Edgar Winters, Frankenstein
Sep. 28th, 2004 12:44 pmThe other day by chance I found a big plastic bag full of vinyl singles from the 1970s. Among the Bachman Turner Overdrive, Styx, and Pat Benatar, I found a copy of Edgar Winters' Frankenstein. For those unfamiliar with the piece, it's an excellent jam instrumental piece, full of bassy overtones and early uses of synthesizers, all integrated into a satisfying, powerful wave of guitars, drums, and saxsophones, intermixed with a trippy little pre-video-game sound-effects piece of work that must have been a bitch to engineer in 1972.
By coincidence, a pirate copy of the band's whole album on which Frankenstein first appeared fell into my lap recently, and I listened to it. I don't get it. Frankenstein is a compositional and studio instrumental masterpiece, so why does the rest of They Only Come Out at Night suck like Todd Rundgren on a bad day? It's just mushy 1970s music, almost disposable in a way that Frankenstein is not, filled with silly lyrics sung in a mediocre tenor.
Delete. I'll keep the single, though.
By coincidence, a pirate copy of the band's whole album on which Frankenstein first appeared fell into my lap recently, and I listened to it. I don't get it. Frankenstein is a compositional and studio instrumental masterpiece, so why does the rest of They Only Come Out at Night suck like Todd Rundgren on a bad day? It's just mushy 1970s music, almost disposable in a way that Frankenstein is not, filled with silly lyrics sung in a mediocre tenor.
Delete. I'll keep the single, though.
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