Guns N' Posers II: The Search For Curly's Gold

The best thing GNR ever did, in my mind, is their cover of "Live And Let Die". That's my personal thing, I suppose, but I think it bests the original, with Axl Rose's great great vocals and the weird channeling of Zeppelin in the B section and Queen in the second verse. It's great, and even the shit-ass production can't ruin it.

That said, I have to say that the re-writing of history concerning this group troubles me. I disliked GnR when I was 10 and I don't feel much better about them now. They were only ever better than most shitty hair metal bands of the 80s to me, and that's just not good enough to cast them as some sort of classic hard rock group. You know what a classic hard rock band is? Well, Zeppelin is, for one, and I say that as someone who cannot stand the sound of Robert Plant's voice, much less his lyrics. If it weren't for him, I'd like them almost half as much as Sabbath, but let's face it, Sabbath is one of the best bands ever. I mean I've listened to the first two albums thousands of times and I never tire of them. That's the real shit. People think it's specious to compare Sabbath to Zeppelin, in my experience, but I think it's a good way to go. They were working similar areas in rock a lot of the time, but one was florid, self-indulgent, and kinda silly, and the other has aged a helluva lot better. Both of them kicked out groovy enough stuff to land in the canon, though. It's just that, well, I'm not embarrassed for Ozzie when I hear him sing. Dio's a different matter, of course. But hey, he's the guy who taught the world how to cast the evil eye on people, so he's got that going for him. I cast it on a hated co-worker once and she was out sick for two weeks the following day. Scary.

I'm listening to Bruce Springsteen right now. He's pretty good. Sometimes great, if you can forgive him for the terrible Dylan attempt in the lyrics of "Blinded By The Light", which is easy to do if you just listen to the awesome keyboards in the Manfred Mann version. IV/iii/ii/I never sounded so neat.

Speaking of, how great is their version of "The Mighty Quinn"? Pretty great. Dylan's version is great too, but it doesn't have those nifty tom tom overdubs in it, so The Mann wins out.

On that note, what's with people who don't like Dylan? That's like not liking air. I don't get it. I mean, I get not liking his voice (not really, he's one of my favorite singers), I get not liking the lack of vocal melody and the poetics of his Highway 61 period (actually I don't get that), I get not liking his iconic status (actually I don't see why that matters). Actually, I don't get it.

How about Frank Zappa? Is he not hip enough for you? Maybe you're not trying hard enough. Few musicians marginally in pop music were ever hipper. He was making fun of fashion hippies 40 years before it was fashionable to make fun of fashion hippies. He could do pretty much anything musically and make it catchy and hilarious and insightful. He produced "Trout Mask Replica". He could wipe the floor with most rock guitar players of any era. And he never touched any narcotics save for caffeine and nicotine, AND he was Italian (actually, he was Lebanese, by way of Greece and Sicily). Now THAT's a role model. Do myself a favor and pick up "Absolutely Free" and see if it doesn't blow your blind (thank you Frogs). Listen to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It", which shifts from sleazy blooz rock to chamber pop to light opera to Aaron Copeland to bubblegum psych to Webern to mod rave-up to soft-shoe roaring twenties tuniness to what-the-fuck is this to tone poem to straight rock to T.V. news music via mod raveup to doowoop to barbershop to atonal blooz rock and back, all the while telling us all why America is a nation of depraved idiots with pedophiles running the government. In 1967. Give me a break, are you a philistine?

Neu! is pretty awesome, too. They're like Stereolab, only in 1971, and with more shouting.

Let's talk about Funkadelic. You're not going to win any cache amongst the sort of people I hang out with by mentioning them, but that's a shame, because they managed to be several different varieties of cool at once and no one really bested them at their game. They were like if Sly and The Family Stone were cool, and had someone that sounded like Jimi Hendrix on guitar, only even better. You're thinking "Jimi Hendrix?? C'mon, man, that's LAME", and you're right, Hendrix has aged worse than even the Doors, which is really saying something, but Eddie Hazel ripped out the guitar ninja jams in a fashion very much indebted to Hendrix, but without making us suffer horrid lyrics that Zappa probably had a field day making fun of with his friends in the late 60s. Speaking of the Doors, I still like them if I close my eyes and imagine Iggy Pop fronting them, and different words being sung. Jim Morrison was a great singer, but whoever encouraged his "poetry" and its manifestations in the Doors' recordings should be forced to watch "Designing Women" while being sodomized by Delta Burke wearing a strap-on.

Sorry for the venality, there. Bad form on my part. And hey, I liked that Annie Potts alright, just like everyone. Actually, think about this: what if Leonard Cohen, or maybe Nick Cave had fronted the Doors? Would that have been good? Maybe not. Anyway, you can appreciate Morrison's singing voice, the drumming, and Ray Manzarek's absolutely great keyboards regardless of how completely foolish it makes you feel to hear someone sing "The Blue Bus....is calling us....." Robert Pollard is reportedly a big Morrison fan, which is upsetting on a shallow level, but makes a little bit of sense. Except Robert Pollard is one of the greatest songwriters of all time. So he's got that over Morrison.

Oh yeah, back to Funkadelic. They churned out wonderfully recorded and funky as hell rock/soul tunes for several years before eventually getting too close in sound to their not nearly as interesting sister band, Parliament. Beyond that, their shit was weird. Which always helps. It must have been a shocker to hear some of the tripped-out monologues that begin their first three or so albums back in the early 70s, especially given the context of being a soul-rock band, and not a bunch of British prog dudes. That said, they don't have much to do with indie-rock.

Oh, indie rock. I remember when the phrase actually meant something more specific in terms of sound. Indie-rock was Sebadoh, Pavement, stuff like that. Rilo Kiley, not so much. They're kind of a modern Fleetwood Mac, a band that, while responsible for several songs that I genuinely like, is also responsible for creating an entire dull subgenre of pop music which I simply do not understand the aesthetic purpose of. Years and years ago, before I learned music theory, I used to refer to bands like the Mac and songwriters like Joni Mitchell as pushers of the "dry chord". What I meant by that is pretty specific- it's music that heavily utilizes modal over diatonic melodies (look it up) and unresolved suspended chords. If you mess around with an open D major on the guitar, you'll hit on some of this. That kind of music depresses me because it's emotionally vacant. This isn't at all an ephemeral thing- in this culture, pieces of music with strong harmonic tension and release are more emotionally resonant. The rise of post-modernism and all its cheeky faux-cynicism is a good explanation as to why emotional vagueness is popular in music. To many ears, it sounds more reserved, more distant. One of my major problems with My Bloody Valentine has always been Shield's tendency towards the modal. There's a reason why so few classical composers from the Baroque period up to impressionism didn't create modal music- it's emotionally vacant, good for trance states (this might be part of the reason why so much indigenous folk music from across the globe is non-chordal & modal) but not good for personal expression.

That said, there are people that do modal music, or non-chordal music, whose work resonates with me. Sonic Youth comes immediately to mind- being one of my favorite bands. Their music is very often modal, though usually chordal to some degree, but they make up for this distance with a lot of rhythmic, lyrical, production, arrangement, and vocal timbre aspects that bring an intensity to the music. Stereolab also comes to mind- though unlike Sonic Youth, I'm not always in the mood, as they don't always overcome the harmonic "iciness" with other bells & whistles. Sometimes, they're just too flat and clean for me, though at their best, they update the V.U. and Neu! in a thrilling way.

Oh my god, am I an asshole.

My Top Twenty of 2005

Amazingly, I never finished this.

Here it is, nearly 2006, and I've heard perhaps 2% of the new indie rock of this year and about 25% of the new hip-hop/r&B, but not by choice. So what can I do but write my OWN top twenty, without regard to chronilogical protocol. That is, this is the stuff that I found myself going back to the most this year, "guilty pleasure" (such a bourgie phrase) or no. Some of them are songs, some are albums. All, in my opinion, have something special to offer. And very few, if any of them, came out this year.

1) Tall Dwarfs- "Hello Cruel World"

"Hello Cruel World" combines the first several eps from New Zealand's '80s lo-fi pysch-pop masters Tall Dwarfs. One of the cadre of artists with ties to the Flying Nun label- which has released more great pop (The Bats, The Chills, Verlaines, Tall Dwarfs, for example) than any label post-1964 has any right to. I first got into this when my lovely girlfriend put it on, thinking I'd probably love it. It didn't sink in right away, but the overall tone was intruiging- the tinny, chirpy, strained voices and warm analog fuzz of the whole thing was captivating even without songs to back it up. But I must have been asleep when "All My Hollowness" came on- as I've been obsessed with that brilliant tune for about 8 months now. Made up of nothing more than a chorus of handclaps and footstomps for drums, cheap organs, and sullen, pitchy vocals, it somehow manages stunning beauty anyhow. In fact, I'd say it's a strong contender for top five best songs of all time. Any real songwriter would kill and infant to come up with something this good. And the rest of the album contains a lot of great moments as well, mixed with weird, fever-dreamy lapses into lo-fi psych-noise and found sound. The opener, "Nothing's Gonna Happen", nips at the heels of "All My Hollowness" in terms of overall impact, and contains one of the greatest lyrics of all time- "stiff pricks in the general direction- of anywhere but home". Essentially essential.

2)
1

Missives

The reign of the middle-brow in indie rock seems to have no end in sight, does it?
I mean for every high-minded art band like Talking Heads or Devo or something, there's someone there to water it down- not to the point of embarassment, of course. We don't want to be so normal that people think we're poor or something.

I guess I mean the press as much of the music. It seems like that melting pot that America has always purported to be has finally succeeded in melting us all into a viscous, intellectually mediocre, vaguely avaricious, but still nominally virtuous goo of a culture. The sudden infusion in the late-90s of Latin influence and presence in mainstream pop may have seemed like portent of a positive change in our society, but it was little more than the result of some hard math by target demographic watchdogs. All part of the goo. No culture is unbuyable in this golden age. I can become an expert in merengue in a matter of days, should I so desire. It all means more or less the same thing- variations on the theme of collecting. I've known a lot of people who were proud of their ridiculously enormous music collections. To them it meant that they were cultured. Because middlebrow lives and dies by its buying power. Actual ideas, conjecture, and dissent from the idea that consumption is our primary objective and purpose in life are reviled. I have been called an elitist many times for criticizing these ideas. What it really says to me is- "We know it's wrong, we know it's destroying us, but shut up and don't spoil it". Most of those who have criticized me have been people who call themselves progressives. I don't see how you can ignore your own capricious, insatiable stuff-lust and still call yourself a liberal, but that's just me.

I'm not really sure, if I'm being honest, whether or not I'm a music snob. I certainly have my opinions on music, as most people do, and my aesthetic leanings, but I can't really recall a time where I thought less of someone because of their taste in pop music. I certainly have thought "Oh, well, we probably won't have much in common"- but never "what an assface, he's into Pearl Jam".

Nevertheless, I have to say- the elitism of indie rockers, at some point, seemed at least defensible in an old-fashioned high art/pop art way, at least when I was in high school and before- but indie rock has gone the way of middlebrow- not saying very much, or not even saying nothing in as interesting a way as possible- like say,
Robert Pollard, or occasionally Steven Malkmus. As a teenager, I was into some college rock- starting to be called "alternative" occasionally, but what I loved about Sonic Youth, The Pixies, and that ilk was the fact that I didn't quite get it. Not because the music or lyrics were above my head, but because they weird so intensely weird and personal- whether they were personal narratives or not. These were the weird kids in school, making up their weird little worlds and putting them on records for me to hear. Well, the weird kids don't seem to be doing it anymore. The existence of Iron & Wine as a major indie act seems to say that much. Indie rock is now stuff for young professionals to attache their lifestyles with. As much as I hate Vice magazine- I'm going to have to agree with those secret neo-cons- there's no edge in indie rock anymore. They called it indie-yuppie. I call it a shame. And edge has nothing to do with loudness, vulgarity, sexuality, or drug abuse. Edge is when you know that the actual personality of whoever made the record is coming through. I don't really hear that much anymore.

Thoughts?

Assorted Thoughts On Assorted Music

I haven't kept on up on this music blog ting as much as I would have liked yet. I blame the hypnotic glare of middle-class poverty. If you don't know what middle-class poverty is, then you probably can't have it explained to you.

Most people who know me know of my love for a handful of artists/idioms that most frequently produce irritation to the listener or derisive comments from the observer of my enthusiasm for them. Notably among these musical pariahs are Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Barbershop Quartet, and the piano rags of Scott Joplin.

I'll not tackle barbershop quartet because it's arguably the least defensible of the three, or the least fun to defend, anyway. But I WILL take on the other two. Let me start with Joplin.

I first became aware of the existence of ragtime piano through my grandparents. My grandmother, Gladys Howard Abbe (the daughter of working class English immigrants), was an accomplished musician, specifically a soprano and a pianist. As a pianist, her passion was the "stride" piano style famously associated with Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and to a certain extent, Art Tatum, the Van Halen of early 20th-century jazz pianists. She could play like Jesus threw mystery fish to peckish Canaanites.- it was miraculous-sounding, yet she didn't seem to be putting even the slightest effort into it at all. She was a dour, often depressed, sometime tyrannical English woman (well, English-American), but when she played, all of that melted away and it was pure joy that eminated from her face. She was progidal, really. She had perfect pitch (I'm close, but can't quite sing an A# reliably without a relative pitch), amazing technique, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of early standards, novelty tunes, and a great many classical piece.

Anyway, getting to it, the piano in my grandparents' house was a player piano, an old one with a lot of great reels piled up all around it. Naturally, there were a bunch of Joplin rags included in those reels, since reels and sheet music were the primary modes of hearing new Joplin compositions in his day. I can remember setting the reels in and watching the ghostly hands bang out those stunning syncopations in awe. I couldn't really imagine how people could play that stuff. I loved the music- it was, to me, funny, frantic, virtuoustic, and underneath it all, incredibly sad. I always thought ragtime music was sad more than anything else. Whenever I made up movies in my head as a little kid, the end always came with the death of the protagonist set to "Paragon Rag" or "Maple Leaf Rag" or, when I got older and learned more of Joplin's pieces "Solace: A Mexican Serenade".

That combination of humor and solitude that is captured so well in Joplin's work is one which I seem to find in a lot of my favorite music in general. Another piano composer, Frederic Chopin, filled his music with much of the same sentiment, in fact, I've always considered the waltzes and mazurkas of Chopin to be kissing cousins to Joplin's rags. There's even a theoretical basis for this, since both commonly use passing chromatic notes in their melodies and often have strikingly similiar progressions. Don't even get me started about the Smiths. Or the Misfits, for that matter.

Most people regard Scott Joplin as novelty music. This I don't understand. Sure, it's of its time, but why is that if not for a laundry list of films and television shows depicted those whimsically to the sound of "The Entertainer"? And why isn't such whimsy associated with a "serious" composer like Chopin, or Mozart, for that reason, who is guilty of similiar harmonic flights of fancy? And furthermore, why is it that at the same time that Joplin is not taken seriously, he is considered one of the progenators of jazz? I mean who takes music more seriously, or overly serious, than jazz people? I can tell you from personal experience that no one does.

I don't know. I've gone on too long about him. All I know is that Joplin's rags are some of the only pieces of music in any idiom that can totally transform my emotional state, no matter what mood I am in to start. It takes me away like very little else does, not even my precious fucking indie pop, kids. So give him a chance, is all.

Next entry: Jedediah takes on Frankie Valli and the Wall of Resistance, or On The Important Italian-American Contribution to Pop Music.

The Wedding Present

The Wedding Present- “Tommy”



I first discovered the Wedding Present on the behest of a coworker at the record store I worked at in college who referred to them as “my favorite Velvet Underground band that isn’t the Velvet Underground”. He played me their John Peel BBC record and I was pretty intrigued by the overall sound- the guitars, though certainly redolent of Mssrs. Reed and Morrison, had a unique ringing quality to them that I hadn’t heard before. The rhythm guitar seemed to be strumming impossibly fast, and high up the neck, too. Even though the odd, froggy baritone vocals threw me off a bit, my interest was definitely piqued. Later that week I went to the competing used record store of the used record store that worked at (Mystery Train, our rivals, were in Amherst and we were in Northampton) and found a couple of CDs. Afraid of spending my money on non-edible items even then, I stood at the listening station and carefully went through them to figure out which one was better, or at least which one I was most compelled to steal from. That, of course, was “Tommy”, the other was “George Best”. Now a lot of people will tell you that “George Best” is vocalist/guitarist David Gedge’s masterpiece, and maybe it’s somehow a more competent work than “Tommy”, but for me, “Tommy” was the one that got my attention and held it.

To be fair, “Tommy” isn’t actually a real album; it’s a compilation of B-sides and other unreleased presumed offal from corpus Gedge & co.. However, it doesn’t really lack much in the way of cohesion- the production in particular is pretty consistent, despite the fact that the cuts were culled from several different sessions. And the production is, in my mind, far more appropriate for the material than their official album efforts like “George Best” and “Sea Monsters”. The drums are fantastic-sounding, all high and thin and replete with a washy reverb, emphasizing the cymbals and snare rather than the kick and toms, which, antithetically to Lou Reed’s normally correct suggestion that “cymbals kill guitars”, bring out the ringing, abrasive percussiveness of the guitar work even more. My favorite track by far, and probably my favorite Wedding Present song in general, is “Go Out And Get’em, Boy”, which opens the record very nicely with its chiming, up-the-neck guitar arpeggios and blasts into a wonderfully twisted vamp with some slightly off-key-signature bass and simply awesome rhythm/lead parts that recall Sterling Morrison playing fuzzy Afropop. The vocals don’t come in for at least a minute and a half, and though normally I’d consider that a bad thing, what precedes them is equally compelling. When they do kick in, we’re treated to Gedge’s quirky baritone singing a conversational song of ambition or avariciousness, or whatever comes first. This is a song that a band could base their whole career off of (and some have), it’s so rich and full of invention..

Their obvious Velvets influences aside, nothing really sounded like the Wedding Present in the mid 80s, if you’ll forgive that egregious trope, and thanks to the blandness of contemporary indie rock, the more adventurous young pop musicians out there are taking a page from Gedge’s book- Human Television is an example of an excellent young group doing so, as well as the aforementioned VoxTrot, to a much lesser degree. I’m glad of it, and so is Gedge, hopefully. Now I’m just waiting for the Dead Milkmen to make a comeback.

Voxtrot, Vox Humana, Voxy Lady

I’ve seen Voxtrot twice. They’re terrific live, a bunch of nice-looking young men in their mid-early twenties bouncing and gleefully delivering spurts of well-crafted, energetic indie pop, which comes off live as sort of a combination of the Smiths, Heavenly, and mid-period Beatles, as well as a host of other 80s and 90s indiepop influences. Good stuff indeed, and I was eager to hear how it translated in recordings. The mp3s I heard I their site awhile back were, I admit, kind of boring, but luckily this particular document, a self-titled EP, is much more promising-sounding, and comes close to delivering on their live promise.

Firstly, lead singer Ramesh Srivastava has a beautiful voice. Live, however, my only real complaint was that the songs were too good to be delivered by a singer who, though gifted with a technically pretty voice, lacked personality. They dealt with the potential for vocal vanilla well in the recording by lathering the vocals up nicely with double-tracking and generous slap-back delay, the latter of which is an effect I am admittedly a sucker for. It was a good idea. On top of that, his performances on the EP are a little more ragged, a little more vibrato-laden, which, even without the effects (which are absent on some passages) help a great deal in delivering him from a Ben Gibbard hell of a pretty tune sung with an offensively bland voice. Don’t get me started on Death Cab For Cutie, please.

Onto the songs, then. The best song on the EP by far, in my opinion, is “Long Haul”, a wonderful slice of Beatlesque bliss that comes close to going on for too long at 4 minutes but gets it away with it by virtue of its loveliness. Everything here is good- the stuttering snare/hihat pattern, the slinky, melodic bass, and most importantly, the excellent vocal melody of the verse. It’s the definition of hook in that it’s not only catchy, but that it seems to live in its own self-contained universe, as if it always existed, which in my mind is the very definition of a great pop song, and evidence of a very talented tunesmith. Either that or he stole it from something else. But I don’t think so, and even if it were the case, I don’t care, as I’m wont to defend thievery as a means of rescuing good parts from bad songs. Lyrically, “Longhaul” also stands out as the finest track- nothing in this song makes me cringe or makes me say “ooh- could have said that better”. I would have shaved a minute off of it, (but then again, I consider Alien Lanes to be a concise, well-fleshed out piece of work) but overall, it’s pretty close to a classic.

As for the rest, they range from pretty good to very good. The opener the more rocking “Wrecking Force”, is probably the least of the songs offered on the EP, lacking a really convincing and interesting vocal melody and being a little undercooked feeling. A good indication of this is the usage of the open hi-hat during part of the verse This has always been a sign to me of a song not arranged with enough deliberation. The open hi hat is a tonally destructive technique that can kill the overall sound and drive of a song when used in the wrong context. Lyrically, "Wrecking Force"
both offends and delights, offering us the terrible “you can be anyone, or just some mother’s wasted son- you can be your own God if you want to”, and later, offering us the wonderful “you can’t fit good company up your nose”, almost as if two different people penned the verse and chorus. Anyway, overall, not bad, but they can do a lot better.

As for the last two songs, “Missing Pieces”, which has a nice Cure vibe to it and an amazing-sounding guitar breakdown, pleases me well, though there’s that goddamn open hi hat again. One or two lamentable lines in this one, but they pull it off anyhow. Again, at 5 minutes, it’s a bit too long, but the last minute is when you get that guitar break- terrifically reverb-laden and pretty. The closer, “The Start Of Something”, is something like Belle & Sebastian really bearing out their Smiths influence. It’s certainly the most derivative of the lot, but that’s only because it does something really specific, and in my mind, it’s the second best song here, which means it’s a hell of a good one. It’s got that great Motown bounce that both Morrissey and Murdoch are so fond of and Srivastava really puts on a nice Moz/Murdoch hybrid voice just for the occasion. The cello / ride cymbal breakdown just before the end is simply lovely. No lyrical snafus at all, either. Well done, gentlemen.

So, in short, or rather, in four or five paragraphs, Voxtrot’ S/T EP is a worthy purchase, particularly for the terrific “Long Haul” and the really really good “Missing Pieces”, but additionally because this is a band who, as long as they are careful to avoid occasional tendencies toward lyrical triteness, overlong songs, and bland vocal performances, is going to do very well, and will probably record a full-length or two which are remembered for a long time. Ramesh Srivastava is clearly a talented songwriter and the band is a top-notch pop machine (special mention goes to the absolutely fantastic and McCartneyesque bass playing and the lithe, song-minded drumming, open hi hat snafus excepted). The production here doesn’t have that egregious hyper-loud, dry sound that so many recordings indie and otherwise suffer from, and in fact some prudent choices were made that assist the songs nicely. Hopefully when they record again they won’t try to “go pro”. That would be a terrible mistake. Wonderful work, boys. Just don’t get cocky and spoil the grit of it all.

http://www.myspace.com/voxtrot

www.voxtrot.net

Emmit Rhodes

About two years ago my lovely girlfriend brought home a CD from San Francisco for me. She was at the same Popfest that I played at this year and she had heard a recommendation from someone about it, and when she heard it she knew I'd love it. At the time, I was in a very strange period of really wanting to hear obscure soft pop singer-songwriters from the 70s- perhaps spawned by my long-time love of solo John Cale. Specifically, I was fascinated by the work of Tim Moore, a small-time L.A. songwriter whose main claim to fame was penning "Rock N'Roll Love Letter", a hit for the Bay City Rollers. Moore's own version, predictably, is far better -seeing as BCR was little more than a Caledonian sub-Rasberries power-pop act, it's not surprising. But Moore's version was actually kind of magical. I heard the track on WFMU one day and had still been looking for the album when Sarah brought me Emmit Rhodes- and I forgot about Moore right away.

Emmit Rhodes was a shaggy-haired pop multi-instrumenalist and songwriter with a golden, McCartneyesque voice and musical chops to match. From that description, he sounds a little lightweight, I realize, but the difference between solo McCartney and Emmit Rhodes is that Rhodes actually seemed to care about his songs. As much as I am apt to lionize Macca, in particular his totally matchless bass playing and arrangement saavy, in the 70s, one got the sense that he was writing so many songs so quickly that he didn't care if they were made out of cardboard so long as they had catchy vocal melodies. Which, of course, they did. But Rhodes is choosier without sacrificing the indelible melodies, and his songs have an aching, emotionally naked quality that give them a lot more resonance. The definitive Rhodes item to get is probably Daisy Fresh From Hawthorne, California, which collects every track from his 1970 debut album and various tracks from the subsequent two albums. The small bulk of the disc is the first album, which is a good thing, because it's his best- and Emmit Rhodes at his best is well, brilliant. Not only does every song from the first album shine, but Rhodes plays every instrument himself and acts as his own engineer and producer to boot. At the time, one-man-bands were still pretty rare, and Rhodes is a gifted one, turning out amazingly deft and highly nuanced performances on each instrument and easily keeping up with the Stevie Wonders and, well, Paul McCartneys of the world. Strong, simple drums, heavily compressed, direct-injected bass and an ever-present tamborine (or sometimes a maraca) provide the bouncy backing to songs laced with incredibly well-developed vocal melodies, highly personal lyrics, and sometimes uncoventional but never jarring chordal and harmonic movement. Particularily amazing is his guitar playing, not only for its melodic inventiveness, but for the fact that it was the last instrument Rhodes learned and in fact he'd only been playing it a relatively short time when he recorded his debut. But it's really his voice that stuns. He does in fact sound uncannily like McCartney most of the time, but hell, that's not a bad thing, as McCartney in his finest, purest voice has one of the most beautiful voices in pop music- warm, resonant, and inviting. In McCartney's case, those aesthetic qualities often just made his frequently trite and throwaway lyrical preoccupations cloying, but Rhodes's songs are filled with such loss, despair, pessimism, and broken spirituality that the honey-throated vocal delivery of them make him seem more like a monk and less like a used car salesman (see anything from McCartney's post-Beatles career work minus Ram and Band On The Run).

It's only when the songs from the second and third album kick in that things start to disintegrate a little bit, but even then, it's merely a downgrade from "masterpiece" to "exceptionally good", and it's only after 13 songs or so. It's sort of like saying that "Help" has no good songs on it, simply because "Rubber Soul" or "With The Beatles" contain only good songs. Rhodes, who after a storied battle with his record label, vanished into complete obscurity, may never be a legend on the level that he deserves to be, but with Daisy Fresh From Hawthorne, California, at least we've got the essential document of an underappreciated pop genius at our disposal. What's sad is that his story is incredibly common. It makes me wonder how many amazing songs there are out there that most of us will never get the chance to hear. By the way, if anyone has an mp3 or a CD of that Tim Moore album, or at least his "Rock N'Roll Love Letter", I'd appreciate your charity.