Funeral to Finish

  Long, long before the Jefferson Airplane some how mutated into just "Starship" and produced the widely-reviled "We Built this City," they produced this actually rather enjoyable album with at least two certifiably incredible rock songs, "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love."  In fact, I will put up that moment in "Somebody to Love" when Grace Slick gets to the middle of the first line of the verse ("When the truth is found...") and there's that big B -> E chord change against almost any moment in rock.  It's huge.  And her vocals on "White Rabbit" are absolutely electric.  Man, what a voice. Like most albums released in the late 60's, there are some duds here too.  "My Best Friend" has a real Up With People vibe and "3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds" sounds like generic hippy music and not in a great way.  But overall a solid album! One crazy Grace Slick story longtime Bay Areans may r...

  This is somebody's - probably a lot of somebodys - sex album, I guarantee it.  Aside from the openly sexual songs ("Doves in the Wind," which I had to dive for the skip button when I had this on while I was making my kid lunch, oh my god), the whole album just feels sexual in some way.   (When I was much much much much younger my sex album was "Avalon" by Roxy Music, which might still work, I don't know.  I guess I fancied myself a debonair, smoking jacket-type guy, when in fact I was just your regular highly insecure teen trying to act like a Smoking Jacket Guy.) This is "alt-R&B" I guess?  There's a song called "Drew Barrymore" that doesn't directly reference Drew Barrymore in any way but I think my favorite is probably "Prom," with a great beat and a couple of fascinating melodic turns.  Great chorus that really opens up the song, too.

  I'm struck by the fact that we're, what, 27 albums into a list of 500 and there have already been three (counting this one) that are mostly or entirely in Spanish.  I bet that wasn't the case with the Old Boring White Guy version of this list! (I do have a couple of questions about what's eligible for inclusion in this list.  So far it seems like pretty much anything goes; we've seen country (or at least country-adjacent), classic rock, Spanish-language pop, Tejano, hip hop, R&B, etc.  I'm guessing that classical isn't eligible, which is fine, I get that classical is its own thing.  But I'm wondering what else will be excluded, or included, for that matter.  I haven't gone rooting around for the criteria RS used but I'm curious about it.) Which leads us to this record, and our first exposure to reggaeton on the list.  From what I'm given to understand, "Gasolina" was a monster hit, but it wasn't even my favorite song on th...

  Just a hugely important influential album if, like me, you love power pop or just rock in general.  There's a famous line about Velvet Underground (who I'm sure we'll be getting to later) that goes like "they only sold a thousand records but everyone who bought one started a band" and that's probably doubly true for this record.  I mean, Cheap Trick went out and basically copied this sound to the note and became huge stars while Big Star, despite the winking-at-themselves name, toiled in obscurity and disappeared, only to be rediscovered in the 90's by record store clerks like Jack Black in "High Fidelity" and music geeks like me.  I mean, how important do you have to be be to have another band record a (truly kickass song) titled with the name of one of the guys in your band?!?!  (It's "Alex Chilton," by the Replacements.) And Alex Chilton didn't just appear out of nowhere.  Before Big Star he was already famous for being in ...

  One of those albums where you are surprised that you recognize multiple songs.  I personally knew three, and I bet you do too, because you've seen car commercials that feature two women with their hair flying out of a convertible wearing sunglasses and laughing merrily as their Ford Churro ably takes the curves of Highway 1.  That's "Every Day Is a Winding Road."  Then there's "A Change Would Do You Good," during the romantic comedy montage where the female lead goes shopping with her bestie and tries to forget about that dumb guy and there's also "If It Makes You Happy" which has the semi-disturbing message "If it makes you happy/It can't be that bad" which is demonstrably untrue for serial killers, heroin addicts, drug-sniffing dogs, and Donald Trump. The rest is mostly forgettable roots-rock.  It's the kind of thing that's playing in a wine bar on a semi-busy Thursday happy hour.  You would never be conscious of i...

  I am almost positive that I first became aware of Sparks from the movie Valley Girl, in which they are featured on the soundtrack .  By the way, this is only tangentially Sparks-related, but Valley Girl is a great movie with a great soundtrack.  The movie, a Romeo and Juliet-style star-crossed lovers story featuring a very young Nic Cage and a bunch of other people who did not go on to the same level, is funny and sweet and charming.  It was like one of 12 movies we owned on VCR when I was a kid and I watched it incessantly.  It was to the early 80's was the Mission-Marina divide was to the early 00's in San Francisco.   And the soundtrack featured the Plimsouls and Sparks and the Psychedelic Furs and is pretty much responsible for making Modern English's "I Melt With You" the song everybody knows and is completely sick of by now. Back to Sparks and specifically this album.  I always thought that Sparks was from New Zealand for some reason but t...

  Before we get to the music, THAT COVER, MAN!  Isn't it great?  That's the first cover we've come to where I'm like "I would totally hang that on my wall."  Just brilliant. More classic blues!  I like this stuff fine, but it doesn't particularly move me, like it did to a whole generation of British kids . Jagger, Richards, and Jones were awestruck when, in 1962, they saw Howlin’ Wolf playing in Manchester at the American Folk Blues Festival. Wolf recorded many songs that influenced The Rolling Stones, and, two years after that performance, the band took a blues song to No. 1 on the UK charts for the first time, with a recording of Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster.” “The reason we recorded ‘Little Red Rooster” isn’t because we want to bring blues to the masses,” said Richards at the time. “We’ve been going on and on about blues, so we thought it was about time we stopped talking and did something about it. We liked that particular song, so we released it.”  I ca...