Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Just a quick note to memorialize my old iPod (80G) which died while trying to play a song from Cluster’s 1974 album Zuckerzeit, and to celebrate the arrival of my new iPod (160G), which will probably be too small to hold everything I’ll want it to, but still.

I’ve only loaded a bunch of my favorite playlists, Theoretical Box Sets, and Top 100s on it so far. The Inaugural Shuffle is after the jump.

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Ronnie Hawkins, Rock And Roll Resurrection

File Between: Fats Domino and Mott The Hoople

Comments: Most famous as the 50s rock & roller behind whom the Band was initially formed, Ronnie Hawkins had been flying under the radar for a good decade when he cut this comeback record (actually, every record he cut after 1962 was a comeback record, and on none of them did he ever come back, unless being famous in Canada counts). (It doesn’t.) I found it in a double-LP bargain set with his 1974 disc Giant Of Rock ’N’ Roll, and they’re of a piece: great old rock & roll covers with beefed-up 70s production. This disc has a solid New Orleans vibe, with prominent covers of Fats Domino and Lloyd Price, with a couple of Chuck Berrys and a Bo Diddley thrown in for good measure (but played Crescent City style). It wraps up with the sole contemporary song, Kris Kristofferson’s “The Same Old Song” (which Kristofferson wouldn’t get around to cutting for another two years), a gently noble lament which is out of place among all the good-time cheer and bragadoccio of rock & roll.

A Keeper? Hawkins doesn’t distinguish himself as a great singer, but as a singer of songs you can hear sung by every oldies act in every dive in America, he does fine.

Vinyl Rip: The Same Old Song

85. The Dixie Chicks, Home

JB: I have to admit, this album wormed its way into my good graces from its very first note: a guitar-banjo duet is always going to put a smile on my face. Following that good-time stomper with a pitch-perfect Fleetwood Mac cover nearly made the tears spring to my eyes. (I unabashedly adore the Nicks-Buckingham period.) The fact that the rest of the record never really lived up to that opening one-two punch doesn’t mean it wasn’t terrific anyway.

I’ve never really listened to the Dixie Chicks before, though of course I knew who they were — the ridiculous response to their perfectly justified (and in light of current polls, prescient) comments about Bush, their reputation for holding to traditional country elements in defiance of the pop-with-a-cowboy-hat Nashville establishment, the gleeful revenge fantasy “Goodbye Earl.” For some reason, though, I had the impression that they were more or less lightweights. Perhaps it’s residual sexism and/or rockism from my days as a true-believing rock & roller (ca. 1996-2002), but in another of those self-defeating never-heards, I’d convinced myself that since I hadn’t listened to them by now they weren’t really worth listening to. (Probably, come to think of it, some elitism in there as well. I mean, they win Grammys, which no self-respecting music act should ever do.)

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Yes, Close To The Edge

File Between: Mahavishnu Orchestra and Led Zeppelin

Comments: I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of Yes, but every time I listen to a Yes record I have to ask myself why I’m not. Then Jon Anderson starts singing and I say, “oh yeah, that’s why.” Unlike the typical progressive rock band, they’re not limited to the Western canon from Bach to Chuck Berry — they have serious elements of funk, fusion jazz, Middle Eastern music, and avant-garde sonics of the kind Brian Eno would make his name exploring in the rest of the decade. Squire, Bruford, and Howe are among the most forward-thinking instrumentalists of their day. Then Anderson comes in with his dippy sci-fi lyrics and helium vocals, and I have to wait for another fine instrumental passage. But then, too, whenever Rick Wakeman dominates, the whole thing tends to comes crashing to a deathly boring halt — although his supremely dull organ solo on the side-long title track is followed by a whiz-bang showcase once the rest of the band comes back in. It’s one of the better side-long tracks of the era (and yes, I have listened to quite a few; a formal study was cut short by the death of my iPod). The second side is less invigorating: the ten-minute “And You And I” is as goopy as its title sounds (though their rhythmic sense is still strong even in an acoustic ballad), and the nine-minute “Siberian Khatru” is too many good ideas stuffed in with a too many dodgy ones (a harpsichord solo right after the sitar solo?), but it’s pretty great funk-rock in several sections.

A Keeper? It’s not my favorite Yes album, but then Yes never made an album I’ve loved all the way through. Maybe Tales From Topographic Oceans. Maybe.

Vinyl Rip: Siberian Khatru

Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, Chameleon

File Between: The Bee Gees and Neil Diamond

Comments: The sense of having lucked upon an undiscovered psych-pop masterpiece slowly gives way to the realization that it’s just another AM-pop record, albeit a pretentious one. Pretentiousness was in pretty high demand in the early 70s, as rock artists vied to show off how many high-culture references they could stuff into their overblown concept albums and jazz artists started talking about how fusion was the way of the future. Even the dependable, schmaltzy Seasons were not immune, and Chameleon finds them pitched halfway between the wacked-out studio psych of 1969’s The Geniune Imitation Life Gazette and 1975’s genteel disco-for-the-Lawrence-Welk-set “December, 1963 (Oh What A Night).” The first side is a suite of sorts, with repeated musical phrases and two songs with the same title bookending it; the second side drifts more into lamely sensitive grownup-pop. The production values are over-the-top — it’s a Motown record, and when early-70s Motown wasn’t letting geniuses do their thing, they were overloading their acts with unnecessary orchestrations — and ultimately it’s pretty dissatisfying. Frankie’s in fine voice — he’s just looking for something worth singing.

A Keeper? A couple songs scrape the edge of good-to-interesting, and I’m always a sucker for seeing what past-their-prime acts get up to out of the spotlight, but on the whole it’s a qualified flop.

Vinyl Rip: You’re A Song (That I Can’t Sing)