Born a Ramblin’ Sam: One of the Most Popular Coolpowers Blogs of All Time

Suicide was the most harrowing duo of synthpunk & industrial music when it unleashed its debut self-titled album upon first-generation punk fans who were probably listening to bands like The Clash & the Sex Pistols when they first heard this bizarre record.  Most of the album just seems very interesting and unique with the first couple songs “Ghost Rider” & “Rocket U.S.A.”, but once you get to the genuinely terrifying ten-minute epic “Frankie Teardrop”, you know this is an excellent album, just from hearing this one song. You know it’s terrifying from the horrific lyrics, which describe a desperate factory worker in poverty who plans to kill his family and himself, but then you hear the absolutely horrifying screams of Alan Vega, who unleashes each agonizing, inhuman screech with fury. It certainly is quite startling, but not so scary you can’t listen to it. It’s brilliantly scary like the rest of the album. The album is fortunately supplemented in recent CD issues by ten bonus tracks. While a lot of potential wasn’t realized to the absolute be-all-end-all fullest, this album definitely deserves five stars. After hearing that one track, may I remind you, one track I mentioned above, I just had to give five stars to the album. I can handle the album just fine, but be warned: if you’re extremely faint of heart and ear, skip over “Frankie Teardrop” at least.

TRACK PICKS:

“Ghost Rider”

“Rocket U.S.A.”

“Frankie Teardrop”

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After Raw went off the air on June 29th, several superstars found out that for no apparent reason, they had been drafted to other brands. While some are drafts of mid-carders, several are pretty big. Here’s a summary of who got drafted to where:

Shelton Benjamin to ECW:

The Gold Standard makes a triumphant return to the Land of Extreme with his drafting. We don’t know if Shelton had been planning for a shot at a title on SmackDown and was disappointed to hear this, but we do know that Tuesday nights are going to be much more entertaining.

Matt Hardy to SmackDown:

After losing an epic final battle against his brother Jeff at The Bash, he finds himself back where his brother also currently resides, SmackDown. Will he seek revenge again, or was the Last Man Standing truly Jeff Hardy, once and for all?

John Cena to Raw:

The Champ is back! In a shocking move, McMahon has returned Cena to his most successful brand, Raw. Now that the WWE Championship is likely in his sights once again, who knows what he might be able to pull off?

Mr. Kennedy to ECW:

Raw loses a good man with Mr. Kennedy, whose team with Bam Bam Bubba Ray may not exist anymore. Kennedy returns to the Land of Extreme, where he can surely make a better home of it than with his previous stint there a year ago.

Dennis Bourne to SmackDown:

Another monumental team breakup! Dennis Bourne moves back to SmackDown and away from his brother, former World Champion Lance Bourne. Will Bourne return to the same sensational appeal he had when he first was a member of the brand and first removed his Thunder mask last summer?

Finlay to SmackDown:

Good lord! The ECW Champion no longer is a member of ECW! The only question here is: will Finlay vacate the title?

William Regal to ECW:

Even more shocking is that the head of Regal’s Embassy is no longer even a part of his own stable! The Britishman moves to ECW in a stunning brand change.

Booker T to Raw:

Not only has ECW lost its own champion, but it has lost its other biggest star, Booker T! Fresh off such main event matches as his match with Sting & Finlay at Extreme Rules for the ECW Title, where will Booker go from here?

John Moondog to SmackDown:

Aw, man! John Moondog probably won’t even get the chance to take revenge on Booker T now! Well, on the bright side, SmackDown regains a bright young man in the soon-to-return John Moondog.

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Bob Dylan’s albums most often reflect a certain period of time in which he made a certain style of music: his first few albums were folksy albums, he ventured into rock with Highway 61 Revisited and continued this with heavy overtones of the blues on his double album, Blonde on Blonde in 1966. While the double format persisted throughout the sixties & seventies in rock, Blonde on Blonde was the first major double in rock at the time.  The album features some of the rawest, loudest and most emotional harmonicas I’ve ever heard, even on a Dylan album, and the album most certainly rocks the hardest of all his career. Alternating between some of his finest accomplishments in bluesy ballads like “Visions of Johanna” and the hardest rockers of all his career, the album is a sprawling fourteen-track masterpiece and is certainly one of Dylan’s most excellent albums in his career. It closes with the truly beautiful 11-minute climax, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”, a tribute to his wife at the time Sara Dylan, nee Lownds, thus the correlation between her original last name and the title is apparent. Filled with epic surreal imagery, the song took up the entire fourth side of the album, almost single-handedly taking it to two LPs.

TRACK PICKS:

“Rainy Day Women #12 & 35″

“Visions of Johanna”

“One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)”

“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”

“Just Like a Woman”

“Absolutely Sweet Marie”

“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”

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Michael Jackson reached an unprecedented high when he released his album of epic proportions, Thriller, at the end of 1982. Early in life, his claim to fame had been as one of the leading members of the Jackson 5, and had hit a high point with his previous album Off the Wall in 1979, but when Thriller came out, Jackson had become a whole new man. Gone was the”cuteness” thing that had been his prior trademark and in was his over-the-top soulful bravado, one that certainly didn’t fail; his album became the best-selling album of all time in America. Never before had the country heard such an album of flawless soul-pop. To this day, there’s been hardly anything like it. Throughout all of the 80s, thanks single-handedly, basically, to this one album, Jackson became the biggest star the nation had ever bore witness to. Not even Elvis came close to what Jackson had achieved in one decade in America. Songs like the title track, “Beat It” & “Billie Jean” became massive hits of monumental stature, and the music video for the title track became what I consider to be a masterpiece of music video. Michael Jackson’s ridiculously over-publicized personal life became seemingly more important than his music towards the end of the 80s, and in 1993, accusations of sexual abuse on Jordan Chandler devastated him and from there, his music became less and less important to the mass media, and by the time he had been acquitted in a later trial, he had become the butt of countless jokes regarding him & children. After his life came to a recent abrupt, cardiac arrest-induced end, one can only look back and decide what was more important: his music or whatever it was he was said to have done? I, for one, am in favor of the former choice.

TRACK PICKS:

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something”

“Baby Be Mine”

“Beat It”

“Billie Jean”

“Thriller”

“Human Nature”

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 Michael Jackson has been pronounced dead. After a bizarre circus of a life, his difficulties have come to a dramatic halt. No longer can the media keep him down like they did when they printed ridiculous stories about him. He can truly rest in peace.

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Blood, Sweat & Tears released their undisputed masterpiece in 1969 and the album became a huge success, garnering the first Grammy Album of the Year of the 1970s, and how rightful that was. Their self-titled second album is the pinnacle of the unthinkable fusion of two fusion genres; blues-rock & jazz-rock. No album, as I can recall, had done something so seamless and passionate like this before. Nearly every track is brilliant, absolute brilliance is found within the ten songs of this album. It features the hit “Spinning Wheel”, with its infectious “what goes up/must come down” refrain, and songs like the 11-minute bluesy-jazz jam “Blues, Pt. 2″, which features an homage to Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” towards the end. The album’s jazz sound is personified by the cover of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”. The album is excellent, the band’s undisputed masterpiece, and probably one of the best albums of all time in my book.

TRACK PICKS:

“Smiling Phases”

“Sometimes in Winter”

“More and More”

“And When I Die”

“God Bless the Child”

“Spinning Wheel”

“Blues, Pt. 2″

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Led Zeppelin released their third album, composed primarily at a remote cottage in Wales, in 1970 to mixed reviews, many of which were critical of the album’s acoustic overtones, and upon hearing it you can see why. The band had released their first two albums as monolothic hard rockers, and thus they were met with very good reviews, while their third album was a very different ballgame for many people. The main thing that decreases a half-star on this album’s rating is the fact that, for one thing, around the end of the album it almost stops sounding like Led Zeppelin, especially on the tracks “That’s the Way”, which almost sounds like some country pop song, and the somewhat poor ending “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper”.  I gave this album’s follow-up four and a half stars, as well, but I’m going to edit that to five, because this album is more deserving of a decreased half-star in retrospect. While Led Zeppelin IV wasn’t their absolute best album, it did the whole folksy thing much better than their first time around with those concepts on Led Zeppelin III. Nonetheless, it still is a great album, featuring the brilliant opener “Immigrant Song” and “Celebration Day”. While you can’t expect a flawless album like the band’s other albums, you can certainly expect something odd, interesting and still great.

TRACK PICKS:

“Immigrant Song”

“Celebration Day”

“Since I’ve Been Loving You”

“Gallows Pole”

“Tangerine”

“Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”

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Are You Experienced? & Axis: Bold as Love were pure psychedelic albums, definitive of the late 1960s, but Electric Ladyland took psychedelic even further into outer space as The Jimi Hendrix Experience turned out its boldest and final album in its short lifespan. The album, originally a double-LP, brought in newly honed blues & funk influences into the fold of Hendrix’s psychedelia, with tracks like the 15-minute jam “Voodoo Chile” representing the bluesy side and songs like “Gypsy Eyes” representing the funky side. Hendrix’s new influences manifested themselves not only with this, but with the radical step of letting bassist Noel Redding (with whom Hendrix’s relationship had become strained at the time) sing the vocals on his own song, “Little Miss Strange”. Hendrix also seemed to have a vague concept within parts of the album, most obviously in the brilliant and epic 13-minute psychedelic jam, “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”, a track in which he uses grandiose metaphors for political oppression in a way that had never happened before with the band. The instrumentation must’ve been very cutting-edge at the time: after the first four minutes with Hendrix’s vocals, the song drifts into one long trippy instrumental passage until the final two minutes in which the vocals return. Never before had rock gone into such exotic realms, not even with Hendrix. Such was the revolutionary impact his music had on almost all music in general, 1960s era and beyond. Also featured are two of his absolute best tracks, the closing tracks “All Along the Watchtower”, a Bob Dylan cover, and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”. Hendrix would never again record material like this, as he passed away just two years later, while Noel Redding & drummer Mitch Mitchell followed him in 2003 and 2008, respectively. The whole Experience is gone physically in our mortal world, but their three killer albums will live on for all eternity throughout the Earth and the psychedelic limits of outer space, and that is for certain, perhaps even for other beings to listen to and be amazed.

TRACK PICKS:

“Crosstown Traffic”

“Voodoo Chile”

“Gypsy Eyes”

“1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”

“All Along the Watchtower”

“Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”

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