Go Metric

Ten Reasons to Now Revisit Hendrix at Winterland and In the West

by Gary Pig Gold

1. These original live recordings – totaling 47 tracks over five hours plus – have previously been semi-available only on long-out-of-print releases (not counting quite inferior-sounding bootlegs), and in the case of the Winterland performances now features three (!) full discs of additional material.

2. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, celebrating both its second anniversary together and the release of their landmark new Electric Ladyland, filled San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom for three nights running in October of 1968. Understandably, after over a solid year on the road, the trio sound a bit frazzled at points, often struggling to keep both in time and in tune …and not just with one another, either. Still, the passages of sheer magic, power, and true resplendence (e.g.: a downright incendiary "Foxey Lady" on Winterland Disc 1) much more than outnumber the odd lyrical or even musical clam.

3. Meanwhile over with Hendrix In The West, the five additional tracks never heard on its long-ago-killed-by-litigation vinyl edition include a ten-minute "Spanish Castle Magic" which not only interlopes "Sunshine Of Your Love" but even lets the late, extremely great Mitch Mitchell indulge in the kind of tasteful drum solo Ginger Baker only rarely seemed capable of. Plus, of course, original In The West favorites "Red House" (in what many believe to be its definitive reading), a semi-funk afternoon soundcheck "Blue Suede Shoes," and even "God Save The Queen"/"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" from the Isle of Wight remain intact and are still guaranteed to raise a smile.

High Tide and Fazed Cookies

by Gary Pig Gold

The jury – to say nothing of the legal teams – appear to still be out on precisely how much of a bigger bang the Rolling Stones are planning to mark their fiftieth (!) year together as a band during 2012. Will they in fact, even for a concert or two, be able to regain the best bass player they ever had? Can even long-lost Mick Taylor again be convinced to try to fill Brian's musical shoes for maybe a solo or two?? Anything to prevent, or at least delay, the next Jagger so-low album, I can already hear all of you thinking out there!

Lindsey Buckingham: The Small Machine That Could

by Gary Pig Gold

For all intents and purposes, Lindsey Adams Buckingham has lived a charmed life.

Raised in the comfy Bay Area opulence of 1950's Atherton, California, a handsome, athletic golden boy suddenly and forever sidetracked by his elder brother's Elvis and Buddy Holly 45s. He quit the school water polo team, moved with his guitar into a local hotshot band called Fritz, left for L.A. with their singer Stevie, produced with her the magnificently understated Buckingham Nicks album, was soonafter asked to join Fleetwood Mac with whom he helped craft a 40-million-plus-selling album called Rumours and, by 1978 at the age of twenty-nine finally found himself at the very tip-top of his game.

For all intents and purposes, that is.

Much More of the Monkees

by Gary Pig Gold

Can it really be true that Rolling Stone publisher/magnate Jann S. Wenner has personally conducted a decades-long campaign to bar The Monkees from induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Far-from-dummy Monkee Peter Tork certainly thinks so.

"He doesn't care what the rules are and just operates how he sees fit," Tork told the New York Post in 2007. "It is an abuse of power. I don't know whether The Monkees belong in the Hall of Fame, but it's pretty clear that we're not in there because of a personal whim."

Now sure, the Monkees (along with the Beach Boys, Byrds, even Beatles, most every Motown act, etc. etc. etc.) certainly didn't play every single note on every single record they ever made. Nevertheless, in 1967 Jann and his fledgling zine were riding extremely high on the Monkee-bashing bandwagon, using the television rockstars as the best/worst examples of all that was unhip, uncool, and truth be told un-San Francisco in the world.

Fair enough. I remember it also took Rolling Stone over a decade to figure out the Ramones too.

Deep-Catalog Purple

by Gary Pig Gold

"Just what the world needs: Another record company."

And with those typically snide words, on the Seventh day of February, 1968, Bizarre Productions was duly incorporated, and two hundred shares of no par value common stock issued in the State of New York, thereby creating the first of several record companies Frank Zappa would oversee during his most colorful life and career.

Opening Neil Young's Music Box

by Gary Pig Gold

Although it's already spent a good two years here in the ol' sty, I'm hardly surprised to find I'm still discovering, hearing, and even seeing fresh goodies galore buried within that great big Neil Young Archives box of mine. Yet it is something else entirely which has me going Metric today about The Greatest Living Canucklehead This Side of Dr. Stompin' Tom Connors.

Now, while some may take offense a mere three-minutes-twelve into the show at the comment Toronto, Canada is, and I quote, "a city not noted for its musical invention" (plus, if you look real close, note photos of Buddy Holly and Sonny & Cher appearing later are actually of impersonators, NOT the real deals), Sexy Intellectual's Here We Are In The Years: Neil Young's Music Box does present quite the journey through the past. And, as The Man himself would approve, this is one documentary which seldom finds itself in the middle of the cinematic road; it does indeed prefer a somewhat rougher ride, and we sure do see more interesting people there as a result.

For example, young Neil's original drummist Ken Smyth of The Squires, who right off the bat drives clear home that all-important point of how Elvis Presley especially shook to its very foundation the hitherto genteel teenaged population of Winnipeg circa 1956 (and, putting our eyes where Ken's mouth is, we're treated to a vintage clip of Elvis, Scotty, DJ and Bill mauling Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" all across the Dorsey Brothers' televised Stage Show: One can't help but draw the obvious socio-musical connections with those Shocking Pinks to come …to say nothing of Live Rust). Similarly, footage of a live "Birds," complete with its "over, it's over"s, draw undeniable parallels with and to another unmistakable early influence: That "fucking opera singer with a backbeat" (as Neil once called him) Roy Orbison.

If It Ain’t Cheap, It Ain’t Punk

By Joe Evans III

If you’re involved in punk rock in 2011, you’re probably familiar with Plan It X records. It evokes strong opinions, from the easy target criticisms of “all right you smelly hippies,” to legions of younger fans who are strongly passionate about the same “up the punks” ethics that it embodies. After countless five dollar CDs by great bands, it’s hard to deny the label hasn’t made an impact that’s worthy of a close up like this.

While this DVD bills itself as a documentary about it’s own fest, there’s more to it than that. The whole thing starts with a quick breakdown of the beginnings of the DIY punk scene of the early/mid ‘90s, with poppy/weirder bands starting to put on their own shows in basements and other weird spaces versus hardcore bands that play rock clubs and bars. As mentioned previously, it’s easy to write that off as “yeah, I know that, that’s why I’m watching this,” but then again as someone who wasn’t there, I also had a moment of thinking “oh, right – I guess there was a kind of conscious decision made at some point.”

The history of the label is wound in gradually, which gives it a sort of natural feel of how it developed amongst everything else in the subculture, building up from putting out some cheap releases to the point where they put on their own fest, where there’s a bulk of interviews with bands and fans, ranging from train hopping crusties who ask for change just to get into the shows, to a father and son who’ve made the trip from Texas to attend, who obviously share a close bond and is actually pretty touching.

Herman's Hermits Made Movies, Two!

by Gary Pig Gold

In the utterly go-go, trans-media flurry which was mid-Sixties pop(ular culture), every television star worth their Nielsens was expected to not only chase spies and rope steers, but compete with those rock 'n' rollers of the moment upon the Top Forty to boot. To cite but two examples, Lorne Bonanza Greene and his 1964 chart-topping "Ringo," not to mention Captain James T. Kirk's similarly Beatle-busting Transformed Man album. Which contained the possibly definitive version of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," I kid you not.

Bob Dylan Revealed #10 & 35

by Gary Pig Gold

A mere twenty-eight seconds into Joel Gilbert's extensive new Bob Dylan Revealed documentary, the subject matter himself warns us "There's many sides to the coin, y'know, and you haveta really, uh, the longer you go on, the more sides you show that are, that are, that are there to be, uh, unraveled."

Sometimes it's Sunset, Sometimes it's Sunrise: Inside the Mind of Larry "Wild Man" Fischer

by Gary Pig Gold

Irwin Chusid (author, Songs In The Key Of Z): Outsider music is a slippery genre. It's musicians who tend to be self-taught, untrained, working certainly way outside the channels of mainstream music. There are very important qualifications: They are sincere about it. They mean it. They're not doing it to be funny. They're not doing it to be outrageous. This is a sincere musical expression. Wild Man Fischer in many ways is a poster child for outsider music.