Nazz - Disc of the day

Nazz
Nazz

(SGC, 1968; reissue on Castle)

“Turd Runtgreen” bursts onto the scene in Philadelphia’s answer to the British Invasion.

The sleevenote to Rhino’s mid-’80s release of The Best Of Nazz contains this jewel: “Thom Mooney didn’t just play the drums. He piloted them at frightening altitudes and velocities.” You’ve got to love a drummer who’d be described like that, and indeed – more even than the prodigious writing, arranging and guitar-playing of the young Todd Rundgren – it is the extravagant Moon-The-Looning of Mooney that overwhelms the strait-laced production of the Nazz’s debut and burnishes it into a dazzling gem. From Open My Eyes’ chiming, fuzzing, phasing, breathless riff on The Who’s Substitute to the out-to-lunch jazz-rock grooving of When I Get My Plane, Nazz ignored prevailing US (ie. West Coast) rock trends to remain immersed in sharp-dressed Anglophile beatgroup psych, fertilizer for the green shoots of Yankee power-pop that would flower in the ’70s. Ultimately, too, there’s Hello, It’s Me, the first hint that beneath the cape of Rundgren the heavy guitar wiz lurked the tripped-out Tin-Pan Alley pop-savant of 1970’s solo debut, Runt. The constant antler-locking of Rundgren and the band’s bog-standard singer, Robert “Stewkey” Antoni did for the Nazz soon enough, but not before they recorded a song about a pig that joins the air force (Meridian Leeward) and their hilarious response to Archie Bell & The Drells’ Tighten Up (Loosen Up, natch), where all the instruments fall out of time until Nazz are playing a kind of free jazz orchestrated by Les Dawson. “Loosen up, fungobat!”: that was their (short-lived) catch phrase.

Danny Eccleston

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 09/04/2008