Blog O’ Leaps

Here are some mostly craft-type beeers I hit after coming off a month off the sauce. There may well be something that is best appreciated in the gentle remove of quiet contemplation afterwards, but beer may not be one of those things and I had these a week ago. Take that as something of a disclaimer, but this is pretty much how they struck me at the time.

All come in the 330ml cheater type stubby, unless otherwise specified.

SMOKEY BISHOP DARK LAGER (WA, 4.7% alc/vol)

Brewery name is Matso’s Broome Brewery. I thought Matsos were what my co-religionists ate during Passover instead of bread. Not particularly smoky, and the usual wine-writery descriptive da-do-ron-ron on the label says chocolatey and ‘coffee notes’ this and that, which kind of makes you think “Porter” more, but it’s basically a reasonably easy-drinking black lager. I’d say ‘not that distinctive’ rather than ‘not that distinguished’, and I’d drink it without too much quibbling (or any at all), but I can’t say I’d seek it out particularly. I’d be willing to take the short money that it’s the kind of beer that would be a lot more interesting on tap than it is in the bottle, but the poignant reality is that most of us are more likely to encounter it in the bottle.

HARRINGTON’S BELGIUM TEMPEST STRONG ALE (NZ, 8% a/v)

Harrington’s is a craft brewer based in Christchurch, apparently. One of my regular bottleshop stops had come to some sort of accommodation with them and got some product in at under-the-odds prices, which is how I came to be able to afford them. I’m told they normally come in at something around $7 or $8 per stubby, which is the kind of price I pay for a few specialty beers from Belgium, Canada, the US, or the UK occasionally, but normally wouldn’t for anything from this part of the world.

According to the, for once, relatively decipherable label copy, this is meant to be a hoppy kind of ale based on the Belgian “saison” style, which is emphatically not one of the preferred Belgian beer styles I’ve encountered. Anyway, I didn’t find it confrontingly “here’s one right up your snooter” hopped like some of the US pale ale/IPA style-craft brews, and it did have plenty of characteristics in common with some of the Belgian complex/rich/cream-cakey beers I like a lot on a one-off basis in a tasting session.

(And to make this clear, when I say “tasting” I don’t mean rinsing my mouth out with it, taking a bite of neutral wafer type palate-reliever, and moving on – I mean drinking.)

I’ve had better balanced beers in terms of dealing with the hops hit, but this is unambiguously a thoughtfully-brewed number that will please the taste-bud crowd in most adventurous beer drinking cake-holes. You wouldn’t abandon any of your Belgian fave-raves for this, but it’s worth a try for the change-up pitch.

RED DUCK BENGAL INDIA PALE ALE (Camperdown, Vic, 7% a/v)

The base line of this brewery is a thirst-quenching balance of the basic product in all of its beers, and I don’t know how to better characterize or describe that quality, other than to say it’s analogous to the inherent drinkability of the traditional mainstays of the Cooper’s line from SA, meaning specifically the ‘red’ and ‘green’ beers, i.e. Cooper’s Sparkling and Pale Ales. It’s not that any of the Red Duck beers particularly taste like the Cooper’s ones, but regardless of the individual Red Duck brew, they share with Cooper’s a certain inherent level of flavour; and more specifically, that kind of balance of ingredients in the finished product that, unlike plenty of other craft brews, tends to lend themselves towards the drinker sticking with them, because, for want of a more elegant description, they keep the inside of the neck wet in a good way, and any peculiar flavour outbreaks don’t get in the way of them sliding down. They are realistic session beers.

Thus, unlike some of the US India Pales, this doesn’t demolish your mouth and schnozz with rampant waves of unchecked hops, and while it is anything but short of flavour and eccentricity, it remains eminently gargle-able. Not particularly a great beer, but real good.

SIERRA NEVADA BIGFOOT ALE (Ca, USA, 355ml, 9.6% a/v)

It says “Barleywine style” on the label. I’ve encountered about two of those including this, and they were kind of similar, so I’ll assume they know what they’re talking about. It’s a very rich, full, sweet-flavoured darker brew, and check out the alcohol content mentioned above and you’ll already know this is something for a genial and leisurely sip-fest, rather than throwing it down like your normal pub session draught choice of record. The other barley-wine type number I’ve had positioned itself on the label as being kind of the beer equivalent of a dessert wine, which strikes me as a pretty reasonable way to think about this style, although there’s no particular reason you couldn’t get stuck into one prior to a meal as opposed to after.

This one doesn’t hold back on the malt or the flavour. It’s pretty well-balanced considering the aim of the style itself is inherently extreme by regular beer standards. I like it a lot. You wouldn’t look at this as a session beer in a million years.

4 PINES PALE ALE (Manly, NSW, 5.1% a/v)

A perfectly decent US style Pale Ale, which has the coppery fruity piney kind of flavour-orientation that goes with that, but doesn’t wear it out. Neither as bland or as mellow as Fat Yak, which is probably the most timid (and perhaps thus accessible for the regular lager drinker) example of that style here, but it may strike Joe VB-drinker as being similarly approachable, and it’s still a perfectly ok example of the style. Didn’t consider it a blowaway beer, but I’d drink it again, for sure.

3 RAVENS GOLDEN ALTBIER (Thornbury, VIC, 5% a/v)

Have to say, I often find crafty-ish beers designated as “Amber” to be a waste of time (and a bit of a mystery in terms of what distinctive, appealing flavour beer was being attempted), and “Golden” ones to be a close second in that category. This was a pleasant exception to the latter case. It’s what you’d like a “Golden Ale” to be – mellow, slightly leaning to the rich side of the flavour spectrum without getting all glutinous on your candy-ass, and it’s a little, tiny bit, leaning to the sweeter side while retaining the balance via hops so that it won’t freak out those who don’t fancy that approach. To me, this is a brewer with a trademark approach, kind of like I mentioned about Red Duck before. Unlike Red Duck, instead of having a “house-style” approach to the brewing method underpinning all their varieties, the trademark deal with 3 Ravens is that they do a lot of different styled beers accurately, and in quite a satisfying way, but all of them are neither extreme nor exceptional within that style. This one may be the exception. It’s very impressive in the style. I think it’s the strongest beer I’ve had from them within a given particular brewing style. Yay, 3 Ravens.

RODENBACH GRAND CRU (BELGIUM, 6% a/v)

OK, this is one for the books, and, speaking personally, I mean the books instead of the human mouth. I’ve had a few alleged “Grand Cru” style beers from Belgium, the best of which I’ve encountered is still the Hoegaarden GC (not the regular Hoegaarden variety you mostly encounter out here – this one says ‘Grand Cru’ right there on the label), but the others conformed to a similarly rich lighter-coloured but richly-flavoured and unambiguously sweet-finished cream-cakey, complex Belgian beer approach. This is a completely different animal.

The label claims that it is “exceptional”, and that it has a “sweet-sour taste” with an “exceptionally long aftertaste”. I’d agree with all of that except the sweet part. It’s just sour. I know there must be people out there who go for that sort of thing, but there must be people out there who like aspic as well, or they wouldn’t keep making it. The shame of this one to me was that you could tell they’d put a hell of a lot of work into it, and, if this makes sense, it would have been a real nice thirst-quencher if it wasn’t for the flavour, which I found un-beer-like and borderline undrinkable. I can’t even imagine why anyone would make a beer like this, but I’ve encountered even more oddball beers which people insisted they’d liked, so I can’t rule out the notion that there’s some sort of market for this one, it’s just that I can’t imagine a single person in that group personally.

DOGFISH HEAD 60 MINUTE IPA (Delaware, USA, 355ml, 6% a/v)

Yep, very rich and complex variant on the US Pale Ale style which avoids mouth-burn from all the hops by some very careful and clever balancing with the malt. This and its more expensive “90 Minute IPA” stablemate (which I probably like even better, but is emphatically even less of a session-beer) are among the real good ones. These guys know what they’re doing.

GRIMBERGEN DUBBEL (BELGIUM, 6.5% a/v)

Bit of a raunchier, more rugged and somewhat unkempt (big bursts of alcohol and hops) entry among the Belgian multiple-fermented types. It’s the legitimate article, and it’s good at what it does without being exceptional. There are better ones around, but if you can get it at the (relative) bargain price I found it at, it earns its keep.

ANCHOR PORTER (San Francisco, USA, 355ml)

As a brewery, Anchor weighs in somewhere in between the more typically eccentric US boutique brewer and a Cooper’s kind of deal. Cooper’s mainstays are the red and the green, as mentioned above, and Anchor’s, which are just as reliable and worthwhile (and defiant of classification within convenient current beer-talk designations) are the Steam Ale and Liberty Ale. This was the first time I’d come across their Porter, and it’s one of the best I’ve ever had. It has all the strong flavour characteristics you’d expect with the style (that chocolatey, “coffee notes” thing the wine-writer types go on about) unexpectedly combined with a readily drinkable approach in line with their flagship beers, so it comes across in some ways more like a black lager than a Porter. The combination of ideas is a winning one. It’s real good.
(Couldn’t see an a/v content specified on label.)

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There’s a pretty grabby doco on The Age website about the indie pro wrestling scene in the States. Don’t know how long it’s going to be up for. It’s about an hour and a half documentary called Card Subject to Change.

I’ve seen about half an hour of it and it’s worth the look.

I guess I should warn you there’s some exceptionally graphic content when it comes to gore, and also drug use. And you’ve got to watch the same credit card ad what seems like about 102 times.

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(I just found this piece that I must have written for the radio show - All Over The Shop on RRR-FM, Thursdays 2-4pm Melbourne time, or via podcast or live screaming or whatever, via the rrr.org.au website - and I liked it, so I’m putting it up here.

Once again our media research desk at Axis International Entertainment have outdone themselves digging up the detail on these obscure but worthwhile motion pictures, which all blazed a trail in terms of combining distinctive horror movie iconography with more traditional artistic themes.)

RICHARD III vs GAMERA (1975)

One of Shakespeare’s scariest villains is exposed to radiation, grows to 100 ft tall and is attacked by a giant spinning nuclear sea turtle. Additional footage for English language version features Raymond Burr, Sir John Gielgud, Don Rickles and Marie Osmond as Macbeth’s granddaughter.

DEATH OF A SALESMAN, DUE TO MOTHRA (1973)

The classic Arthur Miller play expanded to epic proportions, as a middle-aged man examining why his business and family life have failed, is blasted by cosmic rays and grows to 200 ft in height before being mysteriously attacked by a gigantic mutant radioactive moth. English version features the voices of Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Casey Kasem, and Bob Denver, with special on-screen appearances by George Hamilton, Ted Hamilton and the Harlem Globetrotters.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT AND GHIDORA THE THREE HEADED MONSTER (1972)

Dostoevsky’s brooding study of a murderer’s search for self-justification is creatively revitalised when St Petersburg is beset by Ghidorah the Three Headed Monster, a 100ft tall Richard III, and armed intelligent talking apes on horseback, forcing the murderer, Raskolnikov, to expose himself to the cosmic ray machine of the insane nephew of Frankenstein, Herman, and grow to 400 ft in height resulting in clothing problems. Cast includes Burt Reynolds, Raquel Welch, Roddy McDowall, Bill Bixby and the Harlem Globetrotters.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DRACULA (1976)

Shakespeare’s charming tale of thwarted love, magic and the fairy kingdom is altered subtly when a mysterious Transylvanian count enters the enchanted woods and extracts a bloody toll from humans and supernatural beings alike, accompanied by bats, wolves and sundry enormous-knockered women from Hammer horror films. Finally he is challenged to a climactic basketball game by the Harlem Globetrotters and a 200 ft tall Barbara Windsor from the Carry On movies. With Christopher Lee, Michael York, Sid James, Meadowlark Lemon, Yutte Stensgaard, John Hurt, and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields junior basketball squadron.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO GODZILLA (1975)

Nerve-jangling subway suspense as criminals attempt to hold passengers for ransom and then Godzilla takes the train, quite literally, and eats it. With Jack Klugman, Tony Randall, George Kennedy, Telly Savalas, John Ritter, and Bea Arthur as the voice of Godzilla. Captivating musical sequence sees Godzilla tapdancing with Ben Vereen and Mickey Mouse, before he eats them.

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR MEETS THE GROOVIE GOOLIES (1976)

Ill-fated animated sequel to the famous musical sees Jesus and his pals updated to the present day, where they roam around in the Disciple Machine in search of mystery and adventure, encountering Drac, Frankie, Wolfie, Batso and Ratso, and the other residents of Horrible Hall, ending in a giant jam session. Score by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Flip Wilson and Larry Storch includes, “Judas – Don’t be a Ratso”, “Never be Cross with a Vampire”, and the plaintive ballad, “This Star, This Night, Distemper”. Controversial excised dance sequence “Love, Leviticus and Lugosi” is restored on the DVD version.

THE BEAST OF BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2011)

Actually, it’s two beasts, Rodan and Monster X, and there’s no Heath Ledger around anymore, so it’s real bad news for Jake Gyllenhaal. Sequel in planning stages: “The Overworked Proctologist of Brokeback Mountain”.

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(Just reiterating the basic policy here. I’m extremely s-l-o-w-l-y counting down a list I made ages ago, and revised and added to more recently, of albums that I reckon the standard-issue cookie-cutter lists of “all time great albums” pass over too regularly and too lightly.

It’s intended as kind of a debate-expander and think-starter. Any order is just what the MS Word sorting gimmick came up with as vaguely alphabetical order when I processed my initial list with it.)

BEATLES – Let It Be (1970)

Kind of thrown together and somewhat controversially “doctored” by Phil Spector from several thousand miles of tapes recorded for a semi-abortive “back to basics” project from a more than a year earlier, apparently The Beatles and their slightly disturbing glassy eyed and extremely neatly dressed fans more or less officially decided to ignore it and treat Abbey Road, recorded later and comparatively in one clean go, as the last proper Beatles record.

I dunno. Abbey Road - great as a lot of the music is on it - is too neatly gussied up and McCartneyed for my tastes, and also has “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” on it which is fundamentally unforgivable. I like the raggedy-arsed nature of Let It Be and I like it a lot as a collection of songs, probably as much as I like any of their original albums on a cut-for-cut basis. There’s no song-cycle deal, or unifying musical theme, but the songs always hung together for me, and there’s something about the boxy down-home sound and performances that does too. Probably something about them being thrown together on to their own resources under trying conditions with fillum cameras bouncing all around them while they were falling apart.

It’s the warm beaten-up mid-pacer feel of stuff like “Dig a Pony”, “Two of Us”, “For You Blue” and “Don’t Let Me Down” that kind of hold the show together, and the bursts of passion and/or venom laid on top of that feel in “I’ve Got A Feeling” (Paul’s really working there), and one of George’s best, “I Me Mine”, rugged things up a little.

By contrast, John’s out-there one, “Across the Universe” slows and stretches out the template even further than the album’s core material, but it’s a good balancer. For rockers, well, “Get Back” you know, and “One After 909” is peachy-keeno, but there’s earlier versions stretching back to the start of their recording career that had a lot more fire to them.

I probably never need to hear “The Long and Winding Road” ever again, but that’s probably radio’s fault rather than the song’s. I’m sure plenty of people could say the same about “Get Back”, only I’m not particularly one of them.

Many careers and changes of government later, Ol’ Gramps McCartney finally threw down his dentures and said he’d had enough of this Phil Spectorama pork-barrelling, and stripped all the Spector the hell out of there for the reinterpretation/reissue, Let it Be…Naked.

Either is just fine by me. That weirdo Spectory shredded-strings/mellotron thing on the longer, drippier songs never really bothered me that much.

The McCartney version mislays a couple of brief excerpted musical muck-arounds (“Maggie Mae” turns up in an even more truncated version on the “Fly on the Wall” bonus disc), re-jigs the running order, sheds all the Spector cheese, adds the Lennon song “Don’t Let Me Down”, and, in general, it’s kind of amazing how little difference it makes, in a way.

Let’s hear it for the “Let it Be” twins, folks – they’re both understated musical pleasures.

BEATLES – The White Album (1968)

Of their mature era stuff, this is the one that does it for me, along with Let it Be. The latter was a retreat, though, and this one isn’t. A sprawling vinyl double album, it finds them adapting to changing times and sounds – and somehow coming out leading the field again, as they used to – fragmenting in terms of writing songs individually, and, probably, as a group, but still sounding all of a piece, even though some of the pieces are pretty berserk – the sound collage, “Revolution 9”. Even with the Hendrixes, Creams etc around then – and there’s some reflection of that in the harder rockers here, they were Planet Beatles by then too, and there’s a feel that they affected the trends but the trends didn’t so much affect them.

There’s a mix of strong acoustic songs, cheese, folky, country and blasting rock that – although those elements, cheese excepted, bear considerable resemblance to the musical source building blocks for the amazing synthesis job the Stones did on Exile on Main Street – nonetheless sound totally and completely Beatles in context here. Although most articles from the time and after stress the element of disintegration about “The White Album”, the funny thing is it was never there in the sound to me, and it sounds more of a piece than ever listening now, as widely varying as the material and instrumentation is.

Just too many songs to single stuff out here, but the hard guitar Lennon material is some really challenging, snarky stuff from him and to me gives the album its backbone. (McCartney’s “Helter Skelter” gets on this bus as well.) Inevitably, it’s more diffuse than other Beatles albums, but the weight of strong material is very heavily in its favour.

(This is technically a self-titled album, but I’ve hardly ever heard anyone call it that, and it’s pretty much universally referred to as The White Album.)

BIG STAR – Radio City (1974)

Simultaneously somewhat bizarre and absolutely perfect blend of big brittle guitar riffs, wide-open spaces, firecracker drums, occasional mellotron clouds, idiosyncratic pop tunes – some Beatlesy and some climbing some other melodic staircases entirely – and vocals alternately oddly fey but strong, and frankly emotive. Big Star was down to a trio for this one, with co-leader/songwriter Chris Bell gone missing, and Alex Chilton taking the band somewhere distinctly different, even given the first album had its trapdoors and hidden corridors for a banana bunch of anglophile popsters that probably intended to sound kind of Beatles-like.

It’s pop-rock, as it used to be called, by definition, but there’s an eccentricity throughout and a looniness hanging just around the edges, that makes it a lot more of a one-off than that description suggests. It’s before pop-rock had congealed into big crisp meaty riffs with catchy tunes overlaid, and before the staccato rhythm guitar thing had been added when the genre became known as power-pop.

It remains one of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard. But buyer beware – as strong as the tunes are, as convincing as the rock is, as much as it hangs together like a slightly weird dream, every old-school Beatles type I’ve ever played it to doesn’t get this record. You have to get off the reservation a little to meet Radio Cityhalfway.

BIG STAR – Third/Sister Lovers (1975)

In which the band falls apart (down to Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens, and Stephens doesn’t play on all tracks), Alex Chilton sounds like he was falling apart, and the southern gothic blows in to stay. It sounds loose as in “on the verge of fragmenting” and it’s a haunted house of a record. There’s some incredible songs though – wisps of melody, damaged human being lyrics, underwater Chilton vocal performances that tend to stick to the roof of your mind. Most of its paced down a lot from the earlier Big Star material and any connection with power pop is at least once removed. “Stroke it Noel” is beautiful, so’s “Thank You Friends”, “Nightime” lands peaceful and eerie simultaneously and the centrepiece that effectively holds the whole deal together is the song that is most obviously about everything falling apart, “Holocaust” – one of the all-time landmark songs to come out of a rock music context, as frankly harrowing as it is to listen to each time out. It’s an incredibly odd, moving record, and it most assuredly won’t be to everybody’s taste. Nobody should make any assumptions that if they liked either of the first two Big Star albums they would necessarily love this. But you could make a case that it’s as good as either of them. One of the best.

(Just a note here, on the album that kind of never was. The date above is presumably the time the material was recorded – it’s the copyright date on the Ryko label CD that came out in the early 90s which more or less became the version of record. A version of the album was released, not at the time, but later in the 1970s. From bleary memory, I think there have been other vinyl versions along the way since, with alternative titles and track listings. It was variously called Big Star’s Third and Sister Lovers, and I think there might have been at least one other title as well.

I remember once reading an interview where it was brought up to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice about him playing drums on the faux-Velvet Underground album Squeeze. As I remember it, he completely denied having anything to do with it. I also remember reading an interview with the only Velvet Underground member to appear on the album, Doug Yule, who wrote and sang all the songs and played most of the instruments. He remembered Paice turning up for the sessions in a purple Rolls-Royce with the licence plate “DP1”. A very specific memory for a mistake. Also, pretty much any other source you can come across re Squeeze – including Wikipedia for one that comes to mind – lists Paice as playing on it. I’m figuring Paice either forgot, or didn’t want to remember.)

BILLY THORPE & THE AZTECS – Live at Sunbury (1972)

The difference between these amp-splintering decibel hounds and most of the rest of the beer-sweat Aussie blues/boogie types of the time is that these guys were venomously impactful, had groove to go with the smasherama, played big-riff high intensity hard rock like it was a life’s calling, and still could rock’n’roll like the 1950s gone slightly mental. The reason they could do the latter and a lot of the former was Billy Thorpe, who, as a rock’n’roll singer and testifier, was absolutely the real deal. They grafted those values right in on top of thundering chundering guitar and a racket that sounded more like property damage than keyboards and then they boogied so hard and, sometimes, fast, that it didn’t even seem like boogie anymore. Some of the tracks are real long, but it still holds up. Pretty rabid live album, in a completely good way.

(I should probably ‘recuse myself’ from talking about this album, as I wrote the liners on one of the reissues of it, but we’re all friends here. And I wouldn’t have written them liners if I already wasn’t a huge fan of the album. Got to meet Thorpie once too, when Aztecs drummer, and my former boss, Gil Matthews introduced me to him. From memory, Thorpie spent an extensive and convivial five seconds or so talking with me before wafting off into the distance to, presumably, go and talk to absolutely anybody else. How cool is that?)

BLACK CROWES – Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (1992)

The first album was a lovely reminder of Stones and Faces past, and had some strong originals and a canny cover to its credit, but the sound and instrumental performances sounded slightly tamped down and stiff to me. As they hit the second one, Southern Harmony and So Forth, the sound spread out, the songs became more idiosyncratic, the instrumental performances more distinctive, and the music showed off some influences and inclinations less apparent the first time around. (With just a shading of the funk orientation they’d take the next time out, on Amorica.)

This is the one where they found their musical feet for mine, and although the songs maybe didn’t have the “first slap in the face” grabbiness of the Shake Your Moneymaker album’s, they kicked in just fine in a short while, and their staying power is probably better. They went riff-fishing in a slightly different direction too, and landed some whoppers, which does no harm here.

“Sting Me” and “Remedy” were the obvious stand-outs, but just about every track gives up something worth keeping if you give it the time. The key to the best Crowes stuff – and this would certainly be among it, if not heading the pack – is not so much that they exactly aped the Stones or Faces, or even their influences – it was that like the Stones and Faces album tracks, they made bits and pieces of music that had a way of creeping up on you later, so something you previously thought was just nice or ok suddenly became a compulsively played favourite. There’s plenty of those musical bits and pieces all over this record – “Hotel Illness” is one of my picks, “Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye” is just too good and has too much blues pouring out of it to be typed as a “ballad”, and the Bob Marley cover “Time Will Tell” is an insidiously grabby way to end the album, not to mention unexpectedly tranquil.

For all the sprucing up and modernising, it’s also a very American album in terms of where the evident source music came from. (Even the Marley song sounds like a folk-country-gospel hybrid in the version here.) On Southern Harmony they sound like they’re departing from the same kinds of music that influenced the Stones and Faces, a little more evidently than just aping those bands. (The latter more of a dated, received wisdom rep than a fair reflection of what the Crowes also brought to the table over their career.) Still a very strong record.

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There’s been some confusion from those responding to the first part of this list on what the criteria are for inclusion, which is no doubt a reflection on the lack of clarity on the part of the list’s supplier on what those criteria are.

I don’t know if this will help, although that’s the general idea. As stated previously, this is not meant to be an “all-time great” listing, so much as it is a broadening of the general debate on the issue. Some of these I think ARE all-time greats, some of them exceptionally good, and some “different” and more obscure than the albums included on the standard-issue music mag listings of these, but meant to represent the less-considered and still emphatically worthwhile records that always evade such listings.

It’s basically a rock’n’roll or rock list, with a decorative spray of what is now generally referred to as “power pop” included. Plenty of things worthy of consideration which don’t fall into those areas have been disregarded. (And plenty of things which weren’t so worthy to my mind, which may not be a perfect Xerox of yours, and you can chalk that one up to the human condition.)

Given that I said up-front these were the first 150 albums that came to mind that didn’t generally get listed in the rote Rolling Stone or Mojo or Uncut mag type of lists, you can take it to the bank that this list can’t be either definitive or completist by its nature.

I don’t really know what else to tell you right now about it. My guess is that if you read along as I add albums to it, you’ll probably get the general tenor as we hum along.

There are some albums omitted that I’d definitely put in an “all-time” great albums list. The reason they’re omitted here is that I probably thought those were ones generally considered for inclusion on the standard lists in the first place, or that plenty of genuine rock’n’roll fans would automatically include them.

The type of records I’m putting in here are generally ones that have stood every possible test of time, still have their adherents, and never get consideration for the “pantheon” kind of lists. Well, that and some more idiosyncratic and perhaps obscure choices that I definitely think should be up for consideration.

I hope all that helps, while having no great confidence that it does.

ALICE COOPER – Love It to Death (1970)

It’s been a decades-long, hard, brutal battle between me and myself, but for me, this is the definitive, teen-angst gone crazy abandon dream of the Alice Cooper records, ahead of the Killer album. I think the band – and or designated hitter fill-in guys (like multi-uncredited lead guitar player Dick Wagner) – played wilder and better on some later stuff, and the production took the AC band further out into the creative ether, at least musically, but I think the songs, music and the concentration of ideas is all present and best represented here.

Opens up with an absolute classic rockin’ pop song about the audience-bizness-band triangulation that makes for perfect rock’n’roll reflection and perhaps Alice defined better than anyone else, “Caught in a Dream” – hard, Detroit tough, funny and career definitive. “I’m Eighteen” and “Long Way to Go” were almost too perfect teen self-reflection rock gold, but only almost. They’re just great pre-70s punk punk stuff.

“Is it My Body” follows suit and is funny on a KISS arrogance level to boot, but a lot more angled and clever like a trick snooker shot.

Then it’s an astounding bridging song, combining a teen’s expanding view of the naughty, dirty greater world with a perspective that’s rather older and more cynical and jaundiced – Hallowed Be My Name (not the only great AC band song written by drummer Neil Smith) – rocketing into the final three-song ‘Madness and Redemption Suite’, as I call it, consisting of “Second Coming”, “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”, and an amazingly apposite and frankly crazy final ‘redemptive’ choice of the Rolf Harris/Harry Butler aboriginal-music inspired song, “Sun Arise”, which for bizarre source material, let alone an astoundingly and unreasonably inspired adaptation, might be unbeatable in any rock annals you have going.

Up to this point, I’ve omitted mention of the ‘Balloon Du Jour’ extended mix nominal snoozer here, “Black Juju” credited to bass player Dennis Dunaway, and bearing no small resemblance to another track written by a bass player, Pink Floyd’s early astro-cosmoligical groinscratch “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”. That Roger Waters must be a nicer guy than some people say he is if, to this day, he’s let that one slide. Well, it’s like I said about the longer, less-thoroughly conceived material on the Killer album – it fits the tone and it acts nicely as atmosphere and a spacer – it’s just that it’s surrounded by a lot of stuff that is unambiguously great rock’n’roll music.

Overall, this is as good if not better than anything that’s had the Alice Cooper monicker on it, and, in these rarefied circles, that is not meant as any small compliment.

BADFINGER – No Dice (1970)

Sort of Beatles protégés defined power pop before anyone had any idea what it was on this album, adding the seventies power-chord dynamics to the Beatles-ish tunes, but they did a lot more besides. There was some real, and varied, songwriting talents in this band, and buffing that all up to the fore with playing ability wasn’t an issue. The all-timers that everyone knows are “No Matter What”, which is power pop defined in one song, and “Without You”, a Planet Earth-grabbing ballad which isn’t my deal particularly, and sounds a little whiny, though painfully honest here, but Harry Nilsson took it to a worldwide perennial smash. But there’s so much else here – “I Can’t Take It”, “Better Days” and Watford John also defined the form, as did the non-disposable throwaway they had the blessed cheek to call “Love Me Do”.

Make sure you grab the CD reissue version with the extra tracks to land more in the same line, like “Get Down” and “Mean Mean Jemima” and, particularly, a country-rock flavoured heart-bleeder called “I’ll Be The One” which may be the best thing on the whole deal.

The talent displayed here is absolutely ridiculous. If The Beatles had lasted into the 70s, they almost certainly would have sounded like this, and you can just hope they would have been this good at it.

BARRACUDAS – Drop Out with the Barracudas (1980)

Unusual English band of the time, in that they unambiguously championed traditional US-flavoured rock’n’roll, particularly from the 1960s. Their later stuff had a mid-period Beatles/folk-rock Byrds cool depresso-flavoured tone to it, but on the debut – one of the greatest first albums ever recorded – it was half straight-up surf pop-rock, and half darker minor-chord rock. There’s not a misstep on it. They really nailed everything they set out to do. Hard to beat the original “first side” opener and closer tracks – “Summer Fun” and “I Wish it Could be 1965 Again” but there’s nothing to put you to sleep here. Genuinely great record.

BARRENCE WHITFIELD AND THE SAVAGES – Barrence Whitfield and the Savages (1984)

OK, this is insanely great. Wild r’n’b album, kind of from the Little Richard school, with powerhouse vocals backed by a band - of a punk rock background and intent, but with all swing and chops necessary to blow in an r’n'b-ward direction - that has no mercy in them. Incredibly astute choice of unrelentingly obscure covers with a few undetectably interwoven originals. This is a rare thing – i.e. it would have been great if it had come out in the 50s or 60s, but it was just as great coming out in the 1980s. Unusual and happy break for the sound, compared to the original fiercer end of 50s r’n'b, is when it came out - i.e. they had the hindsight benefit and production capabilities of what the 70s rock had sounded like to punch up the band’s end of the sound to match Barrence’s monster soul/blues roar. It’s still a tearaway combination.

BARRENCE WHITFIELD AND THE SAVAGES – Dig Yourself (1985)

More of the same, with a slightly more rounded sound, although by anyone else’s standards the rawness is still unsurpassed. For sheer attack, I guess the first album wins, but there is gold in some of the songs and general hip-shakery here. On the average “official” list of 100 great albums in the music press, there are probably around 90 that have no real business being in ahead of either of the first two Barrence Whitfield and the Savages records.

BEATLES – Beatles for Sale (1964)

Unlike most people who are interested in the subject, I’m not a Beatles album fan, more of a Beatles songs/tracks fan. I find it hard to find a Beatles ORIGINAL album that wouldn’t have benefited from some editing, or a slightly more defined sense of direction.

This is an album I’ve always enjoyed for what it is, bolstered by the stronger – and remarkably influential, and, at the time, original, material – and even including its peculiar departures from these areas, which on this album would emphatically include Ringo’s vocal demolition of the Carl Perkins classic “Honey Don’t”, and the cabaret-friendly extravagutser, “Mr Moonlight”.

But it opens up with four genre-definers in a row, three pop songs that made pop songs, in “No Reply”, “I’m a Loser” and “Baby’s In Black”, followed by a 60s reclaiming of Chuck Berry’s “Rock’n’Roll Music”, and can still throw in something like the power-pop template “Eight Days a Week” as a make-weight, effortlessly add a music-business cornerstone like “Every Little Thing”, and find room for George channelling (and quite well) his inner Carl Perkins on “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby”. It’s just a really nice record.

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Anyone who’s had a poke around this site knows that I have limited patience for the rote, stock regurgitation of more or less the exact same “Greatest Albums of All Time” listings in music magazines on an annual basis, with just the order of the usual suspects rotated for novelty from time to time. I like The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” but I think I might be about Pets Sounded-out by now, to put it one way.

My main objection is that due to the critics all urinating in each other’s pockets on a continual basis dating back to when Rolling Stone used to be a rock’n’roll magazine back in the Pleistocene Era, and due to no-one having what wrestler/philosopher Mick Foley would call the “testicular fortitude” to head off the thoroughly-ploughed path and throw in a few more off-beat and thus interesting selections, so many perfectly viable and under-explored alternative choices are kept well and truly under-explored by the extremely effective method of never mentioning them.

A long while back, it occurred to me that it would be pretty durned easy to demonstrate this principle by throwing together a list of 100 great rock albums off the top of me head.

This I then did, then forgot about it for at least four or five years, until I recently accidentally stumbled over it in the dustier, more cobwebbed end of the computer files, opened it up to find the list had somewhere along the way, expanded to just over 140 titles, then topped it up to 150 for the heck of it.

Now I’ve decided to lob it on here, with expanded comments on all the candidates. (Whatever they’re “candidates” for, exactly.) These comments are ‘expanded’, primarily because there were no comments in the original list, just a bunch of artist names and album titles. So they’re quite ‘expanded’ when you think about it like that.

This is not some sort of definitive Web-O-Leaps attempted list of the all-time greatest rock albums. It mixes up stuff that would turn up in the conventional rock mag lists of that kind with albums that never do, but arguably should or could, and plenty that fall into the most neglected category of all – really good, interesting, distinctive albums that get completely overlooked, because half of everybody is slobbering around those stock-standard “greatest of all time” type listings, which have no room for winning eccentricity, or small but sustained delights, or mind-blasting mastery in an unrespected or overlooked genre, or all of the above plus many more possibilities.

If you’re wondering exactly what the point is, let’s just call it “broadening the debate” to avoid unnecessary argument. It’s close enough to the truth anyway.

Like I said, this was done on a “first come to mind” basis, with the only defining criterion being that they had to be albums which I thought had stood the test of time and were either excellent, or largely excellent, or an outstanding achievement within a particular musical genre.

As usual for me, there will be an almost exclusive bias towards loud rock, rock’n’roll and pop-classicist rock music in the Beatles’ kind of sense of the latter.

Albums are sort of listed alphabetically by artist, (within the limits of how MS Word alphabeticised the list for me anyway), but within a particular artist or band’s stuff, there is no particular order – it’s just how I happened to type the list up.

AC/DC – Back in Black (1980)

“Highway to Hell” went a fair way towards defining the “mature” AC/DC sound and “Back in Black” essentially finished the job. Simple but monumental drum lines overlaid with rockin’ but somewhat majestic repeated block chord patterns, plus little intrusions of almost fanfare-like guitar figures, and a feel of almost classical style scoring, mostly achieved by volume and overtones in the big ringing chords.

Mutt Laing’s production is set up to accentuate those aspects of the band’s sound, although how much of the change from earlier recordings was due to Laing pushing in that direction, and how much was simply the development that the notoriously headstrong Young brothers had decided to pursue is kind of up for grabs unless you asked the key participants. Anyone who pointed out that the Vanda-Young produced/Mark Opitz-engineered “Powerage” album from ’78 had shown very clear steps in the direction of the subsequent AC/DC songs/sound (compared to the earlier, more blues’n’boogie underpinnings of their sound) would have a point.

They went further with this kind of guitar-scoring idea in later recordings (even noticeably in parts of the also Mutt Laing-produced follow-up album, “For Those About to Rock” in 1981), but I’d think “Back in Black” is the most consistent, cut-for-cut success of these, and maybe of all the albums they did. It comparatively lacks for duds and rote ‘album tracks’.

Then-new vocalist Brian Johnson’s ridiculously high-pitched shriek was well-suited to the changing approach to the sound. The days of Bon Scott’s cunning little shifts and jabs in the lyrics were gone, replaced by “Carry On” movie double-entendres (and plenty of single ones), but some of the latter were still funny in their own way, and any intricacies of lyrics weren’t probably the reasons people listened to AC/DC.

“Back in Black” remains unchallenged as the best AC/DC album featuring Brian Johnson, and it’s doubtful that there wouldn’t be a considerable consensus on that – one somewhat unusual for a band with such an extensive and long-lived recording career.

AC/DC – Highway to Hell (1979)

The transition album for the boys, and in a good way – it’s got the unmistakeable rock’n’roll orientation informing the songs, but very adeptly incorporates those values into the newly developed “big sound” they were now essaying. Bon’s great here, as always – just one of those definitive rock’n’roll voices. Songs are darn good most of the way – there’s some Bon philosophy on the title track and “If You Want Blood”, the little kicks of real life feel he used to give the material, and some genuinely sexed-up sentiments, as opposed to the cartoony fornicatory heroics (if entertaining) on later material, such as “You Shook Me All Night Long”. The Young brothers’ riffs just don’t stop pumping out the magic here, epic guitar girders of monumentality on the title track and “Walk All Over You”, go-for-it rock’n’roll on “Beating Around the Bush” and “Girl’s Got Rhythm”, and a working accommodation of both approaches on tracks like “Get It Hot” and “Shot Down in Flames”.

The only count I’ve ever had against this record is that it runs out of puff on the last couple of tracks – “Love Hungry Man” is basically a dud and “Night Prowler” despite having some rep among big-time AC/DC diehards, is both cartoony play-acting at being nasty and also a low-rent “Midnight Rambler” without going within several planets of being in the same league as the latter. Neither have the riffs’n’sex’n’laughs’n’life of the rest of the record.

If you can ignore those two, as I invariably do when playing “Highway to Hell”, it’s basically a perfect album.

AEROSMITH – Aerosmith (1973)

Mean ratty guitar sound on this makes it stand out from the rest of the catalogue. Because of where it came – i.e. right at the start of the band’s recording career, and before they ‘broke big’ – tends to be much underrated. It’s got a blues-and-boogie base, but a real honest sound, and a directness that reminds me a lot more of later Boston-based punk rock era bands (like the Real Kids and the Nervous Eaters, among some others) than it does of the boogie bands of the time that just locked into the riffs and played louder and then louder again. (I guess I’m talking about Foghat, the hit Humble Pie era in the States, and a lot of the Southern boogie bands that did nothing but boogie-metal (not so much the Allmans, who I personally find somewhat dull, but varied, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, who also did something more rock’n’roll with their boogie.)

There’s just a lot more swing in the Aerosmith stuff, and you can hear it all over the place on the debut album, but it’s particularly unmistakeable in the long instrumental section in “One Way Street”.

Their “Stairway to Heaven”/”Don’t Fear (The Reaper)” balloon du jour attempt, “Dream On”, is on this album too. Its mellotron dramatics and Tylerized histrionics are, to put it mildly, at odds with the rest of the album, but the track’s insidious appeal is long-since proven, and it does show the way for the more melodic Beatles influences that Tyler was to bring to the songwriting to round out the band’s best-known and regarded period later on.

The ratty guitar-churning rock’n’roll here is pretty great. The songs tend to be catchy, punchy, brief and full of the stink of real life in a good way. The band already sounds like a very tight and achieved enterprise. They play like they were living in each other’s pockets at the time, and from testimony in the liners to the “Pandora’s Box” set, this impression is basically correct.

AEROSMITH – Rocks (1976)

To a lot of US fans, and plenty of the relative few who picked them up overseas at the time as well, this was probably the breakthrough record. (But see note under “Toys in the Attic”.) If they had a trademark sound – and I’d be inclined to think they did – this is where they hit it and mostly defined it, along with producer Jack Douglas.

It’s a hard rock album in sound, less a rock’n’roll album and tribute to the band’s fan-days roots than the previous ones. “Hard rock album” meaning the generic precursor to generic heavy metal, which was really a later development, although prototypes obviously were either springing up, or had already been developed back then. (Aerosmith were rarely a “heavy metal” band as such. There’s a couple of tracks dotted around here and there, like “Round and Round” as early as the previous album, and “Nobody’s Fault” on this, that kind of fit the description to an extent.) I mean, they’d heard Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple by then – everybody had.

But “Rats in the Cellar” is pure north-eastern US rock’n’roll, it sounds kind of like the New York Dolls, only faster, tighter and a bit trickier, and “Sick as a Dog” and “Lick and a Promise”, they’re sly and dirty and rockin’ and funny, but headed towards something more idiosyncratic – a definitively Aerosmith flavour of stadium-friendly but not stadium-defined rock and roll. “Back in the Saddle” is the most stylised of these, and is certainly the best-remembered: it became part of their touring set for aeons. It has inclinations towards the monumental, but still swings and bumps and grinds, which, I guess, is their particular genius, if you had to define one. A couple of things on “Rocks” are very much “album tracks”, but the strong material is so good and so well and distinctively played that, like “Highway to Hell”, it’s pretty easy to overlook the clunkers.

Also the band went two-for-two, after “Toys in the Attic” with a soon-to-be abandoned tradition of an epic, stage musical dramarama style tuneful closer (“Home Tonight” on this one, “You See Me Cryin’” on the previous LP) with full orchestra and all the condiments, and really nailed it for the second time running.

Hearing these really underscores the limitations of the barrage-balloon ballads they hit with in the 90s, partly composed by other hands. Those were generic ballads, and these are more like the slower, haunting numbers off the early (pre-synthesiser) J. Geils Band albums – i.e. they’re good songs, not industry-standard ballads.

“Rocks” isn’t probably their best album, but it was a key one in their best run, and most of it still holds up fine now.

AEROSMITH – Toys in the Attic (1975)

The precursor to “Rocks” is probably how it was seen, and possibly how it always will be, * but this mixture of styles and influences thoroughly absorbed into the developing band sound – and there was a big jump in defining that, over the previous album “Get Your Wings”, as there had been from the first one to “…Wings” – may still stand as their strongest album song for song and cut for cut. With the benefit of the reviewer’s privilege of 20/20 hindsight, an important creative development for these guys was the key songwriting dynamic – the partnership of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry – was up to three songs on this one.

One was the original version of “Walk This Way”, another was a pretty superior fast rock number with an unusual take on Beatlesy melodic breaks – the title track – and the other was perhaps the best original the band ever wrote, a rocker with a surprising amount of built-in heart and heartbreak entitled “No More No More”.

Rounding out the album was bass player and occasional songwriter Tom Hamilton pairing with Tyler to come up with one of the band’s career defining tunes, “Sweet Emotion” – gutsy, ballsy and derisively sexy in all the good ways – the aforementioned ‘Broadway show closer/show-stopper’ type number, “You See Me Crying”, a pretty hilarious and great take on the old jump-blues number “Big Ten Inch Record” which might as well have been tailor-made for them, an odd but neat late-period Beatles departure by Hamilton and Tyler called “Uncle Salty”, a pure rocker about, of all things on Tyler’s brain, Creation and human history called “Adam’s Apple” – one of the more hilarious and satisfying examples of that rather narrow genre, pure rock’n’roll songs of biblical inspiration (another being ZZ Top’s immortal “Jesus Just Left Chicago”, although you could argue that’s a straight electric blues albeit somewhat Top-erized), and the Brad Whitford/Tyler number “Round and Round” which is probably the best “metal” thing they ever did, and maybe still the weakest track on the album.

It’s an awfully strong record, though – a very solid testimony to how good the band could be, especially in terms of the material.

Anyone who ever thought they were kind of a de-brained Stones only once over louder – which was the rep they kind of had for years, especially critically, and probably still do with a lot of those people who jumped on punk and new wave in the mid-late 70s and decided to revile much of the stuff that had been big earlier on – has never sat down and listened to “Toys in the Attic”.

* (Incidentally, the impression I’d got from fans, critics, those who were around at the time, and the kind of received history that passes for history ever since, is that “Rocks” was the breakthrough album. According to the figures on Wikipedia, “Toys…” went 8 x platinum and “Rocks” sold 4 x platinum. That gap can’t really be accounted for in sales since the heyday, not exclusively anyway. The truth may be they kind of jumped down the throat of everybody’s attention (in the US anyway) when touring “Rocks”, but “Toys in the Attic” must have been the mass market breakthrough in terms of pure sales.)

AIMEE MANN – I’m With Stupid (1995)

Escapee from 80s band Til Tuesday recorded a first solo album that had Brian Wilson influence saturation all over it, right down to ornate arrangements and instrumentation, but some strong and odd, and strongly odd, idiosyncratic melodies and lyrics, with a unique, stand-out sensibility to the material.

“I’m With Stupid” was the second one, stripped back to a more conventional rock band sound, kind of partly post-grunge in the guitars, sort of a precursor and/or reflection of pop stuff to come with dishwasher noise percussion and strange floaty keyboard bubbles, and still brimming with nods to 60s pop classicism in tunes, changes, and sounds.

The directness – even if it’s sometimes deceptively sneaky about simulating directness through some devious little complexities – is a help here. The material can more than handle it. It’s just one great song after another – big rewarding tunes all over the joint, married perfectly to unabashedly intelligent, sometimes funny, often cold-ish lyrics often about, for want of a better summary, the fundamental impossibility of any two distinct human personalities attempting a relationship. (If she’s got a running theme through her solo work, I’d take a stab that that’s the one.) Plus she sings like an angel, if a probingly intellectual, perpetually wry and disappointed angel.

The sound, instrumentation, backing vocals – everything here is done perfectly, so a large lump of credit presumably goes to Jon Brion as producer (he also played all over the record), Mike Deneen as lead engineer, and mixer Jack Joseph Puig, who was doing incredible work with the LA band Jellyfish at around the same time.

I want to avoid the impression, despite what I’ve written about the subject matter above, that this is a downer album. It really isn’t at all. It’s an inevitably uplifting album due to how great the songs, tracks and artist are here, which often happens to be about downer subject matter.

Well, you’ve heard rock music before. Some of the stuff that gets you and your friend the brain the most jumpinest is essentially about downer subject matter. Just think of what the lyric of “Brown Sugar” was about. Jumpin’ Jesus!

However, for an icy blast of pure sustained beauty, “You Could Make a Killing” chills right to the bone on all levels. Incredible backing vocals (really co-lead on the chorus) from Juliana Hatfield meshing in spine-zapping perfection with Mann’s glorious lead.

Don’t know whether I’d call it a standout, though – although that would not be horrendously hyperbolic – because, with the exception of one track, (“All Over Now”, louder but comparatively light on for memorable melody), everything on this is a standout.

For your pop classicist types, other vocalists featured knocking about quite helpfully in the background include Tilbrook and Difford from UK Squeeze, and Neil Innes!

ALICE COOPER – Billion Dollar Babies (1973)

Past the two acknowledged classics of the Alice Cooper band period (see below), I’d say this is the strongest of the later ones, song for song. They’re getting away from the punky feel of the earlier stuff, but not so far you can’t smell it, and the “bigger” sound, more elaborate approach to instrumentation and material, and the ‘reach’ of the lyrics fit nicely with Alice’s expanding ambitions and achievements in terms of reaching and moving a mass audience. On songs like “Elected”, “Generation Landslide”, “No More Mr Nice Guy” and the title track, (with perfectly fitting anti-typecasting guest vocal appearance from a then-pseudonymed Donovan) they’re defining the type of communication-triangle of audience-artist-business that made Alice the breakthrough figure he was (and the band’s music was) at the time.

The abstraction of the song “Hello Hooray”, which in this version sounds very much like it escaped from some Broadway musical *, to serve as album opener was a gift – it’s a definition of the big-powerful-exciting/queasy-underlyingly a little sick, stadium rock feel of a certain time. It’s also probably about as well as Alice has actually sung, in a more conventional sense, as opposed to rock’n’roll singing.

Beyond that, well there’s the playacting Gothic/sick stuff, like the closing mini-suite of “Sick Things”, “Mary Ann” and “I Love the Dead”. It’s actually a fair bit more convincing than the more rational, more Broadway-ish in a cheesy way, re-run on a lot of the “Welcome to My Nightmare” material, but a step back from the more genuinely creepy and lyrically direct stuff on “Love it to Death” and “Killer”. “Sick Things” is kind of great in its own way, “Mary Ann” works right up until the Vegas lounge tag-line, and “I Love the Dead” feels like skinny material stretched out pretty long. The vaguely similar “suite” of songs on part of “Love it to Death” – the madness and redemption stuff that closes out the album – is way stronger material, musically, and both more direct and much more scary, lyrically and in vocal performance – I guess because it sounds like fears that actually came out of someone’s personal thoughts in a real life setting, rather than playacting at being scary for entertainment purposes.

The ‘dental horror tale’ of “Unfinished Sweet” is perfectly matched for lameness by the generic stadium rock wannabe desperation of the music, and “Raped and Freezin’” is a role-reversal sex offence fantasy which is also pretty strictly-from-hunger lyrically, has a verse structure that starts off like gangbusters (well, comparatively speaking), takes a strange wrong turn on the way to the chorus, and then the latter, while generically “rock” is not good generic rock, and thin enough to hang as a decorative lampshade. This is the sort of material that indicates where Alice was heading on the way down, particularly after he ditched the original band.

As mentioned with some other albums earlier, the strong stuff here is in the majority, the album SOUNDS really good, and thanks to the miracle of the digital age, you can always program the disc-player to skip over the turkeys, thus bringing the album several (arguably undeserved) notches up in quality.

* (I’d always thought this song was from some musical, and presumably the show-stopper number in whatever one it was as well. This appears to be a comprehensive error. The song was written by a Canadian musician called Rolf Kempf, and originally turned up on a pretty well-known Judy Collins album from 1968 called “Who Knows Where the Time Goes”. Once you’ve heard the Alice band marching gigantically through it like a stadium rock Godzilla, it’s kind of hard to imagine a folky singer-songwriter rendition, even though Collins had guys like James Burton, Chris Ethridge (from the Flying Burrito Bros), Jim Gordon (Derek and the Dominoes, with Clapton), Stephen Stills and Van Dyke Parks playing with her on that album. Perhaps the definitive comment on this should belong to Rolf Kempf’s own website, which in the bracingly brief biographical section, opens with the unambiguous sentiment, “After writing the Alice Cooper rock anthem, ‘Hello, Hooray’…” and then omits to mention the Judy Collins one at all. Arguably you get the flavour of what Rolf’s trying to say there. Incidentally, although people called Rolf featuring on the songwriting credits of major rock albums are demonstrably few and far between, Rolf Kempf wasn’t even the only Rolf to turn up in that role on a big Alice Cooper album. Details of the other to follow in a later instalment.)

ALICE COOPER – Killer (1971)

The Detroit-oriented steely, direct hard rock’n’roll that punched up and put over the previous album evenly split the dressing room here with more overtly theatrical (in music, arrangements, theme and lyrics) theatrical horror monkeying around. The difference from an awful lot of the later make-up playaround “scary” stuff on later albums compared to the half-album or so of the stuff that’s here is that the “Killer” version sounds lyrically like it comes from some real person’s obsessions – maybe not a person’s life as such, but the weirder corners of their brain – and a lot of the music therein sounds genuinely off-kilter, sick and semi-deranged. (Albeit cunningly arranged and recorded “deranged”.)

Two of the songs in this vein are unmistakably excellent, which doesn’t hurt either. “Desperado” is a western movie-themed romance, which manages to retool this iconography and adroitly key it to the teen angst misfittery which was the fundamental drive of the Alice Cooper band sensibility of the time. “Dead Babies” shocks by not only being a tawdry theme-park ‘Ghost Train’/sick joke kind of deal, but by actually having a point and also being a well ahead of its time song with a strikingly merciless eye towards parental neglect. Basically it does have its cake and eats it too, but turns the trick so well, you’ll be too busy admiring it to get resentful. Music on both (the former a Michael Bruce/Alice Cooper comp, and the latter a band comp) is strongly written and cunningly executed.

The theme to regarding the more straight-ahead material on “Killer” is “Don’t knock the rock”. There are two almost intimidatingly accomplished filthy dirty rock’n’roll songs on it – “Under My Wheels” and the sublime “You Drive Me Nervous” – the latter a piece of definitive Detroitery to stand directly alongside the Stooges and the MC5 – plus a funny lighter rocker “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” and “Be My Lover” feels like the intended hit in attempt to give ‘em more of the same from the previous record, and arguably isn’t quite as strong as the other straight rock material here, but it’s still a long way from a shambles and pretty likeable, at very least.

Basically, the longer tracks here (“Halo of Flies” and the title track) is the weaker material, which isn’t the ideal equation at any time, but they’re patently intended as “album tracks” to help broaden the atmosphere (not to mention running time) of the whole musically, and, as mentioned previously, musically, at least they have some flavour of genuine dementedness on their side.

“Killer” is one of the best albums ever to have the words ‘Alice Cooper’ printed on the front cover, and carping aside, has some claims to be “the one”. I’d say the last truly great album either the Alice Cooper band or Alice Cooper the individual ever did. According to one source, Johnny Rotten says this is the greatest rock album ever made. If true, this arguably means he’s got better taste in music than he probably ever has in personal choices of clothing.

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Credited to news.com.au, from the OptusZoo website, which may or may not have stuck a delicate editorial finger in it:

“A letter claiming to have been written by the cyclist involved in an altercation with cricket legend Shane Warne last night has gone viral.”

The LETTER was claiming?! Letters talk now? Finally the conventional postal service strikes back at all this modern electrophonic communications technology.

I’m looking forward to future simplified verbal correspondence from my mailbox in future. When I open the bills, they’ll all say out loud, “Pay me now, you cheapskate!” and I can simply respond, “Rack off, foul blackguard” (or other words to like effect) and it will all be over with, at a considerable saving on eyestrain.

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From the “front page” of an internet service provider’s entertainment/news site:

“Cannibis is world’s most popular illicit drug and Australia and New Zealand top the list of users.”

Not so popular that people know how to spell it, apparently.

When the link was clicked, the full version of the story on the same site spelled it the same way, i.e. the wrong way, in the opening line of the story, but had managed to rustle up the definite article to insert between “is” and “world’s”.

Although the story was credited to news.com.au the fault may or may not have been theirs. For the version of the story in the “hard-copy” Friday Herald Sun, everyone had apparently recovered their wits sufficiently from all the shock-horror to spell “cannabis” correctly.

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I just stumbled over this somewhere in the computrofile jumble and I couldn’t remember it at all, but I liked it, and, as Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served used to say, “I am unanimous in this.”

That’s about all I know about it. Hope you can mine the occasional snort of laughter out of it.

ON YO MAMA’S SECRET ASS

He’s back and he’s black! The new realistic direction of the James Bond franchise in Casino Royale is taken one step further as James hits the urban streets of today, armed with his combination pocket global positioning system, bazooka and crack-pipe. 50 Cent stars as James J-Man La Washington Bond MC, and when he hears an evil cartel of former Soviet officials headed by Shijizzel Mafizzel (Snoop Dogg) is invading the ’hood aiming to collect all the fine mamas and insert dynamite in they ass, James goes totally Mau Mau on they heads and whups him some Soviet candy-ass. Includes the poignant hit theme song, “Dynamite Upside My Ass” by Fergie and Sir Paul McCartney.

SEINFELD – THE MOVIE

All your favourite joke returns, as the TV legend goes big-screen, featuring Steve Carell as Jerry Seinfeld, Jack Black as George Costanza, Don Rickles as Kramer, Gwen Stefani as Elaine, and Malcolm McDowell as the power-crazed General Asparagoo. In a complex plot, spanning the globe, Jerry is appalled when his socks lose their fluffiness and even more appalled when one of his girlfriends turns out to be of legal voting age. Kramer is off on a crusade insulting Koreans, and George whines about parking spaces being too rectangular, Elaine is comically sold into white slavery and Jerry finishes the picture with a 45 minute monologue about his socks losing their fluffiness, noting “And what’s the deal with jumpers. They don’t jump. Really.”

DIE HARD – WITH A SPHINCTER PROBLEM

The 83rd commemorative Die Hard picture starts off with a bang, as a light bulb blows, scaring Bruce Willis, who falls and breaks a hip. Helped into a home, he immediately loses his wallet and blames the nurse. Later he puts diced carrots in the fish-tank, and loses his TV lounge privileges. In a thrilling climax, he wrestles three jumbo jets onto their backs, bites the engine off a tank, defeats the evil Major Inabusagain (Malcolm McDowell) in arm to arm combat, and then cries because his oatmeal is lumpy.

MAGGOTY McPLAGUE

In the heart-warming follow-up to Ratattouie, the animated triumph about a rat that handles food, Disney-Pixar present the happy-go-laughy story of a little Scottish blowfly larva that wants to be a great cheesemaker, Maggoty McPlague (voiced by Mike Meyers), and the only human who can understand him, Adolf (Tim Allen). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll sing, you’ll have a little diarrhoea. Includes the hit song, The Curd Cycle of Life, by Sir Elton John and Tim Rice.

WELCOME BACK KOTTER – THE MUSICAL

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage triumph of the West End and other beers, comes to the screen with new life, like Frankenstein. The half-crazed Mr Woodman (Michael Crawford) haunts the school where idealistic wise-cracking teacher Gabe Kotter (Tom Cruise) expresses his jokes in song, and tries to reform those famous sweathogs (a role played entirely in ethnic tapdance by Michael Flatley and the cast of Lord of the Dance) until great tragedy intervenes when Celine Dion, repeating her Broadway role of Rosalita Bazonga, starts singing, and the building collapses killing everyone except Epstein’s Mother (Ian McKellen). Songs include the lilting “Up your Nose with a Rubber Horn Concerto”, and the enigmatic love ballad “Up Your Hole With a Piano Roll”.

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A TALE OF TWO FIGHTS

MANNY PACQUIAO v JUAN MANUEL MARQUEZ III

The style Manny Pacquiao conventionally employs in wearing out his opponents on the way to victory involves extraordinarily fast and accurate punching, and a lot of it, along with two key defensive weapons, one of which is that he’s become one of the better boxers around and is excellent at slipping and otherwise avoiding punches, and the other of which is that even if you hit him, he seems to be all but impossible to hurt.

Juan Manuel Marquez’s style, heavy on the counter-punching, is pretty much kryptonite to Manny’s. Technically, he’s possibly even a better boxer, he hits hard enough to get Pacquiao’s attention, his accuracy is the equal of Pacquiao’s – better in this fight, no matter what the idiot stats did or didn’t say – he seems to be able to get Pacquiao off rhythm as no one else can, and, while known for the counter-punching, is able to strike first, and effectively, as well.

Pre-fight Pacquiao was saying he’d counter-punch the counter-puncher, and basically he couldn’t do it. Marquez, when he initiated the punching, started off with straight quick punches, and established that as a pattern, but then, during Pacquiao’s attempts at firing back, punched “around the corner” very effectively on both sides. He has a deceptively good variety of punches, and he wasn’t missing a lot when it counted.

Pacquiao, robbed off the whirlwind approach to overwhelming his opponent by working very fast and hitting very hard and accurately in great numbers, struggled visibly here, and seemed to lose both his rhythm and a measure of confidence as the fight went on.

Marquez won the tactical battle, seemed to connect more often, and at least as hard as Pacquiao generally did (when he did), and was elated at the final bell, evidently sure he’d won the fight this time. (After previously having been dealt a draw and a loss in their two previous fights, both of which also went the 12-round distance.)

I was sure he had too. I had it to Marquez by 8 rounds to 3, with one tied, or in points, 117-112.

(Neither the commentators or I could see any of the rounds being given by more than one point, i.e. 10-9, and, as it turned out, that was the way all three official judges scored it as well, which is probably the only thing I’d agree with them about.)

The judges gave it to Pacquiao, by “majority decision”, which is boxing-speak for two voting for one fighter and the other calling it a draw. Their final tallies were 114-114, 115-113, and 116-112, the latter two in favour of Pacquiao. The last one, who apparently called it 8 rounds Pacquiao, 4 rounds Marquez, in my opinion has richly earned himself a lengthy holiday from the trials and tribulations of fight judging, not that the statutory bodies in charge of such matters would ever act in such an, err, “proactive” way.

This was a rotten decision, even by boxing’s storied history and long-established standards in that field of accomplishment.

Anyone who knew anything about boxing, has watched plenty of fights, can read a fight, and was paying attention, would have recognised that Marquez had won, and won clearly and decisively. If ever a boxer “wuz robbed” in a major fight, it was him in this one. He did everything right, executed perfectly, got the best fighter in the world off his game and out of his usual element, and still couldn’t walk away with a decision he’d apparently richly earned.

I respect Pacquiao, like everything I’ve seen of him as a person, am amazed by him as a fighter, and have absolutely nothing against him (and thank him for the entertainment he’s given me, at a cost to his body and health, given the business he’s in) but he lost this fight.

My understanding is that pretty much every journo in “reporters’ row” at the fight scored it to Marquez. The three commentators on the TV “world feed” did as well.

That said, it was an extremely high level boxing match – way better and busier than we’re used to seeing these days – only tainted by the decision.

Reportedly Marquez commented – whether before or after the fight I’m not quite sure – that if the long-mooted Mayweather-Pacquio fight finally went ahead (as is apparently somewhat more likely now, judging by post-fight comments by both promoter Bob Arum and Manny) that he felt Manny would struggle with the boxing qualities Floyd has.

Oddly enough, that’s what I was thinking during the fight, i.e. if Pacquiao struggled with the scientific counter-punching approach that Marquez brought, how would he deal with the even more comprehensive array of boxing technique (and more aggressive approach, and arguably greater natural size and strength) that Mayweather would bring to the table, presuming he can turn up in prime shape and mentally ready, given his age and numerous lay-offs.

Mayweather all but shut Marquez out the one time they fought, the judges basically giving 10-12 rounds to Floyd. That basically leaves Pacquiao-Floyd as the big intrigue fight left on the table around this weight – basically welterweight for those guys these days – presuming “Pretty Boy Floyd” can be brought to the table.

But if Juan Manuel Marquez, in his late 30s, still has one more performance at or near his career-best left in him, there’s grounds for a fourth fight with Pacquiao now, and it wouldn’t exactly be a tough sell. If he’s up to it, I wish him better luck with the judges next time.

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AUSTIN TROUT v FRANK LoPORTO

Due to a scheduled opponent for the inconveniently-named WBA junior-middleweight champ Trout falling through, Melbourne’s Frankie LoPorto found himself in the equally unlikely-dubbed Cohen Stadium in El Paso, Texas, for a ShowTime telecast title bout. (Shown here live, without additional charges, on Fox Sports.)

With absolutely no meanness or disrespect intended to LoPorto, who is apparently as game as the average opera is long, how can a guy with a 15-4 record (prior to the fight) be ranked top 15 by a worldwide boxing authority, and be in a title fight? By all means let a fight go ahead, since Trout needed the scheduled national US exposure in a TV outing that was already booked, but make it a non-title fight. I can’t see how a guy with a 15-4 record who is a late substitute can be sanctioned for a world title shot, even as little as “world titles” mean these days, presuming one is still making the mistake of taking all this stuff seriously.

(And to give some indication of what world titles do mean these days, the undefeated – 23-0 before this fight – Trout was ranked #9 junior-middleweight in the world by colour commentator Steve Farhood prior to the fight, and is rated #7 by the BoxRec website.)

Also, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, this particular fight should never have been booked. As nicely as you could put it, was exactly the sort of spectacle that allows boxing to effortlessly command such bad press.

Trout had all the skills, punching arsenal, power, timing, and any other salient qualities you care to shake out of the thesaurus, and LoPorto had an incredible chin and plenty of guts. Maybe the “late notice” thing had something to do with it, but they looked on two completely different levels as fighters, and it looked exactly like the type of fight which should never have been made. LoPorto hardly landed one effective punch and Trout apparently couldn’t stop landing them.

I thought the ref stopped it late, and the corner could have stopped it earlier, and other than Trout’s fans, I don’t think anyone particularly would have enjoyed seeing this. It had all the inherent pleasure of seeing a guy getting his face pulped before your eyes with no viable defence.

Commentators mentioned that Anthony Mundine is the next mandatory defence for Trout. It’s an interesting idea, presuming Team Mundine didn’t see how Trout was punching in this fight, and that he was engaging even though LoPorto, particularly early, kept moving forward and trying to knock Trout’s block off. (Unfortunately for him, to no effect whatsoever.)

Even with Trout’s less than intimidating career KO record, and being unable to KO LoPorto clean in this fight, I think the Mundine camp probably saw plenty that they didn’t like the look of.

It would be quite an interesting fight, if it happened. Both are elusive. Both have some boxing skills. Trout looked like more of a boxer-puncher in this, and Mundine is more the straight boxer (when he’s not really on his bike) which traditionally can make for an interesting fight. Trout is a southpaw, which Team Mundane may find off-putting.

It’s Mundine’s chance to win a title from an incumbent champion, something he’s never done. He probably won’t go anywhere near the consensus #1 junior-middle, Miguel Angel Cotto, who throws bombs. Can’t see that Trout’s handlers would be in a huge hurry for that fight either.

My guess is that Trout would win – although Mundine offers a completely different level of challenge to Frankie LoPorto – and maybe by KO, and that Mundine’s people will duck this fight, thus keeping intact Mundine’s record of naming comparatively major opposition “targets” and then not fighting them.

As for LoPorto, I hope the folks managing his career keep him out of “opportunities” like this in future. Too many opportunities like that can really mess you up later in life.

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