I have no idea where I picked this CD up but it is always lurking at arm’s reach for an hour’s worth of good vibes and KILLER tunes. There are no Alex originals here, only covers, but Alex and band make them strut and swing throughout. I just found out there are 3 different versions of this; It was released in Europe in 1999 as “Loose Shoes And Tight Pussy”, in the US as “Set” with different cover art, and as a double-cd reissue with the earlier album “Cliches” as the other disc. Not much else I can say about this other than it is a whole hell of a lot of fun. If you can find one, grab it!
WS
This one is a long time personal favorite. A bit of backstory: In 1986 I was a bored pre-teen stuck in a car traveling through Madison, Wisconsin in the middle of the night. The local radio station had a music hour dedicated to artists from the area, and one of the songs they played was “Penguin Love” by Free Hot Lunch. I HOWLED with laughter, as did my parents. Upon arriving home i demanded the ‘rents find me that record with “Penguin Love” on it and after many phone calls to record stores in the area, the disc was found. I still have it to this day, as well as a mint copy found in a thrift shop in 2012. About 12 years ago I found this live CD mint and sealed on eBay and paid premium dollar for it; Wa-Ha Music has since reissued it with bonus tracks
“Eat This!” is the second live album from Free Hot Lunch, recorded in 1988 at Schuba’s in Chicago, Il. Wonderfully recorded and played (and featuring Randy Sabien on fiddle, to boot), this album never ceases to amaze and entertain no matter the mood. Opening with a cover of John Sebastian’s “Loving You”, they alternate between heartfelt love songs (She’s Headed Off To The Islands, Good Time Lady) and insanity (Sidewalks On Parade, Sex In A Volcano) throughout, crating a really nice balance of coy and crazy (or smile and sneer, whichever you prefer).These guys weren’t just goofs or goons hamming it up; They can REALLY play and clearly spent a lot of time polishing their instrumental and vocal chops. Listening to “Home Of The Whales” I am shaking my head at home perfect the harmonies stack up while Randy Sabien’s fiddle darts in and out behind the guitar solo. For those of you living in the Southern Wisconsin/Northern Illinois area, “Hymn #894” will have extra special meaning. 28 years later and every word of it is still true. Unbelievable.
Waha Surf Shop still has CD’s of all the bands’ albums available, as well as DVD’s and solo albums. Take $50 and buy them all, they are worth every penny!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Iha
This one arrived out of left field in 1998. James Iha, (the *other* guitar player in The Smashing Pumpkins), recorded and released this BEAUTY of a country-rock CD in between Smashing Pumpkins albums. It is a stunner from start to finish, mostly acoustic guitar and James voice augmented by pedal steel, bass guitar, and drums. I could listen to this every day and not get tired of it, no joke. Nothing here is heavy or overdriven; there is a remarkable amount of restraint and space in the production that allows everything to sit just right in the mix at any given time. I need to order the reissue of this, my copy is beat to hell from being dragged through three moves, countless shitty CD players, four cars and a truck, you get the picture. Listening to it now at the end of a very long day it makes me really, really happy.
WS
Here’s a fun one I forgot about for 20 years! An English dance group called Beautiful People decided to do a whole album of dance tracks using samples from the Jimi Hendrix catalog. At the time, no one had ever been given legal clearance to sample Jimi’s music; Beautiful People sent some demo tracks to Jimi’s management company anyway and were shocked to get full permission to sample Jimi’s music! After much back-and-forth on what samples could be used and how many, the album “If 60’s Were 90’s” was released in 1992. Some of the tracks sound a little dated now, but it is still a VERY fun CD to throw on when you need some feel-good tunes to get moving. I found mine in a thrift shop for $1, if you keep your eyes open you could probably pick one up for about the same price. I have no idea who the guys were that put this together, but it is clear they were not amateurs or bored studio rats looking to ride Jimi’s rainbow coat-tails. I wish there had been a second edition of this, it is very well crafted and still listenable 25 years later, no joke.
WS
KSAN – FM POST ALTAMONT BROADCAST
(EDITED)
FROM THE DVD RELEASE “GIMME SHELTER”
All of my “Freebie Fridays” up to this point have been fun and relatively light-hearted. This one most certainly is not. Originally there were 4+ hours of material but for the DVD release of “GImme Shelter” it was edited down to 1.5 hours. I’m gonna dig around and see if the unedited tapes have been posted somewhere.
I wanted to post this today in order to ask a troublesome question: In the 46 years since this event occurred, have we moved forward at all? Or, have we taken two steps forward and twenty five back? Are we chasing our primordial tails? It speaks volumes about our culture that this incident happened then; It shouts even louder about us as a people that it is still happening now in multiples and on planned schedules. As I write this, yet another attack has occurred. This one is the third violent rampage on a nation in 18 months. 86 dead and counting. I am nonviolent by nature but at some point in my future, in our future, I will be forced to make a choice: Be nonviolent and lose my life, or pick up a weapon and live with the guilt of harming another person for the rest of my life. Passive resistance in this time and place will no longer be an option and that turning point will be very, very sad.
I have no answers as to why we, as humans, have chosen this time and place to be so shockingly cruel to each other on a micro and macro scale. I don’t know where God is; I don’t know when the end will come. I don’t even know who let the dogs out. I do know this: We can’t go on like this forever. Either we unite, despite our differences and grudges, and get back to where we once belonged, or we lose everything and have to explain to a higher authority how we managed to end civilization once and for all over petty grievances and the complete failure of our elected leaders to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING.
To those of you who are law-abiding gun owners: I stand with you and your right to bear arms. To those of who who have chosen not to arm yourselves: Please keep preaching the message of peace, hope, tolerance, faith, and passive resistance. To those of you on either side who have lost loved ones to violence of any kind, I extend my deepest heartfelt sympathy for your loss
To those of you who would choose to harm myself or my loved ones, either in public or in private:
Don’t.
PASTOR T.L. BARRETT AND THE YOUTH FOR CHRIST CHOIR SINGS! – 1971
MT ZION BAPTIST CHURCH / 5512 S. LAFAYETTE AVENUE / CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
REISSUED ON CD / 2010 / LIGHT IN THE ATTIC RECORDS
I’m gonna cut right to the chase, good people: Albums like this are the reason I became a crate digger. I am at a point in my life where I don’t even have to find records, they find ME. No joke. This CD arrived under weird circumstances about 3 months ago. I ordered $40 worth of vinyl from a company called Light In The Attic and didn’t hear from them for a couple weeks. Checking the mail one day, a mailer envelope appeared with a CD inside instead of the vinyl I ordered. Frustrated and unhappy, I called them and tried to unravel what the deuce was going on. After a frustrating afternoon on the phone a bargain was struck, I got a deep discount on half of the vinyl I ordered, a refund on the rest, and a weird black-and-white CD for free. Good enough. The music on this CD was recorded in 1971 by the Mt. Zion Youth For Christ church choir in Chicago. Vinyl copies are coveted by collectors; the good folks at LITA reissued it in 2010. I am not a big fan of gospel, and I wasn’t expecting much from this freebie.
I COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG.
From the first notes of “Like A Ship Without A Sail” all the way to the very end, these folks are AMAZING. Holy Smokes! (All pun intended). Organ, bass guitar, drums, and a WALL of joyous voices. I can’t overstate the POWER behind this band and choir. When they REALLY get cooking on “Ever Since” you would have to be pretty hard-hearted to not feel the spirit move. “Nobody Knows” leaves me shaking my head every time at the power and joy behind those GLORIOUS voices. Halfway through “Nobody Knows”, it sounds like the band and choir deliberately bring the dynamics down a notch, the audio equivalent of a whole crowd taking a step back together. After a few seconds the choir comes back in, but not full-blast, more like a slow burn into space. It’s hard to explain, but when you hear it, it’ll bring tears to your eyes. Absolutely beautiful.
This is a MUST-OWN album, no fooling. Buy a couple, you’ll wear them out.
WS
Not Safe For Wednesday, here we go again! This one is quite a bit more listener friendly than the last couple NSFWs. I didn’t buy this, it was in one of several large boxes of CD’s that came from the residence of a friend of mine who died unexpectedly. I don’t know who the “dong” is in Groove Along With Dong, this whole album baffles the hell out of me. Bass guitar, conga drums, wind instruments, and some seriously demented vocals. I am not a Krautrock devotee by any means but from what info I can gather this is a “supergroup” of sorts. There is a German link above that sheds a little more light on the thing. I like it but it certainly ain’t for mass consumption!
I should have saved this for Not Safe For Wednesday, but what the hell, why not now? I was shopping for records and came across an ad that said “The Paisleys! Reissued for the first time on vinyl!”. I scratched my head for a minute and started unpacking crates of records, thirty minutes later I had my reissued copy from 1983 on the turntable. Originally issued in 1970 and reissued on CD and vinyl in 2004, my mint copy is marked “Great Britain, 1983, Psycho 7”. Either mine is a really nice bootleg or some copy writer / hype man somewhere needs to get his act together. Revisionist history? Yellow journalism? Fluff marketing? We’ll never know. The album itself got a savage review from Allmusic but what the hell do they know? I’m digging it much. There’s a link above to another blog that has all the details about this thing. Go investigate, then get out your debit card and go get one!
WS
A word of caution, actually *two words*: First, I am an unrepentant Sun Ra fan and always will be. Second, the man’s discography is a bottomless pit and you’re about to step squarely in it. Ready?
I am of the opinion that this particular album is he perfect gateway into the Planet of Ra. Easy to acquire, budget priced from Delmark Records (Thanks Bob!), and easily accessible in terms of tone and composition for the casual jazz listener. How many other Sun Ra albums fit those parameters? I’ll wait…..
I bought mine direct from the hands of the man who produced it, Bob Koester. A character, for sure. It was certainly not what I was expecting; Having acquired a few other Sun Ra LP’s before this one I was pleasantly surprised. Sunny only speaks three words at the beginning of the album. “Sound of joy…”, and the band takes it from there. Not quite traditional jazz but close enough not to send listeners scattering (that would come later), the overall tone is upbeat and fun. Occasionally the music threatens to veer off into space but always pulls back from the abyss just in time.
This LP is always at or near the top of of any pile it gets shuffled in here at Whizzabee HQ. Very enjoyable day or night. Call Bob! Get one! Right now!
https://archive.org/details/ird059
The posts just keep getting w e i r d e r, folks! This is a 4 LP box set of short wave radio broadcasts from “number stations” around the world.(It is also available as a free download via the link). “Number Stations” are one way radio messages that spies around the world use to communicate to one another. Spoken codes (and music, and static, and other weirdness) are broadcast at specific times on specific frequencies. The recipient tunes in, receives the message sent, and translates it using a one-time-only deciphering code that is never used again. These broadcasts are alternately fascinating and very, very unsettling. There are hundreds of these sent every day; Anyone with a short wave radio can pick them up.
W S
An Album A Day - For Your Dancing Pleasure! 