Day 19: Countdown No. 3, Brain Capers (1971)

"I would cry a million smiles for my Indian City queen." -- Sweet Angeline (1971)

What a sloppy, funny, angry, honest record. What a great album.

My favorites are two of the rawest pieces of music I've ever heard -- "Sweet Angeline" and "The Moon Upstairs."

It's a highlight for me whenever "Angeline" makes an Ian Hunter setlist these days. I enjoy it because, as performed by the Rant band, it's a tight, precise rocker. But not in 1971. The song is chaotic and sounds like it could fall apart at any moment. I swear I hear Ian chuckle while singing -- twice. It's like improv -- and that's borne out by the fact that, even now, whenever the song is performed the lyrics change. I never tire of hearing it.

"The Moon Upstairs," with its bitter lyrics and pulsating guitars, is the best rocker of MTH's Island Records era. If it's played where I think it should be at Hammersmith next month -- as the set closer -- it will blow the roof off the building. The song's climactic lyrics, of course, reflect the anger of Hunter and MTH toward their record company. Thematically, it's not much different from "Marionette," a flashy mini-opera of three years later. But in this era, the sentiments were expressed brutally -- "We ain't bleeding you, we're feeding you, but you're too fucking slow." And who hasn't wanted to explode on an employer that way?

"How Long" is another out-of-control rocker, dubbed, for some reason, "Death May Be Your Santa Claus." Of the three pedestrian songs that fill out the record, the cover of the Youngbloods' "Darkness, Darkness" is the best.

What to make of the disk-ending "Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception?" Same as its twin, "Wrath & Roll" from the first album. Nothing.

SONG RATINGS (OUT OF 5)

Death May Be Your Santa Claus (3.5)
Your Own Back Yard (2.5)
Darkness, Darkness (3)
The Journey (3.5)
Sweet Angeline (5)
Second Love (2.5)
The Moon Upstairs (5)
The Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception (1)