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 Ongoing Features - Member Stuff
             Best of the Mess
Nine Questions with the men of Sequart A Sequel Soliloquy: Scot Eric's Top Twelve #2's of All Time The Golden Age Blog - Flash 11-20! American Comics: The Illusion of Change The Golden Age Blog - Flash 1-10! CriticalMess interviews writer Steve Bryant! Mess member Jim Beard helms new Batman TV book!! Nine Questions with Pamela Des Barres |
Pamela Des Barres, Cynthia Plaster Caster, Lori Lightning, Cherry Vanilla; all names you associate when it comes down to girls and Rock 'n' Roll.
Ian "Mac" McLagan is the king of the British rock keyboard, and he's been in the business since the early sixties, when he backed up blues legends like Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson...Somewhat less legendarily, Mac is also a bona-fide friend of Critical Mess, and sat down for nine questions with us!
The first of three contractual-obligation albums, Time is an example of many sometimes-despised genres. It is a concept album, a science-fiction album, arguably prog-rock. From the bubbly Kirby-krackle “Prologue” with Wagnerian chords and faux-poetic, over-Vocodered recitative, through hit singles and a time-travel fantasy to the “Epilogue” with a parting warning, Time is another Jeff Lynne masterpiece despite his now dismissing it...
...I was 9, almost ten that Christmas. It was the only time I remember music as a gift in that household, and it seemed so strange, because our house was usually full of music—radio or albums playing all the time. Mom had a cousin with the means to record 8-tracks, and on one visit to his place we became the happy owners of a goldmine of stuff, a mixtape of Elvis, hits of the day, country…
Red Hot is a song many people have heard. Not most, not at this point in time. People are born every day into a world in which the language of the music originally described as Rock'n'Roll is slipping further and further from the lexicon. And so, men like Billy Lee Riley are a dying breed. And sadly, Billy Lee himself has now died. 
Being a life-long fan of Michael Jackson (even if I've kept that fact somewhat on the downlow since high school), it was thus inconceivable to me for the longest time that there could, in fact, be people in this world who did not feel the same joy and nostalgia every time "Beat It" or "Billie Jean" would come on the radio, or who wouldn't try to do the freaky zombie shoulder shuffle every Halloween during the umpteenth playing of "Thriller."
Revolver may well be the best rock-pop album ever made. Certainly bands have worked through entire careers working through a genre the Beatles dispense with in two-and-a-half minutes here. It's endlessly inventive and harder-edged than its famous successor; but maybe it's not perfect: I always think that "Good Day Sunshine / Doctor Robert" may have made a perfectly reasonable single for the populist consumer, leaving contemporary platter "Paperback Writer / Rain" to appear on the album in their stead, making a Herculean album even stronger.
...In which our heroes enter the fabled "middle period" of their recording career, and became more or less untouchable. And about time too, because the new breed, such as the Who, were threatening to make their hummable tunes seem overly polite and tame. However, here the Beatles sacrifice raw excitement for art. And art is what they became, with this album: the legendary inspiration for the equally storied Pet Sounds, and the beginning of a three album run which would cement their reputation forever. Here, finally, is the biggest band in the world becoming the best band in the world, something near unthinkable today.
