The Stark Reality - "The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael's Music Shop" (1970)

This shit right here like that there.

This shit is the shit.

It took me four, maybe five years to find this .zip file on another blog. It's albums such as "The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael's Music Shop" is part and parcel of why I took it upon myself to create my own music blog to bring you the hairiest stuff ever recorded. 

Thank you ever so much, Mr. Weird and Wacky! (Apologies, but you have to click a thing to enter his site to let the bloggy overlords know that you are a grown-ass adult... he shows a lot of vintage porny record covers of these girls and their jugs... of beer.)

The Stark Reality, a band so named for their vibesman Monty Stark, were a Boston quartet of jazz heads, groomed at The Berklee College of Music. All four men were exceptional, but most notable among them was their guitarist John Abercrombie, who would begin his brilliant solo career in 1974 on Mannfred Eicher's label, ECM Records. That album was titled appropriately enough as "Timeless", and the roster included Jack DeJohnette on drums and organist, Jan Hammer.

All that's fine, but we're talking about The Stark Reality, and their 1970 album, which was their improvised reading of a 1958 children's album by the songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, who would showcase the music on his 1969 PBS show, "Hoagy Carmichael's Music Shop."

All that necessary history aside, "The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael's Music Shop" insinuates what the Peanuts cartoons would be like if Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band joined forces with Tim Buckley and his group from 1968 to 1971, along with Vince Guaraldi... which would have been really fucking awesome.

However, it was The Stark Reality who cobbled this record together and gave it to us... and really, no one else apart from Hoagy Carmichael could have done any of this better.

Thank you, dudes.

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Portsmouth Sinfonia - "Plays the Popular Classics" (1974)

Imagine if Hans Fenger and the Langley School kids did nothing but classical instrumentals. The reality was that Portsmouth Sinfonia was co-founded by English composer Gavin Bryars at The Portsmouth School of Art. None other than Brian Eno played clarinet with this ragtag ensemble of art and music students who selected instruments they had never before played or thought they were elaborate doorstops or odd furnishings for nesting newlyweds. Eno also produced this, their 1974 recording, "Plays the Popular Classics".

Track number five, "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony" inexplicably has a momentary splicing of what sounds like Chuck Berry's "Good Golly, Miss Molly"... this is the copy I'm providing, and it's the one I have until I get a sound copy. I found it on another blog. Somehow, the glitch adds character. Listen and judge on your own.

The resulting album is brash, clumsy, and gorgeous. Enjoy!

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Isabel Baker - "I Like God's Style" (1965)

Damn. Just... damn.

This super rare record has been gaining a most rabid cult following in recent years, this slice of lo-fi gospel rock art brut. "I Like God's Style" by Isabel Baker is nothing short of phenomenal. I love this haunting, disturbing, often funny record, and you will hear moments where she is laughing to herself in a song.

The year this was recorded, 1965, by all appearances if your vision is slightly blurry, Isabel Baker was a girl of sixteen years. Now, listen to her singing in that deep voice breaking like that of a pubescent boy... then take note of her Adam's apple... and those large hands with articulated veins... understanding that there were some very different goings on in Garden Grove, California at the time... and all over the USA, for that matter... and most folks couldn't speak of such things, to their parents, to their friends, or even to themselves. How fucking scared would you be?

Also be thankful that our collective mindset toward gender preference has advanced considerably fifty-two years later... what's unfortunate is that Ms. Baker's story hasn't fleshed itself out beyond the music and sleeve notes. I hope she's still with us and having the best life.

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The Raunch Hands - "Learn to Whap-A-Dang with The Raunch Hands" (1986)

"What's our word? THUNDERBIRD!!! What's our joy? NATURE BOY!!!"

Punk-a-billy, bitches. Demented shit. The best kind.

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Bill Cosby - "Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs" (1971)

Yep.

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Sam Sacks - "Sing it Again, Sam!" (1961)

You know that scene in Mel Brooks' 1968 movie "The Producers" when the house is packed and ready to take in Bialystock and Bloom's (Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, FTW!!!) "Springtime for Hitler" musical, sight unseen, and the opening number comes across as a gushing love letter to Adolf Hitler? To a theater full of Heebs, in New York City? Then the shocked stares and gaping mouths? 

Then, Dick Shawn appears as an East Village hippie version of Hitler, slanging his way through the scene and into the hearts and funny bones of the audience, who finally get the joke? Thus dashing the multi-millionare scheme for Bialystock and Bloom to deliver a "sure-fire flop", financed by little old ladies? 

Yeah, well not so here, chum. "Sing it Again, Sam!" by Sam Sacks is deadly serious... and absolutely fucking hilarious.

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Spirit - "Clear" (1969)

Let's go all the way back to the 1980s when I was a kid of nineteen or twenty. The tunes coming out of that decade were pretty much a crapshoot: hair metal and "We Are the World", along with bands allegedly being "alternative", initializing their names, and poised to be corporate-sponsored arena rock... with a message. The real alternative acts were being celebrated in one-off or serialized 'zines, made by the disaffected youth such as myself. By using the art of xerography, and often scamming for the office supplies to make our productions look sweet, we were going beyond Flipside and MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL... and the great thing about those bands and singers who wouldn't be heard otherwise, is that they packed the music that influenced them into their guitar cases. It wasn't all punk and new wave, either. Through them, and my beloved Sunburst Records in Huntsville, Alabama (I salute you, Jay Ratts!), I became reacquainted with Tim Buckley, Big Star, and John Cooper Clarke... then hello, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Fairport Convention, Todd Rundgren, The Dwight Twilley Band, Girlschool... and this brilliantly insane band of jazzy psychedelic rock outlaws called Spirit.

By the time I picked up a pristine used vinyl copy of "Clear" for three bucks, it was already sixteen years past tense, yet the sonic boom grooved into the vinyl wasn't dated in any way. The album cover was intimidating with four of the members seemingly inside drummer Ed Cassidy's head, yet further investigation into their other albums and magazine interviews revealed a most content bunch of gentlemen... and Cassidy was always smiling big.

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Geoff & Maria Muldaur - "Pottery Pie" (1968)

Fresh beginnings are healthy and I've always been partial to firsts. I was born on the first day of July. I've never been on an airplane, though I would definitely prefer to fly first class for the simple fact that I don't like to be smushed together with total strangers. The poet, Allen Ginsberg, was famous for saying, "First thought, best thought," and he was right... and my first thought is that I would love to fly first class on my birthday.

However, my birthday was a week ago, so fuck my life.

Geoff & Maria Muldaur's first album is a hoot. They were previously part of Jim Kweskin's Jug Band (pictured below). Being half a Jew, I can get away with saying that this is good old-fashioned yankee Jew hippy folky blues, wandering aimlessly in a thick cloud of weed smoke, barefooted on creaky, wooden slat floors, and bumping butts to old Sippie Wallace 78s like R. Crumb illustrated (also see below).

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Zounds - "The Curse of Zounds" (1981)

English anarchist punk fucking rock. That really angry shit. You know you want it, mate.

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Dolly Parton - "Hello, I'm Dolly" (1967)

Dolly Parton learned a hell of a lot from Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, and Loretta Lynn, and she bottled all that raw country-funk sass into her first album... and at the age of twenty... thank you very much.

If you are having a rotten day, listen to this record. Absorb it into your heart. Listen to anything by Dolly Parton. I love Dolly Parton.

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Marianne Faithfull - "Broken English" (1979)

Marianne Faithfull is still with us and I am a grateful admirer.

"Broken English" was the result of her surviving the 1970s, erm, I mean years of homelessness, drug abuse, and various health problems. This was the new and improved Marianne Faithfull no longer a lovely ornament of the 1960s. This version was a gravelly voiced, blunt, foul mouthed beast who loudly and proudly proclaimed she was not here to take anyone's shit any longer.

It's all right here... and this is the original pressing with "Why'd Ya Do It?"

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The Paul Butterfield Blues Band - "The Paul Butterfield Blues Band" (1965)

This, their first album was a motherfucker. This tasty slab of electric Chicago blues right here.

All five players were at the top of their game and in extraordinarily high demand, but the showstopper was this twenty-two year old MotT dynamo name of Michael Bloomfield, who had already helped lay down tracks on Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" album a couple months prior to TPBBB's first record.

Bloomfield had already cut his teeth in his early teens in Chicago's best blues clubs, playing alongside Sleepy John Estes, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters.

This is a fantastic record, but before you download it here, please check out the video below. Legendary guitarist, G.E. Smith of the Saturday Night Live Band from the late 1980s to middle 1990s (I also saw Smith live in the 1980s as guitarist for Hall & Oates and Bob Dylan) had the golden opportunity a couple years ago to play Bloomfield's 1963 Fender Telecaster, which he played on both albums in 1965. Bloomfield also played it in Dylan's first electric band at the '65 Newport Folk Festival that pissed off so many cranky bastards.

This shit made me cry.

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The Gus Brendel Group & The Crazy Horses - "Die Große Teenager-Party" (1962)

This German frisbee contains all the superficially safe shimmy shake and frug pop one would expect from the early 1960s, aimed at th' youngurns. You can get it for a buck or two on Discogs, or you can get it here fer nuthin' and buy you some dollar store Tylenol and a Mickey's Big Mouth with that disposable income of yours. Yer gunna need 'em.

This cover... I dunno, looks troubling, what with his raging dude hormones and frustrated tension, while she's this sweet little deer trapped in the headlights, smiling innocently... and that red backdrop made for a Kubrick film. I hope she escaped through the ladies' room window.

I suspect this didn't end well.

Just try grabbing THAT Pussy Galore, Donald...

Is that Stevie Nicks or Juice Newton? Whomever, Miss Lady is stylin'! Nicolette Larson woulda broken his dick.

Oh shit! THAT IS Stevie Nicks! Damn, mamacita!

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Rova Saxophone Quartet - "As Was" (1981)

We all love that one creaky desk chair. 

Here we have four of them that take us on an LSD-soaked chaotic sojourn of unmitigated jazz anarchy. San Francisco outfit Rova Saxophone Quartet led the charge.

Originally released in 1981 on Metalanguage (record label of Henry Kaiser and Rova Sax co-founder Larry Ochs) of Berkeley, California.

"As Was" is a classic helium balloon freakout where the balloons are often melodically rubbed together.

A good time is still being had by all... and it's available to be freely downloaded here and now.

(The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers by Gilbert Shelton)

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Can - "Onlyou" (1982)

Quite possibly, this is the strangest Can recording I've ever heard. The uncanniest Can recording ever, which makes it the most Can of all the Can recordings. A lot of rabid fans will argue my personal preference with their undisputed personal preferences. I could give less of a shit. At the end of the day, they can all eat a dick.

Hear Can make make with the experimental songs, sounds, and bodily emissions.

Originally recorded and assembled in 1976 on tape reels stuffed in cans (hawr, hawr, get it?) in limited edition cans (stop it, yer killin' me!) of a hundred, signed and numbered. Re-released on an almost as rare cassette tape in 1982.

Because I'm poor, I have neither of those. 

Because I'm a pillaging sonofabitch, I have an mp3 copy here for anyone to enjoy.

I'm like the Pied Friggin' Piper... or something.

This was everything I expected and more on that first listen a couple weeks ago.

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