Frijid Pink

Frijid Pink - "Frijid Pink" (1970) - Parrot Records

Hello Friends,

Tiki T. and I picked this little treasure up at a flea market over the summer.  We got home, poured ourselves some drinks and dropped the needle down only to be emotionally devastated when we realized the copy of the record we just bought was warped and littered with skips!  

ARGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Now its winter and we're freezing our asses off!  Luckily, we found another, more pristine copy on Ebay and we just couldn't say no!

So crank up the distortion to 10, kids, the order of the Universe has been restored!

Frijid Pink's debut album is an unsung psych-blues rock classic!  This band was so well received in their hometown of Detroit that they shared bills with such legendary acts as The Stooges, The MC5 and The Amboy Dukes; they even had a British band of young upstarts going by the name of Led Zeppelin opening for them at Detroit's Grande Ballroom. Motor City madness!

The opener "God Gave Me You", a bluesy ballad, features some passionate growling vocals by lead singer Kelly Green which builds up to a blistering guitar solo. The songs, "Crying Shame" and "Drivin' Blues" both sound very Cream influenced.  (Tiki T. hears a lot of "Tales of Brave Ulysses" on the former!)  "I'm On My Way" is a fun boogie-blues number which includes vocal shout-outs to blues-rock contemporaries like Canned Heat & Savoy Brown (who were also Parrot Records labelmates.)  

The album's high point is the band's cover of "House of the Rising Sun".  It cranks!  

"I Want To Be Your Lover" sounds like a second-rate (and white) Otis Redding imitator singing lead for Big Brother & The Holding Company.

The album closes out with the slow boozy blues number, "Boozin' Blues" featuring some good old fashioned Motor City shredding on lead guitar courtesy of Gary Ray Thompson-- another unsung guitar hero! 

RATING: 4.5 Gotta hit another city, get drunk, before I get home out of 5

Movie Night: A Band Called Death (2012)

Hello Friends,

Grab your popcorn and pull up a stool, its Movie Night on Vinyl in the Valley!

Tonight we're watching another great documentary about a band that almost no one had ever heard of before, A Band Called Death.  

The Hackneys were three black brothers growing up in Detroit in the early 70's.  Being heavily influenced by Alice Cooper, The Who and Jimi Hendrix, they formed a raucous garage band and basically invented punk rock years before bands like The Ramones came along.  Local record labels and radio stations were hesitant to promote a band called "Death" and producers & promoters begged them to change their name to something more marketable.  Amazingly enough, they refused and they rest is rock & roll history!

The story of Death is a microcosm for the story of rock & roll: boredom and living on the fringes of society leads to immense creativity, artistry, vision and rebellion which ultimately mutates into various vices, egos, heartbreak and tragedy.  Sometimes in the story's third act, if we're lucky, there's some semblance of Redemption, comeuppance or the last laughs. Its like a Shakespearean classic (if Shakespeare lived in a ghetto, played punk rock music and had dreadlocks!)

The documentary itself is pretty good, but like we said about the Big Star documentary, the actual story and people involved are so amazing that you'd really have to screw the pooch to make a movie that's not entertaining!  Directors Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett do a fine job telling their story especially when taking into consideration that there wasn't a lot of archival footage of some noisy, pre-cell phone, pre-You Tube, Detroit punk band who never released an album, who never toured and who refused to change their name! DEATH! 

If we had to rate it, we'd give it two enthusiastic cocktail glasses up!  Cheers!

We'll see you next time, friends, until then the Tiki Bar is closed*.  

(* not really)