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

[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. :)