shock when it was all over. I need some help to determine exactly what happened to me.

I posted the following response:

I’ve said a few times on other threads: when it came out in spring 1977, I absolutely HATED Love You But I gave it a chance and kept listening, and now it’s one of my five favorite BB albums.

I’d say the question shouldn’t be “why do you now like it” but rather, “why DIDN’T you like it before?”

For me, it was a combination of the following:

* On its surface, it sounded like nothing the group had done before. It was certainly a radical departure from the commercial, accessible Fifteen Big Ones (1976).
* The group’s hoarse vocals and the somewhat thin (in spots) background vocals were jarring to someone who was concurrently discovering the group’s “classic” records, which, vocally, were ANYTHING but “thin” or “weak” or “hoarse.”
* Some of the lyrics made me cringe.
* Like the vocal sound, the synth-based instrumental settings were jarring.

That was what I DIDN’T like about Love You when I first heard it. But I think it’s an amazing record. It takes risks, for one thing (like I said, no BB album before or since was such a radical departure from what came before in so many ways).

Musically, I think the arrangements are stunning: the voicings and the way the different instrumental voices play off of and almost “talk to” each other (best example: “I’ll Bet He’s Nice”); the drum parts (one of the best examples ever of how Brian couldn’t be satisfied with a drummer who pounded away on two and four, but who played patterns that, again, played off and “talked to” the other percussion and instrumental voices). The use of the group’s individual lead voices (again, exemplified on “I’ll Bet He’s Nice,” where Brian has his brothers trading off the lead vocal part almost line by line). The BACKGROUND vocals, which, am I the only person who has noticed this, was the last time that the group had a new album dominated by their classic background vocal blend of Mike on bass, Carl, Al and Denny in the middle, and Brian high and sweet on top…and speaking of “Brian high and sweet on top,” SCREW that awful, awful, hideous AWFUL TRACK “She’s Got Rhythm” on M.I.U. Album that everyone oohed and ahhhed over (“Brian’s singing high again!” Yeah, but THE SONG SUCKS!!!)…Brian’s falsetto lead passages on “Airplane” are not only among the prettiest singing he ever did; they’re also pretty much the last time that he sang like “the old Brian.”

The sweet dumbness of the lyrics, which, the more I listened, fit the melodies and the tone of the songs and sounded just fine to me if I didn’t THINK about them too much.

And the cover. I liked the cover.

And the title. In angry “rock vs. Disco” 1977, when the last best hope for rock and roll seemed to be angry new wave or angrier punk, the title The Beach Boys Love You was a breath of fresh air.

The Beach Boys love ME? Why, thank you! 😛

It’s just a sweet, complex, weird, quirky, beautiful album that works on so many different levels that it’s easy to dismiss it…believe me, because when it came out, I dismissed it. But to me, Love You stands right there with Pet Sounds in terms of multi-leveled sophistication, which is why the more you listen, the better it sounds… there’s a lot there to hear, and the more you listen, the more you notice.

That’s my take, anyway.

Roy Wood said of his album Boulders (another quirky fave of mine) upon its reissue on CD that “It’s old, but still weird enough to be different.”

That’s a good way to describe The Beach Boys Love You. I recommend BOTH albums.

I said it about Pet Sounds and I’ll say it again about Love You: Thank you, Brian.

And happy birthday. May we all age as well as The Beach Boys Love You!

Read a few more reviews of the album here.

Teenaged albums

The musical challenge currently circulating on Facebook is…

Copy this post as a status update. List 10 albums that made a lasting impression on you as a TEENAGER, but only one per band/artist. Don’t take too long and don’t think too long.

Like most “list challenges” on Facebook, I resisted doing this at first, but then got into a discussion about a friend’s list on HIS page, and even as I typed that “I never do these things,” I was already filling out the list in my head.

As I told him, MY problem in making a list of ten ALBUMS that influenced me as a teenager is that, as a teen, I mainly bought 45s, not albums. I was definitely more of a singles buyer. 45s were 99 cents (or $1.29 for an oldie), and albums were $5.99, $6.99 or more. So I seldom bought NEW albums… although I’d see what I could score used at flea markets/yard sales/etc. This is one reason I always was listening to music that was ten or more years old… those were the albums (and singles) I found in flea markets.

Used and old and inexpensive = yes. New and full-priced = seldom.

So…

…while “Heart” by Rockpile was one of my favorite SINGLES as a teen, I never bought the  album (SECONDS OF PLEASURE) till I was in college. Same with the Bee Gees, Springsteen, Dylan, and so many others: I loved all those SINGLES of theirs, but didn’t buy the albums till much later.

The other problem I had was one that I suspected was reflected in the lists of friends whose high school tastes were, shall we say, amazingly precocious and eclectic for 15-16-17 year olds. A lot of the lists looked backloaded, which is to say, constructed through the lens of adulthood, in particular an adulthood that wants to remember listening to really great music, but NOT listening to sucky top 40 or pop stuff. As this same friend says, I’m not seeing much Kansas, Styx, or Journey on these lists.

The fact is, when I try to think of music I liked back then, my current tastes can’t help but rewrite the narrative in some ways, so that albums I owned in high school but didn’t really play that much have grown in importance to me, while others I played but have grown tired of since, I’ve pushed to the back of my mind.

So I tried hard to think of the albums that I played a lot back then, whether I’d still listen to them today or not.

So… having given those caveats, here’s the list I came up with. Ten albums by nine artists (I didn’t know about the “one album per artist” stipulation when I made my list… sorry!) and then a bonus artist, who, if I was honest, would probably knock every other album out of my top ten.

But what fun would THAT be?

My list, in no particular order:

Pet Sounds / The Beach Boys (Yes, I really did buy, play, listen, and become obsessed with Pet Sounds as a teen. I think I was lucky in that I discovered Pet Sounds as an adolescent. No album meant more to me as a teen musically, emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually. And I am certain that people who don’t connect with it met it too late in life to really appreciate it.)

The Beach Boys Love You (This 1977 album taught me one of the biggest musical lessons that I could ever learn: when someone you love does music you don’t get on first listen, STICK WITH IT. I HATED this album at first listen, but little by little it grew on me, and it remains one of my five favorites by ANYONE to this date.)

Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief (I always loved the Pythons, and this album wildly creative in so many ways. Not just the content; not just the packaging; but the physical album itself was a gag: one side of the album was cut with parallel lathes. What’s that mean? It means that there were not one, but TWO grooves with different content running parallel on the album side. So if you dropped the needle, you didn’t know WHICH program you’d get. Further, they labeled both sides “side two,” so… I had to put an X on the “twin groove” side. One of the best musical and recording practical jokes EVER.)

Strange Days / The Doors (one of those “don’t play it anymore” albums, but for the year I was in my perfunctory adolescent Doors phase– age 14– this was my favorite of theirs. Probably because I stumbled on a used copy for 50 cents at Renninger’s Flea Market. I haven’t listened to it in years. Classic rock radio has almost killed the Doors for me, with the exception of L.A. Woman, which I also don’t listen to.)

Jan and Dean Anthology Album (I had a lot of Jan and Dean albums, but this one was the one I played most. I loved every song on the record, and a nice bonus was the booklet, with a history of the duo and a detailed discography chart that showed not only recording dates and chart positions of their hits, but the cars they each were driving and the girls they each were dating when the records came out. Talk about essential teenaged information!)

Rust Never Sleeps / Neil Young (The first Neil Young album I ever bought, and still my favorite in so many ways. I can’t remember what impelled me to buy it; maybe that a couple friends I knew already loved Neil. But I bought it full price, and I never regretted it.)

Blast From Your Past / Ringo Starr (I got this for Christmas 1975, and I still think this is the best solo Beatles compilation album ever, and, if you want to count compilations as actual albums, maybe Ringo’s best solo album period.)

 

The Notorious Byrd Brothers / The Byrds (Side one is still one of my favorite album sides by anyone.)

Split Ends / The Move (I loved Electric Light Orchestra, and listening to ELO led me back to the Move and this album, which I probably played more than any ELO record as a teen, save maybe Out Of The Blue United Artists took the Move’s final album, Message From The Country, and cut a couple songs, replacing them with five of the best single sides ever made in succession by any band whose name didn’t begin with BEA: “Do Ya,” “California Man,” “Chinatown,” “Down On The Bay,” and “Tonight.”)

Elvis Presley (his first album) (I had The Sun Sessions and I loved that, too, but somehow I’ve always preferred Elvis’ first album with “Blue Suede Shoes” and “One Sided Love Affair” and a handful of Sun outtakes (“Trying To Get To You,” “Just Because”). I loved this album so much that I even tolerated it in RCA’s abominable “Electronically Reprocessed” fake stereo. (I learned, by the way, how to “correct” that and un-process the album so that it was in relatively echo-free mono.)

Finally, as my “bonus that probably trumps everything else on the list”…

Name Your Beatles album  I mean, really. Any one you’d pick, even YELLOW SUBMARINE. I first heard them all– in the US versions– as a teen, and each one of them was the most important and influential thing I’d ever heard at the time I heard it.

 

Brian’s songs

Sitting at the piano this afternoon, working out the chord changes of a bunch of Brian Wilson songs: “Honkin’ Down The Highway” and “Good Time” and “That’s Why God Made The Radio” and “Solar System.”

Brian Wilson may be my FAVORITE songwriter as composer, above even Lennon-McCartney (because Brian did it on his own) or Billy Strayhorn (because, again, it’s hard to tell at times where Strayhorn ends and Duke begins). All of his songs have UNUSUAL structure, chord changes and modulations. Those elements always take me off in musically unexpected directions, but they feel totally natural, unforced, and easy.

As Marian McPartland said about Strayhorn, “there’s always a train wreck chord in these songs,” a chord that seems to come out of nowhere that just can stop a player dead in his tracks. Brian Wilson’s songs have those “train wreck chords,” but somehow, they never feel out of place, and they always lead you right back to the mainstream of the song.

Plus, it’s almost always rock and roll. Not “pop.” Rock and roll.  Brian takes these highfalutin’ musical ideas and applies them to rock and roll songs, and, in doing so, expands the scope and possibilities of the music. 

I, for one, am grateful that I live in an age where he’s actively performing and creating new music.