Okay.
Alright fellas, let’s go!
48 crash! 48 crash!
(Oops, wrong artist/song. Let’s try this again:}
Oh it’s been getting so hard
Living with the things you do to me…
Good thread. The other night I was driving home late and a fragment of a song popped into my head. I slowly reconstructed it, line by line, and by the time I was on the home stretch I was (again) singing Eddie Rabbitt’s “Driving My Life Away.”
Another big fan of Desolation Boulevard here, and Give Us A Wink as well. A couple of my favorites not mentioned yet are Sweet FA and Yesterday’s Rain.
Sad story…he pretty much drank himself to death.
Chapman and Chinn were fucking monster songwriters; I have a huge fondness for their “Can The Can”. Lesser known, though, but well worth investigating are Sweet’s band-composed B-sides like “Done Me Wrong All Right”, which were far heavier than Chapman and Chinn’s bubblegum glam, and wouldn’t have disgraced the likes of Deep Purple: “Man From Mecca” is a killer hard rock song, and Andy Scott just slays it on guitar.
Fascinating stuff, Penfeather - I’ve never dug into Sweet’s material. That song Done me Wrong All Right sounds like NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal - Maiden and UFO, to my ear). Burning sound exactly like Zep’s Immigrant Song.
Yeah, much heavier with great musicianship.
That is weird. I had no idea that the bluegrass Fox was a Manfred Mann tune. I always assumed it was traditional. I just saw/listened to MM’s live version on Youtube. I think I’ll stick with the bluegrass arrangement!
I think Sweet never really hit the heights because they were so split in what they did. They just wanted to play hard rock, but their writing and management team insisted they do catchy anthems. So their A sides had the Chinn and Chapman material that everyone knows, but which meant they got written off as shiny lightweights. Their own, much harder stuff was relegated to B sides, which means not many people got to hear it. And by the time they did try to wrest control, Brian Connolly had got his throat kicked in outside a pub and started drinking, and the band were on the slide.
The Sweet came out of the same blues tradition as all the great 60s London outfits, maybe with a little more soul influence.
They couldn’t write for shit though and eventually teamed up with ‘pop’ writing legends Chinn and Chapman. Between them they exploited the whole glam rock thing.
Obv. still solid, pub-honed musicians with genuine heritage.
Contrary to other views, the Sweet had little credibility at any point. Slade were the bollocks, a real working class band, and they wrote their own music - the way they stole the Reading Festival in 1980 is legendary. Sadly no video of that.
Fwiw, I bought my first Slade single in 73 
I know that there is always a very fine line between metal awesomeness and self parody, and I’m not quite sure where I should put this, but I think if Spinal Tap had tried a blatant Zep spoof, it would’ve sounded like this (Immigrant Song, anyone?).
ETA: I grew up with Sweet on the telly in 74-76 when I had barely jumped outta my diapers, and I thought it was the coolest shit second to Suzi Quatro, but I never knew their metal side before this thread.