STACK Magazine December Issue 122

115 / 116

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
JO JO ZEP &
the falcons
Screaming Targets
You gotta keep a footin’ a
footin’ a runnin’ a hidin’ a
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
visit
DID YOU KNOW? US Producer T Bone Burnett has just released The New Basement Tapes, adding new music to unearthed Dylan lyrics.
MUSIC
S ee Bob take out the trash.
Or is he bringing it all back
home?
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
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.
Columbia/Sony
24 DECEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi
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.
Photo cretit Elliot Landy