Part concept album, part concoction of West Coast rock and jazz... Steve Sutherland hears the 180g reissue of an LP from 1970 with lessons we can learn from today
If there's a lazier fellow on the face of God's green earth than Jimmy Page, boy, I'd sure like to meet him. Yes, that Jimmy Page, guvnor of Led Zeppelin and hitherto legendary guitar god – it's the 'hitherto' bit that gets my goat.
This debut LP laid down a beat that courses through the veins of rock 'n' roll to this very day. Steve Sutherland pays tribute as he hears the 180g reissue on Sundazed
What's the baddest record ever made? I don't mean baddest as in worst. I mean baddest as in bad-ass, brimming with threat and braggadocio. A few candidates immediately spring to mind. Honey Boy Martin's 'Dreader Than Dread' threatens to shank you and send you to the graveyard. Johnny Cash's 'The Man In Black' is a pretty broody dude. Dr John The Night Tripper's 'I Walk On Gilded Splinters' boasts destructive powers of magic malignancy.
From LA scene-maker to success in shaping the early California surf and folk rock sounds, this US-born producer's legacy became overshadowed by the shocking incident that would bring '60s counterculture to its end. Steve Sutherland has the story...
Pop quiz! What was the title of The Golden Penetrators' debut LP? Was it a) 'Posting A Cheque Through A Dead Person's Mail Box?', b) 'All Hail The Thunder!' or c) 'Try Me On For Size?'.
Ha! Gotcha! It was none of the above because The Golden Penetrators weren't a band – though with a name like that they should have been.
The greatest English pop lyric writers of the 1960s? Steve Sutherland argues his case as he reassesses this mono LP from 1968, recently reissued on 180g vinyl
Afew decades ago I read an interview with Tom Waits where he was asked about the art of songwriting. Tom thought about it for a second, then declared that in fact he found it very easy, thanks to a nine-word magic formula. Those words were: 'Things will be better when we get to Chicago…'.
Veteran of the late '70s British pub rock scene, this UK-born guitarist began to hone his studio skills when appointed in-house producer for the fledgling Stiff Records label. Steve Sutherland traces the career of the self-effacing pop crafstman they call 'Basher'
What's the most embarrassing thing you've ever done? Snog the wrong person at the office Christmas party? Leave the house with your flies undone? Send an email meant for your partner to your boss by mistake?
Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day... it's not easy making albums that sell in their millions while maintaining credibility with your hard-core indie fans. Steve Sutherland celebrates the producer able to 'shift the units while keeping everything cool...'
The singer was suicidal. All he did in his down time was compile list after list of the songs he wanted played at his funeral. Luckily, if you want to put it that way, there was actually very little down time because the singer was labouring in the studio 16 hours a day under the illusion that what was expected of him was to make, in his own words, 'the next album to set the world on fire'.
The producer remembers it this way: 'Billy wanted to make a record that people would put on and say, "What the f*** was that?"'.
Thinking back to just after the time of his dad's Anderson shelter, Steve Sutherland dips into the 180g vinyl reissue of a 1968 concept album with sci-fi overtones
Devo have actually got nothing to do with this article, but in the past week or so it's occurred to me that those crazy coots from Akron, Ohio may have had a point all along.
One-take, on-the-money thrills... Steve Sutherland listens to the recent 180g vinyl reissue of a 12-track LP that saw a 'steely figure' of a singer become a superstar
In three weeks short of two years' time, just along the hall from here, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, who is in town to support the Black Sanitary Public Works employees, who are striking over higher wages and greater equality with their white co-workers, will step out onto the balcony of Room 306 and be gunned down dead by an assassin later identified as James Earl Ray.
His clients have included the cream of rock royalty, so how come this British-born producer is one of the most divisive around? Steve Sutherland on the man who successfully collaborated with the band whose shadow, some say, he never escaped
It was a job you wouldn't wish on anyone, even your worst enemy. A deadly odds-on no-win nightmare. And Jeff Lynne had just been handed the gig.
'Every morning I would wake up with half dread, half exhilaration,' he remembered later. 'The idea of doing it was the most thrilling thing imaginable… but messing it up would be horrible.' The terrible task in hand? To reanimate The Beatles!
The Stones, Beatles, Led Zeppelin's landmark debut LP... pick up a classic album at random and there's every chance it will credit the work of this British-born producer. Steve Sutherland on the man who began as the first freelance engineer in rock history
It's a Sunday afternoon late in 1966 and we're in South London working overtime at Olympic Studios. The band have already done their stuff – the basic track was laid down a few weeks earlier at the RCA Records Studio in Hollywood. So today it's just us, the producer, his chauffeur, the engineer and the singer, who's busy behind that screen putting down vocal takes between hitting on a mighty spliff he's rolled to keep him in the zone.
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