John B. Fitzroy presents … Gig #98: 40 under known and arguably great or at least cool or just strange songs by overly known great or “great” historical bands and solo artists *

* (restored)

 

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The Monkees Shorty Blackwell (1969)
The closing song of The Monkees’ least successful album Instant Replay is a real head-scratcher, an indulgent avant-guard piece of God doesn’t know what.

 

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Bee Gees Lemons Never Forget (1968)
“Lemons Never Forget” is a forgotten track from the Bee Gees’ Horizontal which is considered the heaviest album they ever recorded.

 

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The Fall Bonkers in Phoenix (1995)
This was supposed to sound as if you were at a festival (e.g. Phoenix!) with all the sounds of the different music tents merging together.

 

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Pink Floyd Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict (1969)
The track consists of several minutes of noises resembling rodents and birds simulated by Roger Waters’ voice and other techniques, such as tapping the microphone played at different speeds, followed by Ron Geesin providing a few stanzas of spoken word in an exaggerated Scottish burr. There is a hidden message in the song at approximately 4:32. If played at half speed, Waters can be heard to say, “That was pretty avant-garde, wasn’t it?” Also, at the very end of the rant, Waters is heard to say, “Thank you.”

 

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Lou Reed Bottoming Out (1983)
“Bottoming Out” is told from the point of view of a person an awful lot like Lou Reed at the time, but not exactly, into discipline and control but weakened and tortured by addiction and a deep hunger for redemption, a drunk by the sound of it, with a searing drama about a terrible night and a bad accident.

 

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Nine Inch Nails This is How It All Begins (1999)
From The Fragile era, this song was on the NIN.com website. I have never found it anywhere else.

 

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Bryan Ferry She’s Leaving Home (1976)
from the All This And World War II Soundtrack Album

 

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Siouxsie & the Banshees Il Est Né, Le Divin Enfant (1982)
On November 26, 1982, Siouxsie and the Banshees released a double AA-side single off their album A Kiss in the Dreamhouse that included the song “Melt!” penned by bassist Steven Severin and their cover of the traditional French Christmas carol “Il Est Né, Le Divin Enfant” (English: “He Is Born, The Holy Child”) which comes from the region of Provence in France and was first published in a 1874 collection of Christmas tunes titled ‘Airs Des Noël Lorrain’ compiled by the organist of the Cathedral Saint-Die, René Grosjean.

 

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Yoko Ono Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City (1970)
Using a discarded recording of Harrison on sitar and a Lennon break beat, Ono exorcises about a miscarriage through that hallmark wailing.

 

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Iggy Pop Five Foot One (1979)
New Values was released in April 1979 by record label Arista. Although well-received critically, the album was not a commercial success, only reaching number 180 in the Billboard Top 200 album chart. Videos were made for “I’m Bored” and “Five Foot One”.

 

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Pavement Cherry Area (1997)
Rare gay panic-themed b-side from the Shady Lane EP

 

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Black Sabbath Spiral Architect (1973)
The band invited an orchestra to play on ‘Spiral Architect’ “but couldn’t cram all of the musicians and their instruments into Morgan Studios. They ended up at the nearby Pye Studio along the road, with Ozzy trying to explain what he wanted them to play like some sort of mad conductor. He had no written music to give the orchestra, he just hummed the part and they picked it up.”

 

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Kraftwerk Heavy Metal Kids (1971)
A few years into the 21st Century, an astounding new recording arrived onto the world wide web – a lovingly remastered professional radio recording of the lost original Kraftwerk line-up. The opening track is listed as “Heavy Metal Kids” an intriguing title but one that begs the question is this just the bootlegger referencing how heavy the music sounds or were Kraftwerk referencing William Burroughs? One thing is certain, it is heavy.

 

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ABBA Tiger (1976)
The city is a nightmare, a horrible dream / Some of us will dream it forever / Look around the corner and try not to scream, it’s me.

 

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Sonic Youth Queen Anne Chair (2001)
from the Noho Furniture sessions.

 

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David Bowie All Saints (1976)
A gnarly squall of low-end electronic noise punctuated by sprite-like coils of treble, this track originally intended for Low more than matches the original industrialists for uncompromisingly ugly beauty and offers a stark contrast to the far less visceral instrumental pieces which made the album’s final cut.

 

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The Rolling Stones Schoolboy Blues (1967)
“Schoolboy Blues” (1970) is a parody of Dr. John’s “The Lonesome Guitar Strangler”, released on his 1969 album Babylon. It was written and played by Mick Jagger to be the Stones’ final single for Decca Records. The Stones were leaving Decca and starting their own record label, but Decca claimed they were owed one more single under their contract. So the Stones delivered this song, with its context and language chosen specifically to anger Decca executives; there are explicit references to fellatio and anal sex in the lyrics. Decca refused to issue the song on an album, although about 100 promotional 12″ singles of it were pressed in the United States.

 

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ELO Look at Me Now (1971)
The sound is unique on this recording in comparison to the more slickly produced ELO albums of the subsequent Lynne years, incorporating many wind instruments and replacing guitar parts with heavy, “sawing” cello riffs, giving this recording an experimental “Baroque-and-roll” feel.

 

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The Grateful Dead What’s Become Of The Baby (1968)
“What’s become of the Baby” only includes Jerry Garica’s vocals, and some odd back ground, wind sounding noises. The song sounds like it was recorded in a stadium. Similar to how the the national anthem sounds when sang in some kind of stadium.

 

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Neil Young Last Dance (1973)
Eighth and final track from Neil Young’s (in)famous and unissued on CD live album Time Fades Away, taken from the HDCD test pressings made around the mid-1990s.

 

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Leonard Cohen Queen Victoria (1972)
Recorded by Cohen alone in his Tennessee hotel room in 1972.

 

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The Beach Boys Funky Pretty (1973)
A cosmic love song to an astrological lovely, it mounts its grit in a swirl of harmonic complications with a defiantly baroque choral signature: Vivaldi meets the Regents on a magic synthesizer built on economical and even monotonous musical premises that delight in their unreasonably complex development.

 

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Led Zeppelin Four Sticks (1971)
The title came from the fact that drummer, John Bonham, played with two sets of two drumsticks, totaling four, a result of him being very frustrated with not being able to get the track down right during recording sessions at Island Studios. After he grabbed the second pair of sticks and beat the drums as hard as he could, he recorded the perfect take and that was the one they kept.

 

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My Bloody Valentine Forever and Again (1985)
An unfocused and derivative song of post-punk goth rock that offers no indication of the revolutionary guitar sound the group would later create.

 

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Bruce Springsteen Candy’s Room (1978)
“It’s like a rocket ship that blasts out of somewhere private into the world.”

 

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Fleetwood Mac Tell Me All the Things You Do (1969)
Kiln House is an overlooked album that marks Fleetwood Mac’s transition with the departure of Peter Green from being an acclaimed Brit-blues group to a much tighter alt-rock group. The kicker, “Tell Me All the Things You Do” is a blistering number that stands as one of the finest achievements of Fleetwood Mac!

 

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XTC Pulsing Pulsing (1979)
B-side for a single from XTC’s Drums And Wires album about blood and where it goes.

 

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The Who Real Good Lookin’ Boy (2003)
This weird paean to Roger Daltry’s “good looks” was one of two new ‘Bonus Tracks’ The Who released on their 2004 Then And Now compilation.

 

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Sparks England (1975)
Obscure b-side of the equally obscure “I Want to Hold Your Hand” Beatles cover single and one of Sparks’ jewels of the 1970s.

 

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Radiohead We Suck Young Blood (2003)
Like Thom Yorke fucking around on a piano while someone clapped in another room and it was accidentally recorded, but not one of Radiohead’s GOOD songs where Thom Yorke is fucking around on a piano while someone claps in another room and it was accidentally recorded.

 

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Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band Upon The My O My (1974)
The one really good if compromised song on the first of Beefheart’s two dismal commercial albums Unconditionally Guaranteed, about which Magic Band drummer Art Tripp recalled, “When the band finally got our album copies, we were horrified. As we listened, it was as though each song was worse than the one which preceded it.”

 

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The Kinks He’s Evil (1977)
From Preservation Act 2, a 1974 concept album, and The Kinks’ twelfth studio album. It was not well received by critics and sold poorly (peaking on the Billboard 200 at #114).

 

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Fugazi Ex Spectator (2001)
“Ex-Spectator,” the first time you hear it, appears to do nothing. But the more you listen to it, suddenly all the disparate bits (double drums, loud smashing chords at intro, busy-as-hell breaks) make sense as a unified whole. That’s smart songwriting – refusing to rely on overused riffs, intensity for the sake of intensity and song constructions that do what the audience expects them to.

 

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Alice Cooper Refrigerator Heaven (1970)
None of Easy Action’s songs have ever been performed live by Cooper since the 1971 tour in support of their third album Love It to Death.

 

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Tom Petty I Don’t Belong (1998)
Tom and the Heartbreakers do a rare unreleased song from the 90s that I found on a rare bootleg.

 

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The Byrds Tribal Gathering (1968)
It’s so hard to place, it’s such a strange track. What were they on when they wrote it? How do you get a time signature like that? They were such a strong writing force, individually and collectively, and there was always something explorative about what they were doing as a unit.

 

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Blink 182 I Wanna Fuck A Dog In The Ass (2001)
Though many people do not know it, all of Blink 182’s songs are about oral and anal sex except for two which are about suicide and one which is about divorce.

 

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Bob Dylan Seven Curses (1963)
What makes “Seven Curses” work as a song by Dylan, is that apart from being a haunting and moving story sung well to an exquisite tune, there is no bile and no vindictive feeling coming from the singer, for he is still singing the same song in the same way with the same accompaniment – the emptiness is endless. But instead the repeating of “him” is like the hammer blow. It seems quite extraordinary that this was not released as part of Freewheelin.

 

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Throbbing Gristle Zyklon B Zombie (1978)
B-side of the 1978 single “United”, “Zyklon B Zombie”, has been seen as a parody of punk rock music.

 

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Paul McCartney Kreen-Akrore (1970)
The last track on McCartney’s solo debut is a four-minute instrumental garnished with some guitars, bird calls, and a splash of vocal harmony, but it’s mostly McCartney playing the drums.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. I thought I would restore today’s hopefully fun, easygoing post that a friend of mine made for the blog under a pseudonym semi-ages ago. I know the last time he (and I) were interested to hear of any thematically appropriate tunes people around here felt like adding to the shebang, so if something springs to mind, give a shout. Thanks, and thanks again years later, “John”. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Thanks. I’m going to check out the Wet Unboxing too. ** Colin Herd, Ha ha, nice. Hi, Colin! I got your email, and I’ll write to you today. Have a good one. ** David Ehrenstein, Well, that was the video’s joy, to me anyway. Yes, RIP Roeg. Weird, we were just discussing his work here not even a few days ago. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Thank you again so much. The ‘Salo’ video was one of my very faves for the very reason you suggest. Sure, rebellions within genres have happened and will, but something new that popularly rejects, say, Rap, with the totality that, say, punk rejected disco and prog or that Rave rejected ‘the song’ is the thing that’s hard to imagine. Would be amazing. ** James Nulick, Hey, James. Happy Monday. In the case of the TV script, a deadline is very useful. Otherwise, for me, mm, not so much, but I’m pretty disciplined and driven with my stuff. I do however like that you’re imposing a deadline for your novel for the obvious reasons. There’s no way I can get back into my novel until the TV script is a done deal, and, yes, I am chomping to. I don’t yet know the exact date of the PGL screening in SF other than to safely say it will happen in the first two weeks of February. I know the venue, but I’m not yet allowed to announce that. I’ll give the specifics as soon as I have them and get the all clear. Would be great if it’s timed with your visit. Love, me. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. I trust you on the movie’s badness, and there aren’t that many loveable Coopers, truth be told. I can’t even imagine the thinking that would have lead to the decision that a film should be called ‘Hot Summer Nights’. Even when porn titles are a snore, they usually at least involve a pun. Nice about the Xmas trip. I like the Gramercy area. A mere quick stroll from the East Village for one thing. ** Kuleaton, I liked your story a whole lot, and I didn’t read a thing into it as far as I can tell. One of your best yet, I think. A boon. Thank you for working that greatly configured brain of yours on behalf of us peanut gallery constituents. Actually, a friend of mine who traveled in Asia last year told me that Cambodia was definitely the weirdest country that he trammelled. I don’t remember if it was weird in a good or not good way. I’ll ask. Japan is about as good as it gets, if you ask me. Yeah, the big strike/ demonstration on Saturday here was crazed, and one of its tangents happened on my very street. There were people running into our building for cover, and my apartment smelled like tear gas for hours. It was fun. ** Joey, Hi, J. Cool about Jarrod’s drawing. Can it be viewed? And it’s good you like his ass, obviously. And I’m obviously glad to hear you’re feeling better and more even keeled. Oh, well, if ‘on tape’ isn’t required then check out the ‘4 books I loved’ post from last week for my almost up-to-date recommendations. A friend of mine? No, I did not see your drawings at Evergreen. Huh. I will do that, of course. Congrats to them and to you. An ECT post? Hm, I would need to figure out some kind of aesthetically curious angle. I’ll give the idea a shot. Love, me. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, C. No, I don’t mind. Glad the performance post was insinuating. Ethyl Eichelberger was a great and unique genius. It took some squinting but I did see blurry you in the photo. Were you taking a selfie? Nice rapscallion-meets-art move there, the mask and the challenge and the resulting stress. You could’ve been a legendary star maybe? ** All right. I already propped the post today up north. I hope it causes something of a positive nature. See you tomorrow.