We Will Rock You

Originally released in 1973, Pictures at an Exhibition captured the groundbreaking progressive rock trio Emerson, Lake and Palmer in concert at the Lyceum in London in December of 1970. This is an entirely different performance of the work than that documented on the original album of the same name from 1971, which took place at Newcastle City Hall.

The piece is essentially a rock adaptation of Mussorgsky’s suite, re-imagined for rock instrumentation and interspersed with original material from ELP. As such it was a wildly ambitious reach, especially viewed all these years later, against the backdrop of contemporary rock and pop music. It seems almost impossible to imagine that there was ever a time when a band could actually convince a record company to put up the money to record and release such an ambitious piece of work, and that it could find mass acceptance.

Of course rock critics hated ELP and progressive rock in general, but it’s impossible to deny the obvious instrumental prowess of the individual musicians, and at its best this piece blends those talents into a seamless whole. The members seem to really enjoy their interplay, too; the era of ELP when it got so bloated that it essentially turned into solo pieces co-existing on the same stage was still years away.

Keith Emerson is at his arrogant, maniacal best, performing bare-chested in an electric blue, green and silver stage costume that makes Earth, Wind and Fire look conservative. Emerson serves as a low-key emcee, delivering whatvever modest stage patter there is, but in performance he is a whirling dervish, attacking the organ, whirling from one keyboard to another, and looking away from the keys as his fingers fly. Drummer Carl Palmer is not so much a rhythm player as he is a parallel instrumentalist, while Greg Lake is a more inventive bass player than he is often credited. The success of Lake’s acoustic ballads often overshadowed his other contributions to the group, and indeed, his excellent acoustic playing and the haunting purity of his voice on “The Sage” are one of the highlights of the set.

As with all the best progressive rock, this is presented with an uncompromising, love-it-or-leave-it attitude. There’s really no room for middle ground here; either you are on board with rock music that employs long instrumental passages, complex time signatures and raving, over-the-top performance, or you are not. If you are, then  you may find Pictures at an Exhibition a masterpiece of that genre. If you’re not, then songs like “The Hut of Baba Yaga” and “The Great Gates of Kiev” are quite unlikely to change your mind.

This is music that requires  -  even demands  -  the listener’s full attention and concentration. This is not background music to hum along to while driving your children to school in the family minivan. For the uninitiated, some of the longer instrumental passages might sound like elevator music from another planet.

Overblown? Maybe. Pompous? Perhaps. Pretentious? That could be argued, too. But with all that, Pictures at an Exhibition is a timeless snapshot of one of the most important British progressive rock groups of that era at the absolute height of its creative powers. Call it whatever you want, but this is undeniably the realization of a very specific musical and theatrical vision, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer is probably the only group on earth that could have ever brought it to fruition. For musicians of that kind of bravura, I can offer no higher compliment.

This Special Edition DVD from Eagle Rock includes a bonus feature, a previously unreleased performance from a Belgian television show called Pop Shop.

Stones In Exile is a new DVD from Eagle Rock Entertainment that chronicles the recording of The Rolling Stones’ 1971 album Exile on Main Street, and I have to say off the top that I haven’t been a Stones fan for many, many years because the band is now such a shell of its former self. I can’t help but feel that what’s left of the band is merely a traveling circus that goes on the road every few years with the sole intent of raking in as much cash as possible, with very little in the way of new creative output to support it.

That said,  Stones In Exile is a refreshing look at a time when the group was still vital and making some of the best music of its career. The backdrop for the whole story is interesting; because of the punitive tax rates in England at the time, the Stones decided to live and record elsewhere, like many other rock and roll tax exiles of that era. The Stones settled in France, and the members recount the misery of having to give up everything they were used to in order to try and retain some of their hard-earned money. ”I couldn’t speak French,” Charlie Watts glumly recalls.

Looking around in vain for a suitable recording environment, the band wound up setting up shop in the basement of the large villa Keith Richards was renting, then pulled their mobile recording truck up outside and ran wires from the basement to the truck and back. What followed was a disorganized, chaotic nine-month recording process as the musicians labored to get anything done in that highly unsuitable environment. Mick Jagger recalls his sense of futility as Richards aimlessly went for take after take after take, seemingly with no plan in mind. Richards would fall asleep while recording; Jagger would fail to show up for sessions. Musicians were set up in different rooms to try to achieve sound separation, while the drums were set up in a hallway. With no talkback speaker, the producer had to run around to various rooms to relay even the simplest information to the players.

Add to that the chaos of all of the band members, additional musicians, technicians and all of their families living in one place, the most surprising thing about this film is that any record ever got made at all. There’s a sense of foreboding as the band gets more and more tired, and the sessions turn darker and darker as rampant drug use gets into the sessions and Keith Richards begins his long, slow spiral into heroin oblivion. One of the most shocking moments of this film comes when Medium actor Jake Weber  -  whose father was a drug supplier for the Stones  -  recounts rolling joints for the adults in the house when he was eight years old.

Ultimately, that sense of foreboding found its way into the songs. Exile on Main Street wound up being a dark masterpiece of a record, informed not only by the tumultuous circumstances of its recording, but also by the increasing social sense at that time that the peace-and-love ethos of the Sixties had failed, and an entire generation was left to face that hard fact  that everything it had believed in had proven to be untrue. That’s part of what makes the record so brilliant; it is a perfect summation of the moment in time that informed its creation, when the naive hopes of a generation died and were replaced by a hardened, world-weary cynicism.

As drugs became more and more of an issue, the band was forced to make a choice to move the incomplete sessions to Los Angeles to finish. As Mick Jagger soberly stated, “the lifestyle starts to choose you.” The band decided to leave France amid press rumors that police were planning a raid on the drug-infested villa. It’s interesting to see Jagger desperately trying to finish the lyrics for some of the unfinished tracks, writing lyrics however he can, including writing random phrases on bits of paper, pulling them out and stringing them together. He even laughingly says that “Tumbling Dice” was inspired by a conversation with his housekeeper, who liked to play dice.

One of the best parts of this film is seeing the Rolling Stones as real musicians at work in their creative process. The legend of the band’s fame (and infamy) overshadowed the music many years ago, to the point where when you think of Keith, you immediately conjure up images of the drug zombie he subsequently  became, while Jagger is so busy just being Mick Jagger that it’s almost hard to take him seriously as a musician anymore. But these sessions, while disorganized and not-particularly-professional, still resulted in some timeless work. It’s almost like watching a sculptor standing in front of a block of granite, hammering at it with a chisel, but not knowing what kind of statue he might eventually pull from it.

In the end Exile on Main Street was a massive hit, both commercially and critically; though early reviews were mixed, critics eventually came to see the album as a classic in its own right, one of the cornerstones of the Stones’ career.

This DVD includes many extra features, including extended interviews with band members. There’s bonus footage of Jagger and Charlie Watts re-visiting Jagger’s old house Stargroves and Olympic Studios, where parts of the album were recorded. There’s also extended commentary from celebrity fans of the album ranging from Will.i.am to Don Was, Sheryl Crow, Martin Scorcese and Liz Phair.

Overall, this is such an interesting and well-made film that I could even recommend it to someone who doesn’t like the Stones.

Black Sabbath’s landmark album Paranoid is the latest subject in Eagle Rock’s Classic Album DVD series, and it’s an eye-opening look at the recording of one of hard rock’s most important albums.

This DVD has everything a Black Sabbath fan could want, featuring in-depth new interviews with the band members interspersed with classic archival footage of Black Sabbath. There are also interviews with managers, producers, journalists and other musicians to round out the picture.

It’s particularly interesting to see the members of Black Sabbath in their real-life offstage personas, discussing the nuts and bolts of creating the music. Far from the Satanic icons one might expect, they come off as what they are  -  normal, working class guys who escaped the mills and factories through the only means available to them, playing in a rock band.

Though critics have always dismissed Black Sabbath (and metal in general), the band members have quite a bit to say about Paranoid as a piece of social commentary. The album was supposed to be titled War Pigs, but the record label in America nixed that title. Still, several of the songs on Paranoid  -  “War Pigs,” “Hand of Doom” and “Electric Funeral”  -  are aimed directly at the Vietnam war, which was still raging at the time.  As Henry Rollins aptly points out, those same songs could just as easily apply to the situation of the world today, a sad commentary on the universality of war.

One of the most interesting things is how the title song “Paranoid” came about. According to the band members, the song was an afterthought that they knocked together very quickly when it turned out they needed to fill three or four more minutes of time on the album. It’s rare among the songs on Paranoid in that it’s a traditional pop song structure, and it wound up becoming not only the title song, but the band’s first radio hit single as well.

Another really fascinating element of this DVD is the focus on each musician playing his parts. Tony Iommi is already widely acknowledged for his innovative guitar riffing, and Ozzy Osbourne needs no further explanation, but this DVD does a great job explaining the huge contributions of bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward to the overall sound of Black Sabbath.  Hearing those parts individually makes you realize how much more there is to Black Sabbath than just brainless heavy riffing. The instrumental parts underlying those seemingly simple riffs are actually quite complex in some instances, giving full voice to the song arrangements.

Predictably, critics savaged Black Sabbath and Paranoid at the time, only to turn around and induct the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005. Of course, this is the same critical community that missed the boat on Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Queen . . . in fact, it’s hard to remember the last time these critics were right. Then, as now, rock critics tended to miss (or dismiss) the reasons why fans liked bands that were commercially successful. Far from being defensive, the members of Black Sabbath seem completely disinterested in the opinions of critics, focusing instead on their fans.

This DVD features excellent bonus features that cover the band’s influences, the individual parts from the musicians, a rundown of tracking the songs from the original master tapes and more.

Even if you’re not a Black Sabbath fan, this is a fascinating look at the writing and recording process of an album. If you already like Sabbath, this is an essential guide to one of the group’s most important albums.

When You’re Strange is a widely acclaimed documentary about The Doors. It received awards at SXSW, The Sundance Film Festival and more. Peter Travers from Rolling Stone called it “hypnotic.” And while it really is an insightful look at the band, the film is not without its flaws.

My biggest complaint with this film is identical to my complaint with virtually everything that’s been written or filmed about the group. Because Jim Morrison was such a unique front man with such an unusual presence, and because he died at such a young age, it’s very difficult to tell the story of The Doors without resorting to mythologizing the late singer. That’s true of Danny Sugerman’s book No One Here Gets Out Alive, it was true of Oliver Stone’s movie The Doors, and it’s also true of When You’re Strange. There’s a lot of interesting material here, and it’s presented well, but I still don’t feel like it gets to the man behind the myth.

The strengths of the film are in the archival footage, which is painstakingly put together as a visual timeline of the band’s career. Director Tom DiCillo also does a great job of placing The Doors in context, using footage to capture the mood of cultural upheaval which gave rise to not only The Doors, but the discontented youth who embraced the band. It’s interesting to see that generation facing the exact same liberal versus conservative issues that we are still struggling with today. Actor Johnny Depp is the perfect choice to narrate the film, too; he has enough clout as a celebrity to pull it off, but still seems like enough of an outsider to relate to the themes of the movie.

Apart from mythologizing Morrison, When You’re Strange suffers from an undue focus on the singer, again like everything else ever written or filmed about The Doors. As talented as the late singer was, he was only one person in a collective of four people. The film could have been more balanced by including some recent interviews with the three surviving members and telling more of their personal back stories. After all, when you hear the music of The Doors, you’re hearing the musical efforts of those three players, with Morrison singing over the top. Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore are the players responsible for the unmistakably unique sound of The Doors, and they could have been more fully represented.

One of the really interesting parts of this DVD is in the bonus features. Jim Morrison’s father, Admiral George C. Morrison, gave an exclusive interview to discuss his son’s life, and it provides a fascinating look at Jim Morrison, the real person. Jim’s sister Anne is also interviewed, and between the two of them you emerge with a very different picture of the late singer as someone who once had a stable family life, a sharp contrast to the way Jim Morrison presented himself. It’s both touching and somewhat sad to hear the Admiral speak with pride about a son who had rejected everything his father’s life was about, and fascinating to hear Jim’s sister explain that Morrison probably broke off ties with his family because he felt that his musical career would be an embarrassment to them. It’s a picture of the human side of Morrison that is missing elsewhere.

Overall, When You’re Strange is well worth seeing for any fan of The Doors, casual or serious. Just be prepared to wade through some hyperbole to get to the facts of the matter.

    Ozzy Osbourne’s life of excess has been very well-documented. On the outside it’s a sordid tale of drugs and alcohol, sex, violence, bat- and dove-biting, and multiple arrests that easily tops even the most tawdry exploits of Led Zeppelin or Motley Crue.

    There’s plenty of tabloid fodder in I Am Ozzy, to be sure; Osbourne does not shrink one bit from the darker aspects of his life, and in  fact this book reveals quite a few stories that hadn’t been public knowledge before; for instance, he talks quite openly about the fact that he was still actively using drugs throughout the run of the MTV reality show The Osbournes, during a time when most fans had believed that he was sober. And he doesn’t stint on the details of some of his crazier stunts, either; probably more than half of this book is devoted to Ozzy’s various sordid travails. After all, that’s exactly what fans expect from the self-proclaimed “Prince of Darkness”.

     What I did not expect was how sweet and likeable Osbourne comes off. Despite a feeling of horror at some of the insane things he’s done while on drugs, I came away from reading this book with a sense that Ozzy Osbourne is really a nice guy, albeit one who has lived a life I can barely fathom. He is so scathingly honest about his own failings that you end up rooting for him to overcome them in the end, and indeed, it seems as if Ozzy himself can hardly believe that he not only survived, but thrived despite dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, drugs and booze and all of the other obstacles he’s faced, many of them self-inflicted. And although he readily admits time and time again his shortcomings as a father and husband, his pride in  and love for his children and his wife shines through it all. “I’m like Coco the Clown, me,” he writes (or his ghost writer Chris Ayres writes for him). “At the end of the day I come home, take off my greasepaint and my big red nose, and become Dad.”

     The other standout quality of this book is Osbourne’s sense of humor. I spent half the time I was reading this book practically holding my sides from laughing, so deadly funny are some of his observations. The fact that he doesn’t even seem to intend to be funny only makes some of it that much funnier. Ozzy relays one story about him and Geezer Butler running into a young Robert Plant just after he’d been offered a gig with the New Yardbirds  -  which turned into Led Zeppelin. “I’m not sure I’m gonna be taking the gig, to be honest,” Plant told the other struggling musicians. “I’ve just put a new band together.” When Geezer asked him what the band was for which he might turn down Jimmy Page, Plant replied, “Hobbstweedle.” Another howlingly funny story involves Roger Whittaker’s curtains, but probably one of my favorites from the book involves a gig Ozzy played at a prison in the late Eighties. He drinks a cup of tea made for him by an inmate who turns out to have killed eight people by poisoning, then spends the entire live show in terror because he keeps recognizing famous criminals in the audience. “At one point I looked down and there in the front row was Jeremy Bamber, the bloke who murdered his entire family and then tried to make it look like his mentally ill sister had done it. His face had been on the front page of every tabloid in Britain for months,” Ozzy writes. “He gave me a big smile, did the old Bambinator.” Another inmate in the crowd turns out to be “one of the kids who had tried to cut the head off that police officer during the Broadwater Farm riot. The last thing I saw was this kid taking off a shoe and hitting himself on the head with it. Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I thought. Nice seeing ya, I’m off now.”

     I have to praise Ozzy’s co-author Chris Ayres for the fine job he did organizing what must have been hundreds of hours of interviews with Osbourne into a cohesive narrative that not only tells the story of Ozzy’s life, but manages to retain his own voice while doing so. Too often these as-told-to books can come off too polished to be the work of the person whose life story they are supposed to be telling. Not so with I Am Ozzy. It’s almost like getting to sit down and ask Ozzy Osbourne all of the questions you’ve ever wondered about him, and he’s sitting there answering them.

     I should also point out that with the uncensored language, not to mention the lurid details of Ozzy’s exploits, it should go without saying that this book is not for kids, the easily offended or the faint of heart. But then again, those people are probably not the intended audience for this book, anyway.

    On June 30, 1990 an impressive lineup of some of Britain’s most legendary musicians performed a concert at the Knebworth House in Hertsfordshire to benefit  Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy and the Brit School of Performing Arts. Billed as “The Best British Rock Concert Of All Time”, the show was captured for a 2-disc set originally released by Polydor in 1990.

     On March 23rd, Eagle Rock Entertainment re-issued the double CD to celebrate the 20th anniversary of that memorable concert. Boasting a lineup that includes Paul McCartney,  Elton John, Genesis, Robert Plant, Tears For Fears and many more, this CD is not only an interesting snapshot of that day, but also an overview of several decades of British rock music.

     My personal favorite among the performances is Genesis. This set captures the “Turn It On Again” medey that includes “Somebody To Love”, “Satisfaction”, “Twist and Shout”, and more. Phil Collins is in fine voice and the performances are tight and energetic all around. Another very strong performance  -  unexpectedly, for me at least  -  is Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”. That’s a song I can’t say I ever liked when it was in release, but it’s undeniable how well it’s played and sung here. Cliff Richard and the Shadows turn in a typically strong set, as does Elton John. 

On the down side, Robert Plant’s solo set tends to point out that his solo songs from that era don’t really hold a candle to his past with Led Zeppelin (or his future output), while Pink Floyd plods faithfully through musically accurate, but not-terribly-exciting versions of “Comfortably Numb” and “Run Like Hell”. One of the surprising lowlights of the set is Paul McCartney. This was long before his voice started to go, but he’s just not in great voice here. “Coming Up” is a song I’d just as soon never hear again anyway, and there are much better versions of “Hey Jude” elsewhere. There’s something kinda perfunctory about this performance, like he’s given the exact same performance before and will do so again tomorrow night, right down to the cheesy fake enthusiasm of screaming “You got it! You got it!” as the audience sings along.

Overall, though, there are far more strong performances than weak ones, and this double disc is well worth checking out, not only for the nostalgia of the event it captured, but for the fact that a portion of all sales will go to support  Nordoff-Robbins (the UK’s leading independent provider of music therapy) and the Brit School of Performing Arts.

     Sir Cliff Richard is one of the most successful rock singers of all time. He has had Number One singles in the UK in the last five consecutive decades. He has had 130 albums and EPs make the UK Top 20, more than any other artist. He’s also sold more than 250 million records.

     The Shadows were more than just Sir Cliff’s backing group; they were a separate entity that recorded a number of very influential instrumental tracks, including “Apache” and “Foot Tapper”. The group’s collaboration with Cliff Richard yielded a string of hits as well, influencing generations of aspiring musicians. In 2009 Cliff and the Shadows celebrated their fiftieth anniversary by reuniting for a string of shows, capped off by a performance at 02 Arena.  That concert is captured on this DVD, a retrospective of a staggering career full of hits.

     I wasn’t born until 1969, so this music is really the soundtrack of a generation prior to mine. I was aware of it, and an awful lot of guitar players that I interview cite The Shadows as an influence, but I have to admit I had only a passing familiarity with this music prior to watching this DVD. It’s really very impressive. Most of the time when a band has been around this long,  it’s a safe bet that the members have begun to lose their individual abilities, and often when a band hasn’t played together for a long time, it just can’t recapture the magic it once had.

     Not so with Cliff and the Shadows. Opening with the twangy goodness of “We Say Yeah” , the band presents a mind-boggling set of timeless hits in a wide array of styles. Sir Cliff’s voice still sounds great, and I really like the old-time showbiz razzmatazz with which the band presents its set. The players still sound like a band, too, instead of a bunch of guys who just got back together.  It’s an impressive mix of styles; “A Voice in the Wilderness” is the sound that launched ten million prom slow dances, while “Dancing Shoes” has a great groove. Today’s over-produced rockers could learn a lot from the clean, minimalist arrangements of songs like “I’m The Lonely One”; the real groove is in the spaces between the notes, not in playing as fast and hard as you can.

     The band is uniformly excellent, but guitarist Hank Marvin in particular shows why he is regarded as one of the most influential players in rock music history. You’ve heard these licks a million times, but that’s only because Marvin invented them and everyone else ripped them off. Marvin turns in flawless renditions of “Shadoogie”, “Apache”, “Foot Tapper”, and he also shines on the country-flavored acoustic tune “Travellin’ Light”. With his huge glasses he reminds me a little bit of a guitar-playing mad scientist, gleefully presenting a new invention he just cooked up in his basement lab.

     There’s also one new track entitled “Singing The Blues”. It’s not usually a good idea for an older band to play a new song, because it almost always pales in comparison to the older hits. By contrast, “Singing The Blues” sounds like it was ripped from the band’s chart run, like it could have been a lost track from that original era. Overall I’m very pleasantly surprised by the quality of this DVD, from the performance, to the sound, to the filming itself. There’s also some great behind-the scenes bonus footage with interviews and rehearsals that should be interesting to even the most ardent fan. Whether you’re a huge Cliff and the Shawdows fan or a relative newcomer like myself, there’s a lot to like about Cliff and the Shadows: The Final Reunion.

The Final Reunion
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     It’s interesting, I routinely interview some of the most legendary rock performers of the last several decades, and yet for some reason very few of them are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the last six months alone I have interviewed members of Yes, Heart, Boston, Styx, The Runaways (Lita Ford), KISS, Foghat, Kansas, Foreigner, Journey and more. Those bands help form the backbone of the classic rock genre, and yet not a single one is in the Hall of Fame. Yet this year marks the induction of bands such as Abba and The Hollies, while previous years have seen Madonna and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five join those hallowed ranks.

     I admit, this is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine as an observer of the scene, and I ask people in these bands all the time why they think they haven’t gotten the nod. That’s what got me thinking, this year in order to celebrate the Class of 2010 induction, why not throw it open to a vote and ask the fans themselves what are their favorite bands that they feel ought to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but aren’t?

     One of the things that I feel is really wrong with the nomination and induction process is that it allows the fans no voice at all. They are, after all, the very people whose money  -  in the form of their purchasing decisions  -  fuels the economy of the business we’re all in, including Rolling Stone and including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I am absolutely convinced that if the fans did have a voice, the Hall of Fame would be much more inclusive of popular success and would more closely resemble the tastes of true rock fans, instead of Jann Wenner’s personal record collection.

     So here’s your chance. I am asking each of you to suggest ( in the comments section below or via email at sterlingwit@aol.com) a band  -  or as many as you would like  -  that you feel should be in the Hall of Fame, but isn’t. Feel free to argue your case and give reasons why you think this band deserves the honor. I will tabulate the results and, along with my Long Live Rock co-host jeb Wright, we will narrow it down to the top ten choices, and then we will create a special episode of Long Live Rock  devoted to counting down the top ten.

     We will feature short interview segments with some of the members of each of our top ten bands as well as taking listener calls. This special episode will air Sunday, March 14th, the day before the 2010 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony airs on Fuse.

Again, you can make your suggestions in the comments section below or via email at sterlingwit@aol.com. May the best bands win!

     For the most part I am not a particular fan of the journalistic approach in which the writer is actually a character in the story, at least not for non-fiction. I prefer my rock bios as straightforward as newspaper articles, but that’s not generally how it works. It is a genre that lends itself to hagiography by rock writers who usually choose their subjects because, naturally enough, they love their music,  which in turn can make it hard to separate the fan from the journalist. That’s part of why so many rock bios are just fanboy exercises that shed no new light on their subject.

     When I picked up Marc Spitz’ Bowie: A Biography, that’s honestly what I expected. After all, the author begins by sheepishly apologizing for the fact that he has chosen to intersperse his own personal stories with the life of David Bowie. It is his way of acknowledging just how much impact Bowie’s music has had on his own life, which is fair enough, but it did set the alarm bells off for me.

     Thankfully, for the most part that fear is unwarranted. Spitz has his fan moments, to be sure, but overall Bowie: A Biography is so well-researched and so meticulously detailed that it presents its subject from enough different angles to get some sense of his strengths and weaknesses.

     One of the strengths of this narrative is in the early years of Bowie’s career, before the fame and myth-making.  Spitz presents an interesting portrait of an ambitious young singer on the make, but without a clear focus to his intent the hapless young David stumbles from one ill-conceived project (mime!?) to the next, enduring years of failure before finally landing upon the persona and music approach that made his fame. It’s interesting to see the young Bowie not as a chameleon, so much as someone who doesn’t know his true identity.

Or even more to the point, perhaps doesn’t have a real identity, at least not one that will ever be known to the public.  Bowie comes across equal parts savvy marketeer, brilliant artist, and spoiled star. At one point in his early Seventies fame he was abusing drugs heavily and apparently living on an allowance from his managers, a situation not too uncommon in rock music. It’s interesting to note that although Bowie created most of the work that will probably stand as the largest part of his legacy in the Seventies, it wasn’t until the pop succeses of his much-less-regarded Eighties work like “Let’s Dance” that he became very wealthy. The book follows Bowie up through that period and into Tin Machine, but it’s fitting that the main focus is on the years of Bowie’s career that were the most successful. Bowie’s much-discussed bisexuality is also addressed, but it comes off as being less about experimentation and more about ambition, as many of those who knew him posit that he tended to get involved early on with people who might be able to help his career, of whatever gender.

Overall I could still live wthout Spitz’ asides about his own life. It doesn’t particularly matter to me what Bowie records he used in college for drugs and which ones he used for sex, and I doubt it will to most readers, either. The author also tends to state his own opinion as fact ( ” . . . it’s not a stretch to say that ‘Life On Mars?’ is one of the  best pop songs ever written”) instead of relying on existing reviews and presenting alternating point and counterpoint in assessing Bowie’s work. But balanced against the exhaustive research he conducted and the thoroughness of his presentation, those are small complaints against an otherwise very strong biography of one of rock’s most puzzling and iconic figures.

     As the title implies, BK3 is guitarist Bruce Kulick’s third solo album, and it’s a dramatic step forward for the former KISS/current Grand Funk Railroad member.

     Not that there’s anything wrong with either Audio Dog or Transformer, Bruce’s previous solo efforts. Both are very solid representations of his capabilities, but in some ways each of them was constrained by Kulick’s own limitations. I don’t mean that as disparagement; it’s just that each of those albums had more of  a tight focus on Kulick’s own strengths,  the greatest of which is his guitar playing. There were more instrumental tracks on those albums, and that always tends to limit the commercial appeal of a project to a die-hard community. And on the tracks that had vocals, Kulick performed most of those vocals himself, with sometimes mixed results. His is an emerging voice; Kulick is not a bad singer, but he’s inarguably a much better guitar player and writer.

     The strength of BK3 lies in its accessibility and in the diversity of the tracks. This is by far Kulick’s most fully-realized solo effort to date, comparable sonically and in its production to the best of the work he did in KISS or Union. There are a lot of different moods here, from the heavy rock riffs, to melodic pop, to instrumental rock, to what could almost be termed psychedelia/progressive rock. Part of what I really like about this album is that it seems like it might have been pitched on some levels toward an audience that appreciates KISS and Union, but not in an obvious, calculated way; instead, it just seems like the work of an artist who understands what his fans want and knows how to give it to them. 

     There are some great guest appearances as well, which really help to give the album its depth of character. Kulick’s former KISS band mate Gene Simmons lends his voice to “Ain’t Gonna Die”, and the results are better than most of the music the pair made together in KISS. But the real revelation here is Gene’s son Nick Simmons, making his recording debut on the first single “Hand of the King”. Let’s face it, that could have been a cheesy promotional move, but the track is actually one of the strongest on the album. 

     Other standouts include “No Friend Of Mine”, sung by former Union vocalist John Corabi; Knack front man Doug Fieger singing “Dirty Girl”; legendary guitarist Steve Lukather going toe-to-toe with Kulick on the instrumental “Between The Lines”; and the album’s final cut “Life”. Sung by Kulick himself, the acoustic-based track is unexpectedly Beatle-esque with its string arrangements and uplifting message. Throw in some sitar and you could almost picture George Harrison playing along. It’s an interesting step outside of the kind of songwriting we expect from Bruce Kulick.

     Overall, BK3 is an album that should please fans of Bruce Kulick’s past efforts, and it’s strong enough to warrant a listen from any fan of heavy rock, guitar-driven rock, or even melodic rock. I think some fans who expect this to be a self-indulgent solo outing from a guy who mainly plays guitar in a band will be very surprised by its diversity and quality.

Bk3
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