POP-A-LOOZA: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! T. Rex, "20th Century Boy"

 

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives, Recognizing the truth that an infinite number of tracks can each be THE greatest record ever made (as long as they take turn), this latest shared post turns the GREM! spotlight on "20th Century Boy" by T. Rex.

This T. Rex piece was prepared for inclusion in my long-threatened book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1), but is not a part of that book's current plan. The chapter mentions an oddball 2-LP various-artists collection called Heavy Metal, which I picked up in the '70s and wrote about here. 

My Heavy Metal album retrospective (which is also quoted in the T. Rex chapter) was originally posted as part of my Rescued From The Budget Bin! series. The only other Rescued From The Budget Bin! piece published so far waxed blubberific over The Very Best Of The Hollies. 

Rescued From The Budget Bin! is one of several blog series I put under the (slightly) wider category of My LP Appreciations. The My LP Appreciations umbrella encompasses used albums in Second-Hand Sound (the Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. and Headquarters and The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees), greatest-hits sets in The Best Of Everything (Monkeemania--plainly, I like writing about the Monkees--and The Best Of The Bobby Fuller Four), perfect albums in Love At First Spin (Drop Out With The Barracudas, Mr. Tambourine Man, and Rocket To Russia), albums received as gifts in Groove Gratitude (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and The White Album), a missed opportunity in The One That Got Away! (the Dave Clark Five's Glad All Over Again), and a separate admission that Beatles VI and Beatles '65 are my all-time favorite albums.

Yeah, I like a lot of stuff, including T. Rex. A Greatest Record Ever Made! celebration of T. Rex's "20th Century Boy" is the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

If you like what you see here on Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do), please consider supporting this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon, or by visiting CC's Tip Jar. Additional products and projects are listed here.

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl

POP-A-LOOZA: My First LP

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is a look back at my first LP.

My mania for music started at a very young age. A piece called "Five Songs I've Loved (Nearly) My Entire Life" told the tale of some of my earliest pop obsessions. I've written elsewhere about my favorite record store Main Street Records, I've penned a love letter to radio, and I've done two all-vinyl editions of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio (described here and here, with annotation for the first one here). My ongoing series (and long-threatened book) The Greatest Record Ever Made! displays my passion for individual songs, and my 1960s memoir Singers, Superheroes, And Songs On The Radio chronicles my childhood immersed in pop songs and comic books. My 1970s musical tastes were recalled in "Teenage Wasteland," my inability to make music described in "I've Got The Music In Me (And That's Where It's Gonna Stay)," and my path to writing professionally about pop music was detailed in my '80s memoir The Road To GOLDMINE.

I also tried to recreate lists of what may have been my all-time favorite songs when I was in my teens and early twenties: "Imagining/Remembering The Music That Played." Repeating links from a previous Boppin' Pop-A-Looza, I've written LP appreciations of Beatles VI/Beatles '65, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album, the Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. and both Headquarters and The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees (and the compilation Monkeemania), the Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man, the Ramones' Rocket To Russia and Subterranean Jungle, the Barracudas' Drop Out With The Barracudas, Fools Face's Tell America, the [Bay City] Rollers' Elevator, best-of sets by the Hollies, the Bobby Fuller Four, and the Dave Clark Five, and a nifty (if schizophrenic) various-artists set called Heavy Metal. Hell, this blog started with an open letter to the late David Bowie in January of 2016. I love music. I can't make it, but I can tell you what it means to me.

This doesn't even scratch the surface of the sheer volume (HAR!) of what I've written on behalf of the music I love. It all started when I was a little kid. "My First LP" is the subject of the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:

Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio:  CD or download

I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl.

POP-A-LOOZA: Is BEATLES VI Really My All-Time Favorite Album?

 

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post asks that musical question, "Is Beatles VI really my all-time favorite album?"

I'm generally more of a single-song guy than I am a whole-album guy, so I tend to write more about individual songs rather than albums. But: exceptions! I've written about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album, the Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. and both Headquarters and The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees (and the compilation Monkeemania), the Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man, the Ramones' Rocket To Russia and Subterranean Jungle, the Barracudas' Drop Out With The Barracudas, Fools Face's Tell America, the [Bay City] Rollers' Elevator, best-of sets by the Hollies, the Bobby Fuller Four, and the Dave Clark Five, and a nifty (if schizophrenic) various-artists set called Heavy Metal.

My favorite remains my favorite: the music the Beatles released from 1964 through 1966, A Hard Day's Night through Revolver. The spotlight falls on Beatles VI and its moptopped brethren, all in the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:

Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio:  CD or download

I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl.

POP-A-LOOZA: Rescued From The Budget Bin! HEAVY METAL(24 ELECTRIFYING PERFORMANCES)

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is my look back at a record I owned when I was in high school in the '70s, an oddball 2-LP compilation album called Heavy Metal.

It was, um, not a heavy metal collection.

My recollection of the Heavy Metal collection was originally posted here in 2018 as part of my Rescued From The Budget Bin! series, which celebrates records I scored outta the cheap-cheap bins at various vinyl emporiums over the years. Rescued From The Budget Bin! falls within the slightly broader category of My LP Appreciations, which also includes Love At First Spin, Groove Gratitude (A Gift Of Music), The Best Of Everything (about greatest-hits sets), and the used-record series Second-Hand Sound, plus The One That Got Away! (about records I wanted but never owned) and Lost In The Grooves (about underappreciated albums). Oh, and one discussion of my favorite Beatles album, which wasn't part of any specific series. Here are all of the other LP appreciations posted so far:

THE BARRACUDAS: Drop Out With The Barracudas

THE BEATLES: The Beatles (aka The White Album)

THE BEATLES: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

THE BYRDS: Mr. Tambourine Man

THE DAVE CLARK FIVE: Glad All Over Again

FOOLS FACE: Tell America

THE BOBBY FULLER FOUR: The Best Of The Bobby Fuller Four

THE HOLLIES: The Very Best Of The Hollies

THE MONKEES: Headquarters and The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees

THE MONKEES: Monkeemania

THE MONKEES: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd.

THE RAMONES: Rocket To Russia

THE RAMONES: Subterranean Jungle

THE (BAY CITY) ROLLERS: Elevator

I also wrote one (1) new album review:

THE MONKEES: Good Times!

This list doesn't include any of the dozens of albums I reviewed during my twenty-year stint as a freelancer for Goldmine, though I have reprised a few of them to satisfy the content-hungry demands of a daily blog.

Heavy Metal remains the only various-artists collection to appear in My LP Appreciations. There were many such hodgepodge platters that meant a lot to me--Geef Voor New Wave, Do It Now, Times Square, Troublemakers, That Summer!, Experiments In Destiny, The History Of British Rock, and a little thing called Nuggets, among others--and I really oughtta give some of these the full-length treatment in future editions of My LP Appreciations.

But for now, we cast the Rescued From The Budget Bin! spotlight on a double-album budget set that lumped Black Sabbath, The Grateful Dead, War, Yes, and The Eagles together as an unlikely gathering of not-really-headbangers (except for Sabbath, anyway). Heavy Metal is the subject of the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:

Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio:  CD or download

Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1)will contain 165 essays about 165 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).

POP-A-LOOZA: My Illegal Records

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is "My Illegal Records," a look back at bootleg recordings I've owned.

As the post notes, my first bootleg album was a Beatles boot called The Deccagone Sessions. I wrote this about The Deccagone Sessions in a different post:

My first bootleg record, purchased in 1978. As a teenaged Beatles fan in the '70s, I was fascinated by the idea of unreleased Beatles tracks. Even though there were a handful of legit Beatles LPs I hadn't quite gotten 'round to scarfin' up yet--The Beatles Again, Magical Mystery Tour, A Hard Day's Night, and Yellow Submarine-- I wanted more, more than standard-variety Fab Four fare, more, MORE! I saw ads for this enticing, illicit more in The Buyer's Guide For Comics Fandom, and swooned at the prospect of all this secret bonus Beatles material. I passed up a chance to buy my first Beatleg at a Cleveland shopping mall record store over the '77/'78 Christmas break, then finally grabbed my copy of The Deccagone Sessions at Syracuse's Desert Shore Records a few months later. The Deccagone Sessions offered a hodgepodge collection of BBC performances and 1962 Decca Records demos, plus the horribly distorted live-at-The Cavern Club "Some Other Guy," the promo video version of "Revolution," and an uncredited snippet from the Get Back sessions. The radio cover of Buddy Holly's "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" was my immediate favorite (a skip in the track notwithstanding), with that definitive shooby-doo-wop rendition of "Revolution" a close second. All these decades later, that version of "Revolution" is still without official release.

References to the bootleg ads in The Buyer's Guide To Comics Fandom remind me that those ads played a role in the specific circumstances of my introduction to The Damned. The story involves a girl. Don't all stories involve a girl?

A girl. Not THE girl.

A Monkees bootleg called Monkeeshines served as my introduction to a number of TV-only Monkees tracks, and to "Christmas Is My Time Of Year," the 1976 holiday single by Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork. I eventually bought a legitimate reissue of that song on Rhino's The Best Of Cool Yule CD:

The biggest Christmas treat for me here was THE MONKEES!! Well, almost The Monkees. "Christmas Is My Time Of Year" was a 1976 three-fourths Monkees reunion single by Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz & Peter Tork, a cover of a '60s track by the studio group The Christmas Spirit (with members of The Turtles, The Byrds, plus some chick named Linda Ronstadt). I had the Davy/Micky/Petey track on a boot...er, RARE IMPORT Monkees LP called Monkeeshines, absolutely worshiped it, and was so grateful to secure a cleaner copy of the track on CD. The group's then-unreleased 1967 TV performance of "Riu Chiu" would ultimately become the definitive Monkees Christmas classic, but there'll always be a place in my holiday heart for "Christmas Is My Time Of Year."



There was also Monkeemania, a 1979 3-LP collection from Arista Records in Australia. It was presumably authorized, but it had, I dunno, a bootleg aura about it. I loved it anyway. The Kinks disputed Reprise Records' authority to release the 1973 archive-dive LP The Great Lost Kinks Album, but I don't think anyone really considers that a bootleg.



(Oh, and speaking of Christmas bootlegs, here's what I wrote about my presumably-unauthorized copy of The Beatles' Christmas Album:

One early '70s December evening, I was in the car with my family, riding through the village of North Syracuse, when this crazy, manic comedy record came on the radio. When I asked what it was, my sister said it was one of The Beatles' Christmas records. I was fascinated. But the damned things were elusive; they were originally produced from 1963 to 1969 solely for paid subscribers to The Beatles' fan club, and not available to the general public. To this day, their only official commercial release has been as a pricey limited edition collection of 45s in 2017. The Beatles' Christmas Album, the fan club LP that collected all of the original messages on one platter in 1970, has never been officially released, though bootlegs are quite common. I got my copy at a used record shop in Berkeley in 1989, and I added a decent CD boot...er, RARE IMPORT copy a few years ago. I used to wait for radio stations to play all of these at Christmas time, but few of 'em ever did. When we started This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl, we determined that we would play each and every one of them on our annual Christmas shows, without fail. I can't believe no one else does that.)

My most significant bootleg was a cassette of a 1978 live show by The Flashcubes. That tape was a cherished memento for years and years, and it was my only long-form document of the 'Cubes until the early '90s. The Flashcubes are in my all-time pop Trinity--The Beatles, The Ramones, The Flashcubes--but they only released two 45s during their original late-'70s run. I needed more than that. My live Flashcubes cassette sustained me until 'Cubes bassist Gary Frenay gave me copies of their demos, which in turn kept me going until the release of The Flashcubes' Bright Lights CD in 1997. I wrote the liner notes for Bright Lights, and it's one of my favorite pieces among the miles-high stack o' stuff I've done. It occurs to me that my well-worn, distorted live Flashcubes cassette is long overdue for a lengthy blog post of its own.



After writing "My Illegal Records," I realized that I had forgotten to mention my Dave Clark Five bootleg CDs. The ethics of bootlegs are shaky at best; unauthorized releases bring no revenue to artists or labels, though some fans justify purchasing bootlegs of favored acts because they've already bought everything else, and the boots contain material not otherwise available. That argument doesn't apply to pirates, which are illegal copies of legitimate releases. DC5 boots fall into an area in between; my three illicit documents of the Tottenham Sound--American Tour/Coast To Coast, Weekend In London/Having A Wild Weekend, and The Dave Clark 5 Play Good Old Rock & Roll/Dave Clark & Friends--are pirates of legit DC5 LPs from the '60s. But those are all long out of print, and Dave Clark has been unwilling to reissue them. I already own the four LPs contained on those first two CDs, and I don't think I've ever even seen copies of those last two albums. I'll buy 'em all again from ol' Dave if he ever sees fit to license them for officially-sanctioned shiny discs. Much of the material has been available for authorized digital-air download from iTunes, and I did buy a bunch of those (and frankly, I think those files sound better than some of the bootleg CD tracks). 


Anyway, those are the supplements to my bootleg story. "My Illegal Records" is the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.


TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:

Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio:  CD or download

Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1)will contain 165 essays about 165 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).