"Love Comes in Spurts" Welcome to 1977. While most partisans may claim Never Mind the Bollocks as the year's signature album (or, another crowd, The Clash), for me this is it and nothing else comes close. Containing just about the totality of Richard Hell (nee Meyers) songs—certainly the majority of what mattered, shortly before he teetered off into heroin-induced irrelevance—this thing explodes with energy and the kind of shrapnel that stays in your head for good, marking the ground zero of punk-rock. It hardly matters that such unpunk exercises as a bizarre, sludgy eight-minute workout ("Another World") and none other than a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover ("Walking on the Water") occur here. What does matter is Richard Hell's words and his sensibility and, even more and too often overlooked, the amazing guitar playing of Robert Quine, a lawyer who went on to become a New York City session man nonpareil, chipping in brilliant work with Lydia Lunch, Material, Lou Reed, Marianne Faithfull, on and on. Everything you need to know about this album and its moment is scrawled across Hell's chest on the original vinyl LP cover: "You make me _______."
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Blank Generation (1977)
"Love Comes in Spurts" Welcome to 1977. While most partisans may claim Never Mind the Bollocks as the year's signature album (or, another crowd, The Clash), for me this is it and nothing else comes close. Containing just about the totality of Richard Hell (nee Meyers) songs—certainly the majority of what mattered, shortly before he teetered off into heroin-induced irrelevance—this thing explodes with energy and the kind of shrapnel that stays in your head for good, marking the ground zero of punk-rock. It hardly matters that such unpunk exercises as a bizarre, sludgy eight-minute workout ("Another World") and none other than a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover ("Walking on the Water") occur here. What does matter is Richard Hell's words and his sensibility and, even more and too often overlooked, the amazing guitar playing of Robert Quine, a lawyer who went on to become a New York City session man nonpareil, chipping in brilliant work with Lydia Lunch, Material, Lou Reed, Marianne Faithfull, on and on. Everything you need to know about this album and its moment is scrawled across Hell's chest on the original vinyl LP cover: "You make me _______."
Just outta curiousity, All Music shows this album as containing 12 tracks; whereas your zip file contained only 10. Were "I'm Your Man" and "All the Way" added to later versions?
ReplyDeleteThanks for all you do!
My upload had all 12 tracks, including the two you mention. But conceivably it could have been corrupted, which might explain why somebody trolled it?
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by.