Doing the Pandora shuffle, 7th edition

"OK, Google. Shuffle my Pandora."

"Red Rain," Peter Gabriel (So, 1986): The lead track on Gabriel's breakthrough album was released in the US as a fairly successful followup single to "Sledgehammer." I remember "Red Rain" being featured in an episode of "Miami Vice" and getting a lot of airplay on FM radio. It's never been among my favorite Peter Gabriel tracks -- it's too heavy on gloomy synth-and-drums atmospherics for my tastes. I've never really understood what the song is all about. I get this apocalyptic sense of blood drops falling from the sky. "Red Rain" aside, I have had a love-hate relationship with So since the day it was released. I was a Peter Gabriel megafan for more than a decade when So landed, but it fell flat for me. It was far too conventional to satisfy my appetite for new Peter Gabriel material. I understand So much better in hindsight than I did then, and I find it brilliant. But it was such a drastic pivot both artistically and commercially that it took me a long, long time to get over the shock.

Notes from the weird side of rock and roll

A compendium of the unusual, and sometimes downright bizarre, from the world of rock and roll:

'Gimme Shelter’ cost the life of her unborn child: Four months pregnant when she added her piercing vocals to “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, singer Merry Clayton blames the stress of the recording session for her subsequent miscarriage.

Renaissance: Out of the chaos rose sublime beauty

Ca. 1974: Tout, Haslam, Sullivan, Camp, Dunford

Keith Relf and Jim McCarty formed Renaissance in 1969 as a way to wrap their folk and classical influences into the bluesy rock they had been playing for several years with The Yardbirds. It was a noble experiment, one that did blaze a trail, eventually, for the progressive music that poured out of Western Europe in the following decade.

But Renaissance nearly disintegrated into dust by the time the band's second album, Illusion, was dumped on an uninterested German market in 1971. All five band members wearied of the grind of touring and recording, and they all went their separate ways. McCarty instituted a revolving-door policy to keep the Renaissance name alive while he retreated home to focus on his songwriting. Manager Miles Copeland stepped in to put finishing touches on the revamped lineup, and Renaissance was reborn.

Doing the Pandora shuffle, 6th edition

"OK, Google. Shuffle my Pandora."

"Trip to the Fair," Renaissance (Scheherazade and Other Stories, 1975). This is the 10-plus-minute opener on Renaissance's sixth studio album, the fourth with the Annie Haslam-fronted classic lineup. It's exactly what you would expect to hear from this band by this point -- heavy on John Tout's classically influenced piano and Jon Camp's melodic Rickenbacker bass and centered around Haslam's remarkably versatile, crystal-clear voice. This tune was written by Tout, acoustic guitarist Micheal Dunford and lyricist Betty Thatcher. Wikipedia says the song was written about Haslam's first date with Roy Wood, formerly of The Move and Electric Light Orchestra who was Haslam's boyfriend at the time. Renaissance had a nice three-album run culminating with this one in which every track is pure gold. "Trip to the Fair" is no exception.

A deep dive into Lou Reed's catalog: The stinkers

2011: Reed as frontman for Metallica

Of the 22 studio albums Lou Reed released in his four-decade career as a solo artist, four of them I rate as absolute stinkers -- albums I feel have no value whatsoever to a serious listener. These records might be worth your time if you're the curious type and have a burning desire to hear anything if just once. But if you hope to find some kind of treasure in your exploration, you're probably not going to find anything worthwhile in this basket.

On first glance, four out of 22 might seem like a lot. By the numbers, that would mean that I am telling you that nearly one of every five Lou Reed albums is complete garbage -- a fairly high whiff rate by the numbers. But there is a caveat: Three of these four were the last three albums of his life, recorded long after his well ran dry of artistic inspiration. So factoring that into the equation, that leaves only one stinker out of 19, a pretty good track record if you ask me.