1793. MX-80 Sound: Out of the Tunnel
1794. Mystics: 16 Golden Classics
1795. Johnny Nash: I Can See Clearly Now
1796. Nasty Joe: Hit 'Em With Your Thing
1797. The Fabulous Fats Navarro, Volume 1
1798. The Fabulous Fats Navarro, Volume 2
1799. Necros: Tangled Up
1800. Ricky Nelson: Legendary Masters
1801. Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band: Garden Party
1802. The Very Best of Sandy Nelson
1803. The Best of Willie Nelson
1804. Willie Nelson: Red Headed Stranger
1805. Willie Nelson: Stardust
1806. Willie Nelson: His Very Best
1807. Nervous Eaters: Hot Steel and Acid
1808. Robbie Nevil: C'Est la Vie
Mixworthy: "I Can See Clearly Now," #1795; "Lonesome Town," #1800.
Before Fat Joe and Ugly Kid Joe, there was Nasty Joe--a spectacularly unnasty-look-
ing white guy out of Quebec who'd look right at home in N'Sync. At least I assume the
white guy's Joe; he's the focal point of the cover shot, and his black and Hispanic
bandmates are pointing at him, although I swear the guy to the left of Joe has his
hand very clearly positioned to look like a revolver, which if you could see Joe,
and could see the look of pained humiliation on the bandmate's face, makes perfect
sense. (You'll have to either picture all of this yourself or seek out the album;
there will be no scan forthcoming.) No clue from the lyric sheet as to what "thing"
Joe's threatening to hit them with. The follow-up to Terror Squad's "Lean Back" came
on the radio while my class was doing art the other day, and when I asked a couple of
girls at the back if it was Fat Joe, they seemed astounded by my supernatural powers
of perception. "How did you know?!" "Uh...because it sounds exactly like 'Lean Back'?"
Welcome to the ghost of Top 40 radio, girls.
________________________________________________________________________________
1809. New Edition
1810. New Edition: Christmas All Over the World
1811. New Edition: Under the Blue Moon
1812. The World of the New Faces: From the Saturday Crowd
1813. New Kids on the Block: Hangin' Tough
1814. New Order: Movement
1815. New Order: "Temptation" 12-inch
1816. New Order: Power, Corruption & Lies
1817. New Order: Brotherhood
1818. New Order: Substance
1819. New Order: "Fine Time" 12-inch
1820. New York Dolls
1821. New York Dolls: In Too Much, Too Soon
1822. New York Dolls: Dolls Live: Dallas '74
1823. The Piano Artistry of Phineas Newborn, Jr.
1824. Mickey Newbury: I Came to Hear the Music
Mixworthy: "Dreams Never End," #1814; "All Day Long," #1817; "Personality Crisis,"
"Looking for a Kiss," "Trash," and "Subway Train," #1820; "Who Are the Mystery Girls?"
and "Human Being," #1821. There's a song from Power, Corruption & Lies I remember
liking, but I'm too lazy right now to check which one; "Bizarre Love Triangle" always
sounds good in the context of Married to the Mob, otherwise I'm a little tired of it.
Chronic substance abuse, abject co-dependency, the farthest reaches of human deviancy--
but enough about New Edition, I'd rather talk about the New York Dolls. (Hands up if
you saw that one coming a mile away.) I was definitely aware of them in 1973, and have
a dim memory of seeing the first album on sale at the record store that used to be in
Brampton's Shopper's World, but because they got no AM airplay, they were just a curi-
osity from some world that didn't make much sense to me at 12. (Much like a couple of
other strange encounters I carry with me from the same time: some band on local cable
flailing around wildly while singing about staining the carpet, and Rainer Schwartz,
a DJ on Toronto's CHUM-FM through the '70s, playing "Golden Years" on a show he must
have hosted on TVO.) Finding their first album as an import during my great punk-rock
plunge in 1979 or (more likely) 1980 had as much impact on me as anything between Neil
Young and Hüsker Dü. I can't say for sure what it was that prompted me to buy it--
possibly Christgau, though more likely it was the Sex Pistols' "New York," or maybe I
saw it cited in some interview I read at the time. Except for "Private World" (which
in context works fine), I loved the album from start to finish almost immediately, and
the fact that it was something I discovered on my own, ahead of my friend Peter who got
me going on punk in the first place, gave it an extra layer of secret-society appeal.
In Too Much, Too Soon wasn't as overwhelming as a whole, but the covers were funny,
"Mystery Girls" was funnier still, and "Human Being" was the greatest sign-off ever.
Unlike some other people who define that time for me like the Cramps or Joy Division,
the Dolls sound more or less as good today as they did then. Pop historians that they
were (which I think means some combination of Johansen, Thunders, and Sylvain, although
maybe the other two shaped the group's aesthetic more than I realize), both albums are
marked by a perfect mix of girl-group savvy, heavy-metal whomp, and Bo Diddley swagger,
so much so that the context in which they first captured my imagination--their privi-
leged place in the punk-rock chain of-being--hardly matters anymore. The Dolls filtered
their genius for pop music through a very different sensibility than Led Zeppelin's,
but both bands had an uncanny ability to stay nimble at a time and within genres where
many turned leaden. My friend Tim was lucky enough to see them live circa 1972 at To-
ronto's Victory Burlesque Theatre, with a very glammy Rush opening--wow. The bootleg
listed above features possibly the most tasteless album covers in my collection: a
bleached-out shot of Johansen in pillbox hat, sitting beside JFK in the assassination
limo. I'm ashamed to say I love knowing that it's there...I actually heard New Kids on
the Block on the radio this afternoon; one of the dance or hip-hop DJs on the station
where I do a show myself was playing "The Right Stuff" (leading into "Kiss"). If you're
mixing or mashing or pumping or dropping, you can get away with that, even on college
radio. If I go on next Sunday morning and play the same song, though, I guarantee some
listener will scream bloody murder...Te salute to the inspiration for this project;
I blame David Bowie, who sucks the life out of everything he goes near.
________________________________________________________________________________
1825. Colin Newman: A-Z
1826. Colin Newman: Provisionally Titled
1827. Colin Newman: Commercial Suicide
1828. Joe Newman/Sir Charles Thompson: Jazz Basie Style
1829. Randy Newman: Sail Away
1830. Randy Newman: Good Old Boys
1831. Olivia Newton-John: Olivia's Greatest Hits Vol. 2
1832. The Best of Wayne Newton
1833. Herbie Nichols Trio
1834. Nico: Chelsea Girl
1835. Nikki and the Corvettes
1836. Maxine Nightingale: Right Back Where We Started From
1837. Harry Nilsson: Nilsson Sings Newman
1838. Harry Nilsson: Nilsson Schmilsson
1839. The 999 Singles Album
1840. 999: The Biggest Prize in Sport
1841. 1910 Fruitgum Co.: Goody Goody Gumdrops
Mixworthy: "Danke Schoen," #1832; "These Days" and "I'll Keep It With Mine," #1834;
"Right Back Where We Started From," #1836; "Without You" and "Coconut," #1837. I'd
definitely list the 1910 Fruitgum Co.'s "Simon Says"; "Goody Goody Gumdrops," I'm not
so sure.
There were a couple of years where I was playing the first side of Colin Newman's A-Z
fairly regularly. Nothing like Wire--and seeing as I couldn't really describe Wire if
pressed, I'm not sure that "nothing like Wire" means a whole lot. Jonathan Demme used
"Alone" in Silence of the Lambs...I bought Sail Away in high school, and it remained
my only Randy Newman album for ages, till I added Good Old Boys a couple of years ago.
I've since downloaded his first two albums, and now know for sure what I probably al-
ready knew 25 years ago when I was trying hard to connect with Sail Away: not really
for me. I do love reading interviews with Randy Newman, though--his appraisal of U2's
Rattle & Hum remains one of the funniest things I've ever read from a pop musician:
"Black people love U2!"...A couple of miraculous curios from K-Billy's "Super Sounds
of the '70s" vaults: "Right Back Where We Started From" and "Coconut." The first one
sounded like disco, felt like disco, was likely marketed as disco, and is today remem-
bered as disco, but if you take one look at Maxine Nightingale on #1836's cover, she
may as well be Tracy Chapman or Phoebe Snow--which, if memory serves, is more in keep-
ing with what the rest of the album sounds like. "Coconut," meanwhile, ranks ahead of
"D'yer Maker," "Montego Bay," the Guess Who's "Follow Your Daughter Home," and--bleah--
"Hotel California" as my favourite white-guy-affects-a-Caribbean-accent song of the
'70s. Nilsson Schmilsson's blurry cover shot of Harry in his housecoat is high art
of a sort--he put the lime in the coconut, he drank it all up, then he drank it all
up a second and third and twelfth time, and now it's tomorrow afternoon and he's
contemplating if that was such a good idea.
________________________________________________________________________________
1842. Richard Nixon: Official Inaugural Album
1843. No Trend: "A Dozen Dead Roses"
1844. Nocera: Over the Rainbow
1845. Nocera: "Summertime Summertime" 12-inch
1846. Norda: West Over Seas
1847. Nu Shooz: Poolside
1848. Nu Shooz: "I Can't Wait" 12-inch
1849. Nu Shooz: Told U So
1850. Nu Shooz: "Should I Say Yes?" 12-inch
1851. Ted Nugent: Weekend Warriors
1852. Gary Numan & Tubeway Army: Replicas
1853. Nutmegs: Greatest Hits
1854. N.W.A.: Straight Outta Compton
1855. Billy Ocean: "Mystery Lady" 12-inch
1856. Phil Ochs: Rehearsals for Retirement
1857. Sinéad O'Connor: The Lion and the Cobra
1858. Sinéad O'Connor: I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got
Mixworthy: "Should I Say Yes?" #1849; "Are 'Friends' Electric?" #1852; "Story Un-
told," #1853; "____ tha Police" and "Compton's in the House," #1854; "Pretty Smart
on My Part," #1856; "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "Nothing Compares 2 U," #1858.
The No Trend LP was the first I reviewed for Nerve. It was completely wretched, and
is now coming up on its 20th year of undisturbed hibernation. Weekend Warriors was a
gift from my parents sometime towards the end of high school, a practice that was dis-
continued not long after when we agreed that records should be removed from the fall-
back gift-giving list--it's been inactive even longer. (A Blues Brothers album from
before the policy-change was lost to the ether somewhere along the way.) That makes
almost half a century of collective downtime between two albums; if I were to throw
either one on the turntable right now, I'm not sure it would even remember how to
rotate...I bought the Nixon LP in New York, along with a box of the Frost interviews
that I'll list later. The clerk who rang them up was great--I got an impromptu Nixon
impression as part of the deal...I always play Phil Och's high-velocity "Pretty Smart
on My Part" for my students on his birthday. Rehearsals is the only music of his I
know, and normally my "Today in History" readings don't veer so far into the margins
of pop history (by which I mean Frankie Lymon I consider famous enough for commemora-
tion, Phil Ochs no). But because I love the song so much, and probably because there's
nothing else of great import on Och's birthday, I squeeze him in. When "Pretty Smart"
gets to the part where he ties some woman up in leather and whips her, I do the same
thing every year--pretend to be confused as I cut the volume out for two seconds, then
mutter "Right..." and turn it back up...I didn't hear a word about Sinead O'Connor dur-
ing all the recent round-the-clock Pope coverage. Didn't hear a word about Gary Numan,
Billy Ocean, or N.W.A., either--strange.
________________________________________________________________________________
1859. Odetta at Carnegie Hall
1860. Oh-OK: Furthermore What
1861. Ohio Players: Honey
1862. Ohio Players: Back
1863. O'Jays: Backstabbers
1864. O'Jays Meet the Moments
1865. O'Jays: Travelin' at the Speed of Thought
1866. The O'Jays Greatest Hits
1867. Old and New Dreams
1868. Mike Oldfield: Tubular Bells
1869. 100 Proof Aged in Soul: Somebody's Been Sleeping in My Bed
1870. Alexander O'Neal: Hearsay
1871. Alexander O'Neal: "Aphrodisia" 12-inch
1872. 100 Flowers: 21st Guessing
1873. Only Ones: Special View
1874. Only Ones: Baby's Got a Gun
Mixworthy: "Use Ta Be My Girl," #1866; "Another Girl, Another Planet," #1873. The
O'Jays best-of has the three-and-a-half minute single of "I Love Music," and that's
one instance where even leadfooted me knows that the scope and majesty of the song
only come through on the full-length dance version found on Philadelphia Classics,
which I'll get to later in compilations. "Backstabbers" is OK--I don't think it's
even remotely as good as the Undisputed Truth's "Smiling Faces Sometimes."
Spent: I came out of a two-year immersion in '70s music for I Wanna Be Sedated lik-
ing a lot of my favourites from the era more than ever, but there were casualties,
too, and I guess "Love Rollercoaster"'s (#1861) one of them--it and Wild Cherry just
make me think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers now.
I don't remember much about the Oh-OK record, the early-80s Georgia band with Michael
Stipe's sister ("Michael Stipe's Sister" would have been a good name for some wiseass
Forced Exposure band), but I'll give it another listen and see if I missed anything...
It's been my experience that "Another Girl, Another Planet" is one of pop music's most
dependable benchmarks; take any random group of listeners, and, provided they've all
heard the song, I bet it's the one thing everybody has great affection for...I really
like the beginning (Excorcist theme) and end ("plus tubular bells!") of #1855's first
side, but there's another 20 minutes between Point A and Point B I don't remember, and
I likely never played the flip side a second time. I think there may be a weird back-
story attached to Mike Oldfield--something to the effect that he made enough money
from Tubular Bells that he's spent the last 30 years drinking tea and puttering
around in his garden. I'll have to mosey on over to the 'Tron site to confirm.