allmusic.com - While still in his teens, Billy Nicholls recorded one of the more sought-after rarities of British psychedelic pop, "Would You Believe." Nicholls was one of the most Beach Boys-influenced British singer/songwriters, and "Would You Believe" often recalled the Pet Sounds/SMiLE period in its melodic construction and ornate production. The album understandably betrayed greater traces of late-'60s British psychedelia than the Beach Boys' efforts did, and it would be foolish to put Nicholls on the same level as Brian Wilson, as "Would You Believe" ultimately displayed more promise than pure genius. Nonetheless, that promise was considerable, and it is a shame that the album was essentially unreleased....

Billy Nicholls- Would You Believe







Digging this album quite a bit, I dont know how well known it is and in what circles, but I figure some here would enjoy it. Link should work, if not let me know if you cant find it after a search.

I have this on vinyl. Haven't had a chance to listen to it as much as I would have liked, so this DL is a blessing. Thanks! I'll be able to dig in a little deeper now.

Mucho gusto!

EDIT:
Link disabled. Damn.

James Talley’s newly reissued debut album sounds as classic today as it did three decades ago.

James Talley was 29 when he recorded his debut album in 1973. The title summed up his station. He had been a songwriter for Atlantic under producer Jerry Wexler, but mostly worked as a carpenter to support his family. He had never set foot in a radio station; the country music he loved most was fused with familial memories of Oklahoma, Washington and New Mexico—shack porch string-bands and barn dance Western swing. Pete Seeger had told him to write about the world he knew, and so he did. The sound and spirit of the album that resulted, Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got A Lot of Love, wasn’t nostalgic; Tally’s western memories were more real and rich with promise than his Music City home.

With the exception of legendary fiddle player Johnny Gimble, the 20 musicians who gathered for the Got No Bread sessions were mostly unknown (including a young John Hiatt) and they played on spec. Talley bartered for the studio time. The sound couldn’t be less hurried. The string arrangements glowed, as if answering countrypolitan’s excesses, and the spaces between lines contained lifetimes. “Take me from destruction, the anger and the pain,” Talley sang on the final song. His voice and words seemed to make the present and the future—from the aftermath of Vietnam to uncertain house payments—go away.

The cover of the album featured a black-and-white photo that could have been taken by a camera placed on a brick and set to automatic. Talley smiles as he leans against a cinder block store (“Talley’s Grocer” the sign says, but there was no relation), his arm around a very pregnant Jan Talley, their son Reuben James playing before scrub grass and a truck tire. Capitol, Talley’s record label, wasn’t releasing this kind of country. No one was. The album sold around 5,000 copies before being deleted in 1979.

That wasn’t a surprise, but the response from three of the counterculture’s best rock-oriented critics at the time, Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau and Peter Gurlanick, was. Talley had never met or even heard of these young writers, and his debut bore no pop or rock traces, yet Marcus responded to the depth of emotion, while Christgau captured the album’s commercial context, or lack thereof: “[T]o market it as ‘country’ is to miss how perspicaciously it looks beyond such categories.”

Thirty years on, the album’s lack of pretension or artifice remains its key. “Pure” is the word most often used to describe it, but the music restores meaning to that sanctimonious plaudit. The swing is so subtle you could miss it; likewise the wit of Talley’s songwriting and the warmth of his tenor. The album’s influence is quiet but significant. Steve Earle’s Train a Comin’ and John Hiatt’s Slow Turning owe the record a palpable debt.

“When Jan and I were first married, we didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of,” Talley recalls. “I probably went to the refrigerator one night, saw that we had no bread and no milk and no money to buy any. But we did have love.” And music, which after decades locked in Capitol’s vaults, still sounds like the most unexpected, generous gift.

Amazon recommended this to me awhile back and I just got around to picking it up. It's pretty special.



James Talley "Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got A Lot of Love"



Stolen link so I can't personally vouch for it:



I'd have to think Tentoze would love this as would anyone who likes things that can be described as tentozian.

Garland Jeffreys first appeared to record buyers in 1970, backed by the band Grinder's Switch, on an album for Vanguard Records that strongly recalled the sound of the Band, with and without Bob Dylan. He next returned to record stores as a solo act three years later under the auspices of Atlantic Records with this singer/songwriter project. Michael Cuscuna, who co-produced the disc with Jeffreys, was more of a jazz aficionado than the artist himself, and he built arrangements around Jeffreys and his backup guitarist, Alan Freedman, using a collection of well-known jazz-leaning session musicians including Ralph MacDonald, David "Fathead" Newman, and Bernard Purdie, along with such other names as Dr. John and David Bromberg. He also agreed to a trip to Jamaica that produced the reggae-styled "Bound to Get Ahead Someday." The result was a set of eclectic backing tracks that added flavor to Jeffreys' poetic story-songs, sung in his soulful tenor. It was a far more individual effort than Garland Jeffreys and Grinder's Switch, more focused on the singer, and demonstrated his growth as a writer and performer. But it still was not as accomplished as Jeffreys' later work would be, and it was thrown into the shade by his next recording, the one-off single "Wild in the Streets," which demonstrated his ability to rock out more. [The European release of Garland Jeffreys substituted a second track from the Jamaican session, "Midnite Cane," for "Lon Chaney."

It's a pretty good record as is pretty much every album I've heard from him.

I know Contradiction was asking about Garland Jeffreys and I saw this got upped on one of the blogs I track and thought I'd pass it along...others should check him out too though.



Garland Jeffreys - S/T



It's a pretty good record as is pretty much every album I've heard from him.

Here's the link to the blog post where you can find a link. Poke around the blog too if you have time. It's a good one with plenty of other great stuff.

a Garland afternoon.

Next Johnny Taint album title

The Blue Shadows - On The Floor of Heaven



On The Floor Of Heaven is a lost gem which has resurfaced after being unavailable almost since its release.
Don't let it get away a second time.

I grabbed this a few weeks ago. I have yet to hear more than just a sample of it. The critiques are so delicious I feel the need to reserve a couple of hours and listen.

Vulgar Boatmen

The Blue Shadows - On The Floor of Heaven

When I first heard the Blue Shadows {Billy Cowsill (guitar, vocals) J.B. Johnson (drums) Jeffrey Hatcher (guitar, vocals) Elmar Spanier (bass) Barry Muir (bass), I knew I'd finally stumbled onto that “Hank goes to the Cavern Club” M.O. which built a rock-country hybrid that stood up better than a thousand other rural-urban fusionists. Uniting Winnipeg mainstay Jeffrey Hatcher (who fronted late seventies power-pop band the Fuse) and former sixties teen-pop idol Billy Cowsill of The Cowsills (the model for the Partridge Family) in the early 90’s seemed a strange idea on paper but it played out like fevered dream version of pre-psychedelic rock n’ roll – Everlys, Orbison, Beatles, Buck et al. The harmonies soar, the guitars ring, the lyrics lament; everyone wins whether you’re a power-pop fan, a British Invasion fanatic, a lover of gut-bucket country or just damn broken-hearted. On the debut you can take in Coming on Strong which hits like the Buck Owens freight train sound. The dozen original songs on this debut album owed more to Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the 1968 album by The Byrds, than it did to anything current in 1993. Heard now, however, the songs sound timeless, reaching back and forth across decades of pop music, from the '50s to the present.

It would be exaggerating the importance of The Blue Shadows to say that On the Floor of Heaven is a lost masterpiece. What it is is yet another example of the way music is frequently crafted within the isolation of a group's existence, heedless of the trends of its time — and, at its best, in stubborn pursuit of nothing more than the sounds the musicians hear in their own heads. In this sense, On the Floor of Heaven is a complete, and frequently exhilarating, success.

Sadly, Bill Cowsill passed away February 17, 2006.

On The Floor Of Heaven is a lost gem which has resurfaced after being unavailable almost since its release.

Don't let it get away a second time.


Key tracks -
Deliver Me, When Will This Heartache End, On The Floor of Heaven, If I Were You, A Thousand Times

This album is a thing of awesome beauty, one of the best country albums I've ever heard. It was just re-released with a bonus album. It's out on the Bumstead label here in Canada for anyone interested in getting it.