ROCKS
Aerosmith
(Columbia)

by Joe S. Harrington

Wowie zowie, did I ever tell you that this is one o’ the most awesome platters ever waxed in the name of, you know, rock n’ roll (old folks music). A real killer from start to finish. Definitely underrated. A CLASSIC transitional alb betwixt seventies boogoid “mustache ride” rock and the oncoming glam-metal of the eighties…
and punk too, because, check out the attitude of Tyler and company on this major-label monster (one of the LAST good ones…ever). But more on that in a minute. Rocks was positively the LAST Aerosmith elpee worth a damn, and it was also in many ways their best. After that they could’ve pulled a Lynyrd Skynyrd (speaking of moustache rock) and it wouldn’t have mattered. They hung in there and trashed the legend, just like Lou Reed, Iggy, the Stones, the ex-Beatles, Dylan, Ozzy and a million others. So what?
      Actually the first four Aerosmith albums are all excellent: the first one is this kind of Cape Cod bar band boogie, very endemic to Boston and the surrounding region. J. Geils were merely doing a more urbanized version, but the intent was the same: kick ass. Aerosmith was the reigning New England party album until Boston came along to usurp it. Once again, the vibe was the same — “smokin’ tokin’/puke tonight mama I ain’t jokin’!” MOUSTACHE ROCK! But there weren’t no moustaches in Aerosmith coz they were also goin’ for this glam-pout image, which put ‘em firmly in the metal camp right behind Kiss as the up-and-comers of the whole ’73 era.
      Get Your Wings, their second, was a continuation of the punk attitude first expressed on such cuts from the first album as “Movin’ Out” and “One Way Street.” This was the album where Aerosmith really came into their own, adding something more sinister to the heavy metal mix ala Sabbath, Kiss or BOC, as opposed to coming off as a Stones/Dolls-derived “party” band. The vibe was dark and heavy, and somewhat oppressive—which is what I like about it. Meanwhile their posture on the cover was, as Circus dubbed it, “cooler than thou” with all their spandex and dirty long hair. It wasn’t quite moustache rock (as epitomized by Foghat, ZZ Top, James Gang etc.). It was a step beyond and the third alb, Toys in the Attic — also for the most part excellent — was a continuation along this decadent path, only by now the tempo had picked up slightly. You notice the same thing about the Dolls and Kiss — they got faster as they went along, and hence better if you ask me. Also with Toys, Aerosmith got their first taste of mainstream success with the hits “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk This Way.” This put ‘em over the top, and now they really were competing with Kiss and Zeppelin in the metal titans sweepstakes.
       Ok, superstardom was theirs at last, this brash bar band from Boss-clown…the Rolling Stone cover, Bebe Buell in the limousine, Tyler could afford a whole lot of new scarves. This was the era where Joe Perry really was like: “Eeeh, I needed two lines and two beers just to get up in the morning.” So how did Aerosmith respond to their fame? By turning around and making one o’ the ultimate glammo-decadento masterpieces of the decade, Rocks, which came out in 1976, slightly before the first Ramones album.
       I mention that fact coz it’s significant. Before there was formerly “punk” there was always punks and that’s what someone like Steven Tyler represents. In other words, whereas guys like Verlaine and Richard Hell, in homage to Rimbaud and Baudelaire (and even Dylan), were consciously “punk” (as in poetic) a guy like Tyler really was the essence of the ill-begotten punk with NOTHING on his mind other than carnage. And that’s what really comes off of this album — these palookas really were reveling in their superstardom in a way that even the Stones or Zep or Bowie had never pulled off. The only comparable alb, attitude-wise, is Kiss’s Destroyer, which came out at approximately the same time — which once again was that slim window right before Punk broke (never mind that Nirvana stuff, punk actually “broke” the day the first Ramones album came out on Sire, but unfortunately the culture was at low tide, and has been ever since, so it took a while for that wave to hit — which was long after it broke, and hence irrelevant).
      So what’s on this platter? Well if you kiddos have never heard this ‘un you’re in for a treat coz it’s just a heavy-mental sledgehammer from start to finish. Aerosmith had improved vastly as musicians since the first album…the tempos no longer plod and Joe Perry was now whipping off metallic leads worthy o’ his idols Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Less Stones at this point—once again, these clowns were coming into their own. And what a way to do it with the monster riff of “Back in the Saddle” leading the way…this is Tyler’s own celebration of superstardom and the vocals are once again sinister. This track shows Aerosmith’s mastery of the sexual-metaphor-as-statement-of-being…a tactic they would employ again and again. It would be an empty boast, like some of Kiss’s stuff, if they didn’t back it up with genuine musical dynamics, but they do. Compare Rocks to either the Stones’ Black & Blue or Zep’s Presence (released the same year) to name just two former influences that Aerosmith by this point had usurped.
      The second cut, “Last Child,” is Aerosmith’s mocking attempt at “hick”-oriented material, but far from a hokey hoedown it features an almost mechanical riff by Perry that clomps along with the leadfoot determination of the ploughman while Tyler once again doles out salacious metaphors dealing w/ “sassafras” and other homespun verbage to once more equivocate his gonads. It’s hilarious stuff, and I’m sure the average cowpoke was NOT too amused by it, kinda like when the Dolls hit Texas and got threatened by those hicks, who really were like: “Waaaaah, y’all look like women.” Once again, Aerosmith were moving way BEYOND moustache rock — the Dolls were definitely the precedent, which is what I mean about this album being TOTAL PUNK, but Aerosmith were able to pull it off in a way the Dolls weren’t. Hell, I know this album is punk coz GILBERT DOUGHTY and I used to listen to it in 1976, when I was twelve and we were doing the most punk things in our lives — like breaking people’s windows, rolling huge cement pipes onto darkened roads, and stealing people’s mail. Rocks was the soundtrack to the whole juvenile delinquent uprising of the seventies, and it wouldn’t be usurped in this capacity until AC/DC released their magnum opus, Highway to Hell, in ’79. It doesn’t get more “punk” than this.
A perfect examp is “Rats in the Cellar,” a bracing punk opus that really drives home the album’s whole nihilistic intent: “Throw me in the slam/Catch me if you can,” Tyler sings with ferocious intensity as the verse literally reverberates in air, before Perry squashes it through some Zeppelinoid tomfoolery and renders an amazing solo worthy o’ Page or Beck himself. And speakin’ of Perry, just like Keith finally blossomed as a songwriter on Let it Bleed w/ “You Got the Silver,” the sideclosing “Combination” gives Perry another chance to shine with his own composition, a complexly melodic but utterly metallic piece containing one of Aerosmith’s most vulgar and beautiful lyrics: “Walking on Gucci/Wearing Yves St. Laurent/Better stay on/Coz I’m so goddamn gaunt.”
      They were admitting their excesses freely, and perhaps no album I can think of so voiced the decadent ethos of rock stardom as passionately as this one. It would definitely be a big influence on the first Van Halen album, which took the overblown posture of Rocks and helped turn it into bubblegum. But that was the whole step towards the eighties metal that I was talking about, what made this not moustache rock was that Aerosmith (and Kiss) were always leaning in that direction.
      Second side starts with another tune that twists a common cliché into a clever metaphor…mainly “Sick as a Dog,” which is another killer riff that explodes with kinetic energy worthy of the Stones, Who, Faces, Zep, or any of the other true masters of the riff. One should also mention Jack Douglas’s production, which had been slowly improving since the first alb—the dynamics are geared towards the highest register so the whole ensemble functions as one giant RIFF (Mutt Lange would achieve the same ends with AC/DC). Dig the handclaps, which have much more in common, sonically, with something like the MC5’s Back in the USA than they do with, say, Montrose. Aerosmith had finally left the plod behind, which is why Rocks stands up a lot better nowadays than something like Ted Nugent.
      “Nobody’s Fault” — ironically coming at the same time as Zep unleashed “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” — is another amazing piece of music, perhaps the most extreme heavy-metal Aerosmith ever produced. One can literally hear them turning up the amps at the beginning of the song and the slight hesitation signals chaos as Perry suddenly lets loose a surging flood of completely over-the-top riffage. They must’ve been doing shitloads of coke, just like Sabbath at the same time, because you can hear Tyler almost pulling his hair out as he screeches lyrics like “shit piled up n’ debris!” This song is like a vacation in hell, but you don’t mind it so much — which once again reconfirms my theory that this alb in many ways, theoretic and otherwise, set the precedent for Highway to Hell.
      Think of it this way — if one had to line up perhaps the three classic heavy-metal LPs it would probably be this one, Highway and Motorhead’s Ace of Spades.
      The third-to-last cut, “Get the Lead Out,” is probably the worst on the alb — it’s Tyler doing more of his “hick” parodies, which is more of the Boston stuff…mainly, THEY’RE so close to being hicks that they think by mocking rednecks they’ll distance themselves from their own New York inferiority complex (or something like that). Hence the fact, on this track, there’s stuff about “fried chicken” and the like. It’s still pretty good though — it would’ve done the Stones proud at this point and Nashville Pussy has never done a song as great. “Lick and a Promise” is yet another supercharger with more of that reverberating dynamic I mentioned a few paragraphs back. They just dive headlong into it, and make all the right harmonic decisions…end result is another twisting turning opus that, even 28 years later, hasn’t grown cold.
      Alb closes with “Home Tonight,” which I of course had mixed feelings about during my kid-hood since it was a BALLAD and all, but that I appreciate now coz w/ Tyler mewling the homesick rockstar blues I realize that this really was the precursor to the whole wave of schlock-metal “ballads” in the eighties. In fact Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home” is practically the exact same song. Gotta give credit where credit’s due, and increasingly, it’s looking like it’s all been done before.
      Now can I review Get the Knack?

Wait, how do you spell that? Oh, okay, G-A-Y. Thanks.

MY LIFE WITH PAVEMENT
by Joe H

Back way back in the primal indie-rock era, before Cosloy lost his eyesight when Matador ruled the roost, there were two groups I absolutely refused to listen to, because they reeked of the hipster cooties that I abhorred. I even bought Exile in Guyville but consciously steered clear of Pavement and Guided By Voices. The latter to me seemed to be the worst kind of classic-rock-in-drag and there was nothing I cared about less than a paunchy middle-aged schoolteacher who jammed with his buddies and taped every second of his time-out-for-bathroom-breaks gramps-rock. And Pavement seemed the epitome of smarmy college rock and just the fact that it seemed all the “right” (read: wrong) people liked ‘em made ‘em a slightly too precious (read: smarmy) for me to indulge in…although I must admit by the time of Watery, Domestic, their ’93 EP—which is included in the new Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Redux—they’d even won me over (although that might’ve just been the homage to Ambergris on the cover, and the fact that the day I bought the album was also the occasion of a very well-remembered one-night-stand). I’ll never forget when Slanted and Enchanted, the ORIGINAL, came out: WMBR in Cambridge actually played the whole thing in its entirety as if it was an actual event. And while I thought that was cool, having always been a firm believer in the potential of benign objects to have world-changing implications (at least in my world anyway, hence Ramones Leave Home or Never Mind the Bollocks or The Dictators Go Girl Crazy), it didn’t make me run out and buy the album. In fact, I seldom bought ANY Matador wax, preferring to give my moolah to Jimmy Johnson, pre-electroid days, for the latest ultra-obscure Corwood or Twisted Village rambling…altho’ I did shell out bucks for an occasional Matador opus (the “trilogy” made by Yo La Tengo—Painful, Electro-Pura, and I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One which, if you really look at it, for that band really was like the succession of Let it Bleed-Sticky Fingers-Exile for the Stones—being an exception as was the previously mentioned Liz “I don’t play” Phair opus, which I got duped into believing was the next step beyond Barbara Manning when it was just this generation’s equivalent of Stevie Nicks, but anyway. The fact is, I never even HEARD Slanted, ‘cept for that one time on ‘MBR, til a couple yrs later when I was drivin’ down to New York with this band I knew called Meatsicle, which featured Steven Prygoda, currently of My Own Worst Enemy, and we played it on the way, and the only thing that stood out was the bratty petulant “I’m trying” tirade of one of the songs, which I still don’t know the name of, but recognized instantly when I heard it again here…
       But there’s one problem: nowhere is there a track listing so I still don’t know what the fucking song is called. Which gets me back to my whole problem w/ this kind of collegiate self-expression in the first place: mainly the lack o’ any credits or even a picture of the band. So once again Pavement lived up to my estimation of ‘em as a bunch of pretentious smarmy twits altho’ it does unconditionally qualify ‘em as quantum indie-rock coz this was a well-worn trick during that whole era, and probably still is amongst the remaining indie-rock factions (which at this late date is symbolic of one long collective yawn). Mainly, the pretentious habit of not listing credits, or the proper song order, almost as if to say that our music is either too “cool” (or unimportant) to require categorizing of any kind. It’s reverse elitism, total passive aggressive behavior that would’ve NEVER behooved groups who wanted to see their name in lights like T. Rex, Cooper, the ‘Tators, the Pistols or even Lisa Suckdog. It’s that whole nerdy staring-at-my-shoes type of humility that helped turn rock n’ roll into something for sippers instead of guzzlers. Pavement to me always represented the absolute essence o’ that kind of thinking, although, like I said, they eventually won me over with some of their post-Slanted work like the brilliant “Sue Me Jack” single, which was some of the most constructive use of post-Sonic Youth noise this side of Al Licht in Love Child, and the aforementioned Watery, Domestic. The good news is, both of them are included in this new reissue package. But once again there are no credits.
       Then again, I just realized….eeeeh, I borrowed this reissue from ANDREW COLSTON, guitarist for Portland’s fab ragamuffin scum peddlers the POINTS! That idiot! Perhaps he LOST the accompanying booklet, which might’ve contained the album credits? Makes it fuckin’ hard for a reviewer when he doesn’t even know which fuckin’ song is which! All I have here to go on, besides a reprint o’ both the Slanted and Watery sleeves (both of which were bastions of more scribble-mark gobbledygook), is a lyric sheet that consists of handwritten scrawl, with no indication what order the tracks actually play. I know you might think I’m griping about this too much, but goddamn, it seems pretty presumptuous to me to put forth a hunk o’ product w/ no way to identify which song is which. But that’s always been Pavement’s whole unassuming posture. And because I’m basically unfamiliar w/ Slanted in the first place, I’m gonna have a hard as hell time translating to you, the reader, which song I’m actually writing about. Checked out the discs themselves to see if the track listings were on there—of course not, it’s just more watercolor indie swirlie-swirl, probably designed by the girlfriend of one of the band mates. None of them are gay, but they’re very tolerant of it of course. Two of the five have actually dressed as women on Halloweens past. Never mind finding out who’s actually in the band either—we all know Steve Malkmus, who’s of course gone on to bigger and better things, letting sweetie-kins in the group, and persevering in a whole new incarnation. But I’d be hard pressed to identify even one other member of the group.
        Which is kind of the whole point about indie rock in general and Pavement in particular—as opposed to rockers past (once again, Cooper, AC/DC, Kiss, the Beatles, Cheap Trick, Iggy, Bowie or even PUNKS like Sid Vicious or Darby Crash) the whole idea was to be kind of FACELESS and, once again, unassuming, which is why clowns like this went onstage in t-shirts and other nondescript attire. They didn’t want attention coz they were petulant geniuses who felt their work should speak for itself. What did they think they were, jazz musicians? Musically, it sounds more like yet another twist on the V. Underground, but why complain? Considering the New World Order that is upon us, the time is ripe for nostalgia for the Clinton era. And even though Slanted slightly predated said epoch, Pavement were one of the quintessential nineties groups and it’s great to finally get to hear what I was missing all along.
       Disc one, according to the scant credits, supposedly consists of Slanted and Enchanted along with “Slanted sessions and the John Peel Sessions #1.” It’s fairly easy to identify the latter due to Peel’s trademark sandbag style, which lends itself well to Fall-inspired rockers like whatever track #18 is called. Remember, the Fall themselves eventually ended up on Matador, so everything connects. Starting at the beginning, the first song “Summer Babe,” the opening cut on Slanted, introduced the classic Pavement sound: a rhythmic rollercoaster of weird syncopated drumming, and a lot of gnawing insect-noise type of guitars, with Malk-mouse sarcastically intoning his throwaway lyrics. This stuff was obviously an influence on everyone from the Strokes to the Libertines, and Malkmus was the best Lou Reed imitator of his generation (way better than Ira Kaplan). I never realized the Lou influence on this stuff ‘til now, but it’s not surprising considering that it was truly rare to find an indie-rock band anywhere, back in those days, who wasn’t well-versed in VU academia. But admittedly Pavement added something to it. “Trigger Cut,” for instance, features a gloriously chunky downstroked jangling riff with an almost call-and-response vocal delivery courtesy o’ Malkmouth n’ company.
       Malkmouse was not a good yeller ala Iggy or that guy in the Agenda (Jason?) or even Bob Mould in his prime—Steve’s supposed “grist” (not to be confused with Ambergris of course) is rather underwhelming I must say. He sounds like a whiny bratty college creep…which is exactly what he was so I guess that makes it “authentic” at the very least, and y’ can’t really ask for much more than that unless you really DO want it to be all neo-Tin Pan Alley and one thing about Pavement is, no matter how much I always loathed them—or what they stood for anyway—I did always admit they were IMPORTANT! Like Liz Phair, it had to happen and of course Cosloy was there first…#$%%$&! Meanwhile the “I’m Tired” song comes back to haunt us and this is the one I remember from the roadtrip to New York, and I think even recall saying something about it at the time to my comrades about how I thought it was bogus. I had a friend once who complained that he thought Alan Licht’s delivery on Love Child’s “Permission” sounded totally forced, and while I disagree in that count, it’s true, rage is something that the average angst-ridden college kid has a hard time pulling off. But despite the fraudulent nature of Malkmisses’ tantrum here, the song itself is a complete bastardization of “The Murder Mystery” with some Butterglory thrown in. Not the best Pavement song, in other words, and I still don’t know the goddamn name of it.
        Pavement was one of the many groups from that era—a great deal of them on Matador—who straddled the line betwixt pop and avant-garde. So on this fine disc you can hear more traditional influences (Lou, Neil Young, Roxy Music) mixing with that weird kind of almost off-key Sonic Youth quality. “Loretta’s Scars” is a perfect examp of Crazy Horse-meets-Sonic Youth-in-Eno’s-greenhouse. It’s got that whooshing Warm Jets texture, with a lot of strangulated guitar notes ala Neil n’ Thurston. “Here” meanwhile is probably the best song on the alb—a great loping mid-tempo march-to-a-metronome riff, very reminiscent of the stuff the Velvets were doing in 1969 with a heartfelt talkalong Lou Reed/Ira Kaplan vocal from Mr. Malkmus. He gets a good tone out of his ax, and even the lyrics are alreet. For once he doesn’t sound like he’s puttin’ you on, and from Malkmus, that’s a rarity. It’s truly a landmark of the era, and I’m really glad to finally have it in the collection (even though these lazy bums, who probably had to get back to studying for their little college finals, didn’t even come up with a proper ENDING for the damn song…)
       Speakin’ o’ Steve-o’s lyrics, they’re a LOT better ‘n his counterpart Bob Pollard’s pathetic drool…but too often his lyrics, as well as delivery o’ said wordage, resorts too much to almost beat-poetry type nonsense. Wish I had a goddamn track listing so I could site #12 as an example of just that, although riff-wise it’s got some interesting early Cleveland nuances (think the Styrenes or the Devo of Duty Now for the Future). Pavement ain’t bad, that’s for sure! They are in the highest echelon of minor, which may seem like a backhanded compliment but y’ know makes ‘em infinitesimally better than, say, Helium.
       A perfect example is track #13, which one presumes was left off the actual Slanted alb although given the dearth o’ adequate liner notes, there’s really no way of knowing. Like I said, never owned Slanted so I can’t go and look. And while I think I have the follow-ups Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Wowee Zowee lyin’ around somewhere (I think I got ‘em free) I’d be hard-pressed to find ‘em right now and have probably only listened to ‘em once respectively apiece. Because this kind of music, while not bad, is so bland as far as ROCK N’ ROLL goes that it’s better suited for background music, and then it’s only the removal of a decade that makes it even palatable in that sense. In other words, when Pavement was actually around I would’ve much rather listened to, say, an AntiSeen album.
       As far as the extra tracks on Disc One goes, at least the “I Saw Your Girlfriend” song (aka “Summer Babe”) gets reprised, and as time goes by it’s evident this is one of only a handful of truly GREAT Pavement songs…along w/ “Lions (Linden)” and “Sue Me, Jack.” The second version on Disc One features some truly twisted guitar playing from whoever manned that position in Malkmus’s empire. Once again, there’s no credits, and let’s face it, who actually remembers the guitar player’s name in Pavement? Do you remember when Lisa Carver and her friends in Rollerderby took the press photo from one of those Pavement albs from the mid-nineties and literally DISSECTED ‘em for their SEX appeal? And that’s the whole point…Pavement never come off sounding like fun guys, like even the Misfits or somebody. They’re just these smarmy nondescript little guys who think they’re smarter than everybody else. But that doesn’t make ‘em bad guys coz they probably ARE smarter ‘n almost anybody else coz, let’s face it, most people are bloody morons! So god bless ‘em for telling the truth (as always)!
       Disc Two is a whole ‘nother ball of wax, and in many ways BETTER coz it contains the great Watery, Domestic EP which was one of the signposts of the whole nineties era altho’ I think the only reason I bought it initially was coz it reprised the cover o’ the Ambergris alb from 1970, which was just a bunch o’ session hacks down in Nashville plowing thru a rather innocuous platter o’ semi-mainstream (for the time anyway) puzz. One of the ALL-TIME loser LPs that haunted the cutout bins of my youth. Once again, it was just another example of Pavement’s caustic wit, making ironic ref to such an object. But it was on this EP, I think that they really found their groove. Perhaps their two best songs can be heard here: “Frontwards,” which moves just like that…frontwards, with a droning understated riff as gloriously fuzz-muffled as the guitars on “Lady Godiva’s Operation” while the always-excellent rhythm section pulls off some calisthenics that make this ultimately simplistic ditty sound like so much more. What it has to do with is SOUND SCULPTURING and by now it was becoming evident that this really was Pavement’s forte. Malkmus sounds like he’s suddenly become bestowed with authority…his intonations come off as nothing less than the eponymous summing-up of a whole generation, a movement if you will (which is certainly what it was). And the ages burned.
       “Lions” is basically the same song repeated (there is in fact a sameness to the whole EP) but with trumped-up dynamics, kind of like comparing “Gimme Shelter” to “Under My Thumb”—this was the moment to me when the movement really crystallized itself as an inescapable truth. It’s the best thing Pavement ever did, and the dynamic tension that sends the melody bouncing around the monorails of the tune’s one-and-a-half-minute framework threatens to derail it at any moment. It also contains one of Malkmus’s smarmiest asides when he makes reference to “a goal line stance on fourth-and-two…” But the problem with a line like that, in these circumstances, is that one inherently understands that Malkmus is ultimately making FUN of football, which is kind of smarmy in itself—but no smarmier than the Karl Hendrix Trio’s “When Will The Goddamn Poor Rise Up” or 9/10ths o’ the other stuff from the era. It’s just that Malkmus was the king of it, and this song proves why. However, I never liked track 4 from Watery, “Shoot the Singer”—and once again, even the title alone reeks of unctuousness. Because let’s face it, when it comes to Stevie Malkmouse, I am reminded by a line from Ice T: “Shee-it! You’d FAINT punk if you ever heard a gunshot!” I mean if a guy doesn’t even dig FOOTBALL what ‘re the chances he’s gonna like fooling around with firearms? Thing is, when Pavement were at their peak—which is when this EP originally came out—I actually worked in the post office! So of course guns were nothing new to me (never mind football).
       I remember when Colston told me ‘bout this alb, I asked him if “Sue Me Jack” was on it coz as far as I was concerned that was the great lost Pavement single, but he waxed oblivious, so I of course was delighted when I heard track 5 on Disc 2 which is the elusive “Sue Me,” another one o’ Pavement’s pounding stomping magnum opuses with its layers of electronic spuzzle, creepy whispering, and Malkmus’s once again adenoidal screaming. When I first heard it on ‘MBR in ’92 it was yet more proof to me that there were endless creative things that remained to be done in the name of independent music, because this truly was one of the most impressive post-Sonic Youth uses of sculpted sound and noise-as-rhythm. Admittedly, the stuff that follows on Disc 2 is nowhere near as auspicious, but most of it’s still OK. Once again, it would help if I had a track listing, but it’s not important—let’s just say that a great deal of the material here, which I guess manifests the second Peel sessions, combines meandering riffs, burbles of noise and Malkmus’s monotonous talk-singing (once again, he’s ultimately another Lou Reed imitator in the same line that produced Jonathan Richman, Gordon Gano and Steve Wynn, only UNLIKE those turkeys, at least Malkmyth added something to it). The live stuff, recorded at Brixton Academy shortly after Slanted came out, is OK, but mostly notable for the band’s rendition of an Echo & the Bunnymen tune—but since I never listened to any fuckin’ Echo, I don’t recognize it.
        So sue me…Jack.