THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE
ARE YOU EXPERIENCED
1967-REPRISE
Produced By CHAS CHANDLER
1. Purple Haze
2. Manic Depression
3. Hey Joe
4. Love Or Confusion
5. May This Be Love
6. I Don’t Live Today
7. The Wind Cries Mary
8. Fire
9. Third Stone From The Sun
10. Foxey Lady
11. Are You Experienced?
The version of Are You Experienced that you are familiar with depends solely on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you reside on. Hendrix was a struggling session player when he was discovered by former Animals bassist Chas Chandler in 1966. He was flown to England, where Chandler put together the Experience and the band began recording. Are You Experienced was an immediate success in England, and after a slow start took off in the US as well, and it’s now considered one of the greatest albums of all time. And even though there are major differences in the US and UK versions, it’s a classic either way. The exclusive US tracks are “Purple Haze”, “Hey Joe” and “The Wind Cries Mary”, while the UK version boasts “Red House”, “Can You See Me” and “Remember”. The album covers are also very different, changed for the US version because Hendrix hated the UK cover. But regardless of which version you have (or prefer), there’s no denying that this is one great mother of an album.
Are You Experienced changed the way the electric guitar was played in rock forever. It also changed the way rockers played the blues forever, and ignited the styles of Led Zeppelin and everyone else who came along behind Hendrix. “Purple Haze”, “Manic Depression” and “Hey Joe” make up one of the strongest beginnings an album could have. Some of the songs here are not as well known, but there isn’t a weak track to be found, on either version. “I Don’t Live Today” has a wonderfully furious chorus, while “Third Stone From The Sun” melds Hendrix’ perfect soloing with the sharp psychedelic sounds of the late 60’s. Are You Experienced shows that Hendrix was not only a wizard on the guitar, but that he also had the songs to make it all work perfectly. Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell provide the expert rhythm: Hendrix provides everything else. This album is simply a classic, perfect record. Flawless and undeniably important in the history of rock guitar. _________________ I'm leaning on the threshold
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JOHN HIATT
WALK ON
1995-CAPITOL
Produced By DON SMITH
1. Cry Love
2. You Must Go
3. Walk On
4. Good As She Could Be
5. The River Knows Your Name
6. Native Son
7. Dust Down A Country Road
8. Ethylene
9. I Can’t Wait
10. Shredding The Document
11. Wrote It Down And Burned It
12. Your Love Is My Rest
13. Friend Of Mine
14. Mile High
Waiting for John Hiatt to finally turn that corner and become the truly great artist you know he could be is like waiting for Paul McCartney to make that one great solo album. Folks, it just ain’t gonna happen. Hiatt spent the 70’s and 80’s on the verge of being truly great, but he could never quite turn that corner. He made a series of almost, but not quite, great albums…Slug Line, Riding With The King, and Slow Turning were almost, but not quite, those albums. And by the time the 90’s rolled around, Hiatt seemed resigned to being what his career had become: almost, but not quite. After Slow Turning, Hiatt slipped into somewhat of a musical coma, putting out marginal albums trading on the same sound over and over again. There were always great bits on his albums, as demonstrated by the impressive list of artists who have covered his material over the years. The best album of this later period is, by far, 1995’s Walk On. His thirteenth album, released 20 years after his debut, it finally garnered him a Grammy nomination, but it was still not that “over the hump” album that his fans had waited so long for.
The highlights of Walk On are the rocking “Good As She Could Be”, the beautiful “You Must Go” (which features Gary Louris and Mark Olson from The Jayhawks), and one of his best pop songs, “Shredding The Document”. But as good as the album can sound, it also suffers from what plagues most of Hiatt’s albums: as good as it sounds while you’re listening, it’s also pretty much forgettable. It sounds comfortable, pleasant and nice, but when you’re done, you won’t remember much of it. The problem with Walk On is the same thing that has kept his career from being what it could have been: inconsistency. Hiatt weaves together a small handful of great songs with the thread of a lot of forgettable ones to make albums that are never bad, but that are also never close to great. He’s also never strung good albums together, which makes him a little more frustrating: Walk On was preceded by the forgettable Perfectly Good Guitar, and followed by the even worse Living A Little, Laughing A Little. It’s been 40 years now…this is what you are going to get with John Hiatt. Enjoyable, but not memorable.
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INDIGO GIRLS
SHAMING OF THE SUN
1997-EPIC
Produced By INDIGO GIRLS & DAVID LEONARD
1. Shame On You
2. Get Out The Map
3. Shed Your Skin
4. It’s Alright
5. Caramia
6. Don’t Give That Girl A Gun
7. Leeds
8. Scooter Boys
9. Everything In Its Own Time
10. Cut It Out
11. Burn All The Letters
12. Hey Kind Friend
By their sixth album, the sound of the Indigo Girls excellent self titled album had given way to more dense instrumentation, and unfortunately, a decline in the duo’s songwriting. Shaming Of The Sun is their low point, a collection of mostly forgettable songs that sounds almost completely uninspired…something that you’d never think of this group when they first appeared in 1989. But this was a full three years after the very good Swamp Ophelia, and the Girls had been struggling even then. By the time of this album, they sounded lost and more like they were going through the motions than anything else. By the last third of this album, you find yourself wondering why they even bothered. Tracks like “Scooter Boys”, “Burn All The Letters” and “Cut It Out” blend into each other in a singular mess that can be best described as “blah”.
But it doesn’t start out that way. “Shame On You” is one big, bad mother of a great song. Amy Ray sings it like she owns it (she does), and the full band setting, including some nice banjo picking by Emily Saliers, works to perfection with this folk anthem that should have been a hit for the Girls…but unfortunately wasn’t. “Shame On You” alone makes the album worth having, but there isn’t, unfortunately, much else to hang your hat on. “Get Out The Map” is good, but after “Shed Your Skin”, it’s a slow decline from there. You can get “Shame On You” on any compilation album released after 2000, which is all you really need from this album…but you really should have that song. Otherwise, pass in favor of pretty much anything else in their catalog.
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CAGE THE ELEPHANT
2008-RELENTLESS
Produced By JAY JOYCE
1. In One Ear
2. James Brown
3. Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked
4. Tiny Little Robots
5. Lotus
6. Back Against The Wall
7. Drones In The Valley
8. Judas
9. Back Stabbin’ Betty
10. Soil To The Sun
11. Free Love
From the rock and roll hotbed that is Bowling Green, Kentucky, Cage The Elephant soared to stardom with their debut self titled album in 2008. Specifically, “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked”, a blatant White Stripes sound alike that tore up the charts, turned the “rock is dead” press on its ear, and heralded the arrival of an exciting new band. Led by brothers Matt and Brad Shultz, Cage The Elephant was already getting a lot of attention for their wild live shows before the album came out…Matt Shultz was a wild man on stage with tendencies toward stage diving and cross dressing. “Ain’t No Rest”, despite sounding a lot like the Whites (Cage The “Elephant”?) has an energy all its own, as does the rest of the debut. And it’s not just the one song that carries this album. “Free Love”, “In One Ear”, and “Back Against The Wall” are also excellent, high energy songs that make this band and this album worth caring about.
The band has remained active since, releasing three more albums (and one on the way) and touring almost constantly. Their drummer, Jared Champion, was hospitalized in 2011 and Dave Grohl filled in for him. They’ve had varying degrees of success, and were nominated by Rolling Stone for Best New Artist of 2011, despite the fact that their first album had been out for two years and that they had just released their second. They are a band to keep an eye on for years to come, and one that carries the torch for rock and roll into the future. This makes their debut, although it’s not perfect by any means, worthwhile. Despite being quite derivative, Cage The Elephant does sound pretty great, and will be an important part of the band’s history…one I believe will go on for a lot of years. At least I hope so.
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FischmanRockMonster, JazzMeister, Bluesboy,ClassicalMasterProfile Land of Enchantment
CAGE THE ELEPHANT
2008-RELENTLESS
Produced By JAY JOYCE
1. In One Ear
2. James Brown
3. Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked
4. Tiny Little Robots
5. Lotus
6. Back Against The Wall
7. Drones In The Valley
8. Judas
9. Back Stabbin’ Betty
10. Soil To The Sun
11. Free Love
From the rock and roll hotbed that is Bowling Green, Kentucky, Cage The Elephant soared to stardom with their debut self titled album in 2008. Specifically, “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked”, a blatant White Stripes sound alike that tore up the charts, turned the “rock is dead” press on its ear, and heralded the arrival of an exciting new band. Led by brothers Matt and Brad Shultz, Cage The Elephant was already getting a lot of attention for their wild live shows before the album came out…Matt Shultz was a wild man on stage with tendencies toward stage diving and cross dressing. “Ain’t No Rest”, despite sounding a lot like the Whites (Cage The “Elephant”?) has an energy all its own, as does the rest of the debut. And it’s not just the one song that carries this album. “Free Love”, “In One Ear”, and “Back Against The Wall” are also excellent, high energy songs that make this band and this album worth caring about.
The band has remained active since, releasing three more albums (and one on the way) and touring almost constantly. Their drummer, Jared Champion, was hospitalized in 2011 and Dave Grohl filled in for him. They’ve had varying degrees of success, and were nominated by Rolling Stone for Best New Artist of 2011, despite the fact that their first album had been out for two years and that they had just released their second. They are a band to keep an eye on for years to come, and one that carries the torch for rock and roll into the future. This makes their debut, although it’s not perfect by any means, worthwhile. Despite being quite derivative, Cage The Elephant does sound pretty great, and will be an important part of the band’s history…one I believe will go on for a lot of years. At least I hope so.
This was a group/album my teenagers turned me on to an I took to it pretty well for the most part. Interestingly, I was not yet familiar with the White Stripes at the time, so I had no such derivative association to start with. Not surprisingly as a result, I continue to like this more than the Stripes, although I think I still would even if I had heard the Stripes first.
Bottom line, it's a very fun album, especially to sing and play along with. My son can whip out his acoustic and do a great Ain't No Rest for the Wicked.
JEFFERSON STARSHIP
GOLD
1979-GRUNT/RCA
Produced By LARRY COX & JEFFERSON STARSHIP
1. Ride The Tiger
2. Caroline
3. Play On Love
4. Miracles
5. Fast Buck Freddie
6. Light The Sky On Fire
7. With Your Love
8. St. Charles
9. Count On Me
10. Love Too Good
11. Runaway
12. Hyperdrive
Once upon a time there was a great band that came out of the San Francisco scene of the late 1960’s called the Jefferson Airplane. When the Airplane was in its dying stages, Paul Kantner, Marty Balin and Grace Slick turned the ashes of that band into the considerably lesser group that was known as the Jefferson Starship. Despite existing under nonstop deterioration, this band lasted for more than a decade before Kantner and Balin were both gone, leaving Slick and former Elvin Bishop singer Mickey Thomas to further desecrate the Airplane legacy as simply Starship, a unit that released the awful Knee Deep In The Hoopla and its ridiculous single, “We Built This City”. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Gold is a compilation from the first four Jefferson Starship albums, before the 80’s and the really bad taste kicked in. And although the period covered here (1974-78 ) is the strongest in the Starship history, you can hear how much weaker it is than just about everything recorded previously by the Airplane.
Part of the problem is Marty Balin and his penchant for straight balladry. Of the four albums represented, he has one ballad from each represented here, and they alone are what keeps Gold from being a better album. “Caroline” (from Ride The Tiger), “Miracles” (Red Octopus), “With Your Love” (Spitfire), and “Count On Me (Earth) represent everything that was wrong with this band. Without Balin at the front, they were at least interesting. “Ride The Tiger” is as hard as the band ever rocked, and it’s terrific. The other non-ballad tracks are satisfying enough to make up for the Balin shortcomings, particularly “Play On Love” and “St. Charles”. “Light The Sky On Fire” and “Hyperdrive” are inconsequential songs that were originally includes with the LP as a 7” single. Gold is as consistent and as good as Jefferson Starship ever got: this is better than having the uneven individual albums, and it has everything you could ever need from one of the most disappointing bands of the rock era.
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FischmanRockMonster, JazzMeister, Bluesboy,ClassicalMasterProfile Land of Enchantment
While there's no doubt the Starship was not the Airplane (and the later Starship was downright disgraceful), there were Starship moments that I think were on a par with Airplane. One album in particular sticks out. 1975's Red Octopus, despite only having one hit, was a great album from start to finish. So while they didn't usually pull it off, the Starship was certainly capable.
BARENAKED LADIES
STUNT
1998-REPRISE
Produced By SUSAN ROGERS, DAVID LEONARD & BARENAKED LADIES
1. One Week
2. It’s All Been Done
3. Light Up My Room
4. I’ll Be That Girl
5. Leave
6. Alcohol
7. Call And Answer
8. In The Car
9. Never Is Enough
10. Who Needs Sleep?
11. Told You So
12. Some Fantastic
13. When You Dream
Barenaked Ladies may be one of the most talented bands to have ever come out of Canada, but they may also be the most frustrating. Able to play pretty much any style thrown their way, they can sound like geniuses on one track and annoying pranksters on the next. The first Ladies album (Gordon) was released in 1992, and since that time, the band has amassed a huge collection of awards and accolades. They were even able to land a hit TV show theme song (The Big Bang Theory) that will keep them all comfortable for life. Founding members Ed Robertson and Stephen Page write songs that on occasion are right on the mark, and that sometimes try to be too cute and humorous. Their albums, as a result, tend to be uneven and inconsistent, with a few really terrific songs bunched together with a bunch more that just do not work. The balance of this is the measure of how good (or bad) a Barenaked Ladies album can be.
With that said, Stunt is their best selling, and their best overall album. One of the main reasons for that is “One Week”, by far the band’s best song and biggest hit. It contains verses that are sung at dizzying speed wrapped around a solid rock chorus. “It’s All Been Done”, “Call And Answer” and “Alcohol” are also very fine songs, and the rest is played well enough to keep the album from being a bad one. In fact, if you are a fan of the band, this is probably the one album you’ll want to own. It’s less inconsistent and less annoying than any of their other works, and because of how talented they are as musicians, it is a good thing to have one of their albums handy. Might as well be the one with “One Week” on it. Otherwise, compilations are probably the best way to go with this group.
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JIMMY PAGE & ROBERT PLANT
NO QUARTER: JIMMY PAGE & ROBERT PLANT UNLEDDED
1994-ATLANTIC
Produced By JIMMY PAGE & ROBERT PLANT
1. Nobody’s Fault But Mine
2. Thank You
3. No Quarter
4. Friends
5. Yallah
6. City Don’t Cry
7. Since I’ve Been Loving You
8. The Battle Of Evermore
9. Wonderful One
10. Wah Wah
11. That’s The Way
12. Gallows Pole
13. Four Sticks
14. Kashmir
When drummer John Bonham died in 1980, Led Zeppelin was no more. The three surviving members had briefly reunited twice during the 80’s for one off concerts, both of which went very badly. But in 1994, when Robert Plant was offered an MTV Unplugged special, the wheels were set in motion to include Jimmy Page as part of the deal. The result was this live album, recorded in August of 1994. It is not, technically, a Led Zeppelin reunion, as bassist John Paul Jones was not only not included, he was not even told about the project. He was upset with the pair that they had done so, and then called the album No Quarter, a Zeppelin song on which Jones was the primary writer. The majority of the album is acoustic (unplugged), with live string players and Middle Eastern musicians. The album contains reworked Zeppelin songs, and four Eastern influenced songs that fit nicely with the band songs. The result is less than Zeppelin of course, but still a satisfying journey.
Unlike the brief 80’s reunions, this project finds Plant’s voice in great shape, and Page in fine guitar form. “Gallows Pole”, “Thank You”, and “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” are the highlights, along with “Wonderful One”, a non Zeppelin song that sounds like it could have come right off of the third album. But the main event is “Kashmir”, a twelve and a half minute finale that brings down the house, and that shows that both men are still capable of greatness. Some of the songs don’t fare as well in the unplugged setting, but, overall, No Quarter is a satisfying reunion of two giants of hard rock presenting their material in a new way, giving the songs a freshness that would not be there had it just been a Led Zeppelin live album. The pair went on to record one studio album before calling it a day again in 1998, but at least they did this. It’s not Zeppelin, but it is something completely different…a bold and smart move on their part.
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