"1966 Nebraska Projection"

SPACEMEN 3
The Perfect Prescription
A few years ago, courtesy of that fab documentary DIG!, I discovered Brian Jonestown Massacre and gobbled all the free music off their website like a kid stuffing himself on Halloween night. Somewhere I heard that Spacemen 3 -- a three-man Warwickshire outfit of the '80s, pioneers of what might be called space-trance, or maybe drone 'n' moan -- were among the few, very few, influences directly acknowledged by BJM fuehrer Anton Newcombe. You can see why -- and you can marvel at Newcombe’s uncharacteristic candor: almost every musical noise he ever made, particularly on his early albums, is right here. The acoustic guitar fixed on an alternating current between two seventh chords, with an electric running ragas above; vocals like far-distant echoes in a hash fantasy; compulsive references to “Jesus” and whatnot -- the whole of it drenched in a white popster’s conception of exotically wasted Orientalism: perfect for darkened ballrooms, swaying girls in headbands, and a return of the Joshua Light Show.

It’s fantastic, i.e.

The Perfect Prescription (1987) is, according to Wiki, “generally considered their masterpiece.” I won’t fight it.

SEAN LENNON
Into the Sun
Friendly Fire
Sean’s face, in case you’d never noticed, is a perfect genetic composite of his parents’. But his voice and talent are clearly the computerized spawn of a hologram and a touch-tone phone, filtering in from a near-future in which the necessity of talent has been replaced, finally and completely, by the privileges of celebrity birth.

Not a single vocal phrase, guitar line, or percussive gesture scores impact in a passel of interchangeable popisms, tropicalia, jazz doodles, and lounge-lite (lounge-lite?!?). These are two of the dullest, dumbest albums I have ever heard, as humanly dynamic and aesthetically thrilling as Tupperware. They make Julian sound like Johnny Rotten. They give “soporific” a bad name. I could eat a copy of The Beatles’ Second Album and shit better music than this. Insert your own belaboring joke here. Just leave me out of it.

THE NEW YORK DOLLS
One Day it Will Please Us to Remember Even This
SCISSOR SISTERS
Ta Dah
Pass the lewds.

CLEARLAKE
Lido
Forward into the past: piqued and prodded by their most proximitous platter, Amber (revisit the archives), I tracked back to this three-years-earlier offering and found it even more strikingly supple and confoundingly catchy. Kinky melody, Brit-centric voicings, and spacious soundscaping variantly reminiscent of Small Faces mod-psych and Brian Wilson dream-weave. Lots of snazz in the presentation, and just enough attitude to drive it all over.

Most surprising to me is that the LP’s top track, “I Want to Live in a Dream” (also noted back in the archives), is found to be more appealing, rather than less, in its de-Christmasized version: remove the sleigh bells and recess the voice a bit in the mix, and what you are left with is not a seasonal novelty but a statement of desperate oblivion and tragic escapism: an inadvertent anthem, I sometimes think, for myself and many others of my over-convenienced generation. The words demand notice by social psychologists and aging X'ers alike:

I'm a lazy good-for-nothing
maybe, but I do know one thing
I know what I want from my life
I want to live in a dream

I don't want to have to worry
about little things like money
I want the world to take care of me
I want to live in a dream

I want to live in a dream
I want to live in a dream
I suppose the real world is OK
but I'd much rather make my own up any day

I'd wish for a nice existence
one with no hard work, for instance
I'm sorry but I really can't be bothered
I want to live in a dream


Greatest Record Ever?
"Killing Floor," Howlin' Wolf


STRANDED -- The Countdown (15)

CLARENCE CARTER, “Patches” (Atlantic). Ex-heavyweight champ George Foreman once said of growing up in Houston's brutal Fifth Ward, "We was po'. We didn't have enough money to be poor -- we was just po'." That one joke says more about a tough black childhood than this dreadful mess of stereotypical grits. The music is horrible too. If you need Clarence Carter, take "Slip Away" instead. 1970.

CELLOS, “Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am the Japanese Sandman)” (Apollo). More '50s doo-wop race-baiting -- is this shaping up as a subgenre? (We've already dealt with the Cadets' "Stranded in the Jungle," and we haven't even gotten to the Coasters.) A matter of taste, these things, and this isn't mine. 1957.

GENE CHANDLER, “Duke of Earl” (Vee-Jay). Mythic more than musical genius, despite Chandler's admirable lack of shame or restraint upon assuring us that nothing can stop him now, 'cause he's the you-know-who: he sings it like it's real. So it becomes real -- at least for those few bars. The myths that take hold of our hearts may start as jokes, but they're not played out as jokes; there's got to be something at risk, even if it's merely the deluded self-image of one preening stud.

While I wouldn't make a point of packing this for the island, it would wind up there anyway, since it seems to be included on every "Oldies But Goodies" anthology ever assembled.

Associated memory: the prostitute Steve Martin picks up in The Man With Two Brains, whom he must (for complicated reasons) poison, and who for no reason beyond happy idiocy sings the Chandler song while changing into her teddy. Sings it, that is, in a Bronx accent. Duke--Duke--Duke--Duke of Oil, Duke--Duke--Duke of Oil, Duke--Duke--Duke of Oil . . . Over and over, until Martin is happy to kill her. 1962.

CHANTAYS, “Pipeline” (Downey/Dot). There's not a noise on this that isn't an essential rock sound: that guitar line, whose tangy vibrations define not just surf style but reach forward and back in musical space to implicate spaghetti western, Hawaiian, Chuck Berry, rockabilly; that mad voice, which could be an obnoxious surfer dude or a cackling Death (Thanatos can assume infinite forms); and that incessant end-of-the-world drum thunder, which seems to command the fiercest beat without ever actually finding a beat. Some records were meant to be. Others simply are. 1963.

The Chantels (End). Listen to them, look at them, think about them: they don't exist. They can't. They are a group of teenage girls from the Bronx who named themselves after a Catholic school and recorded their great work in a church. Those are facts, and the church, for all I know, still stands up there, a few miles away from me in the northeastern borough: if I lean out my Brooklyn window I might hear it in the night. Those are facts, but the Chantels are all echo and their lead singer, Arlene Smith, is all cry. Echo answers cry across cathedral wood and stained glass, watched in awe by immobile saints and a bleeding Christ.

It's been said that the Chantels' producer, George Goldner, terrorized Arlene Smith to make her realize that hers was the greatest voice in pop music. He made her weep, made her cower, made her shake, so as to get the fear into her voice. And not even that good story accounts for the voice. No theory of human psychology or logic of emotional extortion gets behind the hurt, the rapture that goes beyond joy so that it returns to hurt, the first hurt of life, and makes every feeling a shade of pain.

I've many times said, to whomever I could make listen, that "Maybe" could be the greatest record ever made. It drives all breath from your chest, all but a whimper and sorrow from your throat. Your eyes see nothing you can describe.

Listen to them, look at them, think about them. Can you imagine what I mean when I say they don't exist, never existed, cannot exist? 1959.

Ah, bless the vaults and those who crawl through them so we don’t have to.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Phil’s Spectre: A Wall of Soundalikes
Phil’s Spectre II: Another Wall of Soundalikes
“Phil Spector did not produce any of the tracks on this CD,” runs the disclaimer to one of these, “yet they all sound as if he did, or might have.” Fair enough: if Spector’s lesser products tend to be the sonic equal of pig vomit on a silver platter, the imitative rips of his acolytes and plunderers are surprisingly listenable. The moral of the story would seem to be that when genius fails, it always sounds worse than when mediocrity succeeds. Which should give the rest of us hope.

So: the Spector-sparked, Gold Star-spangled moments of such unheard-ofs and never-remembereds as Ray Raymond, Kane and Abel, the Goodies, Noreen Corcoran, the Fantastic Vantastics, and the Dreamlovers, and upward from dark obscurity to the bright light of stardom as incarnated in the Supremes, Sonny and Cher, Gene Pitney, the Righteous Brothers, and the Four Tops. Among the producers, arrangers, and writers are somebodies like Jack Nitzsche, Nino Tempo, Holland/Dozier/Holland, Van McCoy, and David Gates; and relative nobodies like Peter Antell, James Holvay, Jerry Ross, and Marty Cooper. Somebody or nobody, obscurity or superstar, they all sound amazingly, nay staggeringly similar to their common avatar. I used to think, back about 1984, that the Alan Parsons Project’s “Don’t Answer Me” was the most flawless Spector ape ever crafted. Was I wrong -- Parsons would come in maybe 15th behind some of these others. In the aggregate, Spectres I and II are proof either that A) Spector’s genius was among the easiest things in the world to figure out and copy -- far easier, say, than the formula for Coke; or that B) the ‘60s were so musically enchanted that brilliance fell as indiscriminately as rain upon the land, and even mediocrities were blessed with the temporary vision to produce records that, though in their day they passed unknown, would one day prove magical to the few.

Demonstrating that sequels can sometimes be worth it, Spectre II is actually the better of the two compilations; to list its highlights would be, virtually, to transcribe the tracklist. From the Beach Boys’ “I Do” (an absurdly youthful, moving, long-unreleased Brian Wilson production, previously wasted on the Castells) to Timmy & The Persianetts’ “Timmy Boy” (an attempted steal of Spector’s “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” thunder which outthunders the original); from the Victorians’ “Climb Every Mountain” (the Sound of Music standard straitjacketed and elevated by an arrangement utterly derivative of the Spector-Crystals “He Hit Me [It Felt Like a Kiss]") to Reparata & The Delrons’ “I’m Nobody’s Baby Now” (just a great, great, beautiful track in its own right); from Dobie Gray’s “No Room to Cry” (an angular clarification of Spector’s modernist potential) to Ruby & The Romantics’ “Your Baby Doesn’t Love You Anymore” (worlds away from the minimalist burble and sudsy organ of “Our Day Will Come”), the collection is full of gold. Some is of the fools’ variety, some is undeniably genuine. The worst any of it will do is turn your finger green.

Spectre II also contains at least one Bizarro Supremo demanding of mention: “Bobby’s Come a Long, Long Way,” by a group called Eight Feet, released on Columbia in 1966. It was co-written and co-produced by none but Al Kooper, who’d already backed Bob Dylan for “Like a Rolling Stone” and Forest Hills and was in line for Blonde on Blonde duty. Kooper describes “Bobby” as a product of “cross-pollination -- a girl group record, very Spector and Nitzsche-influenced, with the subject matter being Bob Dylan”: that is, Dylan’s journey from imaginary tramp to innovative lyricist, and from folkie to rockie. It’s not a great record, just an unusually shimmering and improbable novelty stab, and only slightly less absurd if you don’t know who it’s about. With a meaningful guitar / On a road that seems so far / Bobby’s come a long, long way . . . You can imagine the rest. On second thought -- no, you can’t.

Spectre I runs a slightly less surprising line of stars and knock-offs (most of them superfine nonetheless), though there are worthy obscurities in the form of “On the Spanish Side” by the Corsairs and Landy McNeil; “You’re So Fine” by Dorothy Berry; “Missin’ My Baby” by Clydie King; and “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” by Hale & The Hushabyes. And it does lead off with a glorious unedited stereo version of a Jack Nitzsche-arranged, Dick Glasser-produced vinyl titan, ‘64 vintage, which inspires the same question every single time I hear it: Is this truly -- could it possibly be -- is it just imaginably conceivable that it factually IS -- the

Greatest Record Ever?
“When You Walk in the Room,” Jackie De Shannon