Punk Ikebana

Marc Bolan welcomed the advent of punk rock with the biggest smile he'd worn in years. The hippest young gunslingers could go on all night about the influence of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and the Ramones, but Bolan knew – and subsequent developments proved – that every single one of them had been nurtured in his arms, growing up with the ineffable stream of brilliant singles he slammed out between 1970-1972, and rehearsing their own stardom to the soundtrack he supplied. With tennis racquet guitars and hairbrushes for mikes, they stood before the mirror and practiced the Bolan Boogie. Of course, most punks only knew three chords.

With Talking Heads having split, guitarist Jerry Harrison released his second solo effort with 1987's Casual Gods. In addition to playing guitar, keyboards, and singing, Harrison also produced the release which featured players like Bernie Worrel on keyboards and Chris Spedding and Robbie McIntosh playing guitar. Harrison's vocals have a quality similar to David Byrne and the music is reminiscent of Fear of Music-era Talking Heads. "Rev It Up" was an AOR hit and deservedly so. The song lives up to its name with a funky, loose groove, snaky guitar, and throbbing bass. "Man With a Gun" is just one of many great lyrics on Casual Gods with a series of wry observations ("A pretty girl can walk anywhere/All doors open for her") over a moody rhythm punctuated by guitar twitches. Casual Gods is a pleasure for Talking Heads fans, but manages to stand on its own.

The most blatantly, and brilliantly, portentous of Marc Bolan's albums since the transitional blurring of boundaries that was Beard of Stars, almost seven years prior, Futuristic Dragon opens on a wave of unrelenting feedback, guitars and bombast, setting an apocalyptic mood for the record which persists long after that brief (two minutes) overture is over. Indeed, even the quintessential bop of the succeeding "Jupiter Liar" is irrevocably flavored by what came before, dirty guitars churning beneath a classic Bolan melody, and the lyrics a spiteful masterpiece. While the oddly Barry White-influenced "Ride My Wheels" continues flirting with the neo-funk basics of 1975's Bolan's Zip Gun, the widescreen sonic majesty of Futuristic Dragon was, if anything, even more gratuitously ambitious than its predecessor.

Although Enigma Records was better known for its connection to the mid-'80s Paisley Underground scene (Rain Parade, Game Theory, etc.), the Los Angeles-based indie was also among the first to document the rebirth of glam metal, which overtook the L.A. club scene at the same time, by issuing the first album by Mötley Crüe, Poison, and others. The glam-poppy Lizzy Borden was also ran in the hair metal sweepstakes, but its debut album, 1985's Love You to Pieces, holds up better than many other documents from the era. The packaging, complete with faux-goth band logo and the requisite hot big-haired chick in lingerie, is crushingly obvious, and the entire album flirts with cliché.

Live in Germany 1976 is a live album released by Rainbow in 1990. The tracks are cherry-picked from a series of German dates (Cologne on 25-9-76, Düsseldorf 27-9-76 Nuremberg 28-9-76 and Munich 29-9-76) recorded on the world tour in 1976. It was re-released two years later in the USA as Live in Europe on a different label. The content is the same for both although sleeve notes differ.