Dynastie Crisis "Vivre libre" b/w "Faust 72" France 1972

It was my intention to post a compilation this past weekend, but I was hit with a computer virus that took me most of the weekend to clean out of my machine.  I have a backlog of LPs to post, mostly compilations, but editing and labeling those audio files takes a lot of time, so for now here's a single and I hope to post an LP this coming weekend.

It would be nice to claim that this was a cool find on a trip or at a flea market, but it was simply an eBay purchase that I was the sole bidder on.

With a bunch of hair farmers and one baldhead, these guys look a bit like Spirit, and honestly given the variety of sounds that classic band gave us these guys can be said to sound something like them in places as well.  For some reason many French, Italian and other Romance language speakers seemed to have trouble producing rock'n'roll rhythms smoothly in the '60s, and although some gems were produced from those countries, early on many of the records from southern Europe up through the garage era sound awkward to me in a sense I have trouble describing.  Something about the rhythm section is often just a little bit off, as if the musicians had rock'n'roll verbally described to them once without ever hearing it in person.  (I sometimes think this is somehow related to language as Germanic and Slavic and some other speakers don't seem to have had these problems for the most part, but on the other hand neither did Latin Americans, so who knows...)  Many of my favorite '60s French recordings are things like Serge Gainsbourg productions that aren't really even trying to replicate straight rock'n'roll.  Once we get to the '70s and harder rock and prog, the different groove that France was in actually seems to have worked for them and produced some cool sounds.

The A-side here has some interesting percussion in a good way, almost Latin, and the addition of some flute puts this in the mid-ground between any hard rock early '70s band, Santana and Jethro Tull.  The B-side is even better, a blend of hard rock and prog with interesting keyboard sounds.

The band was only together for a few years, releasing only two studio albums.  More info here.

Live free or die.

Various Artists "Exploiting Plastic Inevitable: Lesson II" LP international 1960s/1970s

Full title: Exploiting Plastic Inevitable: Lesson II Globular Lightning

One of the great things about the internet is how people with similar interests in different parts of the world can become connected when otherwise they would never find each other.  That's the story with this album.

Shortly after posting the rare first volume of these two compilations, my post got some comments from one of the German fellows who put them together.  One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was proud owner of an untouched copy of one of only 700 of these follow-up compilations pressed back in 1996.  A couple of months ago I didn't even know this existed.

So Vielen Dank! to my German source.  The idea was that this was going to be the first time this rarity was posted by anyone, but as luck would have it the excellent blog Paradise of Garage Comps beat me to it by a few weeks.  Seeing the effort that went into getting this LP as far as it came, I'm going to plow ahead and post it again myself.  Two sources for something this scarce can't hurt.  (And yes, this is my vinyl rip... first time the album was played!)

Once again this album is composed of some fantastic garage and psych rarities from literally all over the world, spanning the mid-'60s through the early '70s.

Side 1

1 Les Problemes - Dodecaphonie (Puteaux, France)
2 Brains Ltd. - Change Your Life (Hamburg, Germany)
3 Adam's Boys - Get Away From Me (Athens, Greece)
4 Hide and Seek - Riven Street (Austria)
5 Los Vidrios Quebrados - Que Importa El Tiempo (Chile)
6 Rob De Neys - Bye Bye Mrs. Turple (Amsterdam, Holland)
7 John Wonderling - Man Of Straw (NY, U.S.A.)
8 The Nicols - She Has A Name To Find Out (The Hague, Holland)
9 Ganim's Asia Minors - Daddy Lolo (New York, NY, U.S.A.)


Side 2

1 The Rope Sect - Dae Du Dae (Villingen, Germany)

2 Tom Dae Turned On - I Shall Walk (Hartford, CT, U.S.A.)

3 Berry Clan & The Pollution - My Crock (Belgium)

4 Revolver - I'm Down (Israel)

5 Ram & Sel - Screw You (Sheffield, U.K.)

6 Illes - Nem Erdekel, Amit Monsz (Hungary)

Take a trip!

Lalo Schifrin "Theme from Enter the Dragon" soundtrack 45 USA/Argentina 1973

It's a busy weekend and I only have time to post a single this week, although there are a lot of great LPs I have lined up for you folks in the coming weeks.  We'll be getting back to more '60s/'70s rock soon, including some rare compilations I think people will love.  It takes more time to edit an LP into mp3s and do the track listings, especially with compilations.

Here's something a little different, two Lalo Schifrin compositions from the soundtrack of the classic 1973 kung fu flick Enter the Dragon.  Schifrin is from Argentina, and has been involved in both classical music and pop movie and TV soundtracks in L.A. for deacdes.

I much prefer the A-side, which is an up-tempo funk/orchestral pop track punctuated by some awesome '70s kung fu screams.  You can enjoy this with or without irony.  The B-side, "The Big Battle", sounds like the composer was told "OK, we need a song for a long fight sequence... make it sound something like the main theme, but like it could be coming to a climax at any point... but don't do that, just keep it going..."  This was a thrift store find and I likely paid 25 cents for it.

Them kids was fast as lightnin'.

Fox "Only You Can" b/w "Out of My Body" UK/USA/Australia/Ireland 1974

Here's another one of those singles that I thought was a rarity, but is just relatively unknown in the United States.  This song hit #2 on the West German and #3 on the UK pop charts in '74, but at only #53 here in the US this is never going to get played on any commercial radio station.  My copy is a German pressing on the GTO label.

Fox was a multinational band put together by American songwriter/producer Kenny Young, and featured Australian Susan Traynor (using the stage name "Noosha Fox") on vocals, which in her case includes suggestive inhaling.

The hit has a loping beat, a softer side of dance-able glam-pop number that approaches, but never reaches, a reggae grove.  I bet they dug this at Rodney Bingehheimer's English Disco.  The B-side is more a psych-pop by way of glam ballad track and has quite the lysergic lyric, although if I had to pick a drug that was in the studio at the time I'd have to go quaaludes.  Despite - or is it because of? - this description I like both sides.  Now I'd like to hear the '75 LP.

Get out of your body.

Various Artists "Killed by Glam 2: 14 Euro Glam Rock Gems" LP international 1970s

This LP came out within the last couple of years on the MoonBoot label out of London. The first volume is all British bands and I'd love to hear that if anyone out there has it. This is all pretty killer '70s glam from continental Europe as the title suggests. Not much more I can add to that. If you like that genre, you'll love this. If you're a sucker for cheesy '70s electronic effects mixed into stomping rock tracks like I am, you'll love it even more.

Unfortunately my copy seems to have a couple of minor flaws in the pressing that cause brief skips in the first couple of tracks. (The obvious way to avoid this is for you to track down the CD or another vinyl copy like this and buy it.)

Overall this is a very nice job of presenting the music - very clean sound, and color reproductions of the 45 sleeves on the reverse with brief liner notes.

Side A

01. Rocket Men - "Rocket Man" (France 1974)
02. Sharaton - "Caught in the Act" (Netherlands 1974)
03. Mabel - "Hey, I love you!" (Denmark 1976)
04. Tiger B. Smith - "Morning Bird" (West Germany 1974)
05. Nicky Bulldog - "Chewingum Rock" (Italy? 1976)
06. House Of Lilly - "Turn Around" (Switzerland? 1973)
07. Walkers - "Fire" (Denmark 1973)

Side B

08. Funky Family - "Part of My Life" (West Germany 1973)
09. Black Fire - "Come On and Do It" (Netherlands 1975)
10. La Strana Societa - "Vento che soffi" (Italy 1973)
11. Lennart Messagie & Dagleth - "You Can Make It Better" (Belgium 1975)
12. Blue Vamp - "Jolly Dolly" (France 1974)
13. Tears - "Ooh Lah" (Sweden 1974)
14. The Killer - "Say Goodbye" (Netherlands 1975)

Rock on!

Petra Janů & Pro-Rock "Exploduj!" LP - Czechoslovakia 1979

This LP was purchased yesterday at a record show in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia, and has leapfrogged several other records I had in mind to be today's post ... because you need to hear this now!  It's rare when an album meets up to the expectations of cover art and photos this far out there.  Back cover photo posted below.

This is a pretty wild, often punk-intensity, hard-rocking psych-prog release with the odd orchestral and/or synth passage.  I could see it appealing to fans of several genres.  It was a release on the state Supraphon label, which seems to still be in operation in some form.  Lyrics are in Czech; there appears to be a futuristic/space thing going on here but this isn't a language I understand.  Since the '60s and up through the Velvet Revolution, Prague has had a reputation for harboring an avant garde arts scene which has crossed over into popular music and included socially relevant bands such as Plastic People of the Universe.  That makes the presence of this sort of release less surprising coming from that corner of the world.

Ms. Janů, who might have been born Jana Petrů if I'm reading this Czech social networking site's info correctly (it looks like you might be able to contact her directly!) has been active in the Czech music scene since the mid-'70s.  She has a discography here - this appears to be the second album and I'd love to hear the first.  She's been performing the title track from the first album as recently as last year - and in the US!

Note that I'm categorizing records based in the country that existed at the time of their release.  Note also that my track listings are missing some of the diacritical marks over certain letters required by the Czech language.  I figure you either knew what was meant if you can read it or you wouldn't understand it anyway, so I'd save myself a bit of effort.

There's a whole lot going on with this album and in some ways I feel in hearing this as I did upon hearing Os Mutantes (which this does not sound like) for the first time... a bit pleasantly disoriented, amazed that this exists, that it could be this good and this unknown here mostly because of language, cultural (i.e. the refusal of most English speakers to listen to music in other languages), political and probably economic barriers.  Similarly I think the variety of influences is going to make this interesting listening for years to come.

Czech it out.

Spinach - "America-America" b/w "Rhythm of Love" - Italy / West Germany 1970

This is one of the few items I'll be posting that was purchased on eBay, in this case probably a decade ago.  I recall this not being cheap for a single - I'll bet close to $20 with postage.

Here we have one of the many projects of alpine/German-speaking Italy's producer Giorgio Moroder (his official site is down unfortunately), who began producing rock and pop in Europe in the mid-'60s, rode and popularized a number of trends including bubblegum pop, electronic pop and proto-glam, and found huge success as a disco producer (Diana Ross) in the late '70s.  He was a big proponent and composer of electronic music, which led to his composition of over 100 film and TV soundtracks.  Apparently he's living in Beverly Hills these days, penning tunes for Hollywood's crap factory.

Earlier on the soundtrack work was interesting electronic stuff (Midnight Express), but by the '80s this went pretty mainstream schlock (Top Gun), where things likely sit today.  Between 1966-1971 or so there are dozens of singles out there which are his work, mostly pretty cool crazed bubblegum/garage stuff typically with a mangled English lyric.  Often the projects are attributed to his first name or are called "Giorgio & The... [pick a band name]."  Check out this very detailed discography.

Spinach dates it appears from his Munich producing and composing days, which is a very good thing for us.  Side A is a bubblegum piece with a lyric about the stereotypical USA; it sold over 400,000 copies in Japan in the early '70s.  (There is a 1973 Japanese LP of this material which is likely not cheap.  Anyone heard it?)  The B side has more interesting percussion and some of the early synth sound that would come to dominate his work in the coming years.

Noteworthy is the naked woman covered in leaf spinach on the front cover, and a horrid enough view on the back cover of Moroder and his partner in this project, Michael Holm, dressed pretty much as the Festrunk Brothers, the wild'n'crazy guys of early Saturday Night Live fame.  It would be wrong of me not to include a photo of that as well.  You know they just want to get down and make funky with a couple of swinging American foxes.

Relive 1970 here.

Bulldog "Doggy Doggy" b/w "Where Did She Go" - UK 1975

Another single from the 4 for 10 euro stack purchased in Rome, and again I was hoping for something a little more glam and got something more on the pop end.

There is no info on the sleeve about any band, and I suspect that this was a studio project hoping to score a novelty hit.  Songs were compsed by "A. Taylor" on the Blue Jean label, and distributed by "Spark It." (Italia?).  It seems safe to assume this is British.

The A-side reminds me of the George Baker Selection hit "Paloma Blanca", only with barking.  Seriously.  There's barking.  The B-side is filler, an Elvis impersonator-type goof on '50s rock'n'roll/pop that sounds like a Bonzo Dog or Move joke track.

Woof! Woof!

Guy Bedos et Sophie Daumier "La drague" b/w "Private-Club" - France 1973

This is another of the singles I bought at a second-hand store in Paris for a very small sum, probably 1 euro.  It's in excellent condition.

My college French told me that the A-side translated as "The Pick-Up" so I figured this would be a keeper.  It's pretty close to what I expected, a generally similar track to the scandalous Serge Gainsbourg / Jane Birkin classic and international hit "Je t'aime... moi non plus."  Only this isn't as good and there aren't the moaning sounds.

In fact this is less a couple of songs per se than a spoken word/comedy novelty item with minimal background music, especially the B-side which sounds to have been recorded live at some dinner theater-type venue.  This will likely have limited appeal for non-francophone readers unless you want some background sounds for your swingin' retro cocktail party.  Honestly a lot of this dialog goes by so quickly that I'm missing a third of the content and most of the jokes.  I find the B-side especially hard to follow.  If someone who understands more would like to comment on the content, please do.

So, who are these people?  "Guy Bedos (born June 15, 1934, in French Algeria) is an actor and stand-up comedian, mostly known in France for his part in the film Nous irons tous au paradis.  He is also famous for his left-wing political affiliation and support to politicians such as François Mitterrand."

"Sophie Daumier (24 November 1934 – 1 January 2004) was a French film actress. She appeared in 28 films between '56-'79.  She was born as Elisabeth Hugon ... the daughter of composer Georges Hugon. She was married to Guy Bedos from 1965 to 1977; the marriage ended in divorce."

Divorced and then dead... this is turning out to be one downer of a post, huh?

Remember better times here.

Matia Bazar "Play Boy" b/w "Tu simplicita" - Italy 1978

Antonella Ruggiero began recording as "Matia" in 1974 and formed the band Matia Bazar (meaning simply "Matia Bazaar" in English) a couple of years later, in Genoa.  The band represented Italy in the 1979 Eurovision song contest, and had one #1 hit in Italy and Belgium (this is not it).  I don't think anyone in the US knows them.


Here is an extensive and quite cool official band site, here is their Wikipedia entry and here is a Russian-language fan site.  The official site also has a Russian option, so they must have a following there as well.


I had never heard of them until stumbling across this single in a second-hand store in Paris a couple of years ago, where I picked it up for 1 or 2 euro.  I bought a handful of other European discs with more obvious appeal (glam and surf) there that day, and a few will more will be posted here.  My copy is a French pressing although the lyric on both sides is in Italian.


The five-people-taking-a-bubble-bath cover led me to the purchase, and frankly at the price asked I didn't care much what the record sounded like.  As a bonus the music is quite good, the A-side despite the high-pitched female vocal reminds me of a later period George Martin-arranged Beatles song in a number of ways, down to a very George Harrison-style brief guitar solo.  The "kazoo" backing vocals especially make this sound like a song that would fit in with the early '70s "toytown" pop compilations that have been popular with psych fans in recent years, and I'm surprised that people were still turning out that kind of music several years later.


The B-side is a bit more sedate but also a nice pop tune that I would have guessed was recorded at least 5 years earlier.  Quality stuff.


Give it a listen!

Nass el Ghiwane / ناس الغيوان "New Dervich" 45 - Morocco 1972

What tropicalia is to Brazil, the 1970s pop drawn from the Gnawa tradition is to Morocco.  One of the two big bands dating from the 1970s that led the movement was Nass El Ghiwane (link to their blog, in French).

"American film director Martin Scorcese once referred to them as The Rolling Stones of Africa. Their music merges the traditional music of Morocco with modern subjects. ... Nass el Ghiwane was formed in the late 60's by four young men from the poor district of Hay el Mohammadi in industrial Casablanca. ... Nass el Ghiwane specialized in writing colloquial poetry about topics related to the social and political climate, and arranging its music in the Moroccan tradition. ... In a time where the only music available was middle-eastern pop music that sang about love, Nass el Ghiwane had prepared something new for Morocco: they mixed the Sufi chants and litanies of Zaouias ... with the elegant colloquial poetry of Melhoun adding to it the ancient rhythms of the Berbers and the healing dances of the mystical Gnawas. Morocco has just had its independence from the French and its population, still uncertain of what the future is hiding, was shocked and moved by the texts of Nass el Ghiwane: corruption, injustice and degradation of society. They were the first Moroccan band to mix such a diverse and rich heritage and to speak their minds even about the most forbidden subjects, public discussion of which may have led to imprisonment at that time."  (See their Wikipedia entry for more.)

This record is from 1972, two years before the death of Boujemaa Hagour, who is described often as the leader or main initial creative force in the group.  Every time I spoke with a Moroccan music shop owner about this group, the owner would point him out in CD photos as "the one who died."  I bought this disc last year in an amazing music store in Essaouira called Bob Music, which is accurately described in some detail over at the Crud Crud blog (get yourself to the July 2010 entries).

This and a couple of the other records I'll probably post in the future are likely the very same ones that were mentioned there as too beaten up to be worth buying.  I likely overpaid for this at about US $10, but the same shop owner let me have some quality CDs at very low prices and I wasn't about to complain.  I enjoy even having the sleeve of something this cool.

This is one of my all-time favorite covers on a single, with striking colors and graphics.  The sound quality on this even after cleaning it is fairly rough; hope you like pops and crackles.  I suggest buying yourself a compilation or two of the band's releases, as I have, if this strikes your fancy.

Listen here.

Julie Felix "Heaven Is Here" b/w "Soon" - UK/USA 1970

It's exciting how much music is out there.  No matter how much I think I know, there are always new artists and even whole genres to dig into of which I was previously unaware.

This is yet another one of the 7" discs I picked up in Rome at a used bookshop 4 per 10 euro.  Like the Chris Spedding single I opened the blog with, I picked this up in part because it was a Mickie Most/Rak label production.  This is the second post on the blog already of an Italian pressing of a single I assumed was a British artist, but is an American who had been working in Britain for a substantial period, becoming better known there than here.

I'm too young to have caught the '60s, but I have a pretty massive collection of '60s recordings, and you would think that I would be familiar with Julie Felix for one of any number of reasons.  The cover art plus the year gave me a pretty good idea of what this was going to sound like while I was still in the store, not knowing the name.

She played the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969, recorded several (mostly folk) albums in the UK beginning in 1964, was the resident singer for David Frost's BBC show, had her own TV show where she hosted performances of The Kinks, Jimmy Page (check out this video!) and Leonard Cohen.  This was the second Top 40 hit (#22) of hers in the UK for 1970.

Yet I'd never heard of her!  Ms. Felix is American but has lived in Britain for about 50 years.  She has an extensive website with info about her ongoing performances, ways to order CDs that cover a lot of her material spread over some years, and even join her fan club.

"Heaven Is Here" is an excellent pop-folk-rocker that Americans should hear.  The B-side is an OK typical B-side, providing a more introspective, slower song.  At times when Felix is really belting it out her voice reminds me of Joan Baez, but that's a starting point of reference and she has her own sound.

Give it a listen.

Bruce Foster "Platinum Heroes" b/w "(I Remember) The Revolution" - USA 1976

Don't those song titles scream glam?  This just has to be some T. Rex-style, jams-kicked-out rock, huh?

Unfortuately it isn't.  What you have on the A-side is a 5+ minute homage to The Beatles, running down their career from '64 into their '70s solo stuff.  The song borrows liberally from Beatles tunes throughout and is interesting mainly for that reason.  Somehow in 1976 people were already nostalgic for less than a decade earlier.  Some Beatles tunes actually charted a second time in various countries in the early '70s upon rerelease.

This A-side ends up sounding like a more restrained David Bowie or even Kim Fowley track, minus the melodrama or the palpable insanity respectively.  This is totally something Fowley would do, only his take would be somehow menacing.  The B-side is a ballad to the good ol' hippie activist days and the post-hippie "doin' my own thing" cultural miasma.  Not bad pop overall and an interesting artifact of people knowing even this early that a major wave had crested, and the blahs had set in.

The lyric to the A-side is on Foster's personal website, which gives a bio and plenty of other info and photos.  Foster is apparently descended from arch American songwriter Stephen Foster.  He was a session musician in the UK and in the US, and played keyboard for Status Quo, Gladys Knight and KISS.  Later he teamed up with a very young Richie Sambora and wrote material for/with him.  The album the single is drawn from is reviewed in a 1977 Billboard magazine you can read here.

I don't have my Billboard charts book handy but the claim is that the A-side did chart and received a lot of radio play, and still is played on radio, but I have no recollection of having heard this before.  Perhaps this was a bigger song in Europe than in the US.  It's also very possible that the single charted on the lower end of the Top 40, which for an artist who isn't a household name can absolutely bury you with the oldies and classic rock programmers.  My pressing is Italian and is another single from the stack bought in Rome, 4 per 10 euro.  I had assumed Foster was British.

The lyric states "I was there at Shea for their last show."  The Beatles' last live show was actually in San Francisco, unless you count the "rooftop concert."  Extra points for mentioning the "Paul is dead" craze and LSD use:

"We dug for clues back in 1970
They crossed the road but we just couldn't let them be
We saw the hangman, priest, and the prisoner
followed close by the gravedigger
Dropping tabs and playing back hidden incantations
Revelation's # 9
and counting black carnations"

Nice.  Grab it here.

Space - "Magic Fly" b/w "Ballad for Space Lovers" - Italy 1977

This single was purchased at a used bookstore in Rome, Italy, less than 10 minutes' walking distance from Vatican City.  From the sacred to the profane, eh?

The hope was that this was some late glam stomper or a "Space Oddity"-type cosmic rock ballad.  No such luck; side A is a synthy instrumental probably meant to be played as a disco dance tune, and the flip is a less interesting instrumental synth ballad that at times reminds me of the theme from Last Tango in Paris.  I'm not even sure how I recall that, never having seen the movie but having seen the trailer once or twice.  I suppose the melody made an impression as images of a chubby, aging Marlon Brando were burned into my brain.

The faster side is interesting enough to merit inclusion on the blog, and might appeal to fans of the less funky tracks of Kraftwerk, or maybe even Depeche Mode.  The pic sleeve is a winner, and one wonders which part of speech "Fly" is in this context.  Just three posts in and I've already introduced a genre beyond the bounds I laid out for the blog, although in fairness I bought the record hoping for a rock gem and now maybe you won't make the same error if this doesn't float your boat.  Once I started playing a side on the wrong speed and it sounded equally interesting and slightly menacing.

This was likely a producer's studio project.  No musicians are listed and the composition is by "Ecama", no first name listed.  Between that name, the Vogue label apparently being Italian, most of the language on the label and sleeve being Italian and finding the record in Italy I conclude, using my advanced cognitive powers, that this was probably of Italian origin.  If someone knows otherwise, do tell.

This is one of a number of singles I picked up at this store at 4-for-10 euros, most of which will eventually end up here.

Blast off to '70s Euro-electronic-discoland here.

Chris Spedding - "Time Warp" b/w "Bored Bored" - UK 1978

Sorry folks, no pic sleeve for this one.

I am not very familiar with the solo work of Chris Spedding, who appears to have played with a wide array of rock royalty as a '60s/'70s session musician.

Judging by his YouTube videos, as a solo artist he had a foot in glam, the pop/New Wave end of punk and that range of guitar music in the UK in the mid- to late-1970s.

I was attracted to this single, scored for just $1, at a garage sale because it's on the glam label Rak and was produced by '60s/'70s ace producer Mickie Most, who owned the label.  This didn't disappoint.

"Bored Bored" is a nice mid-tempo pop-rocker with an obviously '70s punk-inspired lyric, but the flip is the star here.  "Time Warp" features everything but the kitchen sink, a slow burner with loud backward guitar, synthy "robot" vocal effects and an echo-laden space lyric.  It has nothing to do with the song of the same title from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Both sides of the single actually do end this abruptly, there are no technical difficulties, which I take it was also punk-inspired immediacy.

Do I sound enough like a music snob in my first "real" post?

Listen (two zipped mp3s, photo) right here.