Music Library: Butthole Surfers, Buzzcocks, Byrds

Last three B bands! And they all kick ass!

The Butthole Surfers:

• Brown Reason To Live/Live PCPPEP. The first two BS releases. You can hear them working towards the classic Butthole Surfers sound.

• Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac. I sure love this album. I know it's not quite up to the insanity that the Surfers were about to unleash over the next three albums, but this one hit me at just the right age.


• Cream Corn From The Socket Of Davis EP. An early taste of the mature (that can't be the appropriate word, can it? Let's say fully-formed) Butthole Surfers sound.


• Rembrandt Pussyhorse. The sound of taking too many hallucinogenic drugs among a bunch of terrifying people you don't really know. This is the sound of being far outside of anyone's safety zone and having no idea where the brakes are. This is the crazy punk-ass homegrown psychedelia your mother warned you about.


• Locust Abortion Technician. Or this is. (And this is the best one, for the record.)
  
• Hairway to Steven. Or this.


• Piouhgd + Widowermaker!. This is not. There's moments of pure Butthole Surfer awesomeness here and there, but for the most part, Pioughd is D.O.A. Even in a song like "Revolution Part II, " which is at least 47% awesome, there's a kind of overdetermined weariness that stands in sharp contrast with the unhinged craziness of prior albums.
  

The Buzzcocks - Time's Up, Another Music In A Different Kitchen, Love Bites, A Different Kind of Tension/Parts 1, 2, 3, Singles Going Steady. I thought about splitting these out to talk about each album on its own, but I'm not sure how specific I can get about each album's greatness. Time's Up is, of course, the Spiral Scratch EP with Howard DeVoto on lead vocals, plus a few extra demos, including a cover of Beefheart's "I Love You, You Big Dummy." If you just know the Buzzcocks from the perfect pop-punk progenitor Singles Going Steady, you might be surprised by the Can and Neu! influences on their studio albums.

The Byrds - The kings of American folk-rock that turns into psych-rock that turns into sweet country-rock. Here's how their albums (at least the ones I have, and I should really pick up the rest) play out:

• Mr. Tambourine Man. Folk-rock in its purest form.


• Fifth Dimension. Leaping into psychedelia with "5D" and "Eight Miles High," but retaining their folk-rock fundamentals. Beautiful stuff.


• Younger Than Yesterday. The Byrds leap antennae-first into acid-drenched psych rock without abandoning their commitment to gorgeous multi-part harmonies.


• The Notorious Byrd Brothers. A more insubstantial effort, somewhere between confident psych-rock and unsure floundering.


• Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Ground Zero for country-rock. Gram Parsons joined the Byrds and pushed them forewards by going backwards to the country records of his youth. This release has bonus tracks of the songs with Parsons on lead vocals. On the actual release, Parsons had to be erased due to legal troubles with chamber-popster Lee Hazlewood, and McGuinn gamely did his best Gram Parsons impression for the final released tracks. Great, great, great album.