PAUL WILLIAMS - Here Comes Inspiration 1974

This is one of those albums who's history has been lost in the mists of time. I can't remember exactly when in 1974 I bought it or why, but at the time I enjoyed it - an oasis of middle-of-the-road pleasant music during a year when I also bought other albums of various genres - T. Rex 'Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow', Nilsson's 'Pussy Cats', Gram Parson's 'Grievous Angel' and Cat Stevens 'Buddha and the Chocolate Box' etc., etc.

Paul Williams is a prolific singer/songwriter, but I'm sure many only know his name by association with covers of his work. I've seen one reviewer (Charles Donovan) describe his voice as "a weak, bleating non-instrument" which I think is very unfair. It's a distinctive voice and as with some other singer/songwriters it may not be the best in the world but it is the only one that can translate the words into music with original feeling. 

Paul has written such a broad range of material that he really defies categorizing. Many of his songs were picked up and made popular by 'adult contemporary' artists along the lines of -
The Carpenters .. 'Rainy Days and Mondays', 'We've Only Just Begun', 'I Won't Last a Day Without You'
Three Dog Night .. 'An Old Fashioned Love Song', 'Family of Man', 'Out In the Country' as well as Helen Reddy with 'You and Me Against the World' and Barbra Streisand's 'Evergreen' from "A Star is Born".

Some of his other work though spans a wide and diverse range of styles and artists. The soundtracks to the 1974 movie "Phantom of the Paradise" (in which he also acted) and the joyous 1976 "Bugsy Malone" starring a young Jodie Foster. How could anyone forget Kermit the Frog singing 'Rainbow Connection' or the lyrics to the cheesy long running TV show "The Love Boat".

Even his very early work was taken by artists who were polar opposites. 'Fill Your Heart' was co-written by Paul and Biff Rose and it was recorded on Biff's first album, but two other artists also covered it. One - on one end of the spectrum - was Tiny Tim on his album 'God Bless Tiny Tim'. The other - as far from Tiny Tim as possible - was David Bowie on his 'Hunky Dory' album. Talk about the odd couple !!

Even more remarkable was Paul's contribution in 2012 to the Daft Punk album 'Random Access Memory'. He co-wrote 'Beyond' and also co-wrote and sang on 'Touch'. In 2014 he and Nile Rodgers spoke about Daft Punk at the Grammies. Paul related a story about them .."Back when I was drinking, I would imagine things that weren't there and I'd get frightened. Then I got sober and two robots called and asked me to make an album."  

I like this 'Here Comes Inspiration' album for a number of reasons. It has Paul's own versions of some of his classic songs .. 'You and Me Against the World', 'Rainy Days & Mondays' but also has a bit of fun too. The opening track, just 54 seconds long, mentions a couple of Paul's contemporaries, Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson. The track is called 'Nilsson Sings Newman' which was actually the title of a Nilsson album from 1970.
"You don't like Schumann
Or Randy Newman
And Nilsson's not your cup of tea
You say Van Heusen is the shirt worth choosin'
But you're still undecided about me"

Two tracks later he tends to disparage himself again on 'You Know Me' with a comparison to Cole Porter and a comment about his own height (he's 5'2") ..
"Sentimental fellow
Sometimes overmellow
Writing verses no one plans to do
I know I'm no Cole Porter
I'm noticeably shorter
Do I deserve to have someone like you".

Singer, songwriter, actor and author, Paul turned 81 in September 2021. You'll hear his music everywhere you go but just occasionally do yourself a favour and listen to him doing it himself. It's not the best voice, certainly not the worst, but it's honest.

In the Beginning

You and Me Against the World

CARAVAN - Canterbury Tales: The Best of.. 1976

This double album in all it's typical 70's gatefold glory just fell into my lap quite recently. I have to admit I had never heard of Caravan, didn't know their songs, didn't know the members of the group - nothing. They never really made it, falling into the void of 'also-rans'. No commercial singles and although they released quite a catalogue the best they did was #50 on the album charts.

Because of that, it was very strange playing the tracks all these years later. This is a compilation so some songs are over 50 years old. I've never been adverse to a bit of prog rock and I've written about it in Vinyl Vault before, bands like ELP, Magna Carta and my favourites, Curved Air (Vinyl Vault 18 Jun 2020). However, playing what is effectively brand new 50 year old prog rock is a different kettle of fish. It's strangely familiar but still unknown, potentially pretentious but at the same time you have to push aside 2021 and listen with 1970's ears. That way it is fresh and experimental and does what it says on the tin. Prog rock may be a bit of a wide brush for Caravan. Due to them being from the Canterbury area they're also termed as part of the "Canterbury Scene" which although predominantly prog rock also blended psychedelia, rock and jazz into the mix.

The two opening tracks are almost mainstream - 'If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You' and the very pleasant 'Aristocracy'. Then there's the typical slightly self-indulgent prog-rockyness of track 3 on side 1. It's an 18 minute combination of three titles - 'Can't Be Long Now / For Richard / Warlock'. If you thought that was a marathon, strap yourself in for ALL of side 2. This is a 22+ minute opus of 9 individual titles. They're spelled out on the gatefold but I've given it the short title of 'Nine Feet Underground'.

Side 3 opens with an odd bit of cheeky-chappy stuff, 'Golf Girl'. It's about cups of tea and has a trombone that is the equivalent of someone blowing raspberries while a piccolo attempts to imitate Ian Anderson's Jethro Tull flute playing.

'Hoedown' almost is.

Once again there's a 4 title combination that takes 12½ minutes to close out this side of the album, called 'The Love in Your Eye' for brevity. The last side of this double album starts with 'Memory Lain, Hugh' then drops straight into 'Headloss' with a drastic change of style and tempo, switching gears to an almost Top of the Pops foot-tapper. Not expected but a bit of light relief after the intensity ?? eccentricity ?? of some previous tracks. 'Virgin on the Ridiculous' is taken from a live show in 1973 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It's quite heavily orchestrated but still cuts into sort of 'Yes-light' breaks, as does the last track 'The Dog, The Dog, He's at it Again'. The lyrics of that last song seem blatant and obvious but I think I need to listen and re-read a few times, there could/should be a deeper meaning.

This is the 1976 pressing of the double vinyl album, not to be confused with the 1994 2-CD release of the same name. Oddly the CD version had 10 more tracks than the vinyl, but 4 of the original vinyl tracks were left off, so of the 21 tracks on the 1994 set only 7 appeared on the 1976 release. Got that ?? Good.

So that's Caravan. It took me 50 years but I got there and some of it was worth the wait. 

If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You

Aristocracy

BEE GEES - Odessa 1969

 This was a double album presented in a plush red flocked cover with the text embossed in gold lettering. As you can see by the photo, that's clearly not the copy I have. 

Mine is a single disc sampler with commentary, no separators and a continuous mix. The cover clearly states "Promotional LP for record department in-store-play". There are five songs on each side giving 10 selections from a total of 17 tracks on the full commercial release. To add to the unusual quality of this album, there is a hand-written notation on the cover which reads 

"To Pete, from the Gibb Brothers Thanx for all your help". So far, the identities of 'Pete' and the writer of the message are unknown. Through a series of connections, in fact 3 degrees of separation, I managed to get a photo of the cover and inscription to Dick Ashby, 1960s road manager and then decades as personal manager to the Bee Gees. His comment in part was "The hand written message does not appear to be that of either Barry, Robin or Maurice. Having said all that if this is indeed a genuine Atco Records sampler I imagine it would be very rare indeed".

The sixties promoted the idea of 'concept' albums, either albums with a common musical or narrative theme running through them. Think of stuff like The Small Faces 'Ogdens Nut Gone Flake', or Moody Blues 'Days of Future Passed' and of course 'Tommy' by The Who, the rock opera phase.

Starting life under the name 'An American Opera', which was later changed to 'Masterpeace', the double set of 'Odessa' was meant to be a concept album about a fictional ship, The Veronica, set in 1899.  It didn't end up that way, but it did scuttle the group for a while. The whole concept thing got a bit disjointed, too many points of view, too many cooks spoiling the broth. Even though the inside of the gatefold album featured an illustration of a sea tragedy with a child being thrown down to a lifeboat, the album as a whole was no longer built around the storyline. There were also disputes about the actual songs, particularly which one would be released as a single from the album. Robin wanted his vocal on 'Lamplight' to be the one, but it was relegated to a b-side on the back of Barry's vocal on 'First of May'. Passions were so high that Robin left the group for a couple of years and recorded a solo album.

To be honest, back in the day I always leaned towards Robins vocals anyway. Things like 'I Can't See Nobody', 'Massachusetts' and - from my favourite album "Idea" (Vinyl Vault 2 July 2020) 'Indian Gin and Whisky Dry' and 'I Started a Joke'.

After an album is released it's pretty common for a re-release to include extra tracks, demos, alternate mixes etc. That did happen to Odessa in 2009 when a 3-CD set was released. Oddly though, in 1976, 7 years after the 1969 double album, RSO Records issued a single-disc version which cut 7 tracks from the original, the contentious 'Lamplight' was one of them. 

The title track 'Odessa (City on the Black Sea)' is a 7+ minute loose story of a man adrift on an iceberg after a shipwreck, which holds to the original idea. After that the rest of the album travels (IMHO) into various disparate directions and styles. There's the countryfied 'Marley Purt Drive' and the strange homage to Thomas Edison on 'Edison' telling us about electric lights and cylinder music players. There are 3 instrumentals, reminiscent of the aforementioned Moody Blues stuff, although 2 of them were amongst the tracks dropped for the 1976 single-disc release.

Waiting until the penultimate track on the 4th side of the original double album here's Barry with the lush ballad 'First of May', pulling at heart strings and spreading a thick layer of nostalgia. The album ends with one of the subsequently cut instrumentals 'The British Opera', full of orchestration and ethereal 'ooh's and aah's'.

Although I don't have the vinyl of the original album I do have the digital version. I find it a bit confusing, a bit hit and miss, particularly coming after 'Idea', but the saving grace is that it also came before disco !!

Odessa (City on the Black Sea)

First of May

EURYTHMICS - Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) 1983

 In the early 80's I had a home-recorded cassette version of a song called 'Jennifer' that I loved. Played it to death. Never really bothered to find out who sang it. It never occurred to me it could be The Eurythmics.

"Jennifer with your orange hair
Jennifer with your green eyes
Jennifer in your dress of deepest purple
Jennifer, where are you tonight?
Underneath the water
Underneath the water
Underneath the water"

That's it - that's pretty much the whole song, but it's ethereal, enigmatic, surreal, hypnotic. Well, it is to me. If I'd bothered to look I would have seen that on the album cover and on the video clip for 'Sweet Dreams' Annie Lennox had orange hair !!

In 1986 I took a contract to work in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Entertainment was scarce, at the time there was no radio, an unreliable one channel satellite TV signal from Australia and a bunch of knock-off, bootlegged dodgy cassettes. Then, one day, I came across this tape shown in the photo. A genuine, commercial licensed version of a real album - and not only that, it had 'Jennifer' on it !! It was quite a while later when I managed to pick up an old copy on vinyl and not long after that, their 'Greatest Hits' arrived on CD and that opened up almost 9 years worth of good stuff.

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart had been working together before they became The Eurythmics. In 1976 they were part of a punk band called The Catch and later they had a couple of songs on the charts as part of a 4-piece group called The Tourists. In 1979 The Tourists did a cover of Dusty Springfield's 'I Only Want To Be With You' that made it to #4 in the UK.

This is the second Eurythmics album, their first, 'In The Garden' sank into oblivion but with the release of this one in 1983, two things happened. The Eurythmics became a worldwide phenomenon and people who previously didn't know began to hear the word 'androgyny'. Annie Lennox's distinctive look in the music video for 'Sweet Dreams' combining cropped hair and men's clothing seemed to be the polar opposite to seeing Boy George in full performance mode.

The first song on the album, 'Love is a Stranger', although initially nowhere near as popular as the title track, has been re-released twice and now ranks as one of their well-known staples. The album as a whole is still very early electronic pop, new wave and bits of R&B sneaking in. It was a promise of things to come, particularly the power and range of Annie's voice. If I could break ranks from the Vinyl world, I'd certainly recommend getting either 'Greatest Hits' or the later 'Ultimate Collection' on CD. All the singles released between '83 and '90 are worth collecting. I still get chills when I hear the opening of 'There Must Be An Angel (playing with my heart)'. Don't stop there, do yourself a favour and get Annie's solo album 'Medusa' - the hits just keep on coming.

I have to mention a Dave Stewart instrumental composition he did in 1989 for the Dutch movie 'De Kassière'. He brought in saxophonist Candy Dulfer and together they released 'Lily Was Here'. Prior to that, Candy hadn't released anything, but the success of the single led to her album 'Saxuality' the following year. If you're into smooth jazz, search it out.   

The Tourists 1979 I Only Want To Be With You

Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)

Jennifer

NIRVANA - In Utero 1993 (Limited Edition, Clear)

 

I saw Dave Grohl on The Graham Norton Show recently and it prompted me to take this album out for a ride. 'In Utero' sold close to 5 million copies but I'm fortunate to own one of only 15,000 special limited editions pressed on clear vinyl. The photos show the very slight blue/green hue the album has. 

This is the band's 3rd and last studio album, the second to feature Dave Grohl. Their previous release, 'Nevermind' had sold at last count over 30 million copies and has one of the most instantly recognisable covers in music album artwork. Controversially the photo used of the naked baby boy swimming after a dollar bill is the subject of long on-going legal action. On the plus side, that album gave us 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' and 'Come As You Are' among others.

This album though was a bit more .. um .. inaccessible ?? .. is that the right word? Certainly in it's original form the record company didn't even think it was commercial enough to sell. Producer Steve Albini had created a much more basic, raw sound than their previous work and after the studio raised concerns he refused to do anything to make it more .. again, what's the word .. acceptable ?? Anyhooow, R.E.M. producer Scott Litt was brought in to tweak stuff and he also remixed the singles 'Heart-Shaped Box' and 'All Apologies'.

'All Apologies' almost became Kurt Cobains swan song. It was the #1 charting track from the album and after Kurt's death in 1994 'Unplugged' was released and the clip of Kurt singing 'All Apologies' is the one most frequently associated with the video and album. Pity really, 'cos he does a great version of Bowie's 'The Man Who Sold The World'.

In 2014 the surviving members of Nirvana were at the 29th Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction with a twist. They invited four female singers to cover the band's songs - Joan Jett, who sang 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', St. Vincent did 'Lithium', Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth sang 'Aneurysm' and to top it off, Lorde did a strong, grungie heartfelt version of the main track from this album, 'All Apologies'. Lorde was just getting her feet on the ground, what a massive endorsement this was.

Nirvana came and went, but their shockwaves are still rippling in ever-outward circles.

All Apologies

Lorde and Nirvana 'All Apologies'

MORRISSEY - California Son 2019

In the world of music, things change. Sometimes it's evolution, a natural progression of art and skill. Pink Floyds journey from early experimental works such as 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' through 'Meddle' to the glory that is 'Dark Side of the Moon'. 

Sometimes it's environment and exposure. The Beatles were masters of the 3 minute pop song, then Dylan got them stoned and they teased us with 'Revolver' then hit us with 'Sgt. Pepper'.

For years Rod Stewart was the lad, even when he threw a ballad in the mix, he was always going to come back with a punchy raw gut-rocker to let you know he was still there, still doing it. In the other column of the ledger there are 5 albums of The Great American Songbook.

All of that is great and all of that is exactly how things should have happened.
Then there's this. In culinary terms, this is deep fried Mars Bars, it's a slice of cheese on Christmas cake, it's balsamic vinegar on strawberries. It shouldn't work - but it does.

There's no denying that Morrissey has a good voice. It's distinctive, there's a quality and he can carry a tune. That's just as well, because there's a wide variety of tunes he's picked to carry. It pleases me to say that he does a very commendable version of Dylan's 'Only a Pawn in Their Game'. He doesn't try to be clever or too "Morrissey", he just delivers. Sticking with the protesty controvertial stuff he does Phil Ochs 'Days of Decision', Buffy Saint-Marie's 'Suffer the Little Children' and Joni Mitchell's 'Don't Interrupt the Sorrow'.

There's the plaintive lyrics of 'Lenny's Tune' by Tim Hardin, originally titled and recorded by Nico as 'Eulogy For Lenny Bruce'. It's a hard song to hear, harder to sing, but plays well here. Likewise, unexpectedly Melanie Safka's music makes an appearance. Taken from her album 'Gather Me'. Morrissey picked the dark, brooding 'Some Say I Got Devil'. Knowing Morrissey perhaps it was the obvious choice, on the same album Melanie recorded 'Brand New Key' so he was hardly likely to pick that.

Or was he ???

Back to this 'California Son' album, all of a sudden we're listening to Morrissey singing the Gary Puckett & The Union Gap staple 'Lady Willpower' ! Where did that come from? Almost as quirky as the Laura Nyro penned 'Wedding Bell Blues'. But wait, there's more. If you're in any doubt as to the coverage Morrissey gives to nostalgia just listen to his version of the Roy Orbison classic 'It's Over'. Who'da thunk it !! 

Morrissey is too controversial to just sit back and think about why he chose these songs. Whatever reasons you come up with can be argued and built up or destroyed. Don't think of the politics, the protests or the appeal to baby boomers. If you can, just let the music wash over you and try to reconcile the sounds with the same guy who brought you 'Girlfriend in a Coma'.

Has he changed? No, it's still Morrissey, but which version - the hypocrite, the enigma, the miserable cold hearted older guy looking to gain some favour? It doesn't matter, sit back, enjoy and take the whole thing at face value.

Suffer the Little Children

Wedding Bell Blues