I’ve had an exhausting week and
I’m bone tired and ready for an early night. Before I go to bed I am determined
to get this next review written so I can keep the CD Odyssey moving.
Disc 782 is….The Best of Johnny Kidd and The Pirates
Artist: Johnny
Kidd and the Pirates
Year of Release: 2008, but featuring
music from 1959-1966
What’s up with the Cover? It’s Johnny himself, wearing his
signature eye patch. No, Johnny does not have a disfiguring eye injury – he
just likes to rock the patch. Note he is also sitting on a bunch of old pirate
stuff to show what a buccaneer he is. This cover is cheesy as hell, and I love
it, all the way down to Johnny’s not-so-pirate cowboy boots.
How I Came To Know It: When I was recently listening to
Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” album to review it (back at Disc 752) I realized that one of the bonus tracks was a Johnny Kidd cover. I’d never heard
of Johnny Kidd but I decided to check out what the original sounded like. I
liked what I heard and I liked the other Youtube offerings of Johnny Kidd as
well so I went out and bought this album.
How It Stacks Up: This is a “best of” so it doesn’t
stack up.
Ratings: No ratings for ‘best of’ albums,
monkey!
Johnny Kidd and the Pirates are one of my happier
discoveries this year, fifty years after they were hitting the charts in the
U.K.
This album is a pretty exhaustive ‘best of’ and they
took a fair bit of latitude on just what was a hit and what wasn’t. There are
56 tracks spread over two albums, and so you get a heavy dose of what the band
is about throughout the entire run of their career from 1959 to 1966.
With a couple small exceptions, the songs are
presented in chronological order, which is how I like to hear an anthology of
music, particularly of a band I don’t know well. This let me get a good grasp
of what the Pirates were like out of the gate and how their sound evolved.
And their sound really does evolve a lot in just
seven years. Up to about 1961 they sound like an interesting cross between
early Dick Dale and late Buddy Holly. It is a great mix, with a hint of surfer
guitar around the edges of sixties crooners, and a nice hard edge on the
biggest hits like “Please Don’t Touch”
and “Shakin’ All Over” that obviously
got the attention of hard rockers like Motorhead in their formative years.
“Shakin’ All
Over” is one of those timeless classics you’ve probably heard a million
times and never known who performed it. The guitar riff on the song is sublime
and coming out in 1960 the song just feels like it is ten years ahead of its
time.
The early stuff also has some fairly dirty stuff
including the make-out session song “Longin’
Lips” and “Big Blon’ Baby” which
is one step away from both kitsch and creepy but somehow straddles the line.
Sadly in 1961 most of the Pirates “jumped ship” as
it were, and the sound changed a fair bit. Johnny Kidd’s voice is strong (back
in the day you actually had to be able to sing to sound good on a record) but I
really miss Alan Caddy’s lead guitar. Caddy is definitely from the surfer
school and the big reverb sound of his guitar gives the Pirates their edge.
In its place, the tracks from 1962 and 1963 have
them sounding a bite more Beatles in flavour. There is still plenty of good
stuff in here, although less consistently than in the early years. The magic is
still there on standouts like the frantic “Some
Other Guy” and the groovy instrumental “Popeye.”
Overall though, the band started to lose me around
the end of the first disc, as the songs start to slip into 1963/64. There is a bit
more organ and proto-psychadelia that doesn’t suit them, as well as a growing
propensity for cover songs. Hearing them sing “Oh Boy” or “Shop Around”
sounds OK, but I’d rather just hear the originals by Buddy Holly or the Smoky
Robinson.
Most of the songs after 1964 are just remakes, and
when I heard “Shakin’ All Over (’65
edition)” I could tell the end was near creatively, with the band recycling
old songs and just adding odd touches of stoner organ.
There was one cover worth honourable mention,
however and that is their 1965 cut of Roy Hamilton’s “You Can Have Her.” Sure it is another remake, but the Johnny Kidd
version is different enough to be fresh, and just as good as the original.
The sound of the music started to change at the end
as well, with Kidd gravitating to a more Motown-infused sound with a lot more
soul. I prefer the proto-punk surfer edge of his earlier stuff, though.
Johnny Kidd’s life ended abruptly in a car accident
in 1966, so we’ll never know if he would have recaptured his early glory.
However, the crazy antics of dressing (poorly) like pirates on stage inspired
later acts like Alice Cooper, and as the Motorhead cover shows, they also
served as early role models to later rock gods like Lemmy Kilmeister.
That legacy, plus the sheer brilliance of their
early material makes this album well worth having, even if I will rarely put
the second of the two discs into rotation.
Best
tracks: Please
Don’t Touch, Longin’ Lips, Shakin’ All Over, Restless, Let’s Talk About Us, Big
Blon’ Baby, Please Don’t Bring Me Down, Some Other Guy, Popeye, Ecstasy,
Casting My Spell, Don’t Make the Same Mistake that I Did, You Can Have Her
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