Trent Reznor signed married couple Atticus Ross and singer Claudia Sarne (left) AKA 12 Rounds (not to be confused with the shoot-'em-up z-grade movie of the same name) to his Nothing Records label and released what would be the couple's second album in 1998. Last.fm describes their sound as goth, trip-hop and alternative rock [borrowing] from the likes of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Cranes or Whale and Claudia Sarnes' distinguished voice as deep and absorbing. I'd agree about her voice but don't hear Souixsee at all. I'd suggest early Beck with the Bad Seeds and maybe a more black leggings and mascaraed version of Morcheeba. The couple would have songs included on a few film soundtracks, enjoyed some college radio airplay and then what followed could've been a series of dream shattering unfortunate events. Whatever it was, it kept their Reznor produced and recorded third album from ever getting seeing the light of day. 12 Rounds has kept working and producing music deserving of support. (Somehow it doesn't appear that Reznor was to blame for the third album fiasco—Atticus Ross has worked on NIN projects ever since.)
According to Wiki, they've recently regained the rights to their unreleased third album and plan a release. Be that as it may, their major label debut My Big Hero was indeed a good one and used copies are floating around out there. Recommended.
Sample Pleasant Smell from My Big Hero:
Download: 12 Rounds, Where Fools Go from the album My Big Hero Three newer high definition tracks are available for free download at their website, 12rounds.net
136) Devo, Q: Art We Not Men? A: We Are We Devo album: I was a Devotee from the beginning. I've memories of a costume contest at one Halloween show where a gorgeous tramp in little more than a corset and stockings lost to a guy who could've been Lurch from the Addams Family. He stood, smiling and balding with excruciating nervousness (like it wasn't his idea to get up there) as he waited through his long winning ovation. (Miss Corset had fully expected to win.) And then there was the evening I saw their movie The Truth About De-Evolution projected on a sheet at the Whiskey, the same night my friend got hit in the head with Bob 1's guitar. I owned all of the original self-released singles, the EPs Be Stiff and the rare Mechanical Man. Then, one day, my parents told me to get my boxes out of their garageand I was impelled to sell much of my record collection, including those singles. It was heartbreaking, not so much for the irreplaceable loss of the collection, but for the pennies it'd all end up being worth. (This was in the days before eBay or Half.com.)
You could say I had a PhD in Devo before that the release of the first album. And though the album presented the band under a museum vetrina—nothing like those raw singles—the album was still everything fans could've hoped for. During that time the band was practically a puking cornucopia of ideas, not the least of which was those punchy early songs—Sloppy, Uncontrollable Urge, Shrivel Up, Satisfaction, Clockout, Social Fools. Devo was the It band for my twilight teenage years. The second album was pretty good too—less guitar, more synth, no Eno—but the It factor was gone. I didn't even buy it. Further on, as one of the early fans, Whip It and Beautiful World just weren't what I'd signed up for. That first record said everything they had to say. And even now it still stands as one of the best records of the '80s New Wave.
In the beginning...
137) Robert Gordon, The Way I Walk: Quite simply one of the greatest guitar solos ever. To say Link Wray goes pyrotechnical here is not hyperbole. He whacks those ecstatic dyads with a brutal beauty and the sound is wild and fast like a freebasing cicada playing through a cut speaker. (Wray has been credited for inventing the fuzz tone.) It's guitar playing at maximum volume, no matter how loud he's playing. So many other players have tried to approximate Link Wray; none have ever gotten anywhere close: A guitar masterpiece. Below, a scorching live version: even at 50 years old, Wray was the coolest guy in the room.
138) Annette Peacock, I'm the One album: Ah, the '70s—all of that artistic zealotry and boundary pushing and how music transformed just in those 10 years especially. Peacock's album from 1972 is a time capsule from an historic time when mainstream culture reached out and absorbed some of the avantgarde. (Think of the noisy interlude in Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love). Many forward looking musicians of the time were testing a new eclectic sausage recipe. For Peacock, this meant stuffing in a mix of free jazz, Morton Subotnick, Doris Day, Revolution #9, gospel, and R and B. As an example of how pervasive this recipe was, even Creedence Clearwater (!) jumped on the bandwagon. Peacock's pillow-talk voice and slightly flat, nasal tone were an effective vehicle. When my 2nd grade daughter's teacher taught her students to write with words they didn't know how to spell, she called it brave spelling. Call Peacock a brave singer, taking a limited range and depth and courageously squeezing every last morsel out of it. And she can screech if she's in the mood but mostly she keeps it cool and it's good that way: A quirky classic.
139) Cheap Trick, Ballad of TV Violence, Elo Kiddies, Mandocello; Back in the day I saw the band on their first trip through LA. As I've said before, I'm a perfidious fan. I loved the first three albums, forsook them during the punk era, eventually bought one morebut already knew that the future wasn't going to work out between us. In his prime, songwriter and guitarist Rick Neilson could conjure up the magic sauce that made for a tasty meat loaf again and again. His songs teased catchy melodies out of crunchy chords and provided an elusive model for many latter-day candy-ass '80s hair metal bands—of course, none of them could tie the masters' shoes. Blonde pretty boy singer Robin Zander was more than a chiseled visage, he wasn't above going straight-jacket apesh*t when the circumstances required. Hear the evidence in the last verses of Ballad of TV Violence. Obviously, humor was a big part of what they did—how Neilson could play on stage while going through all his goofy antics is remarkable—but so was a high craft that betrayed all that fuzz tone. And the rhythm section was distinctive, an absolute prerequisite for a great band. Listen to Mandocello with its two bridges, its cheesy and effective lyrical snares (revisted again in I Want You to Want Me), and its throwing out more hooks than a free beer fishing barge. The early work also had a snotty punk edge that was lost on subsequent albums. They were big in Japanbut stateside they just made a living. They should'vebeen way bigger.
Social critique with a pinch of Gary Glitter: 'Elo kiddies/'elo kiddies/Whatcha gonna do when you get religion/'elo kiddies/'elo kiddies/Hope you didn't get it on the television.
Beatle fan Neilson could squeeze out the saccharin quality McCartney ballad when he wanted:
140) King Crimson,Neal, Jack, and Me: The way Link Wray's solo scorches, Adrian Belew's chills here like a martini stirred in liquid nitrogen—stone cold, math-y, with a heavy chunk of the right brain. Robert Fripp's phasing and fastidiously picked rhythms are pure math, like the calculus Newton invented to study the universe and, in his best moments, Fripp can coax the universe from his guitar. But on Neal, Jack, and Me, Belew is the hero. His solo turn (at the 2:24 mark) is tantalizingly brief and doesn't need another second—he's accomplished all that needed to be done. Plus, his sound finds the avantgarde angles (with a little psychedelia) that even titans like Coltrane never found. His playing bursts into all directions like a sniper bullet through an apple. Belew learned at Fripp's feet and with this one he may've just outdone the master.
141) Screamin' Jay Hawkins, I Put a Spell on You: Jay—bless him—was what you could call "a world-class fornicator." (Quantity was his game.) He was also a world-class cad. (As you'll see, he clearly preferred bareback.)
Back in the '90s, a national search was underway to locate the progeny of this deadbeatsperm donor. Jay's dying wish was that all of "his" children would get together, children he'd never met, for a gathering. Eventually, 57 of them were found (not counting histwo legitimate ones). There may'vebeen morebut those are the ones that confessed. The gathering didn't go so well—52 of them didn't show up. (Who can blame them?) For those who did, they got to watch a video of papa saying this: "Yeah, there might be 50 or 60, or 75, or there might be more, 'cos I don't know about the abortions and the miscarriages." In his will he left each of his children $1: A cad and a miserly one at that. (Here's an article from MailOnline.)
Anyway, Jay was a one hit wonder with the good fortune of his one hit becoming an immortalized standard, kind of like the way Nature Boy was for Eden Abbez. A song, like the composer himself, that'd spawn many other versions. Whatever about the song's progenitor, it's still a great song proving that great art is possible regardless of character—even if it's from a world-class turd.
Some of the song's legitimate progeny:
142) Henry Cow, War: Upon her spoon this motto/ Wonderfully designed/ Violence completes the partial mind. More free-jazzy than proggy, though it can go a little proggy at times, but it's also laden with plenty o' non-progvirtues too: crazy vocals and various utterances (her name is Dagmar), big beat, atonal skronking and meter changes (OK, that's way proggy); "an inherent anti-commercial attitude" (also proggy), and a humor as proof they're not taking themselves too seriously (very unproggy). This is brilliant madness: Ideas are climbing all over this like vines on a crumbling building. And like the crumbling building, it's the vines holding it together. Founded by Fred Frith, Henry Cow is like one of those bands that everybody praises but no one listens to except here you can actually listen. (Frith has been connected to just about every avantgardist from John Zorn to Mike Patton to The Residents to Robert Wyatt and all points inbetween.) Anarchy, sometimes, is just another word for spontaneity. (Whatever happened to Dagmar?)
143) The Buzzcocks, Hollow Inside: Bubblegum punk was the 'cocks and I was slow to warm. Shelley's singing was too cutesy by half, most of their early songs (e.g. Orgasm Addict) were just irritating, and even their best ones ran two and a half minutes on ten seconds of idea. It took this song, Hollow Inside, to break through to me. The minor key riff grabbed me by the collar and Shelley never sounded so much like his former partner, Howard Devoto. It was practically emo. This song too is slim on the ideas, almost five minutes of your life given away to six seconds of ideas, but the idea is a good one. Shelley did have an ear for a hook. After Hollow Inside I gained an appreciation for the 'cocks I hadn't had before. (Even my teenage daughter is hooked.) And they do have an undeniable bounce.
144) Coleman Hawkins, Rifftide: Hawkins is the bridge between the big band era and bebop. If he didn't invent bop he certainly has his DNA all over it. His was a more restrained, buttoned up version of what those cats that followed him played—Monk, Bird, Rollins, Miles. The bop generationgets all the praisebut they were also the jazz killers. If theywon the cultural battle, it was a pyrrhic victory. Boppers did to jazz what Kline, Pollack, et. al. did to generations of art dilettantes. Like abstract painting, jazz unmoored itself from the pure aesthetic joy of creative communication and lost its audience. (How many times have old jazzers said, "I'm not an entertainer. I'm an artist!") This, my friends, is the difference between expression and communication. Communication is a communal act. It wants to create a bond; expression, on the other hand, is often just a jerk-off—a secret language indecipherable to most. A cultural patois designed to keep the rabble out. Hawkins didn't do that. He respected melody. His tone was fat and clean and he loved the songs he was playing. He was everything the upstarts wanted to rebel against. His musicdoes kind ofscream tradition. But then, everybody needs some tradition to go with their avantgarde. Apparently, Rifftide's riff was stolen from an arrangement by pianist Mary Lou Williams. Monk might've used a couple of its bricks to build Well You Needn't. Good ideas deserve high mileage and this one earned a few turns of the odometer. Whoever the daddy was, I think we can all agree it's a bouncing slam of a tune.
145) King Sunny Adé, Ori Mi Ja Fum Mi: Wiki says that Nigerian Adé is the most influential musician of all time, bar none. So forget Elvis, this King is so king it's his name. Nigeria is a country with an abused history (blame the West) of colonization, civil war, military coups, and 500 different tribes with long memories. It's a country with more than its share of despair and woe. And yet the native jùjú music, as is much of African music, is so goddam full of' sunshine and ecstatic rhythm you have to wonder what kind of superior stuff these people are made of. The racist jokes about putting chains on Africans and hearing them sing was meant to disparage, but the truth is these are people who won't be crushed and are able to find the slivers of joy no matter the direness of their circumstances. (That's not to say they invite or deserve it.) We could all learn from that.
King Sunny Adé and his music are clearly made from that stuff. The polyrhythmic beat goes deep into the chest and lifts (its a crime when some of his later work cuts in programmed drums). The instruments, especially the drums and multiple guitars, weave together like Kente cloth. The band is playing the sh*t out fromevery cornerand there's not a melancholic note to be found anywhere—this is music that dares to be simple in the best way possible.Adé's jùjú takes some of the world's darkness and makes it into one of the happiest places on Earth and that, my friends, is quite something.
146) Frank Zappa, Willie the Pimp: Childhood buds Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart (the Beefheart moniker was Zappa's idea) never had much luck working together. The rare exception was Willie the Pimp. Beefheart's appearance is brief but adds the necessary atomic weight to this rocking molecule. (What are those percussion sounds underneath, a winding clock and a shaking ring of keys?) A great cockfight of sound ensues starting with the riffing violin. Zappa solos, starting sedate before going steroidal when the wah-wah kicks on. Beefheart wordlessly growls and yelps for a few rounds while the bass player plucks some frenzied bowel-clearing low end. Somehow a piano finds a way in and it works, laying down energized whorehouse atmospherics from the back room. (Willie the Pimp is also one of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time. *Yawn*)
The chick singer with understated sexy—if she were your girlfriend, she'd be the kind to break a bottle over a head to protect you in a bar fight. But a pin-up doll? Wouldn't have seen that coming:
Magazine, a band that once meant so much to me, is back and as is often the case it's not quite the band I remember.
Magazine has reunited after a 27 year hiatus with hairlines and two original members gone (the late, great John McGeoch and innovative bass player Barry Adamson [seen above, at right] who left after joining for some gigs in 2009). The remaining vestiges of the nearly geriatric band may offer something other than what it might've been—this is no Secondhand Daylight—still, those vestiges aren't half bad.
Before the hiatus and somewhere between the second and third album (ca. 1980), singer and lyricist Howard Devoto had already begun a transformation. Always one to take himself and the work a little too seriously, though it was part of his charm, Devoto's transformed vocal style yielded a softer, less edgy, more lilting, and at times histrionic approach: Think early Bowie (Laughing Gnome era) crossed with Anthony Newley without the vibrato or chops. I call it Devoto's dinner theater period. At the same time, keyboardist Dave Formula took more prominence as the band's sound sculptor, these two factors combined brought Magazine closer to the middle of the road, a dramatic departure from the band's earlier punk and post-punk incarnations. EventuallyMcGeoch would have enough (not agreeing with the lighter keyboard-laden sound) and would leave to join Siouxsie and the Banshees (helping to create some of the best Banshees material of their career, a point on which Siouxsie agrees), and later Public Image Ltd. Even before McGeoch's departure, the band began flirting with a more bubblegum sound. By the time of About the Weather, the band had slipped into a full retro AM radio splendor, especially Motown, which only two years before would've been unthinkable. As a fan, I'd follow them nearly to the end, albeit reluctantly. By the fourth and final album––a record still capable of the decent odd tracks––Magazine was over. (There'd be no tour.) Devoto would go on to pursue a short-lived solo career (Jerky Versions of the Dream, see Rainy Season below) and then follow that in a collaboration with future elder Magazine guitarist Noko in Luxuria. Both latter day iterations would be interesting, but neither would be close to classic period Magazine. With all that in mind, hearing the new album No Thyself(2011) it's understandable that one might be prepared for a grave disappointment. Instead, while the album does have its janky moments, it's an overall relatively impressive work, far better than anyone had a right to expect. When keyboardist Dave Formula, a highly skilled and gifted musician, takes the forefront it tends to pull things rightward. Things tend to go better when more space is given to guitarist Noko, in fact he may be the album's MVP. Readers of this blog know I'm always delighted when old guys do good. It's clear that Magazine's band of elder baldies still has much to say. Good on 'em: Hear No Thyselfhere.
According to Wiki, in 1967, the year Jefferson Airplane hit with Surrealistic Pillow, the former model, erstwhile oboist, and first person to ever say "motherfucker" on live television, Grace Slick (née Wing) would become America's first and preeminent female rock star. Once in the spotlight, Ms. Slick proved herself articulate, courageous, outspoken, and politically motivated (as you'll see below). She also had the kind of spokesmodel good looks America demanded for its trending mistress of counterculture. Based in San Francisco, the Airplane also just happened to be at the movement's spiritual center.
Five years later in 1972, the Jefferson Airplane was preparing to land for the last time. Counterculture was more than a threat now, it was in full engagement. Part of the establishment's irrational fear of the counterculture was for its spectre of hedonist and non-marital sex. Following the repressive 50s and its skirmishes with atomic apocalypses and McCarthyism, sex in itself was a revolution enough. For the under 30 crowd it was liberation, defiance, and just a plain f**king goodtime. With Erica Jong's Fear of Flying on the bestseller lists and Last Tango in Paris and Clockwork Orange in the theaters, much of the cultural language of the time was in full drooling compliance. Slick reflected this language in the entendre of her own Milk Train:
I don't want to stop your milk train running
I just want to ride it some of the time...I don't have to pay for your open mouth...
I'll give you a free milk tongue bath.
Cost you nothin'...
Milk Train was the heretofore relatively unheard of POV of the highly motivated and self-empowered, shall we say, service provider—not unlike the voice of the later Butter Boy. This is not Peaches girl-on-girl dominance, or Melanie's coyish Brand New Key, this was a woman shamelessly waving the flag of her inner slut and taking it to the lucky tool of her choice. Even now, songs like this are far too rare indeed.
Come-ons aside, the music of Milk Train—written by latter day Airplane member Papa John Creech—is what makes this Train roll. Creech's prominent violin jousts with Jorma Kaukonen's guitar and that great opening riff quickly take this train from steam chug to rocket fuel. Jack Casady shows why he's rock's most underrated bass player and Grace Slick shouts more gospel than she ever did before. She belts with her characteristic muscle: no pyrotechnics, no mad parlandos, melismas nor hyperglottic warbling around the notes and no hammering screams, just pure blasts of wind through those well shaped chords. A voice capable of blowing birthday candles out from across a room. It's a chesty power and when it's heaving about milk trains, it's very, very sexy.
Milk Train comes from the last proper Airplane album (1972's Long John Silver) and for a brief moment this smutty little masterpiece actually made it to the radio. Within two years the Airplane would dissolve and rebuild as The Starship, and the arch-psychedelic 'Frisco sound would transform into the mega-platinum yacht rock of the Reagan '80s. By then, Milk Trains had become friends with benefits and entendre would become virtually a lost art.
A smutty masterpiece:
Download: Jefferson Airplane, Milk Train
Ms. Slick on the Smothers Brothers show in 1968 performing in blackface and gloves. The raising of her fist at the end is a show of support for the Black Panthers.
Establishment rep Dick Clark interviewing the band in a minute and a half and showing why he's Dick:
As I've argued before, while musical longevity has its exceptions, it's rare. And I don't mean acts trotting out their catalog of evergreens on some nostalgia cruise for aging boomers, I mean true artists still capable of producing quality new material, e.g. Cohen, Cave, Dylan, and Bowie. To this list of grayhead warriors add Julie Tippetts, 60s Brit "Northern Soul" singer ("with distant blues and jazz roots"), fashion vanguardist, and poet. (I've argued her virtues before when when her name was still Driscoll.) Tippetts' recent collaborations with Martin Archer tend toward the ambient with shades of RenFair blown through with a jazzy phrasing and "experimental music." But damn, the 66 year old chanteuse can still hit the angelic high notes, nearly breaking escape velocity into whistle tones. Below are highlights from her last two albums with Archer. They may not be everyone's thingbut give her props doing the hard work. She could've chosen the path of playing Vegas-y retreads of weather-beaten standards (like, say, Nina Hagen) and safely padded her pension fund, but she didn't. This old bird is still on the vanguard: props to her.
This weekend I've been attending a conference for the Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). I've listened to various writers, agents, and editors speak on what they're looking for and what might possibly get a prospect out of the slush pile. When sending material they advise a quick and specific log-line (one or two sentence description) that immediately gets the author's idea across. To wit: For a picture book manuscript I've written, an apt description might be a Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs meets a Fischer-Price Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a playground. I've been told it needs work but you get the idea.
In describing Natalie LeBrecht, AKA Greenpt Bluepot, you might say she's a Nico meets Indian
opera imagined by Mel Blanc (see 5 below) by way of Ellis Island (she's lived in both Williamsburg and the Lower East Side). Vocally and stylistically I hear some Jarboe and even a touch of Joni Mitchell in an opium den: Indianesque with a solid Western pulse and a voice way closer to Brooklyn than Mumbai (all right, opium is more China than India but I liked the way it sounded). She seems to hover between the sacred music and the profane sounds of Bollywood. She also favors traditional analog sounds (a big plus, I think) and though one could accuse her of a musical tourism, her music seems created out of a genuine affection and respect for the traditions she's appropriating. She also stakes a good amount of musical real estate that is refreshingly her own, and for this she earns a few gold stars. At best you could say she's attempting to shift boundaries, mix East and West, and expand a musical language in the process. Or maybe she just digs yoga and patchouli. Whatever: She's worth your attention.
She does get a little pitchy at times but her heart is in the right place.
On a side note: Recently I was visiting my neighborhood big pharma peddler (Rite Aid in this case), and noticed this on the shelf:
I have the great fortune to live in a progressive enclave in Westside Los Angeles. In this era of wars against women, pharmacists twisting Gospel into denials of birth control, and a candidate for governor who promises to make oral sex a crime, it warms my heart to see the open sale of marital aids at my corner drug store.
And events like the one captured in LeBrecht’s Royal Parade. Ah, to live in an open and free(ish) society. Dwellers of the two islands of civilization in the U.S. (NY and LA just to be clear), you are truly blessed. Be grateful and indulge. It's your right and duty.
You could say I had a PhD in Devo before that the release of the first album. And though the album presented the band under a museum vetrina—nothing like those raw singles—the album was still everything fans could've hoped for. During that time the band was practically a puking cornucopia of ideas, not the least of which was those punchy early songs—Sloppy, Uncontrollable Urge, Shrivel Up, Satisfaction, Clockout, Social Fools. Devo was the It band for my twilight teenage years. The second album was pretty good too—less guitar, more synth, no Eno— but the It factor was gone. I didn't even buy it. Further on, as one of the early fans, Whip It and Beautiful World just weren't what I'd signed up for. That first record said everything they had to say. And even now it still stands as one of the best records of the '80s New Wave. 
140) King Crimson, Neal, Jack, and Me: The way Link Wray's solo scorches, Adrian Belew's chills here like a martini stirred in liquid nitrogen—stone cold, math-y, with a heavy chunk of the right brain. Robert Fripp's phasing and fastidiously picked rhythms are pure math, like the calculus Newton invented to study the universe and, in his best moments, Fripp can coax the universe from his guitar. But on Neal, Jack, and Me, Belew is the hero. His solo turn (at the 2:24 mark) is tantalizingly brief and doesn't need another second—he's accomplished all that needed to be done. Plus, his sound finds the avant garde angles (with a little psychedelia) that even titans like Coltrane never found. His playing bursts into all directions like a sniper bullet through an apple. Belew learned at Fripp's feet and with this one he may've just outdone the master.
142) Henry Cow, War: Upon her spoon this motto/ Wonderfully designed/ Violence completes the partial mind. 
143) The Buzzcocks, Hollow Inside: Bubblegum punk was the 'cocks and I was slow to warm. Shelley's singing was too cutesy by half, most of their early songs (e.g. Orgasm Addict) were just irritating, and even their best ones ran two and a half minutes on ten seconds of idea. It took this song, Hollow Inside, to break through to me. The minor key riff grabbed me by the collar and Shelley never sounded so much like his former partner, Howard Devoto. It was practically emo. This song too is slim on the ideas, almost five minutes of your life given away to six seconds of ideas, but the idea is a good one. Shelley did have an ear for a hook. After Hollow Inside I gained an appreciation for the 'cocks I hadn't had before. (Even my teenage daughter is hooked.) And they do have an undeniable bounce. 
144) Coleman Hawkins, Rifftide: Hawkins is the bridge between the big band era and bebop. If he didn't invent bop he certainly has his DNA all over it. His was a more restrained, buttoned up version of what those cats that followed him played—Monk, Bird, Rollins, Miles. The bop generation gets all the praise but they were also the jazz killers. If they won the cultural battle, it was a pyrrhic victory. Boppers did to jazz what Kline, Pollack, et. al. did to generations of art dilettantes. Like abstract painting, jazz unmoored itself from the pure aesthetic joy of creative communication and lost its audience. (How many times have old jazzers said, "I'm not an entertainer. I'm an artist!") This, my friends, is the difference between expression and communication. Communication is a communal act. It wants to create a bond; expression, on the other hand, is often just a jerk-off—a secret language indecipherable to most. A cultural patois designed to keep the rabble out. Hawkins didn't do that. He respected melody. His tone was fat and clean and he loved the songs he was playing. He was everything the upstarts wanted to rebel against. His music does kind of scream tradition. But then, everybody needs some tradition to go with their avant garde.
146) Frank Zappa, Willie the Pimp: Childhood buds Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart (the Beefheart moniker was Zappa's idea) never had much luck working together. The rare exception was Willie the Pimp. Beefheart's appearance is brief but adds the necessary atomic weight to this rocking molecule. (What are those percussion sounds underneath, a winding clock and a shaking ring of keys?) A great cockfight of sound ensues starting with the riffing violin. Zappa solos, starting sedate before going steroidal when the wah-wah kicks on. Beefheart wordlessly growls and yelps for a few rounds while the bass player plucks some frenzied bowel-clearing low end. Somehow a piano finds a way in and it works, laying down energized whorehouse atmospherics from the back room. (Willie the Pimp is also one of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time. *Yawn*)
Come-ons aside, the music of Milk Train—written by latter day Airplane member Papa John Creech—is what makes this Train roll. Creech's prominent violin jousts with Jorma Kaukonen's guitar and that great opening riff quickly take this train from steam chug to rocket fuel. Jack Casady shows why he's rock's most underrated bass player and Grace Slick shouts more gospel than she ever did before. She belts with her characteristic muscle: no pyrotechnics, no mad parlandos, melismas nor hyperglottic warbling around the notes and no hammering screams, just pure blasts of wind through those well shaped chords. A voice capable of blowing birthday candles out from across a room. It's a chesty power and when it's heaving about milk trains, it's very, very sexy.
