By Jacob Coleman
Thanks to my chronic case of football brain, I’m starting a new column where the results of University of Florida (UF) football games will determine what albums I write about. If the Gators win, I’ll write about an album by an artist from Gainesville. If the other team wins, I’ll write about an album by an artist from that team’s area. These will be posted every few weeks in groups of 3 or 4 mini reviews at a time. Enjoy!
The Osmonds - Crazy Horses (1972)
Utah 24 - Florida 11
Crazy Horses is an odd little musical detour of an album. The Osmonds were a family band from Ogden, Utah who were huge for a good chunk of the ‘70s, and they were a showbiz family through and through. They got their first taste of the limelight as extremely young children singing precocious barbershop quartet numbers on national television, but they soon had pop star aspirations. Their chance came in 1970 when the Jackson Five, a similarly young family band, went on an all-time classic run of hit singles and became one of the biggest names in music. The Osmonds promptly signed to MGM Records and recorded "One Bad Apple," a fun song and literal Jackson 5-reject that took them straight to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
With the success of “One Bad Apple,” the Osmond kids carved out showbiz careers that put them firmly in the realm of ‘70s kitsch. Donny immediately became the breakout star of the family when he was 13 years old and started racking up hits with saccharine covers of songs like Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love.” A few years later, Donny and his little sister Marie got their own variety show on CBS where they’d sing smiley, peppy covers of songs that didn’t always beget smiley, peppy covers. You get the idea. With all of the showbiz sparkle of the Osmonds’ usual output, you would be forgiven for thinking that an Osmonds album full of honest-to-God hard rock would be out of the question, but you would also be wrong.
I don’t want to oversell Crazy Horses. It’s not the Osmonds’ In Utero or anything. It’s not completely without that variety-show sheen. Still, consider the title track. It opens with this screaming synthesizer meant to sound like a horse’s whinny, and this guttural guitar riff comes in and blows it wide open. The hook soars out of the song. The final chorus sounds like a sonic bomb of energy. It’s definitely a sillier and poppier take on the hard rock it’s emulating, almost like a bubblegum spin on Led Zeppelin, and it sets the tone for the rest of the album.
Quite a few of the songs on Crazy Horses sound like they were songwriting exercises by the Osmond brothers, and it’s fun to try to figure out who they were emulating. The album opens with “Hold Her Tight,” a fun, raucous tune that goes for Led Zeppelin to the point where they use the “Immigrant Song” riff wholesale. Rollickers like “Utah” and “Julie” fit in with glam-rock bands like The Sweet who were just coming into their own at the time. My favorite of the bunch is easily “What Could It Be?,” which aims to sound like a Paul McCartney piano ballad and absolutely sticks the landing. It’s not all smooth sailing - “Girl” in particular sticks out as a dud - but there are quite a few great moments on here. If odd pop culture obscurities are your thing, I would check this out at least once.
Tom Petty - Full Moon Fever (1989)
Florida 49 - McNeese 7
Look in the liner notes of Full Moon Fever and you’ll see a verifiable who’s who of some of the biggest names in rock history. At the executive producer’s chair is Jeff Lynne, better known as the mastermind behind Electric Light Orchestra. The closing track has backing vocals from the late Roy Orbison, easily one the most arresting singers to ever pick up a microphone. The guitar solo on “I Won’t Back Down” is done by none other than George Harrison. A year before Full Moon Fever came out, Tom Petty recorded an album with all of them plus Bob Dylan. I’m pointing all of this out because Tom Petty had only been in the national spotlight for about a decade by 1989, yet he was already laying down tracks with some of the biggest veterans of the music industry. That’s nuts. I doubt that anyone was that surprised, though. It doesn’t take a music industry veteran to realize that Tom Petty could write a damn song.
Tom Petty wrote a whole lot of songs before releasing Full Moon Fever. He played in Gainesville music scene in the early ‘70s as part of a band called Mudcrutch, which eventually morphed into Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Their self-titled debut came out in 1976 and included the mind-boggling masterwork “American Girl,” which seems like hitting a grand slam on your first at-bat in the majors. “American Girl” didn’t even scratch the charts when it came out, but it’s reverberated through pop culture; it’s appeared in movies ranging from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Silence of the Lambs, and it heavily inspired the Strokes’ breakthrough single “Last Nite.” Meanwhile, Petty’s audience continued to grow until 1979’s great Damn the Torpedoes was a bonafide smash. With his newfound superstar status, Petty collaborated with a bunch of musicians - Stevie Nicks and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics for example - without ever compromising his signature sound or knack for writing great songs.
Full Moon Fever is one of those albums that plays like a greatest hits record. The first thing you hear on it is “Free Fallin,’” a wistful ode to SoCal ennui that anyone who owns a radio could probably sing in their sleep. Next up is “I Won’t Back Down,” which gives me and everyone else in Gainesville a Pavlovian urge to start scream-singing at the top of their lungs. Both of these songs are so ingrained in pop culture that it’s odd to consider that they didn’t always exist or that we weren’t born with their massive hooks inscribed in our DNA. The songs here that weren’t cultural totems still sound like they have “hit song” written all over them. “Love Is a Long Road'' has a mean, snarling, drive-along hook. “Yer So Bad” and “Depending on You” have absurdly catchy choruses. Even at its most laid back, the songwriting on this album still seems to aim for the cheap seats. The hooks have a way of being dead simple to learn but still utterly captivating. It’s hard to think of many songwriters who did more with less in their writing than Tom Petty.
The production on this album is as clear as a bell. Jeff Lynne produced comeback albums for some of this album’s guest stars, like George Harrison’s Cloud Nine and Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl, and he managed to adapt the slick and shiny production of the late ‘80s without losing any of the warmth of his artists’ classic material. Full Moon Fever might be his best work. The dreamy, jangly haze of “A Face in the Crowd” sounds fantastic on Spotify, and I’m sure it’s unbelievable on CD or vinyl. The production gives this album an out-of-time quality, as it compliments Petty exploring the bygone sounds of his youth while sounding still fitting in with the sounds of the day. For instance, Petty pays tribute to his heroes the Byrds, a defining ‘60s folk rock group, with his fantastic cover of “Feel A Whole Lot Better,” but the jangle of the guitars and richness in the harmonies wouldn’t sound that out of place for more contemporary bands like R.E.M. or the Replacements, both of whom probably took quite a bit of influence from Petty. I’m sure that cross-generational appeal helped push Full Moon Fever to sell five million copies in the US, but maybe music fans of all stripes just know a well-made album when they hear it. After all, Tom Petty knew how to write a damn song.
Against Me! - Reinventing Axl Rose (2002)
Florida 29 - Tennessee 16
Axl Rose and Laura Jane Grace have more in common than you would probably think. Both of them had troubled upbringings, both being raised in restrictive households that were rocked by acrimonious divorces. Rose’s adolescence was fraught with religious restrictions and physical abuse, while Grace experienced gender dysphoria before there was much or any public awareness of it. Grace came out as a transgender woman in 2012. Both had run-ins with the law as teenagers, and both fled to their scenes of choice (Los Angeles and Gainesvlle, respectively) where they lived in total squalor.
What’s striking about these similarities is how differently it comes off in their respective debut albums. Guns n’ Roses’ 1987 debut Appetite for Destruction is, of course, a total classic, but it presents Axl Rose as a chaotic, unthinking force of hedonism. Songs like “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Nightrain” are pure id; they sound like the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes let loose in the studio. Reinventing Axl Rose is not that. It’s loud and roughshod, but it’s full of pointed left-wing protest songs that never aims for less than collective catharsis. Grace’s songwriting manages to be both confrontational and empathetic, and with this debut, she knocked out a half hour of anthems. In its own, very different way, Reimagining Axl Rose is just as much of a classic as Appetite for Destruction.
Reinventing Axl Rose is an ambitious record, but it never sacrifices the DIY appeal of the Gainesville punk scene it came from. I love Grace’s vocals here; she has a rough, forceful holler that sounds precedent of the best post-hardcore of the past twenty years. The songs here often sound like they were meant for a drunk punk singalong, especially on acoustic tracks like the sneering “Baby, I’m An Anarchist!” A big part of this album’s appeal is how ramshackle it can sound, yet underneath that looseness is proof that Grace can write some fantastic songs.
My favorite track on here comes right at the beginning. “Pints of Guinness Make You Strong” opens with a twangy guitar riff that sounds like it’s straight from a Marty Robbins song, but Grace soon launches into a impassioned and crushingly sad set of lyrics about her grandfather drinking himself to death and the devastation it left on his grandmother. “Well, I swear to God that I’ll love you forever / Evelyn, I’m not coming home tonight” is as gutting as any lyrics put to paper, and the holler-along chorus in which they’re presented is cathartic and deeply empathetic. That’s really the tone for the whole album. It’s messy and angry and paints some desolate lyrical pictures, yet there’s genuine heart, compassion and solidarity at its core.
Less Than Jake - Hello Rockview (1998)
Florida 22 - Charlotte 7
The first thing you need to know about Hello Rockview by Less Than Jake is that it goes hard. A few seconds after you press play on this album, you’ll hear a blast of speedy, distorted power chords, energetic ska horns, and absurdly catchy vocal melodies. Something about this specific combination of sounds scratches some lobe of primal satisfaction in my brain, and Less Than Jake keep that combination up for the remaining 38 minutes of the album. Suffice to say, it’s a fun album, and it places Less Than Jake at an interesting spot in the story of Gainesville and punk’s intersection with the mainstream.
Less Than Jake formed in 1992 as a bunch of college buddies of the University of Florida, and they soon signed to No Idea, a legendary Gainesville punk zine that was quickly turning into a legendary Gainesville punk label. They toyed around with skate punk and pop punk on their early releases, and they soon found a winning combination with ska, where their speedy riffs were accentuated by blasts of trombone and trumpets. To my knowledge, ska punk was a strictly underground phenomenon when Less Than Jake incorporated it into their sound, but a few years later, there were tons of punk and alt rock bands getting mainstream traction by interpolating reggae and ska. Sublime, 311, and the Mighty, Mighty Bosstones all had #1 hits on the Alternative Rock charts, and No Doubt sold upwards of 10 million copies of their ska-infused Tragic Kingdom. Perhaps inevitably, Less Than Jake were signed by Capitol Records in 1996, making them one of if not the first Gainesville punk band to sign to a major label. They made it count.
Hello Rockview, their second major label effort, was the album that broke Less Than Jake through. It’s not hard to hear why. The riffs are bouncy and in-your-face, the hooks are sticky and immediate, and perhaps above all, it’s just fun. It plays like a soundtrack to skate parks and pool parties and Malcolm in the Middle episodes. This album also reminds me a lot of late-90s pop punk behemoths like Blink-182 and Lit, bands that were both sonically similar to Less Than Jake and had a similar ratio of silliness to seriousness on their albums.
Less Than Jake pulls plenty of goofball moves on this album. For instance, there’s a brief novelty number called “Richard Allen George… No, It’s Just Cheez,” which says all you need to know in the title. They sample a bizarre vintage PSA that references “drunken dope addicts and glue sniffers” before launching into “All My Best Friends Are Metalheads,” a song that has nothing to do with sniffing glue. For all of their goofball antics, though, the best songs on Hello Rockview capture a sense of suburban malaise and alienation. “History of a Boring Town” encapsulates this feeling quite well, going in deep on the quiet resignation of living in a go-nowhere town. “Help Save the Youth of America From Exploding” and “Nervous in the Alley” capture similar feelings of feeling like you’re just spinning your wheels in life, and feelings of listlessness and melancholy pop up more than once on here. The music itself is still as fun as ever, but much like the suburbia that Less Than Jake depict, there’s something darker, emptier, yet more interesting a bit deeper under the surface.
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