various artists - Afterglow: Rare! Live! Unreleased! (Steve Marriott/Small Faces/Humble Pie)

It seems like the great Blogger blogroll blackout of 2026 has yet to resolve itself. I haven't seen Primitive Offerings pop up in anyone's lists (or The List) in a couple weeks. So if you're stopping by: thanks for making me not feel alone in visiting the same 30 blogs every day to what new stuff they posted.

This aluminum slab came over as part of a major Mojo buy a few weeks back, and it's fair to say that it's one I won't be regularly listening to until my end of days. Steve Marriott played with some cool people, but, truth be told, I'm only really familiar with Small Faces. Humble Pie is defined for me by a reference from "Almost Famous" and by Peter Frampton's involvement. Everything else shared here is beyond the scope of what I'd typically seek out. So maybe one of you, my kind visitors, can point me in a good direction what I might dig.

Discogs

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various artists - Mojo Presents: Move On Up (A Modernist Compendium)

It's a lovely mod revival giveaway, bookended by a pair of Jam cuts and named after a Curtis Mayfield song. The cover evokes "Sound Affects", and all this is missing is a Geno Washington contribution and a set of keys to your own Vespa. Spinning this one makes me miss the late night dance parties at Lithuanian Hall in West Baltimore, the homebrew hooch we'd do shots of, smoking cigarettes, dressing sharp, and greasy eggs the next morning. Move on up, indeed.

Discogs

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various artists - Made In Britain: Mojo Presents The Sound Of A New England 1977-1983

"I don't want to change the world/I'm not looking for a new England/I'm just looking for another girl." What a perfect chorus. What a great song.

And this freebie, tacked onto the cover of September 2005's cover of Mojo Magazine, is chock full of songs like the Billy Bragg classic quoted above. Some, like "Too Much Pressure" or "The Modern World", are ones I've known by heart since long before this comp landed in my hands. Then there's deeper cuts, like the cuts from the Ruts and Soft Cell compiled here, that I came to when I finally landed myself copies of the full-lengths they originally appeared on. Then there's music from Alien Sex Fiend and the Meteors, who I'd never in a million years buy a record by. Yet, here, I found it all pretty compelling, which, knock ME over with a feather. Also, there's a Pop Rivets cut present. I probably should be a bigger Billy Childish fan.

The point? Ah, yes, the point. The point is that this 21-year-old is jam packed with pretty amazing 40+ year old songs, all of which where created by people who were in their early 20s, and probably just wanted to get laid and make music (not necessarily in that order). And that's pretty awesome for this old man. Just keep writing, keep chopping...you'll get there soon enough.

Discogs

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various artists - Mojo Presents: Small Faces & Friends

The things I know about Small Faces could fit on an index card. I know that "Ogden's Nut Gone Flake" is one of the first concept records (if not the first), that Kenny Jones replaced Keith Moon as the Who's drummer after Moon died, and that "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?" is a killer proto-punk banger. Oh, and Steve Marriott left to start Humble Pie, which led to Rod Stewart & Ronnie Lane joining the leftover members to start Faces, whose entire catalog I celebrate.

See, an index card.

But, in the estimation of Mojo Magazine, they also had some cool friends. I'll cosign Nico (performing a Gordon Lightfoot composition) and the Nice; one of my favorite Teutonic vocalists AND some proto-prog featuring Keith Emerson is worth checking out. I only knew Murray Head from teaching me about one night in Bangkok; I discovered via this freebie from 2014 that he was a label mate of Small Faces with his 1967 single "She Was Perfection". There's an early Rod Stewart solo cut from 1968, and compiler Rob Caiger even whipped up a pair of Small Faces rarities.

This one's even got a pretty cool cover. Not something I typically see in Mojo comps, but here, it's poppin'.

Discogs

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various artists - Mojo Presents: The Route To Quadrophenia

I've been exploring more of the original mod & beat sounds this year, hearing these songs through the lens of proto-punk/new wave. So I'm finding myself hearing an awful lot more from the Yardbirds, Small Faces, Kinks, and Who than I have in the past. For some of y'all, that may seem weird. But I'm prejudiced against the dinosaurs of rock, so I just slept on some of these bedrock rock records until this year.

...which ended up being a fun little discovery for me. The stripped-down, amphetimine-fueled rock records of the early 60s that soundtracked the mod movement in the UK fed into the first wave of British punk. So of course I'd feel a collection like this, coming in the issue of Mojo dated October 2011. With an equal balance between the contemporary mod tracks and the early rock, jazz, and R&B that inspired the song in the first place. I love having Slim Harpo and Mose Allison alongside the Creation and the Action. The addition of a new-in-2011 Booker T. song is a bit weird, but, hey, maybe Stax wasn't licensing any MG's songs at a reasonable rate for this project.

Discogs

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various artists - Mojo Buried Treasures (15 Key Tracks From The Greatest Albums You Never Heard)

It's a late evening drop for this week's Mojo Monday. So for those of you waking up Tuesday to see this fresh in your feed: my apologies. I've reached that stage in life where I can't read without my cheaters. Nor can I type with any sort of accuracy. And I couldn't find my reading glasses Sunday; hence, no midnight Monday AM post.

But enough of that. This one is about the ability of music to still surprise you. This one landed in my lap earlier this year. I'm sure I didn't pay more than a buck or two for it, and I snagged it on the basis of completion, more so than any other factor. I have the Third World War and Creation Rebel records from which their tracks here originate. And, at the time, other than Joe Meek, there was nothing here that piqued my interest. But it's a buck, and I like sharing and writing about Mojo comps, so why not splash out? It arrives, I rip it, it goes in a box, and I move on.

At some point between then and now, I decide I'm going to load a bunch of comps I've yet to write about onto my phone. It''s the way these things go for me; I'm at work, I want to hear something new, I put one on, I write about it later on. Onto the phone goes "Mojo Buried Treasures". I hit Shuffle. The phone plays me a ton of different stuff: Augustus Pablo, Masshysteri, Stiv Bators, LeeHi. Y'all should know by now that there's little I won't give a shot to. A song settles in on my headphones. It reminds me of Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch, the British folk music that I used to shelf at my first record store job a million years ago, back when I thought it was all dusty tea sippers with long beards. There's a percussive nature to the way the guitar's being played, like m'dude is beating the hell out of his acoustic while singing a tale about a drowned miner. I gotta say, I was enthralled. So I played it again. And again. And one more time on the way home, as I drove north into the gray Washington fall.

And that's how I discovered Nic Jones. Off a Mojo comp that I barely even paid attention to.

I ended up ordering the Shanachie reissue of "Penguin Eggs" a few weeks ago. I've not really dug into yet. But I'm taken aback that I've discovered this 30 years after I probably first grudgingly placed the same recording between Sandy Denny and Iain Matthews solo records. These things can still sneak up on your ears and grab hold of your brain and make you seek out more. What an amazing thing.

Discogs

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various artists - The 2 Tone Collection: A Checkered Past

This is an all-timer of a comp, a collection of every released A-side on 2 Tone, and just about every double AA-side as well. And what a set of performers and songs these are: the Specials, Madness, the Beat, the Selecter, the Bodysnatchers, Rico Rodriguez. It's clearly not full encompassing everything from the second wave of ska, but this is the sort of thing that, 30 years ago, you would have put into your younger sibling's hands so they had something great to listen to.

I did not have an older brother or sister to get this from. Truth be told, I can't even remember my first exposure to the Specials. It would have come around this time, that period of later in high school when one crosses over from mainstream radio into the underground out of curiosity or provocation or some combination of the two. But i can say there was rarely an episode of my radio show where I didn't play something off this collection. It was as intrinsic to my identity as Fugazi or Issac Hayes or Public Enemy.

So it kinda freaked me out when, at some point last year, I went to put it on my phone and I couldn't find my copy. Not ripped to digital, not present in physicality. Many of these songs were present elsewhere in my collection, but I really wanted to listen to the Bodysnatchers, having been inspired by Belle Stars' 7"s I had downloaded from a TwilightZone! post. No cobbled-together playlist would do, and I wasn't going to give in to Spotify for this. I dashed off to Discogs and, within a week, I could scratch my itch.

I had been sitting on this download for a minute, just waiting for the right moment to share some thoughts. It's springtime now, when my JA tastes always shift from dub to ska. This is a good soundtrack for this time of year, when the grey disappears from the sky and good things seem imminently possible.

Discogs

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