IAN HUNTER
Shrunken Heads
Hunter, whom I had the pleasure of seeing live a couple of Saturday nights ago, is in a unique class of performer: he centers a stage with the look and noise of a rock star, but weighs in with none of the arrogance. He was humorous, commanding, in roaring voice, a lot of fun. Not a shred of gut was spared in the delivery. Hunter's daughter and Mick Ronson's son came on at the end for the "Dudes" chorus, and Iggy Pop, with long bleach-blond hair, was snake-dancing in the "Reserved" balcony. Hunter looked, from the floor about 50 feet out anyway, just like he did in 1975 — or, at worst, 1983. Eternal shades, big blond blow-frizz undiminished, not a pound of paunch or any restraint of age on him. He hit the Mott classics (which I love) and solo favorites (which I mostly don't), but at least half of what he played came from his new album, and it all sounded great: well-built, left-of-mainstream rock songs of feeling and humor and observation.

But they call it "live" for a reason: sometimes a band onstage grips with two fists a feeling and ferocity it was lucky to hook with two fingers in a carpeted studio. That seemed to be the syndrome in play as I listened to Shrunken Heads with the live, crowd- and mic-drenched versions still crashing in memory. The album, the permanent document of those songs that sounded so brash and big in concert, is a piece of largely blah rock, with odd encrusted gems flinting among songs which set their limits early and stick to them. You get a few of the half-ironic Hunter shout-alongs (like "Cleveland Rocks" and "Once Bitten, Twice Shy") which, now as much as then, smack of cheese. You get, even worse, repeated dips in the shallow pool of soft rock, instrumentations worthy of Norah Jones, grooves for geezers.

It gets frustrating around the midpoint when you realize the album will probably never achieve its breakout, that it will not stun or jar you out of a fairly comfortable region of the familiarly irritating. That's when you start looking around to gather ye rosebuds while ye may: the grand chording on the verse to "When the World was Round," the album's best song, if also its least surprising; the "shrunken head" metaphor, simple, elegantly gruesome, which seems to cover all the agents of mediocrity, venality, and hypocrisy abroad in our world; the love and guts behind a post-hurricane song ("How's Your House") that is, as well as a vision of Hell, an uptempo piano roll full of near-joking lines and a laughing finish; or the title and funny lines of "I Am What I Hated When I Was Young," a raucous piece of banjo corn.

Hard to say "studio-safe" without sounding snotty or dismissive — because I loved Ian onstage that Saturday night. Oh well, it's not the end of the world. Just of an album.

MAGGIE BELL
Queen of the Night
Bell began as the main vocalist for British rockers Stone the Crows, but she truly notched her initials on rock history by backing up (or fighting with) Rod Stewart on "Every Picture Tells a Story." This 1974 solo album is noble soul-rock hysterics and sensual smoke, not terribly unpleasing, but not invariably funky, either: the material is hit-or-miss and grooves wobble. Bell has the true scratch in her throat but she can't do much to sex up songs that have been arranged with all the raunch of the "Tonight Show" band's commercial-break transitions. Notable, though, for an early version of "We Had it All," a Jagger-Richards song which the Stones didn't record for several years, until the Emotional Rescue sessions — though, with Keith singing, they did it better.

THE MIKE CURB CONGREGATION
“More Than Ever (Nixon Theme Song)"
"Nixon Now (Nixon Rally Song)”
Mike Curb had his first hit in the early '60s with a jingle for Honda scooters. In 1969, year of the constipated apocalypse, he was appointed head of MGM Records, after the movie company had decided for about 10 minutes it would be hip to have a pop label. While there, he promoted a clean-jeans, sta-prest, family-friendly collective image that was epitomized by flagship acts like the Cowsills — which move necessitated him releasing the Mothers of Invention and Velvet Underground from their contracts with Verve, an MGM subsidiary.

Around this time Curb formed his Congregation: suitably pious title for a cacophonous choir that was like the Ray Conniff Singers with bangs, or the Mormon Tabernacle with a middle-class twitch in its hip. "Burning Bridges" was their decidedly unholy hit, from the 1970 Clint Eastwood-Telly Savalas-Donald Sutherland-Don Rickles-Carroll O'Connor — enough already, it was a Dirty Dozen rip-off — Kelly's Heroes. (Disappointed lately in the intensity of your nightmares? Try watching this steaming two-and-a-half-hour heap of tank vomit and Howitzer flop.)

Having conquered the music world, Curb — encouraged, apparently, by California governor Ronald Reagan — sought entry into the political sphere. His first move in this direction was to write and produce, under the Congregation banner, campaign songs for the 1972 reelection campaign of another California son, Richard Nixon. The songs, along with Nixon's winning personality, were just the ticket. Curb ran for Lieutenant Governor of California and won. From 1979 to 1983, he acted as de facto governor in the absence of Jerry Brown, who — rather unconscionably, in the circumstances — spent more time running for President than tending to state affairs. In 1980, in between redrafting Brown's orders and vetoing his legislation, Curb found time to write and produce Ronald Reagan's campaign song. Key losses in California state politics evidently deterred him from pursuing further triumphs in the public sector. Today he has a country-music empire in Nashville and a NASCAR sponsorship. He is one version of the American dream.

But — so was Richard Nixon.

RALPH "SOUL" JACKSON
“Sunshine of Your Love”
In case you didn't know, his middle name tells you where to file this piece of mid-line not-badness. Notable mainly for two conspicuous lyric changes, both geared away from romantic abstraction and toward physical specificity. In the first, Give you my dull surprise becomes Give you my big surprise, natch. In the second, the word "tears" is replaced with the word "sheets" — as in I'll be with you when my sheets have dried up —

IRMA THOMAS
“We Won't Be in Your Way Anymore”
Yet another lost classic shakes loose from the riffled pages of this great lady's long history. A little 1970 soul heartbreak and ain't you fulla shit action for those long smoky midnight hours.

ELVIS PRESLEY
The "Lost" Album
And lost it might have stayed, without tragedy. All that merits mention in this collection — recorded in Nashville in 1963 for a non-movie-soundtrack LP never issued, though some tracks appeared as B-sides and album filler — is "It Hurts Me," a surging ballad nearly worthy of "Any Way You Want Me," with a lovely tacky piano obliggato. The balance is taken by boggy blues and pseudo-sex. Elvis's version of "Memphis, Tennessee" doesn't have anything like the guts of his later "Promised Land," though not because of the vocal (engaged but not excited) so much as a peculiarly enervated guitar riff — which of course is one of the riffs, one that even I can play competently, and that any studio pro, let alone a real live Nashville cat, should be able to slice into like a fisherman fileting a trout.

THE FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS
The Flight of the Conchords (HBO)
At my mother's suggestion, we just watched the first three episodes of this musical sitcom. A New Zealand duo, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, perform pop parodies and oddball diversions while trying to score gigs and stay alive somewhere in the concrete wilds of Brooklyn. (Or is it Queens?) The deadpan comedy scenes (an incompetent manager, a single obsessed fan) are amusing enough, but the music videos that occasionally (but never arbitrarily) break up and into the action are the real bacon on the plate: an inspired parody of "what's wrong with the world today" songs, about people lying on the street with heads cut off and forks stuck in their legs; an absolutely ridiculous sci-fi thing involving cardboard-box spaceman suits; an "I'm not crying" brain-twister attributing ocular moisture to allergy, sweat, dust particles, rain, every imaginable cause except that you don't love me no more.

TFOTC's music is not quite like anything, except that it evokes rap, soul, techno, and whatever else it needs to; I could compare it to They Might Be Giants, except the Conchords didn't make me want to puncture my eardrums with a pencil.

Something so odd and beguiling cannot live forever. It may not live a season. But it's living now, right there on your TV every week. If you have cable. Which some people don't. That's the thing about pop culture. It takes money. Unless you want to steal it. Which some people do. But I'm not here to judge anyone. Except the musicians.

Fab Revelation #537
That virtually the whole of Oasis's worthy career sprang from a single tight and polished tap of pop musicality: "And Your Bird Can Sing." And that as well as Oasis have done what they've done over their 15-year career, the Beatles not only did it better but did it in two minutes.

That Curb Congregation ordeal reminded me of what might be the

Greatest Record Ever?
"Shenandoah," the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

No kidding: watch the end credits of Oliver Stone's Nixon if you doubt it.