Gene Clark – No Other

29th January 2024 · 1970s, 1974, Music

This really is a proper deep cut from Gene Clark’s long-forgotten fourth album No Other from back in 1974. Long forgotten for many years, but now regarded as something of an underground classic.

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This was the first tune I heard by Archie Bell & The Drells when it was a hit single in 1973. It’s very different from the sprightly funk jam of Tighten Up which put them on the soul and funk map five years earlier. For that matter it’s different to the Northern Soul stomper Here I Go Again that gave them their first UK hit at the end of 1972.

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The only thing wrong with this slice of psychedelic funk is that it’s too short; far too short. Put all three parts together and the whole thing is less than two and a half minutes long.

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For all my abiding love of The Velvet Underground, I’d have to concede that Lou Reed’s solo career has been inconsistent, and his albums a patchy representation of his talent.

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Whatever we expected when Eno left Roxy Music to go solo out of sheer boredom – he said he was found himself “thinking about the laundry onstage” – in 1973 it probably wasn’t this.

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Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris were never romantically involved but when they sang together their voices made the sweetest love. Never more so than on this song. (more…)

Spaghetti Head – Funky Axe

21st December 2023 · 1970s, 1975, Funk, Music

Bass lines don’t come much funkier than this minimalist drum-and-bass obscurity by a short-lived mid-’70s band called Spaghetti Head.

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I’ve never listened to anything by Yoko Ono. I grew up hearing the propaganda line that she “broke up The Beatles” and subsequently formed an uninformed opinion that her music was experimental rubbish.

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When I think of funk, this is the sound I hear in my head. The fat bass (is that the “phat” bass?), the hissing hi-hats, the waka-waka guitar licks, the muffled exhortations of the vocalist… put it all together and that’s The Fatback Band.

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Merry Clayton is best known for her gospelly backing vocals on the Stones’ anti-war anthem Gimme Shelter, wailing in harmony with Jagger. But there was much more to her than that.

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