I love rooting for the underdog. In almost any scenario, whether it’s sports or politics or just plain real life, I root for the little guy. This means I’m frequently frustrated, of course, but that’s neither here nor there; I’m giving you this personal detail because it’s the only explanation I can think of for my inordinate fascination with Toto.

It sounds a little funny calling them underdogs — it’s Toto’s style of music, after all, that formed part of the establishment that punk (just to give one example) reacted against. Most of the bandmembers were music biz veterans well before Toto the band even existed as a recording group — keyboard player David Paich, keyboard player Steve Porcaro, drummer Jeff Porcaro, bass player David Hungate, and guitarist Steve Lukather were in-demand session players for pretty much any record being made in L.A. for years. Paich and Porcaro had well-known relatives in the industry. In other words, these guys were total insiders.

And yet, in spite of all this, virtually their entire career has been one long uphill struggle. They’ve had to overcome shifting trends, rotating personnel, and critical hostility (not to mention the lamest name for a rock band ever.) They swept the 1982 Grammies, sold millions of records, and became a semi-permanent fixture on Top 40 radio in the ’80s, and yet they were never, not even for a minute, cool. In fact, due to the resolute and utter facelessness of their sound, a lot of people who liked Toto songs probably didn’t even realize they were Toto songs.

Of course, that facelessness was the band’s own fault. Though technically amazing musicians, as a unit, they were often somehow less than the sum of their collective parts. They could (and often did) play just about any type of music under the sun, but it was difficult to discern an absolute commitment to any of them, or even an honest artistic vision. During the height of the band’s success, Toto may just as well have been Chicago or Foreigner or Journey; their commercial triumphs were arguably due more to their ability to mimic current trends than anything else.

Because of all this, today’s Guide is a bit of an anomaly. I’ve written the other ones out of an intense love for the music of whichever band or artist happens to be the topic, but I have no such feelings for Toto. Have they written and recorded good music? Yes. A few classics, even? Maybe. But even though I know they’re out there, I don’t really know what makes a hardcore Toto fan tick — I just think the fact that they’ve managed to persist for almost 30 years now is deeply fascinating, and even sort of admirable. I guess what it boils down to is that this Guide will probably contain a lot of lukewarm reviews, backhanded compliments, and even a few snarky comments, but it’s all in good fun. (more…)

[He doesn't write them anymore -- in fact, they aren't even online anymore -- but truth be known, it was my good friend Ben Wiser who inspired the original Idiot's Guide series, via his impassioned, messy, and always entertaining Field Guides. He always wrote about artists I'd never bothered to investigate too deeply, or that I'd written off outright, and even when I knew I didn't like whatever music he was writing about, he always had a way of making me want to go back and listen to it again.

Anyway, toward the end of '05, I got a request from Eric at Theme Park Experience for a Tom Waits Guide. I love Waits' early Asylum albums, but some of his stuff is beyond me, so although I've got all his records, that's something I'd never write.

Luckily, though, one of Ben's old Field Guides focused on Waits (and, actually, was my reason for going back and filling in the gaps in my own Waits collection). Through his kind permission, we re-christened it and republished it way back in '06 -- now here it is again. Enjoy!]

Closing Time (1973)
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Tom’s debut as the late night, honeythroated troubadour. He covers a lot of ground on this one. It’s amazing to think of this as a debut, I mean, it sounds like he’s been doing it for years. If a heart beats in your chest, “Martha” (download) and “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You” (download) will make you weep. The whole thing is a classic. Like a Capra film, it’s good for the holidays. (more…)

[Editor's Note: I just checked, and it was November 24, 2005 when I got an e-mail from Ken saying "If you ever want someone to do a guest Idiot's Guide to: The Smiths, R.E.M. or Lloyd Cole, I'm your guy." He later went on to cover the Smiths for Jefitoblog -- and co-authored the Lemonheads guide last year -- but the Lloyd Cole guide has been our personal equivalent of the Anselmo case for many moons. Until now, that is.

Lloyd Cole has been releasing albums for damn near 25 years, and you probably haven't heard any of them -- which makes him a perfect Popdose Guides artist. Ken's done a fine job of making a case for Cole, so sit back, open your ears, and enjoy!]

(more…)

I am not one to toss around the word “hero” lightly. It takes extraordinary courage to earn such a designation. I am also not one to write one of these artist overviews with too much usage of the first-person singular pronoun. I like to keep myself out of it as much as I can, trying to maintain some semblance of journalistic objectivity.

But you know what? Ornette Coleman is indeed a heroic figure, not just in jazz, but in popular culture. And for me to make such a statement reflects my own definition of what a hero is. So, to hell with omitting the first person singular pronoun. I’m telling this story the way I want to tell it – from my own personal, biased perspective.

That perspective began when I was in college. What better time to be introduced to Ornette Coleman than during the time when our minds are being pried open and expanded farther than our confining high school institutions ever could pry? And it was in a jazz history class at the University of Rhode Island, appropriately enough, that I first heard Ornette’s name. It was and still is a unique name – who else besides Coleman’s own son can claim it? Admittedly, I was drawn in and driven to find out more as soon as Coleman’s name was linked with that most attractive of adjectives to the mind of a college student with a taste for the unusual – “controversial.”

The text in our history book only briefly touched upon what made Coleman a controversial figure, from what I can remember. Most significantly, Coleman’s tendency to play outside of conventional chord changes seemed to make him a target of derision in his early career. He played by his own rules, and by the early 1970s he had given his set of rules a name – harmolodics.

(more…)

The Beginning

Mike Zelenko (drummer): “I met Jim through an advertisement in the Illinois Entertainer (a local monthly music magazine) right out of high school.

He called me a couple days after the ad started running and told me to come out to Addison, IL (where he lived) right now. With him still on the phone, I’m asking my mom if I can I borrow a car. ‘I thought you were gonna mow the lawn,’ she says. In my other ear, I hear Jim saying, ‘Tell her that if you can’t borrow the car tonight, you’ll never mow another lawn.’

What impressed me the most about Jim was the fact that he was always thinking about the band in the future, planning 3 steps ahead. Forward progress was always being made.

We had a very D.I.Y. ethic, were getting college play, and were willing to work harder than other bands. We made sure to hit New York at least once a month.”

Ted Ansani (bassist): “Jim and I were friends at Columbia College and one day he asked me to start a band with him.. In turn, I asked, ‘Do you have enough music?’ He just smirked and said ‘Of course I do, man.’”

Jim was such a prolific songwriter, every day he’d write a song that was better than the song he’d written the day before.

In the beginning, we literally ran the record company out of Jim’s bedroom. We would glue the covers together, insert the vinyl, and send them out to every college radio station in the country.” (more…)

Welcome to the Popdose Guide to The Call, a semi-forgotten group that had a couple of hits in the ’80s, but has seen its catalog fall out of print and into obscurity over the last ten years or so. It’s a shame, if you ask me. Of all the bands making earnest, sweeping Heartland Rock during the decade (see: U2; Alarm, The; BoDeans, The), The Call were among the most talented and consistent. Though songwriter Michael Been flirted with overt Christianity in his lyrics and themes, his faith was often so tortured that even the most devout atheist would find it hard to listen without feeling a little of that old-time religion. In other words: While freshly scrubbed, L.L. Bean-wearing chumps like Michael W. Smith — or the always-vile dc Talk — were busy bringing Jesus to the mall, Michael Been and The Call were digging bare-handed through the bloodstained soil of Gethsemane.

In discussing the band’s religious leanings, I realize I run the risk of scaring a few readers away from the music. For what it’s worth, I tend to find “Christian rock” mostly neither Christian nor rock — but I think what the open-minded listener has to appreciate about The Call is the music’s passion, regardless of its source. Been often sings — and the band often plays — like it’s pulling barbed wire through its vital organs. I’m not talking Slayeresque rage here, but commitment. Perhaps you’ll listen and hear what I mean. (more…)

Nanci Griffith is arguably the most important folk-music artist of her generation. That statement is risky not so much because there are so many other contenders for the throne, but because we live in an era when the term “folk music” itself has lost considerable meaning — falling victim to record-biz economics and radio-industry pigeonholing. Indeed, during the most successful period of her career Griffith shifted (or, on occasion, was shifted) from indie-folk to country to pop and back to folk — pardon me, I meant “Americana” — based as much on the demographic-targeting whims of industry marketers as the evolution of her music. Griffith herself describes her music as “folkabilly,” which fits about as well as anything else. (more…)

Act I: Johnny Cougar

Chestnut Street Incident (1976)
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I remember finding a cassette of this album back in the ’80s and enjoying the hell out of it, most notably for the fun covers of “Jailhouse Rock,” “Twentieth Century Fox” and “(Oh) Pretty Woman” and whenever I found a book that claimed to review every album ever made, I’d look up my favorite artists and Mellencamp was on that list, so whenever I came across the entry for Chestnut Street Incident I was always shocked to see it get one star (and in some cases, less than one). This album is despised — I think I even read one review which claimed it was one of the worse albums ever made. At the time, I thought the writer was being overly harsh; however, I was lacking history and context. (more…)

[Jefito's Note: She's been a critic's darling for most of her career, but the public at large has always been mostly unaware of Sam Phillips' music, which is why I leapt at the chance to feature this Idiot's Guide to her work, thoughtfully written by our pal Jon Cummings. If you're anything like me, you relish the opportunity to take a guided tour through a catalog you know almost nothing about. Thanks for all your hard work, Jon! —J]

Since emerging from the haloed ghetto known as Contemporary Christian Music in the late 1980s, Sam Phillips has recorded six albums of consistently sharp-edged music while navigating the boundaries of numerous radio genres — without ever managing to find her way across those boundaries into real mainstream success. Encouraged to expand her sights beyond CCM by future producer, songwriting partner and husband T Bone Burnett, Phillips launched her secular career with albums that dabbled in the thematic as well as the musical obsessions the two of them shared, from roots rock to psychedelic pop. More recently, after a less-than-successful flirtation with electronica and dissonance, Phillips has stripped down her sound and released two acclaimed albums of acoustic cabaret-pop.

Full disclosure: I’ve been in the tank for Phillips since the first night of her first tour as a secular artist, an opening slot at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va., in December 1988. My wife and I got to the club a little early, just as Phillips and the evening’s headliner, Luka Bloom, were heading out to dinner. Soon Sam had invited us to join them, and we were off to RT’s restaurant down the street to introduce Sam to the wonders of turtle soup. (She liked it; my wife, not so much.)

Later, back at the gig, Sam had what could have become a very rough night, breaking two strings on the only guitar she had brought onstage. By the time Bloom brought out one of his own, Sam had valiantly and good-humoredly picked her way through the tricky (and bass-note-heavy) instrumentation of her early semi-hit “Flame” (download) on the four remaining strings. It was one of those moments that earn an artist the undying loyalty of everyone present, and I can’t help thinking of that night every time I hear her sing. Heck, I thought of it even while watching her vamp her way through the sultry silence of her Big Hollywood Moment a decade ago, playing villainous Jeremy Irons’ mute girlfriend in Die Hard With A Vengeance. Fortunately, she’s never quit her day job.

Phillips’ secular music reflects a perpetual, largely fruitless yearning for truth and bliss, be it spiritual or romantic. Though she has ventured far from the unquestioning confines of the Christian market, her fan base continues to include some holdovers from her CCM days; Seattle resident Jeffrey Overstreet has much to say about her from a Christian perspective on his website, lookingcloser.org. However, judging from postings in various locations on the Internet, many fans of Leslie Phillips’ strident ’80s pop-gospel still have no idea that she has evolved into a relentlessly inquisitive singer-songwriter whose secular work is practically a guidebook to contemporary agnosticism.

Recollection (1987)
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Anthologizing the four Christian-music albums she recorded under her given name, Leslie Phillips, for the Word/Myrrh labels during the ’80s, Recollection offers a glimpse into the creeping alienation of an artist from her God — or at least from an industry built upon celebrating that God. Her first three albums — Beyond Saturday Night (1983), Dancing With Danger (1984), and Black and White In A Grey World (1985) — were successful within the confines of CCM music, where she was considered the edgier alternative to Amy Grant. At that time CCM recordings were sold mostly in Christian bookstores and, for the most part, had nowhere near the sales impact that Christian artists enjoy today. Typically, Phillips’ early albums never appeared on CD, though they’re all now available on iTunes and presumably elsewhere online.

To the ears of a listener not predisposed to get much out of Christian pop, those first three albums were largely nondescript, sub-Grant treacle. Occasionally peeking out through the layers of keyboards and trebly vocals were some decent melodies, particularly “No One But You” (download) and “When The World Is New” (download). But only on Black and White did Phillips even hint at expressing the shift toward spiritual ambiguity that would make her last Christian album, The Turning, a classic in any genre.

It is no coincidence that the only truly engaging music on this “hits” disc comes from The Turning. Earlier this year Word Records released a second compilation of Leslie Phillips’ music, titled (as more and more of these things tend to be lately) The Definitive Collection. However, the new disc contains only one song from The Turning, compared to three on Recollection; so if you must expose yourself to music from her first three albums, Recollection is the way to go.

The Turning (1987)
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Better yet, forget the early stuff and head straight for this album, which remains to this day the best one Leslie (or Sam, for that matter) ever recorded. (In fact, if you can find a copy of The Turning on CD these days, you’ll find it attributed to Sam and not Leslie; the Word label had the good sense to re-release it in 1997 under a name that would sell more copies in the mainstream market.) Moody and sensual, offering up equal measures of glory and doubt, Phillips on The Turning has her heart in the heavens but her feet planted firmly on the ground. It is the sound of a Christian rethinking her relationship with her faith, and it is, in a word, revelatory.

No doubt the ambivalence on display here, not to mention the new edge in both her lyrics and instrumentation, was rooted in her evolving relationship with Burnett. By then Burnett had achieved cult status for his own spiritually tinged roots-rock albums such as Truth Decay (1980) and a self-titled effort released a year before The Turning. (He also had produced Los Lobos’ brilliant How Will The Wolf Survive, as well as the BoDeans’ debut Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams.) The Turning and T-Bone Burnett share a track, “River Of Love,” that is only obliquely religious yet neatly sums up the couple’s stance with lines like “There’s a river of grief that floods through our lives/It starts when a heart is broken in two/By the thief of belief in anything that’s true.”

Opening Phillips’ album, “River Of Love” sets the tone for a set of songs that explore the joys and tensions found in religious faith and metaphysical doubt. Uncertainty runs rampant through these 10 songs, from the hopeful plea of “Libera Me” (download) — an upbeat, almost giddy track that boasts a bassline so melodic it could send Paul McCartney running back to Lady Madonna — to the transcendent “Answers Don’t Come Easy” (download), which signals the onset of Phillips’ agnosticism in exquisite fashion. As Phillips vacillates between following her heart and her head, she’s also toeing the line that separates Christian music from secular pop. Merely approaching that line likely sealed her fate as a Christian artist, as that market never has been a bastion of tolerance for ambiguity. In fact, Phillips’ Turning tour of churches was an utter disaster, and it’s likely that Christian bookstores subsequently would have shown her the door had she not already pulled it shut herself.

The Indescribable Wow (1988)
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In short order, Leslie Phillips signed with the nascent Virgin label and changed her stage name to Sam (a childhood nickname, its link to the Sun Studios godhead apparently remained unknown to Phillips until well into her career). She and Burnett then set about writing and recording The Indescribable Wow, an album whose songs (despite the metaphysical implications of its title) bore few traces of overt religiosity. That’s not to say her concerns no longer venture into the spiritual, or that her attitude betrays any more certainty. On the album’s best-remembered track, “Holding On To The Earth,” she catalogs her earthly rewards with a familiar ambivalence: “I got a long black Cadillac/Marble hot tub in the back/Champagne waterfall/Solid gold question mark twenty feet tall.”

That song, featuring sitar-like licks from Burnett’s guitar and other psychedelic touches, gave Phillips her first whiff of mainstream attention. Its lyrical mood was matched by a triumvirate of songs whose titles trumpeted problems without solutions: “I Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye,” “I Don’t Wanna Fall In Love,” and “I Can’t Stop Crying” (download). The latter’s bridge lyric is a brilliant, altogether secular reckoning of one’s place in the world: “I know that this heartache is a speck in the sky of love/But it’s all I feel around me.”

Phillips turns her focus away from herself (or does she merely change pronouns?) on “She Can’t Tell Time” (download), a song that could be read as a metaphor for her break from the Christian market: “She can’t tell time/Deaf ears won’t listen to her/When faith went blind/I could see light through her:Her vigils in the street/Left my youth incomplete/Left meaning obsolete.” A couple of tracks were overproduced by Burnett, and Phillips remained unable to control her higher vocal register (a problem she solved by sticking to lower octaves on subsequent albums). Still, The Indescribable Wow marked Phillips as an artist to watch in 1988 — a year so resplendent with fresh-sounding debuts by female singer-songwriters that Musician magazine famously dubbed it the “Year of the Woman,” and featured Phillips prominently in its cover story.

Cruel Inventions (1991)
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While some of those women went on to long-term success (Melissa Etheridge, Sinead O’Connor, Tracy Chapman, Mary Chapin Carpenter), others proved to be flashes in the pan (Toni Childs, Tanita Tikaram). Phillips took her time responding to her seismic career shift and the notoriety occasioned by The Indescribable Wow. Indeed, she waited nearly three years to release a second album; for all that, Cruel Inventions sounds like a natural progression from The Indescribable Wow. It explores similar musical terrain, returning to Beatlesque psychedelia on “Where The Colors Don’t Go,” while darkening the mood on songs reminiscent of The Turning’s more brooding numbers.

Phillips broadens her lyrical concerns with tracks such as “Raised On Promises” (download), taking on politics both electoral and sexual in thickly veiled language while touching on familiar spiritual issues. The illogic of consumer culture gets skewered in the sharp-witted “Standing Still,” while “Tripping Over Gravity” (download) seems to abandon logic altogether. Burnett takes the ’80s edges off the production, focusing instead on mood-enhancing guitar effects and propulsive drumming (two strong points throughout his producing career).

A stronger, if less accessible album than The Indescribable Wow, Cruel Inventions upped the ante on Phillips’ songwriting even as it made a mainstream pop career less likely. Phillips and Burnett would pursue their joint obsessions with even more exciting results on her next album.

Martinis And Bikinis (1994)
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Another long period of silence followed Cruel Inventions, broken only by the prominent use of two Phillips songs, “Raised On Promises” and “Holding On To The Earth,” in Ashley Judd’s 1993 film debut Ruby In Paradise. But when Martinis And Bikinis arrived it made the biggest splash of Phillips’ career, earning unanimous critical raves as well as a Grammy nomination, and even poking its way onto the Billboard 200 album chart (the only time she has managed that feat). More important, the album consolidated all the themes she had pursued since The Turning, in particular her relentless search for “truth” in a life that, particularly through her conservative-Christian upbringing and her journey through the CCM circuit, had surrounded her with “meaning.”

To drive the point home, she closes the album with a cover of John Lennon’s “Gimme Some Truth” that trades Lennon’s vocal snarl for an weary tone of resignation; to borrow from another rock god, she clearly still hasn’t found what she’s looking for. The Lennon tune fits here not just because of its themes, but because, generally speaking, Martinis And Bikinis takes Phillips and Burnett’s mutual Beatlemania to new heights. “When I Fall” and “Same Rain,” the latter co-written by the two, are veritable primers on Revolver-era guitar licks and harmonies, and the Pepper-y imagery that permeated earlier albums reaches full flower power here on tracks like “Strawberry Road” and “Same Changes.” You’d swear it was Ringo on drums all the way through.

“Baby I Can’t Please You” (download) serves as a neat bookend for “Gimme Some Truth,” and features a neat lyrical trick: Even as Phillips skewers an unnamed politician through the verses (”You try to tell the world how it should spin, but you live in terror with the hollow man”), in the chorus she turns on herself with a mixture of self-loathing and pride familiar to persecuted peoples who’ve been forced to hear themselves derided by their oppressors. Finally, in the glorious “I Need Love” (download) she presents a manifesto that sums up everything she’s done since she turned away from the Christian market: “I need love/Not some sentimental prison/I need God/Not the political church/I need fire/To melt the frozen sea inside me.” And from wherever he is now, Lennon smiles.

Omnipop (It’s Just a Flesh Wound Lambchop) (1996)
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Hidden within the triumph that was Martinis And Bikinis lay a solitary stinker, a track called “Black Sky” that jacked up the electronic effects and “Tomorrow Never Knows”-style drumming to conceal a clichéd lyric and weak melody. Sadly, when it came time to follow up Martinis, Phillips chose not to capitalize on its strengths but instead to record an album full of tracks like “Black Sky.” Omnipop has its fans, but not too many of them. Phillips should be given credit for experimenting with electronica when electronica wasn’t (yet) too cool; still, most listeners found the album comparable to a trip to the dentist, complete with drilling noises and screams from the next room.

Phillips returns here to themes she’s explored before — sexual politics on “Where Are You Taking Me?” and “Slapstick Heart” (download), the latter written with R.E.M., and the consumerism that dominates pop culture in “Plastic Is Forever” and “Power World.” (The latter song plays as an homage to the Catholic philosopher Thomas Merton, whose ideas Phillips has explored elsewhere.) On “Entertainmen” she joins the intersection of sex and commerce; the pun of the title is about as clunky as the rest of the song (”Entertainmen/Watch me/Let me be your TV”). Having been rendered mute in her Die Hard role as the jaded terrorist’s girlfriend the year before, Phillips seems here to be pouring forth her character’s unexpressed angst over the state of American culture as discussed in the film — or maybe the album was simply a reaction to the process of making a cookie-cutter Hollywood blockbuster.

Whatever. The results were mostly desultory, the critical response was the worst of her career, and sales were so poor that Virgin dropped Phillips like a hot potato. First, of course, it released the contractual-obligation best-of Zero Zero Zero! in 1999; the song selection is spotty (nothing from The Indescribable Wow appears in its original incarnation), but it’s worthy for a few choice remixes.

Fan Dance (2001)
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The response to Omnipop might have forced any artist into a career re-evaluation, but the five years that preceded Fan Dance were eventful in other ways. There was, of course, the label change (to the Nonesuch imprint), but there was also the birth of a daughter, Simone, which led Phillips into temporary retirement. Crucial to understanding her re-emergence, however, is Burnett’s production of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, which proved the biggest success of his career, winning the Grammy Award as Album Of The Year, selling more than 5 million copies, and leading the music industry to re-discover its folk-blues roots. Phillips contributed only backing vocals, but the soundtrack’s influence on her and Burnett seemed clear upon the release of Fan Dance seven months later.

Shorn of electronica clutter, and even downplaying the Beatles influences of her earlier albums — Fan Dance strips away the barriers between the listener and Phillips’ enigmatic songwriting. Fortunately, she delivers one of her most delectable sets of songs, restoring her dedication to melody and revealing a matured outlook that de-emphasizes the spiritual and delves into the personal. Her themes frequently are reminiscent of a Brecht/Weill collaboration, and occasionally so are her tunes; “Edge Of The World” (download), in particular, plays like some of the most intelligent theater/cabaret music recorded in several decades.

Elsewhere, “Wasting My Time” employs a small chamber ensemble arranged by Van Dyke Parks; “Taking Pictures” borrows a guitar effect from “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” while lamenting that “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be”; and “How To Dream” cribs the opening of Marshall Crenshaw’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” before offering up a perhaps profound, perhaps obtuse bit of wisdom: “When we open our eyes and dream/We open our eyes.” When Phillips offers up the most straightforward and hopeful song of her secular career — “Love Is Everywhere I Go” — it’s hard not to imagine she’s joking, considering everything that’s come before. She leaps right back into her element with the album’s closer, the downright spooky “Say What You Mean” (download).

With a dozen tracks clocking in at a mere 33 minutes, Fan Dance marked a new direction that, while failing to win over many new fans, left Phillips’ fans craving more. Fortunately, there was more to come in this vein.

A Boot And A Shoe (2004)
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Phillips herself wasn’t sure why she gave her most recent album its title. Was it the juxtaposition of seeming opposites? Was it a metaphor for a songwriter whose spiritual tug-of-war leaves her feeling off balance, as though walking in a boot and a shoe? Whatever its latent intent as allegory, as an album A Boot And A Shoe offers a clarity that’s rare for Phillips, and it serves as a terrific signpost for her future endeavors. A companion piece to Fan Dance — Phillips refers to the two albums as “twins” — A Boot And A Shoe places the earlier album in context merely by revisiting its many charms, and demonstrating that acoustic cabaret/chamber pop is not merely a dalliance, but a permanent direction and one that’s eminently worth pursuing.

That’s not to say that A Boot And A Shoe doesn’t stand on its own. A brighter, more upbeat album than its predecessor, it features Phillips’ most lived-in vocals and signals a newfound confidence in her approach as well as in the push-pull between the spiritual and secular that has defined her career. Phillips sounds completely at home here, exuding warmth even as she’s stirring up her patented lyrical hornet’s nests. On “Reflecting Light” (download) she sounds downright humble, seeming (for the moment at least) to have found a personal, if not a doctrinal, state of grace.

Whether the songs feature piano, guitars or strings, the album is dominated by one of Burnett’s favorite devices: cascades of drums (performed by multiple percussionists, often recorded simultaneously), which propel the shuffling whimsy of “Draw Man” (download) as well as the Weillian “All Night.” Phillips even echoes Harry Nilsson on the delightful, inventive album opener “How To Quit.”

A Boot And A Shoe is a uniquely ingratiating album — until, seemingly out of nowhere, Phillips drops “Hole In My Pocket,” which over the course of just over a minute lays bare the emotions of 17 years before, when she began to seriously question her faith (and abandoned her Christian-music career). “My life fell through a hole in my pocket,” she sings. “I lost my solitude/I lost my balance/I lost my reverence and my voice.” In its devastation, its childlike major-key accompaniment, and its brevity, “Hole In My Pocket” seems intended to play a role not unlike “My Mummy’s Dead,” the coda to Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band LP.

But Phillips has one more trick up her sleeve: “One Day Late,” a sort of twisted take on the gospel chestnut “I’ll Fly Away” in which “help is coming,” but not soon enough. The pairing of the two songs, one despairing and the next ebullient, mirrors the juxtapositions of loss and rebirth that resound through Phillips’ work. Once again Phillips has distilled her obsessions to their essence, but on “One Day Late” she reaches the other side with a humor signaling that, while she’s still working through her issues, they’re no longer the cause of so much rage or grief.

Phillips’ career continues to look up, following the glowing reviews that greeted Fan Dance and A Boot And A Shoe. She has contributed a song and incidental music to the TV hit “Gilmore Girls,” and appeared on a 2006 episode. A new album, once expected this year, has been put off until 2008; in the meantime, she has launched small-scale club tours with piano and chamber-ensemble accompaniment, shedding new light on a diverse and fascinating body of music.

[Jefito's Note: His first Idiot's Guide was a controversial one for many of you — but I loved it, and he wanted to come back for more, so this week, we'll be taking a look at the recorded output of none other than Adam Ant, courtesy of our good friend Allen at Septenary. To most Americans — the ones with long memories, even — Adam Ant is a two-hit wonder at best, which is exactly why I was so interested in reading Allen's take on his music. Sit right back and hear the tale of a man who had his band stolen out from under him and lived to sell a few million albums. And then go batty, but better to burn out than fade away, or something:right? —J]

For my 40th birthday my late daughter, Elizabeth, presented me with the bestest of all birthday gifts: The remastered box set of Adam Ant. It is a prized possession of mine and a pleasure for me to now examine the works of one Mr. Stuart Goddard, A.K.A. Adam Ant.

Dirk Wears White Sox (1979)
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Born out of the ashes of the punk movement of the mid ’70s, art student Stuart Goddard was sufficiently impressed with the doings of the Sex Pistols to go out and start a band of his own. But his approach was less the destruction of rock and roll and more an attempt to join its ranks:on his own terms.

Having already dismantled his first band, “Bazooka Joe,” and rechristened himself with the Ant moniker, Adam and his band were starting to gain popularity in England with a series of herky jerk singles like “Plastic Surgery” and “Deutscher Girls” (download), also featured in the punk film Jubilee. Subsequently, a record deal with Do It was in the offing. The result? The strange and disjointed semi-new wave bizarre album Dirk Wears White Sox.

The opening track, “Cartrouble (parts 1 & 2)” (download), an ode to self gratification and impotence heralds Dirk as an exercise in a new sound emerging from the art rock London underground. There is none of the posing “new romanticism” (which would be Ant’s calling card later) to be found on this album, and many of the songs are difficult, to say the least. When he won back the masters to Dirk, “Cartrouble” would be reconstructed and released as a shorter, more accessible song but, in the process, would lose all of its revolutionary style and substance.

Adam would never be known for subtlety, but he had a serious knack for production. And what he lacked in craft, he made up for in his vocal work. Doubling and overdubbing his own voice would prove to be his signature, as well as a penchant for backing himself with bizarre nonsensical warblings. It is this talent that powers trifles like “Day I Met God” and “Catholic Day.” By themselves they are barely songs, but since experimentation was carrying the day in music (this was a time when Laurie Anderson could not only get a record deal, but score a hit with a ten-minute song) and Adam was a master. The fact that he was backed by some pretty talented blokes, like Matthew Ashman and Dave Barbe, helped as well.

“Never Trust a Man with Egg on His Face” (download) would foreshadow the ominous stylings of “antmusic” and its trippy, Twilight Zone overtones somehow make the nonsense work.

If one can get past the obvious songwriting immaturity in pieces like “Cleopatra” and “Tabletalk” and take them, instead, for the late night post-punk art gallery rock that they really are, Dirk is quite a curio; never for one second showing the pop genius that was just a year away and in no way indicating that Adam was about to take Britain by storm, becoming an international pop idol and fully cemented superstar and fashion icon. Dirk’s innocence is rendered timeless by it’s creator’s future crossover success.

Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980)
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It isn’t enough to just call Kings one of the most important New Wave albums of the ’80s. Like many of its contemporaries, this album has somehow gotten lost in the MTV Kajagoogoo shuffle. It’s nothing short of a revelation.

After the underground success of Dirk, Adam turned to The Sex Pistols svengali, Malcolm McLaren, for guidance. The new manager did two things to Adam and the Ants that would forever change the musical landscape of the time: First, he introduced Adam to the tribal “Burundi Beat,” swearing it would be the next big thing, the holy grail of musical stylings. Second, he stole Adam’s band. His idea was to drop Adam and front the group with an underage cutie (Anabella Lwin), but he would let Adam keep the name. From then on it was a race between a bandless Adam and Malcolm’s new group, now known as Bow Wow Wow.

Rather than let the fact that he was, effectively, kicked out of his own band deter him, Adam sought out an acquaintance, a gifted local guitarist named Marco Pirroni. The two of them cobbled together a band, using the ideas that McLaren put in Adam’s head about rhythm and beats, then scored not one, but two drummers in the process and, on the strength of singles and the previous record, scored a deal and proceeded to take the world by its antennae.

From the opening dual drum attack of “Dog Eat Dog” (download) it is apparent that this is something different. Describing his music as “Ant Music for Sex People” and dressing up as pirates, Adam offered one hypnotic rock and rhythm track after another. “Antmusic” heralds their arrival (genius and ballsy to write a song ABOUT what kind of music they play, I would say), “Feed Me to the Lions” drives issues of abandonment home, and just when you think you have a handle on things, “Los Rancheros” turns everything on its ear, running spaghetti western motifs through the punk/art school taffy machine.

This is an album replete with themes of desolation, not just in lyrical content, but, musically as well. “Ant Invasion” is a stark horror show. “Killer in the Home” is as paranoid as it is dramatic. “Kings of the Wild Frontier” (download), an unlikely hit single, is another announcement of the band’s arrival, as is “The Magnificent Five,” proclaiming that “long ago in London town, a man called Ant sat deeply sighing:he was wondering what side of the fence he was on:prick up your ears” (thank you, Mr. Orton).

Sprinkle a little disco and a smattering of pirate chanting, and Kings of the Wild Frontier is one of the most listenable curios in the rock canon.

Prince Charming (1981)
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Adam was one of the first to realize the power of the video medium for rock. Even Michael Jackson took cues from him (note the brocade jacket, something Adam stole from Hendrix, who was much less concerned about presentation and probably just thought it was cool; legend has it Jackson spoke to Adam and inquired as to where Ant got it). So, on Prince Charming the Ants took on their next incarnation — buccaneer dandies.

As wildly reviled as it was popular at the time, this is the album that started Adam’s true ascent to pop idoldom. The hit singles “Stand and Deliver” and “Prince Charming” were all over MTV and flying up the British charts. Another hit, “Ant Rap” (download) would be, along with Blondie’s “Rapture,” the first rap crossover to the mainstream, easily a half decade ahead of its time (French lyrics notwithstanding). I think it’s important to note that Adam’s rap entrée has all the requisite bravado and ego and, for some reason, it works. Or, at least, I enjoy it.

But this album, while calculated to capitalize on “Antmania,” which was talking over the UK, was not without its forays into the bizarre. The opening track, “Scorpios” (download), is, arguably, the best track on the album and something of a divergence. The tribal rhythms are counter-measured by a horn section sending the listener into the realm of glam. It also contains one of my personal favorite breakdowns — check it out at 2:29. “Pablo Picasso Visitos Los Planetos De Los Simios” may be the worst-titled song in history, but it isn’t without its charm.

Adam’s obsessions with all things 19th century and sexual charge pieces like “Mowhok,” “S.E.X,” “Five Guns West,” and “Mile High Club,” and while they aren’t great, they fit in and aren’t an annoyance:just weird. However, they aren’t as inspired as anything on the previous album and suggest a change in direction might be needed to keep audiences interested.

Adam was about to do just that.

BONUS DOWNLOAD: “Beat My Guest” (download). The b-side to “Stand and Deliver” has become a better-known Adam song over the years, having been covered by the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Epoxies as well as being available as a T-Mobile ringtone.

Friend or Foe (1982)
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Jettisoning the Ants (save for Pirroni), Adam Ant became a full-on solo act in 1982. Pulling back the artsy-fartsy songwriting he (along with Marco) landed in America with his first bona fide chart-topping hit. “Goody Two Shoes” could be called the first New Wave song to break the form wide open, and, in a way, that would be true, but it’s really nothing more than a great, hip swiveling, rockabilly tune, infused with as much teeny bop sex as Adam could get away with. The formula worked, and it would propel him into the stratosphere.

FoF is pure pop confection. Chewy bubblegum if I ever heard it. Adam and Marco have taken everything they learned over the past three albums, dumped out the fat, increased the horns, magnified the ego, revved up the 1-4-5 and the result is the most accessible, commercial work they would ever turn in.

The double drumming signature sound is given a makeover on the title track (download), which also continues the exploration of a brass section. The ominous terror of “Ant Invasion” has reformed itself as “Desperate But Not Serous”; Adam is perfectly comfortable singing about himself as he “wants those who get to know me, to become admirers or my enemies” and the theme of what it’s like to be Adam Ant is all over the Friend or Foe album. But who cares? He’s having too much fun.

Calling attention to his sexual prowess or his taste in women (”Something Girls”) seems natural. And the pining for a simple life in “Place in the Country” is, to me, the true heart of the album. It’s where all the ideas coalesce and are cohesive — “Antmusic” at its most malleable and frothy best. Friend or Foe is, in some ways a confessional album but it isn’t sickly; the only downside is what makes it truly a sign of the ’80s times; the songs have no idea that they are over (or that we are growing weary of them) as they repeat their choruses ad nauseam until their inevitable end.

There is a lot to love on Friend or Foe and only a very little to hate. The cover of the Doors’ “Hello, I Love You” is not only dreadful, it’s embarrassing to Morrison as well as to Ant. And there is a big, pointless instrumental piece called “Man Called Marco” that features, of course, Mr. Pirroni and his guitar. But for each of those, there are two neat little numbers, like “Try this For Sighs” (download):oh so subtle, Mr. Ant.

Friend or Foe is a near forgotten piece of pop-culture fluff that remains enjoyable to this day.

Strip (1983)
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With all of his vocal gymnastics, I’ve often wondered what it would be like if Adam were produced by different people. If his music was wrung through someone else’s taffy machine. Would he sound better, worse? Would they add or detract? I started to get my wish on Strip, and it wasn’t all that pleasing.

Starting with the come-hither in the hay photo on the cover, (a play on a Jean Harlow movie poster) it’s pretty much downhill. Adam is overt about who his target audience is now and he was going to leave the boys behind. Too bad. Once you lose those fans, it’s so hard to get them back.

Where was I? Oh, yes, production. Strip is the album where Adam attempted to go mainstream in a big way and, in doing so, hired Phil Collins to produce the singles. On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense, Collins being a drummer and all. On the other, it makes even more sense, since who was a bigger hitmaker in the early ’80s?

Does it work? The title track (download) is catchy, yes. And its string arrangement is:interesting. But what becomes immediately apparent through Collins’ minimalist production is that bringing Adam’s voice so far to the front is not necessarily a good thing. Richard Burgess takes over production chores for the rest of the side and keeps up, save for the opening track on Side Two. Collins’ second single, “Puss in Boots,” is the other good song on the album. Burgess’ job is just to try to maintain the theme that Collins has laid out, and it’s a pretty banal one.

To me, Strip plays like a dopey East End musical production whose central theme wants to be sex. However, the sexual protagonist is just a poser, someone who has had a lot of sex, but has never connected to anyone, so he can’t really describe what it’s all about. Truly atrocious songs like “Baby, Let me Scream at You,” “Libertine,” and “Vanity” fill up Side One, and only “Spanish Games” hearkens back to the fun theme-filled days of yore. It’s a struggle to get through the pseudo-disco, and it leaves one wondering just what happened in less than three years to take us from Kings, which had such teeth, to this impotent album?

After “Puss,” there just seems very little reason to keep going at all. I’ve often tried to enjoy “Navel to Neck” (download), but that’s just because of the groove that almost sounds like the old Antmusic struggling to be heard — quashed, of course, by Adam’s ego.

Viva Le Rock (1985)
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Tony Visconti takes the reins on Adam’s first album after a two-year hiatus. So what did Bowie’s old dial-turner do for our struggling Ant? Just the opposite of Collins and Burgess. Employing an almost “wall of sound” construct, Adam is all over this album, just close enough to be heard, but far enough away to be more of an instrument than a vocalist. I think the AMG put it best when they said that Adam is rendered anonymous on his own album; I couldn’t really put it any better.

I have always been partial to the title track (download), and while Adam is knee-deep in the post-apocalyptic exploding drum sound, this album, which is supposed to be about the LIFE of rock, is almost lifeless. Plodding, albeit determined.

This is Adam’s most aggressive offering since Kings, and it almost succeeds. Playful tunes like “Rip Down” and “Razor Keen” almost redeem him after Strip. And there’s even a hint of danger in the likes of “Scorpio Rising” (Adam has now clocked in with two tracks titled after the Scorpio sign of the zodiac), but the teeth are without venom and it’s rather tedious.

Side Two has more energy. “Apollo 9″ was something of a dance hit, and “Hell’s Eight Acres” (download) suggest a return to the dirty but accessible rockabilly of the “Goody Two Shoes” days. “Mohair Locker Room Pinup Boys” and “No Zap” (download) follow and, believe it or not, one might find one’s self wishing for more.

It would take five years to get it.

Manners & Physique (1990)
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Adam disappeared into the sieve of Hollywood and tried to become a star, trading off his fame and good looks — but the closest he came was Billy Crystal’s impersonation of him on SNL.

One day, I was co-DJing a bar mitzvah. The other DJ asked me to get “Room at the Top,” by Adam Ant, out of his bag of just-released junk.

“What? Who? Huh?”

Yep, all the 13-year-olds in 1990 wanted to get their groove on to Adam Ant. At first, I thought these kids:they have no idea who Adam is, who he was, what he meant, scratch that, means to me and the whole history of:

Then “Room at the Top” (download) came on. An infectious little dance tune, it sounded absolutely nothing like Adam. And, for all intents and purposes, it may as well not be. Produced and co-written by Prince disciple Andre Cymone, Manners and Physique is as anonymous an album as Ant has ever made. “Rough Stuff” (download) has Adam almost sounding like the old pirate we knew, but by now he’s really just making sounds on plastic. The title track, “Bright Lights, Black Leather” and “Picadilly” are vapid. “If you Keep on” and “Can’t Set Rules About Love” (download) sound like Adam was:oh, I can’t. It isn’t horrible. It’s just:crap.

Persuasion (unreleased)

So the record company wouldn’t release Adam’s next album. At least that’s the story. But instead of having the muscle to buy back his recordings, the way he’d pushed around Do It Records over a decade earlier, Persuasion stayed in the vaults. Nary a track can be found on the (fantastic) three-disc AntBox. And it’s for good reason.

We won’t go into too much detail here, except to say that the success of “Room at the Top” must have inspired Adam to try to capture lightning twice. It didn’t happen. I will say, I don’t hate the title track (download) — in fact, I prefer it to just about anything on Manners — but it’s a cold and calculated piece of clubhopping pseudo-dance music.

The whole album is just a mess; it’s no wonder it wasn’t released. With tracks like “Charge of the Heavy Brigade” (download), the world was better off without it.

Wonderful (1994)
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Adam closed the door on his musical career (and his sanity, apparently) in the mid ’90s. Now fancying himself a singer/songwriter, Ant released Wonderful as a sort of melancholy coda. As with most of his albums, the title track isn’t half bad. And once again, my childhood hero surprised me. At the time it was released I was hosting a daytime talk radio show; during the news breaks, I would switch to the FM easy listening sister station, and dammit if Adam Ant wasn’t back with a Top 40 hit!

“Wonderful” (download) is, in many ways, Adam’s best song in years. It is easily his only song you could bust out at a campfire and sing with pride (can you imagine pulling out the old Takamine and serenading a girl with “Ant Invasion” by the crashing tides?). Of course, this is the first time that Adam was really pouring his soul into his work and trying to be understood, and not just writing songs to try to sell them or his image. “Wonderful” works. (I especially like how his voice goes high when he says it’s “too deep, I can’t get under it.”)

The haunting “Beautiful Dream” (download) is a good indication of what Strip should have sounded like, but it’s really a few years too late.

Post script:
I grew up loving Adam Ant. I saw him twice in concert. Once at the Capital Theater in Passaic, NJ, on the Prince Charming tour, and once at Radio City Music Hall for the Strip Tour. Kings of the Wild Frontier was one of the most important albums of my youth.

Flash to a few years ago. I’m at LAX. Baggage claim. Striking up a conversation with a professor from Dartmouth about how we are on the verge of an American epoch (his words, not mine). Out of nowhere this English bloke in a cape(!) and big, goofy wide-brimmed hat starts screaming about his lost luggage. (Well, it hadn’t been lost yet, but he was sure that it would be and he would hold them all accountable!) He was on a tirade and, after awhile, was led away to some safe (we hope) room.

The professor looked at me and said, “Do you know who that is?”

“Oh, god.” I replied.
“That was Adam Ant,” he said.

And we both just stared at my hero as he screamed and shouted at anything within earshot.

With that, I need to consider what to leave you for some bonuses.

What would an Adam and the Ants compendium be without their greatest single, the popular flexidisc reworking of “YMCA”: “A.N.T.S” (download) (and yes, I had it on flexidisc:thank you, Trouser Press)? And, of course, the great single from the early days, “Zerox” (download).

Adam Ant. The Dandy Highwayman.