Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik Warner Bros. 07599-26681-2-5 (1991)

At the time, I certainly knew about the Chili Peppers.  I probably liked them a little, but didn’t really pay any particular attention.  My brother had What Hits!? and The Uplift Mofo Party Plan.  Most of my friends had Blood Sugar Sex Magik I recall.  And you heard the singles everywhere — the radio, MTV, other people’s stereos.  For the most part, I forgot about them, and had no interest in the later stuff.  So twenty years out, amidst a random visit back to some early 1990s music, I came back to this album.  Well, it sounds better than I remember.  The formula is pretty simple but still effective.  It’s built on the kind of funk rock that Hendrix was doing with “Dolly Dagger,” informed by 70s funk too (thankfully omitting any 80s funk influence), with an awareness of punk and hip-hop hinted at in the music.  Anthony Kiedis tends to stay within his vocal abilities, and by half rapping most of the time his street-wise delivery overcomes the limitations of the idiocy of the lyrics.  But the band’s secret weapon is without a doubt guitarist John Frusciante.  Prior to becoming a drug casualty (or his subsequent recovery), he just fills out the band’s sound with perfectly funky yet razor sharp solos.  His tone is bolstered by a kind of flange or other effect that rolls his guitar tone around in every riff while still sporting a full sound with crisp edges.  The band can do seemingly anything it wants behind his guitar.

So this album is mostly head-thumping, fun, pounding rock, with just a few changes of pace like the mellow hit “Under the Bridge” to prevent monotony.  I wouldn’t have guessed this would have aged as well as it has.  Thank Frusciante for that.

Miles Davis – Dark Magus

Dark Magus

Miles Davis – Dark Magus CBS/Sony 40AP741-2 (1977)

Dark Magus is another great entry into the series of live recordings from Miles’ 1970-75 period.  This particular one comes from a Carnegie Hall concert on March 29, 1974.  It’s an excellent performance, churning out an energized voodoo funk jazz that could only come from Miles.  The band had enough control and skill at this point to produce a sound live that couldn’t really be improved on in the studio, no matter how many effects and cut-ups were employed.  There are slightly better recordings from the same period available, but this one is still an excellent album with a lot to offer.  I actually consider it one of my favorites from the period. I wish there were dozens more like it!  This is some OUT shit.

Lou Reed – Transformer

Transformer

Lou Reed – Transformer RCA Victor AFL1-4807 (1972)

One of Reed’s best-known albums.  And really it is one of his finest.  But you know, I think some of the “standout” tracks on this album I find the least interesting.  It’s the “filler” like “Hangin’ ‘Round” and “Goodnight Ladies” that makes this one interesting to me.  One of my favorite Lou Reed lines is from “Hangin’ ‘Round”: you’re still doing things that I gave up years ago.

Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy – Live at Dreher, Paris 1981

Live at Dreher, Paris 1981

Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy – Live at Dreher, Paris 1981 HatHut hatOLOGY 4-596 (2003)

This collection of two archival live recordings — Live at Dreher Paris 1981: Round Midnight, Vol. 1 and Live at Dreher Paris 1981: The Peak, Vol. 2 (both originally released in 1996) — features two long-time collaborators engaged in a great, public musical conversation.  The album is just Lacy and Waldron, playing some originals but mostly Thelonious Monk tunes.  The mood is a supportive one.  Each performer gets some time out front, or by himself, with plenty of collaborative passages as well.  Waldron plays with a blues tonality but also with blocks of repetitive riffs that lend a subtly hypnotic and thoroughly modern edge (the liner notes call this a hypnotic tension & release quality), which is confirmed by playing with sustain just enough to soften the rhythmic attack on his piano but never so much as to devolve into wispy sentimentality.  Lacy plays lyrically and brightly when he wants to, then at times with tangly solos that sometimes reach for “extended technique” honks and screeches, always maintaining a humility that belies the virtuoso technique.  While Waldron tends to synthesize disparate stylistic approaches, Lacy tends to alternate between them.  Both players are clearly “inside” the Monk songs, enough that these versions sound nothing like they way Monk recorded them yet also evidence tremendous admiration — the kind that posits true admiration as adding something to the songs and growing them into unique performances rather than timidly deferential museum piece recreations.  It is also music that finds few limits, pushing beyond the confines of formal structure while also making full and deft use of harmonic and rhythmic structure to develop themes that are long and deep.  If these recordings leave any particular impression, it is of two familiar collaborators who anticipated playing mostly Monk songs, and doing so in a mutually advantageous way, but with few if any preconceived ideas about how they would musically implement their performances.  So the listener gets to experience the performers offering up points and counterpoints, building up a rapport, all with full awareness of the audience for their performances.  It is kind of a more intellectual and cerebral version of the same kind of feeling that drives the “feel good” vibes of everything from rock “jam band” music to reggae…you name it.

Patti Smith – Dream of Life

Dream of Life

Patti Smith – Dream of Life Arista AL-8453 (1988)

Like almost any that could be named, this album could have been better.  The muted and slightly tinny 80s production values aren’t a help, and replacing the keyboards with more guitar would have been an improvement by giving things more of an edge.  But what is here is a pretty fine batch of songs (especially “People have the Power,” “Paths That Cross,” and “Looking for You (I Was)”).  Patti’s vocals are strong and Fred “Sonic” Smith lays down some good lead guitar.  Not a bad album by any means, and unfairly derided by some fans.  The key to enjoying this is to allow Patti the range to make pop music, not just punk rock.

The Red Krayola – Introduction

Introduction

The Red Krayola – Introduction Drag City DC309 (2006)

There might be no other rock and roll band that has continued for so long, gone through so many reinventions and still managed to turn out good or great albums.  Entering the band’s fourth decade (!), The Red Krayola offer up the humorously titled Introduction.  It’s filled with a lot more straightforward pop/rock than you might expect.  But it’s all well-crafted, well-written, and well-executed.

CAN – CAN

CAN

CAN – CAN Harvest 1C 066-45 099 (1978)

This is the last album that CAN recorded before disbanding (though they later reunited).  The conventional narrative is that the band went downhill from 1974 onward.  Is that fair?  Yes and no.  While the post-’74 material is by no means as pathbreaking, there is still much to like about it.  The self-titled CAN (renamed Inner Space for some reissues) grapples with popular music of the day, which is to say disco, funk rock, even reggae, jazz fusion, and more.  This ranges all over the place.  Some of it (“A Spectacle”) even locks into a proto-hip-hop breakbeat-style groove.  “E.F.S. Nr. 99 (‘Can Can’),” a rendition of Jacques Offenbach‘s iconic “Infernal Galop” composition, is sometimes greeted with a sneer, but it’s actually great!  CAN had a sense of humor, which was one of their admirable qualities when it shone through, and this particularly sunny song is much less pretentious than a lot of other CAN genre tributes of the prior few years.  Of course, the opener “All Gates Open” is really a song that ranks among the band’s best, with a moderate tempo, a mechanical rhythm with hints of ambient music, and a jammy, laid-back mystical quality evoked by the lyrics.  “Safe” and “Sodom” are other particularly good ones.  “Sunday Jam” is a dud, with cheesy smooth jazz trappings, but it proves to be the only dud on an otherwise fine album. 

Don’t let the haters sour you on this, which is a good one for anyone with open ears (that is to say anyone who doesn’t limit CAN to their sound of the 1968-74 period).  This has much more of a sense of purpose than the last couple CAN albums, which had good songs here and there but tended to kind of drift about aimlessly.  It is sleeker, more immediate and more accessible than earlier CAN recordings, but it is no worse off for any of those qualities.

CAN – Out of Reach

Out of Reach

CAN – Out of Reach Harvest 1C 066-32 715 (1978)

Widely regarded as the worst CAN album — it was for a long time omitted from a reissue program.  No doubt, this is not music quite like what the band was making from 1968-74, for a number of reasons.  This comes across as a bit slight most of the time.  And another reviewer was probably right to say, “About half of this is merely OK; the other half is terrible.  I’ll leave you to decide which half is which.”  And yet, on the whole, this is passable enough.  If there is a parallel, it would be The Beach Boys when they brought in Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin, and in the years that followed when the band flirted with disco and such.  In CAN’s case, it was new members Rosko Gee and Reebop Kwaku Baah from Traffic.  There is a pronounced shift here with a focus on club/disco music and easygoing, grooving prog rock.  If there is one thing that annoys urban elites, of the sort who are the main body of supporters of avant garde acts like CAN, it is to dally with the music of the uneducated rabble, which is a big part of the demographic of disco, and groove rock.  There is a tendency to consider any engagement with disco (or groove rock), and its fans, to be inherently slight.  Maybe, or maybe it is just elitist bigotry?  Frankly, Rosko Gee’s songs (“Pauper’s Daughter and I,” “Give Me No ‘Roses'”) are not bad, just quite different from the sort of music CAN fans were accustomed to from the band.  But this is just like Fataar and Chaplin’s contributions to The Beach Boys (“Leaving This Town,” “Hold on Dear Brother”).  Still, this is a pretty middling album at best, and much of it feels worn out.  But taken entirely on its own terms it works adequately enough as background music.  That is not much of an endorsement, which the album wouldn’t deserve, yet in the right setting it sounds perfectly okay.  The better songs are in the middle of the album (the end of side one and the beginning of side two in the original LP format).  Should I feel bad about kind of liking this, mediocre or not?  Nah.