Gregg Turner Plays the Hits
review by Joe Viglione
This writer knows Gregg Turner from Back Door
Magazine, but a press release states he is also a “veteran of the Angry Samoans
& New Mexico’s garage-rockin Blood Drained Cows.” What you get on the 11 tracks on Gregg Turner
Plays the Hits is another dimension tribute to the Velvet Underground and Modern
Lovers, the Lovers being, of course, the direct sons of the V.U.
The fun that Turner
imparts into his three minute and fifty one second “I Dreamed I Met Lou Reed”
is an amalgam of Armand Schaubroeck’s “Ratfucker” with the V.U.’s own “I Heard
Her Call My Name” / “Sister Ray” and a dash of the elements of “European Son”
from the V.U. debut with a touch of the “Black Angel’s Death Song” tucked
inside some Jonathan Richman talk-it/walk-it.
“I Lost My Baby to the
Guy at the Bobcat Bite” and “Starry Eyes” take on the fifties with
tongue-in-cheek parody, a bit of doo wop in both. The dissonant “Eve of Destruction” is timed
perfectly for all the madness going on about a half a world away, stylistically
Turner pushing the three-chord rock routine to the limit.
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“Santa Fe” takes
things into a different direction, nice wet guitars – both rhythm and lead –
like an outtake from Jimmy Webb via Glen Campbell. Too bad Glen is in no shape to take this to
his audience, but maybe Webb can.
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“Satan’s Bride” at
2:45 would make a nice flip side to the Unnatural Axe’s “They Saved Hitler’s
Brain.” It’s some rockabilly with a
sci-fi edge and catatonic splintered leads somewhere in the back of the mix
that explode just when the time is right.
“Tombstone” is the longest track at 4:49, a gunslinger epic that brings
an old world (go a hundred years or so back) feel to this otherwise Proto-punk
excursion.
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Now being someone who
HAS met Lou Reed (along with Jo Jo Laine, when I reunited Jo Jo the cover gal
from Nelson Slater’s Wild Angel with the producer of that epic backstage at the
Orpheum in the 1990s) Lou and I both agreed that his early composition “Cycle
Annie” is a good tune. Turner agrees
with Lou and this writer by covering the lost Reed classic and it is a
highpoint of Gregg Turner Plays the Hits.
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The 3:49 of “Another
Lost Heartache” appropriately closes out this 39 minutes of Gregg Turner, and
it is a good one for college radio at 2 AM.
A nice segue for those young d.j.’s who find and adore Andy Mackay’s In
Search of Eddie Riff.
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Gregg Turner plays Club Bohemia,
downstairs at the Cantab, Central Square Cambridge this Thursday, August 14,
2014
“The Pharmacist from Wallgreens”
could be directly from the Jonathan Richman Songbook, it’s kind of like Richman
in search of medication after having been rejected by the New Teller
Pharmacist from Wallgreens
The New Teller
Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
