[Originally posted December 2011]

Juicy Lucy’s eponymous debut album has perhaps the critical acclaim from those who champion the band, featuring as it did the top 20 hit and great Bo Diddley cover Who Do You Love. It’s a great blues-rock album, but it is their sophomore release Lie Back And Enjoy It that introduced the band to me and thus is my favourite. Before moving on to that one I can’t resist posting the inner cover of the band’s first album featuring the wonderful Zelda Plum covered in fruit,

Lie Back and Enjoy It has more occasional but not constant great swamp blues, like second track Willie Dixon’s Built For Comfort with gravel vocals by Paul Williams, ex Zoot Money; guitar by Micky Moody; slide guitar by Glenn Ross Campbell, and that screaming saxophone I so liked at the time played here by the brilliant Chris Mercer. It’s the chugging bluesbeat that propels this funky song. Third track Pretty Woman is more of a country rock number and is perhaps the reason many prefer the first album’s predominately blues selection; and fourth, closing side one of the vinyl, is a light but breezy, slide-driven and band-penned Whiskey In My Jar.

Side two opens with a gutsier return to a rock and blues sound, the Davis/Bramlett Hello L.A. Bye Bye Birmingham [and reading the writing credits from the album sleeve is quite a task as it opens out into six album-sized squares, the inner spread a picture of the band in performance with album details, and the outer using each of the six individual squares to present a member of the band – see below]. Seventh track That Woman’s Got Something is another band-penned number and is an acoustic and authentic sounding blues with Paul William’s vocal growl carrying the song. Eighth is my favourite – and here shouteth the purists in their dismay – a dirty cover of Zappa’s Willie The Pimp, Williams’ vocal sleazy and slithering. There’s some great playing on this with Campbell’s rampant slide and Rod Coombes’ pulsating drums, including solo with Moody echoing on guitar. Playing this song loudly over and over when I got the album, along with and similarly Built For Comfort, they tend to dominate my recall of the album and represent what is best in it. Overall it’s not the most consistently strong or musically memorable of my other selections in this category, but being reminded of the Vertigo cohort, to which JL’s first two releases belonged, it still commanded a place for the amount of playtime it got in my early collection and listening leanings.

The most certain voice
sings a seed into the ground
making it grow
as experienced gardeners
stand around listening
and believing.

It is a song
of one tune over another
like this substance over that
making it bloat or bloom
as a melody you start to hear
without forgetting.

It gets inside the head
like a weed too, not wanted,
not right for a soundtrack
on husbandry and self-help
and inner calm: like
tinnitus sprouting.

[Originally posted May 2011]

Released in 1969, this must be about the time I bought the album at Woolworths in Ipswich, Suffolk. It was loose in a scattered luckydip of cheap LPs presented, as I recall, in a chrome display cage. I bought a number of albums at Woolworths around this time and wish I had purchased more: usually completely unknown and selected by cover design and perhaps the linear notes if I bothered to read. So many have become ‘classics’ [though that is a relative term] but certainly a number are rare today.

This album too is inextricably linked to my formative years, two into living in England and having had my American roots and attachments challenged either by direct attack or ridicule [fellow students are a tough crowd, especially when they wear a black school uniform and you turn up for the first day at your new secondary modern wearing baby blue slacks with matching sneakers and yellow shirt with matching socks. I didn’t need to wear the neon sign that flashed Pick On Me]. But the point is by this time I wasn’t alienated by, for example, the anti-Vietnam war song Beelzebub’s Laughter, my Beach Boy sensibilities having been beaten out by then.

There is a strong sense as I listen now that these songs are crafted to reflect their time: the socio/political and even more ethereal themes of the ‘flowerpower’ generation targeted as a commercial rather than wholly committed audience appeal. Sunshine Fields of Love with its evocation of San Francisco backs this up, as clearly do the Country oriented albums Axton produced from ’64 to this date with their more homespun preoccupations.

That said, the drugs lament Snow Blind Friend has its honest and heartfelt core, a song made famous by Steppenwolf as was the other great Axton penned and Steppenwolf cover The Pusher, itself made famous in the film Easy Rider. Indeed, those who know just a little of Axton will probably do so indirectly by these two songs, and perhaps Joy to the World, or by his screen appearance in Gremlins.

Other songs on this album that resurrect powerful teenage memories are On The Natural, Way Before the Time of Towns, Childhood’s End and Revelations. Axton’s singing voice is unique. At times the long notes have the waver of Buffy Saint-Marie but in bass-baritone.

Another great Axton album I’ll mention now is Love Life with stonking versions of Maybeline and That’s All Right. It also includes the beautiful Billy’s Theme from the film Buster and Millie as well as another Axton gem Boney Fingers, with a great vocal accompaniment by Renee Armand. Linda Ronstadt guest-vocals on When the Morning Comes. Perhaps a superior musical album all round, but it just doesn’t have that similar significant place of When My Griffin is Gone in the nostalgic reconstruction of who I am.

Maybe the category needs to be refined to Top Fifty Influential Albums.

The overall purpose
of tweaking

is to read the modified data
as great,

to look and read until the
overall purpose

is image and error correction
and great.

Great. It looks exactly like
the same before

just with the error correction
tweaked.

Change it through the
decoder again

and it works great –
tweaking

your settings in the decoder
to look and read and

test out until the overall purpose
is error.

Clean

The idea of using electricity
is not new

but scientists study human motion
to produce hand cranks,

hand cranks to power radio and
produce ‘clean’ energy,

sources of ubiquitous ‘clean’ facts
and new news.

Not that you would need to, but if you have been following my English KS2 GPS thread on this blog over recent days, can you work out in a nano-second the connection between the following two images:

The final three: it is time to finish with this. I have presented a similar exposé before on this blog, more than once, and the tests keep coming back. It isn’t that I think what I have to say/satirise will have an impact and thus am disappointed when it doesn’t. I do this essentially as a catharsis for my deep and genuine anger. So I will, no doubt, do again. The only way these tests will be ended is when teachers themselves refuse to mark them. It is this simple. We should not collude.

I simply disagree with the premise of this question. It is ‘easy’ to deduce that one should have a question mark. So what? It is the notion that the other three require an exclamation mark which annoys me. Lest anyone thinks I am not concerned with ‘accuracy’, or appropriate, sensible and meaningful punctuation use from students, that’s adamantly not the case. In my experience, students over-rely and therefore over-use exclamation marks in an attempt to declare exclamation! [You see, my use is apt]. I think we should encourage students, probably as they continue maturing as writers so not necessarily aged 11, to explore vocabulary further, but the words ‘hilarious’, ‘loved’ and ‘laughed [so much]’ carry enough weight of meaning here to not need a superfluous addition to that. Does this seem pernickety here? Perhaps, but it is the repetition of such inane premises in so much of the questioning that matters – this is one example.

My last spoof answer this year. But really – what matters more: knowing a ‘word class’ or appreciating the purpose and effect of word usage?

I don’t know the answer to this. Does this bother me? Yes and no. As an English teacher and writer I feel I should know. But it really doesn’t matter if a student, or anyone, can’t name the grammatical term.

I can imagine/understand [though ultimately not care] if a teacher would be disappointed that a student couldn’t name this having been taught explicitly, and probably relentlessly to the test and such feature-spotting exercises. I once read a teacher writing proudly about how her KS2 students could knowingly use such technical features – and quite complex ones – as if this was a significant achievement. No, it’s a dog, a clever one, doing tricks. I think it is sad [I’m being polite] when a teacher foregrounds this over students being writers. And enjoying writing.