Through a Vast Crystal Sphere

California Feeling

2012-01-11T22:11:00.001-08:00

Hey! What's happening? Yeah, I know I haven't really been doing much of a job keeping this place up and running lately. My motivation to do so has been, shall we say, less than extreme. Nothing to do with you fine folks, but if you must know, I've been going through a rather intense period of self-examination lately. It could be viewed as a something of a crossroads I suppose. Probably the sort of thing a lot of divorced 37 year old males have experienced throughout the ages, but it's been a gigantic pain in the ass nonetheless.

Without getting too in depth about it, I'm in a rut. A lot of it has to do with what I perceive as a lack of growth, or maybe a need for more perspective. Basically I'm stuck, you see. My life's passion has always been music, and my free time has been centered around going to live shows since I was a wee lad of 14. But lately, that's been something that hasn't been providing the same amount of joy it used to. In theory there should be no reason why I don't enjoy seeing live music, but damned if hitting (or now being well past) 30 doesn't seem like a death sentence to this once happy club goer.

It's just weird checking out a show, looking around you and noticing how young everybody is. Whereas I once felt surrounded by brothers and sisters at these gigs, lately I'm starting to feel like the proverbial drunk uncle, or "drunkle" as I've recently become fond of saying. Not that I'm always drunk, but you guys probably get where I'm coming from here. Against my better instincts, somewhere along the line I became just another schlub with a job and a mortgage. My interest in keeping up with fashions and trends is dying steadily, and as much as I try to rail against the march of time there is really nothing much that can be done about it.

I go to dance shows in San Francisco looking to have a good time, but the thought of grinding on some girl fifteen years my junior just seems so unseemly all of a sudden. I often ask myself what the hell am I doing here exactly? In my heart I know I have little desire to settle down again, but mainstream society isn't leaving me a whole lot of other options either. One by one, my friends are either shacking up and dropping out of the scene, or becoming victims to their own vices. Yet neither of those options really appeals to me.

So I generally come home from work, slam a bunch of PBR and listen to my old Chris Montez or Sergio Mendez & Brasil '66 records, dreaming of some beautiful alternate reality where men wore white tuxes and ladies were dressed in exquisite evening gowns, and everything was groovy and simple. I burn lots of incense and candles, and have taken to smoking cigarettes again, mainly out of boredom.

On weekends I hit the dive bars, but it's a shitty situation in Oakland. Insufficient public transportation and my general unwillingness to not get arrested for driving under the influence usually has me dropping $40 a night just on cab fare, which on some evenings pales next to my bar tab. It's not like it's a guaranteed good time either. I meet and talk to a fair amount of women, but it's like I've become so picky about what I'm looking for that I'm just searching for any excuse to disassociate myself from them, rather than judging them fairly on whatever charms they do possess.

I touched on this briefly in my previous California Music post, but the overwhelming ennui of the thirtysomething California lifestyle is tangible. Nothing's ever really bad out here for those of us that are fortunate enough to be healthy, not broke or destitute, and to be living in a neighborhood where we don't have to worry about getting shot at on a daily basis. But damned if it's all still not what I thought it would be.

Since I moved to the Bay Area, I've partied in $20 million houses, and I've partied at warehouses in what we fondly call around here the "super ghetto", and yet (shockingly!) I haven't found what I'm looking for at either. So is it a case of searching inward for answers then? I feel like maybe I ought to meditate, or start getting into yoga and new age literature, but to be honest I just can't be arsed. I've toyed with the idea of forming an internet start-up numerous times, but it just seems like such an overwhelmingly competitive environment for someone such as myself who really isn't the least bit competitive.

I haven't written a song worth a shit in over a year. The boundless joy I used to get from just playing guitar or drums has been reduced to a mild sense of enthusiasm. Lately life seems to be centered around waking up to an alarm clock and making sure my bills are paid on time. I actually sort of like my job, so that's not a major source of stress (thank God!), but advancement opportunities there are unfortunately few and far between.

Furthermore, I live in an area where I'm surrounded by artsy, cool young people on one hand and rich douchebags on the other. A lot of the quote unquote "normals" around here I see out driving or waiting in line at the CVS just look beaten down zombies. I'm happy to say that I still possess enough enthusiasm not to look like that.

Maybe it's the economy, or the pace of 21st century living, but something about the times just doesn't agree with me. Which is weird because I'm a huge tech junkie, but it seems as though everyone's buried in their gadgets, and real conversation is becoming a thing of the past these days. And generally I find most people to be overly preoccupied with their own internal drama anyway, or overwhelmed with obligations and the like. I know I'm fortunate to possess a great nexus of individuals I consider close friends, but they fall trap to the same things I've been talking about, and I suppose I'm not immune either. And we all know about the level of drama that can exist between friends at various times.

Anyway, I'm just posting this missive by way of letting those of you who care enough to post here why the lack of updates and such. Please understand that I'm not going through a depressive state or anything of the sort; it's more a case of persistent though not overwhelming boredom. It's a daily struggle-- the fight to remain vital, to not become the proverbial wet blanket. Maybe if you've been through something of the sort, and feel as though you can relate, you might care to leave a message. No obligation though. I'll be back at it soon enough, and until then, you can find me somewhere around Oakland, hiding in plain sight.

L.A. Gemstones: The Rock Box compilation (5 CDs)

2011-07-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

Compilation (various artist)

And... without further ado... I believe this is what many of you fine folks have been waiting for. The Rock Box is finally here! As promised, 150 of the best tracks out of Los Angeles and SoCal from 1964-69. The entire L.A. rock music scene on five discs, sequenced in exacting chronological order so that you can see for yourself just how fast music was progressing during this halcyon era: from Johnny Rivers to CSN in under 5 years! Dance with go-go girls at the Whisky; check out The Byrds at Ciro's; hang out in the garage; get in a riot at Pandora's Box; drop some acid at the Griffith's Park Love-In; hitch a ride up to Monterey for the Pop Festival; get hassled by the fuzz; swim naked in Peter Tork's pool, and then go ride horses in Topanga when it all gets too heavy, man. The music will take you there.

We'd also like to take the opportunity to introduce our new L.A. Gemstones Blog. From now on, all L.A. in the sixties' content will be centered over there. I will be writing liners for both Gemstones sets (the notes for discs one and two are already up there-- go read 'em!), compiling a ton of great YouTube content and rare photos, and trying to get discussions going on all things L.A... We hope to have some very special guest contributors lined up soon as well.

Anyway, I'll save the long-winded comments for the new blog. Enjoy the set!

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | track lists (both sets)

Also still available-- L.A. Gemstones: The Pop Box

The Rock Box cometh...

2011-07-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

Well the day some of you have been waiting for is finally almost at hand. Through a Vast Crystal Sphere's new five CD L.A. Gemstones: The Rock Box has officially been compiled, tagged and quality controlled. All that's left is the artwork, which should be arriving here any day from now, and then we will post the entire set immediately. We understand that this has been a long, drawn-out process and specifically wanted to assure you that the additional delays were made in the service of tracking down rare, out-of-print titles and cleaner source material, so that sound-wise this collection would rise to the same standard set by last year's L.A. Gemstones: The Pop Box.

The Rock Box includes 150 of the very best songs from Los Angeles and Southern California, beginning with Johnny River's 1964 hit "Midnight Special" and closing with the Cascades' uplifting 1969 sutra "Indian River". In between you'll encounter all the top show bands, instrumental virtuosos, folk- and garage-rockers, chart superstars, mind-bending practitioners of psych, and the many talented blues- and country-rock acts that defined what it was to live in SoCal during that magical era.

We hope that you'll be as stoked as we are!

New Goffin/ King demos surface!

2011-07-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

Pretty self-explanatory, no? We can never get enough of Carole over here at the Sphere, and so of course we were stoked to see not one but two more unreleased Goffin/ King demos pop up on the YouTubes!

In keeping with the theme of our lauded Phases set, we will present the demo version of each, followed by a more recognized commercially released one. Enjoy!

JUST SOME THOUGHTS:

- Interesting to hear Carole use the word "girl" in both songs. We can clearly deduce that these were only meant to be demos by this fact alone.

- I'm guessing Phil Spector didn't really do all that much to garner his co-compositional credit on "Just Once in My Life". The song already sounds fully formed at this early stage.

- Not to give the short shift to Gary Goffin here, but Carole always wrote the melodies and Gary was just a wordsmith, right?

- Also, how sad that Carole never got the chance to record an album of her own prior to The City. Even something along the lines of those quasi-legit first Nilsson or Jimmy Webb albums would be a revelation to hear today.

- Sorry for the drastic volume dip in that Turtles clip. It was the only version of that song on YouTube.

The Who - Lifehouse (2 CD)

2011-05-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

Compilation (single artist)

It occurred to me as I was getting ready to put this post together that 2011 is the 40th anniversary of Who's Next, surely as timeless an album as you'll find from the "classic rock era". Yet while even the doltish teens of today must begrudgingly recognize such songs as "Teenage Wasteland", "Yeeeaaaaahhhhh" or "That One Limp Bizkit Covered", I wonder how much anyone outside of the devout Who fanbase (a.k.a. a bunch of deaf geezers) really knows about the concept that spawned this almighty warhorse: Lifehouse.

If you're confused about what Lifehouse was supposed to be or ever was to begin with, you're not alone. I've been following The Who for going on twenty years now, and I still don't understand the plot any better than I did when I first read about it in Richard Barnes' Maximum R&B book back in my early teenage-hood. And for once this isn't just a case of me being retarded. None of my other Pals In Whodom can extract anything other than the basic premise that there's a guy living in some sort of future dystopia where everybody is plugged into a giant grid, and who loses his daughter and goes looking for her at a rock concert where a band is playing a show striving to achieve the universal note that will unite society, and... Yeah, do I really have to go any further here?

Cover to the Lifehouse lyrics booklet, included with the LP

Okay, so what if Lifehouse's plot makes Tommy look like the world's most concise narrative by comparison? The music is still amazing, and that's all I'm after really. THE POINT BEING: If Who's Next is a perfect album, and Lifehouse is a double album containing almost every song off of Who's Next plus a bunch of other great shit, then isn't Lifehouse really the greatest album ever? That's called math, people!

Anyway the decision is yours, mister listener guy. I will just lay down a few of the basic parameters of track selection that I used, and then you can be on your merry way. All songs were recorded at or around the initial 1971 sessions for Lifehouse, with a few being tracked as late as 1972. The sequencing is supposed to be that of a double LP, with five songs per side on disc one and four a side on disc two.

As you will see, side three is comprised of live performances from the Young Vic and the San Francisco Civic Auditorium. This is the "concert" part of the story. Also, please note that we do not consider this a replacement for Pete Townshend's Lifehouse Chronicles set, but rather a companion release that should be made available to the public someday. Okay then?

What else to add? Can't think of anything really. Just listen to the dang thing and let me know what you think of it. Did I come close to what your estimation was of what Lifehouse should be? How would you have done it differently? Is Donald Trump really a viable candidate for the Tea Party in 2012?

Lebenhaus

Fleetwood Mac - They Play On (4 CD)

2011-05-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

Deluxe Rei ssue

Fleetwood Mac's Then Play On is an album that I consider to be one of Britain's finest exports of the late sixties, on par with The Who Sell Out, Led Zeppelin II, Beggar's Banquet or any other record you'd care to name. This version of the group (nearly unrecognizable when compared to the later Buckingham/ Nicks era) reached their pinnacle here as their leader, the visionary guitarist Peter Green, was joined by an 18-year old phenom by the name of Danny Kirwan. Though the pairing only existed for this album and a handful of singles, it was an explosive combination that burned bright and then faded away just as quickly.

The addition of Danny Kirwan pushed Fleetwood Mac beyond the limitations of the strict blues structure heard on their earlier releases, as Kirwan brought along a soft, melodic sensibility to his songwriting. Likewise, he was nearly an equal to Green as a guitarist, and the two summarily pushed each other to lofty heights that may have never been equaled during the British blues boom.

So why is it so hard to get a decent sounding copy of Then Play On on CD? It was only ever issued once digitally in 1990, and it was a botched release at that. The sound was sub-murky, and the tracks weren't even sequenced in the proper order (a problem that had hampered U.S. releases of the album since it was first released over here back in '69).

The problem could only be solved by procuring a great sounding copy of the original U.K. vinyl, which is exactly what we did to start off this collection. Now American audiences can finally enjoy Then Play On the way it was meant to be heard, in its proper running order. Next we added two discs worth of vital 1969/70 Mac singles and outtakes, including the long lost Milton Schlitz Show EP, which was originally supposed to accompany the album when it was released but was pulled at the last minute. Disc four contains a live concert from Stockholm recorded in March of '69 that shows the Green/ Kirwan line-up in all its glory.

If you've never heard this album or don't know much about the early Fleetwood Mac, prepare to be blown away! 1 | 2 | 3

Tuesday Timewarp: The Lost Lester Bangs Interview

2011-04-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

Lester Bangs, perhaps the greatest rock scribe to ever put pen to paper, died in 1982 and didn't leave much in the way of taped conversations when he passed. That's why this recently uncovered 1980 interview is so important. Here is an hour and a half of Lester expounding on New Wave music, Rolling Stone magazine, modern sound equipment, the music industry, touring oldies acts and much more. Insightful, visionary, never boring-- this is the Professor giving you a Masters-level thesis. So sit back, grab a beer, and click HERE to check out The Lost Lester Bangs Interview. (hosted at www.cousincreep.com)

Prnce & the Rvolution - A Shock to the System (2 CD)

2011-04-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

Compliation (single artist)

Hey kids! In the interest of keeping up momentum until the Rock Box drops, here's something for you all to dig into. Basically I've always considered myself a fan of That Purple Guy Who Shall Not Be Named, but my enthusiasm for his work comes and goes in phases and nearly always centers around what I guess is considered his Golden Age, roughly 1983-87 or thereabouts. During that five year span he was the dominant force in both the rock and, ahem, urban formats, and it seemed like no matter what type of music you were normally into, you couldn't wait to see what the Short Guy would come up with for his next masterpiece.

So while I as a young lad gobbled up his releases on vinyl and, later, compact disc, I was really only aware of the songs that were on the albums proper. It wasn't til much later on, during that weird, long forgotten era we refer to today as the "Mid Nineties", when I finally started getting into club deejaying, that some dude or other turned me on to "Erotic City" for the first time. Well slap my ass and call me Aunt Sally! If that tune wasn't a good old fashioned ear opener, well then my name isn't Fonzie J. Robocop.

In what I'm sure for you the reader is a predictable turn of events, young me went out and scoured the bins for all the old 7" and 12" vinyl singles that the Flaming Funkateer had released during the old days. Now I'll be honest here, having felt perplexed by Lovesexy, let down by Batman and abandoning ship sometime around Graffiti Bridge, I had little use for his new stuff. I had of course heard the few singles he did with the NPG that received airplay, but apart from "Money Don't Matter Tonight", none of them did a damn thing for me, and so I regressed back into smoking pot and listening to 311 and Sublime in my mom's basement. (Hey I was like 18 at the time, so keep the shut-in jokes to yourself!)

But yeah, the vinyl singles! Now that's what got me back into old Unpronounceable Symbol Head. And so of course I did what any other young lad trapped in 1995 would do-- I made a CASSETTE TAPE with *all* the b-sides on it! I mean, my God, the sense of achievement that I felt for being-- you know-- the only kid in Prospect Heights, or possibly the whole of the Northwest Chicago Suburbs (excluding the cities of Schaumburg, Park Ridge and perhaps Palatine) to own such a thing! Yes folks, I remember the good times: rollin' down the mean streets of Suburbia, bumpin' "Erotic City" in the Honda and giving the screwface to any and all retirees or school children that got in my way. Hells yeah.

Um, yeah, so anyway, this would be what is referred to in industry jargon as the "digital" equivalent of those old cassette tapes of mine. In most cases these are sourced from the same original vinyls that I dubbed the cassettes off of all those years ago, so be prepared to share in the magic, folks. One note: I encoded a bunch of these tracks like ten years ago when drive space was actually still a consideration, so the bitrate may not be up to your audiophile standards. That said, I listened back to this mix numerous times as I was putting it together for y'all, so you can trust me when I tell you it's a good listen if you just take it all in and don't sweat the numbers. This is the Purple Yoda in his prime, making music so good, it might just cause A Shock to the System.

California Music Part One: Requiem for Vitality

2011-04-14T19:25:00.000-07:00

Compilation (various artist)

Hey! I know what you're probably saying to yourself-- This guy doesn't update his blog for three months, and now he's hammering us over the head with more new crap than we have time to listen to. C'mon, I totally know you just said that right now.

Well enjoy it now, people! The good times won't last forever, and you know why that is? Because I'm OLD. Hella old. Thirty-six to be precise. I'm at the point in my life where even such rote past-times as maintaining a music blog are considered childish wastes of my valuable time, which according to too many people I know should be spent "doing something productive". PRO-DUC-TIVE (adj.). Yes gang, here are some of the exciting, productive things on my agenda, in no particular order:

Get garage door fixed (and pray it doesn't take the local schmoes more than an hour to do so at their rates!)

Go to traffic court to resolve ticket. (Seriously, what the hell is the deal with these cameras at intersections? I miss the old days when you actually had to, you know, get busted by a cop or something in order to get a ticket.)

Get a haircut. (Overt resemblance to ca. 1971 Brian Wilson getting to be a bit much.)

Send assertive e-mail to lackadaisical eBay merchant who refuses to ship me my NM- Papa Doo Ron Ron LP, which probably isn't anywhere close to a NM-, but fuck it I gotta have it anyway. (Yep.)

Yes, good times on the old homestead. Hey I'm just livin' the Cali lifestyle, yo. Now pass me the granola and WATCH OUT FOR THAT BEACH BALL!

(Sigh.) The previous diatribe is what we call in the writing game an "introduction", wherein I use a gripping personal saga to sucker you into whatever it is I'm really trying to sell you on. Are you with me still? Holy shit, you actually are, aren't you? Pfft! For real? I mean, like, seriously? Okaaayyy...

So. You now know this much about me: I'm old and I live in California. As such, while I try to keep up with the latest in all things pop culture, it's become soberingly apparent to me over the last two years or so that I just totally do not give a shit about your Ke$has and your T-Pains and whatever other eight track rock 'n' roll records the youngsters are boppin' to these days. What can I say? I'm not proud of it or anything. But it's just like a great man once said: "I'm old I tell ya! Why my social security card is a rock with a fraction on it!"

Yep, transitioning into your mid-thirties can be a stone drag, even here in the Golden State. And if you don't believe me, why not ask these guys?

I mean if you look up the word ennui in the dictionary, this photo would probably accompany it, amirite? (Wait do dictionaries have pictures? Do they even make dictionaries anymore?) But yeah, here's five seriously burned-out looking cats, with an average age of, iunno, thirty-five? And their music of the time reflected this fatigue! I mean with the exception of that scary looking dude on the right, it's possible none of them even knew what a Sex Pistol was, let alone what one would do with such an item. Maybe you've heard of a book by Dave Rimmer called Like Punk Never Happened? Well here's your answer, folks.

But here's the rub. The Beach Boys continued to put out some killer music during this, their wilderness era. We've focused on Dennis and Brian's output in this blog already, but what about the rest of these dudes, and their buddy Mr. Bruce Johnston? They didn't exactly crawl up under a rock and die, did they? Nosirreevinniebarbarino, they kept on making music. Good music. California Music.

Huh? No, I did not make that last bit up. There really is a genre called California Music, as in-- not music from California, but California Music. And yes the italics are absolutely necessary! (Okay no they're not.)

Yes, you the reader may be amazed to know that this genre was first coined in an article that appeared in Phonograph Record Magazine titled “A California Saga: The Revival of Coastal Consciousness,” by Gene Sculatti, Ken Barnes, and Greg Shaw. (Vol. 3, No. 10, May 1973). I will not quote you anything directly from this article, seeing as I am too cheap to cough up some money for the fine folks over at Rock's Backpages, but from what I remember of it, the jist of the article was that, by 1973, the California music scene was beginning to morph yet again. Out was country rock, singer songwriters, metal and glam. In was Holland, American Spring and Jan & Dean. I shit you not, I am not making this up. My ears do have the tendency to perk up whenever I hear about individuals digging on the same obscuro shit I listen to during my humdrum daily existence. And yes, the writers actually make the point that numerous young swarthy-types were heard driving around SoCal "bumpin'" (in the vernacular of today's yutes) the 45 mix of "California Saga".

Take a moment and let that sink in. I mean, talk about the time and the place. (Ooh! Moby Grape!) The article goes on to list some impossible-to-find singles by The Legendary Masked Surfers and Jan Berry that were, believe it or not, getting heavy play from folks who were "dialed in" that lived on the best coast at the time. (See what I did there?)

How could such a thing happen? Because PEOPLE WERE GETTING OLD, MAN!! (Say that last bit just like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, and you'll get where I'm coming from.) I mean, Spirit and Vanilla Fudge were groovy back in the day and everything, but lately that shit just gives me a headache. But this pussy-ass James Taylor crap, I can't abide by that either. And don't get me started on all these queers from the U.K., with their "androgony" and their "originality". Who needs that shit? Not me! Hey you know who was cool though? JAN AND FUCKIN' DEAN.

Or at least that's how I visualize what this guy would have had to say about it!

Sooo... Somewhere around 1974, Bruce Johnston decides, having left the Beach Boys, that he and his pal Terry Somebody-Or-Other are going to start a record label called Equinox. I picture the conversation going a little like this:

BRUCE: Hey Terry, have you noticed that there really seems to be no outlets these days for musicians like me who want to specialize in generic, middle-of-the-road schlock?

TERRY: (Ignoring Bruce.) Oh man, it says here that Manson may actually be eligible for parole next year! (Twiddles thumbs with a look of consternation on his face.)

The upshot being, the Equinox label is sprung into action and Bruce quickly assembles a group of session pros known as The Roadhouse Band, led by guitarist Bill House and featuring vocalists Gloria Grinel and Kenny Hinkle, as well as other musicians with names that sound made up but really aren't. Before quickly going into debt over Terry Melcher's two solo albums (average cost, just slightly less than the Spruce Goose) they unfurl this minor masterpiece from the pen of some unknown songwriter:

Good thing they changed those stupid lyrics about a car or whatever, right?!

No, seriously, this song is the shit. It's the shit, and if you don't agree with me then TURN AWAY NOW! It's only going to get smoother, and soon you're going to be faced with even more sax solos.

Now if I may inject a bit of levity into this otherwise serious essay, I would like to point out that Bruce and company actually did a rather nice job of modernizing this Beach Boys classic for, ahem, modern listeners. It's not a patch on the original, but the vocals are strong, the new lyrics stay out of the way, and more to the fact, the song latches onto a vibe of some sort that's hard to describe, but let's see if we can do so anyway. Let's see: It's smooth and definitely laid-back -- almost to the point of somnombulance-- but yet it's so fucking pitch perfect and well produced that you'd have to be some kind of monster not to admire its modest charms. It's as though Johnston's production screams at you, "I AM MADE BY A TOP PRODUCER IN A TOP STUDIO USING THE BEST AVAILABLE SESSION MUSICIANS, HOW DARE YOU NOT SUCCUMB MY MODEST CHARMS THANK YOU DRIVE THROUGH." Almost. Except Bruce Johnston would never scream at you. He's far too polite and well heeled to do such a thing.

As stated, Equinox, in partnership with RCA, actually went on to produce other albums-- several with covers such as this:

And, yes, I do actually own this record. I am not proud.

Moving on, Equinox predictably fell apart after selling approximately 734 copies of its combined catalog. Terry Melcher later went on to achieve super-stardom flipping houses in the San Fernando Valley. Bruce Johnston gave up his dreams and went back to work for his dad's insurance company, by which I mean The Beach Boys. Bill House was last seen heading into Da Nang while manning an M-60 in the back of a Bell UH-1 Huey and is currently M.I.A.; his last words reportedly being "eat shit and die, motherfuckers!"

No doubt broken hearted by this tragic turn of events, Johnston handed over the "California Music" moniker to the one man on Earth inspired enough to make even gayer music than Bruce was capable of. (Y'all know where I'm going with this, right?)

When we last saw Curt Boettcher, he was signed to three-album deal with Elektra that he had delivered approximately 1.12548 album's worth of material on before they dropped his ass. The story gets a little harder to follow from there. He was apparently supposed to be part of the big "Sail on Sailor" circle jerk with Brian Wilson, Ray Kennedy, Tandyn Almer and Van Dyke Parks, but missed the boat on that one. (Get it? GET IT!) Then, Curt being Curt, he retreated back to the simple, honest existance of bartender/ club deejay at Barney's Beanery in Hollywood.

Poor Curt. I know Brian Wilson said that he "wasn't made for these times", but if anyone deserved to wear that sable fur, it was this poor lad. I mean, imagine for just one minute being a raging homosexual back in the 1960s, when even loose talk of such an abomination was a mortal sin against the creator. Hell, times were so straight back then even Paul Lynde pretended to dig chicks-- and we're talking about a guy so swingin' that he died with amyl nitrate poppers dislodged in his pooper! (Too soon?) No, when I dwell on what Curt's life must have been during his Goldebriars days, I can only think of one thing. Mad Men.

Kurt: I’m homosexual.

Ken: I don’t think that means what you think it means.

Smitty Smith: Kurt.

Kurt: No. I make love with the man, not the woman.

So yeah, Curt. He did what only he could do. Grabbed the California Music axe and turned that motherfucker up to eleven. "Aiko Aiko"? Yes please! A disco version of the "Banana Boat Song"? Motherfucker, I'm ON that shit!

I kid of course. Curt was the man, will always be the man, never was not the man. If there was a gold standard for record production, it would bear an insignia with him and his lovely little Seventies' white afro. He was the one who took California Music from being something some dudes wrote about in an old magazine article and gave it the breath of life. Because unlike Bruce Johnston, Curt was funky. And gay. Incredibly gay. But it's the gay-ness (DISCLAIMER: "Not that there's anything wrong with that!") that this Jan & Dean-inspired hetero bro-fest was so sorely lacking that was the missing ingredient. All of a sudden, here was a dude who sang like a chick-- better than a chick in fact-- fucking KILLING IT. Don't believe me? Ask Eric Carmen. Curt toured Japan with him in 1980, on Carmen's personal invite. Elton John? Curt is all over Blue Moves. The Beach Boys? Well you know the answer to that shit:

Could things get any more decadent? More than anything, this one track symbolizes the entire California Music movement to a tee. The Beach Boys meet Curt Becher (his spelling, not mine) re-meet Bruce Johnston in a triple collision of post-Sunshine Pop excellence. These guys wanted NO PART of punk. This is music for adults! Sunburned, sexually free, drug addled, thrice-divorced adults, but adults just the same. What cost more? The studio time or the coke? Who knows? WHO CARES?! All bets are off when you're dialed into the sweet, sweet sounds of California Music. There's a party somewhere and Neil Bogart is picking up the bill, so MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC BITCHES!!

Except it all had to come crushing down. You remember that old saying about when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Well Curt Becher, you beautiful, unstoppable flaming force of the hedonistic, discofied Californication lifestyle-- you, sir, have just met your match:

Okay, time to take a poll here: How many of you know that Curt Becher actually produced this little number? Cuz I sure as fuck didn't. At least til I learned who Curt was anyways. Now let me tell you why it's important:

Flat out, it's just this simple. This record doesn't suck. Not remotely. Oh, they'll try to tell you it does. Hell, the cover is enough to turn you off before you even slice the shrink wrap. But have you actually heard it? I mean, as in heard it without scoffing over the songs instead of paying attention to them? Don't believe the hype. Instead, check out the track we sampled for inclusion with this comp, "Runnin' Around the World". There's a fascinating story that goes along with that song concerning Curt and Mike, but I won't get into it now.

It's just that many, many people, particularly those who wrote music reviews for large corporate rock rags in the early Eighties, could not get over their adverse hatred of Mike Love. Which to some point is justified. The guy could be a huge douche, there's no getting around that, and no amount of revisionism can spin it otherwise. But I'm not gonna go there. We all make our mistakes, and it's how we learn from them that determine the real measure of our man- (or woman-) hood. Anyone who really knows about the Beach Boys knows there's no such thing as a Hero or a Villain. Remember what I said about the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object? Shades of grey. Shades of grey.

Anyway, I'm about out of steam. Here's the comp. If you've stuck with me this long then you deserve to hear it. All I ask is that you withhold judgement, and as you listen, try to consider the fact that we all grow older. Let those familiar voices you hear singing resonate, and think about where their heads were at then, and all the life experiences that brought them to where they were by that point. Why did these master musicians decide to abandon the brass ring and settle into the seedier, less noble environs of Hollywood discos and St. Tropez beach resorts? Would you have done the same?

Listen and absorb:

California Music pt. 1

(Dedicated to Ken Barnes, Gene Sculatti and Greg Shaw.)

The Ballroom - The Complete Recordings

2011-04-12T21:43:00.001-07:00

Compliation (single artist)

Even for those familiar with the vast recording universe of pop production deity Curt Boettcher, his sixties band The Ballroom is a corner of his career that remains something of an enigma. Compared to Curt's relatively renowned Sagittarius and Millennium projects, the Ballroom is still shrouded in mystery. As such, we must return to the beginning if we are to uncover the facts and chart the brief development of this short-lived but monumentally important recording group.

In November 1966, Curt Boettcher was on his way to becoming a highly sought-after producer in Hollywood, with a production vitae that already included such hits as "Sweet Pea", "Hooray for Hazel", "Along Comes Mary" and "Cherish" (though he would unfortunately not receive credit for the first two) and, shortly, "It's Now Winter's Day". Boettcher had also recently cut a record for his friend Lee Mallory titled "That's the Way It's Gonna Be" that, while not as commercially successful as the other songs I just mentioned, nevertheless had been heard and felt by a couple of his notable peers: Brian Wilson and Gary Usher.

It should be duly noted as well that Curt at this point was tied into a production contract with one Steve Clark, head of Our Productions. Though Clark was apparently little more than the money man in the equation, he and Boettcher had also recently elevated one of their house session musicians-- a young oboist named Jim Bell-- to co-producer status. However, if the label on the Ballroom's sole 45 is any indication, neither Clark nor Bell would have received a production credit on any Ballroom album. This was to be Curt Boettcher's baby and prize project from the start.

The group itself was hand-picked by Curt, and would a quartet. However, unlike the two-guy/ two-girl lineup of his previous band The Goldebriars (or the Mamas and Papas who were currently riding high atop the charts) this vocal group would be comprised of two male leads in Curt and Sandy Salisbury, a female lead in Michele O'Malley and an oboist in Bell. Working behind the scenes would be a team of players, singers and writers including the aforementioned Lee Mallory, ex-New Christy Minstrel Mike Whalen, former Goldebriar vocalists Dotti and Sheri Holmberg, and the team of musicians who comprised the Our Productions House Band.

It is known that their first album was in the can by December of 1966 and would have actually beaten Smile to the marketplace, had the group been signed to a deal at the time. (SOURCE: Dawn Eden.) A mono master reel dated 9/66 exists, its label shown within the booklet to Sundazed's Magic Time box set, with a ten track line-up. The tracks listed are as follows: "5 A.M."; "Magic Time"; "I'll Grow Stronger"; "Lead Me to Love"; "Would You Like to Go"; "You Turn Me Around"; "Baby Please Don't Go"; "It's a Sad World"; "Crazy Dreams" and "Why Don't You (Forever)". These were notated on the box as basic tracks, meaning they were most likely devoid of any vocals or instrumental overdubs.

Furthermore, a second mono master reel was also ultimately discovered, containing the previous ten songs as well as "Love's Fatal Way" and "Musty Dusty". This reel was dated 12/01/66 and was indeed the final master of the first Ballroom LP, tracks listed in the appropriate running order. We have faithfully replicated this line-up as the first portion of this CD compilation-- The Lost Ballroom Album.

As stated previously, the group did not have a record deal in place during the recording of their first LP. They were, however, ultimately signed to Warner Brothers by the beginning of 1967. The story has never been explained, but one likely scenario was that Our Productions initially did a deal for The Ballroom with Valiant Records (already home of affiliated artists like The Association, Lee Mallory and The Looking Glass), only to see the band brought under the Warner's umbrella when the larger label usurped the smaller indie, ca. March '67. Seemingly nonplussed, the group continued recording, actually committing even more material to tape. This is a fact that has mostly gone unknown or unheralded, even amongst Boettcher devotees: the band had at least another ten tracks in the can by mid-March, 1967-- enough for a second album!

The Ballroom also performed one live show at this time; a well-received gig at UCLA's spring Mardi Gras Festival. However, in a screw-up of monumental proportions, Warner's actually sat on the first Ballroom album, choosing not to release it. Instead, they coupled "Baby Please Don't Go" alongside a Ruthanne Friedmann song that was finished during the second album sessions titled "Spinning, Spinning, Spinning." Sadly and predictably, the single never made it past the promotional stage, their first album was never released and The Ballroom, perhaps *the* most commercially viable unsigned band in America, were dropped from the label and forced to disband.

What happened afterwards wasn't all bad for Curt Boettcher. He went on to produce one more album for Our Productions (Bobby Jameson's brilliant Color Him In), and then was bought out of his contract with Steve Clark by Columbia Records at the behest of Gary Usher. Some of The Ballroom's tracks, taken by Curt over to CBS as the result of the buy-out, would receive extensive overdubs and wind up on either Sagittarius's Present Tense or the Millennium's Begin LPs.

But what of the lost second Ballroom LP? Nobody's ever heard it, right? Well get ready...

Yes folks, here it is in all it's glory: Our best approximation of what the second Ballroom LP would have sounded like had it seen release. It contains all ten known tracks recorded by the group after the sessions for their first album, augmented with two other amazing Curt Boettcher productions from the Ballroom era. In terms of listenability, this record is every bit the equal of the first, ranging from the almost twee sunshine pop of "Spinning Spinning Spinning" to the haunting, mystical psych of the original "Karmic Dream Sequence #1". The Ballroom Returns fits nicely on this single CD right after The Ballroom, and we even bookended the set with the original 45 mixes of "Spinning" and "Baby Please Don't Go". Hard to find!

Everybody, please enjoy The Ballroom - The Complete Recordings on one CD, and saturate yourselves with the sounds of what surely must be the greatest lost band of the Sunshine Pop era!

Peel - Blindside

2011-04-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

Unreleased Album (single artist)

Back by popular demand, here's the great lost modern power-pop classic, Blindside by Peel. The brainchild of Kevin Ridel (AM Radio, Ridel High), this may stand as the ultimate melodic statement by a guy who has already written more than his share of classics. Alongside Phantom Planet, Weezer and Kara's Flowers (all bands we've featured here to some extent) Peel stands as the fourth column of L.A.'s late-nineties pop rock renaissance. (Honorable mention goes out to the late, lamented That Dog who may feature here shortly as well.)

While there's no videos for Peel to be found on YouTube, check out this one by Radel's later band A.M. Radio which will give you a taste of his compositional godliness:

It's tempting to grasp for influences upon first hearing this gem, but while you'll surely hear a little Oasis here, a little Ben Folds there, in the end it's Ridel's own songwriting that comes to the fore. While every song is a highlight, stand-outs include the poignant "Birthday Present", the epic sturm und drang of "Day to Day", and the melodically perfect single-that-never-was "Gel". If you've been downloading all our previous comps, you'll be well familiar with these and chomping at the bit to hear the rest of the album. If you haven't, well... why are you here?

Blindside.

Kara's Flowers - The Fourth World

2011-04-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

Out-Of-Print (OOP) Re-issue

Hey! Here's a 4 1/2 star review for the 1997 album The Fourth World by Kara's Flowers that I wrote probably six years ago for the website RateYourMusic.com. And they say music criticism doesn't stand the test of time??

I'd heard the name Kara's Flowers mentioned in the same breath as a few of my other favorite bands; Weezer, Phantom Planet and AM Radio. But I never gave The Fourth World a chance, primarily because of the fact that the group later morphed into the bland commercial entity known as Maroon 5. But on a whim I decided to track this cd down for a close friend of mine who's a huge Maroon 5 fan. I burned a copy for myself just before I gave her the original, and finally I decided to play it just for the hell of it. My God, was I ever surprised when I heard it.

This is an incredible power pop album, made even more amazing by the fact that this band was still in high school when they recorded this. By all means please DO NOT pre-judge this album on the fact that these guys later went on to become Maroon 5. The only similarity between The Fourth World and the tepid Songs About Jane is the nasal croon of singer Adam Levine. Where the latter record is not much more than run-of-the-mill top 40 grist, The Fourth World is classic pop rock with psychedelic flourishes in the mold of the Beatles, Fountains of Wayne or Jellyfish.

The album's lead single "Soap Disco" made a minor splash on "alternative" radio when it originally was released, but the strength of this record really lies in its more ambitious moments like the gorgeous "Future Kid" or the epic "Captain Splendid". It's fruitless to try to summarize what makes these songs so special... It's not as though they are overwhelmingly unique or something. They are just catchy, well-played and exquisitely produced, with pristine vocals and layers upon layers of sound. There is a depth to the songwriting here that Maroon 5 sadly abandoned in their quest to sell a gazillion records.

Song for song, this is some of the most well-crafted and infectious pop rock I've heard in the last ten years. Forget for a moment what these guys later turned into, and take a chance on this cd. Chances are if you are a fan of great pop music, then you will be pleasantly surprised by what Kara's Flowers achieved.

Yeah, so anyways, not much has changed regarding my opinions on this record since I knocked that mini-review off back in 2005. It's still the same very catchy album of melodic alt-rock with twinges of Beatles and 80s ELO. And similarly, you'll probably still be amazed at how un-Maroon 5 everything sounds here. (Jellyfish fans, please note the presence of Roger Joseph Manning, Jr. on most of these cuts.) What else can I say except dig up some Kara's Flowers!

Updated links and other fun stuff

2011-03-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to let you all know that I revised about half of the dead links on the Sphere, so that those of you that missed our archival reissues the first time around can get another crack at downloading them. I will be getting to the other half in the next week or so as time permits. Please take advantage and sample all the great stuff we've worked so hard putting together to share with you nice people! I will list which links are re-activated in the comments section for this thread. If you have any requests or notice one of the reactivated links not working, please consolidate all comments to this here thread so we can keep it organized. Thanks!

In other news, I've just started teaching myself how to use Vegas Studio Pro 10. Here's a little promo clip I put together to promote Who's for Tennis? It's nothing fancy-- just some images synced up to 30 second sound clips, but there are some very rare photos I included that you're sure to dig. Here's the clip:

Cover Flow: Finally a reason to love iTunes

2011-03-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

So last night while poking around on iTunes I finally discovered Cover Flow. Or maybe I should say I re-discovered it. I had initially come across this animated interface when it was initially integrated into iTunes 7 back in late 2006. Back then I was using iTunes to manage my entire music library-- a precarious solution to say the least. Now anyone who's spent time around me knows that my list of grievances with Steve Jobs' ubiquitous media manager are numerous. (Lack of support for FLAC, no customizable skins, crap visualizer, memory hog, lousy for track tagging), but being the owner of two iPods, I had little choice other than to use their app for all my .mp3 sorting needs.

When I first triggered Cover Flow to see what it was all about, I was underwhelmed. For those unfamiliar with how it works, in the simplest terms Cover Flow essentially presents the cover art stashed in the ID3 tag of your mp3 files as a collection of miniature LP sleeves that can quickly be browsed through. In theory it seems like a cool idea, but logistically for large music collections it's a nightmare. At least half of the 25,000+ .mp3 files in my library had no cover art at all, and of the ones that did, much of it was incorrect. Disgusted, I quickly switched back to list mode and remained there for the next four years.

However the temporary loss of my main workstation a couple of months ago necessitated a switch to a new machine. This interim machine, while blessed with a powerful Intel Xeon processor, lacks sufficient drive space, capping out at 100MB. Clearly I only needed to copy music that I absolutely could not live without in the short term. Well, I needed to get the blog up and running again anyway, so the decision was made to just copy over music that was being or was about to be shared on the blog. I would get back to my massive main collection when the old workstation was up and running again. The music was summarily copied over to the new machine and dumped into iTunes. Everything was working as it should, when somehow I managed to jack up the way the program sorted albums. It now insisted on only sorting by something called "Album By Artist". What the hell was this shit? Angered by Apple's insistence on telling me how to organize my tunes, I furiously started going through options in the menu bar. This is how I rediscovered Cover Flow.

What's this? All my album art was in place and looking tight on my 36" bedroom LCD screen. I paused to consider why this was. Clearly the time I had spent track-tagging music for the blog had paid off. Instead of a gigantic collection of poorly tagged files from sundry sources like on the old machine, this was a tightly managed collection a tenth of the size, with all tagging and artwork meticulously prepared. Only with such a library does Cover Flow truly shine, but when it does it is simply the best method I know to digest digital music.

Much is made today of the soullessness of .mp3s and the death of LP and CD art. Now it has been brought back to life. As I listened to the songs playing, I found myself compelled to quickly forward from track to track, watching with amusement as the mini-LP sleeves rapidly flipped back and forth between tracks. Most digital music organizational software displays artwork at about one square inch, if at all, so it was nearly a revelation to see it displayed at over three times that size. The time I had spent picking out appropriate artwork for all my old "records" had finally paid off, as I was rewarded by minor details that would have otherwise gone unnoticed: The Parlophone "pound" logo on my mono UK Revolver, the different elements of the Their Satanic Majesties Request cover mural, the deep green background and action illustrations on And Then Along Comes... The Association. For the first time ever listening to digital music, I was rewarded with the same charge of positive electricity I receive whenever I flip through my old vinyl.

It occurred to me that Cover Flow, when used in a well-tagged music library, brought back the record collector sensibility to the digital age. In retrospect, it's not much of a mystery why this is so. While simply downloading music off of the internet is an instant gratification, there is no sense of accomplishment associated with doing so, the way there is when one discovers a lost gem amidst the dollar vinyl bins at the Record Shack. Most of us know and cherish the feelings associated with making a new vinyl "discovery" at the store, then going home and cleaning the record, giving it a spin and finally sorting it alphabetically amidst one's collection. It's the juice that keeps record nerds like us powered up, and the reason we drop so much money on an "obsolete" medium. What makes Cover Flow so great is that it gives a bit of that same feeling over to the digital realm. The time you spend properly tagging and "arting" your digital music file becomes akin to time spent digging through crates. Flipping through your "records" is your hard-earned reward. Except Cover Flow offers up one feature that real world collecting generally can't. If you're the sort of person who is into making their own compilations and mixes, including customized artwork, it is really groovy to see your own cover designs mixed in amongst all your old favorites. As a designer, it gives you a real sense of the quality of your own art. It's one thing to whip up a cover in Photoshop, make a little thumbnail and tag a file with it, but it's quite another to see how it looks as part of the band's canon. Trust me when I say you'll quickly get a sense as to which of your covers are worthy additions to the world of album art and which ones aren't up to par, or just flat-out suck.

Anyway I hope I've convinced you to give Cover Flow a try, even if you normally hate iTunes as I do. I am certainly going to attempt to make everything I upload here "Cover Flow" friendly. If any of you have tried this or would like to get into it, we can discuss tips or techniques in the comment section.

Time to get pumped up

2011-03-25T08:27:00.000-07:00

Heeeeeeey everybody, good news-- We've renewed our lease with SendSpace! Therefore, look for most of the links on this site to be re-operational by tomorrow night. (I've still got a few things that need to be re-uploaded, but the majority of the stuff is already back on the cloud.) In other words, we are back in business here at the Sphere and have all sorts of new disposable teenage product lined up for you!

#1 - Rock Box: This is still in the "near completion" phase. I promise I am not just yanking your chain here-- we are this close to being done with it. Unfortunately, there's a small handful of tracks that we simply have not been able to procure in sufficient fidelity, so that eBay is the best and only solution left. Once we win the stuff we need to finish it off (which is maybe 6 songs out of 150), I'll finish compiling it and you'll have it in your hot little hands! In the meantime, I am working on an essay that will hopefully satiate your cravings for all things L.A.

#2 - Smile Box: Finished, actually. Not allowed to share it, though! Now before you brand me a cock-tease let me explain: And actually, if you've been looking for Smile clips on YouTube lately, you'll understand exactly why this is. In the wake of the announced official box set, certain lawyers for a certain band have been, shall we say, quite thorough about issuing cease and desist letters to anyone sharing-- out of the pure goodness of their hearts-- Smile-related content. And since I would consider certain parties within the Beach Boys camp personal friends, I must respectfully withhold this set until the official thing hits stores. Sorry, and let's hope it's on shelves soon! Moving on...

#3 - The Ballroom/ Curt Boettcher: We will try to soften the blow somewhat by focusing on a different lost '66-'67 masterpiece-- the collective works of the great and tragically discarded BALLROOM. If you haven't heard of them (and really, if you haven't then why are you hanging out at a place like this?) The Ballroom were a sort of sunshine/ psych-pop supergroup helmed by savant record producer and soundscapist Curt Boettcher. They recorded their first and second albums at the exact same time Brian was working on Smile, and the similarities do not end there. Further collections of Curt's work will follow, including the highly sought-after 6 CD Singles Collection, which I helped assemble back in 2001.

#4 - The Who: A band whose available catalog is in sore disarray, we did our bit a few years back by issuing five separate rarities compilations that collected all the necessary singles, outtakes, BBC performances and rarities in chronological order, using the best possible available mixes. Now we will set our sights on rectifying the abominable job MCA did on the group's first three albums. So, how about mono/stereo 2fers of each, again using the best sounding mixes known to man?

There's more stuff floating around in the ether, and don't think we're going to neglect the music of the Nineties, Oughts and Teens either. This blog has never been about fetish-izing the past, or a providing a place for Boomers to sound off about how bad today's music sucks. (That's what Steve Hoffman's board is for!) As such, we are re-affirming our pledge to keep you updated with the best in new and newish sounds. There will also be more rants and reviews on the lifestyle side: tech, fashion, pop culture, trends, politics, cinema, fiction and more.

So welcome, or welcome back, as we begin what is bound to be a pretty amazing Phase 2.0!

The Dog Ate My Homework or I'm Mad, Man: A Play in One Act

2011-02-25T16:02:00.000-08:00

"Hello, Don! Nice to see you again! How's the wife and kids? Hey sit down! Let me pour you a cocktail? No really! I've got whisky, scotch, gin, some nice imported Russian vodka. Help yourself to anything... Not the Stoli."

"Look my time here is short, so get to the point. You said you had something for me. Now either give me something I can work with or I'm gone. I don't care if you work ten seconds if you bring me something I like. We're gonna do this right now."

"You don't know how to drink. Your whole generation, you drink for the wrong reasons. My generation, we drink because it's good, because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar, because we deserve it. We drink because it's what men do. Now listen, I know you're a little upset because I wasn't able to come through with those things you wanted when I said I would. And for that I'm apologizing. And you're not going to believe it, but that AMD quad-core processor I had driving my system went and died on me, and now I can't get at any of my music anymore. Yes, I realize it's a monumental failure. All these musical treasures I was going to share with you just... sitting there, useless as a swimming pool in February. Can you believe it? And now my sorry hump is left to devise some sort of a workaround to get this thing done. And then I went and let my Sendspace account deactivate, and..."

"You lost Sendspace?! I can't believe what I'm hearing! What about the Rock Box, Roger? What about Smile? What about all the existing inventory? How do you expect to keep this company afloat with no product? Things better be worked out by next week, and don't think you can spend Monday hiding behind corners and trying not to make eye contact. I will find you."

"Now hold on just one second, Cochise. Look, I want to tell you something because you're very dear to me, and I hope you understand it comes from the bottom of my damaged, damaged heart. The Crystal Sphere will be back. It'll be back and it'll be better than ever. You’ll come in Monday and everything will be the same – only there’ll be diamonds on the doorknobs!"

"I can't decide... if you have everything... or nothing."

**Seriously, we'll be back as soon as possible once the technological junk gets resolved. Also, be on the lookout for L.A. Gemstones: The Blog-- coming soon.

Updates and Ephemera-- Christmas '10

2010-12-19T11:02:00.000-08:00

Happy holidays from the Sphere! Here are some updates for you all as we transition into the New Year. (2011... Can you believe it?!?!)

It's unfortunate that 2010 had to go out on such a bummer with the loss of one of our heroes, the legendary Captain Beefheart. Old Don was a great man and a hero to many. From a personal perspective, I had just pulled out Trout Mask Replica for the first time in a couple of years and was listening to it when I heard the news of his passing. The combination of the ethereal sounds found on Mask and the emotional severity of the news made for a very spiritual experience for me. If you have yet to hear Trout Mask Replica for yourself, some kind soul has posted the entire album on YouTube. Though it's not an easy record to get into by any means, it's a one-of-a-kind statement that really rewards you when it finally clicks.

We are also working hard to get L.A. Gemstones: The Rock Box out as soon as possible. At the present time, sources are being compared and evaluated in order to attain the best possible sound quality. Rather than rush things and turn out something that we feel is sub-standard just to meet an arbitrary Christmas deadline, we want to make sure that the product is uniformly excellent before unleashing it. Trust me, the results should speak for themselves.

The other major project this winter has been the long awaited SMiLE box set. Currently this is about 80% complete, and should be done by March of 2011. This will be nothing less than the most complete assemblage of SMiLE sessions, acetates, mixes, remixes, concerts and outtakes ever compiled. While other large scale compilations have circulated (Big Bag of Vegetables, Project SMiLE and the mysterious "12 CD Box Set") the Crystal Sphere set should blow all of these away in terms of sound quality, historical accuracy (session dates, etc.) and overall completeness.

In between these two major projects, I also have some special soundboard audio recordings from the legendary Hollywood Bowl by artists such as the Seeds, the Animals, the Buffalo Springfield, Tommy James & the Shondells, Brenda Holloway, Hearts & Flowers, the Yellow Payges, the Rascals, Merle Haggard, Nat "King" Cole, Glen Campbell, Nancy Wilson and more. The historical importance of these shows cannot be overstated. They were literally rescued from a garbage can and lovingly restored, warts and all. A true time capsule in other words.

Finally, we'd like to officially endorse a new blog you may not have had a chance to check out yet. Classic Studio Sessions is a site devoted to just that-- the legendary sessions that produced some of your favorite tracks. They've just posted their first entry on a Wrecking Crew session for Sonny & Cher, and you will not believe the amount of information they were able to uncover using both photographs of the session as well as a first hand interview with legendary guitarist and arranger Don Peake!

Well anyway, that's all the news that's fit to print. I ran into a little trouble with SendSpace and some of the old stuff on the blog has been deleted, so if you'd like a re-up just drop me a message and I'll try my best to get it up for you. Until next time-- further! ~JP~

John Entwistle: Tale of the Ox

2010-12-08T11:46:00.000-08:00

Compilation (single artist)

If any of you had a chance to check out my recent post on Alan Wilson, you'll see where I described him as the quintessential musical "X-Factor". This is something that I've been thinking about more and more as this humble blog develops. I must have never realized it, but I seem to have quite an affinity for musicians who fit into this category-- guys who may not have sung lead on every track or written every song, but who came through with clutch musical contributions that helped to elevate their bands from "very good" to "classic" status. So here, in no particular order, are My Top 12 musical "X-Factors":

Dennis Wilson (The Beach Boys)
Brian Jones (The Rolling Stones)
Richie Furay (The Buffalo Springfield)
Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson (Canned Heat)
John Entwistle (The Who)
George Harrison (The Beatles)
Gene Clark (The Byrds)
Marty Balin (Jefferson Airplane)
Mike Pinder (The Moody Blues)
Russ Giguere (The Association)
Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (The Grateful Dead)
Peter Tork (The Monkees)

Someday I would love to write a book about these twelve amazing musicians, and the vital contributions they brought forth to their respective bands. Until then, this blog will have to suffice. And in time, they will all get their due, but for now let's focus on "The Ox"... John Entwistle.

There's not too much I can say about John that hasn't been said before. He's probably the best rock bassist of all time, as well as an underrated composer who was able to place his songs comfortably alongside one of the undisputed greatest songwriters of his generation. The Ox was also a man possessed with a brilliantly morbid sense of humor, which was never not reflected in the lyrics he penned both for his solo albums and his work with the Who. Perhaps somewhat strangely, a compilation of all the songs John recorded with The Who has never appeared-- until now that is. Here is hoping you listen to, and enjoy the Tale of the Ox.

Tuesday Timewarp: A trio of clips on Dennis and Charlie

2010-10-19T00:14:00.001-07:00

It's the long-awaited return of the Tuesday Timewarp. This week: Three enlightening YouTube videos that shed light on the quote "parties that never stopped" at Dennis Wilson's beach house. Check out the Greg Jakobson interview for some particularly keen insight from a guy that was there first hand.

Alan Wilson/ Canned Heat - Blind Owl Sings

2010-10-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

Compilation (single artist)

Where to begin with this one? Well, in the world of underrated white blues prodigies, Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson must certainly reign supreme. Now most of you will probably recognize ol' Al via the band he co-founded and helped bring to prominence; the legendary Canned Heat. The Heat in their prime were a fantastic group, no doubt, because they injected the true spirit of the blues into rock. At their best they stood shoulder to shoulder with Butterfield, Mayall, Fleetwood Mac, Cream or any other white blues band you'd care to mention. It's also true that the Heat came up through the same Topanga Canyon scene that also gave us two other very strange and beautiful bands: Spirit and Kaleidoscope. In fact, various members of the Heat also put in time with the Mothers of Invention and Pacific Gas and Electric. These guys were players basically.

So in the original line-up of the Heat, you have some very interesting and divergent personalities. Singer Bob "The Bear" Hite was a good natured 300 lb. goofball and avid record collector. Bassist Larry "The Mole" Taylor had jammed with everyone from P.J. Proby to Tommy Boyce, the latter of whom brought him in to help track the first Monkees' album. Drummer Frank Cook may be best known today as the idealistic nitwit seen in CBS's Inside Pop TV special, but his vitae at the time included stints backing jazz greats like Chet Baker and Charlie Hayden. Lead guitarist Henry "Sunflower" Vestine, perhaps mainly regarded today as a notorious acid casualty if at all, was actually one of the top American lead guitarists of his era, counting Jimi Hendrix as a fan and Frank Zappa as a previous employer.

These four cats alone could have formed a hell of a band in their own right, but what truly put the Heat over the top was their "X" factor. In fact, when I think of the term "X" factor in a musical sense, I can not imagine a band with a better one than the guy who's the subject of this thread and compilation: "The Blind Owl", Alan Wilson.

But why should you, the discerning listener, give a shit? I mean, isn't this the same cat that the old Rolling Stone Record Guide casually dismissed as Canned Heat's "bumblebee voiced lead singer" or some such shit? (Seriously, FUCK the Rolling Stone Record Guide.) Well, if all you know about Canned Heat is "Goin' Up the Country" and "On the Road Again" (both included), perhaps that's all he'll ever be to you. But that's your loss, kid. Overlook the Heat at your own peril, because these guys knew how to (Frank) cook, and their motor was this nerdy looking cat:

That's the Blind Owl, performing the Heat's cover of Elmore James' "Rollin' and Tumblin'" at Monterey. Perchance you've seen this clip? If so, bully for you! I would do terrible things to go back and watch the Heat, the Flag and the Blues Project tear it up on the same afternoon at Monterey Pop. Wait, where the fuck was I going with this? Oh yes.. BLIND OWL! Okay, dig. I'm sort of lightweight drunk right now, so I'm just going to copy/paste a bunch of shit off of Canned Heat's website:

Alan Wilson grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, where he became a music major at Boston University and a frequent player at the Cambridge coffeehouse folk-blues circuit. He also found time to write two lengthy, analytical articles on bluesmen Robert Pete Williams and Son House for “Broadside Of Boston”, a Massachusetts music paper, which Downbeat Magazine described as “among the most significant contributions to modern blues scholarship, representing the first important musicological analysis of blues style.” In fact, when Son House was “rediscovered” in 1964 by Phil Spiro, Dick Waterman and Nick Perls, Wilson ended up spending hours with the elderly bluesman helping him recall how to play his own songs again, as House had not owned a guitar for several years and was suffering from what was later diagnosed as both Alzheimers and Parkinsons. Waterman managed House and got him a recording contract with Columbia Records and Wilson assisted House in recording his 1965 album, Father of the Delta Blues, and provided harmonica and second guitar on three songs (two of which, “Empire State Express” and “Levee Camp Moan”) were included on the album.

Wilson was an excellent harpist, slide guitarist and vocalist with a unique tenor style. His friend, Mike Bloomfield introduced him to Charlie Musselwhite as “the best goddamn harp player there is. He can do things that you’ve never heard before.” Wilson occasionally worked for his father’s construction firm laying bricks but, thankfully, he preferred laying down unforgettable riffs to hard physical labor. Wilson’s nickname, “Blind Owl,” was bestowed upon him by friend John Fahey during a road trip in 1965 from Boston to Los Angeles and was a reference to the extra-thick lenses Wilson wore to compensate for his poor vision. Later Fahey, while researching a book on bluesman Charlie Patton for his degree in Folklore at UCLA, invited Wilson out to California to help with the project. Wilson was a music major at Boston University, and Fahey needed someone who could transcribe, chart and notate Patton’s material correctly.

YEAH! Okay, now you're getting the picture possibly. Blind Owl was a) a blues scholar of the highest order; b) an altruistic dude who went out of his way to help all his heroes (largely poor, African American musicians) get recognition and record contracts; c) a fucking badass of the guitar, and when I say guitar I mean acoustic, electric and steel, and most of all d) the fucking be-all-end-all of the motherfucking blues harp.

No, really. This isn't me saying this. (ED: OR IS IT?!?!) Because, here's the thing: Back in nineteen sixty-two-- before the idea of a Canned Heat even existed-- back in those stupid old days of Ozzy and Harriet where little Ricky Nelson was just beginning to come into his own and those little Beach Boy fucks were just getting a record deal, the Blind Owl was playing piano, harp and guitar on John Lee Hooker's Burnin' LP. Ever heard it? well you oughta! As previously mentioned, Al also helped Son House re-learn his own fucking songs, and you can hear the results on the Father of the Folk Blues LP, where he plays harp and guitar on a few tracks. This is still all before the Heat, mind.

Al also kicked down some harp on Fred Neil's classic 1967 self-titled LP, which is one of my favorites, seeing as it features "Dolphins" and "Everybody's Talking"... Two of the greatest songs ever written by anyone. But the ultimate statement might be out of the mouth of John Lee Hooker, who called Alan the greatest harp player he'd ever heard. Not the greatest WHITE harp player, mind you, but the greatest of all time. John Lee Hooker said that, and he played with Little Walter. Who have you played with again? (Joke.)

Now I personally don't understand too much about the ol' blues harp, ya hear? I'm a guitar player first and foremost, and my kind tend to stay away from stuff you have to put your mouth on, but HEY! I know genius when I hear it, right? Of course I could never actually describe to you exactly what makes Al so much better than all the other harmonica playing fools out there, but thankfully there's this guy to break it all down for us! Listen and learn.

Yes I find it perhaps a bit funny that a guy like the Blind Owl, who was burning so much raw talent coming from so many different directions, would settle for a more or less secondary role in what essentially became America's #1 boogie 'n' blooz band for a couple of years there, but from all accounts Alan was a self-effacing cat who was not fond of the spotlight. A lover of nature, he would sleep outdoors while on tour while the rest of the band lodged comfortably in a hotel room. It was just the kind of guy he was. It's been said that his eventual suicide (he overdosed on reds and gin while camping in the Bear's back yard) was due to the fact he was despondent over the state of the environment. More than likely, though, he was tired of the grind.

Buried within the Canned Heat's catalog of party-friendly boogie choons is the work of a real genius. It's amazing nobody thought to compile it until now, but I guess that's the reason this blog exists. So, ladies and germs, have at it-- 17 legendary performances featuring the Blind Owl on vocals; his entire recorded contribution to the Canned Heat saga. All I ask is that you please take the time to listen to what Al and his harp are saying to you. It was there all along within those old Canned Heat records, but taken as a whole this is the most potent of potables.

And if anyone ever asks you who that bumblebee-voiced lead singer of Canned Heat was, you can now feel free to simply punch them in the nuts and say "I told you so".

Blind Owl, fools!

L.A. Gemstones: The Pop Box compilation (5 CDs)

2010-08-23T21:01:00.001-07:00

Compilation (various artist)

So here it is as promised: 149 tracks of L.A. Pop goodness spread like Peter Pan Creamy across five Cee Dees. You can read the complete introductory essay posted earlier on this 'ere site: For now I'll just explain why this is such a monster upgrade over the version I originally posted here two years ago.

It all starts with a groovy young lad name of Ian Zamboni who contacted me with an ambitious plan. He dug the set, but made a very valid point that the sound quality just wasn't worthy of the music. 160/192k mp3's might be cool for the typical shit you'd throw on your iPod, but this set was meant to be listened to. Hell, the producers, sound engineers, console designers and studio architects are every bit as important as the musicians in this story! L.A. had the best studios in the entire World back in the sixties, so why present it in such a lossy fashion?

And so began the undertaking to reassemble the set at 320k, and using only the best available mixes. A lot of times this meant tracking down mono single mixes to replace some of those early wide-stereo two track sonic nightmares. Other tracks could only be found on eBay, where we sought out the best existing available quality of long lost singles. A few times it actually involved tracking down the original artist to hit them up for copies.

Anyway what does this have to do with anything? Well it just *sounds better*. Way better. Because let's face it; Ian Zamboni is the man.

Anyhoo, did I mention no more overlap with Rhino's Where the Action Is? Yes, we removed all the tracks that Rhino put on their wonderful compilation and replaced them with some "new" stuff that we know you're gonna dig., So now you can just power up your CD changer or iPod or WinAmp playlist or Maxell Metal grade cassette tape or whatever the hell you're listening on, and just pile everything in there and ROCK OUT TO THIS GROOVY FUCKING MUSIC.

WHAT THE CRITICS BE SAYIN':

"Unofficial this may be, but I'm thinking this could be reissue of the year for me. The fact there are another five discs of this...and not a single track's overlap with the Rhino L.A. Nuggets box...pretty handily blows my mind."-- This Here Dream Machine (Black Cat Bone)

"good job on the pop box bro."-- Aeroplane (hipinon)

"holy fuck." -- Naturemorte (hipinion)

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | notes

PLEASE READ: Track Tagging

2010-07-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

'ello. So I recently received a comment from a poster here that the ID3 track tags on some of the available music are coming up looking a bit haggard. For example, one of my early Who compilations may show up on his media player with the information for the various source CDs instead of displaying the artwork, track numbers, etc. for the new comp.

This is distressing to me because I have sunk a *lot* of time into getting my track tags "just so"; making sure the titles, album art, writers' credits etc. are all in good shape. Rather than using iTunes to do this, which I have found in the past doesn't really work well at all, I have been going with an app that was recommended to me called Stamp ID3 Tag Editor.

What I would love here is feedback from you all regarding the quality of my ID3 track tags on your end. Do they come up looking pretty consistent? What player/ platform are you using? I test everything in both iTunes and WinAmp on my Windows machine before upping it, but that may not help you if you're using Foobar or running Ubantu or OS-X. Anyway, please leave some feedback so I can get this sorted out. My goal is to get my tags looking as good as possible for everyone who visits the site!

Stop Playing Guitar: The New Power Pop (2 CDs)

2010-06-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Compilation (various artist)

Does hearing the words "Power Pop" ever make you conjure up the image of some overweight, gray-haired boomer in a old Rubinos t-shirt and UCLA ball cap rapidly perusing his way through the used CD bins at your local record shop? I don't know; maybe it's just me, but I believe this whole Power Pop thing needs a re-think if it plans on surviving through this decade.

The word "Pop" has a million musical definitions, but put the adjective "Power" in front of it and we're down to one particular type of music: jangly, Rickenbacker 12-string driven pop rock, played at slightly faster than average tempo and accompanied by some three-part harmonies on the choruses. Bands of this ilk are slavishly devoted to seemingly any of the old "B-Groups" like The Byrds, Big Star, Beatles, Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, etc. Now if you know me at all, you know that any of these older bands I just mentioned fall on my short list of Best Groups Ever, so what's the problem then?

Here's my argument. When your band, regardless of style, is so magnanimously influenced by a core of easily identifiable sources, the question has to arise: Why should I listen to you, when I can just go back and listen to the bands you're trying to emulate? Of course every artist out there is influenced by somebody; but do most of them (think about this) wear their influences on their sleeve to the degree that, say, The Wondermints or Jellyfish do? What exactly do The Explorers Club or Fastball have to offer us that is unique or in any way creative and different? Now surely we can agree that one man's "hugely derivative" is another man's "rootsy"; but that's us record collectors bickering amongst ourselves. The masses have already spoken. The old Power Pop warhorse has had it's day: it peaked with the Raspberries in 1972 and had a tiny resurgence in 1991 with the La's and Teenage Fanclub, but it's since been put out to pasture and was on its way to the glue factory last I checked.

But fear not. The Crystal Sphere is nothing if not a Pop Music board run by and for Pop Music fans. Yes, we celebrate and dig the oldies here, and God Only Knows we can and will talk your ear off about the brilliance of all the old sixties' icons. But that's okay because, as I've said before, it is quite all right to look back so long as you keep moving forward. It's when you get stuck in time that problems can arise. Your beloved Power Pop is still out there, friend; just as fresh as it was when "Mr. Tambourine Man" was the #1 song in America and people still drove around in convertibles jamming out to transistor radios. You just gotta know one trick, and that's that you'll never find that righteous fix you're looking for in music that comes from alien lifeforms that value style over truth, or from old men cloaked in the bodies of twenty-five year olds.

If what you crave is guitar-based music of a particular quality, drenched in that same shimmery brilliance that encompassed all your favorite old records, and sporting gigantic hooks and choruses as big as your head; but at the same time is also self-aware enough to not be looking up its own ass for inspiration, then maybe you've come to the right place after all. Here's 46 of the best-- to groove to, to move to, to live your life to. Not everything here is aiming for the fences: some songs may be deeply heartfelt, while others might be lighter than your brain after a shot of nitrous. And clearly there's also many an influence to be heard here for sure. But in the end these are 46 artists that are moving forward, even as they look back. It's time to get groovy and glorious again. 1 | 2

Charles Manson - A Letter to William Dakota

2010-05-26T21:13:00.000-07:00

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Have you ever sat around and just wondered what life must have been like living at Dennis Wilson's Sunset Boulevard beach house in the Summer of 1968? Well you're never going to find that one out, sucka!

However-- the following letter from Charles Manson to gossip columnist William Dakota, written while Manson was serving time at the Vacaville State Prison, might shed a little light onto what was going down in L.A.'s most notorious party house (possible exception: Peter Tork's crib on Willow Glen Road).

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: The following is simply a re-print of the Manson's own words. Clearly I cannot verify the authenticity of his claims, and the following is provided merely for entertainment purposes only. Please visit Bill Dakota's fabulous wiki site for more true tales of Hollywood glory.

"B. columnist, Yes, I like your letters when I have time & I've time. I don't write like you write and you don't need to run none of that bullshit on me. Don't talk (write) around the corner on me. Straight-away, just the truth, no more..less-I don't understand you trying to run fear or B.S. at me. Yes, I know what you mean-my words were when I was out-my souls still in prison. Peace of mind. All Polanski can say, is what the D.A. said or what he read somewhere. It would take 44 years for me to explain my 31 years in hallways-cages-it's home. No one can know what I mean. They would need for them to be me. All he will do is judge himself in me & see reflections of his own fears. I seen Sharon and she never impresed me as being anything but $. He bought her mind to get her body.

Man don't get fat on me. NO B.S. don't get fat. Lookit, I can't put myself out front. You can get your paper back & don't need to say I said nothing. I never sued no one else. The D.A. & all got away with saying anything. Marcus can tell you things he may have thought he heard, I didn't say Elvis was Bi or not.

Loook it. If I sleep with all the girls you sleep with & we go to bed with 3 or 4 girls at a time & I check you out & the way and things you do & you check out my strokes & pick up on some of the motions don't mean I'm BI or your Bi. If I'm in the same dream but I got a good heart, I can hold that heart in bed. Elvis couldn't fuck over me but I could-over any little fat girl in his dream bed because I earned them when I lived at Tom Mix's old beach house on Sunset out by the beach. We had a pool of naked beauties and strobe lights in the living room & sex in 5 bedrooms & all closets had secret doors that go from bedroom to bedroom plus the guest house, big beds & pool shacks-bedrooms, little ones and mattresses in the living room, a tree house, sex all over the grounds, in the rose garden, under the trees everywhere.

B.D, I'm, forgeful, who's Mark? I'm one of the dumb people-aware but not smart in human ways. I think more like an animal. Yes, I read the story B.D. Im not easily impressed one way or the other. I don't like people enough to care what they think. Not you because you suffered my suffering & been through a lot to see and understand me. I know what you do is & will be good because I know when you are alone & in a cell and see the good of you when no one else is looking.

Neil Diamond used to come over, Mike Love of the Beachboys, Doris Day's son, Angela Lansbury's daughter, DeeDee, Nancy Sinatra's daughter used to be at the beach pad. Dennis Wilson of (the Beach Boys) & I lived with 15 or 20 of the best. We kicked Jane Fonda out of that dream because her jewish boyfriend wanted to bring a black guy to play ping-pong with her & I said I don't play mixing blood for phony christians that work for their money selling children. She had a big dog and a crummy camera & I said no no, I do what I do for love, not money.

They had a key to Red Skelton's beach pad. I had been there before, so I went and fixed the window so I could look in and they found my peek place. I just wanted to see what they did with the dog & guy they picked up over at UCLA, I don't think she was playing stop the war. She was (I think) making some kind of video tapes like Peter Sellers & Yul Brynner (bald headed guy) were making. Dennis gave me a $5,000 video tape, TV thing for tapes that fit only an elite bunch (porno ring) that was world wide.

I heard Polanski got money from dog and children movies to make movies with. I was offered record contracts, movie parts, etc, when I got out (prison.) I went to Universal Studios-saw a producer named Stromberg, a phony guy. He wanted me to cut a record with a South African black, Hugh Maskella & big black trumpet & drummer for a movie. He told me Jews control & I'd never get any music over, unless I did it his way. He was making a movie, he said, about the second coming of J.C. & he was to be a black & police were to off him and the system would get the blame & they would control the movie minds and take power. I said no. They did it anyway. Jackson was killed in San Quentin & Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin got big power controls. I was a dumb ass.

I went to Cary Grant's parking lot & this homosexual came and told me to move my car. I knew Grant was in England so I told him & I've had a little experience with homosexuals. So I took him back to Cary Grant's office, that had an apartment (bar) & such. I don't want to say all of the things that happened at Universal Lot because I liked that gay guy & don't want him to lose his job.

That ass Peter Falk & guy that played James West, in WILD WILD WEST, propositioned me. James West also came to the car. I don't fuck with closet queens. There is more but I can't spell. Like one night a girl took me to Elvis' pad...with big iron gates & she was begging to suck on my ice cream. Elvis's wife came home that night and when Dennis Wilson came around he had so many broads. Elvis got afraid, cause that little girl had his heart. I could have eaten it there in front of them but was playing a front & I was having sex in the back. I could have fucked him. He had a car I wanted but Terry Melcher gave one of my buddies a new XKZ Jaguar, for me because he didn't want anyone to know about me & his mom, & when D Wilson gave me the Ferrari my other buddy wrecked it & we went off to shoot a game of pool & someone ripped it off.

And Dennis is (a wonderful person no bullshit) he got mad at me. He had a phony French bitch running after him only because she was a star fucker & was fucking Jimi Hendrix. When she asked me to fuck her I rammed it up her ass & wiped it in her face & throwed her out of the pad because all she wanted was money money money and producer Stromberg destroyed my music. When I seen the conspiracy to do in Jackson, I ran and put a "1" up over that bed of fools and clowns.

B.D. I do more on a weekend than most do all of their lives. I'm not into sex porno or selling distorted sex. All sex I do is human, clean and natural. No make-up. No ego fuck but the God fuck. Everyone I fucked wanted to pray to God. I can't say that to toot a horn that everyone will hate me for. Sex paranoia is a heavy trip but what I do is open without guilt or hang-ups. It's not human. I can put a woman on like a robe. That's the only stick I had with people I was with. If the women did right I would favor them with attention. Most men get mad at me because even if theirs is bigger and stronger, my stiff stays up until I tell it to go down & the motions I reflect is from movies as a kid-YMCAs, Hollywood Boulevard, Wilshire, Beverly Hills, Malibu, off the top of that...to reach 200 or more people in the bed that went through all the stars, Elvis and a bit more.

Elvis had a reputation like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin had in the 50's, when I had sex on Orchid Avenue, Orange street, and the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel across from the Chinese Theatre.

B.D.-other don't have the mind to do what I can. All the hang ups related to sex--I don't have & few are free to be in a bed like mine. I can build the passions in 30 people & fuck it all to death & past that. I can put my motion in them and watch them dance, put my song into them & listen to them sing, put myself into them, like looking through their sexual passions like holes in blankets.

Anyway the guy I shot in Hollywood with a 33 that Tex used later..there was white girl in bed begging me not to let him kill her over money. I told him I don't give a fuck for money & he yelled & I shot him and his Mexican dope dealers froze in fear & I took the shirt from the guy, so I was on top of the money bed & sex bed. Luckily, I didn't kill him. I missed his heart because I use dick and don't know much about guns.

Oh yeh, I feel the women with me has witnessed and been with me all the way. They, as a whole, have not let me down & did what a woman can. They've been under it also. Red and Blue have stood against a lot of women-for what they can see Green and Red have been right. When someone is right with me, I must be right right back. Red put her life up trying to get me out & a trip. Most people in the know, use fear over women. I didn't do that. I tried to show them their fears & how to keep love over fear. Gotta end this I'll call if and when I can.

Send some pictures (Unsigned).

Nirvana - Unit Shifters/ Live at the Paramount Theatre 10.31.91 (3 CD)

2010-05-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

Compilation (single artist)

It's been awhile since I've had anything worthwhile to say about Nirvana, but during one stretch of my life they were my favorite band; you know, during that ancient pre CD-R era when you actually had to make mix tapes if you wanted to go the DIY route. The funny thing is, I can't really speak now as to why their music had such a profound effect on me back then. I mean, I'm certain it had something to do with the collective angst my generation was experiencing at the time, but saying something like that just sounds so hollow and cliched nowadays. I'm still currently experiencing my fair share of angst and torment (who isn't?) but more often than not I find myself turning to stuff that's catchy and soothing in order to alleviate it, rather than screaming along with some guy who's clearly experiencing more pain than I am.

But that's just it. I can lose myself in sweet harmonies and inventive chord changes, but whatever happened to Losing My Shit? The actual, honest to goodness catharsis? The smashing of guitars or the punching holes in walls? The screaming and crying? The cutting and cigarette burns?

Well somewhere along the line I clearly lost the plot. I mean, I'm listening to fucking Fountains of Wayne as I type this, so draw your own conclusions, right?

Nirvana is no longer a band that represents who I am or what I am about, but like many of you I still carry on fond (if largely mixed) memories of the era that they defined.

SCENE: 1992. A large record store in Brownsville, Texas. Mark and Jason, two teenage boys, are studiously examining a row of cassette tapes under a section marked "Rock".

MARK: ...Ahh, Eugenius! These guys are fucking great!

JASON: Who?

MARK: Well you've heard of the Vaselines, right? The head guy Eugene Kelly started this band called Captain America, and Kurt was going to take them out on the road but Marvel Comics sued Captain America, so they had to change their name to Eugenius.

JASON: Yeah, Catherine and I were supposed to get tickets to go see Nirvana this summer when they come through Houston, but now that we broke up I seriously doubt I'm going to go... Hey do you think the Pixies are ever going to get back together?

MARK: (Clearly ignoring what Jason just told him.) ...And he's going to get the Raincoats out on the road with him, and probably Tad or Flipper. It's fucking amazing, man! He's getting all these bands he likes that nobody's heard of and he's dragging them right into the mainstream with him!

JASON: (Cautiously looks around store before stealthfully sliding the Eugenius cassette underneath his flannel.) Hey, whatever you say, man.

So what's this all about then? Well clearly the memories have been recurring for me as of late, and rather than dwell on them for much longer, the thought occurred to me that I might just re-experience a bit of the old catharsis by reexamining Nirvana with the benefit of 15 years of hindsight. Now I could lay it all on you-- the rush of raw emotion that kicked in upon hearing the opening chords of "Aneurysm"; the sudden, mad urge to pogo to "Been a Son"; the beautiful-as-a-rock-in-a-cop's-face pop perfection of "Sliver"-- but maybe it's better that you just listen to it with fresh ears so that you can draw your own conclusions.

Rather than compile my own thing here, which would have distracted me from the major task at hand of getting L.A. Gemstones 2.0 out to you on time, I'm going to cheat and hook you up with a comp my man Beckner aka HeftySums hooked me up with awhile back. Honestly, he's definitely the guy you want in charge of a Nirvana comp anyway, because he's got all the hard-to-find non-LP b-sides, compilation tracks and sundry live cuts available on a brilliant set he put together called Unit Shifters. Also from my personal collection, a soundboard of the legendary 1991 Halloween show they put on at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle.

Well, I'm off to search for more memories in the bottom of a bottle of Glenlivet. Enjoy the 'choons.

The Groovy, Incredible, Mysterious and Much Misunderstood Eternity's Children! (2 CD)

2010-04-13T22:39:00.000-07:00

Compilation (single artist)

I've been meaning to do something with Eternity's Children for awhile now, so I guess with all the other long term projects I've got in the queue it would be a good time to talk about these guys.

Where to begin? Well it's not like there's a lack of product out there on the group, that's for sure. Their two Tower LP releases, Eternity's Children and Timeless, though difficult to locate on vinyl, have been re-issued on CD at least twice in the last decade, both times with additional bonus tracks. In addition, the fabulous GEAR FAB label unleashed The Lost Sessions in 2003; a great release that filled in many gaps in the Eternity's Children saga. It revealed a band that was far more than just another faceless studio assemblage; one that dated back to Mississippi ca. 1965 and specialized in raw, garage-styled rock 'n' blues before moving to Los Angeles and getting into the sunshine pop bag. Furthermore, it showcased the group's top notch later recordings of songs by many master writers including Jimmy Webb, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro and Sly Stone.

The only problem with the Gear Fab release (apart from the pearls-before-swine factor in that nobody really actually bought a copy) was that the liner notes were sparse and didn't really reveal too much about who played on what, or when any of this stuff was actually recorded. It certainly stumped me at least, to the point where I devoted a good chunk of my free time trying to track down info on the band. You see, despite a few clunkers in their catalog, Eternity's Children were a far cry from such faceless Curt Boettcher studio amalgamations as the Bootiques or the Candy Company, names they were sometimes lumped in with. No, this was a real group with a story to be told, both in words and music.

And so we begin the saga of the groovy, incredible, mysterious and much misunderstood Eternity's Children. According to drummer Roy Whittaker, the band was originally formed at Delta State College in Cleveland, Mississippi. They came of age circa 1965 and were originally known as the Phantoms. Other members included vocalist/keyboardist Bruce Blackman, lead guitarist Johnny Walker (both later of the band Starbuck, best known for their Seventies' smash "Moonlight Feels Right"), bassist Charlie Ross and rhythm guitarist Johnny Bounds. Whittaker, Blackman and Walker were all previously classmates at Greenville High, while Blackman was recently described by one fan who knew him around this time as "the best keyboard player I have ever known". The Phantoms released at least one single during this period: "Workin' Tired" b/w "Gonna Be Nice Tonight" on the Senatobia, Mississippi based Flash label (52965).

As the Phantoms gained status locally, the group gravitated towards Biloxi where they played such venues as the Biloxi Hotel and the Vapors, eventually changing their name to the much hipper "Eternity's Children" after hooking up with a dynamic folk singer by the name of Linda Lawley. They made a name for themselves backing such national touring artists as Charlie Rich and B.J. Thomas and were eventually signed to Crocked Foxx Productions and Music; a company run by Baton Rouge health club magnate Ray Roy and his partner Guy Belello. Near about this time, a second single was released on Apollo Records, comprised of two Bruce Blackman originals: "Can't Put a Thing Over Me" b/w "Time and Place". The record was so obscure that not even an original catalog number could be located by this author. (Another Blackman original, the sinister "Cigarette", likely hails from these same sessions.) Poster "tbrown" over at musicaltaste.com remembers: "I too am a long time Eternity's Children fan. Grew up in Biloxi, played in a local band in high school. Used to go hear the Children at the Biloxi Hotel and at the Vapors in about 1967. Along with Little David and the Giants, they were the hottest groups around at the time....great memories."

As 1966 turned to 1967, a locally produced demo on the Ace label (contents unknown, but may have included their covers of both the Hollies' "Hard Hard Year" and the standard "A Taste of Honey") found its way all the way to Hollywood, where it was absorbed by A&M staff producer Alan Stanton, recently coming off a tenure over at Columbia where he'd produced the Byrds transitional Fifth Dimension LP. Stanton presumably liked what he heard, as the Children were soon signed to A&M and whisked away to Hollywood where they would cut their next single; "Rumors" b/w "Wait and See" (A&M 866). The A-side was again penned by Blackman with assistance from their new engineer/arranger Keith Olsen (late of the Music Machine), while the flip came from the pen of the great David Gates, still a struggling songwriter at the time. With a record under their belts, Eternity's Children soon hit the road alongside the Seeds, the Blues Magooes and headliners the Strawberry Alarm Clock. (Groovy bill, no?) Despite the tour, the record tanked and A&M passed on a follow-up.

With the A&M deal down the drain and the group now firmly ensconced in Hollywood, the Crocked Foxx boys went label shopping and finally struck a deal with the Capitol subsidiary Tower around the beginning of 1968. Arrangements were immediately made for Keith Olsen and his new partner Curt Boettcher to come in and produce an LP that would help break the band to a national audience.

The resulting sessions were presumably fraught with tension, though apparently this had more to do with the management of Crocked Foxx than anything having to do with the relationship between the producers and the recording artists. Bruce Blackman and Johnny Bounds were the first to leave the group. States Blackman today; "We did not survive because of incredibly bad management... After I left the group, they tried to cheat me (unsuccessfully) out of any credit." Ex-Nurotic Sheep keyboardist Mike "Kid" McClain was brought in to help finish up the sessions, and the album's cover features a line-up of McClain, Ross, Whittaker and Lawley.

Unfortunately, given the turbulent circumstances surrounding the group at the time of recording, and combined with producer Boettcher's penchant for using his own group of session vocalists and musicians on any given recording he was put in charge of, it's simply impossible to say who played what on Eternity's Children. What can be ascertained however is both the beauty of the album as well as its inconsistency. At its best, on such songs as "Again Again", "Your World", "Little Boy" and the lead single "Mrs. Bluebird", the group achieve an almost uncanny level of brilliance on a sound that's equal parts A&M Records and Our Productions (Boettcher's production company). Elsewhere, there's some great hybrid bossa-nova in the form of "My Happiness Day", sunshiney pop in more of a Spanky vein with "Lifetime Day" and a catchy, rocking closer in "Sunshine Among Us". These are the songs Eternity's Children actually played on, which is to say others-- whether by choice or necessity-- did not feature the band on backing instruments, or sometimes at all. "Rupert White", as has long been known, utilized the same basic backing track as the Gary Paxton produced Chocolate Tunnel's version of the same song. Similarly, "You Know I've Found a Way" is an under-dubbed version of a track found on Boettcher's concurrent album with Gary Usher-- Sagittarius' Present Tense.

The clear highlight of Eternity's Children was it's first single. "Mrs. Bluebird"-- a sublime achievement for both the group and their producers, combining the very best of many disparate elements found within the musical ether of 1968: smooth, full harmonies; perfectly performed backing arrangements; a melancholy chord progression; bird calls and even a fuzz guitar solo that starts off fooling the listener by perfectly emulating a tenor sax. It was state of the art record making for its time, and the band hit the circuit hard to promote it, including a performance in front of Dick Clark on American Bandstand. (The video of this appearance has yet to surface, but is a legitimate holy grail.) Sadly, "Mrs. Bluebird" was not able to chart higher than #69 in July, and its follow-up "Sunshine Among Us" performed even worse, hitting a paltry #117 that September.

At the dawn of 1969, the Eternity's Children reconvened at the studios of producer Gary S. Paxton to record a follow-up single for Tower; "Till I Hear It from You" b/w "I Wanna Be with You". Percussionist/ vibesman Bo Wagner had now replaced Whittaker within the group, and his bell overdubs combined McClain's multiple virtuosic keyboard parts to hold down the upper-middle register generally reserved for guitars. Sadly, the departure of both the group's best songwriter and their whiz kid producer did the band few favors, as they moved away from the moody pop of their previous album to a more Vegas-y approach. The single was released at the same time the band's second album, the somewhat ironically titled Timeless, was nearing completion. When the single sank without a trace, Tower decided to withdraw the LP prior to release in the United States and release it only in Canada where "Mrs. Bluebird" had been a moderate hit. Despite an increased songwriting presence from McClain, Ross and Lawley, and contributions from Clarence White, Gene Parsons and Ben Benay, the album was not as strong as its predecessor and it too sank.

Assessed from today's standards, however, Timeless is clearly not without its merits. The singing and musicianship are absolutely first-rate, and despite the additional Cheez-Whiz factor in some tunes, the moodier numbers like "Christina in My Dreams", "Gypsy Minstrel Man" and "The Thinking Animal" still make the grade. Even better, Linda Lawley was beginning to emerge as a true talent with a voice that was simultaneously clear and powerful. Indeed, Lawley attained such a singular sound for her time that I find it impossible to believe that Richard or Karen Carpenter didn't catch the band either in concert or on record during some formative stage of their existence as a performing entity, for the simple fact that Eternity's Children Mark II was virtually a template for the Carpenters' entire career path. Nevertheless, all good things must come to an end, and that too includes Eternity's Children.

But not so fast, my soft pop loving compatriots!.. Even though the Eternity's Children had missed their initial shot at big time, they still had a record contract and a fighting chance, right? Disheartened, the group decided to leave L.A. and return back to Mississippi, where former band-mates Blackman and Walker had since started a new band called the Omen that was making a huge splash on the Southern soul circuit. Eternity's Children headed straight to Memphis to record a new album with Chips Moman and session bassist Tommy Cogbill. Though the record never materialized, several new Eternity's Children-related singles were released on Tower throughout 1969. In short order the group and Tower served up the quintessential Memphis/Moman sound of "Sidewalks of the Ghetto" (Tower 476); "Railroad Trestle in California" (Tower 477) credited to Charles Ross III and featuring gospel backing from some unnamed female vocalists; some nice orchestrated soulful pop from the pens of Mark James and Spooner Oldham with "Blue Horizon" (Tower 498); another Ross solo with the admittedly awful "Laughing Girl"; and finally a Linda Lawley solo single in "When the World Turns" b/w "Living Is Easy" (Tower 500) that continued to anticipate the sound of the Carpenters.

When Tower folded at the end of the year, the group were scooped up by Liberty Records, who were still smarting after losing the 5th Dimension to the Bell label and were looking for another vocal group to market. Re-energized, the band set course for Tyler, Texas where they would record their final single under producer Robin Hood Bryant. The result was a spectacular bit of almost baroque pop music titled "Alone Again". (Interestingly, the flip side was another Curt Boettcher/ Sagittarius demo; this one being "From You Unto Us".)

When that record soon failed, Eternity's Children parted ways with Liberty and returned once again to Mississippi. Back on home turf they would continue to gig at any place lucky enough to have them, leaving enthusiastic fans in their wake wherever they played. Eventually Bruce Blackman, Johnny Walker and Bo Wagner would re-surface in Starbuck, who as previously mentioned at the beginning of this article would score a #3 hit in 1975 with the classic "Moonlight Feels Right". Likewise, Mike "Kid" McClain and Roy Whittaker would continue to gig throughout the South as well, often times crossing paths with their old E.C. bandmates. As for Linda Lawley, she too would continue on with her singing career. She released a self-titled solo album in 1989 and backed Carole King at the New Orleans Jazz Fest. Carole introduced her as a "local girl" and she was even allowed to sing lead on one number. Sadly, both Lawley and Walker passed away in 2007.

In 2003, a wonderful gift was bestowed upon all Eternity's Children fans, as Gear Fab released the highly anticipated Lost Sessions, which collected not only the single sides not found on the 2fer, but also nine previously unreleased E.C. tunes. Though information contained for each song was next to none, a casual listen could help date the tracks to an extent. "Cigarette" sounds like it was recorded around the time of the first single, before the band hit L.A. "A Taste of Honey" and "Hard Hard Year" seem to date from around the time of the A&M single, and as previously stated could have appeared on the demo that led to the group getting signed. Takes of Jimmy Webb's "The Girls' Song" and "Didn't We" and Randy Newman's "Just One Smile" have a definite L.A. sheen to them, while their versions of Sly Stone's "Somebody's Watching You", Ike Clanton's "Down the Aisle" and Laura Nyro's "Woman's Blues" have more of a down and dirty Southern vibe and were probably recorded once the band left Los Angeles. The one unifying factor of these later-day performances are that they are uniformly excellent cover choices, and feature the band in a very positive light. Linda Lawley in particular should be commended for owning the Nyro track, as she grounds it in a way the song's creator wasn't quite able to do.

The entire Eternity's Children oeuvre can be found here and here for you to explore. I specifically encoded both discs at 160k so as to facilitate some more sales for our pals over at Rev-ola and Gear Fab. If you like what you hear (and I know you will) you can support Eternity's Children and these fine labels by buying lossless versions of the following: Eternity's Children/Timeless (Rev-ola); From Us Unto You: The Complete Singles (Rev-ola); and The Lost Sessions (Gear Fab).

**This essay would not have been possible without the hard work and dedicated research done by Dawn Eden for her liners to the original E.C. 2-fer, and for the personal recollections of the band and their fans over at musicaltaste.com. Thanks for keeping the E.C. spirit alive!

April 2010 update

2010-03-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

Hello. This is just a friendly notice to let you all know that my brain is officially on hiatus. Lately I've been spending too much of my free time obsessing on the human condition to really put forth any kind of an effort into this blog, and for that I apologize. Was a time when music provided all the relief I needed from pressures relating to the outside world, but lately the time involved in putting together these ambitious compilation projects, combined with my perfectionist attitude towards detail, has largely sapped the fun out of it.

To put it another way, if I have to listen to one of my compilations 200 times during the assembling/ editing stage, then by the time you finally hear it I'm already way, way burned out on it and ready to move on to something else. Many of these comps have literally been years in the making. The Tuesday Timewarp feature was a brief attempt at a paradigm shift, intending to speed things up, but the complete lack of response to the Standells post has shown me that this is probably not what you people want out of this site.

Currently I am almost completely lost in three major projects. The updated L.A. Gemstones I have been promising will likely be here by the end of the year, as I have been very fortunate to find a collaborator who is doing a great deal to assist me with this ambitious set. The new version will feature a revised track listing, much improved fidelity and a companion e-book containing liners, essays, photos and more. It will be, simply, the greatest Various Artists box set ever known to man. It'll take time to complete, but I promise you you will see it eventually.

The next thing on my agenda is nothing less than the complete organization, annotation and presentation of every available bit of Brian Wilson's '66-'67 SMiLE sessions; again presented in the best available fidelity (lossless) with companion e-book with detailed notes on every session. What will emerge will be the most complete portrait of SMiLE that has ever been revealed. When finished I will submit this to my contacts within the Beach Boys camp and see if they want to run with it. If they don't, I will try to get the book published and the 15 or so disc box set will go unheard.

Perhaps less exciting, but much more fun, is a collection of 80s Pop, RnB and New Wave hits from my childhood. I know these sorts of sets have been compiled and released thousands of times, but trust me when I say that this box will reign supreme in your car stereo, because it will have the Crystal Sphere "touch". Since this isn't as complex a set as the other two (no e-book, .mp3 quality) I have a feeling you will be seeing it first out of the three.

So what's the point of teasing you all with this? Nothing, I guess, except to let you all know that I haven't abandoned the ship. It's just that right now this minute, I'm much more into hanging out with my girlfriend or sitting in front of the TV and getting caught up on "The Office" than having to do the actual thinking that comes with writing anything of substance. This will change soon enough I'm sure, but in the meantime please bear with me.

Tuesday Timewarp: The Standells

2010-03-16T17:17:00.001-07:00

. . .
Here's a new feature we've added to the Sphere called The Tuesday Timewarp. Every Tuesday we'll be adding some rare/out-of-print/unreleased junk from the past, with the hopes that if your mood is sufficiently elevated, you just might suddenly find yourself on a little mind excursion courtesy of these tunes.

Prepare the Wayback Machine. Today's introductory feature is a selection of cuts from the Standells' late-1967 album Try It.

Now the Standells were a solid band for their time, but never one you'd term as terribly interesting or ambitious. Their stock-in-trade was polished frat/garage rock stuff, typified by "Dirty Water", "Sometimes the Good Guys Don't Wear White" and of course "Try It". It's fair to say they never really attempted to break out of that particular mold until this, their last album.

Apart from two great singles in the form of the title cut and "Riot on Sunset Strip", the rest of the Try It LP is a major stylistic departure that virtually embodies the term "mixed bag". While some ill-chosen soul and blues covers drag the album down from classic status, the group's attempts at a more psychy pop/rock sound are winners!

Examine these four groovy cuts I've resurrected for you off an album that sank like a stone when it dropped 42 years ago. "All Fall Down" kicks things off; sounding for all the world like Dick Dodd and company had been digging on Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Satanic Majesties, and decided to incorporate strands of those records into a bubblegum pop song. It's not a stone classic by any means, but man does it ever reek of the Nag Champa! Perfect for the Tuesday Timewarp.

"Trip to Paradise", with its Ellingtonesque strings and horns arrangement, clearly was not written by the band, and I'm nearly certain they resented being told by their producer to record it. This baby could have just as easily found a home on World in a Sea Shell or the first Giant Crab album. That might sound like an insult, but its not-- "Trip" is a soaring, ambitious pop recording that should have been a big hit in some parallel universe.

"Barracuda" finds the Standells back in the garage rock bag, but damned if this isn't way more primal than what we're used to hearing from these guys. This is perfect music for a bar fight, high speed police chase or cocaine party, and if it sounds more like the Chocolate Watch Band than Dick Dodd and his gang, well just remember that the song's author Ed Cobb also served as producer for both groups. (NOTE: Cobb also penned the great "Medication" which both the Standells and Watch Band recorded back in the day.)

Perhaps even stronger is "Did You Ever Have That Feeling?", a mind-melter of cosmic proportions. Listen hard as the Standells finally lose what was left of their good-guy image and go for broke on this psychedelic punk hell ride. If only they had somehow used this song as a template for re-inventing themselves, perhaps today they would be known as more than just the guys who sang "Dirty Water". And so it goes.

Carole King - Phases (2-CD)

2010-03-03T17:25:00.000-08:00

Compliation (single artist)
Compilation (various artist)

My fascination with Carole King started in pre-adolescence. That is to say, I had always been aware of her on some level; whether it was her early collaborations with Gerry Goffin on things like "The Locomotion" and "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" or via the battered copy of Tapestry my parents kept around the house. (My folks listened to a lot of albums back then, but as a tot I liked Tapestry the best because Carole was funkier than Joan Baez and much prettier than Harry Chapin.)

As I grew older and began to expand my musical horizons a bit, Carole was right there with me. Whether it was the Monkees, the Byrds, the Beatles, the Association, the Turtles or the Strawberry Alarm Clock, it seemed like almost everybody covered at least one Goffin/King tune! More to the point, those songs were almost always ear-worms, peeking their little worm heads out from their surroundings as if to say, "yeah, we were written by people who knew exactly what the hell they were doing".

Yet apart from that old copy of Tapestry, I never really made any valiant effort to check out any of Carole's solo material. That all changed on a fateful afternoon when my friend Jack (er, former friend, but that's another story!) and I drove up to Montclair to check out the CD store he used to work at, Village Sounds. Now I had heard stories about Village Sounds being a front for some sort of money laundering scheme, and sure enough as I started to peruse their CD collection those stories began to ring true. Basically, the place was cut-out city. It was as if they specialized in music that no other stores would sell. Rack after rack of garbage: Krokus, Firefall, Armored Saint, Rob Base & DJ Eazy Rock, Winger. If it sucked or was played out, chances are Village Sounds had it in stock. But then a funny thing happened on the way to rock 'n' roll hell. Amongst the dross, a solitary album cover caught my eye-- two dudes and a chick, nondescript really, leaning up against an old broken down car parked out in a field. And neatly typed up in a very plain-Jayne kinda font alongside the car's driver's side window read simply, "The City".

Something about the overall simplicity of its front cover immediately separated this disc from the garishly adored flotsam that surrounded it on all sides. Mildly intrigued, I picked it up and examined the back cover. "Snow Queen", "A Man Without a Dream", "Wasn't Born to Follow", "Hi-De-Ho", "Now That Everything's Been Said"-- Hot damn! This was a Real Carole King Album from the Sixties, with her singing all my favorite songs! I grabbed it and left Village Sounds, and upon returning back to my old Park Boulevard pad, immediately put said disc on the Sony 5-CD changer. The opening piano lines to "Snow Queen" filled the room and I was hooked.

I don't why I felt it important to explain my lifelong attraction to the music of Carole King just now, other than possibly to impart to you how much the songs you're about to hear mean to me. Her work with both Gerry Goffin and Toni Stern has been covered by virtually anyone who's anyone in the music biz; but astoundingly-- considering the level of talent of the people she's always composed for-- Carole's own versions of her songs almost always trump even the greatest of covers. (See "Wasn't Born to Follow" for an example.) There's just something about the way her soulful, throaty vocal delivery compliments her fluid piano lines that just works on such a high level; at her best she's operating on the same plane as Laura, Dusty, Jackie or Aretha-- all of whom covered Carole King songs by the way, and all of whom are present on the set I'm about to discuss.

So what is Phases then? I suppose you could say its the final fruits of a seed that was planted in my head around the same time I first heard the City CD. Here's the plot: I wanted a 2 disc set that contained a collection of some of the very best cover versions of Carole King tunes on one disc, with Carole's own versions of the same exact songs on the second disc. It's such a simple concept really that I cannot fathom how such a thing is not already out on the market! I started off by compiling a list twenty-three classic Carole King performances (roughly 80 minutes) from what I consider the peak of her career as a writer and performer; 1966-71. Then it was just a matter of accumulating some exquisite contemporaneous covers of those songs; something I've been working on for the last fifteen months. (I crossed the final one off my list last night-- Matthews' Southern Comfort's groovy CSN-meets-Beach Boys take on "To Love".)

As I sit here listening back to Phases while I write this, I realize this really was a brilliant idea on my part. (Pardon the self-aggrandizement, but I'm feeling entitled at the moment!) The first disc of Phases alone serves as an awesome "Best Of" sampler of Carole's phenomenal talents as a singer/songwriter (including the four never-before-released demos that start the set off), but hearing the second disc-- with such an amazing All-Star roster of artists taking turns re-interpreting these gems-- it just does my heart good to listen to it. And so, it's my sincere hope that you will enjoy both discs 1 and 2 of Carole's Phases as much as I do. And if you do, please by all means come back and leave us a comment or two letting us know how much Carole's music means to YOU.

A Couple of Wings Mixes I Made for My Friend

2010-02-17T22:47:00.000-08:00

Compliation (single artist)

Hey hey, welcome back!

Is this thing on?.... Hello?.... Testing?.... One... Two....

OK then, welcome back to the Sphere. Hopefully my prolonged absence in the face of home remodeling madness wasn't too distressing to the two or three of you that actually come by this place on a regular basis. Anyway I hope to make it up to you all by actively posting more content here in the coming weeks.

The first thing I wanted to share isn't anything particularly rare or hard to come by, but it is something by a band that is often overlooked and neglected today-- even though they had 6 platinum albums, 13 U.S. Top 10 singles and were fronted by an ex-Beatle. Of course we're talking about Wings.

"But wait just a frickin' minute, pal!", you are certainly yelling at no one in particular right now. "I've heard 'Band on the Run'! I've heard 'Silly Love Songs!'"

Wow, I'm impressed. I mean, really. Really, really, really impressed.

Riddle me this then: How many Wings albums have you actually heard? Okay, so maybe you're actually a huge fan of the group and own all of them, but I'm willing to bet that's not the case. It certainly wasn't for me either, until I got hip you see. And you're talking to a guy who grew up around Beatles freaks.

For the longest time, the only non-Beatles McCartney in my catalog was a copy of All the Best, a copy of Band on the Run and I think at one point I even had Flowers in the Dirt on cassette. My sister owned Ram and McCartney and the Give My Regards to Broad Street soundtrack, and for most of my life I was convinced that that was all the McCartney I was ever going to need to hear.

Certainly Rolling Stone magazine didn't persuade me to investigate anything further. I mean have you read their reviews of Paul's Wings-era stuff? For the most part it's borderline character assassination masked as rock journalism.

No it wasn't until I got bit by the vinyl bug that I finally took a chance on a copy of Wings at the Speed of Sound, a record that was vilified by nearly every review I've ever read of it. For the longest time I didn't even play it, until one night I figured "what the hell" and took it out for a test drive.

Hey I'll be damned, this universally hated on piece of black vinyl isn't too bad!

It was like the great awakening for me. I mean sure S.O.S. was a bit hit or miss, with a couple of clunkers, but the good stuff was SO GOOD. I returned to the record store the next weekend and bought Wild Life and Ram. Then London Town. Then Red Rose Speedway and so on, until I had amassed the entire catalog. And while every record contained a bit of dross, there was also gold in them thar hills. Compilation time!

Actually what you've got here are two sundry collections of Wings LP tracks (including a few ringers from Ram and McCartney), deep cuts and forgotten singles. In fact, the closest thing to a hit here is probably either "Hi, Hi, Hi" or "Helen Wheels", neither of which you'll ever hear on the radio these days.

It's important to note that I made these comps for my friend Marina to listen to while she was away at school, and so track selection was truly a painstaking process. I wanted to establish a flow, or a mood of tranquility and discovery , and so I intentionally laid off anything that she would be overly familiar with. After all, nothing beats hearing a really stellar song for the first time, right?

Anyway, while this was a gift from me to her, after a while it made sense to share it with others who might be receptive to such a thing. Both of these discs are highly recommended, by me, to anyone who likes Paul McCartney's 1970s stuff but hasn't made it past what's always on the radio. Please don't let the writers at Rolling Stone or any other hack critic dissuade you, because at its finest, this music rivals nearly anything Paul did while the Beatles. The horn charts on "Letting Go", the smooth Association-like harmonies at the end of "Mary Had a Little Lamb", the majestic orchestration on "Long Haired Lady" or "Little Lamb Dragonfly"... If these titles mean nothing to you then run, don't walk to your sound system of choice and immerse yourself in the goodness that was Paul in the Seventies.

A1l the B2st!

Oh, and P.S. -- To those that have asked for them, I'm not in the habit of posting track listings, because I'd rather any interested person just listen without any preconceptions as to what they're about to hear. This site is all about taking chances and exploring the unexplored, and no road maps are necessary for the enthusiastic traveler!

The Sphere Sells Out

2010-01-15T09:41:00.000-08:00

Hi! You might be wondering why there's been no action around these parts for the last month or so. Well, you see, there is actually a very good reason for that: your favorite visionary guru psychedelic mind pirate has sold his soul and bought into the "American Dream" he has railed against for the better part of his life.

Translation: I bought a house.

Yes, I know this absolutely flies in the face of the staunch anti-establishment pose I've tried so hard to cultivate all my life, but dammit there's just something nice about quadrupling the square footage of your old shithole apartment, having an actual garage to park in and such amenities as a washer/dryer and dishwasher.

Anyway the upshot is that AT&T still hasn't come out to set up my internet, so you guys and gals are gonna have to wait a few more days for your next fix. In the meantime, feel free to check out some of the other blogs you see linked on the right hand side. I particularly recommend "The Red Telephone" if your into super obscure psych. I can spend weeks on that site!

Anyway I'm posting this from work on the down low, so I'd better get out of here. See you guys shortly!

Obsession, Lust and Betrayal - Modern Rock's Greatest 1998-2008 (10 CDs)

2009-11-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

Compilation (various artist)

It may seem an outrageous idea to try and hold onto in today's über-cynical, post-everything age, but Rock 'n' Roll really did just start out as music for teenagers to lose their shit over. All the conceit, pomp and arrogance that followed during the next four decades has only served to delude the original message that folks like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry and Richard set out to establish; namely that this music shit should be fun, man. If you can't jump up and down, bang your head, pump your fist or slam into a wall (or each other) then perhaps you're not cut out for this whole Rock scene, right?

It was a notion that served music fans well throughout Rock's first wave, and up through the Surf era, the early British Invasion and all the American Garage-type bands that emerged in its wake. The medium of choice was singles: potent blasts of sheer electric exhilaration and joy. Two minutes thirty a side. No time for lofty concepts and conceits, the message had to be short, brutal and to the point. Yet a funny thing happened on the way to Rock 'n Roll nirvana: the long playing LP. Originally viewed within the realm of pop music as a way of collecting together stray 45s and sundry filler for the Holiday market, by 1966 the LP was becoming the format of choice for heavy musicians: the run of Fifth Dimension, Love, Pet Sounds, Blonde on Blonde, Freak Out!, Aftermath, Revolver, Sunshine Superman and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme being the opening salvo.

By 1968 the LP had become the predominant form in which one enjoyed a band, and the poor 45 RPM single was considered a pop move, or worse, Bubblegum. Anyone who was Anyone in the Rock Hierarchy was cutting long-form conceptual "masterpieces" of their own design, intent on showing just how serious they could be. This trend of outrageous conceit reached a plateau of sorts with the Who's overblown "Rock Opera" Tommy, and within a year there would be Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes. (Oh Elvis, where art thou?)

But as Psych begat Prog begat College Rock begat Alternative begat Indie, fans of Real Rock Music began to rebel. Perhaps the gauntlet was initially thrown down by none other than George Lucas with the soundtrack to his American Graffiti; a superb double album comprised of hit singles from the early Rock 'n' Roll era that single-handedly kicked off a national Fifties nostalgia trend. However the real hero of this tale was Lenny Kaye, whose original Nuggets compilation beautifully resurrected the world of Rock 'n' Roll right before the LP took over.

Nuggets wasn't just about Garage bands-- indeed most of the bands included were fairly polished and signed to at least medium-sized labels, if not majors. It also wasn't squarely about hit singles, or even singles per se. Whether or not the song was originally popular, or whether it was indeed picked as a single by some A&R rep, really had little bearing on its inclusion. No, what Nuggets was was the original "Scene" comp: Get together all the top bands, represent them with their very best song and get the fuck out of the way. But most importantly, keep it short and to the point. One blast after another. Club the listener senseless with the raw power of the three minute pop song.

It's a formula that's worked brilliantly for numerous genres and sub-genres. The masters of course were Rhino Records, who apart from keeping the Nuggets legacy going strong also released definitive Scene comps with their 70s-80s Punk and New Wave DIY sets; reclaimed 70s Bubblegum with the Have a Nice Day series; and also brokered the ultimate 70s funk, 80s Hip-Hop and 90s Brit Rock collections (What It Is!, The Sugar Hill Records Story and The Brit Box respectively.)

But where are the Nuggets of today? In other words, where can today's discriminating listener-- searching perhaps for the primal pop blast of, say, a Chocolate Watch Band or an Amboy Dukes-- score a quick fix? With the state of Rock radio and MTV these days, as well as the growing presence of Hip-Hop and Electronica within the new millennium, sometimes it's hard to remember that there are still young bands out there with electric guitars and a strong desire to simply rock the house and get bodies moving. I speak not of today's latest crop of Pitchfork approved Indie-Hipster-Slacker crap; groups that take navel-gazing to an extreme that would positively embarrass their hippie forefathers. Nor do I refer to the safe, calculated sound of such Dad-Rock stalwarts as U2, REM or Coldplay; music so cold and lifeless that it should sooner be played inside a wax museum than in the home of any true Rock music fan. Alternately, many of the more extreme if interesting bands trading in the realms of Metal, Noise, Math, etc. simply aren't sweetly commercial enough to provide the necessary sugar rush. So what does that leave our listener with?

Quite a lot, actually. Emerging roughly around 1998, and led by such later-era Alternative bands as Green Day and Weezer, came a new genre loosely referred to as Modern Rock. The term is actually more or a catch-all than anything, combining as it does Power Pop (Fountains of Wayne, Phantom Planet); Punk (Pennywise, Alkaline Trio); Pop Punk (Blink-182, Yellowcard); Reggae Rock (311, Rx Bandits); Pop Metal (Linkin Park, Hoobastank); Post Punk (Franz Ferdinand, We Are Scientists); Singer Songwriter (Dashboard Confessional, Jack's Mannequin); Emo Pop (Hawthorne Heights, Taking Back Sunday) and just flat-out Rock 'n' Roll (White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age). In other words, the term comprises anything in the Rock milieu that's "hot", contemporary/ commercial and hi-energy. Or for another way of looking at it, if it sounds good pumped through car stereo speakers and gets young people excited and amped up, it's a Modern Rock Nugget.

On a personal level, I began compiling Obsession, Lust and Betrayal back in 2004 as a series of quicky compilations to help me better absorb all the great music I heard coming out of the New Pop Rock Renaissance. It was never intended to be anything other than a series of mixes I kept in the car for my own enjoyment. However, by the time I initially finished off the tenth volume sometime in 2008, I had been inundated by so many requests from friends for copies of each and every disc that I started to understand the widespread appeal of such a collection. Remember that no credence was given to whether or not these songs were released as singles. The qualification was simply that they had to be the hottest, catchiest tracks going. If the song didn't merit 5 stars in my iTunes library, it didn't make the cut. Simple as that.

At any rate, after giving out about 50 copies of this set to various friends and acquaintances, I decided to go back and tighten it up by making sure each song was ripped at 160K or better, the track-to-track flow was smooth, the overall volume normalized and my original artwork added to all files. These cleaned-up versions are my early Christmas present to all you Children of the Sphere.

Apart from becoming reacquainted with the bands I previously mentioned, listeners of Obsession, Lust and Betrayal will be introduced to such overlooked genre luminaries as songwriting genius Kevin Ridel (represented here on cuts by AM Radio, Peel and Ridel High), Pop Punk masters Gob, and Manchester UK's hardest rocking band Nine Black Alps. I even granted a little additional space to my great local Oakland bands Desa, the Matches, Davenport Totem and my good friends the Violent High so that folks all around the world can get a taste of the fantastic scene we've developed here locally.

As a final aside, we do of course understand that the critics are down on a lot of these bands, and that Weezer, Blink, 311 and their ilk aren't likely to be inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame© anytime soon. Therefore it is our opinion here at the Sphere that these critics are simply overpaid hacks pushing agendas that have nothing to do with loving music. These pond scum are merely the progeny of the dip-shits that almost killed Rock 'n' Roll in the first place by telling your folks that the Electric Prunes were garbage and what you really should be digging is ELP's Love Beach. So like Flav says, don't believe the hype. Just download this box set, throw it on your iPod or car stereo and rejoice in feeling alive with the power of the perfect three minute Rock song.

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REVIEW: Where The Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968

2009-11-23T14:38:00.000-08:00

Where The Action Is!
Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968
(Rhino)

Well, as of earlier this month I was finally able to set aside enough extra coin to pick up Rhino's new box set dedicated to the L.A. pop music scene from 1965-68. Don't get me wrong, I had been planning on purchasing it from the moment it was released back in September was it? But sometimes with packages like this, it's better to sit back and wait for all the advanced reviews to come in before taking the plunge. There's a lot of ways to screw up archival re-issues like this, but I'm happy to say that Rhino's latest entry to the Nuggets series is a very worthy addition.

As one whose love of the music from this city and era goes far beyond casual fan status, my expectations were set quite high. Having immersed myself in these sounds for the better part of the last decade, I was skeptical that there wasn't much Rhino could present to me that I hadn't already absorbed and digested. Again, I'm happy to state that I was wrong on all counts. The package itself was just over $50.00 at Amoeba, which is reasonable for a 4-CD set with booklet and free T-shirt. The booklet itself is quite well done: There is information provided for every band, including label, chart, musician, producer and engineer credits whenever possible, along with a paragraph or two describing each song in greater detail. The discs themselves are housed within slots in the back cover-- From an artistic perspective it's a cool idea, but practically speaking it's a disaster. Complaints on the internet abound regarding Action's CDs arriving with heavy surface scratches and sometimes even glued upon! Fortunately, all four of my discs were delivered scratch free and in good shape. I immediately withdrew them from the slots and placed them in more protective cases.

I immediately slid Disc one of Action into my car's CD player just as soon as I hit the Durant Ave. parking garage and was instantly greeted by the agreeably familiar groove of the Standells' "Riot on Sunset Strip"; a tune I had previously selected for my 10 CD L.A. Gemstones set, released last year over at the Record Room and on this site. I should take a moment to state that I have no idea whether or not the powers-that-be at Rhino had any familiarity with L.A. Gemstones before they decided to put this set together. But since the original goal of Gemstones was to encourage some forward-thinking label to put forth a licensed compilation that could put money in the pockets of the musicians who made all this wonderful music, while at the same time helping to spread these sounds to as many people as possible, I can only be grateful that Rhino was up to the challenge. And since only a mere 16 of the 100+ tracks on this set overlap with the 250+ found on L.A. Gemstones, the two sets "play nice" together for the most part. (NOTE: The idea of going back and switching out those 16 overlapped songs on L.A. Gemstones with 16 alternative cuts not found on Where the Action Is! is something I plan on doing shortly-- apologies to those of you who have already downloaded it; I'll try to make the update process as painless as possible!)

Back to the analysis at hand, the raucous Standells cut serves nicely as an "opening credits" type number (just as it did in the movie from which it originally hails), and the rest of Disc one provides a Byrds-eye view of the nascent Sunset Strip rock scene starring all the usual suspects: the Doors, Love, the Buffalo Springfield, Iron Butterfly, the Byrds, Sunny & Cher, etc. Of the four CDs included on Where the Action Is!, the material here will be the most familiar to the casual fan. Still, archivists Andrew Sandoval and Alec Palao do a nice job of selecting lesser-known numbers by most of the big groups, and all are presented in their original mono mixes for added panache. No real masterpieces here (although the Association's spirited reading of "One Too Many Mornings" comes close) but plenty of great, catchy fun.

Disc two struck me as the most bizarre of the bunch, featuring as it does many artists that may be unfamiliar to all but the most stringent of collectors. I'll admit that groups like the Light, the Bush, Ken & the Fourth Dimension and the Others were so obscure as to be completely off my radar, and I thought I knew all there was to know about the L.A. scene! As such, this is the disc that will appeal the most to Garage fans, featuring as it does such genre heroes as Thee Midnighters, the Premiers, the Spats and Opus 1, whose all-time bizarro classic "Back Seat '38 Dodge" is the best thing here. Still, in terms of overall listenability and enjoyment, I'd rate this disc the weakest of the four.

CD three focuses more on artists who were at home in the recording studio, and has a nice mix of the familiar and the eclectic. It is here that we start to encounter some real underground masterpieces: the Full Treatment's "Just Can't Wait", Hearts & Flowers' "Tin Angel", the Oracle's "Don't Say No", Pleasure's "Poor Old Organ Grinder", the Ballroom's "Baby Please Don't Go"... These are amongst the very finest "pocket symphonies" ever recorded. The fact that none of these came close to being hit singles the first time around makes their inclusion here all the more vital. Likely they will now be heard by more listeners than they were in their own time!

The final disc starts off quite retentively in a folk-rockish vein with cuts by artists like Jackie DeShannon, Peter Fonda and the Rose Garden, but quickly evolves into a sort of psych-pop wünderland of obscuro delights. This is Action's strongest run, and I get the feeling Sandoval and Palao are just deejay-ing purely on feel at this point. Highlights pile up one after the other: spacey pop from the Motorcycle Abeline, rootsy rock from Gene Clark, a dippy Ricky Nelson number titled "Marshmallow Skies" of all things, an absolute stunner from Del Shannon (who knew?), Randy Newman doing heavy psych?!?! alternate "Heroes and Villains", "Come to the Sunshine", "The Truth Is Not Real", Love, the Byrds and, oh yeah, Barry Fuckin' McGuire. In short, every element that made the era special, wrapped up in one 30 minute stretch of songs.

All this is not to say that Action is perfectly compiled per se. Amongst all the quality selections are a few head scratchers, none greater than "Acid Head" by the Velvet Illusions-- a great song to be sure, but one not even recorded in the State of California let alone Los Angeles, it has no business on this set. Amongst the more established bands there are some curious choices as well: The Buffalo Springfield are represented by two of their earliest cuts (one a demo) at the expense of their more ambitious later material; The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, a band who released two classic albums for Columbia in 1967, see only one of their pre-CBS demos included here; The Doors and the Beach Boys-- arguably the two biggest groups to evolve from the scene-- only merit one cut a piece, while the much respected but less commercially viable Love rate two inclusions. Worse yet, some of the best SoCal bands of the era are completely absent. How could Rhino include songs by third rate acts like the Guilloteens (not even an L.A. band) yet leave out the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Grass Roots or the Millennium? (Other important artists such as Frank Zappa, the 5th Dimension, Johnny Rivers and Bobby Jameson are excluded as well, but due to licensing issues which are clearly not the fault of the compilers.)

Still, my gripes are that of an obsessive completist and fan who takes this stuff way to seriously, and as such should be taken with more than just one grain of salt. The beauty of Where the Action Is! is that is contains much to love, both for the neophyte and the avid collector. As such, is receives our highest rating: 5 Tabs

BUY "WHERE THE ACTION IS! LOS ANGELES NUGGETS (1965-68)"

Tim Forster and Jon Mills Discuss the WCPAEB

2009-11-20T14:36:00.000-08:00

Here's an unmissable video for all you Sphere-heads, brought to our attention from none other than WCPAEB biographer Tim Forster (Welcome, Tim!) himself. The guys touch all all aspects of the West Coast Pop Art gang; from their serendipitous beginnings at the 1965 Yardbirds tour party to their latter era backing of Bob Markley on the Markley: a Group LP. Throughout the interview Jon asks many probing questions you have no doubt been asking yourselves all this time, and of course Tim's responses are insightful and highly informative.

Although we're on record as disagreeing with Forster's assessment of the monumental Where's My Daddy? LP, which we still feel is an undisputed masterpiece of sixties L.A. madness and magik, this interview nevertheless receives our highest 5-Tab recommendation. Watch and learn!

(Also, you can read Tim's complete essay on the WCPAEB in Shindig Magazine's new Shindig Annual No.2, available at www.shindig-magazine.com)

Their Satanic Majesties Request (4 CD deluxe edition)

2009-10-19T18:42:00.000-07:00

Deluxe Reissue

Yea, verily! No doubt thou ardst familiar with thy Rolling Stones and thine brilliantith album of ye olde English psyche and whimsy heretofore known unto thee as Their Satanic Majesties Request. But did'st thou also knowith that thy surviving session material hasdth leakithed forth unto thine own self from hither and yon? DID'ST THOU?!?!

Yea, I sayeth unto thee, explorith unto yon self this set-of-four. Containith thou it might not only thine stereo remaster (labelledith S-A-C-D) but also thine droppith of needle unto thy vinyl-of-mono quite pristine.

Henceforth, thou shalt also hearith thine album complete in instrumental form quite rare! Sequenced thou it is by Lord Pinniclith... Yea! He hath toiled long and hard upon ye olde Pro Tools to bringith forth yon treasures faire!

Per chance shall an additional discus of outtake-iths most scarce cause some little beaumont about ye to flutter? "Verily!" sayeth I. Lords and Wenches, listen unto thine acetates dubbed "Monitor Mix" in a form most unreleased! Marvel at mixeths borne of small platters from yesteryear, spun forth at forty-five revolutions per time-minute. Surely thine are't the work of some treacherous form of sorcery?!

Come forth! Indulgith thine own self upon a feast of musical magik and light quite certainly not to be found outside thy realm of Thee Olde Crystal Sphere. Groovith upon yon Mellotron as played forth by His Majesty Prince Jones, he of thee Prince Valiant coiffure. Wiggith out on ye olde Elizibethian piano interludes of Lord Hopkins as he whips the llama's ass forthwith.

Assuredly I say unto you, good sir or madame, that thou must partake-ith in all four of yon discuses presented unto thee for a Satanic experience most complete. Hast thou accepted thy crusade? Yon ho then!
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Instant Replay Redux

2009-09-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

Deluxe Reissue

Instant Replay by the Monkees is a great album, there's no doubt about it. However it's lacking in one significant area-- no Peter Tork!

Completely neglected on their 1968 The Birds, the Bees and the Monkees, Peter rebounded with two classic contributions to the Head soundtrack. Around this time, an idea was being seriously considered throughout the Monkees organization that the group's next album should be a 2 LP set, featuring one side for each band member. As the Monkees were now essentially a group in name only, the idea made sense as each member was now creating their own music, seperate from the rest of the group.

Somewhat ironically then, it was the Monkee who most believed in the band ethic that was the first to split. Sometime in November of 1968 during the filming of 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee, Peter Tork informed the other members of the group that he no longer wished to carry on as a Monkee. From the beginning Tork just wanted to be part of a band, and in various interviews since his departure he cited the recording of Headquarters and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" as the epitome of his Monkees experience. However, once the decision was made that the group would part ways with producer Chip Douglas and cease recording as a unit in lieu of each band member record separately, Peter quickly lost interest.

The first report of Tork leaving the group was in the NME on December 21, 1968, well before 33 1/3 even had a chance to air. In a confusing chain of events, the TV special featuring all four band members would finally be shown on NBC in April of 1969, while the Instant Replay LP-- featuring only Mike, Micky and Davy-- was released three months prior in January of that year. Rather than simply focus on the individual talents of the members, Instant Replay was a well-programmed hodge-podge of solo productions and leftovers from the Kirshner era, strung together in a haphazard fashion as if to say, "hey these guys are still a band!" So while the individual material was strong, it was essentially a scatter-shot collection of solo performances, held together by an overarching lyrical theme of lost love and ennui. Lost in the shuffle was one Peter Tork, unceremoniously ostracized from the band with little but a $6 watch to show for it.

Could the Monkees and their team have done any better given their current situation? Well think back to the initial plan: a double album, with one side reserved for each musician. Certainly there was enough material in the can, as the various group members had cut a huge amount of unreleased material in various sessions, much of it great. Could Peter have been represented as well? Absolutely. He had many fine songs that would ultimately go unheard for the next 20+ years until Rhino introduced their Missing Links series. Most importantly, would the concept have worked? I say without a doubt. Here was a band that was already completely fragmented, with the principles headed in four disparate directions. What better way then to launch four solo careers than with a double album showcasing exactly what each member of the Monkees was capable of achieving?

And there you have it: a 2 LP Instant Replay featuring Michael, Peter, Davy and Micky at their very best. A Monkees album, certainly, but at the same time a very important and timely record, showcasing the individual talents of four future solo stars: a visionary country rock pioneer, a multi-talented hippie troubadour, a Broadway-bound English teen sensation and a soul dynamo with creativity and humor to spare. Four very different guys, thrown together in the most contrived of circumstances, taking a stand and saying "this is who we are". No more bullshit, no more deception... Just Davy, Peter, Micky and Mike. Really.

Putting aside the fact that they were no longer a "real band" in any sense, this double album re-imagination of Replay stands up to any album from the 1960s you'd care to mention. Try it for yourself and see if you don't agree.

September Update/ Housekeeping

2009-09-15T20:26:00.001-07:00

Well before jumping into uncharted territory, we've gone ahead and resurrected all the expired links from previous threads. The following were accidentally deleted and are now back intact:

The Who - Here for More | The UNi Records Story disc 1 | Jason Penick's SMiLE | Phantom Planet - All Over Again (1) (2) | The Underage Mothers | V/A - Here in Your Bedroom (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6).

Friends, you could do worse than to check these out if you missed out on them the first time. The Who release does a tidy job of chronicling their takeover of the U.S... The UNi set is sublime 60s psych-pop and soul... Nab the SMiLE set and let me know whether or not you think it compares to your preferred mix... Phantom Planet is the most underrated power pop band of the decade-- you all missed out on them the first time around, and it is now time to GET HIP and immerse yourself in these guys for a week; they're brilliant... The Mothers of course, one of the legendary L.A. bands, and surely you're a little bit curious what led up to their big Freak Out?.. Finally, Here in Your Bedroom is here to convince you that rock 'n' roll radio from the mid-90s on didn't suck quite so bad as you remember-- take a chance on disc 1 and see if that don't make you wanna check out the rest of this set.

Up next, another new twist on an old favorite!

Uhh, Sorry!

2009-09-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

Just an quick opportunity to say "sorry" to any of my regular visitors for not keeping this blog up to par the last month or so. Due to a mis-communication with youknowwho, a lot of the older links have gone down and I've since been getting many requests to re-post.

Please note that everything will be back up within the next few days, so please be patient. Time has been in short supply lately, but I have some more goodness lined up and ready to rain down upon the countryside very soon. But, as always, I like to encourage feedback from anybody who visits here. My goal for the Crystal Sphere was always to have it be something more than just a repository for old classic rock bands, but lately I've been at a loss for where to go next, which is why I need help from you guys. I mean do like the political stuff? the various tales from my life? Music from bands not 40 years old? Or would you rather I just post a hundred photos of Dennis Wilson for Beach Boys fans to jerk off to and hang it up for good?

I really don't mind all the leeches my hit counter tells me I have-- that's par for the course for this sort of thing-- but if half the people who just come here to check out my links and split bothered to leave a comment or some sort of feedback critical or otherwise, this whole scene would be a lot more vibrant than it currently is.

That being said: on tap will be more Monkees stuff, as well as shots from Echo and the Bunnymen, Hawkwind, T Rex and the legendary Pink Fairies. Additionally, we'll re-examine the L.A. scene of the 1960s with some *new* Sunset Sounds, and at the same time get heavy into modern rock music and some more ranting and writing from your's truly about politics, relationships and life here in the Bay Area.

Anyway, I'll get it together on my end, but feel free to leave some love in the comment boxes if you appreciate what we do here. Over and out.

It's like the gift that keeps on giving...

2009-08-18T01:11:00.000-07:00

Crazy thanks to Crystal Sphere contributor "Stu" for linking to these additional phantasmagoric shots of the sickest piece of men's apparel ever:

This is probably the all time best shot of Bruce Palmer. In fact the entire band looks tough as fuck, even though a certain piece of cotton apparel still manages to steal the show. Ahem...

For the record, these pictures were taken by the legendary LA scene photog Henry "Tad" Diltz, formerly of the MFQ. Explains Tad:

"Buffalo Springfield was the first group that I actually photographed when I was still a musician. I was just starting to take pictures in late '65/early '66 and Stephen was a good friend of mine, and Neil. They lived up in Laurel Canyon and one day they said "Hey, we're going down to this folk club in Redondo Beach, why don't you come along and just hang out?" And I did, and while they were doing their soundcheck I was out on the beach photographing people. When they finished the soundcheck they walked outside the club and I said "Why don't you stand in front of that sign over there and I'll take your picture." And that's what this was. I was just along as a friend; it wasn't even a photo session or anything. Then a magazine, Teen Set, called me a week later and said "We hear you have Buffalo Springfield shots. We'd love to use one." They paid me $100, and it was a revelation. "You mean people will pay me for taking pictures? This is cool!"

Get Off of My Cloud!

2009-07-24T09:22:00.000-07:00

Cloud computing... the wave of the future or the downfall of humanity? It's questions like these that I ponder late at night as I start to get drowsy and my data entry (aka .mp3 tagging) skills begin to wane. As I set the Sendspace Wizard to upload my latest masterpiece, I begin to think about what it all means, exactly.

Some of you may have never heard the term "cloud computing" before, but I guarantee you've all partaken in it. Basically it's a pretty simple concept: instead of running applications off of or storing data onto your local hard drive on your personal computer, you use the internet (cloud) to access online applications and storage. There are literally thousands of examples, such as Google Apps, Sendspace, Mozy.com and countless others services that many of us use everyday due to their overall convenience and nominal fees. (Google Apps even goes so far as to hype themselves as having improved security and reliability over local networks.) An additional benefit of the cloud model is that the user can get access to whatever they need from any computer workstation that's connected to the internet, since everything resides on centralized servers. (More on that later.)

So what's the downside then? Don't we all desire solutions that are cheap, easy and flexible? Well to get to the bottom of that, let's feather our mullets and do a quick time warp back to the 1980s: I'd like to use music/ sound recording as my example here since that's something we all dig, even though this lesson applies to all technologies. Anyway, as you may recall reading in one of my recent blog post here, I was a mere thirteen years old in 1988 and my favorite band back then was Megadeth. Their new album So Far, So Good, So What?! was burning a hole in my skull at the time, mainly because I was listening to it on my Sony Cassette Walkman while riding my bike around the 'burbs looking for trouble. What the hell does any of this have to do with the future of the internet you ask? Well hold tight and you'll get your answer.

Anyway Megadeth, being a good old school thrash band, recorded their music to analog tape, in which an electro-magnet applies magnetic flux to ferric oxide powder contained on the tape itself in order to encode the audio. The tape would "remember" this flux and convert the electromagnetic signal back into audio upon playback, via any loudspeakers that were connected to a tape machine. These studio master tapes would be dubbed down at a factory to thousands of tiny cassette tapes that were then distributed to rack job retailers such as the Sound Warehouse in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where a certain young man would fatefully buy his first Megadeth tape sometime in late 1987.

The important thing here is, despite a distinct drop in fidelity between the master tapes and the cassette that I purchased that day (due to the width of the tape within the cassette itself), what I received was otherwise an EXACT COPY of what the band had cut in the studio. Furthermore, just as Megadeth's label got to keep their master tapes, I too got to retain ownership and possession of my little cassette copy, and I could even make copies off of it to give to my friends, courtesy of my dual cassette deck. (Bet you forgot all about those bad boys, didn't you?!)

But around this same time a different method of recording and distribution was really beginning to catch on. Yes folks, we're talking about digital. Instead of recording to analog tape, suddenly studios began to switch over to digital tape as a means of storage, again due to flexibility and ease of use. And instead of quaint little records or cassettes for the general public, we were introduced to THE COMPACT DISC ("perfect sound forever!"). Gone were the days of crackly records and hissy tapes, we were told. Now get out there and support America by re-buying every album you own!

All well and good then, except for the inconvenient truth that the initial hype surrounding digital recording and distribution was nothing short of a conspiracy to bilk music lovers out of their hard earned dough. Far from being perfect sound, digital tape did not record every nuance of the music the way analog tape did; it merely "sampled" what the artist was playing at regular increments and relied upon fancy algorithms to fill in the rest. (Learn more about sample and bitrates here.) Digital employed a process called PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) to convert these samples to binary data (zeroes and ones) that was then burned directly onto compact discs by a laser screening process. These CDs were then distributed to those same rack jobbers that we all used to buy our records and tapes at. Nobody complained and the World went wild for the convenient new format.

Who DAT?-- Digital Audio Tape from the Nineties

Now I probably don't need to tell anyone here that most early digital recordings sucked balls from an audio perspective. Indeed, any CD from the Eighties with the dreaded DDD emblem on the back was something you did not want to get involved with, even back then. This is largely because of crappy A/D (Analog to Digital) converters and low sample rates used in early digital studio setups. This would inevitably improve as technology progressed, and by the late Nineties as the concept of recording direct to hard disk became a reality, audio bit rates began to increase and studios started to shrink. By the turn of the decade it was suddenly commonplace for musicians to record entire albums at home using multi-track sound editing software, and even to burn their own CDs using CD-R drives.

With the mainstreaming of broadband internet in the early 2000s, the final piece of the puzzle was complete, as the amateur musician could now not only record his entire album at home, by himself, but he could also easily promote and distribute it online via Myspace, iTunes, CDBaby or seemingly a million other sites. It was nothing less than a full scale revolution, and probably the best thing to happen to music since the advent of magnetic tape. Likewise, these advances that I've just discussed have been paralleled in nearly every field, but specifically in movies and literature where online distribution has completely changed the way the game is played. For movies, independent directors can simply upload their films to hosting sites such as Youtube, while authors can either publish DRM-free .pdf files of their work for readers to sample, or attempt to sell it for a profit via such new DRM enabled text readers as Amazon's Kindle.

Now we are at the precipice of another digital revolution, centered cheifly around Google's soon-to-be-released Chrome operating system. The basic concept behind Google's OS is this: Microsoft's Windows has become bloated and obsolete because people don't want a slow, expensive OS, they don't want to shell out money for additional software, and they don't want to worry about their hard drive crashing and taking all their data with it. Google wants to give you a free OS that will run on any cheap notebook computer with a minimum of necessary hardware and disk space, that will also load quickly and have a web browser built directly into the desktop. Once on the internet, you'll have access to a wide range of free web-based software and plenty of storage space to upload all your docs, images and music files. And you'll never have to worry about where you stored that picture of you and Aunt Francine at Cousin Paddy's 16th birthday because Google's awesomely intuitive search feature will find that shit for you instantly. Finally, stress-free computing for the masses!

But there's one significant problem with Google's plan for World domination, and it's what I keep coming back to late at night when I tend to dwell on this kind of stuff. By uploading our docs, our images, our music and movies, our lives to Google's servers, they no longer remain ours. All of our beloved content, for better or worse, becomes property of Google; perhaps not legally speaking, but technically it's still all theirs. Maybe you've already sold off most of your books and CDs, dumped your DVDs and tossed your old photo albums aside in exchange for a bunch of zeroes and ones. Ask yourself then, if and when all your priceless stuff resides on their hard drives and not yours, who do you think really has control of it? The album you've been painstakingly re-recording; all your irreplaceable home movies; your blog you've been updating bi-weekly for the last three years-- They'll try to assure you that the data is secure and yours to do what you want with, just as the RIAA tried to assure you that CDs sounded better than real audio recordings and would last you a lifetime. My advice is not to fall for it. The signs are out there already if you look for them.

ITEM: Amazon CEO apologizes for remote deletion of Orwell's 1984 from users' Kindle devices. Still won't disclose what other dirty tricks the Kindle is capable of.

ITEM: AT&T technician blows whistle on illegal NSA National surveillance program.

ITEM: Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig predicts internet i-9/11.

ITEM: Man locked out of Google account; no explanation given.

ITEM: Federal Judge orders Google to surrender YouTube user data to Viacom.

ITEM: Google as Big Brother-- what do they do with all that data exactly?

Look, there's no way I can say with certainty that the shadow government is in cahoots with Google and Amazon to control the world's information and peoples' access to it, but after reading articles like the ones I just posted, sometimes it's hard to believe otherwise. Obviously the convenience of cloud computing is hard to resist for some (I'm certainly not immune to it-- just look at who my blog provider is!), but if you truly value your information/media/content, it behooves you to take precautions to ensure that it remains yours. Here's some good first steps you can take:

●Hang on to all your "obsolete" physical media-- books, DVDs, CDs (vinyl even better of course!)

●Store all of your digital content on your own hard drives, and do physical on-premises backups instead of using cloud services such as mozy.com.

●Consider investing in your own email server.

●Just say "no!" to DRM-encrypted devices such as the Kindle that do not let you retain ownership of the media you paid for.

●Boycott the RIAA, MPAA and any other organizations that bribe politicians to pass unfair laws and deny you your Constitutional rights.

●Support the good work many are doing at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

●Most importantly, keep tabs on your elected officials and don't support anyone who's voted against net nutrality laws or taken bribe money from the anti-freedom lobbyists.

The Kindle-- Harbinger of Dark Ages 2.0?

Hey, I love the internet. It's probably the greatest technological advancement of my lifetime, and it's responsible for making me about a thousand times smarter than I would probably be otherwise, because it provides me with a world of information at the click of a mouse. If you feel as strongly I do, let's continue the fight to keep cyberspace as a vital force for good in our World.

33&1/3 Revolutions per Monkee

2009-07-17T20:14:00.000-07:00

Rarities Compilation (single artist)

1968 could hardly be considered a banner year for our boys. After the dismal failure of their brilliant movie Head, the bottom basically fell out of the Monkee Express. Head's soundtrack could barely outperform the film itself, peaking at a modest #45 on Billboard. Perhaps sensing (accurately) that the group's popularity was dwindling, NBC then allowed the Monkees to commit to filming three made-for-TV specials in lieu of a third season of their show. It was a catastrophic decision.

From the outset the first special, titled 33&1/3 Revolutions per Monkee, was seemingly cursed. A strike amongst studio workers caused the location of filming to be moved from NBC's state of the art facilities to the much smaller MGM studios, and as such the program had to be shot on videotape instead of 16mm. And despite the participation of such legends as Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll and Buddy Miles, and the featured talents of legendary producer Jack Good (Shindig!) and director Art Fischer, NBC elected to air the special opposite the Academy Awards. It was not shown at all in Hawaii, and was actually presented out of sequence in the markets where it could be watched. Predictably, ratings were disastrous and NBC quickly canceled the two proposed remaining specials. Perhaps envisioning that the group's better days were now behind them, Peter Tork would then leave the Monkees shortly after the completion of 33&1/3.

All this may lead your typical Monkees fan to believe the 33&1/3 special itself was a giant rat turd of an event, and perhaps the average Monkees fan would think so, even today. Thankfully, however, any soul such yourself who is valiant enough to enter into the realm of the Crystal Sphere is most certainly well beyond any measurable definition of "average", either in terms of basic intelligence or acute perception. And perception is a trait that is desperately needed to truly appreciate this long forgotten TV special, for what seems at first like a chaotic mess when viewed passively soon becomes an ambitious, deeply thought out social critique when one is properly tuned in to such a thing.

Dig. Thematically, 33&1/3 a continuation of both Head and the final episode of the Monkees TV show, "Majacogeo", both of which deal with the same basic concepts of "the Monkees" as a collective entity within and outside of the realm of mainstream society, vis a vis their public image. Huh? Okay then-- The show starts off with our fearless foursome trapped in some sort of Spinal Tap-esque tubes where they are being brainwashed by the Mad Professor (Brian Auger) into an "idolized, plasticized, psychoanalyzed" state of being. Instead of simply being Micky, Peter, Mike and Davy, they are now psychologically trasformed into "Monkees" #1, 2, 3 & 4. The professor and his lovely assistant, played by the gorgeous chantuese Julie Driscoll, are brainwashing the boys so that they may in turn brainwash the world, using television as their medium. (Hence one parallel to the two previous Monkeeprojects I just mentioned.)

At first, the four young men venture into a dreamstate where they are one-by-one allowed to briefly demonstrate their distinct personalities (Quadrophenia?) by performing a series of new original songs. Micky kicks things off in fine style, duetting with Julie Driscoll on a spellbindingly soul-drenched rethink of "I'm a Believer", each singer lifting the other in turn to higher levels of vocal consciousness to the musical accompaniment of Auger, Buddy Miles and other top musicians.

Peter then takes center stage sitting cross-legged on a giant pillow for a surreal, meditative version of Michael Murphy's Eastern-flavoured "I Prithee", which the group had originally cut a couple of times earlier in their career but had never released up until this point. Murphy's song makes good use of Peter's limited vocal range, as belly dancers are seen swooning around the young electric messiah.

Michael comes on next and is literally beside himself during his performance of his new original number "Naked Persimmon" aka "The Only Thing I Believe Is True", where splitscreen technology is used to show a dapper, moddish Nesmith playing a Gibson SG next to "Country Nez" in a fully sequined Nudie suit and acoustic guitar. A wanted poster in the background cleverly indicates Nesmith is guilty of "fraud" and is wanted dead or alive.

The scene then shifts to Davy who is seen cavorting with some pretty young things in a life sized dollhouse to the tune of Bill Dorsey's "Goldilocks Sometime". Though the song itself is quite banal, the clip nevertheless favorably shows off Jones' not insignificant stage dancing skills.

Now that their on-screen personalities have been established, the four musicians are further psyched by Auger into their new roll as "the Monkees" where they are first seen cavorting as automatons in front of a green screen on Dorsey's "Wind Up Man". With their free will now completely broken, little is left for them to do but fulfill their predetermined destiny, mugging along to Neil Sedaka's vapid "I Go Ape" on camera while dressed in gorilla costumes. The point the band and their producer Jack Good (who actually booked Sedaka to play "I Go Ape" on Shindig! a few years prior) are trying to make here certainly should not have been missed by anybody taking the time to pay attention to it, yet it is seemingly misunderstood today even today by nearly all but their most ardent fans: These are four disparate, real musician types-- a soul showman, a hippie-mystic, an urban cowboy genius and a song-and-dance man-- shaped (against their will) by forces (beyond their control) into some phony plastic entity known as "the Monkees" and being coerced into singing ridiculous novelty songs about bananas or what have you.

Weirdness is beset by even more weirdness as a group of unitard-laden hippie dancers (Paul Arnold and the Moon Express) do an interpretive dance about evolution, which apparently was meant to parallel the evolution of our four protaganists into The Monkees, baby. Elsewhere, Auger and Driscoll are temporarily freed from the constraints of character in order to perform a hotshot rendition of the Rascals' "Come on Up", backed by Auger's Trinity. The band's molten hot performance here threatens to steal the show away from the stars themselves. Auger is also on hand in what must be the single most memorable scene of a TV special filled with such scenes: He's shown laying down a boogie-woogie lick on a small Wurlitzer, and as the camera pans back we see he is perched on top of a baby grand played by Jerry Lee Lewis, who in turn is revealed to be supported by a grand piano played by Little Richard who, wait for it, is featured as the camera pans even further back on top a concert grand manned by Fats Domino. They don't do it like that anymore, folks!

Eventually the plot resumes and we see that the professor's nefarious plan has now culminated in the Monkees "debut"; a televised 11+ minute vintage Rock 'n' Roll medley featuring Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and the Clara Ward Singers that has to be seen to be believed. Musically, the Monkees are out of their element here and are outclassed by their formidable co-stars at this type of thing (Dolenz has mentioned that the stage monitors were so bad that no one could hear what they were singing), but the Prefab Four still manage to pull off one classic moment when they get to their take on the the Diamond's "Little Darlin'" (written by Maurice Williams whom Jack Good was no doubt aquainted with, but that's a story for another time maybe.) Davy, at the time one of the biggest teen idols since Elvis had hit the scene, cleverly parodies himself and his heartthrob ilk throughout the song in such an over the top fashion that it's impossible not to smile. Similarly, when I first witnessed Peter doing his straight-faced spoken word bit on the middle eight, even busting out the handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his brow ("my darlin'/ I need you!") I was on the floor in hysterics. In total, the whole medley scene itself is just vintage Jack Good. If you're not familiar with his earlier work on Shindig! (or on its great UK precursor Oh Boy!) then you damn well oughta be.

This apparently is the exact moment Auger, using the Monkees as his bait, is set to take over the world. (An exact date is even given: December 07, 1956.) However, by the time the Clara Ward Singers practically raise the stage off the ground with their awesome gospel harmonies, Auger suddenly breaks character and stops the entire show in its tracks, arguing that "What we want is complete and total freedom! Now do you know what that means?", to which a deadpan Driscoll replies, "Yeah. Utter bloody shambles!" Priceless.

With the Professor's change of heart, the four Monkees are now freed from the prisons of their minds and are at liberty to once again display their real talents, starting with Davy Jones who sings a snippet of the pretty "A String for My Kite". The scene then shifts to Peter Tork who enters stage right by himself, sits down at the Hohner Clavinet, and proceeds to blow the audience's mind with a nearly note-perfect version of Johann S. Bach's "Solfeggietto".

Michael Nesmith then solemly takes the stage with his Gibson Black Beauty, says hello to Peter, and begins to strum and sing a new number titled "Listen to the Band", backed only by Pete's softly played Clavinet. A beat from Davy's tambourine soon joins in, followed shortly thereafter by Micky on the drums. Then, one by one, a bunch of Sunset Strip street kids make their way up to the stage and start gently grooving along to the music. As the camera pans back, we now see the Monkees-- Michael Nesmith, David Jones, Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz-- finally exercising their free will by choosing to jam with one another. Far from the plastic image that was forced upon them, this is just four guys playing together for the love of the music.

It's a very groovy scene that shortly devolves into "utter bloody shambles" as out of nowhere Buddy Miles, a horn section, gospel singers, Rip Taylor and seemingly half of the Hollywood street scene are caught cavorting around onstage in a good old fashioned freak out. It's bizarre to see the cuddly Monkees in the middle of all this chaos; one would sooner expect something like this from Zappa's Mothers or Warhol/ V.U.'s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, but here it is the "Prefab Four" pushing the limits further than most of the "heavy" groups of their time would dare to attempt. Amidst the chaos, Julie Driscoll is heard bellowing away in a Yoko-esque wail as Davy goes into some sort of stream-of-conciousness spoken word thing and for the second time tonight the stage threatens to rise off the ground. There is little the director can do but end the program on this note.

The 33&1/3 special wraps up with a brief rendition of Peter's wacky yet ominous "California Here It Comes" played over the credits, ending with the sound of a nuclear bomb going off. The message is clear: "The evolution is complete", as man has evolved to the point where there can only be one of two outcomes. Either he will blow himself up with atomic bombs, or Mother Earth will rise up and swallow him whole. Good morning, America.

Anyhow, to give the whole thing a quick summary, I'll just say that it's astounding that this wholly subversive, fucked up psychedelic mind trip of a TV special ever made it past the NBC censors-- 5 stars. You can find the entire 33&1/3 Revolutions per Monkee special on the Rhino Season 2 Monkees DVD collection. What you can't find in stores, however, is a copy of the soundtrack because one was never released. But hey, since you're such a good sport for reading this review, I'll turn you on-- just this once. Here's the Sphere's own 33&1/3 Revolutions per Monkee soundtrack, sourced straight from the DVD and featuring 8 additional bonus tracks plus custom artwork. Listen and enjoy, and to quote Miss Julie Driscoll from the 33&1/3 special; "Don't it feel good?!"

Crystal Sphere to MSM: "Go Shoot Yourselves in the Head."

2009-07-08T19:07:00.000-07:00

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that... if we did not stand up [in the run-up to war] and say 'this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this,' that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role." -- David Gregory (NBC News/ Meet the Press)

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Bringing You the News That Matters Most": This clip is a near-perfect example of the abject failure of America's mainstream media (MSM). Watch and recoil in disgust as they force feed the populace a steady diet of conjecture about dead entertainers, while we continue to sink further into depression and as civil unrest erupts throughout Honduras, Iran, Guatemala and much of the rest of the World.

"Bubble Headed Bleach Blondes": Don Henley had it right! Here's a double-dip of faux anger and hypocrisy from a couple of piggies from the Fox network. Yes, instead of ignoring the loonies at Westboro Baptist like any sensible newscast should do, these two bimbettes and their producer decided to give the Westboro Wackos five minutes of steady camera time so that they could attempt to link them to the ACLU-- Because we all know the ACLU hates dead American troops, right? Meanwhile the far more important question of what exactly these soldiers died for in the first place is never addressed.

"I Really Don't Appreciate You Bringing All This Up...": Stoking fear and paranoia in American soccer moms is CNN's Nancy Grace's stock-in-trade, what with her show's never-ending coverage of missing and abducted white girls. So how great was it to finally see her exposed as the heartless pig she is by one of those same young, melatonin-challenged young ladies that Grace typically exploits for ratings?

"You Can't Handle the Truth!": Who needs intelligent, thoughtful arguments and discourse when you can just score points with your flock of sheep-followers by calling your guest a lunatic while trying to marginalize her and put words in her mouth at the same time? Bill O'Reilly again demonstrating why he is the biggest asshole on the planet.

Not One Bummer: The Complete West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

2009-06-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

Compliation (single artist)

Well today we're gonna take a look at a small group of Hollywood miscreants known collectively as the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. I don't have room to give you the whole back story, so I'll just talk about the fascinating circumstances under which this insane band was formed under and then provide you with a link that tells "the rest of the story"...

Anyway, this group of cosmic mind voyagers we fondly refer to as the WCPAEB (if you think I'm gonna keep spelling out their full name then you're nuts!) was initially founded in Beverly Hills in 1965 by teenage brothers Shaun and Danny Harris and a classmate of theirs named Michael Lloyd. Lloyd-- who was already well on his way to a career in record production that would ultimately net him a Grammy and millions of records sold worldwide-- had himself a home studio, and the trio first recorded a single under the moniker The Laughing Wind. The guys liked to get together and jam on standards like "Louie Louie" and "You Really Got Me", and the Harris Brothers also enjoyed folk music and harmony singing and probably would have made quite a dandy little folk rock band had fate not intervened.

Meanwhile, across the pond the Yardbirds were preparing for their first American tour (1965), when the group was forced by customs regulations to play a private party in order to obtain work permits. The band's manager Giorgio Gomelsky had previously met the acquaintance of one Kim Fowley the previous year when Fowley was visiting in England, and so Gomelsky called up the lanky California record producer and asked him if he knew of a house where the Yardbirds could perform a private party for 100 or so guests. It just so happened that Fowley knew of such a place.

The Laurel Canyon mansion Fowley enlisted for the event was the property of 33 year old Bob Markley, Attorney at Law and adopted son of a wealthy Oklahoma oil tycoon. A varsity tennis player, Bob also hosted the TV show "Oklahoma Bandstand" when a TV producer suggested he go to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor. Markley didn't get any acting gigs while in California, but he did cut a couple of early singles.

Despite his square upbringing, Markley was something of a Bohemian, known for walking around Laurel Canyon with a set of bongo drums hung around his neck. Bob also had a notorious fascination with underage girls which would certainly get him in trouble later in life. For now though, Bob Markley was living the life of Hollywood playboy, and having a hot band from England like the Yardbirds play a party at his pad would mean hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite, and more importantly, a gaggle of young starlets.

Kim Fowley was also a friend of Michael Lloyd and the Harris Brothers, and invited them to come on up to Markley's and check the band out. It must have been quite a scene. According to Fowley, as quoted in Tim Forster's definitive article on the WCPAEB, Markley's bash was attended by "over 180 industry journalists, programme directors, disc jockeys and a handful of the in-crowd. Al Kooper was the warm up act and Phil Spector came with his binoculars so he could watch Jeff Beck's fingers." Into this scene of (I'm assuming) unbridled Hollywood debauchery stepped the innocent teenage trio of Mike, Danny and Shaun, simply there to see the band. Sounds like something out of a Russ Meyer film, eh?

Anyhow, after the gig, Fowley introduced the guys to Bob Markley who in turn told him about the group. Almost immediately, the shrewd Tulsan formulated a plan that went something like this: He, Markley, would join the band as singer and producer. In exchange for control over all aspects of the group, Bob would provide the rehearsal space, gear and most importantly, his Hollywood contacts. Markley, meanwhile, would presumably reap the sundry benefits associated with being a rock star including, most importantly to Bob, young chicks.

Image from the cover of the Where's My Daddy? LP. What was Markley's relationship to this girl?

After releasing their initial home recording sessions on the tiny FIFO label, the band got a real record deal through some of Markley's contacts with Reprise. They would ultimately release a total of three albums on that label, as well as one each on the smaller Amos and Forward labels, before calling it quits in 1970. Due to the spacial limitations of this blog I won't be getting into reviewing them, other than to say that they're all definitely worth hearing; a very unique blend of psych, folk, classical, jazz and funk influences coupled with the one-of-a-kind lyrical ramblings of the sage Bob Markley!

Now that I've hopefully got you intrigued, though, check out Tim Forster's AWESOME Legend of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Take it from us here at the Sphere, this is one unforgettable story you don't want to miss! And while you're at it, you can dig all the tunes on a lovely little 2 disc set [1 | 2] compiled just for you by the Brotherhood here at the Crystal Sphere. So go ahead and turn on, tune in and drop acid to the very groovy sounds of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band!

Summer '88

2009-06-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

Compilation (various artist)

Summer '88 - the Soundtrack D0WNL0AD TH1S!!!!!11

This is the only remaining photo of my '87 Haro Sport. In the days before I had my driver's license, this (and other bikes like it) was how I got around in the suburbs. And as you can probably tell, I put a shit ton worth of work into this particular bike.

This picture was taken before I added the Dyno flip-down platforms and threaded GT pegs to the front. Back then I mostly rode ramp, but the sickest street trick you could do was the "Cherry Picker" and you needed front pegs to pull that one off. These future modifications would reflect my transition from ramp to street, just as Freestyle BMX as a whole started to revert towards ramp riding again with the emergence of Matt Hoffman as the king of the vert ramps. Typically poor timing for me!

I payed over $350.00 for this bike out of my own savings, which at the time made it one of the most expensive freestyle bikes on the market. Only the GT Mach One compared, but I always went with Haro. Sadly, this particular Haro was stolen at the Randhurst Shopping Mall in Mt. Prospect, Illinois in September of 1988 while I was inside looking at cassettes at Camelot Records. You haven't seen it by chance, have you?

Anyway, other than this one somewhat tragic turn of events, the summer of '88 was a good one for me. I was transitioning from middle school to high school and didn't have a job of any kind, so a typical day would involve getting up every morning and riding my bike past the Junior High school up to my best friend Dean's house. We'd hang out in his basement playing NES games or listening to Twisted Sister, Def Leppard and AC/DC cd's on the component stereo in his bedroom while we plotted our next move, which would inevitably be a trip to 7-11 for Slurpees or to Niko's for cheese dogs and fries.

When we'd come back, we'd kick it in his driveway with our shirts off and play one-on-one or horse until the rest of the crew showed up. We hung out with some of the older guys who all had cars. There was John ('85 Mustang GT), Carl ('67 Camaro), Matt ('84 IROC) and Dean's cousin Jim (70s' VW Bug). Car radios at the time were tuned to B-96, WCKG or "The Loop" (WLUP).

Carl had a quarter pipe set up in his driveway where we'd take our bikes and attempt to get "rad". Just getting even a little bit of air was an accomplishment, especially when the alternative was a quick trip to the pavement. Everybody would line their bikes up and just kind of root for the guy who was attempting the run. I remember the tape we listened to more than any other in those situations was the first Iron Maiden (the one with Paul Di'Anno on vocals, before Dickenson joined the band.)

In the evening I would generally bike back home for dinner with my mom and then reconviene with the gang over at the pool at the Gary Marova Center. This was a big outdoor swimming pool that all the neighborhood kids and some of their parents routinely congregated at. All you needed was your park district pass and you could get in. These evenings generally resulted in us chasing the trim around (in good fun-- this was still a year or two before we all lost our innocence in that regard) and coming up with far-fectched plans that we knew we could never achieve.

Fast forward to now, and as horrible as the 80s look in retrospect when watching old music videos and TV sit-coms (those haircuts!) it was actually a pretty cool time to be alive. We were thirteen years old, and maybe we didn't have any internet or XBox 360, but dammit we sure as hell had our NES, our Hysteria, our Sony cassette Walkmen and our freestyle bikes.

I'd do terrible things to go back and relive just one of those gorgeous Summer of '88 days, when the nights were long and we could still take pleasure in things that were simple and fun.

The Sweet - The Complete UK Singles Collection (1968-1980); 3 CDs

2009-05-23T09:30:00.000-07:00

Compliation (single artist)

Ahhh, the Sweet... Probably Britain's greatest singles band of the 1970s. It started in 1968 when the English pub rock band the Sweetshop changed their name to the Sweet and signed a deal with Parlophone Records. They released four singles, none of which charted, and the band seemed destined for obscurity when they switched over to RCA and signed a management deal with executive producer Phil Wainman and a couple of unknown songwriters named Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn. With the duo penning such catchy early hits as "Funny Funny" and "Co-Co", the Sweet started to take England by storm, and the hits continued: "Alexander Graham Bell", "Poppa Joe" and their breakthrough in the U.S. "Little Willy".

While the band had now achieved some commercial success, creatively they were still well under the thumb of the "Chinnichap" machine, which insisted on complete control over the A-sides of all Sweet singles, right down to picking the session musicians. While this resulted in a tight, commercial sound, the band's image was squarely "bubblegum" with the average English record buyer. The Sweet fought to change this, and to their credit insisted on playing on all their B-sides from the outset. This is the reason why the Sweet's flips are just as cool and important as their respective chart sides, and it's why they deserve inclusion here: on the whole they are tougher and more indicative of who the Sweet actually were than the early Chinn/ Chapman commercial product was.

However this dynamic began to change with the next single "Wig Wam Bam", on which the band demanded to play on both sides. The result was a more ballsy sound that caught on with listeners, and over the next three years the Sweet would hit their stride with a stretch of unforgettable hit singles from the pens of Chinn and Chapman: "Block Buster", "Ballroom Blitz", "Hell Raiser", "Teenage Rampage", "the Six Teens" and "Turn It Down". Now commercially established on both continents and craving the artistic acceptance afforded to their peers (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, etc.) the group jettisoned their outside songwriters and came up with perhaps their two greatest singles of all time, both self-written: the anthemic "Fox on the Run" and the propulsive "Action".

As alluded to previously, the B-sides to all of these singles were nearly as good as the hits, and way heavier to boot. "Burning", to name one example, is pretty much the template for Iron Maiden's career, while "Miss Demeanor" has to be the best Led Zeppelin piss take of all time. At their best ("Rock & Roll Disgrace", "Burn on the Flame") they are essentially "double-A side" quality.

At this point the Sweet were at their commercial apex and were invited by none other than Peter Townshend, an admitted fan of theirs, to play an arena gig with the Who at the Charlton Athletic Football Ground in June of 1974, which sadly the band had to turn down as singer Brian Connelly was busy recovering from injuries sustained in a brawl. Perhaps this can be looked at as the turning point in the Sweet's career, as they began to fall off commercially around this time. Singles like "The Lies in Your Eyes" and "Lost Angels" saw the band moving towards more of a prog-type sound to little avail, though again the B-sides are more in line with the classic Sweet sound. Of particular note here is the instrumental "A Distinct Lack of Ancient" which finds the group treading on the same turf as the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jeff Beck.

Yet despite a late-inning rally with the classic "Love Is Like Oxygen", a comeback was not to be and the Sweet faded off, releasing their final single in 1980. Their later work is not to be ignored however, as it produced such fine songs as "California Nights", "Big Apple Waltz" and "Short Girls", as well as the aforementioned "Love Is Like Oxygen".

Almost thirty years later, the Sweet are finally beginning to get their due as one of the U.K.'s premiere bands of the 70s. In addition to their nine full studio albums, the group release a whopping 29 singles between 1968 and 1980, all of which are included on this 3 CD set; the only one available ANYWHERE with BOTH sides of EVERY U.K. SINGLE that the Sweet cut during their run, INCLUDING guitarist Andy Scott's 1975 "Lady Starlight" solo 45. As an added bonus, we've also included all the classic U.K. picture sleeves for your visual amusement. So in words any Sweet fanatic would understand: this Block Buster is a Wig Wam Bam of a good time, so all you Little Willies and Co-Cos should Ballroom Blitz yourself over to Sendsp@ce if you want a piece of the Action! 1 2 3

"The Sweater"

2009-05-07T23:44:00.000-07:00

Sometime around the dawn of 1967, the Buffalo Springfield posed for a photo shoot on the Sunset Strip. While the following photos were presumably either to be used as cover art for their second album or, more likely, as grist for teen mags such as Tiger Beat or Hit Parader, the shoot nevertheless immediately transcended the mundane entirely due to the keen fashion sense of one particular band member.

Behold, "The Sweater"...

Please take a moment to sit back and revel in its awesomeness. Drink it all in and then ask yourself this important question... How is it that a young man living in circa 1966 America could ever procure such a quintessentially perfect piece of apparel?

Furthermore, in which era between the beginning of time and now would such a sweater EVER be considered an appropriate means of dress?!

An Observation: This was obviously a "dress down casual" shoot for the Springfield boys, as Stills, Furay and Martin normally wore suits on stage and in pictures.

In this shoot, Stills is outfitted in a plain black T-shirt, while Furay adopts a sort of Urban Cowboy look three years before the movie of the same name hit the big screen. Bruce Palmer seems to be the prototype for GEORGE HARRISON'S "gravedigger" look on the Abbey Road LP with his button-up shirt and Levi's. Dewey Martin is seen here wearing a typical Mod Cowboy lace-up top that he certainly must have procured from one of the local Hollywood or Topanga Canyon boutiques. Nothing out of the ordinary for these chaps.

But then there's Neil, with his roughed-up Prince Valiant 'do and his geometric multicolored drug rug, looking for all the world like a discarded Thurston Moore prototype. How these disparate personalities ever existed in the same band is beyond me.

Furthermore, from the way the group is set up in the shot, it appears that Dewey Martin was to be the featured member. (Not surprising, really, as his drums were often times moved to the front of the stage during Springfield gigs. But I'll do another thread later on the overall greatness of Dewey Martin.) Yet the viewer's eye is completely drawn towards Neil, and even more so to his remarkable, eccentric sweater!

It's as though the entire peace and freedom movement could be summed up in one individual garment. Nevermind the bell bottoms, fringe and tie-die of the hippies-- THIS is where it's at... er, where it WAS at.

If you have any other shots of Neil wearing this fantastic piece of apparel, please forward them to the Crystal Sphere immediately and await further orders.

Cocaine Is a Hell of a Drug, Man (pt. 1)

2009-04-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

As we originally envisioned the Crystal Sphere to be something more than just another music repository occupying space on the internet (not that we've got anything against said sites, mind), it's important to indoctrinate the uninitiated into the lifestyle. But before you get your panties all up in a bunch, this is in no way a post advocating Cocaine usage... in fact far from it. We here at the Sphere highly advise against usage of said drug for a variety of reasons, mainly having to do with the inordinate cost of procuring it and the adverse health effects that seem to accompany its usage.

That being said, Coke (or Delilah, or Yay-Yo, or Pura or whatever you happen to refer to it as) is ubiquitous here in Oakland. It's truly boggling how the myriad of unemployed and under-employed hipsters that pervade the underground scene here are able to procure so much of it-- especially when they seem to already be dropping all their money at the bars on a near nightly basis. Meanwhile your intrepid leader works a 40 hour a week wage gig and maybe has money left over for a case of PBR if he plays his cards right. Yes, strangely it seems that it is the jobless of all people that are enjoying the good life amongt us here in post-Bush/ Cheney America. That isn't any kind of political statement, just an observation based on what I see around me all the time.

But I'm not bitter. Really. Bored as hell, but not bitter. Sure it sucks to be staying home on a nice Wednesday night in an area where there's a hundred different parties going on within a short driving distance of where you live. But when you have to wake up at 7 am every day, you learn to sacrifice for the greater good. You sock money away when you feel like you ought to be blowing through it. You subsist on frozen burritos when your brain is screaming for margaritas and fresh sturgeon. You manage.

But sometimes, maybe you look in the mirror and ask yourself exactly what the fuck happened? You can't burn down a bank when you're chained to a desk 8 hours a day, and you can't kick out the windows of a squad car when you're at home blogging. And it's usually at one of these crucial moments that a random thought enters your mind... Something you haven't considered for possibly even a year or so.

Co-CAINE.

Yes, that is the only answer that will do. A one-way ticket to reckless behavior and wild times. Oh sure, you may start out innocently enough by shotgunning a couple of beers out on the porch and sucking down some Parliament Lights with your friends, BUT WE CAN'T HAVE A GOOD TIME HERE SO LET'S GO TO THE BAR AND GET SHITFACED.

Oh how many thousands of dollars have magically disappeared from my bank account due to this one isolated notion; one random stray neuron in my otherwise organized mind. We're talking money that could have been better served by investing in such precious, interest-accruing commodities as OBSCURO PSYCH AND GARAGE 45s AND ELL-PEES!

No sir, we're on the way to the bar and we're getting hammered. That much is certain. But hey, before we go, let's suck down some Whip-Its. You know, take the edge off.

BAR TIME: Jagermeister on tap and Pinkerton on the jukebox. Life is good, but... Wait! What's this? Which one of these emo looking assholes is harshing my buzz? DEPECHE FUCKING MODE?!?! Man, to hell with this "Blasphemous Romours" crap. I need to RAWK right now, fucker. Thin Lizzy. "Jailbreak". Done.

The memories are fleeting... drunken pool and missed shots; "Who wants a Scorpion Bowl?"; more war stories than can be found in the entire six-season run of Hogan's Heroes; "I'm cool to drive..."; digits exchanged with several strangers you know even now you're never going to call; "Fuck this place, let's go see some bands..."

(AN ASIDE: The Crystal Sphere accepts, nay, actively condones the controlled usage of psychedelic and mind altering drugs when used in pursuit of higher states of consciousness or being. This is clearly not what we're talking about here though.)

"Patrick just gave me a Percoset."

"No shit, does he have any more?!"

By now we're driving to the late night underground club, located on the absolute shadiest part of San Pablo. Park at your own peril. And when the homeless guy comes up to the car asking for change, simply greet him with an earful of Blink-182 sing-screaming "I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE GIRL AT THE ROCK SHOW" at top volume. You're just that kind of asshole right now.

Stumbling towards the club, you recognize the cat working the door right away. Same dude you see riding his bike all over town with his scraggly beard and keychain hanging off his belt. You know, like every other fucking hipster wannabe in the 510 region. You maybe said "what's up" to him at Peet's that one time.

Inside, the deejay is spinning garage and psych. He's playing some shit you've never heard before. Freakbeat? Definitely sounds like a UK band. You stumble over and harang him with some half-formed drunken rant about this or that band you think will trigger his interest. Instead he politely ignores you and goes back to spinning his music as the band on stage continues to set up. It's taking them a while because they have 13 members and are having a hard time tuning the singer's guitar to the other guy's harmonium. You wish that kick ass garage band from the other week was here instead, but they were on their way up to Portland and you never did get their CD.

You look around and realize all your friends you came with are out of your line of sight, and you're too drunk to even begin to try to work your way through the crowd. Nevertheless, you somehow manage to make eye contact with the guy working the door who meets your gaze in turn and gently taps his right nostril twice while raising his eyebrows ever so slightly.

(To Be Continued...)

Help Paul Williams

2009-03-31T17:32:00.000-07:00

Called by many the “father of rock criticism” after founding Crawdaddy Magazine at the age of 17, crucial early champion of Philip K Dick, author of the underground classic Das Energi, confidant of John Lennon, biographer of Bob Dylan and traveling companion to the Grateful Dead, Paul Williams has lived a half dozen remarkable lifetimes, and his work as rock critic, holistic philosopher and avant-garde underground gadfly forms a unique and indespensible link through the past 40 years of pop and rock culture.

In 1995, Paul Williams suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bicycle accident, leading to early onset of dementia, and a steady decline to the point where he now requires full-time care. The burden on his immediate family has been immense.

Donations are currently being accepted over at PaulWilliams.com to help out with the family's expense. Fans of Sixties' music will undoubtedly be familiar with Mr. Williams and the magazine he founded, Crawdaddy! Basically, this was the first serious Rock magazine on the scene, predating even Rolling Stone by a year and a half. Mr. Williams' contributions to the cause of great Rock music have been enormous, and as such, I am calling on all you Children of the Sphere to help his family out, even if it's just a dollar or two.

And while you're over there, click on the "Writings" tab, scroll down a little bit and treat yourself to every issue of the original Crawdaddy! magazine, completely scanned and free of charge! I J-Pinnacle insist these are mandatory required reading for all denizens of my blog. Now go forth and feed your mind on some serious first generation rock crit!

LA Gemstones 1964-69 -- 10 CDs

2009-03-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

Compilation (various artist)

Though revisionist history has cast the San Francisco Bay Area and the United Kingdom as the top purveyors of quality rock and pop music during the 1960s, the truth is that more of that decade’s boss sounds emanated from studios throughout Hollywood, California than from the rest of the World combined. Why, then, is the sixties' So-Cal music scene relatively dismissed and ignored today? There are perhaps several answers, but seemingly the biggest reason is a backlash from the Bay Area hipster musical community that still lingers to this day. While self-important San Francisco screeds like Rolling Stone's Jan Wenner would have you believe that Los Angeles was the plastic capital of America, and that most bands that called the city home were utter jive to be dismissed or ignored completely, the aural evidence speaks otherwise.

The Beach Boys; the Byrds; the Doors; Love; the Buffalo Springfield; the Mothers of Invention; the Association; the Mamas & the Papas; the Grass Roots; the Monkees; Steppenwolf; the Turtles; Jan & Dean; the 5th Dimension; Canned Heat; the Seeds; the Chambers Brothers; Iron Butterfly; Spirit— These are just some of the biggest names that emerged out of the Southern California music scene during the period where “Rock-n-Roll” became ROCK and the children began to grow their hair and free their minds. The sounds produced in such L.A. studios as Gold Star, Western and Columbia were transmitted over the Worldwide airwaves sometimes just days after they were recorded, spreading a Universal message of freedom, compassion and love for one’s fellow man.

Though you won’t read about it in any edition of The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock ‘n’ Roll, most of the top bands from the U.K., San Francisco, New York and elsewhere regularly came to Hollywood to record during the sixties. The Stones, the Who, the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Simon and Garfunkel and the Lovin’ Spoonful, certainly considered amongst the top musical acts from their respective locations by any definition, cut many of their best records in L.A. while frequently employing the city’s top session musicians, a.k.a. “The Wrecking Crew”. Though the music of those artists I just mentioned falls outside of the scope of this set (indeed, any future “Nuggets” styled collection of acts from the Empire State that omits Simon & Garfunkel or the Spoonful may risk the wrath of a million angry New Yorkers, regardless of where those groups actually cut some of their songs) it still might tweak the frozen noses of some of rock’s “hierarchy” to learn that “Paint It Black” was actually produced in Hollywood by P.F. Sloan and not A.L. Oldham, or that such “underground” role models as the Grateful Dead signed deals with major L.A. labels and recorded at top Hollywood studios while looking to make hit records just like a thousand other bands you’d care to mention.

So let’s forget the “plastic” tag once and for all. Certainly there’s nothing artificial about the stories of teenagers getting their heads busted by the Gestapo police force on the Sunset Strip between 1966 and 1968 for the crime of having long hair in public or for staying out after 10:00 pm on a Friday night. Nor were the stunning vocal and instrumental arrangements on albums like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds or the Byrds’ Notorious Byrd Brothers churned out by some robotic assembly line. Though these and many other L.A. albums of the era employed studio session musicians, should not the ultimate quality of the music nevertheless be judged by the beauty and inventiveness of the final product rather than whether or not the band is considered legitimate in the eyes of some hack critic because their drummer didn’t really play on some of the tracks?

Enough ranting— Let us focus on the music instead. So what you’ve got here is not one but two companion box sets, divided roughly between the most vital of Southern California “pop” and “rock” acts from the years 1964 to 1969. If you’ve already examined the track listing and are questioning how the Grass Roots’ pleasantly inoffensive “Where Were You When I Needed You?” somehow qualifies as “rock” while Elvis Presley’s raucous and sexy “A Little Less Conversation” falls under the category of “pop”, the answer is… I’m not exactly sure why! The basic rule of thumb while compiling these sets was that the Rock Box would contain mostly guitar-driven bands that one could have actually seen in concert had they been cruising the Sunset Strip in the mid-to-late sixties, while the Pop Box would focus on those acts that were more at home in the confines of the recording studio and in certain cases could not have even played their material live in a rock club environment. Still, it would be foolhardy of me to say that the lines between these sets are not blurred at times. Nevertheless, it’s my sincere hope that the track selection and running order of both the Pop Box and the Rock Box are thematically consistent and to your liking.

For those who care about such things as how the tracks here actually got selected, I’ll offer some insight. The most important thing to mention is that I tried my best to adhere to a strict set of rules while compiling these sets. Rule number one was that, even though these discs are not affiliated with the Nuggets series in any official sense, I wanted ZERO OVERLAP with either the Rhino Nuggets 4-cd box, or their two limited-edition Nuggets from the W.E.A. Vaults sets. As such, these new collections can exist comfortably alongside the previously mentioned compilations, as well as the Nuggets from the U.K., San Francisco Nuggets and Children of Nuggets box sets. While every effort was made to ensure that both L.A. Gemstones collections are presented in as close to exact chronological order as possible, those who don’t have 10+ hours to kill listening to both sets in order might just wanna mix the files in with the rest of the previously listed sets and set the whole thing on shuffle for a non-stop blast of sixties’ rock and pop action!

Rule number two was that all Billboard Top 10 (actually more like Top 15) singles were to be avoided whenever possible. It’s a reasonable assumption that anyone seeking out this set would already be familiar enough with the likes of “Along Comes Mary”, “Good Vibrations”, “For What It’s Worth”, “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and “Eight Miles High” (the Byrds’ version, anyway!) so that the limited space on these CDs could be reserved for some things more obscure but equally great. Yet since these sets are almost entirely sourced from my own limited personal collection (the exceptions being three tracks that were sent to me by friends K.S. and C.M. for which I’m absolutely grateful!) I was forced to sprinkle a small handful of big hits onto discs 1 and 2 of The Pop Box. I’ll attempt to justify this development by stating that since these particular hit songs fall under a radio format that is nearly extinct these days (“Oldies Radio”, verses “Classic Rock Radio” which is what I’d classify most of the post ’65 or ’66 stuff under) their inclusion is somewhat warranted as a result.

The final rule of track selection is that all bands and artists were weighted according to their overall cultural impact (as determined by me!) The cream of the crop were awarded a total of four songs between both box sets, and some other artists have either three or two selections, but most are represented by just a single track. This ensures that I was able to cover a large spectrum of Southern California groups, while still giving the top groups their due.

Some odds and ends:

The idea for separate Pop and Rock Boxes was decided upon simply by not having enough room to cram everything I wanted into a single set. Even so, there was plenty of good stuff that didn’t make the cut that will be released forthwith. I will be following these sets with single disc compilations for the L.A. soul, country rock and surf music scenes, as well as perhaps a double-disc compilation of ultra-rare stuff that came close to making the final cut.

As for the time-span covered within, I picked 1964 as the starting point because that was not only the year of the massive British Invasion (which impacted nearly every musician on both sets) but it was also the year Johnny Rivers debuted at the Whisky a-Go-Go, unofficially kicking off the whole Sunset Strip Scene.

While I’ve gone with the title L.A. Gemstones, any band from Southern California that recorded in L.A. between the years 1964 and 1969 was considered fair game. So you’ll hear groups from Santa Barbara (the Strawberry Alarm Clock), Long Beach (Creation of Sunlight), San Diego (the Hardtimes) and more. Likewise, artists such as Chad & Jeremy, who switched their base of operations from the U.K to Hollywood, and who worked exclusively with west coast producers were included, as were non-local performers like Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison who, while not exactly L.A. natives, nevertheless recorded significant amounts of their material in Hollywood AND utilized the city’s session musicians as their primary backing bands. Finally, in the case of such L.A.-based bands as the Peanut Butter Conspiracy who recorded some of their material at out-of-state studios like Columbia in New York City, their non-L.A. material was deemed worthy of inclusion as long as they were still working with their Hollywood producer (in this case Gary Usher) and not using East Coast session musicians.

It is my intention to write track-by-track liner notes for both boxes, but due to the amount of tracks on these sets (nearly 300 in all!) this will obviously take me a while. Until then, I will gladly answer any questions that I can about these particular tracks, or sixties’ music in general, over at the Record Room:
http://s3.excoboard.com/exco/forum.php?forumid=29211

As stated previously, all the material contained herein stems from my own personal collection and therefore comes from a variety of sources: LP, CD and digital. Every effort has been made to include the best sounding versions of each song (in dynamic MONO whenever possible) but naturally some tracks will sound better than others, and you may experience some difference in fidelity between tracks on occasion. I apologize in advance on this count, but I did the very best I could do. My hope is that these sets will find their way to someone in power at a reissue label such as Rhino or Sundazed, and that they will follow my lead and issue a legitimate box set (or sets) so the individual artists and/ or their estates will get the recognition and compensation that they so richly deserve.

Finally, a disclaimer: These sets are not to be sold or in any way used as a means of financial gain. To combat this, I will be dispersing them to a few of the more popular sixties’ blog sites in an effort to combat copyright infringement via unauthorized sales. My sole motivation for sharing these songs is to help spread the word about this wonderful, timeless music and hopefully generate some revenue for the people that created it via catalog album sales.

Rock On!

NOTE: Links removed in anticipation of the all new L.A. Gemstones 2.0; coming soon to this site!

Here in Your Bedroom - 126 PowerPop Hits of the Modern Rock Era

2009-03-05T15:12:00.000-08:00

Compilation (various artist)

Well if the last few months of doing this blog have taught me anything, it's that the people that read it aren't interested in anything recorded after 1982. Try as I might, my last series of offerings (Phantom Planet, Top 100 Hip-Hop Songs and the Wu-Tang Clan EP) were total stiffs, sparking only a handful of downloads and zero total comments. Yet my Who and Beach Boys comps are still flying off the shelves, loosely speaking. I'm starting to sense a pattern here.

Anyway, after tossing around the idea of abandoning this blog entirely, I decided to at least go ahead and share at least one other comp of songs not hailing from the pre-CD era before giving up all hope. Contained here, 126 of the catchiest Alternative/ AOR/ Modern Rock hits of the last 15 years. If you can't find something to like on these, you'd better check your pulse.

The set starts off with Silverchair's 1995 grunge-gum classic "Tomorrow" and navigates through the highs and lows of mainstream rock radio, ending up on a sullen note with Death Cab for Cutie's 2008 hit "I Will Possess Your Heart". In between, you'll hear dozens of songs you remember but lost track of somewhere along the line, by artists with names like Nada Surf, Spacehog, Semisonic, Kula Shaker, Vertical Horizon, Three Doors Down, My Morning Jacket, Goldfinger, Jimmy Eat World and over a hundred others. If you've ever banged your head along to one of those "Buzz Ballads" ads on TV, this is sorta like that, only like a hundred times better because it contains pretty much anything anyone would want to hear from the years 1995-2008 that got played on Rock and Alternative radio.

We've been spinning this set non stop around my house lately, and you may find yourself doing the same if you give it a chance! Especially recommended as a starting point for those of you who've been hiding under a rock for the last 15 years and want to get caught up: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

All Over Again: the Phantom Planet Story

2009-01-06T19:32:00.000-08:00

Compliation (single artist)

According to their web site, Phantom Planet are officially on indefinite hiatus. Effing sucks.

For those of you that don't know or care, they were awesome and under-appreciated; a band that cranked out a slew of 2-3 minute pop gems over the last ten years that many un-hip people missed out on. DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE! If all you know of these guys is Jason Schwartzman and "California", you probably owe it to yourself to learn the rest of the Phantom Planet Story. 1 2

Through a Vast Crystal Sphere

California Feeling

L.A. Gemstones: The Rock Box compilation (5 CDs)

The Rock Box cometh...

New Goffin/ King demos surface!

The Who - Lifehouse (2 CD)

Fleetwood Mac - They Play On (4 CD)

Tuesday Timewarp: The Lost Lester Bangs Interview

Pr*nce & the R*volution - A Shock to the System (2 CD)

California Music Part One: Requiem for Vitality

The Ballroom - The Complete Recordings

Peel - Blindside

Kara's Flowers - The Fourth World

Updated links and other fun stuff

Cover Flow: Finally a reason to love iTunes

Time to get pumped up

The Dog Ate My Homework or I'm Mad, Man: A Play in One Act

Updates and Ephemera-- Christmas '10

John Entwistle: Tale of the Ox

Tuesday Timewarp: A trio of clips on Dennis and Charlie

Alan Wilson/ Canned Heat - Blind Owl Sings

L.A. Gemstones: The Pop Box compilation (5 CDs)

PLEASE READ: Track Tagging

Stop Playing Guitar: The New Power Pop (2 CDs)

Charles Manson - A Letter to William Dakota

Nirvana - Unit Shifters/ Live at the Paramount Theatre 10.31.91 (3 CD)

The Groovy, Incredible, Mysterious and Much Misunderstood Eternity's Children! (2 CD)

April 2010 update

Tuesday Timewarp: The Standells

Carole King - Phases (2-CD)

A Couple of Wings Mixes I Made for My Friend

The Sphere Sells Out

Obsession, Lust and Betrayal - Modern Rock's Greatest 1998-2008 (10 CDs)

REVIEW: Where The Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968

Tim Forster and Jon Mills Discuss the WCPAEB

Their Satanic Majesties Request (4 CD deluxe edition)

Instant Replay Redux

September Update/ Housekeeping

Uhh, Sorry!

It's like the gift that keeps on giving...

Get Off of My Cloud!

33&1/3 Revolutions per Monkee

Crystal Sphere to MSM: "Go Shoot Yourselves in the Head."

Not One Bummer: The Complete West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

Summer '88

The Sweet - The Complete UK Singles Collection (1968-1980); 3 CDs

"The Sweater"

Cocaine Is a Hell of a Drug, Man (pt. 1)

Help Paul Williams

LA Gemstones 1964-69 -- 10 CDs

Here in Your Bedroom - 126 PowerPop Hits of the Modern Rock Era

All Over Again: the Phantom Planet Story

Prnce & the Rvolution - A Shock to the System (2 CD)