1875. Yoko Ono: Season of Glass
1876. Every Man Has a Woman
1877. Orange Juice: In a Nutshell
1878. Roy Orbison at the Rock House
1879. The All-Time Greatest Hits of Roy Orbison
1880. Roy Orbison: The Singles Collection 1965-1973
1881. Original Concept: Straight From the Basement of Kooley High!
1882. Original Mirrors
1883. Originals: Baby, I'm for Real
1884. Portrait of the Originals
1885. Originals: California Sunset
1886. Kid Ory Plays W.C. Handy
1887. Wavis O'Shave: Anna Ford's Bum
1888. Osmonds: Phase III
1889. The Osmonds Greatest Hits
1890. Donny Osmond: My Best to You
1891. Johnny Otis: The Capitol Years
1892. Our Favorite Band: Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings
Mixworthy: "Yo-Yo," #1889.
I know--I should probably be listing "Willie and the Hand Jive" from the Johnny Otis
album, and I should definitely have at least two or three Roy Orbison songs. I don't
think it works that way with Orbison, though, who's the same kind of lightning rod that
Billie Holiday is: he so overwhelms most everything he sings, he's not someone who in-
spires a measured response. You're either going to keep him at arm's length or count at
least a half-dozen of his signature songs as indespensible. Obviously, I belong to the
former group, but, with David Lynch's help, I do understand why people find him so com-
pelling. The Sun album has "Domino," but I heard the Cramps' version first, and its
theirs I still prefer...#1876 is a bunch of different people singing Yoko Ono songs.
Unlikeliest: Eddie Money. The album came out in '84, two years before Money had a great
hit duetting with Ronnie Spector on "Take Me Home Tonight" (at least I thought it was
great at the time--now, who knows?). According to Be My Baby, Spector's autobiography,
she and Lennon engaged in some brief flirtation during the Beatles' first American tour
in '64. Eddie Money, shadowing John Lennon every step of the way...I make no apology
for "Yo-Yo," but I'll concede that there's no excuse for the Donny best-of. (The Ever-
est syndrome--because it was there.) In 1972 or so, my family and I sat in a Cleveland
restaurant and watched a waitress spill a tray of food all over Donny, sitting two or
three tables over with his brothers. It's a memory so improbable that I sometimes won-
der if I dreamed it up, but no, it really did happen.
________________________________________________________________________________
1893. The Outlaws
1894. Outsiders: Happening "Live"!
1895. The Best of Buck Owens Vol. 3
1896. Patti Page: Golden Hits
1897. Tommy Page
1898. Pale Fountains: ...From Across the Kitchen Table
1899. The Paley Brothers
1900. The Paper Lace Collection
1901. Charlie Parker: Bird/The Savoy Recordings
1902. Charlie Parker: One Night in Birdland
1903. Norman Granz Jam Session: The Charlie Parker Sides
1904. Bird (O.S.T.)
1905. Charlie Parker Volume II
1906. Charlie Parker: Live Sessions
1907. Graham Parker and the Rumour: Heat Treatment
1908. Graham Parker and the Rumour: Squeezing Out Sparks
1909. Graham Parker: The Up Escalator
Mixworthy: "There Goes Another Love Song" and "Green Grass and High Tides," #1893.
I haven't read Greil Marcus's Bob Dylan at the Crossroads yet, but in a recent inter-
view for the book, he said that "Like a Rolling Stone" resists anyone who tries to
cover it--it's basically uncoverable. Maybe, but I really have to question whether
he took the time to seek out the Paper Lace version...Usually when you see quotation
marks used as they are on the title of the Outsiders album, you can assume they're
not meant ironically, that it's just a case of someone over-zealously punctuating
where none is needed. But I think Happening "Live"! might be the work of some clever
record-company guy who was in on the joke--the screaming and general mayhem in the
background sound totally canned...I'll put Charlie Parker in a group with Duke El-
lington and Thelonius Monk as the jazz musicians I enjoy most after Coltrane and
Miles Davis. Again, "mixworthy"'s hard to apply in this instance--the Savoy album
is the best of those listed above, but I can't point to any specific songs that
stand apart from any others. It's all of a piece...The Outlaws are much easier for
me dissect: two of my all-time high-school favourites that, for reasons that pas-
seth all understanding, still sound great to me today. The Graham Parker albums,
which were topping polls in the late '70s, I caught up with a few years after the
fact; with the Outlaws, man, I was there.
________________________________________________________________________________
1910. Junior Parker & Billy Love: The Legendary Sun Performers
1911. Junior Parker: The ABC Collection
1912. Ray Parker Jr.: The Other Woman
1913. Ray Parker Jr.: Greatest Hits
1914. Terrence Parker: Disco Disciple EP
1915. Parlet: Invasion of the Booty Snatchers
1916. Parlet: Play Me or Trade Me
1917. Parliament: Chocolate City
1918. Parliament: Mothership Connection
1919. Parliament: The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein
1920. Parliament: Funkentelechy
1921. Parliament: Motor Booty Affair
1922. Gram Parsons: GP
1923. Gram Parsons: Grievous Angel
1924. Dolly Parton: Touch Your Woman
1925. The Best of Dolly Parton
1926. The Partridge Family Album
Mixworthy: "You Can't Change That," #1913; "I Think I Love You," #1926.
I'd never noticed before, but just like Kiss, Chicago, and Parliament, Ray Parker
Jr. appears to have had a logo--the typeface for his name on the two albums listed
above is identical, with the best-of angled and compressed to about half the size.
I thought only groups did things like that...The Toronto Symphony gets a thank-you
on Chocolate City--yes, Toronto served as the blueprint for the African-American
utopia George Clinton envisioned. There actually is a Parliament St. running north-
south in the downtown core here; I've always wished they would rename Richmond St.
accordingly, so I could arrange to meet someone at the corner of Parliament and
Funkadelic...For the third entry in a row, I'm looking like the corniest kind of
self-conscious provocateur: first I gave the nod to the Osmonds over Roy Orbison,
then the Outlaws over Charlie Parker, now the Partridge Family over Junior Parker
and Gram Parsons. Coincidence--I have my moments, but taken as a whole, I think
most anyone would agree my taste veers towards the standard-issue end of the spec-
trum. ("Standard-issue end of the spectrum" is my torturous attempt to circumvent
the cliché of the moment, which I made a pact with myself never to utter in the
presence of impressionable children, immediate family members, or other sentient
human beings. If you don't know what I'm talking about, consider yourself a hap-
pier person for it.) But the Partridges and I go way back--#1926 was quite likely
the first LP I ever walked into a store and paid for on my own. It's long gone by
now--my current copy is a replacement bought years later--but "I Think I Love You"
and the willowy image of Susan Dey remain. Sofia Coppola somehow knows what I'm
talking about: The Virgin Suicides might just as well have been called Inside the
Head of Middle-Aged Men Who Never Quite Got Over Susan Dey.
________________________________________________________________________________
1927. Pasadenas: To Whom It May Concern
1928. Les Paul & Mary Ford: The New Sound, Vol. II
1929. The Very Best of Les Paul & Mary Ford
1930. Freda Payne: Deeper and Deeper (The Best of Freda Payne)
1931. Peaches & Herb: Let's Fall in Love
1932. Peaches and Herb: Golden Duets
1933. Peaches & Herb's Greatest Hits
1934. Peaches & Herb: 2 Hot!
1935. Peaches & Herb: Worth the Wait
1936. Ann Peebles: If This Is Heaven
1937. Melvin Van Peebles: What the...You Mean I Can't Sing?!
1938. Teddy Pendergrass: It's Time for Love
1939. Teddy Pendergrass: Greatest Hits
1940. Teddy Pendergrass: Love Language
1941. Art Pepper: Discoveries
1942. Art Pepper: So in Love
Mixworthy: "Band of Gold," #1930; "Love T.K.O.," #1939.
There's a gap of a decade or so between the first three Peaches & Herb albums and the
later two. Peaches looks like she just arrived from Glee Club practice on the cover of
Let's Fall in Love; on Worth the Wait, more like she just wandered over from the set
of a porno film...I have no recollection at all what the Melvin Van Peebles LP sounds
like, but I'm guessing from the title no one ever mistook him for Al Green. Having
seen Mario Van Peebles' film about his father last year, I also bet that whatever cir-
cumstances led to Melvin making a record, the purpose was to conjure up some desperate
financing for whatever film project he had on the go at the time. "Save the Watergate
500" at least reads like it might be great: "Yeah, maybe there was a promise broken/
But you can carry this checks and balances stuff just a little bit too far"..."Band
of Gold" stands alongside the Five Stairsteps' "O-o-h Child" and the Chairmen of the
Board's "Give Me Just a Little More Time" as some kind of Holy Trinity of 1970 soul.
All three artists had a few other minor hits, but none of them made the Top 10 again.
"Give Me Just a Little More Time" entered the Top 100 in January, "O-o-h Child" in
March, "Band of Gold" in April. Has there ever been such a concentration of one-shot
brilliance in the annals of soul music before or since? In the mid-60s, undoubtedly;
more recently, well, not that I can remember from 15 years of drawing up year-end
lists.
________________________________________________________________________________
1943. Pere Ubu: The Modern Dance
1944. Carl Perkins: Original Golden Hits
1945. Itzhak Perlman and André Previn: It's a Breeze
1946. Persuasions: Chirpin'
1947. Peter and the Test Tube Babies: Pissed and Proud
1948. Peter, Sue & Marc: Like a Seagull
1949. Pet Shop Boys: "West End Girls" 12-inch
1950. Pet Shop Boys: Please
1951. Pet Shop Boys: Disco
1952. Pet Shop Boys: Actually
1953. Pet Shop Boys: "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" 12-inch
1954. Pet Shop Boys: Introspective
1955. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: Damn the Torpedoes
1956. Pezband
1957. John Phillips
1958. The Exciting Wilson Pickett
1959. Wilson Pickett's Greatest Hits
Mixworthy: "Dixie Fried," #1944; "West End Girls," #1950; "What Have I Done to De-
serve This?" #1952; "Left to My Own Devices" and "It's Alright," #1953. I'm not that
big a Wilson Pickett fan; he's a little more to my liking than Otis Redding, but both
are at the other end of the spectrum from Smokey Robinson and Al Green, which is where
most of the soul music that I love sits.
When I talked, back in the Madonna entry, about a disorienting (for me) vinyl/CD split
in the careers of some '80s-90s artists, the Pet Shop Boys should have been the first
name to occur to me. It's strange to think that their first couple of albums--which
they've arguably never surpassed--came along at a time when vinyl still commanded more
than half of all music sold. They just seem like such creatures of the compact disc,
their disco lineage notwithstanding; it's hard for me to think of them as situated at
the end of a technology that traces back through the Cowsills, Glenn Miller, and Edi-
son. I'm guessing that most Pet Shop Boys fans wouldn't feel the need to append "argu-
ably" to the standing of those first two LPs, but I've been surprised to find myself
so taken with some of their more recent September-of-my-years meditations: I like "A
Different Point of View," "The Samurai in Autumn," and "Flamboyant" as much as any-
thing they've ever done. The songs I've listed above, especially "What Have I Done to
Deserve This?", were central to the transformation my musical taste underwent through
the second half of the '80s, a period that culminated in a sense with getting a chance
to interview both Tennant and Lowe when they were out promoting Introspective in the
fall of '88. The interview was scheduled for the issue that the magazine I worked for
at the time decided to go bankrupt on, so it was never published. If I were ambitious
enough, I'd go dig it up and transcribe it for publication here, and when school lets
out for the summer, maybe I will. I don't think there was anything of earth-shattering
importance said by either of them--I don't think Chris spoke more than three sentences,
period--but I retain three fairly vivid memories. First, something that I think Neil
soon turned into a cottage industry, but that he was still in the process of feeling
his way around: making fun of U2. Not too many people did at the time--he was hilari-
ous. I also remember a sense of great satisfaction when he seemed to understand per-
fectly a very vague question about the way "Left to My Own Devices" captured the
"rushing out into the night" feeling shared by the best disco music; having spent
the disco years getting high and listening to Neil Young and The Twelve Dreams of Dr.
Sardonicus within the social setting of a small-town high school, I have no idea where
I dreamed that one up. Finally, there was the glare I got from Neil when I broached
the subject that dared not speak its name: "Is it true you're...a sushi lover?" He
didn't want to discuss sushi; it wasn't till a few years later that he admitted what
everyone knew all along anyway, that he'd been a sushi lover for as long as he could
remember. (I of course see now what a perfectly pointless and idiotic question it
was, as necessary a clarification as asking Stevie Wonder if it's true that he's
blind.) Anyway, it was all pretty exciting. One of the many great things about the
Pet Shop Boys is that the melancholy heard on "Flamboyant" and "The Samurai in Au-
tumn," you can hear it almost as fully formed in "West End Girls"; the elegiac
phase of their career basically started from day one.