“Fox – “He’s Got Magic”/”The Juggler” (GTO, 1975) Eh, this is okay, but just barely. Passable Top 40 pop/soft-rock, with a girl singer plus five guys in the band and false endings. Both songs about how great some guy is — he is apparently a magician and a juggler. Actually, the vaguely reggae rhythmed B-side sounds kind of ominous I guess, thanks to the scat singing by the lady singer (who is actually pretty good). I dunno. I’ll come back to this later to decide whether I should keep it. (The magic song says he has magic and his lips and in his fingertips, and he can turn some kind of other animal into a whale. But why would you want somebody to do that? Heart’s magic man was more interesting.)”

a response from Frank Kogan:

“Fox’s “Only You Can” showed up last May on the League Of Pop over in Poptimists, which means we were listening to it blindfolded. Daddino, who was the judge that week, guessed it was J-pop. It sounded vaguely familiar to me; I wondered if it was by latter-day art bohemians going for ’70s naff, but I cheated and did a lyrics search and found out it was actually ’70s naff shooting for ’70s naff and hitting the bullseye. Also found out that this was a top five hit in the UK, from whence Fox originated, though I suggested that if the singer had actually been raised in the UK she must have been hidden in a basement and denied human contact through age 13, since I was damned if I could work out how her pronunciation originated in social interplay on the British Isles. (A thought: perhaps as a wee’un she’d been left in the forest to die but was adapted by a pack of foxes, hence the group name.) William Bloody Swygart, who’d supplied the track, then informed us that the woman was originally Australian, “and this is by no means the oddest she ever sounded.” Anyway, the reason I first thought “Only You Can” might have been recreated rather than original ’70s naff was that its ’70s naffness was scarily precise, and I figured that actual ’70s naff wouldn’t try to be ’70s naff so precisely (since why would it need to?). I got caught up in my own convoluted reasoning, I guess. Song comes off as a teen girl with speech impediment and a drive towards infantilism doing a countryish tuba two-step accompanied on keyboards by Captain of Captain & Tennille. “You can fly my heart like a bamboo kite/Make it twirl and gyrate just like a tribal delight.” Tribal? “You can see as far as an eagle bird/See right through my head to my every word.” An eagle bird! About perfect of its type. “Sssingle Bed” sounds on first listen a bit funkier (relatively speaking) and more stuttery; concept seems to be that the evening is promising but the bed’s not big enough for the both of them.”

Speaking of Flying Lotus, what did you think of SFJ’s NYer piece – esp. his preference for the EPs over Los Angeles?