Before I get to my review, a bit of stereotype slinging. About the Irish, who are oft said (you can ask anybody) to have produced the greatest drunken poets the world has ever seen. Here in the States, a drunk is a drunk is a drunk. In Ireland, if you believe the hype, every drunk is a poet and every poet is a drunk, and when the pubs close every last inebriated man, woman, and child who spills into the dimly lit street to stagger home or fall fecklessly into the filthy gutter is conjuring brilliant quatrains in their brain.

It’s obviously shite, and to the part of my lineage that is Irish (or is it Scottish, who knows?) offensive even, but I do believe the Irish harbor a romantic soul and love their whiskey as much as they love a gift for high-blown (Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan, anybody?) speech. So just for argument’s sake, who is the greatest drunken Irish poet of them all? My vote goes to The Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, hands down.

He may be a spent force now; it’s been years since he wrote any new songs (that we’ve heard, anyway); his voice is every bit as much a ruin as the Acropolis; and the last time I saw him perform he hung precariously onto the microphone stand like a sailor clinging to the ratlines for dear life in the face of 90 mph typhoon winds. But the fact that he continues to draw breath at all is in itself a miracle.

I have done the math, and more whiskey has passed MacGowan’s lips over the course of his lifetime than was imbibed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Jones, Malcolm Lowry, and Dylan Thomas put together. Despite this dubious achievement, he has written some of the best poetry ever set to music, and has brought more happiness to mankind than a regimen of teetotalers.

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One of the first great electric blues LPs is titled I’m Jimmy Reed, and it’s loaded with twelve songs from one of the 1950s only true blues crossovers. Over half a century later it still holds up spectacularly well and additionally provides a solid contrast to the electrified delta sounds that poured out of the studio Chess during the same period.

Jimmy Reed’s blues is amongst the most accessible ever recorded in either the acoustic or electric permutations of the form. Master of a relaxed, natural style lacking in the rough edges that his contemporaries Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker utilized with prideful relish, Reed’s stellar run of sides for the Vee-Jay label displayed how in the bustling post-WWII urban environment the blues could represent more than the power of the plantation transmogrified after traveling up the Mississippi River (Muddy, Wolf, etc.) or the horn-laden high strains of citified sophistication (Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, Tiny Bradshaw, Willie Mabon).

In contrast to Muddy, who instigated a booming ensemble sound that while impressively groundbreaking completely on its own terms would also prove an essential component in rock music’s ‘60s growth spurt, Reed was somewhat closer to the norm of a “folk-blues” player, offering up simple and often insanely catchy guitar figures and an unfussy, plainly sung (some might say sleepy) vocal approach with accents of trilling rack harmonica.

This shouldn’t infer that Reed engaged in any forced gestures of aw-shucks down-home authenticity, at least not in what’s considered his prime. Hell, one glimpse at the picture on I’m Jimmy Reed’s back cover presents a man of top-flight refinement and truly choice threads, and his image intersected with the sound of his records extremely well.

To some extent less celebrated than those abovementioned Chess bluesmen as a key factor in the development of rock, Reed appears in retrospect to be equally if not more influential, both in terms of the user-friendly simplicity of his template, for he was adapted by blues rockers, garage bands, folkies, psyche merchants, and even a few punkers, and in the sheer number of prominent covers; Elvis, The Rolling Stones, Them, Grateful Dead, Steve Miller (no surprise), and four times by Bill Cosby (a surprise), and that’s just for starters.

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The Vinyl Guide is a weekly podcast for fans and collectors of vinyl records. Each week is an audio-documentary on your favourite records, often including interviews with band members and people who were part of the project.

It’s hosted by Nate Goyer, a self-described vinyl maniac who enjoys listening to records and sharing the stories behind them. Despite his Yankee accent, Nate lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife, 2 kids, and about 1,500 records. (But only about 1,000 of them his wife knows about.)

The Vinyl Guide takes records one by one, telling the tale of how they came to be, why the work is important, and then shares how collectors can tell one pressing from another. Learn more at the TheVinylGuide.com or simply subscribe via iTunes or RSS feed.

Holy bejeesus look who’s on the show—Fat Mike from NOFX, Me First & the Gimme Gimmes, and of course head honcho at Fat Wreck Chords—the famed independent punk label—drops by to talk about his history, running FatWreck.com for 25+ years, shares some road stories, and discusses the new NOFX record First Ditch Effort. Also included is the new NOFX track “6 Years On Dope.”

The union of political subject matter and music can surely make for a problematic, sometimes even dysfunctional relationship, but the occasions where the results actually work are cause for celebration. Unsurprisingly, much of the good stuff sitting at the big crossroads of social issues and song sprang forth from the 1960s, and one of the best protest singer-songwriters of the era was Phil Ochs. His music shines great illumination upon the tumultuousness of that decade, but in its specificity to concerns of its period it also manages to present a somewhat discomforting commentary on the present.

For as long as I’ve been cognizant of Phil Ochs, he’s been identified as a tragic figure. This reflects upon how undiagnosed sickness and a troublesome final act to an eventful life can cast a shroud over prior achievements that are quite substantial and worthy of praise. And the fact that he was a success as a topical folk artist who never really transcended the realm of modest renown to become a household name (ala some of his contemporaries) only contributes to the grimness that surrounds his story. Add in that, Ochs’ attempts to move beyond the constraints of folk-based protest persist in being underrated and the downbeat mood of the man’s life narrative is secure.

Phil Ochs committed suicide by hanging on April 9, 1976 after suffering a long period of depression, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism, and his self-inflicted death has often been linked to the creeping malaise that transpired in the ‘70s after the fallout of stumbled progressiveness that ended the previous decade. While denying this symbolic resonance is surely a mistake, it’s also true that wallowing in the difficulties of Ochs’ later years reduces him to an artist of fleeting productivity that was victimized by life’s struggles and ultimately died a failure.

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Fred Schneider is famous for his work in The B-52’s, but over the years he’s also released a pair of solo LPs, the second of which found him in some unexpected company and delivering a set of pumped-up, punked-out mania. But ‘96’s Just…Fred isn’t really an outlier in the man’s discography, standing instead as a brief manifestation of an alternate career possibility that also reinforces how the ‘90s produced all sorts of unusual musical documents. The record’s charms could easily encourage a little bit of the ol’ pogo and might even inspire a few appropriate laughs, so in the end it’s very much a part of Schneider’s MO.

I can still remember quite clearly the reaction of certain friends and acquaintances over the arrival of Just…Fred, the out-of-nowhere solo record from instantly recognizable vocalist Fred Schneider. The general idea expressed by these folks was that in deciding to record an LP with a certain highly opinionated and defiantly indie-minded producer and a bunch of oft-noisy underground rockers as his backing, Schneider had suddenly, out of the blue, gotten “hip.”

To put it kindly, that assessment only made any kind of sense if one’s historical perspective spanned back to around 1988 or so. To put it less kindly, it was simply malarkey, a belief wrapped up in denigrating The B-52’s mainstream breakthrough Cosmic Thing and its smash hit single “Love Shack” as unworthy of any serious consideration.

That song’s ability to cross nearly any kind of social lines in its soundtracking of celebrations of all sorts has almost turned it into a cultural inevitability. If you’ll be attending a wedding party any time soon, the smart money is on hearing “Love Shack,” and maybe more than once. The groom’s grandma might even start a conga line. In this writer’s perception the tune has become so associated with revelry that imagining a person listening to it while alone in their abode, simply sitting in a chair and perhaps eating an apple, seems rather ridiculous.

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Few albums have been as vilified or written off as colossal missteps as The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request. There’s Taylor Swift Sings the Songs of Captain Beefheart, and Arnold Schwarzenegger Sings Barbra Streisand, but neither of these albums can hold a candle to the Stone’s 1967 answer to the Beatles’ acid-influenced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Their Satanic Majesties Request was quickly dismissed as a shameless attempt to keep up with the psychedelic Jones’s, and the critical blowback was so negative that the Stones promptly hopped to it and followed Satanic Majesties with Beggars Banquet, an LP so down to earth a filthy toilet graces its cover.

Aside from “She’s a Rainbow” and “2000 Light Years from Home” you’re highly unlikely to hear any of Satanic Majesties’ songs anywhere, and the Stones themselves haven’t had much good to say about it over the years. Keith Richards called it “a load of crap,” while Mick Jagger said “there’s a lot of rubbish” on it. But it has its fair share of cultists, whole heaps of them in fact, and they love it to death. And their waxing enthusiastic over the LP finally got the better of me. Just how bad could it be, after all?

Not bad at all is the short answer. Strange, far stranger than Sgt. Pepper for that matter, Their Satanic Majesties Request has more than its fair share of fine moments, along with a few dubious tunes that don’t quite make the grade. Me, I’ll take it over Sgt. Pepper any day, and I think the Stones should be commended for putting out an LP that was even more experimental than its Beatles counterpart. Mick and the boys took real chances on the LP, and if they didn’t always work, at least the Stones tried.

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“Vinyl brings me back to my ’80s childhood. It’s visceral—from the dusty smell of an old record jacket, to how it feels to set it on the turntable, and of course the sound! The needle, the static…the fullness of the music. The “oh sh!t, change the record!” moment of panic before the needle drops off.”

“I grew up on Beatles records from my Mom and Iron Butterfly from my Dad. I inherited a diverse collection of records from them. Motown, rock, folk. My favorites are Jefferson Airplane, George Harrison, Simon & Garfunkel, The Supremes, The Beach Boys, and the Hair soundtrack. Every Christmas we listened to Mitch Miller and the Gang’s sing along record.

As a teenager in Calumet City, IL we had Hegewisch Records—the “cool” place for music and music culture. My friends and I would go there on the record release days of our favorite bands. At the time, cassette tapes and CDs were more prevalent than vinyl… but the artwork never held up. When I think of iconic album covers, I think specifically of the vinyl versions such as the Breakfast in America cover by Supertramp and the Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. The visuals are so instant and clear in my mind.

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Okay, so in everybody’s life there comes a day so bleak that not even Joy Division can do it justice. And on that day there’s only one recourse: to crank up Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition. John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols band’s sophomore release, also known as Metal Box because it initially saw light as a metal 16mm film canister containing three 12” 45rpm records in 1979, was re-issued in 1980 as a double LP. But regardless of format it was designed to brutalize the listener with music that was as remorselessly and relentlessly down-in-the-mouth as it was utterly hypnotizing, thanks to Lydon’s deranged vocal stylings, Jah Wobble’s loping and rhythmic dub-inspired bass, and Keith Levene’s splintered and utterly unique guitar riffs. Me, I find it soothing when I’ve reached the end of my tether; it lets me know I’m not alone.

Lydon was wise to abandon punk rock; he’d said everything that needed saying in that genre and knew damn well it was a dead end. And it’s a credit to his musical knowledge—which was far more wide-ranging than anyone would have given him credit for—that he went the avant-garde dub route. Sure, the Sex Pistols posed an existential threat to everything that had come before them; but Second Edition is downright SCARY at times, and sounds every bit as demented as the Sex Pistols did menacing. Plus you could dance to it, as the band’s legendary (and hilarious) performance on American Bandstand proved.

The “death disco” (the alternative title of the song “Swan Lake”) of Second Edition marked a radical move away from the (relatively speaking) more conventional punk of 1978’s First Issue, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Lydon was not interested in making music for the masses. The band may have released two singles from the LP, but neither made any commercial concessions, and were completely representative of what critic Steve Chick described as the “cold dank, unforgiving, subterranean” nature of Second Edition in general. With the exception of “Radio 4,” a symphonic piece that is lovely really, and “Socialist,” a throbbing and fast paced instrumental that won’t give you the shivers, Second Edition never gives you a break… it wants you to suck you down into a tarpit of sound, and sink, and sink, you do.

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Jo Mango – Better Lands (Live at Manchester Museum)
SASO – Stephanie
Soft Pyramids – Planes
Handgrenades – Daily Routine
Bleach Girls – Like You
Film Jacket 35 – Angkor Wat
Belinda Esquer – Silverlining
The Burgeoning – Loud Noises
Jason Gaffner – Murder In The First Degree

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Bic Runga – Close Your Eyes

Von Sell – Names
Tennyson – Your Eyes (ft. Njomza)
Gladkill – By My Side
Ty Richards – Spaceman
BOYSLASHFRIEND – Maiden Lane & Broadway (Mighty Mark & TT The Artist Remix)
L’Orange & Mr. Lif – Antique Gold (feat. Chester Watson)
Grand Pavilion – Touch
Mr. Bill – Blergh
Ronaissance & Holly – Ready
Psymbionic – A/S/L