Boogie Chitz

While not the most coveted 'Mats LP - Hootenanny is the one that got them out of the icy Jesse Ventura-ness of their beloved Minnesota - and on the road to alt-rock knighthood. This is where Paul Westerberg began to fully embrace the joys of socially ergonomic songwriting...sometimes.

Here we are blessed with a baker's dozen of Anatolian-flavored funk nuggets via the side project of a Swedish film and television composer.

The eponymous third aka Grey Album from 1969 began the second half of the VU's run - the forgotten half - when they were an actual touring rock and roll band trying to pop big. No Warhol, no New York City and no John Cale. A deep track dynamo without the literal AND figurative feedback of the past. Lou's older brother Roy shows up though.

Back to Zamrock with Amanaz (Ask me about nice artistes in Zambia). The group only made one album - 1975's Africa - but that's all that is needed to ingest the 'One Zambia, one nation, three chords' spirit.

Led Zeppelin return from the meadows of Bron-Yr-Aur, shave the beards and begin another three album run that would lead them to the top of King Shit Mountain. They would get one last look from its peak with Physical Graffiti - a deep track orgy that showcases Zep at full creative mast.

A new wave band made up of musically-gifted members of Frank Zappa's backing band, Missing Persons dropped a solid debut in 1982 that's kind of a paradox - loose music made by the tightest of musicians. Oh, and they also had a singer that nailed Prince.

The same year their Seattle cohorts made flannel globally sexy Mudhoney stayed local and loyal to their friends at Sub Pop and released Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge - an unrelenting pounder that sounds the beating heart of the Grunge Hunx Dynasty.

Disco was becoming played out in America at the start of the 1980's but it was just getting started in Italy. Pino D'Angiò landed a YMCA-level Italian hit with the song Ma Quale Idea in 1980. The following year he unleashed the full Power of Pino with his debut LP Balla! This is Italo-Disco at it's Satanic best.

WoV was way too loose with the drizzugs to build any sort of career sustainability - but they managed to uncork the forgotten classic Call of the West along the way - angular art rock that cuts through the collective 1982 whoosh of parachute pants.

The Ghetto Brothers were one of thousands of street gangs that skulked the busted-ass neighborhoods of the Bronx in leather vests during the 1970's. I think they are the only one that formed a band though. Power Fuerza is the lone musical relic left behind by the good-guy gang known as the GB's.

Hair Hunk Titans Poison fought their way thru pubic lice and a universally-perceived lack of talent to crank out their debut - Look What the Cat Dragged In - an overachieving classic squeezed into a 1986 already overstuffed with guitars, drums and spandex pant.

The USA was on fire in 1969 with Vietnam War protests and such. Everyone had a voice and wanted to be heard. But they also wanted to be SEEN. It was a flashy year of afros, flower power, bouncy boob-curtains and bush. The last year of the sixties was an eccentric one - and it was largely soundtracked by the four average Americans of Creedence Clearwater Revival. CCR dropped three in 1969 and Green River gets the gold star on it's forehead. Roots rock classic for your face.

During the 1970's while China and Vietnam were busy playing grab-ass and keep-away with the Spratly and Percocet island chains in the South China Sea, the other countries surrounding the water like Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia funk'd their way into the next decade. Ayo Ke Disco, curated by Alice from Soundway Records, provides us safe listening passage thru this fantastic sea of sound.

LCD Soundsystem is an exhaustive one-hundred minute affair that showcases the best of what the combination of rock and dance music can become when crafted by the hands of an erudite music nerd. LCD eponymous - the start of a relatively flawless catalog that continues into the now.

Marty Robbins' cinematic western music classic was released at the end of a decade that would soon be overshadowed by the one that followed. JFK was about to be President, the Beatles were about to form, but for now in 1959, we have Marty Robbins singing songs about other men. And horses.

So few bands remain that were born during the post-MTV, pre-streaming and social media purgatorial zone of the mid-aughts. Woods are still with us. And despite having one significant kink in their curb appeal, they bring twenty years of codeine-dipped freak folk and high-value return to the listener's ears. City Sun Eater in the River of Light is my favorite of their hot dozen.

The 1980s proved that as big as forty-something millionaire cultural icon Bob Dylan was during the decade, he was not bigger than the ever-evolving and fickle world of rock and roll. ATO Records' A Tribute to Bob Dylan in the 80s contains seventeen covers of songs from Bob's least-celebrated decade.

Myself, my dad and the Canseco Twins neutralize Dee Dee's annoying production duo so that she can crank out a classic without interference. Too True is the final (boo) and best (yay) Dum Dum Girls album. A catchy atmospheric finale to a five-year run powered by good ol' work ethic.

Exclusion was a word rarely used in Grateful Dead world - so in April 1972 when it came time to decide who was and who wasn't joining the band for their spring tour of Europe the answer was simple - 'Everyone goes.' So off to Europe the extended Grateful Dead family went - forty-plus posse of band members, family, friends, the New Riders and even an LSD chemist named Bear. The triple-LP live album Europe '72 was released to recoup the expenses of this European vacation that Warner Brothers had fronted, and to also debut a slurry of new songs that they couldn't get down in a studio proper. A healthy musical snapshot of an ever-evolving band beyond description.

Pixies (there's no the 'The') started their ascent into alt-rock wonderhood with Surfer Rosa. No album from the 1980s had a greater influence on the rock sound of the 1990s than this record. Good start Pixies. Nice work.

The men who make Mangina Music suffer for us. They play with soft hands for our hard hearts - and we need to give thanks. Lord Huron's Strange Trails is a sprawling hallucinatory masterpiece that I'm pretty sure is way more popular than I think it is. It's also long and emotional - they're gonna need some assistance from the Canseco twins.

Several years before Parliament Funkadelic grew into a multi-banded gang of diaper daddies traveling around the country in a crack-fueled spaceship, there was Maggot Brain - a standalone gift of collective imagination and a sonic pillar of the early-1970's Lori Lightfoot Era of American black music.

We enter the Guns N' Roses Herpeverse via the band's second album G N' R Lies which contains songs recorded both before and after their historic Ape Tit debut. Initially released as a Geffen Records pacifier until the unpredictable band's next LP, Lies is an undervalued dudless wonder that bookends the group's opening volley toward global ambassadorship.

Holy Fuck are pure punk electronica - creating dance music using everything BUT the standard loops and laptops to achieve that sound. This chaotic urgency is never more apparent and beautiful than on LP from 2007. Songs born out of improvisational jamming and then refined for record.

With so many time-ambiguous single song bangers, it's tough to not classify The Cars as a 'greatest hits' band. But 1979's Candy-O is as cohesively beautiful as a standalone LP can get. And thank Christ The Cars got hot BEFORE the launch of MTV because they never would have gotten a glance with THOSE mugs.

Pantera ditch their hair hunk past yet keep the gay superhero band name and begin their groove metal assault on the nineties with Cowboys From Hell.

Mbaqanga was a style of music birthed in the segregated South African township of Soweto in 1964. The super-unit of Simon 'Mahlathini' Nkabinde, Mahotella Queens and the Makgona Tsohle Band pumped out a volley of bouncy mbaqanga classics before the genre fell out of township taste in the late 1970s. The genre received a global re-up during the 1980s however, when several popular albums by American and British artists came out that were heavily inspired by the swing of township jive. Melodi Yalla was released at the height of this mbaqanga revival.

One of a kind delight. A fictional band from a fictional television show creates a very-real compendium of sonic pleasure. Plus, we put the Hermanos Cansecos into action and show what happens to members of Boogie Chitz bands that quit.

A chugging audio compote of cinematic psychedelia created by a garage rock lovin' couple from Perpignan, France. The Limiñanas are generally a two-person operation, but Shadow People is loaded with guests including one from Boogie Chitz past.

Seems like by 1970 Steppenwolf were already becoming a two-hit relic of the cultural past. Nonsense. Steppenwolf 7, which is technically their fifth album, is a furious nine-track assault that sounds like cocaine psychosis set to boogie rock. Love it.

A neck-to-nuts banger of a synth album found in a genre mostly celebrated via individual songs and videos rather than LPs. Upstairs at Eric's contains by my count three 'oh yeah I know that song' songs that are probably recognizable to the greater American public.

Marination/Hibernation season is ovah for the class of 2023. Let us celebrate one of the stronger bears to emerge from the cave - or in this case frogs...ManFrogs.

Grimes dropped out of college before uncorking this masterpiece - created during a nine-day frenzy of imagination in her Montreal apartment. Good. Class dismissed.

Los Angeles 1983. While the hair hunx were leaving leather pant ass prints on the hoods of laundromat dryers, bands of the Paisley Underground scene were quietly cranking out sixties-style jingly-jangly psychedelia across town. The Rain Parade were the shortest-lived of all the P.U. bands, but their debut album Emergency Third Rail Power Trip helped garden just as much musical fruit of the future as it did pay tribute to the past.

After five wild years playing together as a support band for other artists, the corduroy boys of The Band find their original voice in the basement of a house in West Saugerties, New York and begin a near-decade run of rustic rapture.

Penza Penza is an Estonian big band/lo-fidelity sonic buzzsaw led by multi-instrumentalist/composer Misha Panfilov. Their fourth LP called Alto E Primitivo is fourteen instrumental rippers that could mow thru the thickest of Baltic bush.

Filled with breezy melodic beatitudes that are impossible not to enjoy, It's a Shame About Ray is an underrated alt-rock classic that proved Evan Dando did indeed deserve his lemon lordship. {{{Gracias Hermanos Cansecos}}} https://youtu.be/EzKcxQGOKKE?si=st8Z_R3rMnPmyxHC

Curtis Mayfield dropped a winner in 1972 with the Super Fly soundtrack. A masterwork so dense that its songs musically narrate the film while still maintaining accessibility to be plucked for off-the-reservation playlists. Your main boy, thick and thin.

For their sophomore effort, the sextet of Scandinavian riff-raffers known as Viagra Boys seek fresh musical adventures in less-shrimpy waters - and ultimately discover bang city with Welfare Jazz.

The slightly off-kilter art punk of The Sugarcubes was the first rock music from Iceland to gain ears in America. The band's debut album - Life's Too Good - is a bouncy masterwork and the world's introduction to Bjork - who by the way, is the SECOND weirdest singer in this band.

In 1969, Sly & The Family Stone were flower power royalty - a racially-mixed pop powerhouse armed with a slew of hits destined to soundtrack the Valtrex commercials of the future. Sly followed up on this glory by locking himself in his mansion loft with enough drugs to down the Hell's Angels and created a masterpiece out of the madness - There's a Riot Goin' On. Trouble funk is here.

Royal Trux were king and queen of the scuzzrock prom when they got signed to Virgin Records in 1995. Two years later, Virgin couldn't get rid of them fast enough and RTX made their best album on their way out the door - Accelerator - a masterpiece molded out of the sludge of confusion.

The album that broke the band in America - Out of Our Heads is the musical bridge connecting the Rolling Stones American R&B-cosplay past with their Richards/Jagger-juggernaut future.

The Budos Band sprinkle some Ethiopian jazz into their menacingly-infectious sophomore album released on Daptone Records at the height of retro-soul revivalism in 2007. Full-time funk from a part-time band. * The Budos Band live in the Netherlands in 2008 * https://youtu.be/IkgD6AwsPZM?si=3hfoNHuY1jBqnQtk * Musicawi Silt by Hailu Mergia * https://youtu.be/r9pLeol6A9s?si=iPIf20IT-hUzJije

John Cale's scrappy solo debut recorded the year after leaving the Velvet Underground. His half century of creating high art out of low living begins here with Vintage Violence.

The Meat Puppets third album - the Kirkwood brothers fire out a catchy collection of psychedelic swingers that help keep weirdness to the front of the American music underground in 1985.

An affectionate curation of the disco-funk-fueled music made by Cameroonian Jo Bisso during his half decade living in America.

Three southern girls that met at band camp bring their garage rock gravitas north to New York City and record a ripper more potent than the purest line of Appalachian meth. The Whole Damn Thing live from Maxwell's in Hoboken 2010 - Look at little Jessi holding that big CHOOCH guitar - https://youtu.be/3lYdlaEg2zY?si=b0sFRCxXmy7xJeUX Be Your Bro from second album - https://youtu.be/TyVs4B26_P4?si=bHrJbKgAo6Gr5tWl

The sunshine pop banger debut from The Mamas & the Papas - a devilish foursome who soundtracked the summer of love before being drowned out of the cultural zeitgeist by the electric guitar gods.

The 'should-woulda-coulda' sixth album from retro-revivalists The Brian Jonestown Massacre - led by the emotionally-compromised Anton Newcombe. Anton going berzerk at the Viper Room 1996(?) https://youtu.be/jSm5optFVUw?si=BOI8pzeljh_jJylr Anton going berzerk in Australia in 2023 https://youtu.be/3MKRAzCkJfM?si=06lmZxqMulq4sRaA

Despite the occasional TMC (Too Much Chuck) moments, Introduce Yourself is a fun listen and criminally-ignored glance at a weird underground band right before they blast off toward the MTV universe. *** Follow @boogiechitz on Instagram *** *** 1988 music video for Anne's Song *** https://youtu.be/w7dD-JJJytM?si=LIiZIEqkhU89jQfk