1. Over the nearly three decades that I’ve been posting “Album of the Year” lists on my website (the most recent, here), I’ve generally done a “half-way there” post of the things that are moving me most as the summer season kicks in. Last year, though, I elected to go with quarterly updates, and to create a running Spotify playlist as I posted the evolving list each quarter. That seemed like a useful approach, and one that elicited a fair amount of interest/engagement as the year went on, so I’m going to continue that rubric this year. And, with that as preamble, here are the albums and non-album singles (both previews of forthcoming albums due in the second quarter) that have most moved me over the past three months.
HOUSE Of ALL, “Murmuration,” from the forthcoming album Continuum
And then here’s the Spotify playlist sampler, providing one representative cut from each of the records listed above:
2. I mentioned in an earlier post that I had finally printed out the complete manuscript of my next book with Rear Admiral Jim McNeal, Crucibles: History’s Most Formidable Rites of Passage, nearly two years after we began working on the project. We’ve now had it copy-edited by independent eyes, have made what seem to us to be the final updates, and will be sending it on to Agate Publishing on Monday, with publication expected in early 2025. Which is all very exciting, of course, even as we are beginning to frame a proposal for our next collaborative work. When describing Crucibles in conversations with curious colleagues and friends, I’ve routinely had people ask me for examples of the rites of passage we cover. So as a preview tease, and as a convenient place for me to park this list where I can nab it quickly (since I often struggle on the spot to name all of the chapters), here’s a screen-cap of the Table of Contents for the book’s main text, laying out the specific cultures and organizations that we assess and analyze in our work, including our own Plebe Year experiences together at the United States Naval Academy:
I look forward to sharing it with you all, and hopefully lots of other readers who do frequent this website, when it’s ready to roll out. As always, I’m grateful to all of you who support my creative endeavors, and also as always, if you’ve not read my earlier books and are interested in doing so, here’s the link to learn more about them.
Note: For an index of all articles in all three Favorite Songs series, click here, then scroll down.
Who They Are: Earth, Wind & Fire are a joyously genre-crossing ensemble formed by former Ramsey Lewis Trio drummer Maurice White in 1969. The group issued a pair of funk-centric albums in 1971, then provided the score to Melvin Van Peebles’ seminal blaxploitation film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, before Maurice White rebooted the band with an entirely new line-up; only his brother, bassist Verdine White, survived the transition. Vocalist-percussionist Philip Bailey joined for 1972’s Last Days and Time, and by 1973, the group’s “classic line-up” had largely cohered, debuting on their first platinum certified album, Head to the Sky. Over the ensuing decade, Earth, Wind & Fire scored platinum or gold certifications for eight additional albums, along scores of killer singles, most of them chart monsters in their own rights, before Maurice White put the group on hiatus in 1984 to pursue other creative and musical interests, including producing hit albums for Ramsey Lewis, Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand, among others. Philip Bailey also emerged as a significant solo artist in this period, including a hit duet with Phil Collins; Genesis and Phil (solo) also borrowed EWF’s horn section during this period. In 1987, Maurice and Verdine White, Bailey, Ralph Johnson (drums/percussion), and Andrew Woolfolk (reeds) from the classic line-up reunited with additional players to re-launch the Earth, Wind & Fire brand; the latter incarnations of the group have earned another three Gold Records, but never quite hit the same level of dense studio success as they had in the ’70s and early ’80s. The respect and affection for their work never dwindled, though, and they were inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, among many other honors over the years. Maurice White was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in the late 1990s, and slowly stepped away from active involvement with the group he had founded; he died of the complications from the condition in 2016. The group continue on on this day, with Verdine White, Bailey, and Johnson as the core members.
When I First Heard Them: Probably in 1973 or 1974, almost certainly on pop radio, where I would have followed the rise and fall of “Mighty Mighty,” “Devotion,” and “Shining Star” (their first #1 single on the Hot 100) on Kasey Kasem’s American Top 40 each week. When I lived at Mitchel Field on Long Island from 1976 to 1980, EWF were big favorites among my social circle of the time, so I acquired and listened to their older albums (except the first two), and then stayed abreast with all of their work through the 1984 hiatus. There was also sort of a “Beatles vs Stones” dynamic between EWF and the sprawling P-Funk empire during that time, for me; one group nominally wholesome and suitable for family play, one group kind of nasty, and reserved for listening when parents were not about. I never quite got back onboard as intensely with the group in its latter days, though I stayed interested in their work and progress. I saw them live for the first time around 1980 at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, at the peak of the classic group’s prowess. I saw them again in Albany, New York, shortly after September 11, 2001, the first concert I attended after that devastating attack. The show was powerful and moving on a variety of planes, highly memorable because of the circumstances associated with being together with a large, diverse community in public again after a period of hunkering down and being frightened by what had happened and what was yet to come. It was one of the finest examples in my personal experience of the power of music to uplift and transform.
Why I Love Them: It’s tough to straddle diverse genres and make popular magic in so doing, but Earth Wind & Fire were utter masters at that approach during their heyday, blending jazz, soul, funk, pop, rock and African melodies/rhythms into a perfect, seamless whole, technically challenging, but utterly captivating to audiences of all stripes. Their music is dense, crafted with multiple vocalists, batteries of percussion, horns, strings, keys, reeds and more, but the song craft and accessibility of their output never suffered for that, whereas other groups attempting similar approaches often succumbed to unwieldy bloat. The heart of the group, for me, has always been Verdine White, an utterly killer bass player who provided the anchor around which the rest of the group sailed, his lines crisp, clear, and mighty, mighty indeed. The vocal blend of Maurice White (baritone) and Philip Bailey (tenor) was also magical, both of them effortlessly stepping into and out of lead lines as dictated by the necessity of the songs and ranges they were tackling. Underneath all of those technical and sonic aspects was a general vibe of joy, improvement, celebration, and uplift in both their arrangements and the words they put atop them. This is music to make you think, yeah, and to make you move, sure, but at bottom line, it’s music to make you happy. And it works, without the sickly-sweet glurge that so many other ostensibly inspirational bands so often spew. To lightly amend one of their most famous lyrics: “When you feel down and out, play an EWF song, it’ll make your day.” Yes, that. Precious, rare, and oh so valuable.
#10. “Mighty Mighty,” from Open Your Eyes (1974)
#9. “Sun Goddess,” from Sun Goddess (Ramsey Lewis)(1974)
#8. “September,” from The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire, Vol. 1 (1978)
#7. “That’s the Way of the World,” from That’s the Way of the World (1975)
#6. “Gratitude,” from Gratitude (1975)
#5. “Shining Star,” from That’s the Way of the World (1975)
1. Marcia and her Clean Slate colleagues, Jay Ruby and Mike Fogel, completed their required signature petitions and “qualifying fives” gifts a couple of weeks ago, and recently filed their formal applications for the 2024 Arizona Legislative Ballot, per this press release:
Marcia, Jay and Mike have since received confirmation that their application has been accepted as complete, placing them officially in the running. They have now filed for their campaign funding from the State of Arizona, provided via various fees and other income sources (but not from taxes) to candidates who agree to eschew corporate, PAC, and other dark money, and to cap their individual contributions, both in total, and in the amount allowed from any individual donor. They’re also launching a campaign newsletter, to which you can subscribe, here.
Why should you follow along if you don’t live here? I’ll once again post my own personal explanation on that front, as follows:
While this is a regional state level election, a key component of Marcia, Mike and Jay’s campaign is expanding outreach and engagement to prospective voters who are disillusioned with the extreme and performative approach to politics that has become so toxic across the State and country, where consciously and willfully obstructing the processes of governance is considered acceptable behavior in service to often hateful and discriminatory goals. By working hard on their own voter engagement, Marcia, Mike and Jay hope and expect to boost up-ticket Democrats in the State’s Federal races, and given that Arizona is one of a small number of true swing states, those races could easily be the deciding linchpins to defining who controls the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the White House come January 2025, along with who controls the Federal judiciary in the years that follow. These state level races are important for our home in Arizona, sure, but they’re also integral to the national electoral narrative in 2024 and beyond. Your support and encouragement will make a difference!
Finally, the trio also have a nice new campaign profile photo, taken at our county seat in Prescott, Arizona. Here ’tis; you can click it to visit their website.
2. The annual March Madness (or Silliness) NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament began last night, with the first pair of play-in games for the final field of 64 last night; the main brackets start exploding on Thursday morning. This is one of my favorite sporting events, but as much as I love college basketball, I must note that the NCAA has made a change this year to its post-season play that I find awful and annoying, though it involved the second-level NIT brackets, not the “Big Dance.”
For many years, teams that won their conferences in the regular season, but lost in the conference tournaments that came with automatic qualifying berths to the NCAA’s Field of 64, were guaranteed bids in the NIT. Some superb mid-major and small conference teams who stumbled in their own tournaments were thereby given the chance to play on in a meaningful post-season format with its own rich history beyond the main event. For some emergent programs, success in the NIT helped with their subsequent recruiting seasons, and was a precursor to emergence onto the larger stage in the years that followed. A good system with appropriate rewards for solid on-court performance, at bottom line.
But the NCAA did away with that automatic-qualifying rule for conference winners this year, instead guaranteeing two spots to each of the six “big” conferences (five of them the greed-fueled football powerhouse conferences, plus the Big East), along with the identified first-four-out from the March Madness field, who are also generally from the football powerhouse conferences. Because the big conferences already hoover up so many bids in the main tournament, this fills the NIT field with a bunch of marginal teams with unexciting 17-14 or 15-16 records and often losing tallies within their conferences, while small potentially exciting Cinderella programs with stellar records (beyond their unfortunate conference tournament losses) are stuck in the two garbage pay-to-play tournaments that nobody pays attention to, the CIT and CBI, if even that.
With 68 teams in the NCAA Tournament and 32 teams in the NIT, it seems loathsome that programs who put together magical seasons like Quinnipiac (24-9), High Point (25-8), Norfolk State (22-11), and Tarleton State (24-9), among others, aren’t judged among the Top 100 teams in the nation in recognition for their sterling successes, all of them having been neglected by both of the two meaningful post-season tournaments. It’s just another data-point that middling programs from the big conferences will always be favored over the solid programs from small conferences, with money as the obvious underlying factor, and the core concept of student athletes representing varied and diverse institutions of higher education being stomped on once again. Boo!! Hiss!!
3. Last Friday, I went to the local office supply/support shop and printed out this document:
That’s the first physical manifestation of my next book, again collaborating with Rear Admiral Jim McNeal, my classmate at the Naval Academy and Naval Supply Corps School. (You can click on the image for a link to my other books). It’s quite satisfying to have it on paper for the first time, since the oldest components of the book have been residing on my computer since Spring of 2022. We are having it read by fresh eyes for copy-editing this week and next, then will submit it to Agate Publishing on April 1, on-time and per contract specifications, being the good Navy guys we are. (Well, actually, as good Navy guys, we need to submit it five minutes early to be on time, but we’ll let that slide). Target publication date is early 2025. I’ll obviously keep you posted!
Note: For an index of all articles in all three Favorite Songs series, click here, then scroll down.
Who They Were: A smart and energetic rock n’ roll quartet from Marietta, Georgia, whose life cycle essentially book-marked the ’80s: they formed in 1981, they released four solid albums, and they broke up in 1989 (except for a few short-term later reunions). The group’s line-up never changed throughout their history: Murray Attaway was the guitar-strumming front-man singer, Jeff Walls the roots-rockin’, twang-slingin’ lead guit-box man, Rhett Crowe the high-NRG bass player, and John Poe the secret-weapon drummer, who also offered crucial vocal and songwriting support over the group’s run. Guadalcanal Diary (who took their name from a 1943 war memoir) had the arguable misfortune of being a guitar-based band from Georgia just as R.E.M. emerged from the college-rock ghetto into unexpected mass marketability, leading the record industry to seek out “similar” groups who could generate comparable buzz, along with jingling the coffers handsomely for the suits. Guad Di were one of the ones so lumped by the music magazines and marketing cabals of the era, even though their sound, lyrical interests, live approach, and overall musical aesthetic were significantly different from R.E.M. and any of the other Athens, Georgia bands then emerging. As each of their albums were issued, there was a general critical trend to compare/contrast it to whatever R.E.M. had most recently issued, and as R.E.M. got bigger and bigger over the ’80s, the music press tended to become increasingly dismissive of Guad Di. Unjustly and unfairly so, objectively speaking in hindsight. I suspect fatigue with that consistent “not quite R.E.M.” narrative got to them eventually, though the marriage of Walls and Crowe in 1988 and the birth of their daughter a year later also likely changed their perspective and priorities vis-à-vis touring and music-making. The group’s members intermittently engaged in a variety of musical pursuits (primarily regional) in the decades that followed; Walls died of pancreatic cancer in 2019, shutting the door on any future reunions. They left behind a fine catalog and a reputation for in-concert excellence, though, and there’s nothing wrong with spending a solid decade doing that.
When I First Heard Them: Would have been sometime in late 1984, likely on WHFS-FM, my go-to radio station of the day, soon after the release of their major-label debut album, Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man. (A 1983 EP on Atlanta’s influential indie/regional DB Records would have been the item that got Elektra to sign them in the post-R.E.M. contracting frenzy). I’m fairly certain the first song I heard would have been “Watusi Rodeo.” I’m also fairly certain that I would have read a lot of gushing prose in music magazines about them being the next R.E.M. I didn’t hear that, and I didn’t really care about having another R.E.M. anyway, but I loved the weirdness of that first single, and the album from which it sprang was superb, diverse, interesting, fun, and yet surprisingly dark on some planes, with the group’s attack seeming to involve laughing and raging across various emotional and spiritual abysses. I nabbed each of their subsequent albums happily and eagerly on release, along with Murray Attaway’s sole solo disc, 1993’s In Thrall. They’ve never, ever rolled off of my routine listening lists for very long over the years, enduring in my personal pantheon in ways that loads of other “next big thing” bands from the ’80s could never achieve.
Why I Love Them: The collection of songs that Guadalcanal Diary left behind is a fine one, covering a lot of territory, both in terms of sonic attack, and in terms of lyrical concerns. There are elements of the Paisley Underground, there’s roots-rock, there’s smart pop, there’s cowboy music, some heart-breaking ballads, some childhood chants turned into energetic rock songs, some hair-raising instrumentals, and some classic college rock radio-era hits. Their lyrics ranged from the silly (e.g. “Cattle Prod” and “I See Moe”) to the sad and sublime (e.g. “Michael Rockefeller” and “3AM”), and were often far richer or more impressionistic than most of what the radio was spewing in their time. But my affection for the group really moved up a next level after I caught them live for the first time, which was such an amazing experience that I went on to see them numerous times in the ensuring years in Athens and Atlanta, Georgia, and in Washington, DC. For the latter part of the ’80s, I’d have eagerly cited them (along with Butthole Surfers) as my unquestionable favorite live acts, to be seen and cheered anytime the opportunity presented itself. Onstage, Guad Di’s component personalities really popped, with Attaway as the stereotypical adenoidal/bespectacled geeky ’80s front-man, Walls a sort of stoic flannel-clad cowboy anchor who flicked out killer leads effortlessly, Crowe a perpetual motion machine linked in perfect lock-step with Poe’s crisply-slamming concussions, a rhythm section to die (or kill) for. I lived in Athens, GA in ’86-87, so I got to see a lot of artists in concert there who either in their time or retrospectively were judged as having made the best and most influential music of their era. But I’ll say this with certainty: Guadalcanal Diary mopped them all of the stage, and some of my finest ever concert memories are of working up a true frothy lather in the the thrall of their musical ministrations.
#10. “Always Saturday,” from Flip-Flop (1989)
#9. “Heathen Rage,” from Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man (1984)
#8. “Little Birds,” from 2X4 (1987)
#7. “Trail of Tears,” from Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man (1984)
#6. “Please Stop Me,” from Jamboree (1986)
#5. “Fire from Heaven,” from Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man (1984)
#4. “Litany (Life Goes On),” from 2X4 (1987)
#3. “Gilbert Takes the Wheel,” from Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man (1984)
1. Today is my wife Marcia’s birthday. And today is also my daughter Katelin’s birthday. As a husband and a dad, that commonality has certainly made birthday planning easy for me over the years on one level, even if it took a little extra effort on another level to make sure that both of them were made to feel personally and particularly special on their shared magical day. That dual birthday experience has always made it an extended holiday of sorts around our house, worthy of celebrations that have often gone well beyond the natal day itself. And, any personal biases set aside, I’m all in favor of their birthday being declared a National Holiday, as it is in many countries around the world. Marcia wrote about the legitimate reasons for that on her own website, here. (Short summary: They were born on International Women’s Day). It’s more than fitting that two of the most formidable women in my life celebrate their entries into this our mortal coil on the very same day that much of the globe acknowledges the achievements, accomplishments and arduous ongoing efforts of women to advance their own causes, the causes of their global sistren, and the well-being of the communities in which they live, play, love and work. Just perfect, on so many fronts! So happy birthday to my beloveds, both of whom I adore more than I can express.
2. There are a lot of native Minnesotans (like Marcia) who live in our neighborhood, sensibly electing to spend all or part of their retirement years in climes balmier than those found in the North Star State. One of our good friends organized a “Minnesota Fest” this week, with three days of hiking and three communal dinners. There was no lutefisk or lefse served, alas, (or actually, phew!), but we did do some classic Minnesota Hotdishes. And we had cake on Wednesday night for Marcia and another friend with a birthday this week, as per normal protocol to extend the birthday celebrations as broadly as possible. I was asked by our host, along with another off-trail warrior, to come up with and guide a pair of signature hikes for the group, and was happy to do so. If you don’t connect with me on Facebook (my only social media outlet, somewhat begrudgingly, but useful for book marketing and such), I should note that I generally post all of my hiking reports there, rather than here. But for those who only interact with me here, I offer the photo logs of those two hikes below; click the images to visit the full galleries. I do enjoy hiking on my own, and I do it often, but there’s an extra joy to be had in experiencing these glories with friends.
Note: For an index of all articles in all three Favorite Songs series, click here, then scroll down.
Who They Were: Brothers Rob (bass) and John (drums) Wright formed NoMeansNo in their hometown of Victoria, British Columbia, in 1979. The pair performed and made their earliest recordings as a live and studio duo, both singing, John adding occasional keyboards, Rob intermittent guitar, both deploying their formidable technical chops to fill aural space that normally takes at least trio or quartet configurations to pull off. The pair of brothers, though older and arguably technically more talented and musically ambitious than many of their peers, fell into the emergent West Coast Hardcore scene, touring with D.O.A. and others across Canada, the United States, and eventually into Europe. Guitarist-vocalist Andy Kerr joined the band in 1984, around the time that NoMeansNo signed with Jello Biafra’s incredibly influential label, Alternative Tentacles. The trio formed a Ramones-inspired, hockey-themed alter ego band called The Hanson Brothers soon after Kerr joined; John Wright was front-man for that ensemble, with a variety of drummers filling his normal stool over the years. They would occasionally tour Canada in one direction as NoMeansNo, then return home, touring as The Hanson Brothers. Kerr departed NoMeansNo in 1991. Following one album in their duo format, the Wrights added guitarist Tom Holliston and second drummer Ken Kempster in 1993; Kempster lasted for two years and one album, after which the group returned to their drum-bass-guitar format until the band was put to bed around 2016. Rob Wright is now retired from music-making, John Wright has a new band (Dead Bob), and Tom Holliston continues to perform in a variety of solo and group endeavors. I just finished a superb, recently-published, rock bio about the group called NoMeansNo: From Obscurity to Oblivion: An Oral History, by Jason Lamb, which featured in-depth interviews with all of the group’s member and a vast who’s who of artists who were inspired or touched by them over their long and influential career. Recommended reading!
When I First Heard Them: In 1991, via their collaborative album with Jello Biafra, The Sky Is Falling and I Want My Mommy. Following the original dissolution of Biafra’s most-famous band, Dead Kennedys, Jello issued several albums backed by other bands, most of them associated with Alternative Tentacles. While The Sky Is Falling was not my favorite in that series (that would be 1989’s Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors, with D.O.A.), the instrumental approaches and songwriting of NoMeansNo definitely caught my attention, and I nabbed their first Alternative Tentacles album, 1986’s Sex Mad, soon thereafter. It was quite an impressive musical beast, and I stayed abreast of the group’s activities in the years that followed, while also collecting their earlier works. I never got to see them live, alas.
Why I Love Them: Genre labels can certainly be helpful in putting different styles of music into buckets for convenient sorting and release, though they often miss the mark as atypical examples of artists get tagged with labels that don’t really fit. In the UK, you had groups like The Damned (covered in the prior installment of this series) or The Stranglers (who will be covered soon) getting tagged as punk, though they arguably never really were. In the States, “hardcore” was similarly applied to groups releasing music on various labels, or touring with representative artists, though they were not really aligned with musical idioms and lyrical interests typically beating in the heart of that movement. NoMeansNo (along with, say, Minutemen, Alice Donut, and others) were among those groups that got tagged as hardcore, but weren’t, really. Their technical skills were often far beyond the reach of their peers, and their influences and techniques quite different as well; John Wright was a jazz-trained drummer who played with hardcore energy and strength using a traditional grip, Rob Wright turned his bass guitar into a lead instrument, Kerr and Holliston offered impressionist blurs atop the rumbling Wright rhythms. All members of the group sang, though Rob’s basso bellow is the most typical word-based sound in the mix, and he was an exceptional lyricist to boot. NoMeansNo also eschewed the common “fight the power” and “down with the man” and “unity (for those we like)” and “my edge is straight” and “here comes the break” themes that typically defined hardcore lyrics, opting instead for super-smart and often-funny tales anchored more in detailed personal narratives than in vague, sweeping, simple sentiments. Their sense of humor crossed into their marketing approaches, too, with Kerr never actually being credited under his real name (his parts would be attributed to “No one particular” or “Someone, but we’re not sure whom,” among others over his tenure with the group), and their media materials rarely, if ever, actually depicted the band in its entirety. NoMeansNo were also delightful interpretive artist of songs composed by others; I include their a cappella version of a Dead Kennedy’s song and their bonus lyrics version of a Miles Davis song in my top ten list below, to give a sense of the creativity and perversity of their cover songs. Their ferocious energy and technical skills made NoMeansNo about the closest thing possible to an equal merger of punk and prog, which is a deeply appealing combo platter to me, and they’ve long been seen as “musician’s musicians,” with reputations and regard that typically transcended the specific commercial rewards gleaned by touring musicians. I’m also pleased to learn from reading their recent bio that they both seem to be thoughtful and generous guys, too. It’s pleasant, but not always expected, to actually want to like the artists who make the art that moves us.
#10. “Forward to Death,” from Virus 100 (Various Artists compilation, 1992)
#9. “Life-Like,” from Dance of the Headless Bourgeoisie (1998)
#8. “I Can’t Stop Talking,” from Dance of the Headless Bourgeoisie (1998)
#7. “Bitch’s Brew,” from One (2000)
#6. “Give Me the Push,” from Dance of the Headless Bourgeoisie (1998)
#5. “Rags and Bones,” from Wrong (1989)
#4. “I See A Mansion in the Sky,” from All Roads Lead to Ausfahrt (2006)
#3. “The Tower,” from Wrong (1989)
#2. “Heaven is the Dust Beneath My Shoes,” from All Roads Lead to Ausfahrt (2006)
#1. “The River,” from Why Do They Call Me Mr. Happy? (1993) and “In The Fishtank 1” EP (1996)
Note: For an index of all articles in all three Favorite Songs series, click here, then scroll down.
Who They Are: A long-running group who emerged from the nascent English punk scene, usually cited by music historians as having issued the very first UK punk single, “New Rose”/”Help!” (yes, a Beatles cover) in October 1976. The founding quartet of Dave Vanian (vocals), Captain Sensible (bass), Brian James (guitar), and Rat Scabies (drums) issued two largely punk-centric albums, Damned Damned Damned and Music For Pleasure (both in 1977, the second featuring Lu Edmonds on second guitar and production by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason) before primary-songwriter James departed. Following a brief hiatus, the group re-convened with Captain Sensible switching to guitar and Algy Ward (ex-Saints, future-Tank) on bass; this quartet issued Machine Gun Etiquette (1979), which found the group significantly expanding their sonic pallet to include hard rock, pop, psychedelic and Gothic elements (though “Gothic” hadn’t really emerged as a term for such quite yet). 1980’s The Black Album found Paul Gray replacing Ward on bass; this quartet also issued Strawberries in 1982 (with Roman Jugg on keyboards), and I count it as the best of their historic line-ups. Captain Sensible left The Damned in 1984; Jugg switched to guitar, and Bryn Merrick joined on bass. This line-up issued two albums, and achieved their greatest chart success in England with their non-album single, “Eloise,” a cover of a 1968 hit by Barry Ryan. Following a period of intermittent inactivity and various “Farewell Shows” featuring returns by Captain Sensible and Brian James through the late ’80s and early ’90s, a new incarnation of The Damned emerged around the Vanian-Sensible axis, along with keyboardist Monty Oxymoron. They have issued four albums and various EPs and singles since that time. Paul Grey rejoined on bass in 2017 (Vanian’s wife, Patricia Morrison, ex-Gun Club and Sisters of Mercy, had filled that role for nearly a decade, followed by Stu West), and Rat Scabies returned to his drum stool in 2023, just after their excellent most recent album, Darkedelic, was released, and after the original quartet had played a series of reunion shows.
When I First Heard Them: I heard of The Damned long before I actually heard The Damned, since the critical telling of the tale of English punk almost always referenced the “New Rose” single, but generally with a consensus that “Yeah, they got there first, but The Clash and The Sex Pistols were a whole lot better,” leaving me more conceptually interested in that pair than I was in the creators of “New Rose.” I finally came back to explore The Damned only through the back-door of Captain Sensible’s solo work, which was popular in the clubs I frequented in the early ’80s, first through his cover (with The Softies) of the oft-interpreted “Jet Boy, Jet Girl” (a.k.a. “Ça plane pour moi” in its original form), and then through his amusing faux-disco single “Wot.” Some friends at the Naval Academy had some Damned records that I sampled or taped at the time, but the first one I bought myself was 1987’s compilation, The Light at the End of the Tunnel. I loved that two-disc set and went back to nab all of their prior work, just as the group went into its longest period of churn and hiatus. I was happy when the Vanian-Sensible incarnation re-emerged, and I saw them live with Patricia Morrison on bass in the late ’90s. That show was superb, and I’ve eagerly followed along with their ongoing story in the decades since. While some of the latter-day albums are just okay, in a fair and objective assessment, the return of Paul Gray really bumped things up a notch, and their last two long players have been outstanding, ranking high in the overall pantheon of their expansive catalog.
Why I Love Them: Unlike most of their early UK punk colleagues, The Damned weren’t overtly sour in their world-view and politics, and from the git-go, their music was a bit more fun than anything else emergent from that scene. Dave Vanian has an extraordinary voice, a deeply-appealing baritone that lends itself to a variety of styles, and his intonation most certainly fits the mold (and perhaps inspired the mold’s form) of the great classic Goth singers who followed. While he began as the group’s bassist, Captain Sensible found his true calling as an ace six-string slinger and occasional second lead vocalist, and I love his work on both fronts. The pair and their various colleagues are fine songwriters, with a gift for catchy melodies, interesting and amusing lyrics, and a palpable, embraceable zest for music-making that routinely lends itself to ear-worms and toe-tapping and head-bobbing. The group’s back-story is also a fascinating one, as their personalities are distinctive and widely-divergent, and they’ve often been their own worst enemies, blowing up just as things were getting good for them. The 2015 film The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead is one of the best rock documentaries I’ve ever seen, a fascinating and comprehensive look at their history to date, funny and surprisingly poignant in equal measure. And on the literary front, I also highly commend Christopher Dawes’ 2005 book, Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail, which is about precisely what its title says, a truly quirky, fascinating and (again) poignant road-buddy story anchored in arcane and esoteric historical conspiracy theories. I generally find the various five-piece incarnations of the group to be the most enjoyable, as their sound benefits from the presence of strong keyboard play. I’m also very pleased their latest album is among their best, and with the return of Rat (alongside Vanian, Sensible, Gray, and Oxymoron), I’m highly optimistic for what the next phase brings. Of course, given their history, that probably means that everything is about to go south, immediately and imminently, but therein lies the fun and thrill of being a long-term Damned fan, I guess.
#10. “Manipulator,” from “The Rockfield Files” EP (2020)
#9. “Problem Child,” from Music For Pleasure (1977)
#8. “Wait For the Blackout,” from The Black Album (1980)
#7. “New Rose,” from “New Rose”/”Help!” single (1976) and Damned Damned Damned(1977)
#6. “Follow Me,” from Darkedelic (2023)
#5. “Under the Floor Again,” from Strawberries (1982)
#4. “Smash It Up (Parts 1 and 2),” from Machine Gun Etiquette (1979)
#3. “Roderick,” from Darkedelic (2023)
#2. “I Just Can’t Be Happy Today,” from Machine Gun Etiquette (1979)
Note: For an index of all articles in all three Favorite Songs series, click here, then scroll down.
Who They Were: A hugely influential German band whose members, together and with others, pioneered the (questionably-named) “Krautrock” genre, that touched and shaped countless other musical movements of the past 50 years. The core members throughout the group’s history were Irmin Schmidt (keyboards), Jaki Liebezeit (drums), Holger Czukay (bass/electronics), and Michael Karoli (guitar). In the group’s earliest incarnations following their 1968 formation, Americans David C. Johnson (reeds/electronics) and Malcolm Mooney (vocals) supplemented the quartet; Johnson was gone within a year, and Mooney followed him out in 1970. CAN then recruited Japanese busker Kenji “Damo” Suzuki to handle vocals; he fronted the group through what’s generally considered to be their era of greatest achievement. (Damo died a couple of weeks ago, and I offered a more detailed telling of his story via an obituary, here). Following the mercurial Suzuki’s departure in 1973, CAN recruited Traffic’s Rosko Gee (bass) and Rebop Kwaku Baah (percussion), with Czukay shifting into electronics and production roles before drifting away from the group. The remaining members went their separate ways in 1979, with one brief reunion and a new album in the late 1980s featuring the return of Malcolm Mooney on vocals. All of the members of CAN continued making influential music with a wide variety of collaborators (often including each other), mostly until their deaths; Schmidt, Gee, and Mooney are now the only members still living.
When I First Heard Them: Gosh, this one is hard for me to answer. I have been aware of CAN since the late ’70s, in large part because they were frequently name-dropped or referenced in interviews or reviews by artists I liked, or had “rock family tree” connections to same (e.g. Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Hawkwind, etc.). I know that the first song I heard by them was “Oh Yeah,” and I know that I heard it on a compilation album or a mix tape, because I remember how it jumped out from matrix of a bunch of other stuff that didn’t excite me, but I can’t find any compilation album or label sampler that seems to fit my memory, nor can I think of who would have given me a mix tape featuring that song. I know the first album I owned by them was the Cannibalism compilation, which came out in 1978. I will guess that I bought it in either 1981 or 1982 in Jacksonville, North Carolina, just before I headed off to the Naval Academy. I picked up a couple of the “wrong” CAN albums from cut-out bins while in Annapolis, featuring the latter-day, post-Damo line-ups. My interest in the group was bumped over the years by The Fall‘s tribute to CAN’s singer (“I Am Damo Suzuki,“) by Czukay’s ongoing collaborations with a variety of interesting artists (e.g. Jah Wobble, The Edge, Brian Eno, etc.), and by my print review of the 1997 remix album Sacrilege, which finally drove me to acquire the full catalog, and then to nab various reissues and compilations and live and “lost tape” collections that have emerged over the past quarter-century.
Why I Love Them: CAN’s music had one creative foot firmly planted in highly technical and theoretical musical precepts; Schmidt and Czukay were both former students of Karlheinz Stockhausen, often dubbed “The Father of Electronic Music” for his aleatory techniques and serial compositions performed on and by non-traditional instruments. But the group’s other creative foot was restless and loved to dance, to a variety of rhythms from a variety of cultures, and it dragged the group in myriad spirals of interest around a central axis anchored by Liebezeit’s relentless and metronomic “motorik” drumming and Czukay’s dubby bass. Having read about CAN for a long time before I actually heard them, I expected their music to be chilly and Teutonic, like Kraftwerk, or Cluster. But it rarely was, in part because the group could establish some stone-cold masterful riffs and jam improvised leads atop them for ages, in part because Mooney’s passionate blues/soul-based performances and Suzuki’s ethereal scat-styled word soup were decidedly not stereotypically German-flavored. The group’s latter-day Rosko/Rebop era found them further exploring a wide variety of global rhythms and textures, made far weirder than most “world music” by Czukay’s use of shortwave radios and oscillators and other sound-shaping non-instruments atop Karoli and Schmidt’s more traditional soloist’s instruments. While their music is almost always and instantaneously recognizable as CAN, their music also rarely sounds the same or hews to common tones and traits; they could do what they did, and the common magic of their creative approaches made it theirs, regardless of what it actually sounded like. There are some really influential musical artists who I appreciate, but don’t really care to listen to that often. Then there are other artists who just make pleasing music of no particular lasting import who I love to listen to, regularly. CAN are one of a small number of groups in my personal collection who were important and influential enough to appeal to me intellectually, but were also accessible and engaging enough to make me grin and groove bodily, when I just wanted some rhythm and melody in my life spaces. That’s a sweet spot to sit, for sure.
#10. “Below This Level (Patient’s Song),” from Rite Time (1989)
#9. “Father Cannot Yell,” from Monster Movie (1969)
#8. “Vitamin C,” from Ege Bamyasi (1972)
#7. “Spoon,” from Ege Bamyasi (1972)
#6. “Don’t Say No,” from Saw Delight (1977)
#5. “Yoo Doo Right,” from Monster Movie (1969)
#4. “Oh Yeah,” from Tago Mago (1971)
#3. “Midnight Sky,” from The Lost Tapes (recorded 1969, released 2012)
J. ERIC SMITH 