Worst liner notes

What I hate is slang from whatever era making itself into the finished product. I've got a lot of reissues of R&B albums and compilation and there's 90s slang on the notes. I hate it....

 

More of a general complaint: nearly every compilation of late 70's/early 80's punk/new wave music has liner notes that dredge up that tired canard of "By the mid-70's, prog rock had killed rock music. It was only the invention of punk that saved rock and roll from the overblown horrors of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Genesis, etc." It's true that punk galvanized rock in a new and very exciting direction, but the whole prog-was-killing-music narrative is simply wrongheaded and bad music journalism that shows the writer's limited perspective on rock history.

 

Besides that, prog kept on going regardless.

 

Liner notes to the The Grass Roots Where Were You When I Needed You LP, 1966.

Preface: this record was recorded by Phil Sloan and Steve Barri plus session players after their single release of Where Were You When I Needed You became a surprise hit and they needed a quick LP . There was no “Grass Roots”, there was no “band”, not at the time the LP was recorded, anyway. Sloan and Barri would later recruit a band from SF (in 1967) and that’s “The Grassroots” that would have a hit with “Let’s Live For Today.” Making the subject of these liner notes a real mystery.

There is a name listed as the author of these notes. I thought it best not to include it.
There is so much to say about these liner notes, but, where to begin? So I’ll just submit them for your consideration.



“Sunset Strip” isn’t what it used to be.”


And that’s what they’re saying. “They” are the sightless inevitables with their white socks and well-gnawed toothpicks, usually to be found lurking in the shadows of a topless bar, over twenty-one and hating every minute of it, smugly observing the youth of Hollywood as it swirls into the psychedelic movie show across the street in a mad explosion of suede and polka-dots.


Of course the strip isn’t what it used to be. People aren’t what they used to be. Today is not yesterday. And if Sinatra can reach the top of the Hit Parade, then Sinatra is today. As much as Dylan or Shrimpton or anybody else.


And that includes The Grass Roots.


The Grass Roots are four Johnny Folk’n’rolls who don’t pretend to be anything else. They play loud, vibrant music, they have long, Dickensian hiarcuts and they blast up and down our hallowed strip on gleaming motorbikes with long-haired birdies wooing and cooing on the back.


They probably live high in the Hollywood hills in a castle – a mode of living which the Folk-n’roll jet set finds highly fashionable at the moment. They are probably all having platonic love affairs with the palm-trees on the Pacific Coast Highway or the whispy clouds in the desert sky and they certainly don’t watch the George Putnam news.


They became famous at a bawdy, boisterous, smoke-filled beat-parlour called ‘The Trip’ where the waitresses hustled drinks and the bouncers stood tall and the angel-faced ‘groupies’ searched nightly for Donovan with wide blue eyes.


Where it’s at? Yes. Until ‘The Trip’ banished freaks and folk-rockers alike and started to import shining, smiling, sharp-suited people like The Knickerbockers and The Temptations and then the pop-folk rebels headed upstreet for the “Whisky-A-Go-Go,” and with them went The Grass Roots.


While outside the strip bustled on and still does. Baby-faced protestors, with more money than Mom and Dad ever had burst into the ‘Ben Frank’s’ parking lot in their ’66 Mustangs, stereos shrieking, hair blowing ecstatically in the night wind.


And there they sprawl, steaming hamburgers cradled in palms, cigarettes glowing in the dark, talking about the sunshine at the ocean today, the bike ride to Big Sur, the new group at “It’s Boss” and the apartment they’re going to take when they leave home and the sooner the better. What they’re really saying is this: There has never been a groovier time to be young. And they’re right.


So The Grass Roots wind up at the “Go-Go” and everybody else piles off to “Cantors” – the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ headquarters of Hollywood’s folk revolution – and nobody thinks about bed-time.


And tomorrow they’ll all go to “De Voss” and buy a hundred mosaic shirts and fifty sweaters and maybe a couple of pairs of those new flared pants in the Pierre Cardin whipcord. And then they’ll go to school or to the beach or to the body-shop and in the evening they’ll all come back and do it again. And when they do it, these are the sounds they’ll be doing it to. Here. In this album.


‘Time’ magazine may well curl its glossy lip. The proprietors of the burlesque shows may well sneer into the reflection of their polished finger nails. But as Murry the ‘K’ so delicately put it, “It’s what’s happening, Baby.” And nobody can argue with that.


...

 

I remember being surprised at the over-the-top liner notes in the Stephen Stills box set praising him as some sort of renaissance man intellectual genius. They were uncomfortable to read.

 

Kelsey Grammer's "notes" for Sinatra'57 are pitiful....

"I LOVE YOU FRANK!!!!!!!! YOU WERE THE BEST!"


ugh

 

exactly what i was going to mention. i like the liner notes refers to one of the b-sides as "a rarely performed tune". i guess thats pretty accurate since the song was NEVER performed live lol. thats pretty rare

 

Those would be the liner notes written by the great journalist Pete Hamill at the request of Dylan and for which Hamill was awarded a Grammy. The Blood On The Tracks notes are among my favorites, in fact. Far from trying " to link these personal songs to Vietnam," it seems to me that Hamill's message was that Dylan's art had survived and transcended the dogmatic, strident polemics of the Sixties and how his latest offering -- in which Dylan lays bare raw feelings and emotions as in no other album of his before -- represented a shift to the personal and, hence, universal ("Dylan’s art feels, and invites us to join him”.).

 

Speaking of Kim, his liner notes for the Runaways' Born To Be Bad demos are petty and self-serving.

 

We've had this topic before so I'll mention my previous choice again: The liner notes on Moby Grape '69 are basically an apology for everything Moby Grape did wrong in the past.

Some highlights : "They themselves demanded the enormous hype - I know this-I was there- but they didn't know what they had started ( nor did I) and logically they could never live up to their notices.
They chose to substitute notoriety. They became defensive-self destructive..."

"Let there be no mistake: they demanded the hype, they were greedy and they didn't trust their enormous talents.They lost all faith in themselves and stopped loving their music, stopped respecting each other."

Yes, David Rubinson mentioned Moby Grape demanding the hype twice in the liner notes. Thank you mother, can I have another?

 

Some of the first several King Crimson Collector's Club cds have notes where it's just 20 pages of Robert Fripp's online journal entries from the late 90's or early 2000's. I mean, this will be on a cd of a gig in 1972, and have all this completely unrelated text from the 90's. What's the point in having so many pages of that?

 

The notes for the Allman Brothers' Live at the Atlanta Pop Festival incorrectly state that their second album was titled "Capricorn", but otherwise the liner notes are fine.

 

I only read page 1, but was surprised Wings WILD LIFE hasn't been mentioned.
Truly awful!
Talks about two different times when the McCartney's wrote "a bunch of songs".
Well there were only 7 originals on the album and two were nonsense. So what happened to the rest of the "bunch"
"Can you dig it?" (that was the final line of the liner notes)!

 

it's on page one.

spoiler: Harrigan is McCartney.

 

Pretty much any liner notes Ira Gitler wrote for Prestige jazz albums in the 50's. I'm not sure he realized the purpose was to try to help sell the records...

 

"The birds the bees and the Monkees "
Each Monkees gets some ink in the flower on the back. Only Peters' simple "love" isn't corny. Not sure if these count as liner notes but the warning stuff about "Magnolia Simms" not ruining your record player and using the word "yippies "I don't think has EVER been done since ! That was cool!
The Beatles should have done something similar warning fans about Revolution 9!!!!

 

The Kinks' Deluxe Editions from 2011 have many typos and some misinformations.

 

What did they mean with that reference to "The surface noise and skipping effect are built in to more realistically capture the sound of the 1920-30 yippies."?
I thought yippies had something to do with 60s activists like Jerry Rubio and Abbie Hoffman.

 

I remember being excited when I pulled the booklet for Radiohead's Kid A out of the jewel case. It was so thick I couldn't wait to see what all was inside. Unfortunately, it was just a bunch of seemingly random, boring art (at least to a then 19 year old).

 

I know there was a reissue of Klaatu's "3:47 EST" on CD where the liner notes were just completely uninformed, and basically described the album as one giant, calculated "let's make people think we're the Beatles" hoax.

 

Those Tobler liners are terrible in multiple ways. Far too much emphasis on sales and chart placement at the expense of discussion of the music itself and the writing/recording process.

 

Bob Dylan's notes on the back of "Highway 61 Revisited". Stunning two paragraphs of prose poetry (even though I don't pretend to understand any of it), just not what I would call great liner notes. I'm glad he did it anyway. Plus, it's of my all-time favorite albums.

 

Bowie "The Next Day" deluxe. Scissors anyone?

 

Any of those mid-late eighties big budget, chart bound ersatz dance/funk albums where the artists thank about a hundred people and the caterer, and finally 'Gawd' for lighting up their life and being an inspiration. I heard a lot of those records, and God had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Shalamar, you're excepted, I love you guys ....

 

I couldn't wait to read Jeff Lynne's track-by-track comments in the first batch of ELO remasters, but my excitement quickly turned into a sense that he was either using the opportunity to showcase his distinctive humour or simply writing any old nonsense and taking the paycheck anyway. Just look at some of these fascinating, insightful remarks from Time alone:

"It's that vocoder again." (Prologue)

"I guess the lights went down." (The Lights Go Down)

"About someone who is lost." (21st Century Man)

Wow - tell me something I didn't know!

I'm not even going to write up his remark about Letter From Spain on Secret Messages, as it's equally pointless. The annoying thing is that some of his brief notes are quite informative, though if he didn't want to commit then why couldn't Rob Caiger have provided something better, as he'd done on the ELO website for each of the albums during the same period?