Rocks In The Attic #112: Aerosmith - ‘Live! Bootleg’ (1978)

This album is overlong. The performances are sloppy. The mix is pretty murky. But I love it.

Of all of the Aerosmith albums that I initially bought when I got turned onto them, this one represented the ‘way in’ to their back catalogue. Other than 1980’s Greatest Hits and 1991’s Pandora’s Box, there wasn’t really any other comprehensive Aerosmith compilations available in the early 90s when I started to listen to them. Now it’s gone the other way and I believe that when I last counted, their (officially released) compilations and live albums were just about to overtake their count of studio albums. That’s a pretty bad statistic, but proof that record companies will plunder and plunder an artist’s back catalogue, endlessly re-releasing the same songs over and over again, as long as there’s a willing public to buy them.

In terms of chronology, this 1978 release comes between 1977’s Draw The Line and 1979’s Night In The Ruts - in their only fallow year (up to this point they had released a studio album every year since their 1973 debut). If Draw The Line didn’t signal the end of the band due to their over-reliance on drugs, this surely did.

Aside from the hits (Walk This Way, Sweet Emotion, Dream On, Back In The Saddle), the set covers a heap of decent album tracks which wouldn’t see the light on Greatest Hits and in most cases would have to wait until Pandora’s Box to get the attention they deserved.

But the real treasures of the album are those live tracks not recorded in stadiums and arenas like the majority of the material. There’s Last Child, recorded in a Boston Club; a stunning cover of Come Together, recorded at the band’s rehearsal space; and in I Ain’t Got You and Mother Popcorn, two covers showcasing the band’s R&B influences, recorded for a radio performance in 1973 when promoting their first album. I have that 1973 Paul’s Mall performance in its entirety on CD - a fantastic set - and a true live bootleg album, unlike this one which is CBS Records’ attempt to capitalise on the trend of professional-sounding bootleg albums in the late 70s.

There’s just one more reason I love this album: the photos on the gatefold showing Joe Perry playing his red BC Rich Bich -  truly awesome, and in terms of body-shape, the best looking guitar I’ve ever seen.

Hit: Walk This Way

Hidden Gem: Mother Popcorn

Rocks In The Attic #111: ZZ Top - ‘Degüello’ (1979)

ZZ Top’s first album after their beard-growing hiatus is a gem. I guess this is where that clean production sound on blues albums of the 80s (eg. Stevie Ray Vaughan) started. On Degüello, it’s very noticeable that the band sound very different to their earlier albums. The guitar tone is very clean, and both the bass and drums sound clearer, with more separation than on their five earlier albums.

It’s more of a transition album really - bridging the gap between their earlier, dusty, swamp blues, to the more electronic - and contemporary  - work on their 80s album. The album after this, El Loco, would hint further towards the New Wave sound they would employ to great success on Eliminator.

During the sessions for this album, a couple of songs required a horn section. Instead of doing what most bands would do, and employing a group of studio musicians, they recorded the horn parts themselves, calling themselves The Lone Wolf Horns. A photo of the trio as the horn section on the album’s inner sleeve shows Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill showing off their new chest-length beards, standing next to Frank Beard displaying a decent bit of facial growth himself, putting the dampener on that oft-recycled fact that he’s always the clean-shaven one.

Hit: Cheap Sunglasses

Hidden Gem: I Thank You

Rocks In The Attic #110: Wilson Pickett - ‘Wilson Pickett In Philadephia’ (1970)

I found this in the sale racks at Real Groovy in Auckland. I figured it must be a relatively decent release as the record was brand new - indicating that it was a reissue - so I quickly surmised that the general bad taste of New Zealand record buyers had left it languishing in the ‘New Items’ racks for so long that the staff decided to put it in the sale racks. I held onto it until I got it out of the shop - and what a find!

This album represents Pickett’s first recording outside of the Deep South, and away from the familiarity of Memphis and Muscle Shoals. It has a slightly grittier and funkier sound than his earlier work, but it’s nicely held together by the studio band and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.

Hit: Help The Needy

Hidden Gem: Get Me Back On Time, Engine Number 9 (Part 1)

Rocks In The Attic #109: Mamas And Papas - ’20 Golden Hits’ (1973)

It’s funny that there’s a Lennon & McCartney song on this album - a very good cover of I Call Your Name (in addition to a cover of Twist And Shout) - as Denny Doherty has a real resemblance of John Lennon, as the cover of this album shows. And I guess John Phillips doesn’t look too far away from George Harrison circa 1968.

I can’t remember why I bought this album. I guess with a lot of 60s artists, as it was a time before the LP had really become the in-thing, it makes a bit more sense to go for compilations over (usually) hastily assembled studio albums (which in most cases are simple compilations of singles and B-sides anyway).

I used to work with a guy in Oldham who was obsessed with The Mamas & The Papas. I never really saw the attraction really - although there are some very nice harmonies on here. I guess they’re a bit like a prototype Abba really, five or so years before that group hit the big time. Although if you were to go the whole way and change the name of the band to the band members’ initials, they actually sound more like a hip-hop group: DJMC.

Hit: California Dreamin’

Hidden Gem: Creeque Alley

Rocks In The Attic #108: Manic Street Preachers - ‘Generation Terrorists’ (1992)

It’s funny how your perception changes as you get older. I used to love this album when I first heard it - strangely after I had been introduced to Indie and Britpop (as it would have made more sense to have been into this when I was a fully-fledged rocker). I used to think this was a very edgy, attitude-driven album - but it sounds a bit tame these days.

When I first got into music and all I was interested in was rock, I used to read the likes of Kerrang! and Metal Hammer and I would see mention of the Manics all the time, but I hadn’t heard anything by them. I did have a rock compilation and Motorcycle Emptiness was on it, and it’s such a slick song that it’s no wonder that I wasn’t drawn in by it.

I remember I used to be able to get free tickets to gigs at The Academy and the three Manchester University venues, through a friend of the family. Once I was given tickets to see a band - I think it was The Almighty - and for some reason the ticket I was told to use was a Manic Street Preachers ticket to a gig at the same venue that had been cancelled. The ticket had a big black mark drawn on it. It got me into the gig fine, but I later worked out that it must have been originally for a gig cancelled when Richey Edwards disappeared in 1995. Using that cancelled ticket for a gig by a different band was probably the first time that the Manics came onto my radar.

I can’t remember what turned me onto them big time - it definitely wasn’t the ‘comeback’ album, Everything Must Go, that came out a year later. I didn’t appreciate that album at the time (too Indie / Britpop for me at the time). Whatever - or whoever - it was that turned me onto them did something major. I became obsessed with the band - well, with their first three albums anyway. I did eventually start to appreciate Everything Must Go, and I was probably besotted with the band the most when This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours was released.

I used to listen to this album - their debut - repeatedly while walking into University in my third year. It made a bit of sense walking through the red light district of Huddersfield (where the Yorkshire Ripper had picked up some of his victims), listening to some of the lyrics of this album. Although I like the out-and-out rock of this album and its follow-up, Gold Against The Soul, it’s really their third album, The Holy Bible that got to me. I’d put that album into my top-5 albums back then, and it’d still be in my top-5 now.

Generation Terrorists has one major drawback - and that is its length. It’s a double album - the band initially said they’d release this, their masterpiece, headline Wembley Stadium for one night, and then split up. The album would make a killer single disc (and a heap of decent b-sides), but there’s really too many average songs towards the end.

Hit: Motorcycle Emptiness

Hidden Gem: Nat West - Barclays - Midlands - Lloyds

Rocks In The Attic #107: Various Artists - ‘Inglourious Basterds (O.S.T.)’ (2009)

Of all of Tarantino’s films so far, this is probably the one I’ve liked the least. Death Proof was pretty poor, for no other reason than it was just plain boring; this film however, was insulting in its revisionist fantasy retelling of WWII events.

The soundtracks jars slightly too, because among snippets of Morricone film scores (which prop up the album), there are odd choices that sit in-between them.  Songs like David Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out The Fire) or Billy Preston’s Slaughter would have fit into any other Tarantino soundtrack - but as an accompaniment to a period film, which otherwise is well scored with Morricone’s western themes, they feel just a little too much out of place.

The vinyl artwork for this soundtrack is very nice - made to look like a very old 1940s release, with water marks around the edges and publicity shots from the film printed with Ben-Day dots.

Hit: The Verdict - Ennio Morricone

Hidden Gem: White Lightning (Main Title) - Charles Bernstein

Rocks In The Attic #106: Dire Straits - ‘Making Movies’ (1980)

I’m as much a fan of minimalism as the next man, but I sincerely hope that the person who designed this album cover was fired immediately for being incredibly lazy. What an opportunity: to design something - a piece of art, even - that will be consumed by many people; and the best you can manage is a blank red cover with a blue edge which makes the album look like an office file.

Musos tend to dislike Dire Straits, and they have good reason to, as they’re the very definition of Dad Rock; but this album comes a whole five years before the global hit Brothers In Arms and it doesn’t have the disadvantage of sounding like it belongs in the 80s, like its successors commonly do.

Hit: Romeo And Juliet

Hidden Gem: Solid Rock

Rocks In The Attic #105: The Police - ‘Outlandos d’Armour’ (1978)

As far as debut records go, this has to be one of my favourites. It’s a little bit punk, a little bit reggae, and all wrapped up in a minimalist pop recording. People don’t tend to like The Police because of Sting’s later crimes against music, but I prefer to ignore his faux-bohemian noodlings and concentrate on his work in this band.

They’re just a perfect band: in Sting, you have a bass-playing, pop song-writing vocalist (with an unmistakable, high-register voice that’s very difficult to emulate); in Stewart Copeland, you have a jazz inflected drummer, who’s not scared to try something new (his timing and beat on Roxanne takes it uncharted territory for a pop song); and in Andy Summers, you have a slightly older guitarist (he played on stage with Hendrix, and counted The Animals as one of his former bands!), with a very progressive approach to chord progressions.

Those sort of attributes can sometimes weigh a band down - but probably because they’re all as equally talented, you don’t really hear anything too weighty or self-indulgent. I’ve heard David Fricke from Rolling Stone magazine say that after the assassination of John Lennon, the next big event in pop music to have a global impact on the youth of the day was when The Police split up in the mid-80s. Although they became a watered-down version of themselves on their later albums, you can understand, with this debut, how they made such an impact.

Hit: Roxanne

Hidden Gem: Next To You

Rocks In The Attic #104: Nirvana - ‘MTV Unplugged In New York’ (1994)

Released following Cobain’s suicide, I guess this is the first example of Geffen Records cashing in on his death. None of the other contemporary bands that recorded an Unplugged performance on MTV went on to release them on record (except for Alice In Chains and Alanis Morrissette) - the tracks usually found their way onto singles as B-sides (or existed in full only on bootlegs). An Unplugged album was more of a classic rock thing to do - hence the releases by Clapton, Dylan, Bryan Adams and the Page & Plant reunion.

I wasn’t a fan of Nirvana at the time this was released - mostly because I didn’t like that he wasn’t particularly a good guitarist. Learning the guitar will give you crazy notions and put you off bands like that. I later realised that it’s far more important to be a good songwriter than it is to be a good guitarist; a guitar solo is never going to change anybody’s life.

Trying not to like them, and failing miserably as this performance was getting a lot of airplay on MTV, the songs started seeping in and I started to become a Nirvana fan, purely by osmosis.

You know those famous questions - ‘Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?’ or ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ - the first such question I can remember in my lifetime was ‘Where were you when Kurt Cobain shot himself?’ The answer: travelling home in a taxi, on a Friday night, leaving Middleton and just reaching Chadderton. We asked the taxi driver to turn the radio up, and still shocked, had to explain to the taxi driver who had died.

Hit: Come As You Are

Hidden Gem: Oh Me

Rocks In The Attic #103: The Clint Boon Experience - ‘The Compact Guide To Pop Music & Space Travel’ (1999)

Ex-Inspiral Carpet and local boy done good Clint Boon started this band as I was playing in a band in Oldham at the same time. They even used to use the same rehearsal rooms as we did (but then again so did Thin Lizzy, but that’s a story for another day). Being the only venue in Oldham dedicated to Indie and Britpop, the band also used to come into 38 Bar / The Castle on weekends, where I would DJ. One such evening got me Clint’s autograph on this record.

I think I only bought this album on the strength of White No Sugar, which really is a decent tune (although the mix on the re-release version of the single is far superior to the mix on this album). The rest of the album isn’t that great - it’s exactly as you would imagine an organ-based Britpop album to sound like.

The most grating thing about this album is the opening track - an eight minute poem about Oldham recited by Boon’s American wife against a jazz inflected background. Sheer indulgence and a track that immediately turns you off the album as soon as you’ve turned it on.

I remember DJing once, and in the bar that night was Richard Stubbs - bass player in The Clint Boon Experience, and a bit of a prick thinking he was the local rock star (although I later found out that only Clint was signed to a record contract - the rest of the band was simply hired help). Stubbsy’s girlfriend walked over to my booth and asked me: “Can you play a song for Stubbsy. It’s his birthday. You know, Stubbsy - from The Clint Boon Experience.” “Who?” I replied, “Ken Boon? Never heard of him.”

Hit: White No Sugar

Hidden Gem: You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down

Rocks In The Attic #102: The Jimi Hendrix Experience - ‘Smash Hits’ (1968)

I remember buying my first Hendrix record - the mid-90s compilation entitled The Ultimate Experience - which I played to death on a winter holiday in Scotland. There have been many Hendrix compilations, but this one - 1968’s Smash Hits - was the first.

This is the kind of behaviour that exists nowadays - bands releasing greatest hits when they’ve only had a couple of albums out - and given the fact that this album collects Hendrix’s first four singles - including the b-sides - and a raft of album tracks, you do get the idea that the record company was scraping the barrel slightly while waiting for the band to finish Electric Ladyland.

Hit: Purple Haze

Hidden Gem: 51^st Anniversary

Rocks In The Attic #101: Foreigner - ‘4’ (1981)

Call me xenophobic, but...

Hit: Waiting For A Girl Like You

Hidden Gem: Urgent

Rocks In The Attic #100: Aerosmith - ‘Toys In The Attic’ (1975)

It only seems apt that as I covered Aerosmith’s Rocks as the 50^th entry in this series, I would need to do Toys In The Attic as the 100^th, completing the name of the blog which took inspiration from these two albums.

So the story goes that not long after I was first exposed to Aerosmith - via an Aerosmith music video weekend on MTV - I went on holiday with my parents to Cornwall. I had, by this time, bought Pump on CD - in fact, I think I bought it the following weekend after that MTV weekend, from the Our Price that used to be next to Boots on Market Street in Manchester.

These, however, were the days before CD players in cars had become commonplace. I think we travelled down to Cornwall with a taped copy of Pump playing on the car stereo. When we landed in Newquay, the first thing we did after checking in at the Bed & Breakfast, was to walk down the road and pop into the little adjoining row of shops. In that row of shops was a second-hand record store, and in the row of tapes on the counter was a second-hand copy of Toys In The Attic. I snapped it up, and alongside Pump - which I’d probably played too much on the journey down - Toys In The Attic became the soundtrack to that holiday.

To me, Toys In The Attic and Rocks are very much like Rubber Soul and Revolver - two back-to-back albums with a very high watermark, and indistinguishable enough to be double albums in their own right - hence Rocks In The Attic as the name of this blog (or I guess to take the song from Rocks, the alternative to this would be calling it Toys In The Cellar).

Of the two, I believe Rocks is the better album, but I prefer Toys In The Attic. It’s a little looser, and has a bit more light; whereas Rocks is the shadier, more serious of the two. Rocks really doesn’t let up, and you can almost hear the cocaine on it. Toys on the other hand, sounds like it was only made with the assistance of a joint or 200.

I love this album so much, I have it on CD twice - one of those being the 1994 collector’s edition gold disc version from Sony’s Mastersound 20-Bit Super Bit Mapping Series; and I also have it on LP twice - one of those being a Japanese pressing with an Obi strip. I probably still have that worn-out copy on cassette that I picked up in Cornwall too.

Hit: Walk This Way

Hidden Gem: Big Ten Inch Record

Rocks In The Attic #99: Thin Lizzy - ‘Johnny The Fox’ (1976)

It took me quite a while to track this album own on vinyl. When I eventually found it, in Manchester’s vinyl exchange, I realised why. Most record shops over a decent size won’t store this album in the Rock & Pop section, as you might expect - instead it gets lumped into the Breaks & Beats section, all because of the very cool drum intro that opens Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed on the second side of the record.

Although it’s not as popular as the Jailbreak album, I think I prefer this album. There’s only so many times you can listen to The Boys Are Back In Town and Jailbreak - and although this album doesn’t really have as big a hit as those two songs, the biggest hit on the album - Don’t Believe A Word - is a really nice, short sharp slice of Phil Lynott’s poetic lyrics.

I came across an amusing comment on this album on Wikipedia:

The album also includes two tracks with the name "Johnny" in their titles as well as the album title itself, a character by that name having already appeared in earlier songs such as Showdown and The Boys Are Back in Town. Guitarist Scott Gorham noted the name's proliferation: "Phil should've been this guy's publicity agent, as he was cropping up everywhere!"

There’s a story that my Dad always tells that happened to him in the early 90s. At somebody’s wedding reception or 50^th birthday party, in a function room of a grim working man’s club somewhere in Oldham, a lady walked over to my Dad and said “Pete - I think the lead singer of Thin Lizzy is sat in the next room. He’s sat having a beer.” “You mean Phil Lynott?” asks my Dad. “Yes,” she says. So my Dad rolls his eyes, and goes and takes a look. On his return, he says to the lady “Well, I don’t think it’s Phil Lynott.” The lady looks disappointed. “Why not?” she asks. “Because,” he replies, “Phil Lynott’s black, and that guy’s white. And Phil Lynott’s been dead for five years!” It was later established that the honky at the bar was Oldham resident, and latter-day Thin Lizzy keyboard player Darren Wharton.

Hit: Don’t Believe A Word

Hidden Gem: Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed

Rocks In The Attic #98: John Williams - ‘Jaws (O.S.T.)’ (1975)

One of my top five favourite films, and probably one of my top five favourite film soundtracks, I was so pleased to find this on vinyl in the soundtrack section of Real Groovy when I first came to New Zealand on holiday.

People assume that Williams is merely aping Bernard Herrman on this soundtrack, with the tuba on the soundtrack’s Main Title (Theme From Jaws) being as simple and effective as the strings in Herrman’s score for the shower scene in Psycho; but as Williams himself admits, his score is just some jaunty pirate music, bookended by a simple touch of horror music in the opening Main Title and a touch of calm in the closing End Title.

The repetitive motif that is introduced in Sea Attack Number One and opens One Barrel Chase and Preparing The Cage continually goes round and round in my head, probably more than any other piece of film soundtrack. If I start humming that theme, I will start off on one instrument and then follow this with another instrument, just like Williams’ arrangement. There’s only so many instruments I can mimic so it soon gets tired, until I start humming it again. And again. And again.

I’ve never been diving in a shark cage, but I can guarantee that when I eventually do, it won’t be the Main Title (Theme From Jaws) that will be going round in my head, it’ll be that tune that permeates through the second side of this album, and the latter half of the film.

Hit: Main Title (Theme From Jaws)

Hidden Gem: Preparing The Cage

Rocks In The Attic #97: AC/DC - ‘High Voltage’ (1976)

My love for AC/DC was founded on the international versions of their early albums, with this being a collection of songs from their first two Australian releases. Now that I live at this end of the world, I keep meaning to hunt down their Aussie originals.

After I bought their 1992 Live album and decided to get the rest of their back catalogue, my OCD collector’s attitude urged me onto buying their albums in order, so naturally I started with this, their (international) debut.

On first listen, I remember thinking that compared to the crunch and bombast of Live, that it sounded pretty weak. Each successive album gets closer to that raw live sound, but here it almost sounds like a different band - like a poorly produced bad covers band playing AC/DC material through cheap instruments. It does have a certain charm though.

To give you an idea of how formative this album was for me, The Jack was the first song I learnt to play on the guitar. I didn’t start with something by Aerosmith - who I’d been listening to for a few years by then - I started with a Blues in E, by AC/DC. To this day, I can’t listen to the song without picking up my guitar and ripping through the solo.

As far as album covers go, the front cover of this is a classic - with a nice drawing of Angus clutching his SG, and an early version of the band’s logo evident in the top left corner - but the back cover is slightly disconcerting. Alongside publicity photos of each band member are fictional letters from the likes of worried parents and school teachers, concerned about the band’s latest exploits with their teenage daughters. At the time, I’m sure this made them sound edgy and dangerous, but in the 21^st century with a touch of added hindsight it makes the band sound like a group or marauding paedophiles, parading through Australian suburbs just as the school bells ring out. To further add fuel to this fire, Bon Scott namechecks Gary Glitter in the banal lyrics to Little Lover; and of course the album cover features the band’s lead guitarist dressed as a schoolboy. Oh dear.

Hit: T.N.T.

Hidden Gem: Live Wire

Rocks In The Attic #96: Pink Floyd - ‘Animals’ (1977)

It doesn’t surprise me, but it always saddens me, that this album tends to get a bit brushed to the side. The latest round of Pink Floyd remastering has thrown up 3 relatively hefty box sets of Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, and even though this album comes along in that run of albums, it hasn’t been treated with the same love and attention.

Unfortunately for this album, it doesn’t have a hit like Money or Wish You Were Here, or something throwaway like Another Brick In The Wall Part 2 to attract casual listeners to. In fact, casual listeners would also be wary of the album as it only has five tracks (and if you told them two of those tracks were under two minutes in length, they’d throw the album back at you and demand a better rate of songs per dollar.

On hearing the album, it really isn’t the most accessible of their 70s output so you can sort of understand why it isn’t as ingrained in popular culture as its neighbours. Aside from the orchestral suite that opens Atom Heart Mother, Animals really is the most progressive thing they put out in that decade. The songs really shy away from traditional verse and chorus structures, with only a sprinkling of passages repeated here and there. The other major difference between Animals and its predecessors is that Roger Waters is almost exclusively the lead vocalist throughout the album. The harmonic dual vocals between David Gilmour and Rick Wright that emerged on Meddle and was cemented on Dark Side took a back seat on Wish You Were Here, with Gilmour sharing duties with Waters. On Animals, Waters sings on each of the 5 tracks, and appears to be almost exclusively leading the band, paving the way for his complete direction on The Wall and The Final Cut.

Great album cover too - one of Storm Thorgerson’s best.

Hit: Pigs On The Wing 1

Hidden Gem: Sheep

Rocks In The Attic #95: Cliff Richard - ‘Rock On With Cliff’ (1980)

This is a 1980 compilation of Cliff Richard’s early hits between 1958 and 1962 - I guess with 1962 being the year that The Beatles came along and took his British rock and roll crown from him. The album is credited to Cliff Richard, but essentially it’s Cliff Richard & The Drifters, who then morphed into The Shadows.

There’s a lot of forgettable material on here - which I’m sure was memorable back in the day (the number of Top-10 placings the tracklisting boasts is proof of that), but songs with names like Gee Whiz It’s You really date the record back to simpler times.

Having grown up in the 1980s, I now can’t listen to Living Doll without hearing The Young Ones, but thankfully Move It has remained untarnished and is truly a hidden gem of British rock music.

Hit: Living Doll

Hidden Gem: Move It

Rocks In The Attic #94: Steely Dan - ‘Can’t Buy A Thrill’ (1972)

There were two bands that my guitar teacher always tried to push on me - Van Halen and Steely Dan. Some of his Van Halen recommendations stuck on me, but I already had a decent idea of their back catalogue at the time. But Steely Dan? Why would I listen to them as a 15 year old obsessed with guitars. Aren’t they a band for old people? Needless to say, I didn’t check out his advice. I really regret that.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I’m in New Zealand on my first trip here. We borrow a car from the In-Laws (to be), and for some reason the radio doesn’t work. We’d soon find out that radios don’t tend to work unless you retract the aerial on the roof (d’oh!), but it didn’t matter - there was a CD in the car. Only one CD mind you, so we’d have to listen to it a lot, on our 3-week trip.

The CD was The Best of Steely Dan - Then And Now - the one with the image of the car graveyard (or I’d guess you’d call it an art installation) on the cover. We must have listened to that album dozens of times, and all of a sudden I was really wishing I could go back in time and take my guitar teacher’s advice.

This is Steely Dan’s first album - and in my eyes it’s probably the least Steely Dan of their albums. Well, their initial run of albums that is. It has a couple of big hits - Do It Again and Reelin’ In The Years - but it doesn’t all fit together as nicely as their later albums. The main point of difference with this debut is that this seems to feel more of a band effort. At this point in their career, it doesn’t appear clear that Steely Dan is Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Only the songwriting credits on the record hint at this. On the reverse of the record, especially in the liner notes, each member of the band playing on the record gets as much mention as anyone else.

The cover of the album deserves a special mention for how awful it is. I love the Steely Dan logo, but the art direction on the album - random images pasted over a shot of a row of housewife-looking hookers is really amateurish, and is easily the worst thing about the album.

Hit: Reelin’ In The Years

Hidden Gem: Change Of The Guard

Rocks In The Attic #93: The Beach Boys - ‘Pet Sounds’ (1966)

Okay, stand back. It might not be easy to hear somebody actual say this, but this album is boring. Give me California Girls and Do It Again over this any time.

Supposedly this was influenced greatly by Brian Wilson’s desire to match Rubber Soul. This album then spurred The Beatles on in the recording of Revolver. Arguably the two Beatles albums sound more varied - but you’d expect them to be, being the compositions of three men. Pet Sounds, chiefly written by Brian Wilson with a few others sharing co-writing duties, doesn’t have the advantage of sounding so three-dimensional.

The other thing that really irks me about this album is that people who really love it tend to really hate Sloop John B - like how dare they tarnish such a classic album by daring to cover a traditional folk song? For me, Sloop John B is one of the highlights of the album. Unlike Rubber Soul and Revolver, once you get past Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Sloop John B and God Only Knows, all of the other songs tend to merge into one big melancholic ballad.

Which brings me to God Only Knows. Wilson may have failed with composing an album’s worth of material to challenge The Beatles’ dominance of the pop LP, but in God Only Knows he succeeded majorly in writing an enduring classic, superior to anything else coming over the Atlantic in that decade.

Does it excuse that LP cover though?

Hit: God Only Knows

Hidden Gem: Let’s Go Away For Awhile

Rocks In The Attic #92: The Ramones - ‘Rocket To Russia’ (1977)

I’m sure some people think this is a great album - probably Green Day fans - but for me, guitar driven rock music has to have more musicianship than just three guitar chords per song.

This reminds me of taking part in a Ramones tribute night at The Castle in Oldham. Without a band at the time, I got drafted by a friend’s band to sing lead vocals on Sheena Is A Punk Rocker. Aside from karaoke this was probably my only foray into singing without the safety of having a guitar slung across my chest.

Hit: Sheen Is A Punk Rocker

Hidden Gem: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Rocks In The Attic #91: Gloria Estefan - ‘Greatest Hits’ (1992)

I remember having a tape of Gloria Estefan songs that somebody gave me when I was in my first year of secondary school. It never seemed to make sense, and I guess that’s because ‘Oldham’ and ‘Latin Beat’ don’t really go together in the same sentence. This album should make a bit more sense now I’m no longer land-locked and living in a coastal environment, but I think it would only make sense if I drove a Ferrari and worked as a detective in Auckland Vice. That sounds like a TV series I hope they never make.

The upbeat stuff on this album is pretty good - especially the early Miami Sound Machine material - but the ballads could have been written and performed by anyone.

Hit: Rhythm Is Gonna Get You

Hidden Gem: Dr. Beat