Nothin's Worryin' Me


2564. James Talley: Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got a Lot of Love 2565. James Talley: Tryin' Like the Devil 2566. James Talley: Ain't It Somethin' 2567. Tashan: Chasin' a Dream 2568. Art Tatum/James P. Johnson: Masterpieces Volume II/James P. Johnson Plays Fats Waller 2569. Art Tatum: Solo Piano 2570. Art Tatum: Solo Masterpieces Vol. 6 2571. Art Tatum: Solo Masterpieces Vol. 9 2572. Art Tatum: Solo Masterpieces Vol. 10 2573. The Essential Art Tatum 2574. The Best of Tavares 2575. Tavares: Future Bound 2576. Alex Taylor: Dinnertime 2577. Cecil Taylor: Unit Structures 2578. Cecil Taylor: Live in the Black Forest 2579. James Taylor: Sweet Baby James 2580. James Taylor: Mud Slide Slim 2581. James Taylor: Greatest Hits Mixworthy: "More Than a Woman," #2575; "Fire and Rain," #2579. I already listed "More Than a Woman" from Saturday Night Fever, not realizing I had it on a Tavares album proper. I'll delete the earlier listing...I tried for many years to get a vinyl copy of James Taylor's Apple debut. I think the closest I ever got was a badly worn and overpriced copy at the store Jonathan Lipson used to operate on Yonge St., the Incredible Record and Book Store. (I think that was his name, and I think that was the name of his shop--I'm trying a number of searches on Google and not having any luck.) It was a dreadful place that managed to get local media cover- age and maintain a customer base because Lipson had a colourful biography--according to the one page reference I did find (where he's unnamed), he used to be the Grateful Dead's gardener. (Petunias, tulips, daffodils, that kind of thing.) Meanwhile, the pricing system went something like this: abused records went for seven or eight dol- lars, anything in good shape that no one would ever conceivably want started at 10 or 12, and if it was something in good shape that was also desirable, forget it--$20, $25 and upwards. Among all the used stores in the city I ever walked into during the '80s heyday, it may have been the only one where I'm pretty sure I never bought a single record. Really, more than his biography, I think it was location that kept him in business--Yonge St. was still kind of touristy in those days, and I bet he sold a lot of criminally overpriced records to a lot of people who'd never been in a huge space filled with used vinyl. In any case, after waiting another 10 or 15 years, I finally found Taylor's Apple debut on CD. I'd be listing "Circle in the Sun" and "Something in the Way She Moves" from it, and I'm tempted to list the version of the latter found on Greatest Hits. It's close enough for horseshoes, but it's still a slightly inferior version of the original, especially in the absence of the harpsi- chord intro. I'm not sure who had control of the Apple catalogue by 1976--the Beat- les? Allen Klein? Billy Preston?--but it's surprising something couldn't have been worked out. Have I mentioned that James Taylor's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Strange--he doesn't play rock and roll. ________________________________________________________________________________ 2582. R. Dean Taylor: "I Think, Therefore I Am" 2583. T-Bones with Gary Farr: Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem T-Bones 2584. Bram Tchaikovsky: Strange Man, Changed Man 2585. Bram Tchaikovsky: Pressure 2586. Tears for Fears: Songs From the Big Chair 2587. Tease: Remember 2588. Teen Dream: Let's Get Busy 2589. Teenage Head 2590. Teenage Head: "Frantic City" 2591. Teenage Head: Some Kinda Fun 2592. Teenage Heads: Tornado 2593. The Best of the Teenchords 2594. Television: Marquee Moon 2595. Television Personalities: ...And Don't the Kids Just Love It 2596. Telex: Looking for Saint Tropez 2597. The Best of Telex - More Than Distance 2598. A Nino Tempo-April Stevens Program Mixworthy: "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," #2586; "Ain't Got No Sense," #2589; "Marquee Moon," #2594; "Parties in Chelsea" and "The Crying Room," #2595. Has Hilary Duff put out any CDs on Death Row? R. Dean Taylor's Motown album remains one of the more puzzling anomalies of its day--Rare Earth on Motown made for a kind of ham-handed sense, but at a time when Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder were leading Berry Gordy's label in the direction of the militancy then starting to overtake black pop, R. Dean is looking very defiantly Bill Bixbyish on his album cover. He initially wanted to call the LP Hell Is Other People, but Gordy convinced him to go with Des- cartes instead. (I love the legalistic quotation marks, just in case the people look- ing after Descartes' estate were on the prowl for lawsuits)..."Marquee Moon" and "See No Evil" are on opposite sides of the mixworthy fence. I still have a hard time get- ting past Tom Verlaine's voice, but "Marquee Moon" almost stands alongside the best long songs from Neil Young and the Velvets anyway...The Television Personalities LP is pretty great from start to finish. I know that "Parties in Chelsea" is one of my favourite songs on there, but I hope I've got the other one right--there are two or three instrumentals, and I'm not totally confident as to which is which...The Teen- chords were led by Louis Lymon, Frankie's younger brother. That just doesn't sound right--kind of like being R. Dean Taylor's whiter sister. ________________________________________________________________________________ 2599. The Best of the Temprees 2600. Temptations: Anthology 2601. The Temptations' 25th Anniversary 2602. 10cc: How Dare You! 2603. Ten City: Foundation 2604. Tenpole Tudor: Swords of a Thousand Men 2605. 10,000 Maniacs: In My Tribe 2606. Tammi Terrell: Irresistible 2607. Tony Terry: Forever Yours 2608. The Best of Joe Tex 2609. Joe Tex: I Gotcha 2610. That Petrol Emotion: Manic Pop Thrill 2611. That Petrol Emotion: Babble 2612. That Petrol Emotion: Chemicrazy 2613. Theatre of Hate: Westworld 2614. Thelonius Monster: "Sammy Hagar Weekend" 12-inch 2615. The "Angry" Young Them! 2616. Them: Featuring Van Morrison Mixworthy: "I'm for You, You for Me," #2599; "Since I Lost My Baby," "I Wish It Would Rain," and "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)," #2600; "That's the Way Love Is," #2603; "Sammy Hagar Weekend," #2614; "I Can Only Give You Everything," "Here Comes the Night," and "It's All Over Now Baby Blue," #2616. I haven't listened to Ten City or Thelonius Monster since they came out, but I had both on a year-end list for 1989 I counted down on my CIUT show, and I'm going to guess they'd hold up well...The second of the two Temptations collections essentially adds nothing to the earlier one except a 25-page booklet. Mine has a little piece of masking tape in the top left-hand corner marked "$2.00," and that's about my ceiling on redundancy. I think there was a time when I loved "My Girl"--was it used in Coming Home?--but, well, soon after that Lawrence Kasdan entered the picture, and you know the rest...I may have bought The "Angry" Young Them! the exact same day as Otis Blue, also because of a placement (#82) in the Gambaccini book. I'd already come to the realization by that point that Van Morrison's own records weren't really for me, but going by The "Angry" Young Them!'s great cover shot, it held the promise of being something different. It was, but all my favourite Them songs show up on the Bangs- annotated collection put out by Parrot in 1972, which I was lucky enough to find in a delete bin for three or four dollars. "I Can Only Give You Everything" I loved immediately, "Here Comes the Night" over time (a minor hit in North America, but I have no recollection of CHUM ever playing it as part of their "Solid Gold Weekends" in the early '70s), and, much later still, "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" because of the Beck sample on "Jackass"--which, until set straight by somebody else, I thought was from Ferrante & Teicher's "Midnight Cowboy" theme. Confusing the issue further, there was a shot in Beck's video for "Devil's Haircut" where he seemed to be imitat- ing Jon Voight walking down the street in Midnight Cowboy, and "Devil's Haircut" used a sample from "I Can Only Give You Everything." Confusing to me, anyway--Van Morrison, Beck, Jon Voight, Lester Bangs, and Ferrante & Teicher seemed largely unaffected by the matter. ________________________________________________________________________________ 2617. Third World: Journey to Addis 2618. 39 Steps 2619. B.J. Thomas: Greatest Hits Volume Two 2620. B.J. Thomas: My Greatest Hits 2621. Dylan Thomas Reading, Volume Two 2622. Timmy Thomas: Why Can't We Live Together 2623. Sir Charles Thompson Sextet and Band 2624. Richard & Linda Thompson: Hokey Pokey 2625. Richard Thompson Live! 2626. Richard & Linda Thompson: Shoot Out the Lights 2627. Linda Thompson: Once Clear Moment 2628. Claude Thornhill and His Orchestra - 1947 2629. George Thorogood and the Destroyers 2630. T.H.P. Orchestra: Early Riser 2631. The Three Degrees 2632. Three Degrees: International 2633. The Three Degrees Live Mixworthy: "I Just Can't Help Believing" and "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," #2619; "Rock and Roll Lullabye," #2620; "A Heart Needs a Home," #2624; "Withered and Died," #2625. The Dylan album is from his late-middle period--not as good as his earlier electric stuff, much better than when he donned makeup and headed for Japan a few years down the road...Like the Allmans, the Grateful Dead, and Kiss, the Three Degrees were much better live than in the studio. #2633 inlcudes a 22-minute "When Will I See You Again," highlighted by an excellent mellotron solo, plus some amazing patter: "Thank you very much the person who threw this glass bottle at my head; you nearly killed me but you missed again, so you have to keep trying next week"...Okay, enough fooling around. This one's actually true: I spent part of a summer working in Georgetown's Greenwood Cemetery alongside Godfrey Thorogood, a cousin of George's. Really, could there be a more surreal connection to third-tier rock and roll fame? Godfrey was studying to be a minister at the time, so of course he was preoccupied with matters of right and wrong, humility, forbearance, etc., etc.--except when he got into a snit because he felt I was getting a disproportionate amount of time riding around on the John Deere (as opposed to trimming around headstones with a hand-mower). I'm being unfair--after I, uh, vigorously explained to him why things were happening the way they were (a long explanation the general thrust of which I still remember but won't get into here-- trust me, he had nothing to complain about), he gave the matter some thought and did the one thing that always makes me really uncomfortable: he apologized. I thrive on arguments; if you want to shut me up, say something gracious. Anyway, looking at the link above, I'm not exactly sure what "Disciplemaking" is, but I'm confident that whatever it entails, a strictly enforced equal-time rule on all vehicular machinery is part of the package. ________________________________________________________________________________ 2634. Three Johns: Atom Drum Bop 2635. Three Johns: "Death of the European" 12-inch 2636. Three Johns: The World by Storm 2637. Throbbing Gristle: D.o.A. 2638. Throbs: Proud to Be Loud 2639. Thunderclap Newman: Hollywood Dream 2640. Thundermug: Strikes 2641. Shelly Thunder: Fresh Out of the Pack 2642. Johnny Thunders: So Alone 2643. Johnny Thunders: In Cold Blood 2644. Johnny Thunders: "Que Sera, Sera" 2645. Johnny Thunders & Patti Palladin: Copy Cats 2646. Tiffany 2647. Timbuk 3: Eden Alley 2648. Times Two: X 2 2649. Timex Social Club: "Rumors" 12-inch 2650. Timex Social Club: Vicious Rumors Mixworthy: "Something in the Air," #2639; "Africa," #2640; "Welcome to the Human Race," #2647. The Times Two album has a song called "3 Into 2 (Don't Go)," thereby covering two of the four major operations right there. Notwithstanding that 3 into 2 yields a perfectly acceptable quotient of 0.666..., they may have been even more math-minded than Wire...So Alone was the album I would name as my favourite ever for at least a couple of years in the early '80s, so it seems strange not to be listing any songs from it. It's a record I absolutely and irrevocably wore out. It's also similar to the other two I-invented-this-stuff LPs of the punk-rock moment, Street Hassle and The Idiot, in that it's hard to isolate songs from the whole--to get very much out of them, I think, you have to take a deep interest in all the mythology attached to their makers, and, whatever their relative merits, they're all of a piece. I used to have that deep interest; now that I don't, the records seem very far away. Having said that, I was really happy I got a chance to interview Thunders, ditto that my copy of So Alone is autographed...I've already written about Thundermug's "Africa" a couple of times elsewhere. No one south of Detroit has ever heard it, but it's one of the great singles of the early '70s...I'm not sure if my cover of Hollywood Dream, which I'll post when this section gets filed, is the original. There's a second cover I used to see frequently: blue, with only Speedy Keen pictured, and either the title or the band name inside a star. I remember that I got my copy out of a regular bin in the late '70s, which suggests it's a reissue. Take a good look when it's posted, especially at Andy Newman, the Bun E. Carlos forerunner in the top-right corner--these are the guys who were calling for the arms and ammo to be handed out? I'm amazed that John Sinclair threw his lot in with the MC5 instead.

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