Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush - "Johnny B. Goode" from the Album Live

I. Best Single Live Rock Albums in the History of the Universe

Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush - Live Marino's, ummm, skillz, made this a cult classic for the guitar freaks way back when a 'z' was only very rarely used to denote the plural. Not everyone had the album, but you knew that those who did were, like, really, really into guitars. See below.

Cheap Trick - At Budokan I bought my friend Jerry Spector this album for his birthday in 1979; he'd told me, get me the Cheap Trick or get me The Knack, and to this day I'm like, fucking ay, I nailed that gifting opportunity spot on.

The Who - Live at Leeds "Magic Bus" is, let's face it, really really silly. But "Summertime Blues" and "Young Man Blues" and "Shakin' All Over" are as powerful as anything recorded out of a remote truck ever.

Blue Öyster Cult - Some Enchanted Evening Always thought BÖC were a little too mannered in the studio; the single live rocks out much more satisfactorily to my mind. I'm a fan of "Astronomy" and the way Eric Bloom says "we nevah fohgot!" when addressing the Atlanta crowd.

Robin Trower - Live Doing research for this piece and I found out that James Dewar re-recorded all the vocals in the studio. You can hear the erased originals as echo in the monitor. But I totally don't give a fuck; "I Can't Wait Much Longer" still gives me chills, hundreds of listens in.



II. Crowd Noise Bands

A very famous rumor--though one that I can't cite internet references for as I look, unfortunately--is that Kiss Alive II was actually recorded in the studio, and was augmented with the crowd noise from "Monday Night Football" games.

I really can't comment. I was just a little too old for Kiss. When I was 12 or 13, I had a buddy named Greg Grossman who was a year behind me in school, and he was a big Kiss fan, had Double Platinum, both live albums, comic books, lunchbox, etc., etc. But I was on the outside looking in then, and later on, as I began building my album collection with cornerstones like Rush and Aerosmith and Styx^* and Ted Nugent, the idea of a band in makeup seemed kind of quaint to me.

As did the fake blood, and discussions about the length of Gene Simmons' tongue.

So, then, OK, whatever: Just from having read what I've read, the silly things that Gene Simmons seems to say, I wouldn't put it past Kiss to have overdubbed the football crowd noise onto their ostensibly live album, but the fact remains I've never heard the thing and can't judge.

But I can judge Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush's Live album. That one I have heard, and on that one I can say: Listen, jack, that crowd noise is 70,000 strong. Which is about 60 grand stronger than any crowd Marino might have played for when these recordings were being made.

Don't get me wrong: it's all very artfully done. It doesn't sound real, but it sure sounds great. Frank (who is of course an amazingly fast and crisp player) goes apeshit on some modified blues scale solo, and it sounds like the Cowboys just scored from 40 yards out. Frank does some stage patter ("Alright!"), and it's as if the home team just won the coin toss. Marino rips into the chords that introduce "Johnny B. Goode" and it's as if John Elway's just thrown the pass that's gonna take him to Disneyland. These are awesome sounds, over the top and psycho, perfect for getting you all pumped up to maybe smoke a joint or see a live rock 'n' roll show, or--what the fuck--both.

But there's no way those sounds are representative of the crowds Marino and his band played for during the tour that birthed these recordings.

It's true that Marino played Cal Jam II in March of 1978, and it's also true that show drew something like 300,000 people, but the album's liner notes tell us that Live was recorded on the band's "1977 tour" in the "Southern United States." Those same notes specify that some of that material was actually recorded in South Florida. This would have had to have been at the Hollywood Sportatorium; there was no other sizable venue for rock 'n' roll shows here at the time. It varied from show to show, but the Sport's seating capacity for rock shows was nine or ten thousand, which is not to say that Marino and his band were drawing those kinds of numbers in '77.

I remember that sometime in the early '80's, Marino came down and played the Sport in a package tour with Head East, the reformed Humble Pie, and one other band I don't remember. Unfortunately, I did not go, but I do remember that tickets were astoundingly cheap, even for the time, at $5.00. Pretty sure I also remember reading an interview that Jon Marlowe of the Miami News conducted (was it with Marino, or with Steve Marriott?) where the guy was saying how important it was to him to do these five dollar shows. Later on, when I became introduced to Fugazi, and became familiar with their policy of five buck shows, I would think of Frank Marino and that package tour.

Which brings us back, I think, to live music, like the kind that is on the Mahogany Rush album we're looking at today. Of course, Mahogany Rush was ALL ABOUT Frank Marino. The backing band, Jimmy Ayoub on drums, and bassist Paul Harwood, were extraordinarily loyal to Marino, but not really otherwise distinguished. There's actually a really good song on What's Next called "Finish Line," where Marino goes off on this flight of the bumblebee solo, all classically influenced, and the guy is flying, he's soaring, but what keeps the track from becoming absolutely transcendent was the rhythm section, who frankly have trouble keeping up.

Like with Neil Young with Crazy Horse, like with Robin Trower and his bands, especially after James Dewar left, like with Ritchie Blackmore after he left Deep Purple to a certain extent, there's a big drop off in talent from the star to his backing band. Fortunately, most Marino songs, and all of them on Live, are straight ahead, and all Marino is really requiring from his sidemen is a framework against which he can jam.

And he does jam. The riffs which issue crystalline from his beloved SG may not always be the most original, and in fact, there's a lot of times when he's playing a phrase and you think to yourself, 'I've heard that before.' But it's rare that you've heard it played so well. Marino's playing style is infused with all the whammy bar divebombs and wah wah transforms that percolated through hard rock guitar before Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads changed the game.

But the '70's era flash never overwhelmed, and always served Marino mostly as contrast and counterpoint to the clean, fast technique that really dominates his playing.

In doing my research for this post, I took a look through Rolling Stone's list of its 100 Greatest Guitarists, and without getting sidetracked by too much criticism of the um, venerable, magazine's rankings, let's just say that, though Marino unsurprisingly does not appear on their list, there are players on the list (and high on the list, too) whose attack is sloppier, less soulful, and slower than that brought forth by Mr. Marino.

Marino (to his detriment, I think) has always dropped the name of Jimi Hendrix during his concerts and interviews, so writers in a kind of sympathetic resonance to that often call Marino's playing psychedelic. But if a shadow of Hendrix' approach trickles through to Marino's playing, it's at the blues end of the spectrum, where Hendrix was most at home, anyway. Paul Leary plays psychedelic leads; Marino was simply the shred guitarist of his era, with more crystal clear speed and more metal face soul than most all his contemporaries.

Though I've come to quite like "Dragonfly," one of the four vocals on the album we look at that gets an "F. Marino" writing credit, Marino is plainly less of a gifted songwriter than a soulful interpreter. Like his hero, he probably never wrote a song as great as "Johnny B. Goode." But his interpretation of Berry's tune, as he marries the '50's rhythm and blues cool to the crazy-as-fuck enthusiasms of 70's arena hard rock, is indisputably of the first rank for anyone who bothers to listen.

File under: Songs with parts recorded on a Monday night in Oakland



^* Yes, it's true: I bought The
Grand Illusion at Sears, and got Pieces of Eight through the Columbia record club. (Return)

Queens of the Stone Age - "I'm Designer" from the CD Era Vulgaris

Like that redneck-chic T-shirt from the '70's said, the Queens of the Stone Age may not be perfect, but parts of their work are excellent.

Each of their albums rock solidly, yet each undeniably has a clunker or two. And even their most kickass tunes--like for Christ's sake the sick, sick raveup presented here--tend to have a chorus or a bridge or a refrain where the intensity is dimmed somewhat.

Excellent, but not perfect. On "I'm Designer," you can see that at 1:12 Josh Homme figured it was time to try and go ethereal with the chorus, but what you can't see is why.

What's with the choral dip in intensity? Homme created QOTSA with the express intent of not being Kyuss Part Two, of getting away from the Stoner Rock ghetto, but I am one to submit that regardless, part of Homme's job description is to rock for fuck's sake.

Note to Josh: For better or for worse, your band is just about the last one in the world that can be described simply as "hard rock." Homme writes in "I'm Designer" that "my generation's for sale," but another thing about his generation is that its bands have all headed for genrification. Everybody's got an emo band or their postrock revival thing or their sadcore project or their newgaze collective, but no-one fucking plays hard rock anymore.

Except QOTSA.

So stick with it, and focus on what makes you unique. I understand being diverse, Aerosmith when they championed '70's hard rock were diverse, Monster Magnet if you want a band more recent were diverse, but they never forgot what they were playing. Please skip the dreampop chorales, the cocktail blues, and the falsetto confessionals.

Stick to what's heavy, and your music will be that much the stronger for it.

Queens Of The Stone Age - Era Vulgaris - 03 - I'm Designer.mp3

207 kbps VBR mp3, up for six weeks (or more) (Right click and save as target)

File Under: Hard Rock

Deep Purple - "Highway Star" - from the Album Made In Japan

Once I'd decided I was going to finally get this blog rolling, I spent HOURS agonizing over whether I should feature a song from Deep Purple as my first post.

I'm really not that much into Deep Purple, and I certainly don't know how much residual cool, if any, remains for them. Even when I was in high school (in the early '80's), I thought, considering they were supposed to be a hard rock band, that they were just a little too slick to carry it off. "Hush" had very little to do with rock & roll for me, and "Smoke on the Water" was just kind of stupid, now wasn't it?

But here I go, 25 years later, and I'm starting this blog thing, and with all the weird shit I listen to, I've selected Deep Purple's "Highway Star," the live version anyway, to be my first post.

What's up with that?

I'm into one of my infrequent exercise kicks now, and last night as I was on the exercycle listening to Junior, there it was, right between "Hey Ya" and "Hit the Plane Down."

The little keyboard fanfare is instantly recognizable and then you hear the polite Japanese audience do their polite thing, and then get a little more excited as Ian Gillan announces the song.


Ritchie Blackmore works his opening downstroke into a ball of shiny electric sustain, and by the time Jon Lord does his organ solo with the gallopping rhythm guitar underneath, I'm remembering that well, if you were going to listen to Deep Purple at all, Made In Japan was the one to listen to.

Because of the boring drum solo during "The Mule" and maybe some half-baked prog overtures during "Space Truckin'," even Made In Japan is not a perfect album, but it almost certainly is Deep Purple's rawest, heaviest, least polished-up work, and it absolutely positively features the band's best lineup of Blackmore Gillan Lord Glover and Paice.


In the book version of Fast Times At Ridgement High, Eddie Mann the ticket scalper who never made it into the movie has made a personal holiday of Ritchie Blackmore's Birthday; he stays home and listens to all of Blackmore's albums, one by one in chronological order, and Cameron Crowe writes

Mr. and Mrs. Mann would come home from work at six in the evening, and Eddie would be getting into the great stuff : "Woman From Tokyo" and the Made in Japan live album with all those excellent five-minute screams from when Ian Gillan was still in the group.

Fuckin' ay, bubba.

Gillan shredded his vocal cords into beef jerky with all the high-pitched screaming he did for Purple in this period. Although his screams on "Highway Star" are awesome enough, there's a moment somewhere else on the album where Gillan engages in a screaming match with the crowd, he goes "hey!" and the crowd shouts back "HEYY!" so he screams back "HEEEEYYYY!!!" and by the end it sounds like you're listening to a crazy man. It's something else.

The version of "Highway Star" on the studio Machine Head is already pretty fast, probably the fastest thing I ever heard the band do, and rather energetic itself. But placed in an environment where Gillan is channeling the crowd's energy into these superhuman yells, the song becomes pretty much immaculate. Having just heard the song for the first time in twenty years yesterday, but about four times since, I'm in LOVE with the construction of Jon Lord's organ solo, with the way the first third of Ritchie Blackmore's solo is in a different key from the rest of the whole fucking song, and how the last third devolves into wonderful feedback noise. I told you how I love the rhythm guitar underneath Lord's solo. I'm in love with the way Gillan sings, "body control and everything."

And I love it how I'm never quite sure whether they're talking about a car or a girl.

You know, this is just totally a great fucking song, and it *totally* works as an intial post.

So what if it's 35 years old? Even at the age of 43, It appears I'm still crippled by the same ridiculous pretensions to coolness that ruined my behavior back when I was a teenager. Back then I was supposed to like Deep Purple, and now I figure I'm supposed to mock them. Either way, though, its pressure I invent to believe something because it's popular--at least among the people I imagine I want to impress--rather than because it's true.

But while not smart enough to be free of such desperate inclinations, I am at this late age at least smart enough to ignore them--at least upon reflection.

Everybody wants to be liked, and everyone wants what they write to be liked. And everyone wants their blog to be visited. But let's cut to the quick, and the hell with the pipe I was laying in an attempt to insulate myself from criticism.

Deep Purple weren't a great band for very long, and two generations have come of age since the time when they were. And they aren't any more my favorites than they were six hours ago for me. But the more and more I think about it, "Highway Star" works just fine as introductory blog post.

That I had thought anything else when I began writing this post--and this blog--
says as much about the overcorrections I continue to make even as a supposed adult to my own insecurities, as it does about a band that might be over the hill, that might be lacking in "residual cool," but still at its best was much more ferocious than your run-of-the-mill Kaiser Monkey or Vampire Fire Chief.

Deep Purple - Made In Japan - 1 - Highway Star.mp3

This file was removed January 14, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Osaka Rock