Month: November 2007

Rescue Co. No.1 –I Want To Save You

Rescue Co. No.1 –I Want To Save You/ Amanda –Jam 14 (1972 UK)

Arnold, Martin & Morrow (Go Go Thunder, Butterscotch etc…) are behind this fine slab of orchestral Glammy Psych/Pop. Rescue Co. No.1 had a plethora of singles on different labels, and this is one of the 3 singles they released on the Jam imprint. It’s probably my favourite Rescue single of the lot, but you can also check out Its Only Words posted May 28th 2007. The lush yet sharp arrangement and production is simply staggering and it all sounds a bit like The Move accompanied by The London Symphony Orchestra playing an unreleased Hello tune…I’m sure you’ll enjoy this!

Click on title for a full version of I Want To Save You.

Real McCoy – I Get So Excited

Real McCoy – I Get So Excited/ Somebody’s Taken Maria Away –Pye N17618 (1968 UK)

The Real McCoy come up trumps with this KILLER cover of The Equals tune. It starts off as a real solid and driving performance and then all hell breaks loose when the track gets engulfed by majestic swirling phasing. Most records sounded this way anyway on Radio Luxemburg anyhow, but they certainly went the whole hog as the phasing is there for most of the track. Real McCoy were Irish and seemed to have specialized in covering key Bubblegum tracks of the time, but always adding an edge –check out the versions of Round The Gum Tree and Quick Joey Small for further examples of this.

Note: You can find all the tracks above on the Round The Gum Tree UK Bubblegum compilation that Sanctuary put out a couple of years back.

Click on title for a full version of I Get So Excited

The Number 600

While trying to come up with something witty to write about the Curb Your Enthusiasm (I’ll leave it at BEST EPISODE EVER!!……………â€ÂWILL YOU JUST SHUT THE F*CK UP!!!!!!â€Â) finale, I noticed that this will make my 600th post on failedpilot.com. Not really a cause for celebration, but cause enough for two REALLY old re-runs.

Check out this depressing post from February of 2005 (an especially disturbing month in my life).

…and this one from the previous month. The links still work!! Watch the last one!!  

 

 

 

Boneshaker –Sweetness –The Mike Berry Story Part 3

Boneshaker –Sweetness/ Badman Strikes Again –London HLU 10332 (1971 UK)

Sweetness is another magic Mike Berry production of a great song –it’s real ’67 psych with a pinch of Russell Morris’ The Real Thing and some commercial Steam catchiness (Na Na Na), it should have been a hit.


Sweetness was written by Bill Parkinson, a session man Mike used on many of the cover versions he did for Reditunes. At the end of a session at Radio Luxemburg, Mike recorded Sweetness at the 4 track studio there. The band on the track were the same guys who recorded Hey Hey Jump Now/ Goodbye (CBS 7760) as The One Hit Wonders.
The track also has a strange monophonic Phasing/Flanging effect quite unlike the swooshing phasing so prevalent in ’67. MB “The original phasing was great. I first heard it on Timi Yuro’s The Hurt. The second time I heard it was when I was in Regent Sound Studios when The Small Faces recorded Itchycoo Park. The engineer let me have a go at it. I’m not sure if my attempt at manual phasing (releasing one ¼ tape slightly after the other) was used on the record, but I just love phasingâ€Â.
Sweetness was the first British record to come out London American … MB: “ Nobody wanted to release it, but a friend of mine went to Geoff Milne at London Records who loved it, but we had to pretend it was an American record!â€Â
The B side is a fun Creedence Clearwater Revival recreation with a C&W bent and masses of gunfire sound effects.
“It had nothing on the B side except a backing track that I had done when in my John Fogerty mood. I loved Bad Mood Rising and we basically just tried to get the sound they got on Cosmo’s Factory. It was a tribute to John Fogerty.â€Â

Click on title for a soundclip of Sweetness

Wohnung Gesucht

It’s been ten years since I’ve had to move, but it looks like it’s that time again.

So, although much of what follows won’t make much sense to those outside of Berlin, here’s what I’m looking for.

At least 50 M2, not too high up (lots of stuff to schlep, so 2OG or lower), rent around 500, maybe a little more if warm. Ideally, I’d like to stay in the neighborhood I’m in and only move a block or two, but failing that I’ll take Mitte generally, Prenzlauer Berg if I have to, and I’m open to other ideas, although K36, Neukölln, Wedding, and Friedrichshain are of no interest. Also ideally, a Nachmieter or Untermieter situation, although the latter may be hard because I have furniture and books, etc.

Move-in between Jan. 1 and Feb. 1, 2008.

E-mail address is right there on the page.

I suspect that neither the search nor the move will be a whole lot of fun, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

While I was out of

While I was out of town at my parents’ farm near Samson, Alabama, the other editors of The High Hat, aka the best damn magazine on the web, managed to pull together Issue No. 9 without any help from yours truly at all. This goes without saying, but I’m going to say it, anyway: they are mindblowingly, forkbendingly, breathtakingly, worldshakingly awesome people, and it’s due to their smarts and diligence that every issue of the Hat is better than the last.

This one is dedicated to places, and is chock-full of stand-out articles, including Erika Jahneke on the ghosts of 9/11 in Rescue Me and World Trade Center, Shauna McKenna on Roma and Tokyo-Ga, and tons of brilliance, especially from the extra-prolific Phil Nugent and Steve Hicken.

I contributed a semi-considered article on the films Gerry and Grizzly Man and the tv shows Survivorman and Man Vs. Wild, all of which deal with little people lost in the huge indifference of Nature. Go check it out.

On another note, if you left me a comment asking for an email and haven’t received one yet, please let me know. I’ve tried to answer all the emails, but I’ve been a bit extra-scattered and smothered and even a little covered lately, what with my book in endgame plus stress of family tragedy and distractions related to our little nuclear family.

OUR LAST TWANG

Thanks to those of you who’ve kept up with this site in its evolution from every-so-often posts about music, film, politics, religion, children’s TV, adults’ TV, libertarianism, hockey, etc., up through its second-half incarnation as a straight-up mp3 blog. I’ve been caught in recycling my own previous writing & generally doing such a half-assed rush job with this blog that I figured I’d hang it up. I don’t have the time to do it the sort of justice I’d like, standards being low as they are. I also may have posted every obscuro song I really wanted you to hear, as well – but if you haven’t perused our archives, start with the January 27th, 2007 post – almost everything after that contains a song you should probably right-click on. Those won’t be up forever, so you might want to do that pretty soon.

In the meantime, I did another music-based blog called AGONY SHORTHAND from 2003 to 2006 that’s got everything I wrote still up & online. Check it out – it’ll take some time to digest all the not-enough-to-do-at-work mania. I still get all judgemental & excited about craft beer over at HEDONIST BEER JIVE too, and that shows no signs of abating any time soon. Thanks for reading – the links on the right over here’ll take you to even better places.

U.K. Baby –Heartbreaker

OK, it’s time to unleash Collin again. Don’t blame me if he bites you on the ankle or relieves himself in your flowerpot…

U.K. Baby –Heartbreaker/ Michael’s Blues –Imperial 66409 (1969 US issue)
(Originally released on Spark SRL 1030 as by The Baby)

Item One. Admission of Guilt:

I

have never liked more than a bare handful of tracks by the Sutherland Brothers.

There, I’ve said it.

You Got Me Anyway, Rock ‘N’ Roll Show… I know, I know! Consider me then Purepop’s cloth-eared Albert Speer – the blogger who said I’m sorry (and I am, believe me, Spandau not required).

And while I can not completely articulate my misgivings concerning the oeuvre of Sutherland Bros & Quiver, there is a certain item from their shared past that I will unflinchingly stand by.

‘Tis a curiously-named bouncing-bundle, by the nom of U.K. Baby. Maybe not snuff-up to the Last-Night-Of-The-Proms/Charge Of The Light Brigade standard advanced bravely by League of Empire Loyalist, U.K. Jones, nevertheless, this TWO-SIDED affray is lobster-back through and through. …and quite GROOOOOVY to boot (and much like later fellow bulldog breeders, The English Beat, the ‘U.K.’ here was a meritorious denotation reserved solely for those soldiering away in foreign service)!

Production-product of the same knob-twiddler as the elusive, Sorrow-full Eggy (Barry Kingston – same label too: Spark/ Imperial), Iain Sutherland and Co. here RAVE AND ROCK – swaddling clothes style – through what Who Put The Bomp! #13 describes as:

“A straightforward rocker with nice melodic touches and a break straight out of It’s All Too Much by The Beatles.â€Â

Appreciative and cultured Bomp! may be, they fail – in my opinion – to fully hone in on the true HEART-broken eye of this lovely little storm: That being the Charybdis-ian whirlpool of keys-guitars-and-handclaps Kingston summons around the 1:30-mark which he would later sharpen to hair-splitting perfection on Eggy’s You’re Still Mine. I can only imagine that Heartbreaker’came out first – it definitely has the feel of a practice-run by comparison to Eggy – but I could certainly be wrong and I don’t feel like squinting at matrix numbers. The b-side, comped and miss-titled all over the place, is decidedly commonplace; at least when sidled next to its black, Siamese twin. Treacly twee and Idle Race-y, it pales next to the stout, wave-ruling Heartbreaker. Being a pre-Sutherland Bro was obviously no picnic; the previous single they cut as A New Generation (also produced by Kingston) from a year before also had a ‘blues’ in the title! It’s one of those big, orchestral, flower power, opiate laments probably about a dog or torn kaftan or something. Less Fading Yellow, more piss-soiled white satin. Awwwww….

I SAY GROW A PAIR ‘PSYCH’ FANS AND ENLIST IN MORE WYMEN-BAITIN’ ROCK/POP/LESS BLUES! GO RE-WATCH ‘ZULU!’ SEE THE WORLD IN FANCY GAITORS! MEN, YOU KNOW JUST WHAT TO DO!

Pick To Clique: Heartbreaker