Lost Generation/Night Lights

he double-CD Lost Generation/Night Lights set collects proto-punk singer/songwriter Elliott Murphy's first two RCA albums and loads the two discs with bonus tracks. He'd never admit it, but Murphy was the first Patti Smith. It's true he may not have had the fiery guitars, but he had plenty of guttersnipe rock & roll poetry, full of elegance and bloodied razor blades blasting from the speakers on the Lower East Side in the early and mid-'70s. These two albums, while never as widely celebrated as Aquashow, are every bit as good and perhaps will stand the test of time better. Lost Generation is a street poet's rock & roll fantasy, full of tracks that allude to lost genius, broken dreams, and an empty present in the hollows of ghost-lit America -- check the title track, "Eva Braun," "Hollywood," "History," and "When You Ride." Night Lights was the other side of poetry. Here a wasted youth living from club to gutter to back seat looked back on the American Dream and the empty promise of rock & roll salvation and wanted to kill not only its heroes but its gods. "Isadora's Dancers" is a thinly veiled slag of Smith's posturing, and "You Never Know What You're in For" boasts an elegiac celebration of jaded icons of the protest and Warhol generation: "We're all junkies and pushers or pimps and hookers/You never know what you're in for/You can shake it/Try to forsake it/But you know you're gonna take it/You never know what you're in for." Here is the dark side of literacy traipsing drunkenly down a burned-out pathway top nowhere, but does it ever sound beautiful. Only someone who has loved as deeply as Murphy has can be so full of poison and grace. Add to this 11 bonus tracks that include demos and unreleased tracks, and you have a package that is as indispensable to '70s rock history as the rest of the CBGB's scene reissues. This collection is a howling masterpiece of pain, spit, and sour champagne. ~ Thom Jurek|