STACK #122 Dec 2015

MUSIC

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DID YOU KNOW? US Producer T Bone Burnett has just released The New Basement Tapes , adding new music to unearthed Dylan lyrics.

KISS Love Gun If you feel kinda queasy about a boofy geezer in demon makeup and

pendulous tinfoil codpiece hanging outside a schoolyard singing Christine Sixteen , wait till you hear the Gene Simmons demo that didn’t make Kiss’s sixth studio album in 1977. Paul Stanley’s high-octane bawl of “You pulled the trigger of maaaah love gun!” is pure Wildean sophistication by comparison, but hey, that’s why every small boy loved Kiss back in the age of enlightenment. Among other bonus disc treasures are a Simmons radio interview, previously unreleased live tracks, and a fabulous “teaching demo” of the title track in which Stanley talks his brothers in greasepaint through the chords. “When you write songs that are great, you know it,” he reveals in a booklet packed with great pics, an early cover sketch, a track-by-track from all four members and more. Honestly, there’s so much to love about this band it’s barely legal. Universal Music what now? Joe Camilleri’s lyrics tended to serve feel rather than meaning in his Jo Jo Zep days, but when the band felt as good as the Falcons, that was enough to make Hit & Run and Shape I’m In bona fide chartbusters. This 2-CD stocktake of the Melbourne band’s hard-working heyday rightly emphasises a raucous live attack via Chuck Berry, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson and copious originals. But the main event remains their sole hit LP of ‘79: a strange, dramatic r’n’b-cum-ska beast that borrowed from UK pub rocker Mickey Jupp and a youngster named Paul Kelly, but mainly documented Camilleri’s combustible chemistry with guitarists Tony Faehse and Jeff Burstin (later to join him in The Black Sorrows). The 2003 reunion outtakes are remarkably seamless, and another great RAM article by Jen Jewel Brown completes the archival gravity of a weighty 37-track sprawl. Warner • The Go-Betweens G Stands for Go-Betweens • Captain Beefheart Sun Zoom Spark Coming Soon JO JO ZEP & the falcons Screaming Targets You gotta keep a footin’ a footin’ a runnin’ a hidin’ a

Photo cretit Elliot Landy

This month Michael Dwyer is at Big Pink for the ‘Big Bang of alt. country’ with Dylan and friends, hangs with boofy geezers in demon makeup, and flies again with the Falcons.

S ee Bob take out the trash. Or is he bringing it all back home?

album of ‘75 that barely scratched the surface. What we have here, at last, are all 138 takes that could be salvaged: the missing link between the psychedelic spirals of Blonde on Blonde and the far stranger (at the time) quasi-biblical and country flavours of John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline . It’s not all pretty. Some tunes howl like drunken sailors. The odd string could use a tuning. But as Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and John Lee Hooker slowly give way to Tiny Montgomery , Million Dollar Bash and Quinn the Eskimo , you sense these guys might be on to something. There’s r’n’b and rock’n’roll, church songs and brothel songs, and Blowin’ In the Wind and It Ain’t Me Babe and She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain and The Flight of the Bumblebee . And as always on Planet Bob, a well of mystery that just won’t run dry.

It’s the cheeky last of several hundred photographs from the dark year of ‘67, spread over two hardback books in the grand revelation of this historic six-disc set. The lavish coffee table slipcase job is only apt for what gobsmacked essayist Sid Griffin calls “the Big Bang of the musical genre we now call alt. country.” The progressive pop world’s trash, see, was Bobby Z’s treasure that year: arcane tunes and feels of older musical traditions retrieved over weeks of jamming with a band soon to be called The Band in an astonishing act of underground resistance to Sgt. Pepper’s summer of love. The story has been oft told. The motorcycle accident, the vanishing act. The not-so-secret retreat in upstate NewYork. The swathe of old covers and new Dylan tunes caught on Garth Hudson’s reel-to-reel recorder; the leaked bootlegs. The official double

Columbia/Sony

DECEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.com.au/music

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