Welcome to Episode 8 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which two music journalists/obsessives, Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

In our last episode, we took a deep dive into The Clash’s controversial 1980 album Sandinista!, and attempted to whittle down its sprawling three LPs into a 12-track single album. Just as the three Clash albums that preceded Sandinista! have tended to loom the largest in that band’s legacy, so too is the case with today’s subject: Love, the groundbreaking, genre-blending American band led by the brilliant and mercurial Arthur Lee.

For decades, Love has been (rightly) celebrated for their phenomenal 1967 album Forever Changes — a record which regularly appears near the top of “Greatest Psychedelic Albums of All Time” lists, and sometimes “Greatest Albums of All Time, Period” lists, too — as well as their half-great 1966 pop-jazz-psych LP Da Capo and their self-titled folk-punk debut from earlier that same year.

But there is far more to Arthur Lee and Love’s discography than those first three albums and their non-LP 1968 single “Your Mind and We Belong Together,” which was the last thing Lee cut with Love’s “classic lineup”. 1969’s Four Sail was ignored or denigrated by music critics for decades, simply because it featured an almost entirely new Love lineup, and because its acid-rock sound was such a radical departure from the pastoral soft-psych of Forever Changes.

And yet, Four Sail contains some of Lee’s finest songs — and there are even some days where Dan actually prefers this underrated album to anything else in the Love catalog, Forever Changes included. Will Dan convince him of that album’s enduring brilliance, or will it all be a bit too “West Coast hippie” for his punk rock liking? Tune in to the latest episode of CROSSED CHANNELS to find out!

A free preview of Episode 8 is available to all listeners, but the full episodes of CROSSED CHANNELS are only available to paid subscribers of Jagged Time Lapse https://danepstein.substack.com/ or Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith. https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/ If you’re already a free subscriber to either of these Substacks (or better yet, both), upgrade your subscription now to hear the whole thing, as well as all our previous episodes. As always, we are immensely grateful for your encouragement and support! Cheers!

Welcome to Episode 7 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which two music journalists/obsessives, Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

A free preview of Episode 7 is available to all listeners, but the episode is only available in its entirety to paid subscribers of Jagged Time Lapse or Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith. If you’re already a free subscriber to either of these Substacks (or better yet, both), upgrade your subscription now to hear the whole thing, along with other bonus features. As always, we are immensely grateful for your encouragement and support! Cheers! On this occasion, paid subscribers can also win a copy of Tony’s book on The Clash: The Music That Matters to be won.

In Episode 6, we discussed Blondie, a band from the NYC punk scene that hit it big in the UK before most Americans had ever heard of them. This time, we’re tackling one of the most important bands from the original wave of British punk: The Clash.

After making their live debut with a July 4, 1976 performance at The Screen on the Green in London (at which they supported the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols), the Clash quickly gained a massive UK following on the strength of their high-energy gigs and outspoken left-wing ideology. But Epic Records, the American arm of their label CBS Records, flat-out refused to issue the band’s self-titled 1977 debut album, assuming that it had no commercial potential in the US.

By 1980, however, the Clash had become immensely popular in the States — their third album, 1979’s double-length London Calling, made it all the way to #27 on the Billboard 200, thanks to the surprise radio hit “Train in Vain” — and the band spent so much time on the road in there that they were regularly accused of forsaking their homeland in pursuit of the Yankee dollar.

This transatlantic shift in the band’s fortunes was underlined by the December 1980 release of Sandinista!, the most politically-charged and stylistically wide-ranging album that the band ever made. The three-LP set received rave reviews in the US, surpassed London Calling on the Billboard 200, and went on to sell over 500,000 copies; in the UK, however, Sandinista! was poorly received by critics and fans alike, and would become the lowest-charting album of the band’s career.

Though often hailed as a masterpiece, Sandinista! has been almost equally criticized as being a mess. Many folks think it would have been a far better listening experience as a double LP, or even a single album. On this episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, we dig deep into this incredibly diverse record, and attempt to assemble the ideal single-album version of Sandinista! by slimming it down from 36 tracks to 12. As it turns out, however, we have wildly divergent opinions on which tracks should make the cut…

Welcome to Episode 6 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, in which two music journalists/obsessives, (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

Our 5th Episode, Oasis: What's The Story?, in which we discussed the 1995 album that catapulted the Manchester band to international fame, is now available in full, on all streaming platforms, for anyone who is not one of our paid-up Substack subscribers and wants to hear where we go with these discussions. We now head back to the United States for a look at the strange case of Blondie.

A cornerstone of the original New York punk scene that revolved around CBGB, Club 82 and Max’s Kansas City, Blondie were a group with roots in both the pure pop of 1960s girl groups like the Shangri-La’s and the pop art experiments of the early Velvet Underground. Fronted by the gorgeously talented Debbie Harry, Blondie were the biggest (and arguably the best) pop band in the US from 1979 through 1981, though they actually scored two massive hits in the UK — “Denis” and “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear” — in 1978, before most American listeners were even aware of their existence.

Blondie’s US breakthrough came in 1979 via “Heart of Glass,” the Mike Chapman-produced disco smash that provoked cries of “Sellout!” from punk and new wave fans, but completely connected with the cultural zeitgeist of the time. Of course, Blondie — a band who were never shy about experimenting with musical styles and forms beyond accepted punk parameters — had actually been playing versions of the song well before “disco” became a dirty word.

In this episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, Dan and Tony take a look at Blondie’s incredible run of six albums between 1976-82, and discuss how a band that was largely written off by critics and scenesters in their early days wound up scoring Number One hits on both sides of the Atlantic — as well as why British record buyers fell for them first. Along the way, our hosts answer these questions and more:

• What was the original title for "Heart of Glass,” and how far back does the song date?

• When did Debbie Harry first show up on an album?

• What was the group that Chris Stein and Debbie Harry first played in together?

• What cassette did drummer Clem Burke bring back with him from London in 1975?

• And was it Farfisa or Vox that gave keyboard player Jimmy Destri Blondie’s distinctive retro sound?

A free preview of Episode 6 is available to all listeners, but the episode is only available in its entirety to paid subscribers of or . If you’re already a free subscriber to either of these Substacks (or better yet, both), upgrade your subscription now to hear the whole thing. As always, we are immensely grateful for your encouragement and support! Cheers!

…A couple of photographic references from the episode: