DRUMS fell off the cliff

I haven’t listened to this record in a long time, but it is one of my favorite Jimmy Reed albums, it’s from 1963. Great Vee Jay Records release.

I watched this 1963 Italian western by director Ricardo Blasco. This film is one of the handful spaghetti westerns that came out before A Fistful of Dollars. But it has the same cinematagrapher as that film, Ennio Morricone doing the soundtrack, and looks like it was filmed in the same part of Spain as the later westerns. And despite a really beat print, this film looked and sounded great. The plot didn’t have the type of themes of the ater films, but that was to be expected.

Gave a listen to the actual original LP from 1967 by this UK band featuring Marc Bolin. I have heard many John’s Children comps, but not this original LP with the canned screaming. Good record though, with tunes like Smashed, Blocked, Not The Sort of Girl & Jagged Time Lapse. What is great about this band is that for UK psych pop, they actually play very primitively, at times on this record they sound like a frat rock band struggling to get through Little Latin Lupe Lu.

This turned out to be a strong psych pop album in a similar vein to their 45 It Ain’t True famous from Pebbles. From NY in 1967, Faine Jade is the guy’s name. Best song was Don’t Hassle Me.

Amazing original radio recordings from 1958-64, with the wild dj spots from The Mad Daddy, who is a master of high speed rhyme, constantly punctuated with mad echo. I would love if someday I could listen to the entire shows with the songs. I am sure that will happen soon enough.

I was a little skeptical about this rerelease of the 1973 lp Iggy and The Stooges’ Raw Power. I had already heard that they couldn’t fix the big problems with the mix (the bass and drums being too low), but the sound is improved on this new two CD version. (I thought there was also going to be a 4 CD version of this?). The second cd is a 1973 live show that is better than the infamous Metallic K.O. set, with some great lines from Iggy and some funny audience chatter too! I assume this was released to make up for the awful Iggy remix from a few years back.

So now that I have recently watched Yojimbo, I watched the remake. And it is a scene for scene remake. But what was interesting is to see where it differs, what scenes were created new by Sergio Leone in 1964. The great scene where Clint Eastwood keeps getting shot and keeps coming at the villian due to the metal plate under his pancho is a Leone invention.

I want step up my intake of spaghetti westerns, so I started with Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo from 1961. Ha! It is heavily influenced by US westerns and the music by Masaru Sato is not period music, but big band orchestra with (obviously) Japanese accents. Great film, but I need to understand more what “distension” means in film technique.

My favorite of the Fat Possum Records blues records of the ’90s, this one is from 1998. Some is just him on acoustic, other tracks are the Fat Possum trademark drums and electric guitar.

A rare 1961 comedy album by West Coast jazz trumpeter Jack Sheldon. He was also an actor and bandleader who led the house band on the Merv Griffin Show. These are jazz informed comedy monologues, usually with a hip beatnik punchline at the end of each bit.