I'm digging the fuck out of these old Nick Tosches reviews!

from Three Dog Night's Naturally:

"There is too much good music on this album for anyone to be defensive about it. If music doesn't move you, it sucks, and this music does (the former). Well, maybe just a little of it the latter, but most of it the former." (same issue)

from Spirit's Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus:

"Any illusions that might still be clung to along the order of Spirit's being an Epic house organ anthropomorphization-of-eclecticism shuck, complete with baldpated, cerebral - looking leftover from the bongo drums and black beret era, should be flushed down the old metaphysical crapper as quickly as one would dispose of just so much Nathan's ® chicken chow mein sandwich puke, because this here Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (a hep reference to William Castle's great 1963 horror flick Mr. Sardonicus, which was about this mick who had his face paralyzed by banshees into a super-hideous grin when he crashed his father's casket to get a winning lottery ticket out of the old geezer's jacket pocket and then went around wearing this creepy plastic mask and bringing women down his cellar to ball except you should've seen the shit that went down whenever he would take off the mask) lay languidly upon the very steps to Parnassus." (RS 3/4/71)

from The Quinaimes Band:

"Besides, it's a really swift album. The only real abortion is their version of "Visions of Johanna", which conjures association with Phluff's (does anybody remember them?) rendition of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry." Which is to say, bub, that it not only stinks but it also completely fails to summon forth the manes of the original." (RS 10/28/71)

from a LONG review of Love Story:

"Probably all of us are doubtless acquainted with the maxim, "The only thing worse than a child molester is a leukemia queer."" (RS 9/16/71)

Nick Tosches - S&D

Nick Tosches

Nick Tosches -- Where should I start?

plus threads on ILE

Start with this!

From The Third World:

"The Third World, like a hydra, has this as a basis, and like the true hydra, after you leave the trunk of the organism you find many arms. Many arms reaching out. Reaching for something else, trying for something better; something they don't really know, something they can't really do, some music they can't really play." (RS 8/19/71)

Re Mick J.'s gripes on the Stones' "Slave": "The broad just asked him to go to the store."

I also like his fantasy Merle Haggard song title: "Make Mine Vindaloo."

i like that third world album. but i would. that quinaimes band album is very not great.

Sorry, I think "Make Mine Vindaloo" is actually Meltzer's joke.

"from Three Dog Night's Naturally:

"There is too much good music on this album for anyone to be defensive about it. If music doesn't move you, it sucks, and this music does (the former). Well, maybe just a little of it the latter, but most of it the former.""

And then there was the reference Tosches made to 3DN's "powerful Negro drummer" or something like that...

^Ha!

BTW, where are you reading these reviews? I have the reader, but I want more of this stuff for sure.

I own the actual 1971 issue of Rolling Stone where that review (and the Norman Greenbaum) ran. Most public libraries worth a damn have all or most of the classic rock mags on file.

Or now you can own every issue of RS (through mid-'07) on DVD-ROM. The set lists for $125, but it was 50% off at B&N (stores and online) as of last weekend. I'm still exploring it, but it is indexed so you can immediately reference bands, authors, reviewers, etc. Hope this starts a trend -- we incorrigble magazine back-issue hoarders need the space.

My wife got me the complete Rolling Stone on DVD-R for Xmas. The only problem is I can't copy and paste from it! But that way I can commit to memory gems like this:

from Christopher Milk's Some People Will Drink Anything:

"Christopher Milk are poseurs, part of the great American tradition of standing in front of the mirror and pretending you're Mick Jagger. For what hideous reason these boys have chosen to mimic that irksomely quaint genre of English fop rock that flourished in the Sixties and has now, thankfully, been all but pushed into the wings by a new resurgence of loudness and raunch, only God and John Mendelsohn will ever know."

or ROM, rather

But of course, then there's this, from Mylon's Over the Influence:

"There exists not a single country & western artist who has not sung his twangoid praise to the Pride of Nazareth. Guilt and the Almighty are as integral to country blues as the twelve-bar structure."

but then, later in the review:

"How can any human possibly comprehend "Blue Suede Shoes" [covered by Mylon] and then turn around and warble stuff like "Jesus is a Waymaker/ One day He made a way for me..." and a host of other Xian lyrics. As Mark Allan Powell points out in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music (the only other extensive music text on my hard drive), Carl Perkins and Elvis would've had NO PROBLEM singing "Jesus Is a Waymaker." Of course, Tosches could easily claim that Perkins and Presley didn't "comprehend" "Blue Suede Shoes" either--but if they didn't, who does? Powell also calls the Tosches review "disgraceful," "fanatical in its religious intolerance," and "implicitly racist," and he's normally pretty cool about such things.

The Mylon's an early CCM album reviewed in the 2/15/73 issue, btw.