Edgar Winters, Frankenstein

[elfs]

The 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.

Comments

[tehrasha.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Frankenstein is just that, a little of this, and a little of that. It is composed of a lot of different jam sessions which were originally destined for the cutting room floor, but were masterfully cut&spliced together to create this awesome piece.

I guess the answer to 'why does the rest of the album suck?' is that the band apparently cant put together one single piece of good music. But they did manage to make a few -good- little bits, that sound good when mixed together.

[woggie.livejournal.com]

1972, eh? Wow, I somehow never looked at it quite that way before, how difficult those effects must have been to try to create. It sounds so effortless in the music. I mean, yes, it sounds like effort, but not work, if you get that distinction.

I'd heard Frankenstein was the best piece on the album, but I guess I had absolutely no idea how strongly the opinion was meant to be emphasized. :)