While out shopping for vinyl tonight I ran across these two delicious finds.I have a huge weakness for anything so wonderfully perverse as Switched-On Rock/The Moog Machine’s old hippie classics re-worked into Moog-synthesized mini-masterpieces. You thought your stereo was broken when you listened to Nine Inch Nails The Fragile, try the super-freaked out synth patches on “You Just Keep Me Hangin’ On”. I actually checked the monitors to make sure I hadn’t lost the tweeters. Hah!
With stuff like this, first you listen cuz it’s cheesy fun. After a few go rounds with it, you actually start hearing how it…could…be…good somehow. This stuff is brilliant. Like eating a brick of jalapeno Velveeta. You know you shouldn’t, but you can’t stop yourself. My favorite part of this two-dollar purchase is actually the liner notes, by “Album conceiver and macrobopper” Russ Barnard. Check out this hilariously dated bit:
“One thing must be stressed: This album is virtually 100% Moog–only two instruments are live. One is the drum set; Moog drums are possible, but in this stage of the art, sound kind of mechanical and ricky-tick.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! That’s 1967 thinking for you…
The Isaac Hayes Juicy Fruit (Disco Freak) is just as great in its own way. This is a long way from Shaft, folks–a disco-infected album (hence the name) that starts off with Isaac Hayes singing about picking up hotties at his favorite disco-teria, and wrapping up the album lamenting about a woman who must “love me…or lose me” My man Isaac is either picking up strict Catholic girls who also love to boogie down but not GET down, or Hayes was just at the end of his lyrical rope by the end of this 1976 coke-n-amyl nitrate soaked leisure suit fest.
I love this cheesy shit. Hayes ain’t phoning this in–he’s going for it on every single track, so there’s this great vibe running through the record. While it’s spinning, you can just see the ABC Records exec snorting coke off the mixing desk, nodding to the beat thinking it was going to be HUGE. “We can shift a million units and get Isaac down to 54 to say hi to Steve Rubell and give Andy Warhol his Polaroids. Then we’ll hit the big time…AMERICAN BANDSTAND.”
Favorite part of this album–the “Solid Gold Dancers” chorus on Thank You Love where the ladies are sing/shrieking “Makin Loooooove” and “Girl, I thank you”.
I ain’t NEVER head Isaac Hayes THANKING a woman for having sex, but it sure sounds like that’s what’s going on here…great stuff. It’s just too wrong NOT to enjoy. “We’ll make love every day…and weeeeeeeellll buh-loowww each other’s MINNNNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSS”