Top Of The Pops 1972 Christmas Show

40 Year Itch: A Marvel-ous Concept Album

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40 years before Disney bought Marvel for $4 Billion, a British prog rock band called Icarus released a tribute album to the great superheroes of Marvel Comics. So you have songs called "Spiderman", "Thor", "Captain America" and "Conan The Barbarian". The lyrics are a bit over the top for the most part --though I like "Hulk"'s chorus: 

Hulk is on the rampage/ Doesn't understand

Cuz underneath that thick green hide is a very mixed up man

And speaking of mix ups, when Marvel's chief honcho found out about the album he demanded Marvel receive 50% of the royalties. Instead, Pye Records pulled the album...making The Marvel World of Icarus a super rare, super album about super heroes.

40 Year Itch: Wonderful Urbanity

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In the video below, frequent Beach Boys/Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks doesn't really have a hell of a lot to say about his 1972 classic Discover America. So I'll try to fill in the blanks just a bit. Don't get thrown by the title. This is an album that will help you discover Trinidad. Especially the quaint , reportorial kind of folk songs made famous by calypso kings like Wilmoth Houdini and Attila the Hun. Songs like "Bing Crosby" and  "FDR in Trinidad" ( recorded on this album with the help of Little Feat) have lyrics that read like editorials in small town newspapers: 

We are privileged to see the democratic president of the great republic 
 With his charming and genial personality and his wonderful urbanity 
 We were struck by his modest style 
and we were intrigued by the famous Roosevelt smile



Discover America isn't all calypso and steel drums. There are covers of two Allen Toussaint songs and one by Little Feat. "John Jones" has hints of reggae. Would a major label ever distribute anything like this in 2012? Probably not. But I agree with AllMusic's decree that this is an "eclectic masterpiece of multi-cultural Americana.

 

40 Year Itch: Taxes, Death and Trouble

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The "Trouble Man" film score was one of my loveliest projects and one of the great sleepers of all our time. I'll probably be dead and gone before I get the probable acclaim from the "Trouble Man" album, musical track, that I feel I should get. And put to a symphony, if someone took my album and did a symphony on it, I think it would be quite interesting
-Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye followed up his Motown masterpiece What's Going On  with Trouble Man, a great soundtrack to a not so good blaxploitation movie starring Robert Hooks as "Mr T."( Yeah , I didn't see it either.)

Marvin Gaye had been cast in a 1971 film called Chrome and Hot Leather. But he was virtually ignored by the director. As Cameron Crowe describes it in a recent NPR interview , Gaye spent most of the time hanging out with the crew "learning the craft of the movie through the men who were shooting it and that is how you really discover the beating heart of a movie...what happened was he took, I think, this experience into the studio."

Saxophonist Trevor Lawrence, who played on the soundtrack, says Marvin was very hands on. Gaye is credited with vocals, drums, keyboards and piano. The drums are often looped. The keyboard is a mini moog . More than anything else, there's an alchemy at work--of jazz, orchestra and soul.This year Universal Music has re-released a special edition of the soundtrack.Most people agree it's worth checking out--tho'  Robert Christgau dismissed the album at the time with two lines:
         "Buy the single unless you like soundtrack albums. This ain't no super-fly shit"

40 Year Itch: Coming over Charaton Bridge

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Cult faves Gentle Giant--celebrated even today for their complex, sophisticated, eccentric recordings-- had to endure the most shaming indignity before heading out on the tour to support Octopus ( released in December of 1972). They had to open for Black Sabbath:

"It was perhaps the most ridiculous pairing of groups ever in the history of show business. For the most part we got booed off the stage... At a show at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, we went on stage and the Sabbath fans were shouting "get off, we want Sabbath" and we were just getting set to play 'Funny Ways'. We pulled out the cellos and violins, and the crowd starting heckling immediately, but we were gradually starting to get past it, when someone threw a cherry bomb on stage. (Phil Shulman) made sure we all stopped playing and said we needed to get off the stage. As we were leaving the stage, Phil grabbed the mic and said to the crowd "you guys are a bunch of fucking cunts!", and the boo that went up after that was enormous! To this day I'll never forget it! We were sort of vindicated later on, as we thought we were never going to play Los Angeles again after the cherry bomb incident, but later on the Octopus tour we were able to sell out consistently there, so something clicked with the fans. “”Derek Shulman on Gentle Giant's failure to win over Black Sabbath's audience in 1972



For  the Gentle Giant novice, Octopus is the place to begin. It features all the odd, multi-instrumental, multi vocal adventures and  twee and twiddly moments that are the hallmark of this band of brilliant musicians... with the benefit of being extremely listenable.

                                                         Octopus, the US album cover

   One of the album highlights is "Knots" which kicks off with three part a capella vocals and then just gets stranger and stranger.



I suppose the oddest footnote to Gentle Giant is the fact that upon the band's break up, Derek Shulman became a big deal at Polygram Records. He's the guy who signed Bon Jovi.

"My Top Ten" By Musical Youth's Junior Waite

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To promote the monster single "Pass The Dutchie ( On The Left Hand Side)" which went #1 in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland and #10 in the US, drummer Junior Waite gave the November 25, 1982 edition  of Smash Hits a reggae heavy Top ten list, with two shout outs to Black Uhuru. The image above comes courtesy of Brian at Like Punk Never Happened.

40 Year Itch: Hi Hi HI Banned in the UK

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When the BBC banned the A side " Hi Hi Hi", released on December 1st, 1972,  for its sexually suggestive lyrics "get you ready for my body gun" ( as opposed to the obvious drug reference : "we're gonna get hi hi hi"), disc jockeys flipped the 45 and played the reggae toss off "C Moon". In the UK "C Moon" became a Top 5 hit. McCartney revisited the song in concert every so often including his surprise performance at Amoeba Records in Hollywood back in 2007.

Probably the most interesting thing about the song is who played the instruments. Guitarist Henry McCullough played drums. Drummer Danny Seiwell played vibraphone. Denny Laine played bass. Probably the least interesting thing about the song is its lyrics:

C moon C moon C moon is she

  C moon C moon C moon is me.