Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1975
by Scott Miller

"Bohemian Rhapsody" - Queen
1975 felt at the time like a year of decline—more so than 1974, which seemed at the time like a rebound year. The Beatles' supreme stylistic sway, as well as the pancultural attention they attracted for rock music, was on the wane. Turning 15, I was beginning to produce demo tapes and have conversations with people who listened for hits, and the sound they were listening for was light, slick grooving the likes of "Get Dancin'" by Disco Tex and the Sex-o-lettes and "Love Will Keep Us Together" by Captain and Tennille—the opposite of my skill horizon. Most harder rock was gravitating toward a juvenile audience—see Kiss. It was a year of decline for rock, but an explosive year for comedy targeting a rock audience, with the appearance of both "Saturday Night Live" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Queen's Night at the Opera, like a few inclusions here, was to the first approximation a comedy rock record—the shopworn rock opera concept played somewhere between camp and parody. Freddie Mercury, Brian May, and breakout producer Roy Thomas Baker were right for stardom in the post-Zappa universe where garish elements stood a chance of passing as some form of funny.

"Complainte Pour Ste. Catherine" - Kate and Anna McGarrigle
This very French language folk-style number is lyrically a piece of modernist poetry, not something devotional, although probably a lament of politics and expediency displacing spirituality. Particularly with the accordion, this is a forward-looking approach that would continue to make sense in the context of back-to-basics acts like Camper Van Beethoven.

"St. Elmo's Fire" - Eno
I first became aware of Brian Eno the avant-garde force (not just the Roxy wacko-glam synthesizer player) in a TV news item on the Portsmouth Sinfonia—an ostensibly straight-faced art project orchestra of untrained musicians—which Eno produced. It was fascinating, but illustrated a threat that could loom near Eno projects: an unreliable distrust of conventionally competent playing. This threat in no wise affected the 1973-1977 pop vocal records, which were generously decorated with world-class performances, here the mesmerizing Robert Fripp solo.

"No More Looking Back" - The Kinks
The Kinks tried to work the rock opera thing through most of the seventies; critics hated it as unproductive gesture—which, alas, it was—and since the world didn't have ears for the occasional redeeming track, it did them less good than just expending no thematic effort. I thought most of the songs on Schoolboys In Disgrace, especially this and "I'm In Disgrace," were a return to the high quality of Lola Vs. Powerman and the Money-go-round. The anti-education sentiment is a bad first step toward The Wall, but it had that 1975 excuse of being played somewhat for humor. "No More Looking Back" sure sounds like it should have been a hit, if anything by the Steve Miller Band can be.

"Little Johnny Jewel" [composite edit of sides A and B] - Television
Television turn one of the most bankable bass hooks I can remember into one of the milestone indie singles, applying Tom Verlaine's nascent crazed guitar lyricism and some beatnik teen-speak-chic lyrics (you know there's art afoot with someone named Verlaine singing "Little Johnny Jewel, he's so coo-wel"). I edited it—if I recall correctly, from about eight minutes down to about five minutes; Little Johnny is cool but not that cool.

"Lady Marmalade" - Labelle
One disco release I liked quite a bit was Labelle doing "Lady Marmalade." The song and Patti Labelle's vocal are 99% of the story here—fine, raunchy soul hit material, and all—but it's Allen Toussaint's production that gets my undivided attention. The horn charts are excellent, a little reminiscent of Chicago to me in their subtle chord shifts, and the New Orleans-based soul piano is grounded in things I like: I feel like I'm hearing a little Dr. John and a little Billy Preston in there. I guess what we're hearing is mostly the Meters.

"I Don't Know Why" - The Rolling Stones
Allen Klein's head-scratching odds and ends concoction Metamorphosis proves you can drill down pretty far and still not find bad Stones material. This 1969 recording of a Stevie Wonder song is absolutely first-rate, especially Mick Taylor's electrifying slide guitar solo.

"End of the Line" - Roxy Music
On Siren, Roxy started being less outright peculiar, if you don't count the communist dictator get-up Bryan Ferry wore on the tour for it. "Love Is the Drug" and "Both Ends Burning" are good songs and more obvious choices, but "End of the Line," with its country twang and spine-tingling harmonies, is the one I most relish actually listening to.

"Better Off Dead" - Elton John
What might surprise today's music fans looking back at the willfully grotesque autobiography Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy is what a gigantic hit it was. Elton John was such a megastar, he could for years put out seriously pointless music, and it just didn't stop selling. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" is a truly awful song—a saccharine melodic non-starter where the singer pats himself on the back for leaving someone at the altar. "Sugar bear" is rhymed with "You almost had your hooks in me, din-cha-dear?" You don't think songwriting can get worse than that—until, "Thank God my music's still alive." Is this a joke I'm not in on? But I digress. "Better Off Dead" is an entirely swell little result tucked away near the end of it all; the lyrics are as expressionistically overheated as the worst of the Captain Fantastic material, but somehow they work. The musical invention is firing on all cylinders, the fancy vocal arrangement is well worth the effort, and that drum echo that's louder than the original signal is twisted genius.

"Thunder Road" - Bruce Springsteen
I have a serious love/hate relationship with this song. For the most part, I think the album is overrated; there's just not enough there there in the composition. "Thunder Road" is the one that stretches out the most, and it's the one I like the most, but from the first sung lyric it stays a little aimless. The finale always gives me chills, and makes the road straighten behind it as it were—but I'm not sure I'm proud of that reaction. Really the singer is feeding this poor girl such a banquet of self-mythologizing nonsense as to make one weep. The message is: "Trade in these wings on some wheels... It's a town full of losers/I'm pulling out of here to win." Quiet good deeds and unheralded personal sanctity are for suckers; it's all about cobbling together an elitist worldview from whole cloth and putting it over for material advantage. So, this is good wild-oatsy stuff, but I'll say it again: if you want world-class lyrics with a reasonable ethical grounding, go try that joke of a flitty chimera David Bowie.

"Poker" - Electric Light Orchestra
ELO do in fact have their fans among hipsters, but often enough a case needs to be made that they compete convincingly for your seventies rock dollar. "Poker" is a stunning track—it's fast, it's hook-filled, and the orchestral strings gimmick finally comes off as a good faith effort to rock harder. The lyrics are a great, big step up for Jeff Lynne, and as fate would have it, work as a knowing and prophetic answer to the Bruce of "Thunder Road": "The ace that's hiding up your sleeve/Will cause the world to grieve/The love you had is gone...The dream in every player's heart/To win it all, not part."

"How Many Friends" - The Who
Do people even remember there was a Who album called The Who By Numbers? With the cringe-inducing single "Squeeze Box," it would be understandable if they didn't voluntarily. But it's a great album—pound for pound, their third best after Who's Next and Tommy. "How Many Friends" is very frank confessional—including what I take to be a gay encounter with dubious motives, and an articulation of betrayal by the music business. Moon is great; Entwistle is great. I find the chorus unforgettable, and what a seventies treasure is the rhyming of "sum us up" with "bum us up."

"Gloria" - Patti Smith Group
Horses is an awesome whole album. I want to give "Land" a lot of credit for how petrified I was the first time I listened to it at 2:00 a.m. in the dark on headphones. But as with the Doors, this isn't just a poet's album, there's a lot going on here musically. The poetry is definitely a young person's, ultimately just a cheap transgressive high dressed up, but what a dressing up. Everyday experience becomes a facade ready to give way to an "atmosphere where anything's allowed"—here, conquering a "sweet young thing" in the manner of Van Morrison and Them, tracing the impediment morality to the executive level: "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." That's still one of the most bracing opening lines in any piece of music.

"Win" - David Bowie
"Win" is the standout track of the bizarre, sometimes very disappointing Young Americans album. The Lennon collaboration "Fame" is great; Lennon's "Across the Universe" is horrid. Game to make a true Philly soul album and possibly extremely coked up, Bowie came up with such staggering lyric sets as "Young Americans," and such gorgeous music as the slow soul burn of "Win," putting David Sanborn to inspired use. Not quite the equal of "Young Americans," "Win" is still a fantastic set ("Life lies dumb on its heroes/Wear your wound with honor, make someone proud/ Someone like you should not be allowed to start any fires") and how about those incredible backing vocals?

"Something for the Girl with Everything" - Sparks
The Mael brothers, looking something like a much fruitier Kevin Cronin on vocals and Adolph Hitler on keyboards, began a long career holding pattern after 1974's brilliant Kimono My House—but their best song is here, on the mostly not great Propaganda. The deliciously twisted baroque melody supports a drama whose deftly constructed backstory involves a young girl who has to be paid off in gargantuan favors lest she reveal some deadly secret. Muff Winwood's production is 2:16 of glam adrenaline. "Wow, the engine's really loud!"

"The Rover" - Led Zeppelin
The production here is modest. It's easy to imagine them walking into any band's practice studio and demonstrating just through the might of their talent what separates the sounds they make from those of mere mortals. Consider the dinky sound of Page's guitar on the middle solo; yet, it holds together as if its gravity were enormous. There's enough transparency here to observe just how much Jones's growling bass accomplishes, especially in tandem with Bonham. I seem to recall Mitch Easter and I agreeing in about 1986 that this was the secret great Zeppelin cut—in both our cases, the first of theirs we'd cover if an opportunity arose.

"Mondo Bondage" - The Tubes
Before their period of cranking out rather humdrum smash hits like "Talk To Ya Later," San Francisco's The Tubes had their day as the most compelling of the comedy-oriented rock acts, with a beautifully over-the-top cabaret presentation, and just maybe the world's best assemblage of musicians on a good day. Drummer Prairie Prince was very possibly the best drummer, with Moon in slight decline; Michael Cotton played synthesizer with an ultramodern sheen that could turn maniacally savage, as on the solo here. "Mondo Bondage," one of their various semi-satire production numbers—this one a photo op for on-stage fetish costumes featuring somewhat undressed model Re Styles—is a brilliant piece of music. The main groove is a throttling round of electric guitar, clav, synth, and the occasional orchestra hit; the chorus is a mind-bending double-time 7/4 pattern over a half-time 7/4 pattern. Al Kooper's production is theatrical perfection. Then there's singer Fee Waybill, for whom words fail in a couple of ways; mostly, he's really good. I remember some critic referring to his range as, "two notes, both flat." Cute comment, but I don't think so, bub. Check out the pre-autotune final note of the performance here and tell me how good your favorite singer would sound attempting that. Or any of this challenging delivery, actually.

"Wish You Were Here" - Pink Floyd
Ah, a return to the great early post-Barrett Floyd days—exemplified on Meddle—of one song, one clever sonic idea. The hyperintelligently paced and deployed Wish You Were Here was the best Pink Floyd album, the last one before Waters became angstminister. So there's this crummy transistor radio playing in one speaker, changing stations, and after it settles on a little acoustic guitar pattern for a while, a live guitarist who's in a room next to the radio, starts playing along (stunningly, one has to add), and eventually the song comes in. See, that's what I call getting my entertainment dollar's worth. Pink Floyd's lyrics don't ever get scarily good, but these are just right in a Dylan kind of way. There's an odd lack of punchline payoff in the litany of things the listener thinks he can tell, or they got him to trade. "Hot ashes for trees... a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage." Help me out. The second thing (trees) starts out being better, but then the first thing (a walk-on part in the war) is better, right? I mean, a lead role in a cage does not sound good. Still, war? Anyway, none of that really matters; it all somehow gets a feeling of shared disillusionment across. "Running over the same old ground/What have we found?/The same old fear/Wish you were here" is more loving than hopeless—and the Floyd don't allow themselves that tone lightly.