Todd Rundgren "Runt" (3*)

Whether you regard this effort as the self-titled debut of a band called Runt or as Todd Rundgren’s solo debut there’s no arguing where it lies in the Rundgren chronology which is, as far as I’m concerned, all that matters.

At the initial time of release, Runt was identified as a trio consisting of Rundgren (guitars, keyboards, vocals), and brothers Hunt (drums), and Tony Sales (bass), sons of comedian Soupy Sales who went on to collaborate with David Bowie in Tin Machine. The entire album was written and produced by Rundgren,who’d freed himself from the Nazz, but wasn’t quite ready (by all accounts) to go solo. As he stated about the subsequent Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren there were some things he couldn’t quite manage yet, and most of them involved rhythm section duties.

What he had managed to get his head around, however, was the studio, collecting an engineer’s credit for The Band’s Stage Fright, recorded at Albert Grossman’s Bearsville Studios in upstate New York and persuading Grossman that he had something to offer from his own artistic bat.

That should have been obvious from his stint with The Nazz, but here he’s out to demonstrate his ability to cut it on his own, presenting a blend of guitar driven power pop and piano-based ballads that come across as an interesting fusion of elements and hinted at interesting things to come.

Rundgren’s guitar work drives Broke Down and Busted, a gospel blues psychedelic workout before the first of the piano ballads (Believe in Me). The piano’s at the forefront for We Got to Get You a Woman, the breezy slice of Brill Building soundalike that turned into a minor hit (as it should have, it’s a rather classy number, very well put together in a  Laura Nyro meets Carole King fashion) and the poppy stuff continues with a rocking and surprisingly cheerful (given the circumstances) Who's That Man.

Rundgren drops the Carole King vocal tone on the next piano ballad, Once Burned, which may or may not have anything to do with the guest appearances from The Band’s Rick Danko and Levon Helm. There’s a bit more drive in the hard-hitting and rather power poppy Devil's Bite and Rundgren’s sarcastic streak comes to the fore in I'm in the Clique, a biting commentary on the state of the music industry with bustling riffs and repetitive  robotic vocals in the verses.

That same quirkiness also lurks behind the absence of lyrics in There Are No Words, with echoes of Gregorian chant and dash of Brian Wilson, and the Laura Nyro piano elements are back (he even checks her by name) at the start of Baby Let's Swing/The Last Thing You Said/Don't Tie My Hands, five and a half minutes of classy pop medley before another pop suite (nine and a quarter minutes of Birthday Carol) takes the listener through a fair proportion of the tricks up the Rundgren sleeve.

Birthday Carol’s subdued classical intro, an instrumental passage that has odd echoes of early Steve Miller Band with subdued horns that drifts into blues-styled guitar workout, harmony soaked piano ballad, subdued folky bit that builds back into rocking guitar and horn-driven R & B that drops back into classical territory doesn’t quite add up to everything and the kitchen sink, but it’s not far off.

File under: Signs of things to come. If you’re not familiar with the man and his work this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Allman Brothers Band "Idlewild South" (4*)

Right from the beginning of Dickey Betts’ Revival it’s obvious the second album by the Allman Brothers Band is the product of an outfit with some aspirations to commercial success. The self-titled debut album had identified them as an outfit with potential, but in a crowded marketplace they’d been doing it tough, and one suspects a realisation that they needed something that would find its way onto the airwaves if they were going to operate at anything beyond semi-starvation level.

As a result (and I suspect slotting Tom Dowd into the producer’s chair had a fair bit to do with it) Idlewild South presents as tighter, more accessible, reasonably commercial and definitely radio-friendly. Part of the credit, of course, also has to go to the emergence of Dickey Betts as a second writer in the outfit, and while he might have only contributed two tracks here, Revival’s poppy gospel delivered hints of a genuine commerciality and In Memory of Elizabeth Reed pointed towards another ABB trademark, the long jazz-inflected instrumental.

Rolling Stone described the album, which takes its name from the band's nickname for the Georgia farmhouse where they were living at the time (the comings and goings reminded them of Idlewild Airport) as comprising briefer, tighter, less 'heavy' numbers, which just about nails it as far as the first three tracks on Side One are concerned.

Dickey Betts’ Revival gets things off to a lively start and could, with a stroke of luck in the airplay department, have been a fairly successful single (think Blue Sky and Ramblin’ Man), Gregg Allman’s Don't Keep Me Wonderin' works as a reasonably poppy take on the blues and Midnight Rider comes across as an on the road campfire anthem and is, arguably, in a three way photo finish with Whipping Post and Dreams in the  Gregg Allman Signature Song Stakes.

Regardless of whether Dickey Betts actually had sex across the relevant grave in Macon’s Rose Hill Cemetery, almost seven minutes of In Memory of Elizabeth Reed’s Latin jazz  instrumental would also have worked in an FM radio environment and would have been handy, in a word of mouth sense, in promoting the band’s live appearances (sort of Hey, man, that was really cool but you should see what happens when they do it live)...

The only track on the album that looks back to the first album’s stone blues is the cover of the Willie Dixon/Muddy Waters Hoochie Coochie Man, though it’s Berry Oakley rather than Gregg who takes the vocal. Gregg, allegedly, doesn’t like to sing more than three in a row, and at this stage there weren’t too many Dickey Betts vocals, so it looks like Berry (or possibly Duane, who probably could but seems to have preferred not to) was about the only option.

But regardless of any shortcomings in the vocal department (Berry’s handy enough but he ain’t Gregg) the thunderous churning bass riff that drives the track makes it, for mine, the album’s highlight. Red hot solos and stinging licks from Dickey, and then Duane take off from there in a setting where it probably doesn’t matter who takes the microphone, and one shouldn’t neglect the thunderous drumming from Jaimoe and Butch Trucks that propels everything forward and maintains the momentum.

After that battering, the polished but relatively low key Please Call Home, with its weary Gregg Allman vocal and Leave My Blues at Home, which is mostly groove without going overboard on substance (impressive solos, though) probably seem like a bit of a let down, but wind things up rather neatly and would both have been FM-friendly.

Or at least they would have been if Hughesy was doing the DJ bit...

At a touch over thirty minutes, Idlewild South might seem a bit on the skimpy side time-wise, which is, of course, why I’d point the potential listener towards the two for less than the price of one Beginnings (I paid $10.99 at iTunes) which has both of the band’s first two albums in their entirety. Really, at the price you can’t go wrong, though there are issues when you split the tracks into the individual albums (my iTunes has the two albums listed between The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet and Teddy Thompson’s Bella).

The debut might have delivered a touch more power, but for production, songwriting and performance Idlewild South is definitely a superior package when you line it up beside The Allman Brothers Band, largely due to what Dickey Betts brings to the party as a second source of original material. As a result there’s a fair bit more sonic more variety, and while it mightn’t be 100% killer there’s a definite lack of filler.

The band were, at this point, still in the process of establishing themselves and exploring the possibilities, and the apex of their achievement is just around the corner with At Fillmore East.

Kevin Ayers "Shooting at the Moon" (4*)

He might have decided he’d had enough at the end of Soft Machine’s gig opening for Jimi Hendrix across North America, taken the guitar Hendrix gave him and headed for the shores of the Mediterranean but the regular demands of the record business seem to have kicked in after Ayers released Joy of a Toy in 1969. An album on the market, it seems, demands a tour to support it, which in turn demands a band, and the result was an ensemble dubbed The Whole World. A British tour and another batch of material ready to go tends to point towards another album and that, in turn, suggests the retiree is back on the treadmill.

Or not, as the case may be, because the outfit Ayers assembled wasn’t your common or garden rock’n’roll hits the road band playing your common or garden rock or pop. Ayers had leanings toward the avant garde, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find someone like free improvisation saxophone specialist Lol Coxhill in the line up, along with teenage prodigy Mike Oldfield, who could switch between guitar and bass depending on what Ayers was turning his attention to.

Keyboard player and arranger David Bedford remained on board from Joy of a Toy, Mick Fincher alternated with Robert Wyatt behind the skins and folk singer Bridget St. John added an extra dimension to the vocals. 

Coxhill, born as far back as 1932, had a few years on the rest of them, and in between busking in informal settings had toured US airbases jazz outfits and backed visiting American artists including Rufus Thomas, Mose Allison, Otis Spann, and Champion Jack Dupree. He’d also worked with Canterbury scene bands Carol Grimes and Delivery, which later evolved into Hatfield & The North and was, more than likely, the collaboration that brought him into the Ayers orbit.

After the tour, when the outfit retired to the studio in October 1970 Ayers for the sessions that resulted in Shooting at the Moon the proceedings, unsurprisingly, produced an odd amalgam of sunsoaked balladry and avant garde experimentation. Equally unsurprisingly, the outfit had splintered by the time Ayers was ready to record his third solo album (Whatevershebringswesing) though most of those involved turned up on one or more of the sessions. Outfits led by people with a propensity to disappear towards the sunny Mediterranean would, one suspects, be odds on candidates for a relatively early demise.

Given the players with whom he was collaborating, and Ayers’ own avant garde background the experimental and improvisational side of Shooting hardly comes as a surprise. With Soft Machine he’d spent the summer of 1967 touring France, performing at psychedelic events along the Cote d’Azur with a three week residency playing daily musical transmissions hallucinatoires, hired by Jean Jacques Lebel to be the second half of his Festival de la Libre Expression outside Saint-Tropez. Picasso’s play Le Désir Attrapé par la Queue (Desire Caught by the Tail) had been the first half.

Equally unsurprising is the warm Mediterranean carefree ballad style that runs through the album from the opening May I? (reprised in French towards the end as  Puis Je?). Rheinhardt & Geraldine/Colores Para Delores heads off into experimental territory, particularly on the instrumental cut up collage in the middle. There’s a more conventional (or as close to conventional as we’re likely to get) heavyish rock approach to Lunatics Lament that runs amok towards the end. 

The experimental side of things is back to the fore on Pisser Dans un Violon while The Oyster and the Flying Fish comes across as a rather pleasant folky duet with Bridget Saint John. It’s a rather pleasant little ditty that adds a bit of light and shade to the albums proggy and experimental overtones, which are back in the foreground on the atmospheric Underwater, a four minute instrumental that leads into the cheerfully sunny ballad Clarence in Wonderland. 

Red Green and You Blue inhabits a neighbouring postcode, with the Ayers croon in the forefront, then it’s back into Soft Machine territory for Shooting at the Moon (a reworking of the Softs' Jet Propelled Photograph). The sunny balladry kicks off Butterfly Dance, which turns up-tempo and heads off into avant garde territory around the fifty-second mark, while Puis Je? as previously noted, is May I? rendered in French.

As far as bonus tracks go in The Harvest Years 1969-1974 incarnation of Shooting there’s a trio of titles labelled Alan Black Session, apparently recorded for Radio One (Gemini Child, Lady Rachel and Shooting At the Moon) and another from 9 June 1970, recorded for John Peel’s Top Gear (Derby Day, Interview and We Did It Again / Murder in the Air).

Looked at as a whole Shooting is a solid record, though the listener’s enjoyment is going to depend pretty directly on his or her inclinations when it comes to progressive, arty rock. Take the experimental elements out and what’s left comes across as a collection of sunny ditties that bop along rather happily (Clarence in Wonderland being the best example), carefree but not exactly lightweight, add them back in and you’re looking at the sort of avant-garde fusion the average listener might well be happy to go without.

Overall, I think, one to approach with caution though there’s definitely something of interest  to be found.

Randy Newman "12 Songs" (4.5*)

By the time Randy Newman's second album came out in 1970 he’d already spent close to a decade as a staff writer for a Los Angeles music publisher and had scored enough minor hits to acquire a reputation. After Alan Price’s Simon Smith and Manfred Mann’s So Long Dad a review noting the presence of a Randy Newman song was close to a trademark of quality as far as I was concerned.

When it came to recording his own material, on the other hand, things hadn’t quite matched expectations. While he’d had plenty of experience cutting demos in the studio the heavily orchestrated Lenny Waronker and Van Dyke Parks produced Randy Newman (Creates Something New Under the Sun) delivered semi-baroque arrangements around a vocal style that was, well, idiosyncratic. It was obviously something the Warner Brothers marketing division were aware of (Once you get used to it, his voice is really something was the headline in one advertisement) and with the hindsight that comes with forty-plus years I’m inclined to put some of that down to the influence of Van Dyke Parks, who’s more than slightly idiosyncratic in the vocal and arranging department himself.

Still, the material was strong once you got past the eccentricities. I mean, how can you not like an album that contains Love Story (You and Me), So Long Dad, I Think It's Going to Rain Today and Davy the Fat Boy? You might wish he’d done them a little differently, but there was no doubting the quality of the writing.

That’s not to suggest it was a complete flop. Paul McCartney, for one, was apparently a big fan, and the album gained its share of kudos from peers and critics. The problem was that it didn’t attract a whole lot of airplay and sales were minimal.

Rather than surrounding Newman with seventy-five musicians for 12 Songs, Lenny Waronker went for the small combo approach, basing things around Newman’s piano and guitar work from Clarence White and Ry Cooder. Add some bass drums and percussion and the result is a lot more direct in the instrumental department. A lack of ornate orchestration tends to pare back the vocal mannerisms as well, and through Have You Seen My Baby? and Let's Burn Down the Cornfield things are fairly straightforward.

Baby is, to all intents and purposes, New Orleans-style R&B, and while a critic might question the lack of piano on Cornfield I’d point straight towards that slide guitar work from Mr Cooder and ask why you’d be looking to let something else get in the way. Mama Told Me Not to Come was covered by Three Dog Night, and comes across here as a wry observation on the L.A. Rock world’s party scene as seen through the eyes of an innocent abroad. Would you like whiskey with your water? indeed.

That innocent abroad may well have ended up on the end of the line in the understated Suzanne, where there’s a creepy caller who found your name in a telephone booth. Reviews at the time had the voice as a rapist, and if he isn’t there’s still no way his intentions are what we used to term honourable.

Given the sequencing, you can’t help thinking he may be the same dude who turns up in Lover's Prayer, just under two minutes of protagonist looking for nothing more involved than a quick complication-free relationship that may or may not involve commitment. He’s certainly not looking for discussion of anything controversial (I was entertaining a little girl up in the rooms, Lord/With California wine and French perfume/She started to talk to me 'bout the war, Lord/Said, 'I don't wanna talk about the war’).

You could make a fair case for the same dude (or his cousin brother) turning up on Lucinda. Summer evening on the beach and here’s a girl lyin' on the beach / In her graduation gown ... wrapped up in a blanket and the narrator, being a man of the world, could tell, she knew her way around. So what does he do? Lies down beside her, of course, and we’re probably best leaving what happens next to the imagination.

And with the approach of the big white truck and the beach cleaning man he clears off, leaving Lucinda ... buried / 'Neath the California sand. He mightn’t be the same dude, of course, but there’s a certain consistency and the three songs are delivered deadpan with maybe a hint of raised eyebrow.

So, a run of songs that could well be cut from the same piece of cloth, and guess what? He follows that with a one-two combo.

Underneath the Harlem Moon, the only non-Newman composition on the album dates back to the twenties and delivers a string of racial stereotyping that sets the stage for later efforts like Sail Away and Rednecks, but here acts as a lead in to the similarly cliche-rich Yellow Man, later described as a pinhead’s view of China (they say they were there / before we were here. Really? Who’d have thunk?).

When it comes to cliche-based satire, Newman’s not being selective in his ethnic targets. Old Kentucky Home merrily skewers the redneck narrator with a cheerful singalong chorus and a couple of lines I’ve been known to purloin for my own purposes (she didn’t grow up, she grew out, for example). I first encountered this one on Ry Cooder, but Newman’s take on it has a bit more of the old raised eyebrow to it.

The last three tracks wind things up in a low key manner. Newman drawls his way through
Rosemary, which comes across as a gentleman caller offering an evening out without a great deal of hope that his desires will be fulfilled, and he may still be around offering his services If You Need Oil while Uncle Bob's Midnight Blues wraps things up without doing anything remarkable. Maybe he needed something like I Think It’s Going To Rain Today to fill that spot, but he’d already used that last time around, hadn’t he?

Coming back to this one after a lengthy interval it’s easy to overlook 12 Songs’ considerable charms. Randy Newman had the orchestrations, the quirky vocals and a handful of genuinely great songs, while the next studio album, Sail Away, had strong material, brought back the strings and had Newman in top form vocally.

In comparison, 12 Songs, on first impressions, may come across as more subdued, but give it a bit of time to sink in and you may well end up rating it as some of his best work. The players deliver just the right amount of light and shade, nothing is wasted, the songs are focussed and Newman goes very close to nailing the vocals. Not, perhaps, as striking as its predecessor or the albums that followed, but definitely a harbinger of quality to come.

But then, after Simon Smith, So Long Dad, Love Story, Davy the Fat Boy and I Think It’s Going to Rain Today some of us already knew he was a class act, didn’t we?

Fairport Convention "House Full: Live at the L.A. Troubadour" (4.5*)

Thank you. This is our last number and it's called Sir Patrick Spens isn't the first thing you'd expect to hear on an album, but presumably it’s the only track from the first of three-nights that were recorded to have made the cut for the disk, so there you go.

In any case, if you’re into musical archaeology, House Full, as the only currently available live Fairport Convention album with Richard Thompson in the band, is probably required listening. There’s the small matter of Fairport’s influence on a group of young Angelenos of Mexican origin who morphed into Los Lobos.

Having lost singer Sandy Denny almost directly after Liege & Lief appeared on the market, Fairport had reshaped the vocal department with guitarist Richard Thompson and folkie fiddler Dave Swarbrick sharing the leads with assistance in the background from new bass player Dave Pegg, who’d been slotted in to replace Ashley Hutchings, who was en route to more traditional territory with his new missus Shirley Collins.

The new line up had recorded and released Full House, and were on the road behind the album (as the saying goes) when they landed in L.A. for a week-long gig at the Troubadour (opening, believe it or not, for Rick Nelson) that was legendary for a couple of reasons. According to Dave Pegg the band were doing a week's residency, two spots each night and three on the weekend for which we were going to be paid five hundred dollars. But when we went to collect our wages, we'd drunk so much we owed them fifteen hundred bucks. Impressive, even taking into account the possibility that the drinks in question were overpriced and the band were generous tippers where leggy waitresses were concerned.

The finer details of alcoholic catering may have had something to do with the related fact that Led Zeppelin were performing at the Forum and Robert Plant, John Bonham and Fairport’s new bass player were old mates from Birmingham. Dave Pegg invited the foursome to the Troubadour after their Forum gig at the Forum and when they arrived a dressing room consultation resulted in Page, Plant, Bonham and Jones joining Fairport on stage for a set that included Hey Joe, Morning Dew, Banks of the Sweet Primroses, Mystery Train and That's Alright Mama. While the mobile eight-track machine was rolling throughout the tapes (existence confirmed by Joe Boyd) are buried deep in the Polygram vaults.

But it seems they exist. In White Bicycles Boyd reminisces: the tape reveals Plant’s vocal being louder than any of the amplifiers, Page trying to keep pace with Richard on jigs and reels and Zep manager Peter Grant at a front table cursing and abusing the waitresses.

He also recalls Linda Ronstadt being invited on stage (another night, another distinguished guest) after Fairport had run out of encores for another forty minutes covering songs she had forgotten she knew.

There’s nothing from either night here, however. So what’s on the disk?

Well, for a start, there’s nothing that predates Liege & Lief (predictable, the infamous car crash would still have been relatively fresh in the memory), and the Liege and Full House material is fleshed out with traditional material, a World War I bagpipe lament and, on a lighter note, Yellow Birds (or boids, up high in banana trees).

Even if you’re not familiar with Fairport, those of us who went through high school in the sixties will probably recall Sir Patrick Spens from the poetry anthologies (I had the impression it was regarded as somewhere in the same postcode as iconic as far as medieval ballads were concerned), but don’t let that put you off.

Actually, while Sir Patrick Spens and Banks of the Sweet Primroses get proceedings off on a nice roll, there’s nothing there to suggest you’re in the presence of anything other than a fairly good folk-rock band, things change with the jigs and reels in The Lark in the Morning Medley, which may not be the fastest of their kind in captivity (that honour quite possibly goes to Jenny's Chickens / The Mason's Apron or Bonnie Kate / Sir B. McKenzies) the version here romps along at a merry clip, and like the later variations, is played with stop on a sixpence precision by an outfit with considerable instrumental chops (Swarbrick’s fiddle work might not quite rate as virtuoso, but it’s in an adjacent postcode and Richard Thompson is, well, Richard Thompson, enough said) and a rock hard, hard rocking rhythm section.

Those chops come to the fore again in twelve and a bit minutes of Sloth, and yet again in the play-out to Matty Groves, with the traditional Staines Morris wedged between them. The vocal department on Matty Groves shows what they lost with the departure of Sandy Denny, but there’s a rough-hewn rustic note to the Thompson and Swarbrick take that has its own charm, from where I’m sitting.

Jenny's Chickens / The Mason's Apron cart us back into jigs and reels territory, then there’s a stately take on Battle of the Somme, a piper’s lament that you might not expect to work in this setting but if you didn’t you weren’t aware of Thompson’s ongoing affinity with the skirl of the pipes.

Up to this point we’re revisiting the original House Full. The related release Live at the L.A. Troubadour gives us Bonnie Kate / Sir B. McKenzie's Daughter's Lament for the 77th Mounted Lancer's Retreat from the Straits of Loch Knombe, in the Year of Our Lord 1727, on the Occasion of the Announcement of Her Marriage to the Laird of Kinleakie, which predictably gets abbreviated to Sir B. McKenzies. Non-Einsteins will no doubt be able to figure out why, and proceedings are concluded on a lighter note with the old Yellow Birds.

In their day, the five man Fairport were, by all accounts, an awesome experience in a live setting and as the only officially released live recording of the lineup House Full, with that extra material from the cousin-brother Live at the L.A. Troubadour tacked on the end is close to essential listening for anyone interested in investigating this little corner of the folk-rock genre.

In summary, a crack five-piece outfit at the height of their considerable powers. I was, back in the day, highly impressed by Angel Delight, the studio album that followed this live excursion, by which time Richard Thompson had gone. Classic, exuberant British folk-rock from the best all-male lineup of a band that has gone on to become an institution (they’re still going strong with a 45th anniversary coming up, and there’ll be those who’ll rate a configuration featuring Sandy Denny as slightly better).

They never, as someone or other pointed out, made an album like this again, but then again, no one else did either. For $10.99 at the iTunes Store it was a no-brainer...