If you can listen to this and keep your pants on, I don’t even want to know what’s wrong with you.

For a song that appears to be dominated by the sexual histrionics of Robert Plant and the equally filthy guitar pump-thrusts of Page, this track is absolutely owned by John Paul Jones. While Page and Plant are flailing about, making a graphic, overblown spectacle of their cock-rock prowess, JPJ is leaning against a wall, smoking, probably eating a sandwich, while pumping away at you so hard that you can feel it in the back of your throat. He hits you sideways, flips you over, jams it in again, swirls it around like he’s mixing a goddamn martini; he intersects with you at irrational angles, then smacks you with it unexpectedly, leaving you there on the floor. He flashes that jagged, mangled British smile then moves on to the next one, while the rest of the band wonders why no one is fussing about them.

The opening sound of Page’s guitar screams that it wants to fuck you, with that brackish, distorted sludge that sounds like he’s submerged in the bilge of a sinking freighter – it’s truly nasty, a coital haze, like a fog of sweat and fluids. But it’s also too obvious, like the douchebag at the bar with the best lines; he’s good, a pro maybe, but that quiet one over there, the one with a ridge down the front of one jean leg almost to his knee – he’s the one that will leave you spent, ruined and gasping for air. I can’t even listen to this song anymore without focusing on the bass. (Thanks, B.)

Today’s Vinyl: The Who

Pete Townsend’s difficulty in penning a followup to Tommy forced The Who to release their first live record, the generically labeled (in a nod to bootlegers) Live at Leeds. After the Tommy tour and a performance at Woodstock, the band declined to sort through nearly a hundred hours of live recordings (and reportedly burned the tapes to prevent piracy), instead scheduling concerts at Leeds and Hull in February of 1970 with the express purpose of taping a live record. The Hull tapes were tossed because the bass wasn’t recorded, but the Leeds performance, as released on vinyl in 1970 (much later, the full recording would be released on two CDs) is reverentially referred to as the greatest live record ever made. Does it still hold that claim thirty years later?

Fuck yes. This record is an all-destroying avalanche of sound, the arms and legs and trees and branches of the band members jutting out awkwardly from the sides as it rolls down the hill toward your quaint chalet, all of it ultimately subsumed into the raucous noise. There’s nothing delicate here, no quiet acoustic strums or graceful songcraft. This is the definitive live rock show, a grand cacophony perched on the edge of self-destruction and entropy. 

If this all sounds somewhat noisy, it is. Townsend brutalized the power trio sound, transforming it into a hot, fuzzy mess of crashing cymbals and distorted guitar, even rendering Entwhistle’s normally clean bass as a chugging, gelatinous sewer-monster. This isn’t the sound of rock turned up to 11; it’s someone intentionally hooking the amps up to high-voltage power lines and watching the whole thing fry. Who needs fireworks when you’ve got real goddamn explosives?

And then there are those drums. Back behind Townsend sits the strange math that underpins this exhibition of chaos theory. “Drumming” is a pitifully inadequate term for the swirling, coruscating wash of crash and rhythm that Keith Moon produced. Like Hendrix, Moon’s method of playing his instrument was so unique that nothing could ever sound like it again. To listen to Keith Moon drum on this record is to hear layers of precision and technique transformed through maniacal energy, like an old master painting thrown into a wood chipper and sprayed against a wall, the end result vastly better than the original.

The standout track for me on Live at Leeds is the cover of Summertime Blues, a live standard for the band that shows them all at their loosest and meanest. Entwhistle sounds like he could break his bass strings with little more than his pinky nail; Townsend plays off Moon, building a terrible, fearsome racket that bears down on the listener like a horde of marauding Visigoths. That feeling you get after taking the most amazing shit of your life? The endorphin-addled rape and the euphoric, empty, evacuated relief? That’s the best live record in the world - this one.

Today’s Vinyl: Led Zeppelin

Back when I was in middle school in southern California, the lost, lamented KMET would play “Led Zeppelin A-Z” once a year, which is exactly what it sounds like – all the band’s songs played in alphabetical order. One summer I sat down with a cassette deck and recorded the whole thing in preparation for an arduous family road trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where I was to be unceremoniously dumped at a Christian summer camp and left to fend off reprobates with lighters and bug spray and girls hitting early puberty. I left there substantially better educated about the female anatomy than the word of God.

Somewhere around Fresno, though, between the Mervyn’s and the motel, it hit me: Led Zeppelin is the greatest rock band, ever. Years later, when people would ask the “Beatles or the Stones?” question, I would inevitably reply, confused, “Led Zeppelin or The Who?” I always wanted my rock big, mean, loud and bombastic. If the Beatles were a delicately-crafted confection and the Stones were a rich, saucy bit of trash, Led Zeppelin was the bloody, three-pound steak staring you down and daring you to eat it. The Beatles kissed you; the Stones licked you; Zeppelin fucked you silly and stole your goddamn chickens. This is what heavy is.

It doesn’t get much heavier than Physical Graffiti in Led Zeppelin’s discography. The first two records may have been dirtier, but they’re too deeply rooted in the blues (and Zeppelin’s dick-swinging interpretation thereof) to be considered truly heavy. Physical Graffiti is unabashedly massive, with three tracks clocking in at over eight minutes, and the eleven-minute In My Time of Dying closing out side 1, which sports only three songs! The motherlode of heavy rock is here - you’ve got the blueprint for every cock-rock song thereafter (Custard Pie); Eastern influences and clashing time signatures (Kashmir); weird spirituality (In the Light); and, in the last three minutes of In My Time of Dying, a template for nearly every guitar lick Jack White has ever played.

The jacket for the original vinyl is a stunning piece of design (the album was delayed due to the difficulty of production) with a die-cut exterior sleeve, two internal sleeves and a third printed foldover sleeve, all of which show different images through the die-cut windows of a New York City tenement. It’s a thick, heavy package for what may be the heaviest double album of all time.

Today’s Vinyl: Pretenders

Go listen to this one again, all the way through, and tell me how many debut albums have been this good. Recorded in 1979 after the Nick Lowe-produced single for Stop your Sobbing, this record dropped in January of 1980 with a sound so fully-formed that it leaves you wondering how good the drugs really were around then. Mixing reggae, rock, punk, classic pop balladry and a freaking metric ton of attitude, this record has as many stylistic flights of fancy as London Callingyet, like that Clash classic, manages to pull them altogether in something cohesive and natural. This is overextension at its best.

It sounds great, too. The recording is perfect – rich, warm, enveloping, blissfully free of the brightness and compression that would characterize so much of the coming decade’s recordings. The real revelation here is that guitar sound:  James Honeyman Scott’s Gibson “jingle-jangle” (as Johnny Marr, who credited Scott as the biggest influence on his sound, would later describe it) is so subtle and precise that it completely transforms the sound of the band. The original liner notes implore the listener to “PLAY THIS ALBUM LOUD” but this record is a near-perfect classic no matter what volume you listen at.

The album was remastered in 2006 and a number of demos and singles were added to the reissue. It’s on iTunes here and Lala here.

Today’s Vinyl: Glass Eye

Austin’s Glass Eye got tagged with the “avant pop” label by local writers, but the group always felt like two separate bands to me: Kathy McCarty’s folk-inflected singer-songwriter tunes and Brian Beattie’s impossibly bottom-heavy nerdcore rock. I was as guilty as any other nerd of heading to the bar or the bathroom when one of McCarty’s plaintive paeans to lost love started up, but she certainly helped keep things in balance – if Beattie penned every track, Glass Eye could well have slipped into Primus territory.

Beattie was probably the most insane bass player this side of Les Claypool - a slight, skinny man whipping the bass around like a geeky Jaco Pastorius, anchoring every track with deep, plunging basslines that could wreck your digestive system and crack the plaster on the walls. My favorite is still their 1988 Bar/None debut Bent by Nature, but HUGE is their first full-length, released on Wrestler in 1986. Beattie’s hilarious, self-effacing I don’t need drugs to be fucked up would be a live staple for years to come, and Lake of the Moon is a good snapshot of McCarty when she’s not veering off into cat lady territory. Glass Eye broke up in 1993 after an ugly brush with major-label stardom (seems to be a thread with Austin bands in the 90s), then reunited in 2006 briefly to support a long-unreleased album.

Today’s Vinyl: Jane’s Addiction (bootleg)

If, like me, you nearly crapped your pants when you saw Perry Farrell collaborating with 50 Cent and Kelly Rowland for an ESPN NCAA football intro a few years ago, you’ve either ignored the commercialization of everything fringe or you’ve clung to the nostalgic memory of Jane’s Addiction as a genre-bashing LA band who sung primarily about prostitutes, heroin, or prostitutes on heroin. Jane’s Addiction actually hit the mainstream pretty quickly with Been Caught Stealing and then promptly imploded, but for a few years they were a reliable bitch-slap to the absurdity of hair metal and the turgidity of Guns N’ Roses.

Any band with a rabid fan base and a good live act spawns an underground market for illicit recordings, and Jane’s Addiction bootlegs were everywhere for the first few years of their existence. This seven inch is one of half a dozen or so I picked up at various record shows over a couple of years, and features a ripped-off Ralph Steadman drawing on the cover. The tracks are live boots from a 1986 LA show and the sound quality is predictably awful. I saw the band a number of times, including an opening slot for Iggy Pop at the Austin Opera House, but an early show at the Back Room here in Austin may have been the most memorable, where Farrell took the stage in a corset and bondage gear and started going on about what a “nice cock” he had and that we “should see it sometime.” Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your predilection), we never got to.

Today’s Vinyl: Genesis

After a week of extreme pain and nausea (kidney stones - they’re like childbirth for men!), let’s continue the sickness and unease with an ignominious lowlight in my collection: a limited-edition, foldout-sleeve, clear vinyl seven inch of quite possibly the worst song Genesis ever recorded (if not one of the worst songs of the Eighties) – the excruciating Invisible Touch (unintentional Wikipedia hilarity: “It is a meditation on intangibility, speaking of a woman whose qualities go beyond what only meets the eye.” Um, right.). For many years before this tripe came out I was something of Genesis completist (don’t get me started on the Peter Gabriel-era bootlegs), so that might explain the purchase of this little gem, but I’d prefer to believe that this was acquired on a benzedrine and spray paint bender, or while sleepwalking, or perhaps as part of a complicated trade arrangement that involved black-market orangutan spleens and handjobs.

Whatever. It stinks, as did most of this band’s output through the latter half the Eighties, when they completed the transformation from prog rock kings to something along the lines of an edgier, less jazzy version of Phil Collins. Sappy schmaltz had been creeping into the band’s material since Gabriel left, but 1980’s Duke was a prog-pop-rock masterpiece, and even Abacab could keep a math geek listening for few rounds. It was all downhill from there, and this drum machine-fueled diaper load of insipid synth-pop was the last I would take from this band. Some quiet day I’ll melt this into an ashtray while listening to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Today’s Vinyl: Butthole Surfers

Forget about death metal, Norwegian black metal or any of the faux-horror-movie acts that entertain the Juggalo nation; the only band that ever really scared me – that made me fear not only for my physical safety but also my mental stability and grip on reality – were the Butthole Surfers. For a while during the late Eighties in Austin, a Butthole Surfers live show was an ugly, surreal trip into a visual and auditory hell worthy of Guillermo del Toro or Terry Gilliam. Cut-up film projections of penis surgery and car crashes, alcohol-filled cymbals shooting flames into the rafters, mutants dancing on stage, Gibby Haynes screaming through a megaphone, and Paul Leary’s tortured guitar wailing like a conscious animal being dissected on a table - it all amounted to a Grand Guignol-style horror, especially for those who attended in an, um, slightly altered state.

Live PCP PEP, a 45rpm 12-inch EP, was their first album on Alternative Tentacles (they’d shortly move to Touch and Go) and their first released live recording, and it’s heavier on the punk than the bizarre psychedelia that the Surfers would soon embrace. Bar-B-Q Pope, The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave and Something are classic Paul Leary, not so much sung or even screamed, they seem to be torn directly from Leary’s gut, or flayed off the skin of his neck with a straight razor or a melon baller. Hey, sung by Haynes, is probably the closest thing to an actual song here, and would be a live staple for many years. If you latched on to the radio-friendly (or blatant Beck ripoff, depending on whom you ask) sound of late period Butthole Surfers, this may be an artifact to avoid. But if you want something rough, scarier than metal, louder than punk and weirder than, well,  just about anything, pump this out of your boombox as you approach airport security.

Today’s Vinyl: Unicorn Magic

Austin has a rich tradition of indie bands with public substance abuse problems, and I’d put these gentlemen near the top of any list of severely inebriated performers. In their brief existence, the Jimmy Bradshaw-led Unicorn Magic regularly graced the inside stage at Emo’s with tales of magic, wonder and childhood joy, at least when they managed to finish the songs all the way through. Most seemed to have three or four false starts and then disintegrated into noise as the acute alcohol poisoning kicked in. Had more than five or ten people ever made it out for their shows, they could have become a true Austin spectacle.

This yellow-vinyl seven inch, released by Frank Kozik’s Rise Records and designed by Bruce Dye, represents the sum of their recorded output, as far as I can determine. The A side is the coulda-been-a-classic Feel Good Gazebo, an uplifting number about a place kids can go when they’re having a rough day, and is pretty representative of the themes the band would tackle regularly, namely: kids, magic, wizardry, fairy tales and, of course, unicorns. No cynics were these boys; every line radiated childlike sincerity and, if you can imagine all of this channeled through a Squat Thrust/Ed Hall kind of twisted guitar attack, you’ve got a pretty good idea of the mindless joy that was Unicorn Magic.