spacedsaviour

Youngbloods

2010-10-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

It's always a good idea to get in the breeze on a sunny afternoon and journey the mental highways to Point Reyes Station to fire up a 'fat one' and blur space and time with the stereo record player for a couple of elongated hours, hours spent in the company of the first two Youngbloods albums, with added niceness from a gig at the Avalon relayed over the trusty FM waves of Hippyville with a rounding up from 'Rock Festival'. Can't be beat.

Jazzbo hep country folkniks with a medicated rock'n'roll brew kicking the gong around for a few years bringing arcane vibes into the Vietnam fearing hippie conciousness to perculate and levitate the heads on the way to better tomorrow.

SMiLE

2010-08-29T07:04:00.000-07:00

SMiLE, the rock'n'roll worlds greatest unfinished masterpiece? the record that never was, the unreleased waxy genius of Brian Wilson was originally going to be unleashed to the public sometime in the early days of flower power but as most now know that was not the case, the whole project was shelved and left to molder in the forgotten annals of rocking history, the Beach Boys as an entity went downhill to the pop commercial dump, into the trash as fallen heroes of yesterday, striped surfing squares from the plastic city, not at all relevant in the modern 1967 world after Monterey Pop high-jacked popular thinking with 'lefty' social conscience for the young draft dodging college kids and the Beach Boys were definitely now 'out of time' in both senses of the phrase (ironically the Boys were all set to headline Saturday at the Monterey bash but pulled out due to unsound thinking, just another mess up in the strange saga of the Hotshots from Hawthorne C.A)...
Smiley Smile was released late '67 to a largely disinterested public with the actual SMiLE project all but forgotten as Brian collapsed somewhere near the outskirts of infinity, diving headlong into paranoiac LSD madness for the last time, this time it was as 'serious as a heart attack', Brian stood at the gates of Chaos Central without a floor plan, the layout of his mind warped and wobbled on an hourly basis, nothing was the same anymore, the changes just kept changing too fast in Brians nervous system...

Into the seventies and a few heads were starting to look back to the sixties and 'discover' the lesser known bands, the more demented, eccentric and esoteric artists of the preceding decade were being looked upon with fresh eyes and listened to with more open ears. This is where the SMiLE mystery returned to the thoughts of a few wondrous types who wished to hear this supposed treasure trove of lost grooves that could equal the Fab4s mid 60s output, Brians equivalent of the Revolver/Pepper discs...
Somewhere around 1973 Al Jardine spoke to European music press saying SMiLE was being readied for release as a double disc set with a twelve minute version of 'Heroes & Villians', though that was Al making the most of an interview and of course nothing happened...
Nick Kent wrote a long long piece on Brian and his tribulations in a two part story in the English music paper NME about 1975 and SMilE was at the core of the piece along with tales of sandboxes in the living room, Brians health food store the Radiant Radish and his reluctance to take of his dressing gown...

Into the late 80's and a few books on Brian and the Beach Boys were popping up in stores and further interest was being aroused in more and more cats who just wanted to hear the original album, not remakes of SMiLE tunes that had drifted onto the market over the years on various B.B albums, SMiLE as a stand alone entity just had to be heard, someone must have the tapes, if only it could be released...

The nineties arrived and with them the first fully fledged bootlegs of SMiLE, at last it was here for all who could find it to savour the mysteries of this ancient supposed masterpiece. By 1995 some thirteen different boots were available, all full of varying tunes/takes/works in progress that made up SMiLE...
With the advent of home computers turning everyone and his dog into 'rock'n'roll scientists' the making of different SMiLEs erupted all over the globe with cats taking SMiLE apart and rejigging the various components to give a different feel to the sound of SMiLing...

SMiLE was a very personal project that Brian felt strongly about and the drugged paranoia he was suffering decided him to abandon it for what now seems a myriad of differing reasons (the usual harping from fellow BBs about the songs being difficult / fires breaking out in the vicinity of the studios / Fab4 making easy headway with their own 'New Pop', the list can become endless as the rumour mongers are still spreading stories) but it has turned into a personal project for all who care to 'have a go' at SMiLing. On offer here are five different mixes for audio perusal, you pays your money and take your choice...

Elektra

2010-08-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

So here's a fine look at Jac Holzmans Elektra Records during those turbulent times known as the Sixties, swinging or otherwise, from 1963 onto the end which in this case is 1973 (when the great unwashed haddock started their sixties, or what they thought that decade was about), from intellectual folk strumming beatniks to singer songwriters with personal concerns, plus a goodly dose of acid rock in between...
Five discs trawl the ten years picking up choice niceties by the likes of Judy Collins, Judy Henske, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton on the first disc mingling with lesser known names such as Phil Borof, Kathy & Carol and Oliver Smith all getting busy with some cool strumming and warbling...
Disc two is where the secretive Greenwich Village marijuana haze of the preceding disc is supplemented with chemical experimentation as the like of Love, The Doors and Clear Light gaze into the white light rush of STP induced punk pummel and the Incredible String Band bring their own form of intoxication to the folk strum...
Disc three continues the drug induced folkniking, some with a more 'arty' orchestration popping up to decorate the tunes, also tomorrows madness is on the prowl from Detroit as the Stooges and MC5 tear up the ballad book and kick up a ruckus of screaming, guitar blazing protest suitable for their city and the wider world in general...
The forth disc starts to calm down with introspection from Paul Siebel, Carly Simon and Harry Chapin along with David Ackles angst and Cyrus Faryars hippy spirit on board for the ride into the seventies ending with Queen who made their US debut on the label...
The last disc is like a bonus with a more left field look at some of the weirdos on the roster, not that any of these people could be considered right wing squares, but disc five is the resting ground for crazed hipsters Simon Stokes and David Peel, with not so well remembered artistes as Rainbow Band, Show of Hands and Aztec Two Step whose ode to Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassidy kept the original beats within sight and listening...
Other flipped out heads populating the set with something to say are Dave Ray/Fred Neil/Pat Kilroy/Tim Buckley/Holy Modal Rounders/David Stoughton, arty acid rock coming from Ars Nova and to a degree Earth Opera, pop rocking with Wackers and Crabby Appleton plus some rural rocking roots from Delaney and Bonnie and Lonnie Mack and last but surely and certainly not least, Jobraith working up some fine glam future rocking and that's only to mention some of these fine practitioners of authentic and stirring ditties and grooves...
All in all a great earfull of top grist with really no dud tracks in evidence, something of an achievement with monumental undertakings of this nature which in itself shows the strength of players concerned and for once the vision of record company execs. and employees who all contributed to the towering efforts of the once mighty 'when it mattered' Elektra...

50 Foot Hose

2010-08-25T13:06:00.000-07:00

Wheeze and whirl, clank and bang with oodles of brain popping doodles spreading itself over some pretty nifty west coast acid folk rocking, psyched hippies and electrical boffins spraying outta-space vibes from their mind liquefying paisley attachments.
Cork Marcheschi was/is the head honcho of the combo and back in the early 60s he was playing the rock'n'roll /R&B noise in North Beach, San Francisco plus at the same time discovering older hipsters like Edgar Varese and began setting about joining together these seemingly different strands of music whilst also digging poetic ideas that had first been put forth by the Dadaist movement two generations and a continent away.
After playing gigs at the Fillmore Auditorium during the nascent flower power days the 50 Footers managed to sign with Mercury Records subsidiary Limelight and recorded Cauldron, only to have it released just before years end of 1967 enabling the record to promptly disappear from view and journey into the 'netherworld of strange wax' where it remained for 30 years until it was released again in the mid nineties.
The easiest way for the uninitiated to get a handle on this first LP is to imagine a heavier more tripped out version of the 'United States of America' album, plenty of electrification FX over beaty acid rock blare with female vocals wailing the songs, still sounding fresh today thanks to the nouveaux hippy 'noise/folk/weird' practioners making this sort of bleat more acceptable /accessable in the post modern hyper real age of todays listening habits.
The other album up for consideration is 'Sing Like Scaffold', a nineties disc with a 'reformed' band which by all laws of rock'n'roll should have been 'not too hot' as is usually the way with reformation of old hippy combos, but no, its a mighty fine and worthy blast of 'kosmichemusik' style madness, Euro-avant grooves hooking up with 50s B-movie soundtrack blabber and smoke.
Both albums add up to more than a wonderful time spent idling away in the smoked up spaces of a sunny afternoon with nary a care for the outside 'square dadz of normality'.

Banana / Bauer / Kane

2010-08-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

...Issued on the Youngbloods Racoon imprint (via those 'hip capitalists' at Warner Bros), Crab Tunes/Noggins was not ever likely to set the woods on fire with its weird 'out-of-time' rural jazzbo grooves, its playful avant slant on rustic mystic wobbliness ain't going to settle on too many hippies record decks for long, it's just going to derail the vibe and the reason is the sheer apparent repetitiveness going down. ...Basically what Banana/Joe Bauer/Michael Kane are doing is getting busy with a couple of tunes (crab and noggin) and just having a blast trying to get the right groove on the move. A few takes and attempts to get them the way they want, the listener is eaves dropping on an afternoon spent in a marijuana fog at the Youngbloods backwoods studio as the tunes evolve/devolve in frothy muggament, the fragments appearing and reappearing dislodging the time continuum whilst the unsuspecting stoned listener imagines the record is scratched and ponders the thoughts of offloading offending disc at the 'second hand store', but its cool, its only some hippy prank with pretensions to Thelonious Monk at Big Pink jamming with Zimmy. ...As with all Youngbloods related endeavours there's a cheery good nature floating around woozily on a pot cloud of optimistic nicety, to live life in the Youngblood universe is to be savoured and valued for it don't get much cooler than time spent at Point Reyes on a sunny afternoon. ...This surely is a most worthy piece of 'left field' grist thats strangely addictive and if this had been made by three unknown stoners it would be going for a heavy amount of change on the collector circuit and thats a fact. Well worth an earful and watch out for that pesky cyclist...

Santana

2010-08-17T03:42:00.000-07:00

...From the belly of San Francisco, deep within the 'New Society' where everyone is 'equal' came the percussion heavy Santana band filling the air with conga-riffic jams of sky reaching intensity, keyboards slamming out monumental Hammond vibes with the guitar sending mystic strings to capture the hippies in a psychedelic boogaloon...the early Santana noise was a melting down of Latin musics into one acid washed frying pan of blues wailing funk, high stepping in the back room of mainstream culture where only the initiated will find themselves.
...To be digging this band in the late 60s Ameikkkan environment was to be standing in the ancient future, where time opens out into infinity, there is no longer any feelings of 'then or when' for 'everything is everything' in the ever present NOW, an ongoing Afreekadelia of the mind.
...The percussionation continuously sends barbs of organic electricity into the marijuana haze of the Fillmore auditorium to zap the draft dodging hippies and bay area greasers with the secrets of fried neck bones and freedom, the freedom to lay in the funk and soak up the cosmic slop to invigorate the soul.
...And so it was back in December 1968 when this show was taped with ideas of it supplying tunes their first long playing release, surely a good thinking move to have the band recorded live, in the flux of the action but it was vetoed in favour of some other recordings not yet known...

ke$ha

2010-06-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

...what's going on in pop land these days?, the ugly noise mongers and 'hipster' alternate avant rockers are just going in a nowhere direction floundering about in the ghettos of their own making, metal thrashers and punk detritus are constantly upping the volume whilst diluting the content, yet bubblegum popettes are rocking the house with vengeance...LadyGaga is playing the game by her rules and seems to be winning on her own terms, all the naysayers being proved idiotically muddle headed when it comes to the records, Gagas mature bubble pop is streets ahead of any rivals parading in the myriad of offshoots that make up the modern entertainment industry, be it Merzbow or Hannah Montana, with all shades in between, Gaga is knocking back the boundaries of 21ST CENTURY pop philosophy by upsetting the status quo through thinly disguised mimicking of the hyper reality thrown down by TEEVEEland, whilst at the same time being wooed by the very people she aims her Ziggy ray at, the paparazzi and the consumers who all need a daily dose of Gagaism at the moment...so if Gaga is the re-manifestation of Ziggy as 'the Lady Sane' then Ke$ha is overspill from Rodneys English Disco, a slutty waif with the heart of tarnished gold rolling drunk on a suburban Sunset Strip and loving the fleeting moment, sneering gutter mouth poems of messed up teenage normality, stoned in the noonday glare of last nights hangover Ke$ha oozes and moans the trivialities of youth in despair, youth caught in the collapse of yet another capitalist dream, trapped in the new depression that surely looms large for all and sundry of the western world...Ke$has 'so what' sneer is couched in a tired reservedness, she's resigned to the dual realities of the outlaw rock'n'roll life, the 'life' that only exists in the fans dream, her 'outlaw life' gets her thrown out of Paris Hiltons party, prompting media speculation about Hiltons stamina in the fast lane of Papsville, and breaking into Princes house to deliver a CD demo to his Purpleness, hence giving the diminutive one a name check in the new pop, a modern pop that is an engaging jolt of Radio Disney playing out the radiation burn of Radio Clash from three decades ago, a throw down of Zappa / Dead Kennedys / Shangri-Las mixed and filtered over a Bambaataa electro explosion, a psychedelic aural strobe light firing disco mirror ball shards of white light into the inner minds of teenage trash locked away in squaresville who desire a way out from endless parental pressure to do good in an ever contracting overcrowded marketplace...again as with Gaga the naysayers and liberal pop pundits have entered the media fray hoping to get noticed as thinkers with accusations that she has to use 'auto tune' to get the voice right, but this is neglecting the fact that it's the whole effect of the sound that's important, not individual aspects, if filtering gives the right vehicle for the sneer, then filter away, who cares, the fans sure don't...Rock snobs are bleating that the lyrics are banal but when 'awop bop a loobop' and 'surfing bird' are the beginning and end of rock poetics it's hard to see the critics stand point if they are true to themselves (pigs are flying tonight), but the truth is the New York Dolls wished they'd come up with this wordy trash and that's about as accurate a statement as can be read at this moment...recommended to all who ride the bus to the strange parts of town after dark looking for the excitement dished out by this aural injection of crack cocaine, happiness in three minute doses...

Schoolly D

2010-06-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

...back in the day a young gun going by the epithet Schoolly D along with DJ Code Money threw down some cheba enhanced jams of street strutting, party tugging urban regeneration grooves with Schoolly kicking in with rudimentary but oh so effective beat box and keyboard washes with scratch ups from the dark side, scraping the edges of dust encrusted reality (the echoed doomy thuds of the first LP are something to behold, this couldn't be made in a 'professional' enviroment, this is cats with a vision and an urgency to lay down the beat)...there's a feeling of panic fuelled claustrophobia permeating some of the cuts on the first two discs (not so much on the third, this could be down to any number of factors, most likely just moving on unconsciously to the next step which is just the next step, there is no grand plan in Schoollys early three joints)but really, when settling in with the sounds we see the panic is just induced by heavy weed abuse and will subside as soon as the piggy patrol car has gone by on its way to the donut shop...the claustrophobia induced is real when these discs are blasting the air, a heavy, heavy basement vibe is in full effect shaking the very soul of the housing projects of Philly in the Reaganomic 80s, a bad time for cash strapped inner cities with welfare hardly covering the cost of frosted cookies and a 40 ounce...Schoolly raps about what he knows, the street life, leaning on the corner playing the games of the projects, the game of existence for all who care to indulge in the wilder side of the suckers world, because suckers surely do populate the avenues and streets of AmeriKKKa...due to Schoollys subject matter he's picked up the reputation as 'inventor of gangsta rap' which may or may not be true, it all depends on the perspective of the onlooker and their knowledge/experience of project life, it's no good checking this from a 'middle class' position, this isn't for nerds to thrill and tremble to, it's just a cat laying down some words about what's going on, real or imaginary in his neck of the woods, no 'O-T-T' boasting, just chatting about the way it is (was) over the primitive mixology of himself and Code Moneys backdrops...Schoollys first three albums were not for suckers who think they're major players in the underworld, it's more for homeys in the hood, cats who surf the project elevators, smoke weed on the rooftops and whistle to the fly girls going through the buildings, the honeys in turn just laugh at such foolishness and keep on moving...there is plenty of humour in these grooves, not forced, just the light amusement of everyday existence, the funny/weird situations that crop up on the streets, in the burger bars and pizza joints...dig a real cat who played the game on his own terms and created some HOT blasts for all to grab and savor forever more, a cool buzz for when it's needed...

Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

2010-05-28T05:50:00.000-07:00

...right from the start, in fact way, way before the J.A.Ms got their beatbox groove on everyone wanted a piece of 'King Boy D' and 'Rockman Rock', two abstract thinkers lost in the rock'n'roll vibe looking for a way out of the torpid stupor that was the mid eighties...it all began over a thousand years ago when the peace loving denizens of 'Mu Mu Land' foresaw their own extinction and started to send out mind waves that were so intense in their force they sailed through the known physical laws of earth science, enduring through a millennium of time and were picked up by two scallies who proceeded to put into action the ancients ideas of disruptive harmony, to throw the karma in the air and mess with the squares to bring about a time for love...kicking off their campaign for some common sense to prevail in the world run by bean counting scum, 'king boy' and 'rockman' decided to form a band that did not exist and to play instruments that were not their own, but were instruments of re-construction of the past times, colloquially known as samplers with an all prevailing beat supplied by a machine known as a 'roland 808', a filtered robotic drummer that did not drink and could pound the groove all night, the 808 could ride the midnight train to endsville without derailing at the first tempo change, with out losing 'it' in drink fuelled pandemonium...their first surrey into right thinking mode came with a one sided disc called 'all you need is love' which would expose the media hypocrisy over the aids epidemic that was causing some distress for more than a few harried cultural experimenters and 'normal' citizens alike...starting with the FAB4 tune of the same name followed by the MC5s plead to 'kick out the jams' the 'Justified Ancients of Mu Mu' collided gay disco torch and hetero phantasy object singer Sam Fox with 700 hundred year plague chanting interspersed with the self referential and reverential shouts of 'justified' all rolling on the 808 beat blasts and swirling acid flurries...it's right at this moment that the outside forces of accountancy fraudsters saw their chance to get some publicity for the beatles catalogue reissue on the new compact disc form with a forcible writ demanding the J.A.Ms destroy their work as it somehow belonged to others (the first few seconds of the world peace anthem from the fabs was sacrosanct and not for consumption until it had been paid for)...the J.A.Ms took some pity on the FAB4 plight with poverty and caused a media fuss so everyone could hear the name Beatles one more time and its here that everything blew up with all sorts of busy bodies getting in the mix from ABBA to Whitney to police force haddock all wanting some publicity for their cause (actually its unfair to lump Whitney with the others but more on that later)...on the first long play album titled after the year 1987 'rock and d' vainly tried to disrupt the karmic harm done by EMI accounting meanies by giving Scandinavian popsters Abba some street cred and use one of their songs for effect but Abba saw things differently, credibility did not pay the bills and they took the ugly root of lawyers and unreasonable demands to have the disc destroyed...Rockman and King went off to see the ungalant Swedes in an effort to enlighten them to the times in which real people lived but the northern ones could not bring themselves to grant an audience to two fans from across the seas who only wanted to help fellow musicians and kept to their lofty demands of disc destruction and nothing less would do...so it was the J.A.Ms destroyed the remaining copies and released a version with the offending tunes plus sundry others (BBC pop coundown) ommitted leaving gaps in the sound lasting up to about 13 minutes all told showing how the capitalist condition of consumerism was run by dark forces from behind the leather topped desk of mesmerism razing all that does not conform...a third go at acting as street level saviours came when Rockman and D sought to save Whitney Houston from a life of drug addiction by getting her to join the J.A.Ms and smoke only weed and drink some beer, to keep away from designer narcotic haze and live life as the ancient muians would wish though to Whitneys misfortune she somehow missed the opportunity offered to ride the 808 to tranceville and dance the ancient dance...others that have unwittingly helped the J.A.Ms cause of saving mankind from credit card oblivion have been Petula Clark/shaft/ Schooly D/Dr.Who/Shangri Las/Hendrix/Led Zep/Monkees/Pistols/Dave Brubeck/Gary Glitter and others who have been more gracious and forth coming with their time, most famously country diva Tammy Wynette who had no hesitation to stand by the J.A.Ms...when D and Rock were not cruising in their polite force JAMmobile they constructed a second LP self mockingly called 'who killed the jams', a half hour tour of rocking exotic house blasts, more coherent than the first but not as disorientatingly engaging, more transitional from serious art prankster to 'political pop hedonism', talking straight talk riddles for all who would and could listen...also on offer here is the incredible double disc boot 'stand by the J.A.Ms', a fantastic trawl through the Kingboy and Rocks oeuvres as both Jamsters and Kopyright Liberation Front spokesmen starting quite rightly with the disruptive first 12inch white label and ending in the chill out zone staring down the wide eyed ones, over two and half hours of mind numbing honesty within a frame work of existential pan globic bliss showing it's still time for love...one thing that does become clear sitting through these trips is the undeniable fact the J.A.Ms create an all encompassing tribal feel with their junk yard of audio audacity that sucks the listener in so deep its hard to beleive the outside world ever existed a few hours before the take off to other dimensions...all these discs are whole heartedly recommended, they still pack the punch as they first intended, listen now and by internally mended, nicely nice...

lizzy mercier descloux

2010-05-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

...lizzy mercier first got busy in paris in 1975 helping to get the primitive nascent leather jack iggy rock/punk scene going by starting a zine called somewhat uninviting 'rock news' but it got the relevant players in the ensuing french new wave a more public profile so a few trips to new york for interviews scored her some time hanging out and working with such flipped out poets as patti smith/richard hell/tom verlaine the following year...living in both paris and NYC got her to dig the funky sounds that could be heard in each locale without too much effort, the funk groove playing itself in record shops/radio/street corners infiltrating and mixing in with any number of permutations calculable to have a positive affect on any situation...when she moved full time to 'hick city central' she put out a couple of discs on the newly created 'Ze' imprint, the first under the name 'rosa yemen' and the second under her own appellation, both exquisite delicacies of 'NO Wave' angular spazz with discoid persuasions on the 'press color' joint and on investigation one is struck by the accessibility of the sound, clean shapes are thrown in a conforming randomness of cluttered disorder landing like small pellets of mind piercing psychic shrapnel upon the discerning aural attendee...mutant reggae and scraping guitar runs mix in with TV themes (mission impossible) and strangled high life string bending, all kept to the correct length (short) for maximum impact...thunky bass under pins other attacks of repetitive one note joviality's, keeping the party bouncing for a 'dislocation of the norm', getting groovy in a downtown art enclave with 'out of town' bohemians looking for the next thrill...these first two discs are lizzy in her purest form, all ideas are worked through her assemblage of local urban input to spring out in (then) unfamiliar forms of communication, the later discs have lizzy moving outer national with influences and musos from africa and south america as well as the usual arty smear all her work has to some degree...the third joint 'mambo nassau' was financed by 'island records' who were looking for a commercial hook on the new sounds/new styles happening in the post punk whirl wind of chaotic creativity then raging across the western world and its a much fuller sound still built on lizzy's understanding of the funky rock vibe but with more complex interplay, hosing themselves with a jazz shower dancing on their receptors (think of a less pretentious and infinitely more groovy version of tom tom club) with some 60s retro vibes like sleazy crime jazz weaving and bobbing with aplomb and lizzy chirping her pipes in exaltation of the mind dance...lizzys forth outing simply self titled was a full trip to shanty town soweto with a full on indigenous sound kicking up a storm and gaining lizzy a hit record in her native land and upping her profile as a serious artiste...due to the timing it must be seen as part of the 'dreaded' world music scene then taking place but this is one instance where a western musician took the host pop sound and blended themselves into the surroundings and not try to alter the original to a more homogeneous sound, lizzy took on the soweto pop groove and melt right in, swimming in the vibes from the southern land and becoming one with the whole, a magnificent self effacing achievement...the mid eighties saw lizzy making her fifth album, this time in brazil getting grooved up with the tropical sound in a laid back jazzy mood with trumpet blower supreme chet baker helping out on a few tunes lending the whole proceedings a sense of historical serenity...at this point it may be pertinent to mention the production does have that sterile eighties sound and feel on some tracks which could lead to some disappointment so it really is down to a matter of personal preference and general tolerance of the antiseptic atmosphere generated from the discs of that decade...this might be her worst record when put alongside the others but a few spins brings the cool numbers to the surface and the program button into play so all is not lost, it just shows what happens when record co. A&R doofus get in the driving seat and think they know whats best...her last album came about in 1988 and this time lizzys back on form with some punchy pop rock partly produced by mark cunningham from early NO Wavers 'mars' bringing everything back to a nice starting point which should have propelled lizzy into the nineties but this did not happen, her recording career came to an end which is a drag for all concerned but we must be thankful for the cool sounds she left behind...

lady gaga

2010-05-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

...lady g. has on the face of things got to be the culmination of the last forty years of pop, a modern ziggy stardust in hyper reality pulling from the past such grooves as bubble gum cheekiness, up front and roaring glam glare, synth pop and euro disco in a darkwave shimmer plus electro filtered piano pop with excellent song writing, it's the campness of jobraith caught in the dazzle of the universal mirror ball of the partisan discotheque, you either love/hate her or ignore with intencity, it matters not to the gaga one, it's all grist to her fun fare mill...other bowie showbiz shenanigans crop up with her mutated 'aladdin sane' flash morphing her into 'a lady sane' in an insane world, twisting perceptible reality into a 'touchable' unreality, a mime theatre with sound (the moderne appproach appropriate to the 21st century attention span and understanding), a kim fowley hollywood dream sequence set on the world stage through a camera lens as a never ending performance art piece, with or without a script saying, via the first album cover 'i'm not here' ala zimmerman back in the day (also dig the magical alignment of the aleister crowley angular shape of the fame monster cover)...the square press love the seemingly infinite mileage they can get with juxtaposing her name with any other word in the dictionary, the latest being 'hermaphrodite' since everyone who does not matter now knows she's not a man as earlier 'rumours' were supposing (amanda lear all over again)...all of this would not mean much if the music was not up to standard in a pop sense at least but the truth is this goes way beyond the necessary call of duty in the pop hemisphere, colliding riffs and hooks to create instantly memorable intelligent but not condescending sky ripping bubble pop with muscle, working on more than one level with ample bundles of cutting humour laced throughout the framework of three minute tunes...samples and beats from the last four decades are given the gaga seal of approval and sent back onto the airwaves for a fresh outing and they've not sounded this fresh for many a moon (bonus points can be earned by spotting 'give peace a chance' rearing up for another go round)...worthwhile and then some, recommended for any one with a pop head and a fancy for the more rarified electric gum that don't lose its flavour overnight...

paris, banksy, dangermouse

2010-05-15T15:31:00.001-07:00

...a few years back the celebrated miss hilton put out a dance pop album that drew media attention from all comers for all of five minutes, everyone getting in some frenzied accusations about the tunes not being so good, miss hilton not being an accomplished singer, it was seen as a vanity release by an air headed rich girl who had nothing to contribute to modern society that could be considered worthwhile...to help promote her disc art prankster and philosopher banksy, along with studio boffin dangermouse constructed a tribute album to miss hilton consisting of a repeated techno guitar sound riff with cut up comments from la hilton liberally thrown around with punctuation inserts of paris' 'that's hot' catchphrase...a limited run of five hundred copies were surreptitiously placed in the would be relevant racks of two UK chain stores (HMV / virgin) and a small commotion was stirred up in the press, both mainstream haddock and 'trendy' dimwits, (we all know the relevant readership, square and squarer), when the offending discs were discovered by an irate paris fan and the alert was raised with the discs being taken away for forensic investigation to find the perpetrators of such an outrage...it does not take the astute listener long to deduce that the soundbites coming from the mouth of miss hilton are fairly on the mark for twenty first century thinking rich people, nothing actually new comes to light through this art statement except the reversal of roles within the entertainment industry, the 'alternative' camp riding on the coat tails of the rich (not that banksy and dangermouse are skint proles on their uppers)...complimenting as it does the original hilton release it actually is not as good as the paris disc which is itself a nice slice of electro bubble pop, harmless fun for kids, that's hot...

zulu nation 6th anniversary

2010-05-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

...the bronx erupts with good natured turbo boasting and flipping the bird to the uptight adult world of workaday squares and welfare haddock, this is the zulu nations 6th anniversary blowout with cosmic force, jazzy 5 mcs and soul sonic with bam at the controls, throwing down the joints for the gathered teens who groove on the sounds and generally dig the scene....it's 1981 and the river center plays host to this occasion and all guns have been left at home and the scent of cheba thickly hangs in the air boosting the good vibes and spreading 'the word' for all to go with the flow...shout outs and choatic moments along with the breaks are captured live and direct on cheap ten cent tapes and make for exciting listening with the whole evening telescoping into some 90 minutes of bragadocious turntable manipulation mayhem...this is rough and ready cut ups of tripping in the midnight hour, all the home boys and fly girls having a buzz as the mcs chat and chitter rocking the mic while the wheels of steel turn ever onward, rewinding and bouncing the grooves into the night, the joint is rocking and sure shocking...this is far removed from the sterile world of todays 'live' entertainment of preplanned tapes and miming, this is kids doing it for themselves before the sharks move in and clean up the excess, so without futher ado, everyone throw their hands in the air and rock like you just don't care...

ruth copeland

2010-05-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

...this lightly tasty confection made up from the invictus joints ruth cut in the early 70's sure got a lot of grooves and styles hitting on all 4 burners...this hep young miss from merrie olde england got herself hooked up with the parliamentfunkadelic crew and knocked out two funk-folk-gospel-rock platters represented herein...the simple fact of seemingly covering too many styles undoubtedly stopped the discs from finding a willing audience, falling between too many stools she slipped through the cracks in public perception as the great unwashed would not handle a multi various stew like this, a kaleidoscopic overflow of assured penship and musicality...as for the more tuned in cats, funk heads wouldn't go for the quieter moments, folk fans if there were any left wouldn't know this from a hole in the ground and as for the dolt brained rockers, it's got to be said, one way or another like to put on blinkers when they got to figure out what it is they might be listening to...some nice screeching guitar from the 'delic crew, courtesy of eddie hazel on some tracks and a couple of glimmer twin tunes crop up to finish up the disc...it's a nice trip to long ago when artists were allowed to collide a few styles and moods, though it's pertinent to say that it may be needful to hear more than once before listening, and the racket box turned up for maximum enjoyment...2nd joint is probably the stronger as the noise button has been flicked to the right though both are agreeably fine and make for some elated late night grooving...

sandie shaw

2010-05-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

...we'll take it as read that everyone perusing this is somewhat familiar with sandies sixties joints, the pop/lounge/R&B ditties that constitute a mostly cool but fun listen when the mood takes one in that direction, but what may not be remembered by so many is her 'rock' outing that came about in 1969, an album of covers by artists such as dylan/donovan/stones/beatles and the newly emerging led zeppelin, all produced by sandie herself which must be considered a radical move for the times...

...the original 'essex girl' had broken loose from the mold that had kept her in check during the earlier six years of pop stardom and came out rocking (relatively speaking), ready for the new decade of 'new sounds', moving away from 'puppets and duponts'...the grooves are filled with a mixture of updated NOW SOUNDS courtesy of some funky keyboards and euro-prog saxaphones with some heavy clear drums underpining the whole shebang, the whole record is one finger popping experience from beginning to end...
...all the tunes come off top notch and for the time it certainly sounded different to her usual fare and it was surely different from the heavy slabs of sound that was happening, the blues rock bashers that were taking up space in the varying airwaves around the globe...speaking of heavy blues bashers, attention should be paid to sandies take on zeps 'your time is gonna come' and the stones 'sympathy...' for some existential bliss, and her version of the FAB4s 'love me do' is way HEP, plus the rest is just so good it's unproductive to single out tracks, lets just dig it for what it is, nothing less than brilliant...
...anyone with any reservations about hits that are re-recorded by the original stars for whatever purpose, be it for a cheap knock off exploitational supermarket release or some other way of grabbing the customers cash need to be aware that some of the hits featured on this sandie 'best of' from about the mid nineties contains some reworkings of a few 60s numbers though this time under sandies control and they sound fairly similar in content if not in spirit...after a few spins it all falls into place as the tunes both old and 'modern' (80s joints) jiggle and juggle in no particular chronological order, but it must be said that some of the eighties sounds and production do come off more cornball than ever these days but sandies incredible 'girl next door' vocals get through the songs with plenty of aplomb...looking back from this vantage point we see that sandie is the proto type for a good few singers of todays age, the carefree innocent / aware yin yang style and range make way for future warblings from many a songbird, both mainstream and indie (same thing) (a certain chrissie hinds from ohio via the NME comes immdiately to mind)...lulu and dusty were top belters in their day of R&B/soul rock but when it came to everydayness, a realness in the inflection of sound, a connection of touch its sandie who comes away with the honors that mark her out as a supreme being of POPness...
...recommended to all who need a fix from distant shaws...

shampoo

2010-04-29T13:41:00.000-07:00

...rock'n'roll, both underground and mainstream have been plagued with accusations of artists not being real, that they are fake and don't mean what their art supposedly says, they are only in it for the money, their heart and soul belong to the bank manager (or crack dealer)...some 'rockers' are accused of being puppets working for a record company, their sole purpose is to separate the mugs from their cash. nothing more, nothing less...pop, again mainstream and 'alternate' is rife with complaints from naysayers and snobs that certain singers and groups are not the authentic article, just manipulated entities owing allegiance to hopeful svengalis and not the fans...we're not talking about obvious 'cash in' discs that cheap labels throw out to capitalise on a trend or the old 'can you tell the difference' from this record and the original artist version (of course we can), we're talking about artists who become the trend for one reason or another...the sex pistols were immediately accused by the older hippy burnout generation of being fake, they could not play and were just being obnoxious for the publicity that could generate...after the pistols proved they could play well enough to make a kind of tuneful attacking noise it was the turn of others to suffer from pomposity's thrown their way, the damned suddenly were now the 'fakes' ripping off the pistols and so it goes on and on...further back was the monkees who actually were put together to capitalise on the fact the fab4 were no longer touring and moving away from teeny audiences, the monkees were created to tour the country via the TV set, coming to town once a week in a cathode ray tube...the monkees were hyper real in their 'fakeness' and soon gave teenage amerikkka a reason to live, to dig the monkees and all they stand for, living rent free and grooving through the day in the monkee-mobile getting wigged with 'wild adventures', more far out than the velvets sitting in hick town NYC being mopey and miserable, the monkees were tearing up the TV with the certainties that they were right and the squares were wrong (dig the monkees head movie or 33 1/3 TV special plus any number of shows where the amerikkkan way in soundly squashed into the ground, not bad for a long haired weirdo as mickey once remarked to the watching millions)...back in 1994 shampoo soon got accused of being pop bimbos just ripping off the latest trend which was the 'riot grrrl' version energy pop punk (pop punk?real or fake?) but just one listen to the lyrics and we soon find urban poetry detailing the lives of teenagers from estates both prole and the more 'refined' middle class enclaves from the provinces...set to machined aged computer rock rhythms shampoo discuss being drunk in unfamiliar parts of town, shoplifting as a way of life, parental (non)control and other such real life anxieties as make up problems and no spending money...all done with great humour and satire shampoo ridicule the hypocrisy rife in society (at least the society they know about) and this leads to the question - is this real or is it fake, what's the difference in art if fake is of a higher standard than real and real is just a distortion that exists to justify a certain perspective held by certain parties at specific times in the societal continuum, shampoo rustle up a picture of existence that quite a few can identify with...

aunt sally

2010-04-29T05:16:00.000-07:00

...dream scape's of angular propulsion populate the grooves on this 1979 japanese wax of some considerable weight when weighed against some other new/NO wave joints that were making themselves known to the trendy hip world of post punk endeavours...to get a handle on the sound here one must think in terms of northern english angst mixed in and stirred with bursts of smiling sun shiney jiggery pokery coming from the likes of L.A.F.M.S roundabout the same time...the tunes drift along while forever striving forward pulled by imaginary but real strings woven from the need to express a new way of imparting their thoughts and postulations, then collapsing to return for fresh engagements with the unfurling curiosities that spring to the surface moments later...after a few spins the ancient folk melodies that had been hiding behind a sheen of bohemian gauziness appear and beg forgiveness for any intrusion and proceed to guide the listener into that always close but somehow fragmentary illusive parallel universe, the place where IT all goes in a does not have to come out, the end zone where all is known to the ones that need to know, the chosen anointed beatnik free from the hassles of mankind...

joy division

2010-04-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

...listening to joy division in the here and now most if not all of their contemporaries and the myriad of copyists and journeymen seem to pale into a vast expanse of nothingness, it's like they actually didn't exist, they were just distorted echoes of earlier division noise, a psychic babble that broke down peoples will to think for themselves, hipsters and trendoids went along with the sisters/nephs/cult/(your selection here) in the goth pantheon and who knows what was happening with the post punk funk shenanigans from every 'with it' nightclub denizen out after dark...joy division sound and textures spread throughout the world via blitz club dandies, one note synth ditherers, goth purveyors from the provinces and just to mention the effect this beautiful doom noise had on the black metal brigade is to acknowledge the tentacles of mancunian angst is forever mutating and diluting and it's this dilution that brings it all back home, all back to the weird years in northern england when the whole area was closing down financially and spiritually, back home to four young lads with time on their hands, time to get some grooves going to alleviate the thought that tomorrow may in all probability be the same as yesterday with not too much happening in rock now that punk had been usurped by the record companies and the bands working to codified programs of weak rama-lama thrashing...the bleak surrounding visions of the countryside and the cities crumbling from within are all fed into the division sound with nary a thought of it happening, they just seemed to do it because it was right, their music was them and all that they encountered on a daily basis, with ians lyrics coming from deep within the darkside of his persistent daylight nightmare world...outside of the studio ambiance and production niceties joy division show how much of a full on attack squad they were, vibrating with sheer unspoken curiosity, a great summing up of the clatter from such forward thinkers such as the velvets/bowie/kraftwerk/glitter/ultravox/saints and the hotrodpistolclash explosion of '76 all channeled through a folkloric attitude of natural reinvention and rejuvenation of cultural (un)desire...true that joy division inhabit a league very much of their own command they were accompanied by earlier players on the rocking fields of noise with such underworld luminaries as doctors of madness/cabaret voltaire and for a split second subway sect but these cats all fell away from frontline duty for varying reasons...these division cats are progressive in a regressive environment and curtis is the lounge crooner from the nightclub at the end of town, the place where everyone is cool because everyone knows its futile to exert negative energy in an imaginary place, this nightclub is the nightclub of the mind, a collective individualisation of teenage brain rage digging the last sounds from the end times...thirty years down the line these boots ably show joy division as emissaries from another country, a desolate land of failed capitalism now forgotten by all (apart from the proles who still live there on crack filled time warped estates) except for populist 'cultural' historians who populate the lovie media with case loads of 'worthy' time wasting clutter...so one and all step inside the heart and soul of the interzone...

johns children

2010-04-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

...what can one say about johns children this late in the day when its all been said and done a hundred times before, all the words and verbiage about their one and only long player ruined by live audience over dubs supposedly to hide the fact that the children could not work their instruments in the fashion likely to be called adequate...the fact that all their records are cut ups and juxtaposition of sound carried out by their manager as a commercialy viable pop art statement is somehow overlooked by critics and snobs in the unsavoury rush to dismiss the group as nothing more than chancers but it is the very fact they were chancers in a chancy game and managed to make it viable for a couple of years (with manager cash) is a testament of rock'n'roll as good and needed as any all out rocking...they got thrown off a tour in germany by the who management owing to the serious popart fact they out did the who with the stage outrage they caused, their own brand of artistic mayhem and destruction causing the pop art modsters to feel uncomfortable with possible heavy competition opening each nights performance with sonic disturbance and ultra-violence from beginning until the tattered ruined end...johns children also had a club on the coast (paid for by their manager who mainly stayed in london) for the band to run wild in and try to come up with other gimmicks and films to sell their freak beat tuneage so it was business as usual in the willful paint splattered lives of the MOD4...while marc bolan was with them he turned in some great lyrics that the others thought brought the right atmosphere to their crazed amphetamine noise but marc did not quite have the right amount of physical stamina to keep up with the active 24 hour jagged time lapse that was the daily norm within the children universe so his stay was limited but profitable for all concerned in one way or another...johns children should not be looked at as a footnote in the bolan story, the other way round should be considered, that marc had the luck / foresight to hook up with such HEP technicians of rocking sound...

nite people

2010-04-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

...page one records, home of the troggs found the time to get all prog and jazzy with this long player from 1969, a nice exploitational sounding disc, the sound has a definite one-take-professional vibe, these cats knew what they were doing straight off and that may be the key to this album, it's a cool take on the new sounds that are coming along, the various strains of prog, jazz prog, orchestral prog, and some plain old pop, lounge pop with urgency all done in a few moments of time during a break in the night club schedule...of course it does not sound like any sort of prog as we now know it but back at the dawn of the seventies the whole shebang was just getting started, many hats were thrown into the ring and this was just one of the myriad of hopefuls and has beens giving it one last go, one last chance to make some cash from the music (business)...some bizarre cover versions crop that the listener can amuse themselves with, surmising on the philosophy of their choice of tune to ride to glory and the hit parade with...in its own way an excellent record doing its required job in the market place, that of suckering suburban proles into getting the NOW sound and getting with it, indeed getting down with the nite people, denizens of the midnight hour cooling out on the hi-fi (dansette) with cheap vodka and tonic...giving these cats some quick thought conjures up a vision of them supporting amen corner on maybe their last tour when the teeny boppers had departed and real life threatened on the horizon so anyway come in and bliss out in the night club of the inner mind...

swinging london

2010-04-07T11:30:00.000-07:00

...four very tasty treats from the limbo land between reality and drug induced muddlement, the saga studio and lounge denizens get busy producing their take on the swinging london sounds, their version of the NOW SOUNDS, be they psychedelic pop/rock or uptempo nightclub jazzing it's all done in a vastly off kilter way, not weird or freaky but just singularly intense psych fusion with no regard to finesse...so without too much added blabber and smoke lets take a quick meander down into the saga basement and see whats brewing in exploito-ville...first up there's some old mods going by the non de plume five day week straw people, firing off some inspired amphetamine shrieks drenched in echo and effects, including some early jamaican dub moves no doubt learnt from kensal sound systems/producers its a tour de force of post acid hard rock, a heavy swill of mad rushed vibes, neuro circuitry shakes instantaneous rewards from the 'cash-in gods', wondrous marvels from the junk shop of lost treasures...recorded in a brief moment it was designed to grab the attention of young married squares looking to get some swinging london vibes in their life, but these vibes had to come cheap, and cheap they were, ready to be whisked away from the budget racks that stood outside record shops back in the days of yore...next is the magic mixture, a hard rock outfit giving out with some doom riffing madness, a blurred generosity of club-land noise, the sound of the prole on the attack, getting hefty with profundity from the absent guru these cats lay down some primitive sludge that must be heard...as fate would have it the only people that did hear it originally didn't know what to make of the sounds they were listening to and just dismissed it into the record cabinet that stood beside the dansette player in the corner of the room...studio players with a certain rocking jazz sensibility got rowdy one night and laid down some tunes from the hit smash musical of the moment, hair , blowing some hard fuzz licks and solid organ growling across the grooves...the world of 'hit musical ' exploitation this stands proudly near the top of the list as a hot contender, a biscuit of renowned tastiness, once only delighted in by some suburban square comes winging its way into the age of ironic conformity where this wax can see off all pretenders...the dave moses group supply some righteous night club testifying with a golden trumpet and plenty of pilled up playing, solid blasts of NOW sound detonating into the living rooms of provincially, flipping their collective long hair sagaciousness into a mean and funky stew of triumphant pleasure, a solid bond with the stage at the mighty sixties london hangout 'the flamingo' and the 'twisted wheel' in manchester with R&B pop coming up nice and close with some purple heart frenzy...a chipper mind cleaning from all four platters, none better than the other in any objective sense, they all do their work of the slick con man from the other side of the tracks, the cosmic spiv with a suitcase of 'genuine merchandise', subjective moments can be discussed in the privacy of the front rooms of yesterdays modern dream...

the jook

2010-04-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

...a very nice compendium of utter jookness suitable for all followers of the rock'n'roll vibe with the amphetamine jag...merging the urban reality of the early who with early seventies glam tickles, this ain't exactly glam in the strictest sense, being a more street level amalgam of thud pop and a streamlined pub rock with muscle, something eddie and the hot rods would work on a couple of years later with their garage R&B pop attack...a direct line back to the weird pilled up mod years occurs through none other than chris townson from johns children holding down the skin worrying position behind the traps...could have been contenders if old mods and rockers like bolan /bowie/glitter had not altered the course of mainstream pop at this juncture...dig it now...

swinging london

2010-04-05T08:28:00.000-07:00

...was there ever a record company like saga records, a blatant cheapo cash-in operation who inadvertently put out some stonking real people (studio cats and lounge grafters) creations...whether it be exploito psychedelic bashing like five day straw people and magic mixture or jazz pop rock like dave moses and graham walker the grooves are never less than full on, a heavy ride to the other side of tomorrow...the recording studio was a basement and the production duties went to the office wino who moved whatever knob came within eyesight...swinging london for young marrieds on a budget, a further out proposition than anyone realised, there ain't a bad cut on the whole compilation, something of an acheivement that must be noted for use by civilization yet unborn...

stooges

2010-04-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

...any layabouts getting to thinking this decades re-revaluation/discovery by the trendoids and citizens in general ain't generating the correct heat with the latest wax being a 'going through the motions' with some friendly production and the touring amounting to nothing in the trashed tapestry that is basic rocking'n'rolling...this version of the first major foray into changing the state of six-oh gutter screach is the euro '88 edition and looking back this is one swell heap of treblelated racket that when the volume knob is registering on stun (the required setting when listening to primo garbage and swill) will bring forth the agony of being stuck in a collapsing authority obsessed culture...this out of control junkyard dog will make an expressway straight to the centre of the mind and bore an endless groove to inner consciousness without any untoward tampering of the truth...freakout for another day...

...the first stooges LP is a brilliant forward looking entity which at the time was derided as amateur playing with delinquent theatrics, a going nowhere disc that would soon be forgotten about was how the record business saw the stooges, a lost cause that had no right in existing as a musical 'pop group'...this first outing is raw and untutored, two things that make it a singular waxing any way its viewed, as complete garbage or as a saviour to the very future of teenage rocking mayhem and unearthly noise...they kick things off with a gigantic rush, their first anthem to boredom, 1969, a year that on the surface seemed turbulent enough with manson family antics / fake moon landing / vietnam / nixon / black panther slayings all getting the 'news'hounds attention and therefore the great unwashed will see it on the TEEVEE and act appropriately, ie; scared beyond belief / moral outrage being but two responses that will issue forth from patriots everywhere across the land, but the stooges had a different perspective on the state of democracy, they saw utter frustration at the lack of 'life' in the surrounding towns, cities, country, everyone accepting their fate as drones for the empire and living in a state of corporate obedience...when blue cheer played at the grande ballroom with their shatter bomb amped up sound the stooges weren't slow in making some mental notes that loud for its own sake is GOOD and should be practised at every opportunity...when the doors played detroit the stooges checked out the theatrical aspects of morrisons 'act of revolution' lizard king routine and decide that it was alright as far as it went but was too slow and arty for any use in real rocking noise...the LP is in all respects the marriage of blue cheer punk attack with street poetry of a bare minimalism, the riff, the phrase is ripe for repetition without any hesitancy to think otherwise, the stooge mentality dictates that 'less is more' when the right ingredients are mixed at the correct temperature a mayhemic disturbance of the individual thought patterns will realign and see things as they really are, a shuck and jive to keep the citizens amused while the atrocities in inner cities and vietnam continue unabated...other magnificent creations of straight ahead rock blasting come forth with titles such as 'now i wanna be your dog' / 'real cool time' / 'little doll' 'no fun', every one of them a grinder, a pulverisation of sweet excess for real 'dogs and dolls', not really hippy floatation type of sounds (except the filler track at the end of side one 'we will fall' which is a nice street level trance groove where the stooges gather round the bong and get REAL GONE), this is some heavy duty punked up riff mongery with disjointed haiku inflections...this is the remaster album and bonus john cale mix on the second disk all showing the LP off to be what its always been, the first of three great LPs by one of the great gutter rocking combos, an LP of considerable fire power, more straight ahead rock racket than the second, funhouse which showed their art / jazz entanglement which had always been there live but didn't come to fruition in the studio until after the first release...listening through both disks in this reissue one is struck by the thought that this is no less than the yanquee equivalent of the rolling stones during the satanic majesties exercise, but this is satanic as a rock'n'roll album, an album built on the foundation that was birthed by the stones earlier single 'satisfaction' (of note here may be the fact that blue cheer groove on a version of 'satisfaction' on their second LP, the psychedelic acid bubbler 'outsideinside'), 'satisfaction' is year zero for the stooge cats, nothing before and nothing since, its the be all and end all for iggys stooges, at least until the funhouse sessions got underway, then they become the mirror of post industrial blight, the war machine in sharp focus as seen by the very cannon fodder the machine needs for survival...the political nature of their early work, both studio and live cannot be underestimated, the art of seeing the truth and being able to express it for the good of all for decades is worthy of high acclaim, the sonic mastery that allows the records to stand apart from the slag heap of hippie rock is something equating to a genius appraisal of prescience, how could this disk fail to be anything other than the most forward moving rocking platter in 1969 (or later as we now can confirm)...

...this is some hotcha package of goodness if ever such an article existed through the whole history of the HEP world from the ancient hash eaters to the NOWness of NOW...funhouse spread to a gigantic six discs (full up to the brim discs, no rip off here, it's the real deal)...this is detroit and by logical extension amerikkka at the end of the sixties...the trials and tribulations of that decade, from civil rights / vietnam / and squares in suburbia to capitalism in general are channelled through the stooge mind, it's no accident this crew called themselves by that self deprecating name as all members of society are stooges of one description or another, from the cat who goes downtown to buy a little something and gets overcharged for shoddy goods to the pig on the street who thinks he's a valuable asset to the town (nowadays the pig knows he's just a donut eating fool with a gun who's only purpose is to keep the citizens in line, how many pig doing nothing is incalculable), everyone is a stooge for some part of the empire, propping up unquestioningly the new world order...the armoury of pig intolerance is at the door battering heads and minds of the 'unconventional', the cacophonous sound of riot torn cities is raining down on the listener from the very beginning of disc one and it does not counter the proposition to cease until the end of the last disc, vietnam gunships prowl the skies as the stooge racket proceeds, heavy vibes are closing in as iggy yelps and gasps his way into getting loose in the funhouse in 1970, TV eyes are shaken from the dirt of LA blues, the stooges are lost in the future some where down on the street with guitars firing electric barbs of righteous mayhem into the waiting ether, drums are pounding the tribal teenage rhythyms, repeating endless thuds that carry the disturbed missives into the world, a world going crazier by the minute all reflected in the stooge noise...saxophone blasts remind the recipient that jazz is never far from the surface of early stoogeness, like the MC5 these cats knew more about making an avant racket than the usual layabout on the corner, rock'n'roll was more than saturday night entertainment, it was salvation...this set is where the stooge dilettante has to move over for this is surely for the maniacs of stooge land, the cats who live the back alley life in search of the elusive freedom that is supposedly available for all humanity, not just the ruling elite...on each coaster there's a run through of the tunes, multiple takes piling up endlessly allowing the onlooker to gather in the vibe that was enveloping the studio during the funhouse days, the cats ploughing ever onward as if somehow knowing the importance of the resulting wax that would hopefully emerge, a wax that would stand tall in the annals off rocking and rolling (it would take a few decades but timelines are unimportant when a true zeitgeist expression is formulating)...low slung motor city fires are burning with exhaltant rage as progression is made through the set, amphetamine soundscapes litter the studio as the cats go in for the kill, to nail the perfect riff into the tapestry of rocking and have it last forevermore...thrust these discs into the playback machine and go wayback for eight hours and as beatlejohn once observed and remarked, 'take it brother and may it serve you well'...dig it...

...alongside funkadelics 'maggot brain' and slys 'riot' no other long player reflected the state of uncle sams autocracy more than fun house, the stooges second go round for elektra records (who got burnt by the MC5 so their patience with street level rocking was wearing real thin, preferring the whinge and whine of singer/songers and limp pop) which would also be their last as a democratic combo...this is the sound of urban degeneration, cities (detroit in this case) getting left to rot after their usefulness was used up, no longer of importance to the machinary of the new empire, the sound of pig violence killing all those who oppose the corporate state...the sound of gunships roaming the skys of southeast asia killing for the dollar sign, napalm burning those who might be different, whos way of life didn't consume for the wall street stockholders, the sound of grunts fragging the gung-ho patriot in charge who will mindlessly follow orders to oblivion...this is the sound of bad drugs and cheap booze wrapped in large jazz reefer loitering in hazy psychedelic basements with no tomorrow and no yesterday, the future has been stolen and the past didn't exist, only the TV image plays non stop with reruns from the blurred twilight zone of the netherworld bean counters who are busy wiping the consciousness from the roobes...this is the sound of back alley stick ups, of cats dropping spare change on smack cut with rat poison bought from a narc...this is the sound of reality colliding with the amerikkkan dream, the chrome plated freedom conspiracy crushing the true spirit, the truth as seen from a burnt out building...the world on fire sounds like THIS...comes with a second bonus disk melted down to bite size proportion from the super necessary fun house sessions...

...this seems to be the rough power joint that came out some years back, though it does sound somewhat better, the pressing may have affected the quality in a favourable way which is a nice turn around...(since when does sound quality crop up with early stooge boots, must be some moral statement issued by the guardians of the rocking universe, those well known iggy aficianados of long standing)...two of the last three tracks are not included but it does end with another take of search and destroy so all is well in the waning days from stoogeland...this is not as bad as it has been suggested by certain nay sayers over the years, of course not the sort of noise that could have been released by a major record co. back in the day but compares nicely with mad and bad joints by the like of 'les rallizes denude' / 'die electric eels' proving the IG was 'on the money' if off his head and out of his tree when he got his hands on the mixing desk...there is imbalance in the stereo placement but what's the deal with this or we should say what's the deal back then with cats who heard it first off, don't they dig the crazed rocking moment? (no answer needed, retorical question only )...it's a messy stew with layers buried underneath each other all grasping for the moment to come alive, which mostly they don't but they are there and at the time iggy could hear them even if no one else could...what is / was wrong with cats not getting down with the gutter groove, after all this ain't no james taylor wax where a sleeping bag is needed for falling asleep after about fifteen seconds, this is primal swamp gas festering its ugly way into life, this is a number one candidate for putting on stun volume and killing the roaches stone dead...the second half of this mess is from a detroit radio broadcast from when the stooges were still sorting out the tapes and the tunes are trebly and squeely with a wooshing sound evident, this sounds even more like 'les rallizes' than ever...it's a tape of the studio tapes and sounds like its running faster than may be it should, but it's cool stooge racket scores high on the ig-o-meter, a needle spiked through the ear drum, an amphetamine rush to the centre of the nervous system, a heart full of napalm (indeed) just about sums it up, an explosive high energy blow up all the way...dig the radio dj cats apologising for the bad shape of this tape, urging the listeners not to think this the end product...there is a desperation in the sound from this tape, as if the stooges must get these missives out of their system, not to be rid but to impart and engage with true rocking cats before all is lost, before the sonablist end times envelope a generation...total groove making the raw power joint a cool triptych...

...raw power mixes, which one is better, who did the real deal job, bowie or pop?, does it matter this late in the day when both are readily available, the choice is there for both to be had and enjoyed, end to end or individually on their own in their own space and time...iggy did the very first one but was off in the dark zone due to chemical imbalance making the mix a little avant creative, instruments crushed into one channel, iggys croaking and roaring in the other...the record co. suits had collective apoplexy and demanded david bowie, then riding high as a bona fide pop star, get to remixing to get some sort of order (and hopefully sales) restored...bowie remixed the record in a few hours and the resultant sound was somewhat hollow and tinny but at the time a lot of cats dug the sound that kind of skimmed across the airwaves as it flew from the speakers, but on the other hand rock critics and snobs decided it was not representative of the artist (as if they had been digging the stooge noise forever!!)...whatever the case the bowie mix was the first one that any one heard and it was the one all others must be judged by, iggys first (now available as rough power) ot iggys 96 endeavour or indeed the last 180g. vinyl repress...a cats got to go with one or all, its all grist to the mill of stooge...

...the third and last stooge album, the other wax with the word stooge on them can't be counted for one reason or another (not talking about live boots, that’s another matter entirely, they are moments in time which luckily can be savoured by the discerning due to using technology)...raw power, a magnificent slip slide of gutter madness, a sleazy ride down back alleys where junkies shake waiting for the next fix, the next karmic rush into the end zone, raw power is the high octane propulsion machine that will take the listener into the heart of hollywood darkness, detroit has been left behind in the waste bin of amerikkkan obsolescence, past its sell by date it would take years for awareness of real rocking to come alive in that city...the stooges shoot up with street level rock'n'roll and take aim for the centre of the brain with the sharpest needle points to be had from the narcotic croaker on the bad side of town...the cheap drug avant jittery of the earlier joints has been forgotten, a straight ahead attack has been formulated, a sleeker version blasting the decibels, shaking the molecules and rocking the atoms...this is the natural seventies progression from the two preceding wax, not intenrional, just circumstances conspiring to bring to fruition maybe the last gasps of amphetamine rocking, the sludge of other rockers (no names no shame) has been all pervasive by 1973, this is a holding position until maybe the sex pistols came to save the righteous (debatable, but at least until the pistols unleashed others worldwide into making a racket of disruptive proportions)...iggy and his stooges had tried for years to get to this position; feature articles in the NME in england / various french journals who loved the stooge noise, all manifesting in a euroland admiration for these yankee rocking dirtbags, but unfortunately the year would see the group implode once and for all, the best was now behind them artistically speaking at least...this edition is the iggy mixed tapes from the mid nineties, still sleazy and stands up to comparisons to bowies vision of stooge rock, both are needed, necessary ear wear for the present day cat it is certainly one of the only vehicles left to free the mind from the gunk and gook that is thrown by government / business into the various market places...

...here we see iggy getting his mojo on as a modern day bluesman, heavy metal crunch backing up some skag infested juvenile delinquent poetry all given over to some heavy moaning in a bluesology idiom, iggy going back to his roots when he was hanging with blues cats in chicago, getting to know the life, getting hip to the amerikkkan ruse, using his own eyes to see what was going on, not relying on the all pervasive idiot box for TEEVEE truth...the sound quality is somewhat lacking when first heard but after a while it gets to the point, this is tape recordings, nothing more, it's field recordings of a disappearing world, iggy is changing, unknowingly getting ready for the rest of his career, the stooges in all but name no longer exist, iggy for better or worse will become MR ROCK in thirty years time, worshiped by trendies and squares alike...no wonder iggy has the blues, any cat would and thats a truth that straight from the source...jim morrison is envoked more than once the 'morrison hotel' LP is referenced, iggy always digging the lizard king but thinking morrison maybe a posuer, maybe a middle class faker getting through by some soul selling and chance luck, iggy blasts into the morrison groove with frenzied attack, riding the riff to 'get out of nowhere' before its too late...also remembered by the IG is seeing 'cream' at the grande ballroom as he lays down some tripped out swill (i'm so glad') in homage to that head destroying evening (any cats getting to hear that cream bootleg from the grande 67 gig will know it's a fine testament to trancy heavy heavy jamming, powerful stuff)...some country blues (hollis brown) is laid out bare over guitar noodle and beat box, taking it all back to the railroad shacks and shanty towns of the depession years, the lonely times when business thumbed its nose at the downtrodden mass is invoked through this weary take on an early dylan tune...with these detroit rehearsals iggy tried to move away from the 'glamour' of london / tinseltown LA and found solace in the proven worth of yesteryear, when the stomp of john lee hooker ruled the back alleys and highways of HEPSville, when the switchblade was dangerous medecine, iggy rides the rails with tenement voodoo for companionship, trailer trash working IT-ON-OUT with black cat bones, smoke and ashes...

...iggy and his stooges get all skanky and strung out in the heart of darkness, roaming the neon nightmare known as the sunset strip in the glitter year of 1973, being skag chasing junkie is now a big part of iggys life, his world revolving around getting messed up in holiday inns instead of trailer parks like many his age in the closing days of the vietnam youth culling expedition they had lived through...the stooges pummel their way through some shake and shimy detroit style, the post riot torn forocity has transposed to hollywood and has an almost blue cheer panic attack, this is metal tarnished rocking, the noise has a resurrection of the blues growing from it, not a rolling stones / allman brothers vision of the blues, this is a much more below street level grimey affair, a dirty damp basement feel, ugly and frightening, not a welcoming place at all...iggy is cursing the cats who mess with his head, the skag peddlers who steal his bread in return for a back alley fix of junk to the record company suits who have bought his contract to hopefully quiet him, to keep him from becoming the new spokesman for a seventies generation, much like what happened to the other great detroit rocking combo the MC5, what the IG had to say on the first two stooges albums was a heavy political statement of intent, the complete disatisfaction with the so called amerikkkan dream which iggy rightly surmised did not exist...iggy is angry and it shows, the band create a barely controlled mayhemic mess for the singer to yelp and moan over, iggy somehow getting near to a jim morrison vibe, but not as middle class poetic stance, this is real out there anger, not theatrical, the doors could not make this racket, their sensibilities would never allow this depravity to issue forth from the instruments...this has been released before as an eight track album, this one has another version of 'heavy liquid' at the end, and of course the sound is the usual standard for stooges slabs...

...who'd have thought, back in the day that iggy would come to exemplify the mass media image of rock'n'roll, the cat the squares hated with vengeance, surely the stooges were too avant/out of control for mass consumption, their very image producing shudders from all lilly livered hippys/FM radio/hit parade magazines, all the natural enemies of heavy swill rocking...now there's got to be some cats lurking out there, living in the twilight shadows, crawling through the back alleys (real or imagined, it don't matter) the terminal rocking cats getting all hot and bothered and draggedout that the mighty roar of the IG and stooges getting turned into radio friendly hard rock with all the revisionist remastering jiggery-pokery that's been happening in the last years need only set the ears no further than this screach powered boot...drums thumping in and out, bass booming, guitar squealing, feedback shattered, vocals disappearing and general hectic audience participation make these recordings a must for early admirers of the detroit racket...needs to be played the usual way with this swill; through cans with the volume on stun... trx1/6-keil auditorium, st louis may 71 trx7/8-crosley field, cincinnati 70 trx9/10-wamplers lake 68...

...more slop and sludge from one of detroits heppest outfits, a raving mix up of time warp scuzz that all layabouts who dig the illicit listening position will want to hear a few times at least...the sound is about what's to be expected from the label throwing this junk on the pile, that's right revenge records have once again excelled in finding some beat up cassette and putting it on the market (a point of interest, anyone remembering those MC5 joints emanating from france during the early '90s will know what to expect, did not one of those only have one channel operating making those mighty detroit hamboners, the 5, sound like some limp wrist sunday morning congregational singalong, rock'n'roll surely is a tough occupation for the dedicated lifers)...this is a box set consisting of six mini discs (extended play style), these jump all over the prime stooge years, including iggy with that misunderstood son of the gutter, james williamson, so cats looking for a chronological ride will have to hit the program button before settling in with the scrape and skrunk on offer...flipping all over like a scatter gun on random relief, the stooge racket sprays its messy goo all over the various audiences and its a fine disorder that one should by now know and love...these 'johnny come latelys' who've somehow made iggy the king of the slag heap for the last few years will not dig this at all, they will need the radio friendly mix, this is only going to annoy then badly, which is what the stooge noise was all about, reshaping the aural / visual landscape of rocking and rolling...this sanctifying of iggy in itself must be some sociological perplexity if looked at logically, like why do thirty five year old squares want some pensioner living out their life, are they so conditioned to be sedate that iggy is wild, wild, wild in their eyes, is there no one their own age kicking up the 'dreadful parent hating noise', in fact it was their parents who first loved/hated/ ignored the stooge cats (this last being the only rational condition for the unwashed pod people of suburbia) ...guitars blurt and stutter in and out of the mix, the bass bubbles and rumbles in eruptions of strangled choogle with iggy moaning and droning, then yelping and shouting in out of control discharges from the 'jimbo morrison' zone...at the back of the stage the drums pummel and clatter with the cymbals ringing out from the quaalude haze that is steadily enveloping every facet of the stooge world...there's a couple of long tracks roundabout 10/12 minutes each where they go off into some manic stooge avant trance blurt with the cats disorientating behind iggy as he sermonizes (at one point he tells the attentive audience that a mans soul cannot be bought, not even in hollywood)...added bonus (time filler?) comes in the shape of a nice interview with ron ashton which is real cool as he reminisces about 60s detroit rocking...for anyone who ain't got much in the library by the early iggy its a good place to find out whether this mess is right on or right awful but all in all though the tracks have been around in various shapes and form over the years it all plays along ok for the seasoned stooges traveller...

slik

2010-03-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

...conceived in the height of 'rollermania' slik came on like the bay city ones elder, more intelligent siblings with their rehashed roller numbers, this was grandiose rollerism, a more eloquent reading of teen dramas than the bcr could ever manage in a million years...glam beats underpin the cathedral expansive nothingness that is their trademark early on (at least on the hit singles) whereas later they grab some early mainstream disco thud to try to propel their tuneage...some funky licks crop up to give the pop rock a certain grittiness, an urban ricochet rebounding across the stereo landscape...
...not all the tracks make it, some are just too boring to even make a non-impression, they are just not there, but there is surprisingly more substance (on a purely manufactured way) on this 22 track enterprise than would have been thought possible, and it is not in any way shape or form an ironic listen, this is straight up grand scale pop on a budget cloaked in a glam sheen shining in a sea of mediocrity...benefits from being played at a high volume for maximum impact...

alex chilton

2010-03-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

...when alex got around to recording this piece of wobbly wax the lost weekends had been mounting up like so many crates of discarded imported beer bottles...he was in sauce town and it looked like the only way up was down...when this arrived in the racks most johnny come-lately-cats were of the opinion that it was the work of a 'lost it all nobody' but of course that was because there was no 'september gurls' style tunes or anything approaching that ultimate pop level but they were thinking along those muddle headed lines as an 'after the fact' trendy when before hand hardly anyone got into big star even though they clogged the cutout bin for a couple of years back in 73/4/5...no, this is r'n'b/rockabilly/lost and lonesome times on a very wet stonedout and wined up memphis 4 a.m sunday morning when the strange ones roam...

richard brautigan

2010-03-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

...digging RB is a high flying buzz, chillin and grooving with cool abandon,a total trip...richard was a left field beatnik caught up in the hippy scene when he came to prominence in the late 60's world-wide underground market place when publishing houses were trying to GET HIP with the youth that was sprouting literary pretentions...even the FAB4 knew richard was a cool daddio and tried to get him out to the public via their zapple imprint for spoken word, there was going be some kind of series of beat visionaries all reading their work and skitting, but as with other HOTcha ideas emmanating from FAB HQ it came to nought in the 'real world'...brautigan had been writing his grooved out stories of weirdsville for many moons, the bubbly reclining stance of his writing takes a cat to an arcane/unseen world vista, there's an olde rustic charm mixing with a commune hippy scene, nothing defined, just an imagining, a calm encroachment into a hearsay world, all that is known is transmitted via gentle rythym, moving along with sweet eloquence, a fluidity in the mythical stream that once was held in the eye of the denizens of camelot...listening to richard is slipping through the keyhole of the ancient gates of the sacred city of righteous dreams...plus any cat who leaves his telephone number on the front cover has to be some kind of honest head who has belief in humanity...(the wax has a couple of crunches on it that dont take away the enjoyment once it's gotten used to)...

creation

2010-03-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

...digging the creation is still a buzz as they kick some freaked blocked vibes into the air, splashing a technicolour overload encompassing all comers, this is a michelangelo antonioni mash up for the aural senses, whizzed at maximum strength...pop art hooligans living the life in dark recesses of long weekends with their nervous system wired for excessive sound knocking down the walls of the square world with their metallic freak beat pounding...
...both these discs come together to form the complete collection, all their 60s joints brought into one very nice package of flipped out mod beat, stereo /mono mixes and some live material giving the listener a fine two hours of prime era screech and blast that will last all night and longer...
...a top effort tailor made for first class tickets looking for the amphetamine thrill of the modern world (existentially speaking)...

guitares de l'enfer

2010-03-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

...les guitares de l'enfer, 'the guitars from hell' is the translation for these lounge rockers from belgium, nightclub bandsmiths hooked on the rock'n'roll beat, the beat of the back alleys, the switchblade weilding pink suited stranger dosed on the amphetamines looking for the rhythm to set the world free with beatnik glory, ( mixing up a couple of styles what with the teenage rocking and the coffee swilling poetry and reefer denizens of the late night haunt ) ...
...there was a myriad of these kind of bands, essentially working the night club and dance hall circuit playing to drinkers out for a dance or something perhaps less wholesome but fun, more in keeping with the darkness of the creeping hours, these bands were fairly skilled operators who'd been in the business ten or fifteen years and were getting to old to learn the new rock, but rock they had to in order to survive the rigours of changing times and taste, the teenage market was happening and seemed to be taking over everyones minds, the sixties was already shaping up as a decade of youth, spurred by the twin attack of two absent trend setters, elvis in the army helping uncle sam defeat communism and james dean gone to a far away place in the cemetary due to some ungainly wheelmanship, plus skifflers cutting a rug with homemade rock'n'roll like the beatles and the professionalism of the shadows all collided in the new teenage/young modern mindset as everyone did the twist, the latest and greatest dance to hit the planet in 1960, old timers even had to get down and try to screw themselves into the floor whilst in the shaking ecstasy of the moment, everyone was unwinding as they wound their bodies in semi circles of delight...
...it is undoubtedly the twist that set the tone for the next few years with society getting in the groove the same way as the patrons of the youth clubs of europe, (an interesting aside comes to mind as nowadays wet liberal whingers moan on about the fact youth have nowhere to go but hang around on street corners selling crack and laughing at cops, but imagine the moral panic newspapers could scare up if such establishments did exist in proliferation like the 'good old days' with excited stories of youth banding together in buildings out of sight from the 'ordinary citizens', planning who knows what atrocities to inflict on their elders when they emerge into the darkness of the night ), a new classless society was being born for a nano second with the whole planet hitting the twist vibe with relaxed intensity...
...the cheap recording studio and lack of time allowed the band lends the tunes a basement grunge that works well in this day and age though at the time this was obviously an annoyance to them but it was all they had and most bands were in the same position, getting no respect from suits at the record company and being palmed off with the 'fuzzy end of the lollipop', copping a 'take it or leave (it)' stance from the management...
...elvis rocking with twangy guitars strumming over various twisting beats explode off the seven inch vinyls for the first part of the cd (E.P mode was very popular in and across europe at the time, it was the perfect medium, four tunes for the remittance of some francs/marks/etc.), though even with the band exerting some lounge ballads to help keep the older female population fueled with dreams, they helpfully do the square routine under other names it's a rocking certainty that it's the twisting that makes this a solid winner, there's more twisting on these discs than can be imagined, they twist on the telephone, they twist in london town, they twist so much their wife is twist (dig the first track for this marvel)...
...twisting is where it's at as they twist with gina (lollobrigida, natch) and the devil also who no doubt twists a mean mofo twist, yes it's twisting time for two solid years (61/62), nothing else comes close for these cats, it's twist or die, there is no other way to express the times and feeling (and score some bread)...
...with the passing of time the twist no longer holds sway, being helplessly 'out of time' and favour the next two years sees the band reaching for new heights as surfing space rock instros are the currency, with cosmos twanging shadows style coming within the orbit of the local 'joe meek' at the controls, all mixed up with cheesy organ and 50s elvis vocal stylings running rampant...
...a pretty solid hours worth of back alley neon via the penthouse vibrations for all to dig in the privacy of that small hours moment when bad motor scooters were getting it on with society dames who in turn were turning slowly into the dolly bird attachment of young go-getters from the provinces europewide...

janis joplin

2010-01-28T15:15:00.001-08:00

...janis and her band are late going on tonight and the MC has to abate the crowd with some explaination about having had their gear stolen earlier in the day and a new bunch of equipment had to be found and that is why the show is late starting...anyone totally believing this must have the gear with them because a load of hippies stealing equipment lock stock and barrel is somewhat hard to swallow, their general ineptitude makes for the deal to go wrong before it's started...more likely janis was too strung out to get with the time to get on stage and get some rocking going...when they do get on stage they get down with some funk soul rock screech and janis gives off some down home urban shouting and the audience settle in for a late evening with the 'wicked woman', the rock goddess who will set them free from the constraints of a straight jacket society...unfortunately for janis she could not set herself free from society or the life that was mapped out for her by unscrupulous bread heads at the record company or management (the wonderfully exploitative al grossman) so she sank into the booze and smack which bought on entirely new problems so the vicious circle of society / alcohol / heroin kept on turning, least till early october 1970 when some kind of sweet relief was offered and taken...the gig represented by an audience recording on this early boot is from august 12 and was to be her last public engagement and she's kind of getting really wired, giving off some extreme vibrations like she's reaching for something / someone unobtainable yet she continually strives but never comes to the end of the quest...the set list is familiar and the raps between songs have all been heard before, interestingly the audience seem not to get any prurient enjoyment from the joplin expose raps so that must be down to the 'sophisticated boston' hick town mentality more than anything else closer to home...the band are getting some of janis frenetic energy which they translate into some heavy soul blasting, letting rip trying to carry janis further, to the place she so wants to be, to the now unachievable nirvana...

2010-01-27T14:32:00.000-08:00

...RAPIDSHARE WITH THEIR NEW POLICY OF DELETEING LINKS THAT HAVE NOT BEEN ACCESSED WITHIN 60 DAYS MEANS THERE IS GOING TO BE DEAD LINKS ON THESE TWO SITES (http://modadelic.blogspot.com/ http://spaced3saviour.blogspot.com/ ) ...ANYONE WISHING TO AVAIL THEMSELVES OF SOME GOODIES WILL BE ADVISED TO SIFT THROUGH THE ARCHIVES FOR ANY AND ALL MISSED WAX...THANKING ALL AND EVERYONE IN ADVANCE...

2010-01-27T14:30:00.000-08:00

...these cats were always a little bit too real to be front runners in the san francisco ballroom scene, a scene that seemed to demand long acid fused choogle with brain melting guitar to drip the lysergic drop into the mindsoup...the grape like to pack some soul into the rock'n'roll attack, the garage RnB and working class country twang also infused themselves into the fabric they wove, a fabric of busy patterns with three guitars threading their way around the tunes and the fact they all liked to vocalise gave way to some fine non chorale bleating, all having their say and sometimes with some good natured ferocity making the tunes explode with an abundance of generosity...this compilation grabs ahold of some demos, audition tapes, alternate takes and a smidgen of live recordings all from the fabulous grape years of 67/8, not one bummer on the entire disk, almost certainly due to the focused outlook they had for their music (if only they had been focused when it came to dealing with squares, their manager a complete crook and the record company publicity department boned headed enough to release their first LP as singles as well as the usual twelve inch 33RPM, a scheme that is common place today, but in the flower power haze it smacked of life sucking capitalism, a major stumbling block that would plague the band forever and a day), at least they were focused for a while, the second album 'wow' took focused to a whole new level, a level they would never reach again what with sound poems and screeching rocking blare all colliding with orchestration and horn arrangements that sound like 'the electric flag' on overdrive and adventurous without vanity, they strove to meld popular musics into a new whole, a 'cosmic american music' all given a dose of FAB4 lysergic varnish via the byrds (a heavier byrds it must be said)...this is a most welcome addition to the moby cannon and a reminder of times when musics organically spread and mutated, not endlessly sampled into 'new' patterns with dizzying regularity...a somewhat ridiculous front cover aside, a cover that makes them look anonymous, it's more appropriate for pink floyd or some lazy 'prog rock' ensemble, aside from that major foray into stupidity this can't be faulted, grape with great sound, wonderful wine will ensue for imbibing with optimistic regularity...

...a double disk of live gubbins from the mighty grape years '66/'69 with most concentrating on '67/'68 so it's a goodly snoot-full of HEP moby with varying sound quality but cool enough to get real cozy with when the mood takes...what we do notice is their jams were not of a total lysergic nature, they had a jazz infusion that pulled them away from intrinsically heavy jammers like QMS/dead and more into a night club feel, a psychedelic night club but with a more liberal attitude to life and art, not hierachy driven like the early frisco scene, once they realised they had a scene it was the beginning of the end, (that must have been about the time the good acid ran out, replaced by government sponsored 'drug'), down the slippery slope to consumer-ville, and a return to 'values' more deviously authoritarian than those from which most hippies fled back in the suburban 'mom&pop/school salute/cop days'...at times they come on like a semi lysergic 'butterfield blues band', surely testament enough to the greatness of the vine from whence cometh the grape, a lighter touch than the 'bbb' but arriving via the grape fascination with alchemy, the desire to meld the varying strains of american musics into a new though by its very nature always revolving and evolving, sound...especiallydigable on a few different levels is tracks 4/5 on disk two, the title track in two parts, a suite of avant-squealing-punked-out-acid-hard-rock in 1966 at the avalon ballroom, a total floatation in the mind soup, and that's a fact that won't be denied any way it's looked at...other times in the '69 contribution the country rocking is becoming evident, not an amalgamation of rock and country now, but a genre and sound on its own though they could still blast away in the R&B/soul rocking vein when they got amped up physically/mentally and volume-wise for some greasy garage beer stained funkiness...the disk ends somewhat mysteriously with the single from early tributary of the grape, 'peter and the wolves', a nice R&B groove but out of place here, but having said that, overall this is most assuredly a hot rocking groove and another welcome addition for the mystic citizen of GRAPEville...

velvet turner group

2010-01-26T14:13:00.000-08:00

...well, this is a goodly approximation of the experience groove emanating from 1972...late power trio madness, absolutely right on, nice and tasty, no head will think about copyism because its too obvious to worry about... nice guitaring racket all over and a nice soulful last track winding up a cool well recorded waxing...originally released in two mixes, one supposedly in the soul idiom the other in the more hopefull territory of the rock groove, muddleheaded thinking maybe but a precursor of what would become second nature by the nineties when remixing to catch the right pockets and empty out some cash became the norm for all record companies, big and small... ...good stuff, well worth digging in and experiencing...

love

2010-01-24T17:50:00.000-08:00

...released towards the end of '69 as the long strange decade collapsed through sheer weight of the madness that had been leaking hither and thither, this wax sees arthurly looking back slightly while the main sight is on the coming years...a more hard rocking approach pervades as a new band is working its way into a cohesive unit, with some light touches to vary the mood...it caused a lot of cats to give up with digging this combo as it was seen as selling out but the only reality of the situation was just love/arthur changing with the times, afterall what was the last biscuit called...also with this new group of cats gathered, arthur thought it might actually be time to venture forth from the city of angels and take the sound outernational, this disk was the passport arthur needed to travel on, to go to europe to receive his just deserts...the last 3 tracks are early versions laid down in summer '68...a tip top slice from a great artist...

...the way to approach this wax and indeed foursail is to divorce earlier arthur disks from them completely, they cannot be allowed to cloud any judgement otherwise proper appraisal is tempered somewhat by times and circumstances that no longer existed in 1970, such had the times moved, way different ideas and social disciplines had come into play, both in the recording studio and on the streets...arthurly being no stranger to styles and experimentation went full on with this double wax and threw a whole slew of grooves into the pot and cooked and simmered until a funky banquet was fit for consumption...hard rock/country rock/goodtime hokey were only the tip of the rainbowed iceberg...jimi style acidrock blast/CSN harmonies vie for attention with social commentary lyrics that now are not so hazed up in poetics, the meaning' is clear for all who listen and think their own thoughts...cats with aversion to late '60s drum solos may wish for stimulants during track 8 which lasts for over 5 years but to keep things in order and the universal yinyang flowing in peaceful serenity track 10 comes on with fx-pedal-string-bending-monster-fuzz-out...some folky sounds like '64/5 dylan crop up at the end which is kind of strange given this late date(maybe easy rider influence creeping in) and theres some nice cali-sunshine pop (track13) happening (dino desi &billy?) but ends in free hippy invocations as if the drugs had just kicked in... to be fair to arthurs art and continuity some vibes/rhythm/lyric patterns from forever changes do crop up but theres a looseness that wasn't present on that LP...this is so much better than the self appointed rock critics on rolling stone/fusion would have the college student/hippy beleive, they had it down as arthur had to prove himself all over again, much more than lesser talents would have to...over in euroland the new love were received as some kind of west coast conquering acid heads who virtually could do no wrong, but theres always been a refuge for free thinking artisans on that part of the globe where amerikkkanism was slowly losing power and influence...this remaster sounds real good and shows the combo off to good effect...

...early 70s and this version of love are still doing time at blue thumb recs. and this wax was slightly treading water in the fact thats its a kind of short on the running time(30mins) and some live tracks mix in plus theres some funky speedfreak edits in a couple of places...the most famous thing about false start is the fact jimi was in the studio and knocked off a couple of licks for fun but the whole LP is a way cool groove, its more groove based than normal '70s hard rock which after the acid jamming gimmicks had worn off a lot of combos got into a thuddy/sluggish kind of rock which just went nowhere, it was lost before it started, and of course it became popular with the great unwashed for most of that decade...theres some great hope from arthur on this wax with it all ending 'riding that vibration', right-on realistic lyrics like a more out there curtis mayfield...unfortunately this would be the start of the end of a realistic future for arthur as the music business and society conspired to keep him from speaking the truth to the wage slaves who keep the machine ever grinding on...

...now this is nice late night album if there ever was one, bluesy acoustic strum and warble from arthur and some hard rocking acid ballads with full love coming on a treat at the midnight hour, the witching hour has always been a time when arthurs groove seems right, even that old warhorse 'forever changes' always hung nice and loose when heard in the small hours...these tracks supposedly were recorded during a short tenure at columbia records and that episode was certainly kept from love maniacs, who knew arthur and co. were working at the home of bob zimmerman and ray conniff for a few months?, not too many is a safe wager (columbia obviously got cold feet when arthur most likely had to tell them what time it was when they undoubtedly tried to cross him on some part of the deal, arthur not being a cat that had much time for squares trying to mess with him)...anyone hip to arthur around the turn of the seventies will know what to expect, the hard/mellow vibe he was laying down, hitting the funk button whilst giving out with some screeching acid rock blare, then turning around with some folky rock strum and socio-political wordage (scaring the straights was easy for arthur back in the day, and later unfortunately too easy) all rolling along at a steady pace kept in check with some potent marijuana strain...the tracks laid down by this love show that any long playing record album would certainly be up to the standards of the last elektra/blue thumb disks (coolest of wax) and that would have been a good thing indeed as arthur was surely onto a nice 'original' post hendrix hard acid sound that would have been more than welcome during the mid seventies when rock in general was undergoing a bad case of the blahs!...the acoustic numbers show arthur could more than still hold his own in the lyrics department, outstriping pretty much everyone when he put his mind to writing properly and this is one reason he didn't get approached by asylum records as he would have rode jackson brown and tom waits out of town from the get go...for a basically no more than exploitation we have some really decent sounding material and it would be extra groovy if some of the boots from that period could be cleaned up a notch or two (gethsemane sessions would be a good place to start) so we could have some good rocking tonight...

madhouse

2010-01-23T14:21:00.000-08:00

...politically charged right on funked out horn rock was the order of the day from these super-bad brothers on their one and only platter released in '72 on the small but incredible 'today' label out from NYC...cool guitar and organ swells move in and around these heavy tales of modern urban life that proved too much for the intended audience and they had to call it a day under this name...this is a disk that shouts out the righteous anger from the inner cities, the cities left to rot in decay while the citizens rot with despair and skag in a media blitzed ghetto of unwelcoming projects and condemned cold water tenements, with propaganda flowing in from the idiot box whole sole purpose is to encourage shopping for obselence and useless medicine...anger from the vietnam vet who came 'back to the world' to find the war still waging, only now it was in the streets of his 'home' town, a war waged by an unseen force controlling the very fabric of seventies society, a drugged landscape of life sapping 'downer' pharmacuticles, drugs best described by bill burroughs as 'FOR SQUARES', a condemnation from on high with no course for disagreement...a disk for cats out of hock and on the block, for hustlers who know the deal and for dreamers of a better today, a disk for all right thinking cats and all who need to learn how to get from under uncles sams mind lockdown and THINK ABOUT IT, a disk to set oneself free and hit a groove from the corridors of the ever lasting hope...

lou reed

2010-01-23T09:42:00.000-08:00

...with this LP lou entered the rarefied air of the early seventies bootleg frenzy where everyone who was anyone in the rock'n'roll game had a bootleg disk on the market, the underground head shop could supply the waxiness of illicit temptation or they didn't stay in the retail business too long, a mark of a head shops standing in the community to some degree once rested on whether it could get the latest bootleg sensation for the heads that needed them...lou was hot between 72/4 with his glitter and drugs flamboyancy, this was the period when he not only sung velvet tunes like heroin/waiting for the man/sister ray, he actually became a velvet underground song, parading his carefree gutter poet persona for all who cared to indulge in lou watching and summer 74 was when lou hit the HEAVY WEIRDNESS button for the last time, all the craziness that lou had observed and to some degree taken part in for the last decade came flooding out in an unstoppable torrent of bad tempered indifference to his audience and to himself, he seems to be waiting for the whole shenanigans to be over, the 'pop star' idea that lou had at the turn of the decade with him coming to london and being treated with a certain envious respect by musos and junkie wasters alike, then getting in the hit parade with something akin to cinema verity novelty crooning it all looked promising for the future, but the drugs and loitering fun around the globe took their toll as lou's patience with reporters shrunk to an unreasonably small quota thereby negating any true popstar standing with the main audience for pop-record-hit parade fodder, young teenage girls, if the chix aint digging it then its over for popism dreams...sometimes this anti audience stance and bad attitude can produce interesting excursions into the dark basements of LOUVILLE, where the creeps and ghouls populate the inner mind and the results are interesting moments leading to that heavy monster drone 'metal machine music', moments where lou just stretches out songs to a coma inducing agony and then sometimes he delivers a totally right on record/show in now classic early seventies drugged/whiskey swilling rock'n'roll (with reggae beat to show lou was still HEP when the day demanded such practice)...with this wax we see lou in australia, sydney on the 24th august 1974 getting to grips with a fine fine ripsnort of rocking swill, all starting with a moody funk riff (bowie style) with 'waiting...', taking the song back uptown one more time, the whole band are energetically laid back in a nice stoned friendly mood with lou feeling his way with a 'cool' rendition, basically being himself when not on an outrageous pharmaceutical binge, here he's taking the bus uptown, not a cab or train...funky head nodding rock next with 'sally...' going one more time for some good time street level poet pop rocking with super vamping keyboard action...third tune gives us a look at how 'vicious' lou is feeling, and he's cutting a fine rendition of rocking aptitude with again the band supporting and helping in a very empathic way, the stance is perfect for lous mindset this evening...'lady day' starts in heavy fashion with the metaphorical screws being tightened, lou is getting a resigned moody vibe going with semi trance invocations and some super nice acid rock string bending happening at the end...side two kicks off with a very interesting space-rock (with synth noodling) outing on 'heroin', a true 70's masterpiece of stoned basement prog rock marathon indulgence, just right for the bonghit rush (or skag, no intolerance of drugs must ever be permitted in the combined mind bohemia of NOWSville)...'...wildside' starts with a mutant bossa nova groove, only it's accompanied by the audience clapping in some really retarded manner, completely out of time with everyone and everything, then lou gets command of the tune and candy and holly live once more in amphetamine glory...'white light...' has really got to be heard by all velvet enthusiasts as so for cats in general, a mind-blast of blitzed chemical splat riding the rails to hell, a cranium cutting rush of 'switchblade intensity', white light, white heat and white powder take full control for this 'jet-packed to the max' heavy metal screech...a great record of a great gig, lou was teetering on the brink of artistic madness while thrusting out some tried and tested street corner rock'n'roll for all to enjoy...

velvet underground

2010-01-22T20:44:00.000-08:00

...the future started in april '66 when the wigsta himself, old warhola took this acetate down to columbia records so they could hear what was needed in the rock'n'roll game, something new and exciting...the mixes are different and some are different takes from the album that did find its way out 9 months later...the columbia suits politely declined knowing they had the ray conniff orchestra to see them through any lean times that might crop up... ...audiophiles and noiseaphobes might need a stiff hit to see them through the hailstorm that accompanies this historical document...

...real nice euroboot containing the symphony of sound jam lasting 20 minutes and the 2 falling spikes tracks which is some chat with john cale and some marvellous velvet trance recorded at different times in late six oh years...symphony was recorded early 1966 and in amongst the proto sisteray riffing and overloaded feedback squealing is a bit of beefheart plastic factory riff, and also they had a good grip on the sound of psychedelic ballroom jamming when this whole idea was in its infancy (more evidence they were ahead of the game by melding NYC avant-droning to embryonic freak style new rock)...the fallin spikes tracks is a great way to get hep to the world the combo existed in with the tranny/superstars cutting in occasionally screaching about womens lib and other proto age of aquarius concerns (dig pope ondines four second soundbite)...all-in-all a nice head style exploito disk that allows cats into the insular rough and ready layabout artist world of mid/downtown manhattan when all things were possible and improbable...cat's who dig the echoed chaos scope and scrape of velvets-life and not so much the ballads and scary softness will get a real buzz off this and thats where its at clyde...

...from the getgo the screach of feedback on the 'melody laughter' track that kicks off this wonderous boot all velvetheads and layabouts of a hep and curious nature will know that they're in for a galaxy bending mindmelt of a trip...lasting for over halfhour this builds up to some sort of epic proportions that not too many ever reach with the insistant thud from moe and some lobe pounding squeal from john and lou plus sterling giving the occasional flurry of notes when the mood takes ahold...this is avant/freejazz blatter as interpreted by and for the NOW rock generation though no-one really knew for sure at the time...nico chips in here and there with some cooled out chantuese and towards the end lou gives out with some chant style wordage...that's the first track and then they go into a 'greatest hits/first LP as will be' routine(femme/venus/death song/parties) that all add to the swirl of noise that the roobs in columbus must have wondered what this big city popmusic was turning into...this ain't the sort of racket that sits too well in booney type places and in '66 this is a blowing apart the known world (car culture/drive-ins/petty vandalism) when it comes to having entertainment...the second disk continues the journey into the black hole of tomorrow where the unknown manifests destiny in the unseen art of chaos rock'n'roll...another halfhour jam crops up further in and again the velvet haze envelopes the listener...'60s heads will dig the murky tape hiss that lets the beatnik know this is a peek through the muddy window to see the future leaking through walls of innocent perception...definitely one of the places the mythical sixties started for cats stranded in the entrenched '50s land of cold war patriotism and wasteful unthinking/unblinking consumerism and general subservience to 'authority'...

...noise terrorism and gentle ballads is a most apt way of describing this singular combo...so far ahead of the pack when they were around, they didn't know they might have any competition from others and as it went, they didn't...no one sounded like this in the pop/rock spectrum in 1966...guitar screach, feedback, viola scraping, bass thumping, relentless drum and the occasional icy chanteuse moves from nico balancing out lou's sneer...fire up the amp and this mono platter really does fill the room out with the hep racket, better than the stereo version as it comes straight out and wham, bam and it still sounds like its recorded tomorrow...often imitated but never bettered and this late in the game never will be...

...recorded by some hep thinking cat on 03/15/69 at the boston tea party in front of lous amp and as a result all the squeal and scrunch is upfront giving slightly the illusion they're playing instro versions with the vocals so far down...a very nice amount of choogle and pounding the whole way through and all layabouts should dig the way heroin slips into sister ray for over halfhour ending the set...dig the keyboard/guitar mangle at about two thirds through, real boss sounding...tape hiss and bad editing lets the velvet head into the murky world of illicit listening...last three tracks on disc two come from the same venue(tracks2&4 12/12/68, track3 07/11/69) and give up some more velvetness which is as necessary and usefull as a cleandout and fresh bong on long afternoons of cerebral hooligan indulgence...

...very nice box set of live velvetness recorded november/december '69 in san francisco at the avalon ballroom/matrix (plus a goodly workout on 'sister ray' from st.louis ) by robert quine, himself later to be a voidoid for richard hell, on his newly aquired portable tape machine...its the usual meandering choogle of low slung back alley damage the velvets were putting down at the end their tenure in the rock business, lou is polite and friendly with the frisco floweroids, telling them what the songs are about and such like, giving out with the NYC amphetamine sleaze (disk 2 has a near 40 minute jam on sister ray) and wasted decadence of edie sedgewick...listening to late era velvets gives an air of motionless spirituality, outside time with all constaints and period shackles removed leaving an eternal oneness with NOW, the on going feeling thats it's happening for the first time even though physically they were winding down from high intensity avant jamming from earlier times...the sound quality is on the scuzzy side which as long time velvet heads know, that's really the only way to dig them, they are hidden behind the gauze that society puts up to keep the truth from being known, the velvets all powerful presence seeps through the muffle barrier imposed by technology to expose the reality of urban living...

...june 26th 1970 and the velevts are fading away with the euro/avant wing of cale and nico long gone, moe getting ready for a baby, it's just lou and sterling and as any true velvet-head knows it takes the original 5 to really getting the whole shebang firing on all cylinders...lou's poetic look at 'real' street life, sterlings guitar, cales drone sensibilities, moes otherworldly trance thud and nico wandering around being some enigmatic ice creature staring into the void...replacing the irreplaceable with replacements doug and billy yule, through no fault of theirs, it's just the way they groove, turn the underground into a rock band and as lou's not terribly interested in group situations anymore doesn't bother to ignite and burn like before...these rehearsals taking place on this disk were again taped by bridget polk, a long time admirer and cohort with a penchant for getting the scene down on tape much like andy did in the beginning...not surprisingly the sound quality is poor though listenable (all velvet heads know the deal), in a documentary sense, this is not an immediately easy experience, although once through the initial hearing it gets less of a chore to pierce the murk and grab an hour of late velvets getting a jam or two in, getting ready to play NYC, a place they never fit into as in reality the city was and is a conservative hick town, not open to self examination, definitely not open to the velvets form of theraputic drug rock, where time is suspended through the tribal dance within and without...we get to hear bits and pieces of conversation and bridget seems to move the recorder a couple of times as the sound improves with it getting slightly clearer...important in velvet timeline as this is a okay 'fly on th'wall' listen to the combo as they wind slowly down to become a forgotten force only to re-emerge in the punk years as the original saviours of rock'n'roll who amalgamated the amphetamine glam rush of elvis with avant theatrics of old europe to challenge the NOW generation who were grooving to ersatz psych and lounge rock...

john peel /dandelion /top gear

2010-01-21T17:05:00.000-08:00

...just about the time dandelion records bit the dust through not making the necessary scratch the original version of this wax was put out to an obviously disinterested public who could care less that heavy blues slammers stackwaddy were nestling alongside whimsy like clifford.t.ward, or that madman kevin coyne was hanging with his combo siren making a healthy and invigorating noise...the fact that singular songstress bridget st.john was grooving on the same label as theatrical hippys principle edwards didn't make a jot of difference to the great unwashed...hard proggers tractor and folkies mike hart and beau were of no interest either...sax blower lol coxhill and strummers medicine head were just two others that the record purchaser of the day ignored to the point of oblivion...for cats that do care there's 17 wonderful tracks all ready to give pleasure to the enlightened...

...this wax must be considered as some kind of cultural barometre of the changing times in albion land, roundabout '71, as the BBC decided it was time to capitalize on their saturday/sunday afternoon/early evening underground deejay as there must be some loot to be accessed in getting cozy with arty cellar dwellers and john was the cat to supply the means to this end...the artists getting the exposure were underground enough in the sense they didn't get in the POP chart but they came from the more cerebral end of the underground, there ain't no freak scene maniacs like the deviants/Laughin Sams Dice/sam gopal, no-sir-ee here's bridget st.john (dandelion recording artiste of this parish)/art(old) school beatnik ron geesin/plus underground rock from the provinces, kind of like the real people on holyground (a once collectible label), that sort of 'lefty avant for the people' sound, sweet marriage and welfare state, both with different exciting noise to offer the discerning listener which is well dig-worthy...bridget does her wonderful upfront folk groove stuff and ron weighs in with the usual poetic electric doodles that hit the spot...overall a top (gear) sound with introduction from john that's been treated by the radiophonic workshop just to keep it all on the 'clever trevor' grammar school vibe...any cats with even a passing interest in the underground will wanna flip to this...

...a wonderfully lovely presentation of the singles once released on the dandelion records label back when the world was young, from the delicately smokey bridget st.john to the scuzz attack that called itself stackwaddy, from lol coxhills ponderance of sax excursions to the string and rhyme forays of beau and all dalliances between are set out in this three disk round up of outright goodness...a refined urban country blues skiffle comes from the chaps called medicine head rests peacefully with all out choogle splat courtesy of tractor, both fine ticklings of the inner ear for when times call for such efforts...original rocker gene vincent found himself with a new lease on life when dandelion brought him on board for some reworkings of his hits and here he give out with some be bop alula, plus others for the hippy generation to enjoy...kevin coyne/siren, principal edwards, clague, clifford t. ward, mike hart, supersister and the way we live all offer some tunes to brighten the day and even outright novelties from the likes of bill oddie, yamasukis and will dandy don't totally let the grooviness drop by too much, everyone is smiling as the vibes perculate with agreeable niceitude...all in all a beautiful package to accompany sunny afternoons dreaming dreams of long ago, visions of the eternal river bank, ambling lazily along twisted country lanes and post war urban decay all lie within disguised as hit parade contenders...

mott the hoople

2010-01-20T07:04:00.000-08:00

...and then came mott the hoople, in amongst all the newly emerging prog outfit back in 1969 mott came to claim the rocking times with this outing of of swinging jams...kicking up a storm with covers of sonny bono/sir doug/(early) kinks on the first side gave a solid thumbs up in agreement to cats who'd been digging the rock groove for awhile, these mott layabouts let it be known to all and sundry they had some kind of handle on what made for a good late night rocking session (hoople noise is most definitely late night, that can't be desputed, chemically assisted late night loafing most probably)...infusing dylan style vocal slur and glimmer twin swagger added to the deal these cats were putting down, going for some kind of transatlantic cross cultural blowout (not necessarily desirous most times but in a way it sort of works, a cat can dig what they had in mind, the yanquee continent was further away, both in mileage and culture, from post swinging london back in 1969)...there's a bit of crazy horse funk attack somewhere buried in the mix along with the whiskey, beer and hash plus a desire to splat the listener full on with all instruments bobbing in and out shouting to be heard...some johnny-come-lates tend to diss this first effort as not up to the mark, boring and derivative are the cries heard most often but that's what happens when a different generation start mouthing about times they weren't part of and don't understand how things fit together...this is a truely rocking testament to late 1960's slip and sleaze...

...so we come to the second go round for the hoopling cats and this time they get elbow deep in the ballad bowl with copius whiskey shots poured over them...the couple of crowd pleasing rockers they do dish out are par for the course during the mott tenure at island recs. with all cylinders pumping out the purest of mott grooves...with this wax being top heavy in the slow and funky department this has got to be a prime candidate for late night listening with the outside world safely kept at a measured distance, no squares disturbing the vibes, the room must become a shrine to the eternal being of hoopleness, and with all the keyboard work here, both piano and organ, this is sanctified hoopling that only the righteous disciples can be allowed to dig...this will cleanse the soul with its spirit of 100% mott...

...motts forth LP for island and what would prove to be their last for the label as the sales obviously did not go down too well with the company bean counters...kicking off in fine style with some patented hoople chaos, part zimmerman amphetamine drive and part stonsian swagger, it goes down mighty fine...followed on by a mid-tempo ballad type groove with all the cats getting the vibe and playing as a whole unit...track 3 sees their interest in west coast psych rising once more with a cool cover of the youngbloods 'darkness darkness' which shows they really had a handle on yankee left coast acid vibes, even going back to when they were the 'shakedown sound' they could get to grips with californian acid pop/rock and not come off weak and befuddled like so many anglo combos who thought the future was in copying west coast rock...there's next a long mott ballad (the journey) that takes a couple plays, or possibly more to work its magic but soon it devolves from being 10 minutes to being timeless...back to rowdy motting with 'sweet angeline' where they work up a sweat and get some whiskey swagger going...mariachi trumpets come in on the next tune (second love) which is kind of funny for a london based outfit but they did dig 'sir doug' so maybe some tex-mex ain't so far from wardour street after all...back to outright stones style pounding with track 7, copying the jagger swagger where they show they have more than an inkling how the glimmer twin aesthetic works, how to run the cheyne walk voodoo down and run it down good, also some whoisms mix in giving this a nice 'london satin loon pant' groove...all recorded live in the studio with guy stevens waving guns around in a last ditch attempt to get the mott wagon firing on all cylinders as he knew fully well it could give the right incentive for the hooplers to 'kick it' one more time (phil spector /lee perry have also tried this trick when their charges need some geeing up)...the last track has some john lennon/macca white album mess about going on which brings the whole thing to a conclusion, kind of starting where they began a few years previously...

...what a mighty mighty fine trawl through all things hooply and the years of motting plus over on disk 3 there's some groovy bits and bobs from various 1960s combos that acted as precursor to the story (doc thomas/shakedown sound/buddies) coming in at just under 4 hours and none of it wasted...disk one is the island years with plenty of unreleased versions to give a fuller understanding of the group, how their rough and tumble sound came into being, what made them stand out from the crowd (the best place to see them was at small clubs away from the bright lights of the big city where they could blast away with their lurching rip roaring sound)...disk two is the hit single years where they learned how to control the rough edges and channel the noise into something the general citizens could dig, be it glam thud and thump or anthems for the crash street kidds...this of course is where they lost a lot of the original fans who didn't dig 'their group' becoming 'pop stars', much preferring the shambolic hoople to the newly clean and concise mott...as mentioned the third coaster is a trip to the pre-beginnings plus the hit years with bowie voicing 'dudes', stan tippins vocalising and some demos for various soon to be well known tunes (dig the shakedown sound groove the 'WCPAE' 'transparent day', sign of what could have been if ian hadn't got himself invited to put some sleazy rock in the stew)...add in some live stuff' and this all works out as a great sampling of mottness, so all hooplers and layabouts are advised to tip and tipple some medication for the trip as anything can and most certainly will happen over the next few hours...

andromeda / czar / writing on the wall / van der graaf generator

2010-01-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

...formed sometime in early 1967 andromeda are a real good example of the changing face of underground sound in the transisional years '67/'70 when psych whimsy replaced the freakbeat, heavy blues replaced psych and mixed itself in with some jazz ideas to begat the misunderstood genre prog-rock (when a cat gets down to it prog was ruined by yes and other college boy fantasies that spoke of elves and fairies in a definitely non psych manner), after prog which hung around forever it was all heads to their own discretion, punkhippy/hippypunk being the best route out from under the burden that was the seventies...getting back to the wax in question, andromedas LP was released in '69 with a nice street level power trio blast of heavy blues progging with some '67 style vocal arragements giving it a more rounded sound, bringing in the past to soften the present and make way for the future, a nomadic eye on the older times whilst heading for an uncertain tomorrow...there's a couple of semi-lengthy suites giving off the classical ideas that early prog latched onto, the popular sounding light classics that actually hark back to the beginning of the 20th century with pastorial meets metropolitan vibes, the urban scene gently eats the countryside as modern industry marches ever onward, filled early prog with an embroidery that was too fine to last, it had to be replaced by bombast on a purely hellish ELP stance (nothing intrinsically wrong with ELP bombast when restricted to the first 4 albums but then it got too stupid for its own good)...the light classic approach is the way these cats envisioned it, being able to pump up the sound with modern ampage took the light out of the classic anyway so the real way to dig prog is most assuredly with bands such as this (unless its jazz prog then another starting point must be found with jools/brian auger type R&B proggy jazzbo)...the whole vibe is one of forward motion, but a motion that is countenanced by caution, probaby caution in the fact that uncharted territory is being explored by new recruits, cadets on the maiden voyage to the next plateau where the watchword is change, further intermingling of ideas that will eventually get too complicated to stand up and prog will lumber under its own unnecessary weight, but now with andromeda we see prog with everything to live for, everything to aspire to without any pretense, without commercial leanings...cats who dig the elias hulk / czar style heavy blues splat might wish to more than dig this, it's the sophisticated elder cousin (sophisticated being in relative useage only), the cousin with examination papers marked with a pass (only just, but a graduation all the same), a mild complication of ideas all brought into line by the molding of psych learning on a substantial blues footing, a grounding from which to fly, a nest that can supply sustenance and energy for the long trip to unknown days...andromeda are most likely better than the LP shows due to studio conditions, conditions that flumox many cool combos to the point of freezeing up, but the evidence on display can only give testimony to some new creativity, a new spark from the old rock'n'roll fire, ashes refurbished with the strike of one last match, the match that relights embers of lost chords...

...this somewhat heavy handed hard rock prog disk gets off to a pretty dreary start and makes a cat want to move on quicky but the second track looks up a bit and then they find their footing...keyboard and guitar fronted copy of 'procol harum' with some looking back in the vocal dept. to the psych days...a good example of a combo not really knowing what the new prog sounds of the 70's should be and not enough talent to write a tune and stretch it out...the sort of group that would be second/third on the bill at small provincial gigs, the kind of' band that plys their wares while the audience does its own thing, like getting a drink, skinning up and generally ignoring the stage...in the pantheon of hard rocking prog they amount to really no more than 'also rans' but not very far...having said that it does not stop an original wax copy going for more bread than it should but one cats steak is another cats granola, in this case heavy is as heavy does, you either dig it or you dont...

...from the tail end of the six ohs comes this really top doomy sounding keyboard heavy, proggy hard rock with nice slices of guitar riffing and solos weaving around to make this a total treat...very much a drag that this was the only offering before it was splitsville and all concerned onto lesser, but more lucrative business...

...the wordy poetry gives this disk an othertime feel, a folky feel from an absinthe soaked, opium smoking, crushed velvet wearing wigged poet, one nestled way up on high in a lofty dusty garrett surrounded by quill pens and stacks of parchment ready to catch and keep the wordage...all this mixed with a decadent cabaret vibe that only invited guest are allowed to experience...it seems to exist only for the initiated, cats who have heard the call to dig a higher vibe...

rocket from the tombs / pere ubu

2010-01-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

...for our purposes here it's 1975 and not too much is happening on the rock'n'roll front in most places round the globe (a few pockets of resistance here and there with some cats keeping the faith, keeping the 'rocking flag' flying but mostly it's lamesville, dull dud city) though in cleveland OH. its a different story, the underground cats and stoners are getting together their own sounds and RFTT are prime example of do it yourself...not caring about what was on the radio, what other people were thinking or what straight society had in the way of any entertainment the rocket bolted together stoogian riffery with hawkwind slop and velvet drone and smeared it all with back alley blues and street level surrealist poetry...chaotic guitar screach which on these tapes is real grungy adding to the out of control vibes that lift off in a MC5/sun ra way occasionally trying to set the controls for the heart of somewhere other than where they were...being the mid seventies glamrock had to rear it's head somewher along the line and bowies 'jean genie' is reworked to good effect on track 7 which gives way to a piercing version of '30 seconds over tokyo'...this 74 minute disk breaks down into 3 sessions at their rehearsal room /live at the famed agora ballroom and lastly a bar...eventually falling into two different combos (pere ubu/dead boys) both exploded with debut LPs of avant rock and '77 punk respectively though both their later careers were not nowhere near the promise of these starting wax...the magnitude of this swill is still so great that reverberations are occasionally heard in rock (both commercial and the so called underground) to this very day...a necessary earful for all layabouts intereseted in the developement of local underground rock seventies style...

...from the post industrial cityscape wastelands of mid seven ohs cleveland came a combo who dealt heavily in future mutant blues based solidly in an avant/basement prog, a prog that was street level amalgamation of english craziness like hatfield and the north / krautrock synthesizer blasts and general loner stoner pyrotechnics, everything exploding to infinite proportion...it sure came as some kind of a revelation at the time, and its power to mesmerize the listener still hasn't really diminished as not too many sound like this even today although plenty have given it a fair go, but this is temporal psycho-geography at work as we hear another part of western underground culture making its own way in the world after being shafted and sold down the polluted river by mainstream society when of no further use to the post nixon war machine...this whole LP is an outpouring of urban sound/word poetry that rages and rails against the staid and sedated pod people that populate the land, a marvellous piece of work that has got to be heard...

wilde flowers / soft machine

2010-01-17T13:46:00.000-08:00

...wilde flowers from canterbury was an early configuration of some of the cats that would hook up in the soft machine/caravan axis to produce some hep vibrations on the psych-pop-jazz front later in the sixties...bo diddley beats mixing up mose alison with bohemian wispyness...suburban hipsters carving out a mod jazz world buried in the albion countryside away from the city blare, sailing reefered dreams on the village pond, lazy afternoons of jazz pondering, connecting harlems 125th street with doses of sandoz from the hollingshead institute for expanding HEPocity...modal blather navigating the wobbly marshmallow midnights of the homeward night bus to the twilight zone...the scratchy state of some of these acetates give the archival nature of the release an authentic glow, field recordings from the middle class basement of stolen marijuana moments...

...early gomelsky sessions from this canterbury combo that have had a myriad of releases, this has been put out under different guises plenty of times in the last 4 decades or more...some cats don't dig it too much but any mid six oh underground noise is at the very least interesting and this sounds real nice and makes for a good beginning when spinning some softs on a green afternoon...

...excellent first wax from thesofts, all the more remarkable for being taped quickly in the middle of a tour of uncle sams autocrazy (1968), everything is in place, at least for this LP, psychedelic pop with avant jazz moves vearing in and out making it flow, lazy grooving on warm afternoons by the river bank indulging in a tab of high class sandoz...this is singular pop-psych in the way the floyd first disk was, it's psychedelic in a free-form way, though structured nothing sounds as it would last, a fleeting moment in the tributary of rock'n'roll, complicated arrangements for pop tunes that have a commerciality yet are not selling themselves in the market place, they last as long as they last, no more no less, while some cats listening they are doing what they were written for, to comunicate the NOW, both bands bought the fun side of avant garde to play in the tunes, plus interesting lyrics...they'd been together for about four years, in various shapes and forms by the time this came around and it shows they'd learnt to work very loosely yet tight, in the best possible way, the jazz way, the intermingling of ideas and playing is wonderful, not a bit seriously po-faced as some of the later work, the name should have been changed after the third disk to protect the groovy but that maybe somewhat unfair but slightly obvious...the whole canterbury scene in some ways is built entirely on possibilities thrown up by what's happening within the walls of the groove...

...second effort from the soft machine, carrying on from where the first left, perhaps the jazzbo tones were turned up slightly, not quite as pop but the original softs sense of humour is still intact, not too much po-faceism (yet), everything grooving nicely...there's a 'jazz-rock' vibe happening throughout but it's not the accepted jazz-rock as it came to be recognised, the machine probably don't realise it's happening, just moving along natrually, doing it as it comes...there's a political consciousness at work, a layabout beatnik way of looking at things, through the distorted reality mirror that true original thinkers and pioneers view the world...freeform avant noodling comes into play as if suddenly they are all hit with a giant LSD rush, a whole trip takes place in a few seconds then fades away, to return later with more bubbles and reflections...very much a worthwhile spin and a great example of london, via canterbury 'underground' rock from the club years of the late 60's...

...although somewhat rough round the edges this is indeed a very nice archive of the softs at the home of london hippydom, the roundhouse in early seventy-one...they give out with a real cool full-on-attack of prog-jazz, plenty of fuzz and wah and skronk with overlays of squeals and scrapes...the keyboard wails and moans while the sax shreaks, the drums clatter over rumbling bass, all with a funky abandon that would eventually leave as the personal left...the recording date allows for robert to still be with the combo and elton deans saxaphone lends a heavy cushion for the others to bounce off, so all in all an essential look at the last of the real soft machine (kevins departure is another bag completely)...

guru guru / neu!

2010-01-17T01:29:00.000-08:00

...what with all the carryings on of the avant garde, those serious cats getting a bit loose with the ever widening horizons of the new music that was coming from the perceived (by the avantsters) pop music it was enevitable that the rock cats in turn would want to see what the avant garde was all about...this k-rock power trio explosion got hold of all manner of studio trickery and slapped it furiously over their incessant swill until a new rock had been formed...a perfect first LP that laid out their intent and purpose whilst showing others what the new seven oh decade could bring...

...expanding expansive landscapes for the mind to travel spaceways in and out, round and round to become invisible and at one with the universe...on and on and on it goes moving to and fro from the beginning through to further along, never ending even when the disk is not playing, the vibes are pulsating with hyper light, bringing forth energy to prolong the trip...its not unreasonable to say that this wax really needs to be heard through cans for that total experience deeply immersed in the krautrock bubbles of yesteryear...

...blip and bleep and whirl, along come the swelling and spreading tenracles of ensnaring noise, motoriffic grooves of epic proportions, pounding out cosmonautical echoes that reach deep to the other side where the all illuminating drone rules, the pace of constant movement that seems to stand aloof from the normal activities, constant molecular restructuring to remain just one step removed from the micro second before there was any knowledge of temporal readjustment...that's just side one, side two has the hippy pranks (the groove shall not be spoilt for cats who ain't heard this) that drove cats to distraction and made this duo famous in the tripped hash world of the underground...

ron geesin

2010-01-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

...this first disk from ron connected with a few heads in the flower power days of 1967, the year when anything seemed possible...he'd worked on the material for most of the previous year and finally decided to use the 14 tracks here...nonsense verse, surreal poetry plus all manner of odd ditties mix it up with banjo strumming, piano plunking and harmonium wheezing with some very nice tape collage stereo panning (always a plus with these records from distant days)...many people have tried these ideas and most fail mainly as they wear out so soon after the first hearing by not having that added extra which ron definitely has, which is a friendly and unassuming presence...stands up well and bears repeated spins...

...when giving a go round with ron a cats got to get well in the zone so a pipe may come in handy for suspending belief in the possible and grooving with the reality of absurdity, thats the only way to be to get anywhere near whats on offer with this early seventies disk released on rons own label...this taking control of his output may have been a good thing as there ain't no way a capitalist square organisation going to get 1% understanding of whats going down with these stories and musical knick-nax of high order weirdity...considering ron was chums with the floyd its a wonder why his immense dream power never really rubbed off on those architects of normality but such concerns are not relevant here...cats who dig ivor cutler/goons/musical tomfoolery will get a blast with this, its a forgone conclusion...

amon duul/amon duul2

2010-01-08T14:05:00.000-08:00

....psychedelic underground indeed, the first issueings from amon duul that came about from the reefered bongo sessions that happened in munich '68, the year of the barricades, the past was rapidly becoming another country that students world wide were tearing up their passports from, the old guard were trashing the life from students/workers in various euro locales and the duul reflected the chaos and carnage in their work, riffs jamming out the electric spark thats needed to sustain existence, testifying in strange tongue and the ever present cosmic bongos giving up the trance, invocating the higher beings...sailing the inner high-ways and by-ways of the nervous system the duul groove ever onward, fluidly traversing the LSD plateau with tape cut ups added on for good measure, more disorientating shock waves that mirror the outside society...the wax is groove heavy with primal thump power, the bongos drumming out to call to the faithful and any stray converts that come along looking for a better way, looking for a path into a different future that the one already mapped out by the robber barons of capitalist piggy enterprises...amon duul call for a new pageantry, a splendour full of beatnik verbiage, only now the structure of living becomes timeless, poems of hope stretch out across the seas to all humanity...'what is now shall forever be' seems the duul message, that its time to get hip or else be doomed by the perpetuel grinding of the machine and back in '68 this was a very real predicament for free thinkers as well as the great unwashed...this wax, plus the follow ups represent a time when rock'n'roll was important, it had the power to shake the walls of establishment thinking, to rearrange the furniture of hierarchy and swim to the moon with the always insistant bongo beat...

...down down deeper and down, further into the jams that make up most of their output... this is the third waxing and it was a double-disk-blowout...upping the communal quotient a few notches to counteract the forces of oppression, the spliffing and riffing just keeps agoing and when it does seem to slow down it picks up again as these cats were on a mission to save all right thinking hepsters from falling prey to capitalist coca-cola indoctrination that was rife in the homeland...as an aside there are a couple of times when a pop tune they've purloined from the ether creeps through but the jams soon win out...one of the great platters of splatter...good for the head, heart and soul...

...by the time this LP was taped the massed freak rock bongo spliff-outs were becoming a thing from the past...a much more pastoral folk groove is getting down here with some acoustic strumming on the first track sounding like floyds 'set the controls...' and some nods to west coast acid choogling dead style are in evidence...layabouts familiar with siloahs brand of acoustic trancey k-rock will vaguely know what to expect though the fake ethnicisms aren't present with the duul...actually recorded as a genuine commercial release as the kraut vibe spread across the head planet, though naturally it sold zilch and so rec.co. interest shrunk from hesitant to infinitely non existant...from this moment on any music the combo got involved in only revolved round their promotion of the commune and not to line business suit pockets...

...heres more of those legendary jams that the original duul, the commune duul from munich put down in '68, fuelling a fair few releases over the coming years of which this seems to be the last, coming out in 1983 as a double wax...the jams have been chopped into shorter, more economical bursts, the longest coming in at 6 minutes, which gives the whole shebang a more rock'n'roll attack, the riffing giving off total insane vibes like the monks were doing at basement dives at various locales throughout west germany, riffing madness from within the deep commune psych, stoned and happening with liberal amounts of bongo bop heading full on to tomorrow...thrashing and moaning tribal noise, reaching into the night, reaching for impossible highs, searching out the truth that only beatnik hooligans can realise, the truth that is hidden from the square world by its very existence, a truth so enormous it would crush the cubes world view as they would have to admit all is wrong in dullsville...spinning this joint is like digging some alien jukebox escaping from a parallel galaxy, somehow strangely familiar yet unfamiliar, turning points on a map thats freshly drawn from newly charted investigations...

...growing out of the munich commune scene of the late '60s amon duul 2 was the more muso offshoot of that bongo clanging tribe amon duul who'd put out one LP from the massed jams they'd instigated (they'd plunder these jams for more LPs as time and record co. moolah permitted) in 68...one of the great krautrock exponents they put out a cosmic abberation of underground rock sound, an inversion of the yanquee variety of ballroom psych, this was acid rock with a sting, it upgraded the amerikkkan template with droning avant squeaks/operatic outbursts/chanting/cyclic off kilter beats/fuzzy skronk guitar slamming, basically throttling the commerciality of uncle sams tirade over the european culture...amon duul threw off the yoke of bland yank imperialism to get busy with a sound of rebirth, a rediscovery of self for a generation who'd been lied to by business/TV/teachers, they no longer served an absent master, they were themselves making a future sound...locked inside a gothic surround, the ancient peoples make a noise to call the faithful, the desirous ones who need freeing from the network propaganda peddling the USA commands, freeing from the mind-strangling burble of 'radio free europe'...crazy patterns dance in the ether, scattering the liberation seeds that will unshackle the youth from the tyrany of nixonian thought, calling on jazzed avant noodling mixed in with primordial dislocating sloppy vibes, a sensual rush from the spheres...this was the sound of chaos and riots, a sound of water cannon and teargas, the sound of revolt against a numbing mindset, a revolt from style into substance...

...second wax from duul2, this time a double to accommodate their expanding/expansive soundscapes that were rapidly oozing out of their collective thought patterns, rocking out in a primitive style yet clearly not a rehash of beat groups R&B from the earlier decade, this is 1970 with all the expectant baggage that entailed, namely progressive rock with a heavy euro bent...avant garde ideas mix it up with droning folk fiddling/scratchy guitar strumming/dislocated whistling/time slipping drum beats/operatic vocalizations/modal chants/bursts of electric string fire, plus who knows what else, every time a cats spins this there's going be new noises popping up, freshening the opiated stew and that's just the first track...all over this platter there's magnificence, whether it be ancient/modern folk scraping and moaning, or pounding acid rock, the whole deal shouts to be heard as if knowing its own importance, an importance that transcends amon duul themselves, they channel a groove from outside knowledge which is somehow sucked into the duul psyche and manifested in multi dimensional psychedelic peculiarities...a heavy gloom hangs over the work, lending the musical backdrop to life in 70s germany, a time of radical chic/offing pig-politicians/celebratory bank robbers/self style liberationists and general paranoia and weirdness...so far away from the psychedelic ballroom rock that it springs from yet at the same time mirrors it through a prism of positive difference, the whole shebang taking off for unknown territory with a torn road map from alien lands...its like a bad drug hangover from acid and speed coctail, where the colours flash by in swirling spiked ornamentation, full of danger, the kind of danger that attracts the curious into darkened basements of desire...a journey to inner space whilst riding the malevolent subway train late at night, full of shadows and strange vibes that beckon the wanderer to enter and never return, a gateway to the other side (of where is always undecided until its too late)...

...third offering from duul2 and this pretty much seals the deal, whats going to be happening over the ensuing years is somewhere to be found on the space tripping 'tanz de lemming', the ultimate declaration of intent...the untrained ear of the first two wax gave the sound impetus, to go further regardless of technical knowhow, what came out was meant to be from the riffing to the ambience of the room, the complete fractured entity was ordained from a higher source (the source that gave the elevators their whole being, also the godz, another channeling combo)...again a double wax holding some of the HEPpest jams from any band getting lumped into the 'progrock' idiom, it takes amon duul2 into a territory that at the time was their own...somehow they managed to take the avant trippy grooves into a hallucinatory sphere that is not easy to define, there's a subtle keeness hiding under the doomy vibe giving hope to the uncertain times in which they operated (possible police state resurrected to counteract baader meinhof activites)...strange worlds appear and leave whilst this joint is spinning, thousand moons cross the sky in an instant, alien visitors drop by to hang then they're gone, leaving half awake memories in floating dormitories of the ever tilting mindsoup...waves of perfect accompaniment to those bonged out afternoons cruising the edge of flip city looking for the entrance way to play, this waxing will slip a cat the secret of the sacred keyhole, the unlocking of forever time, to range the open skies in blissed tranquility, nodding to the noodle of the mighty duul...

gene clark / david crosby

2010-01-08T13:16:00.000-08:00

...being a bolting together of genes first LP after leaving the byrds and a few droppings from his tenure with that mighty fine combo...his first steps with a solo venture (with the gosdin brothers getting full billing) was recorded during 1966 and mirrors plus anticipates his former aviator compadres wax from 5D up to sweetheart proving gene had his finger on thepulse of the sixties more than he's given credit for...everything from early psych guitar lines and feel to country moves are present and comes complete with a couple of fab4 licks and some revolver style artpop showing he weren't afraid of the british invasion but reversely welcomed the chance to join the mersey take on rock'n'roll, with its advanced stylist quirks and general forward thinking attitudes...a real boss sound from the years when structure and senses melted and melded making anything possible, both real as well as imagined...

...although a lot of squares gave this the thumbs down at the time of release (the back cover picture of clark looking all glam gave a few country rockers some thoughts of trans gender weirdness but it's just drugs working their mystic voodoo)...this is probably genes most ambitious endeavour and certainly the best solo wax from any byrd, though the competition never really amounted to much when it came down to working individually...helped by more coke than possibly needed these arrangements take a few spins to work their magic, but the magic is certainly there and cats in an open frame of mind are going dig this...freshen up the bong and get ready for some cosmic vibrations from this downhome groover...

...when the cros puts his mind to it he can surely come up with some deceptively simple yet astounding work as evidenced by his tunes with the byrds and never more so than this his first and best solo work...solo in the early seventies laurel canyon environment of course meant there was at least ten or more guests all adding their few cents but that makes no never mind with this, it's davids visions, the others only embellish what's already there...a spaced out otherworldness pervades the whole thing with these solid stoned grooves meandering and weaving their way into the ether and beyond...when it comes to the west coast rock fraternity this is right at the top of the unsteady pile...(remastered for greater consideration)...

crazy horse

2010-01-07T20:35:00.000-08:00

...marvelous first effort full of funky rocking with a nod to rootsy backwoods grooves...this surely has a hep stonesian vibe that was in the air at the turn of the seventies...what must also be mentioned is a totally groovy afterhours reefer and wine attitude is all pervasive, a vibe that many try for but because they're trying, they ultimately fail...this is the sound of cats jamming and coming up with something fresh...as with all chipper wax from that period it found its way to cutout bins and on to busto crusto hep pads where it stayed until retro/revisionism became the way of the trend foisters planet wide...

...back in 1968 most of these cats were known as the rockets and they had a different, under-appreciated sound from the usual los angeles hippy combos and when crazy horse got their groove on they certainly were an anomaly in the laurel canyon/topanga/hollywood triangle in that they could lay down some drugged grunge rocking without breaking a sweat, effortless grinding down the seventies earth shoe 'hippys' who couldn't quite get behind this weird bunch of studio savvy/reefer and beer heads with the uncontrolled amp busting noise they loved to lay on audiences...this second go round suffers from the loss of key members danny and jack and goes in a country rocking direction which ain't necessarily the bad vibes disaster that could have resulted from such reckless commerciality...it's not as limp and lifeless as a lot of hollywood cowboy efforts that got thrown out around that time, possibly more like nestling in the grin area, which ain't surprising given nils lofgrens tenure with both outfits...some patented neil young screech crops up a couple of times but it must be said it ain't as often as could feasibly be desired...one way of looking at this work is that it's in the spirit of crazy horse and all that name may imply, and could in all honesty need a few spins before a cat can settle in easy with the groove...

booker t. & priscilla / hill/ethridge/barbata

2010-01-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

...somewhat forgotten now and that's a drag for the unbeknowing as this is one expansive double wax of cooled out funk/moody lounge/gospel/swampy grooves that hangs in the air real nice, it just insinuates its way into whatever vibe may be happening around it, taking over to be right for the moment whether it was intended or not...as often the way with real cool wax it takes a few spins to get the full juice out from it, not every track makes the grade first time round but it sure can get addictive if a cat wants it that way...booker t jones and priscilla coolidge put this out when they got hitched back in the early 70s and cats wanting some green onions might be a tad out of luck but any heads needing some slow delta funk will be right in the turnip patch mashing the moonshine and coming up with the goods...recorded just outside of deliverance this is a 'real' recording by 'entertainment' cats (heres another 'music biz' weird thing, booker t. had to leave stax as the suits treated him as an employee, ho hum, the squares just dont get it or just plain don't care) getting real with their position in the great tomorrow society that was being built by the coming earhshoe brigade, the whole earth catalog shenanigans that was trying to get a new capitalism on the go, subvert madison avenue dollars to 'worthier' recipients...any cats digging the choogle put out by delaney&bonnie/joe cocker mad dogs/rita coolidge first 2 wax/neil young/billy preston round the turn of 69/70 will get a strong buzz off this, it's perfect with a bottle of red and reefer on a lazy evening while the wild dogs sleep...

...a solid stoned groove, funky jams emanating from these LA country rocker types who'd individually been scuffling around in the turtles/burritos/strangers when they hooked up for this reefered R&B blowout...dig the cats hanging out with them: dr.john/leon russell/booker t./sneaky pete plus the blackberries doing some fine as wine vocalization, it can't go wrong and indeed it don't, it stays the course rocking out some laid back finger popping tunes...late night beer soaked missives from the bar just outside of town, the place where the hipsters from around the block hang out, the jook joint for the unrepentant beatnik that refuses the come on from the TEEVEEland of squaresville...there ain't no filler, just genuine killer low down blues, dusty and dirty, rough and ready going for the one...all the cats digging each other, getting this gumbo simmering, smearing the whole shebang with some day old grease, a narcotic brew just right for consumption by all midnight moonlight HEPsters...

performance soundtrack

2010-01-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

...through his work with the stones jack nitzsche scored the gig of knocking out the soundtrack to this messed up flipped out gangster movie, one of the greatest films from the fried brain hippy years, the time when it was all up for grabs if a cat knew how get a handle on the society heirachy, the socially turned on who like to throw the bread around for the hustler / hipster /beatnik...jack proceeded to grab a couple of his compardres, laurel canyon cats, ry cooder and randy newman, with whom he formulated a magnificent hippy voodoo funked-out version of amerikkka (and by extension the rest of the planet in that year of strifed vibes nineteen and sixty eight)...lonesome slide (ry) and mouthbow courtesy of buffy st.marie supply vibes from older weirder days and give off unreal and temporal distorted waves which is what's happening in powis sq. from the flick in question...mick jagger is the cat whose house is constructed of drugged worlds within worlds and the rage of the outside uptight world permeates through the james fox character, the ganster on the run from east end villians (the type of cat that ain't easily amused) and via the music...(one of those small lateral asides coming now; what's up with this legend/myth that's been going around for decades that jagger attended the london grosvenor square demonstration outside the amerikkkan embassy, threw a stone at the pigs and run away, what's the deal with this)...though the flick is taking place in old london towne and the soundtrack was put together in L.A there is no discordancies, the discrepancies of cultures (waining swinging versus (hip)capitalist) are not so evident as the hep world is known by the vibe rather than the material...

blue cheer / leigh stephens / dickie peterson

2010-01-07T03:52:00.000-08:00

...like many frisco area punkers (oxford circle/savage resurrection to name but two) the cheer saw the anglo sensation 'cream' play the fillmore and decided it was time to stop emulating the yardbirds/stones and get a dirty heavy groove on and they didn't come no heavier in the summer of 1967 than the cheer whose first forays into the studio produced this monolith of overamped gutbucket slop...like a pressure cooker about to explode and head on out into the voodoo swamp like a kildozer thrown into nirvanic oblivion this 6 track LP upped the ante for yankee combos who wanted to stay up to date yet not get too psychedelic (which too soon proved to be a passing fancy of the flower power tymes)...with the studio thick with reefer and the cheap suds flowing they lay down this testament to the dawn of time, the everpresent weaving thud of the drum dispensing the word and the vibe with the strings bending and screaching and choking the listener into compliant submission...approved by the local chapter of the 'hells angels', the cheer could later walk the heroin infested frisco hills with the confidence and superior knowledge that such kudos brought back in the day...

...as this second LP by the cheer kicked off with piano colouring in the mix it looked somewhat omminous, had the noisenix become musicians and all the negative connotations that brings to good rocking, the possible ruination of the sock-it-to-me swill and splat these cats excelled in...but such concerns proved unfounded and they soon hit the amped up fuzz and shattered the galaxy for some time to come...the cheer had become more comfortable in the studio, the hyper tensive blowout of the previous 'vincebus' had been channeled and slightly streamlined though the lunkiness of cheer playing is a heavily contributing positive factor in their noise...stereo pannin and two channels flowing simultaneous give great disorientating distortions to any high the listener might be on...this is the cheers psychedelic masterpiece, their high art effort as opposed to another bluesrock drug bender...still plenty of bad attitude fuzz and buzz stoner mindsoup for layabouts to get grooved with (special lookout over on side two) and none better than the cover of the stones pinnacle 'satisfaction'...not as immediate as the hit they accidently had with the earlier eddie cochran cover this is a psychedelic bad trip that just pounds into the cranium and goes right to the center of the mind...the original cover opened right out to a quadruple gate fold with some snappy photo collage and painting and freak out trip poster...still approved by the 'angels' with in fact one going by the biker handle 'gut' executed the cover concept so that was cool...

...new!improved!, does this mean the two earlier joints were not any good, they are to be forgotten about?...this may well have been the thinking at the time, maybe somewhat muddleheaded with hindsight but that was what it seemed back in the tail end of the psychedelic sixties...the heavy heavy sludge attack had been replaced with acid guitar psych on the second side and 'songs' on the first, all this curtesy of personel changes that would eventually plague the cheerian world...the acid blast of side two is in some ways a continuation of the first albums bad attitude sprawling slop bucket but it's the first sides tune-smithery that shows the path the cheer would follow into the seventies...chronologically the second side was recorded first with randy holden replacing leigh stephens on the stringbending, randy had been with the 'other half', a going nowhere local punk outfit who'd actually managed to get a long play disc onto the market but otherwise did nothing to mark them out from dozens of other teen R&b combos...randys side is a real nice blasting acid racket, not really frisco ballroom psych but a frontal lobe pounder that don't stop until its over, nicely nice and drugged...inversely side one was recorded later with randy gone from the fold replaced by two cats from another 'frisco acid splatter combo, 'mint tattoo' who also had managed to parley their noise into getting an album released to less than limited success in the bean counting department, though in itself a worthy effort...dickie peterson and paul whaley may have still been in the band but this side does not sound too much like the cheerian mind blast of old, it's much more 'adult' in its outlook, 'new rock' if you will, the future leaking through to some extent, a certain annominity seaping into the preceedings, it could have been made by any number of combos but the name makes it get a few more spins than it would otherwise and this is a good thing because there is some goodness flowing through, it just takes a while to gather its own momentum...petersons vocals are really coming on like some primal bluesman on a couple of tracks, the teenage stoner days are over, a new day is dawning over the cheer camp but the early eruptions would never leave them, they would always be known for the work they laid down on the first wax, a monolithic slab of disturbance that today is still felt where rocking noise is of a premium...(to put the early cheer into some kind of frame of reference, when they played the grande ballroom in detroit in 1968 the stooges took note of their use of loudness for the sake of loudness, stun the audience into submission and take no prisoners (ironically the very essence of amerikkkanism, but here put to a 'socially acceptable' use)...dig it, an album of two halves, literally and otherwise...

...'red weather', the first of two solo joints from axe abusing thud and stun master supreme, blue cheers one and only leigh stephens and a somewhat mystifying entrance of a disk, its everywhere and nowhere at the same time, its perplexing in its perspicacity of reason...the question begging for consideration at this late stage of the game is why was this considered as a dud at the time by most 'knowing underground consumers' when in reality its a magnificent indulgence in quiet seduction for the mellow but vibrant weed head, the loafing cat who checks out wasted sounds to groove on for a couple of hours, chilling with 'buds and suds'...a bargain bin special for a year or two as it was cut out to deletion within not too long a time frame, a lot of heavy rocking bad attitude stoners saw this as distracting with its change and pace, from rocked acid blasts to trance like musicianly playing of a repetition of notes...leigh gets real moaned out with two or three acid fried weirdness inducing blasts of bad tempered drug punch, its blue cheer on an out there consciousness mind expanding trip, invoking some 'demon brother' to guide the way into some future world, this is the moment blue cheer mutated into a snakey tentacle explosion of melting jelly, a carpet ride over the gates of the forbidden city where only the most righteous of flipped out cats dwell...other tracks have a much more flowing mellow but funky and tight, hitting the groove with the right approach, an urbane but urban modern R'n'B effort, moving the audience in the way that will improve any 'high' that will be undertaken whilst getting to grips with the concept going down over the two sides...it's a future / past voyage into the possibilities of substance abuse, a street level experiment into taking the rock'n'roll culture into a viable endless form of metamorphic diagrams on the theory that the world was born from the 'BIG BANG', leigh shows his world born of an even 'BIGGER BANG', the thunderous cacophony thrown down by blue cheer...from mind blasts to mind soup ticklers leigh stays long enough to work the necessary massage on the wobbly lobes of listenerhood, the collected vibe of psychedelic experience as seen through the rough tough city scapes of fifties / sixties amerikkka, where the concept of a 'free' life expectancy was nil from birth, the moment of conception dooms the squares from any hopes of escaping 'operation mindcrime' are dashed into near extinction, cats like leigh use the noise of latter day capitalism to save the world from the blahs, the societal gel of harsh and soft pressure used usually to get the customer, the uptight mug (and such a 'willing' mug most of the time) to consume to save the empire, are here turned around so a roller coaster ride is in constant repreperation in order to save the 'head' from any blahs that may be forthcoming in the then new decade...

...this forth LP from the 'cheer' is probably their most perplexing if looked at as a fresh start for the name if not the actual cats trading under the 'blue cheer' banner, only dickie peterson remains from the original gut busting ensemble, the others are from various frisco outfits (sopwith camel / KAK / mint tattoo) so it should have been a promising new start with a fair amount of acid blasting power noodling but no!, its kind of faceless long hair rock, it could be anybody (indeed it is really, lets face facts here), but the name 'blue cheer' must stand for solid distorted drug rock so what's on offer and what is perplexing about the disk...side one starts with a tamla motown riff (roadrunner) and keeps in an upbeat funky mood, while track two keeps the funk and branchs out into country soul groove with some nice semi acid guitar noodle happening towards the last half...more country soul via a delaney bramlett tune ('hello L.A., bye-bye birmingham',bramlett looking like hot property back in 1970), a nice punchy groove with sanctified keyboards working out reverently...it gets to around track four when visions of 'humble pie' appear, only this is the 'pie' if they were really the small faces ie; no rod stewart or peter frampton, just the small faces getting a mellow funk going, keeping it perculated in a hazy reefer fog in a country cottage somewhere deep in the psychedelic netherworld of perpetual HEPness...track five sounds like an outtake from leigh stephens 'red weather'LP so a good way to reach the half way point with a nod to the original string wrecker for the 'cheer...side two is not getting off to a good start with some formula bar band thud ode to groupies but does end with the patented peterson howl, nice...next up is more 'nice' rock with jazzy sounding modern keyboard and old school keys working away and towards the end it reminds one of the first lee michaels joint (carnival of life') so thats not a bad thing at all...gospel style rock with track three gives out as a head nodder, a nice groove is established that has an unfinished feel, as if something more was needed but they never found out what it was...another decent rock tune follows with everyone working as a unit, more professional sounding on the whole album with none of the earlier feelings of 'IT COULD ALL FALL APART' at any minute which even the new!improved! disk had, let alone the first two and that is what makes this LP not as rewarding as the others, the unstable acid vision is not present, it has been left behind in the dusty past...the LP rounds up with one more tune that's okay, its competent and nice and thats about the size of the whole wax, competent and nice, a whole lot better than the contemporaries putting out similar sound but still not blue cheer, they would not rise until many years later and then on a different continent and a different decade...

...blue cheers fifth long play wax and though it has filler it's still better than the previous, self titled effort which was lame in the extreme, below par and certainly not worthy of the name it carries...it kicks off with some kind of acid rock choogle thats riding on an old spencer davis riff, good start, quite funky...second tune in is a horn rock style workout, good-time bar rock, nothing too special going on here, filler disguised as in a soul groove, it's kind of like some pop rock effort from a year or two earlier, the kinda stuff the cheers racket set out to destroy(inadvertantly possibly)...following on with some acid rock that's a bit generic but the guitar sound has a nice basement-psych proto metal vibe...the real problem with the 3 later cheer disks is the material is not necessarily totally weak as such, but it's ordinary most of the time, these cats trading under the cheer name were slightly directionless, they played with some aplomb and we can see they are doing their best, but the cheer as an entity, a vessel unto itself peaked early with different cats and a different perspective, originally they started wanting to be cream and then they set their sights on getting a hendrix groove workin and that the essence of what made it work, they had no real idea how to emulate these combos so they just got to it the best they could, not too much thinking, just HIT IT and see what happens, real rock'n'roll...anyhow more bar rock follows and then its 1967 somehow with some bongo/sitar/moog jamming, totally in the groove and just right for a hit on the pipe, a spaceways special in 4 minutes...some jazzy modal funk comes next and things are looking good, like maybe now some new cats have arrived and taken the cheer name
in yet another direction with some low slung R&B loping along the avenue, digging the groove...back to some filler, so-so country rock, not as bad as it could be but really no excuse...now its acid rock bar blues, nice and funky, smeared in sleaze, just right, followed by some chunky rock funk with some nice old school soul jazz type keyboard(wolfman jack gets name checked, undoubtably in some vain hope of getting some air time from the great weird beard cat of the radio waves)...last track has an air of resignation about it and that probably sums up this LP, a sometime perplexing disk, but worth a few spins and there's always the forward button for when those certain moments of dullness creep in..

...this is a well tasty little treat from those capt.trips cats out from japan with an exploito/tribute to the mighty blue cheer...originally a heavy blues sludge outfit of epic proportions they gradually transformed themselves into a hollywood (goats head soup) stonesian glitter bar band via hippy rural capers, but its the two extremes that are of significance on this outing...first three tunes (dig the TV hosts intros) come from the first LP and a mindblowing crunch it is, showing the first cheer wax production wasn't a 'mistake' as thats the sound these cats make give or take a blast of bad attitude and fx pedal, a freewheeling 'bad trip' rock'n'roll combo just kicking the summer of love into the dusty hills back to the red dog saloon...this is the teenage blue collar reefer/drinking yankee version of the cream at their most pounding trance onslaught, this is the sound of low rent hendrix in saturation orbit as they pummell every last grace of history from the very corpse of rock, and rock hadn't quite been codified in '68 and these cheer cats already bulldozing it off the boogie highway...maybe if the cheer didn't have the personel problems/changes they'd kept the intial promise as they show here they got the goods, they walk it like they talk it and in '68 the year of the barricades, when sides were being drawn and it was the riot thing to do, san fransisco rock was drifting into the country faster than was morally/culturally good and when the pigs got heavy manners and government drugs flowing through the streets it was up to cats like the cheer to keep the faith with the rocking force field that keeps the squares away...johnny come latelys once tried to talk up the rural rock version of the cheer but the arguement don't stand up after a couple of listens, sure they're nice and all but the very name blue cheer should make hippys run for cover not embrace them...onward from track 4 a very different cheer is happening in gold star studios in 1974, laying down some glitter boogie rock with riff ideas/stance purloined from the stones/NYdolls/foghat all with ace hustler kim fowley and ex- steppenwolf nick st.nick at the controls looking for an entrance into mid 70s rock with some rodney english disco splatter laid over some boogie licks given some keefism from goats head...it aint the greatest thing to come down the pike and it sure aint the worst, its part of the cheer groove with dick peterson and three chancers and also any 'underground 70s' pre pistols rocking is always interesting seeing how ideas and preferences appear in every widening circles as late 20th century c(k)ulture comes into focus more and more...some unkind cats may wish to see this as 3 sixties burnouts trying to get a handle on the youth market but the youth market at this juncture was too stoned to know what they wanted but it probably weren't this...these last tracks do kind of grow and not so much in a perverse/ironic way, they just work their way into the organic computer and when grooving on a late summer afternoon they become real friendly and hang nicely in the air, but its the first three air churners that make this mandatory ear filler, those distorted blasts of mayhemic energy just blow a cats lid off...

...released by those erstwhile pychedelic dadaists over at capt.trips records, this was dickie petersons second solo slab and it's alive with heavy blues rocking voodoo, the beat of the street is happening on stage and in the air, molecules are getting down with the creator, the god of heavy heavy funked out street level rocking is on a super blast of 'bad attitude' good vibes rock'n'roll...this is the way it should be done by the older cats, putting some scrape and moan into the work, not just coasting on easy listening 'rock' or apologetic blues like most of the elder folks of 60s / 70s 'barroom heavy metal' purveyorship (we all know the deal with the old cats and their cynical laziness / medical condition), getting down with the ultra blues, putting the flesh on robert johnsons soul to bring him to life for the hour the band are rocking and socking 'it-to-'em'...recorded in the mid nineties in germany dickie and his compadres kick up the most satisfactory of blues rocking and wailing, with guitars squealing in acid-metal ecsatcy, gospel crunching organ work ensures the sanctified are blessed with rocking goodness, that they receive the word from on 'HIGH' all under pinned with beer drinking thump of cheap workable skins...the albums made up of cover versions of well known blues staples, (red house, killing floor, born in chicago) plus vistitations from delaney bramlett / jj cale all glued together with petersons uncanny knack of throwing down the righteous sludge to keep the vibrations flowing in the positive...this disk packs an affirmitive punch to the noggin, blasting the synapes with chromium steel rocking barbs, a low flying mission with fuel injected burners powering the electric spears...recommended beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is a real deal proposition not to be passed over for inferior 'product'...

...blasting their way into century 21 came blue cheer letting loose in japan back in 1999 and with arch looners the deviants on the tour this must have been a good natured jaunt of some hazy proportions...the mere fact that these cats still got it going on is some heavy testament to their hardy and hearty dedication to the cause of mind altering rock'n'roll, the fact they got it going on in such fine fashion is possibly beyond the call of rock'n'roll 'duty' but this album is a megaton of chemically enhanced super-heavy-blues-rocking that stands taller than solomon grundy...as expected there's a good smearing of early classics intermingled with later grist that hits the spot more often than not and this being the cheer that ain't totally unexpected...dickey peterson and paul whaley must be a couple of cats that really know how to translate the blues into urban rock and not lose the R&B on acid vibe, their contemporaries have mainly gone for the 'authentic' approach to the blues or the good time party route, the cheer seem to combine the two, they're authentic to their own sound and they know how to have a good time, there's a place for both in the very name blue cheer (this is the type of racket that ted nugent thinks he makes but falls somewhat short every time, though he did do great funny interviews back in the day)...

...the beast is indeed back and rocking in that patented blue cheer way that all layabouts of a certain inclination know and love and have dug for many a year...unlike a lot of combos that keep on chugging along/reform periodically these cheer cats know that the job of getting 'outta focus' a serious undertaking and should only be attempted by solid stoners on a mission...obviously after all this time, over 40 years the playing has gotten more precise and refined but the urgent and insistent cheer groove that was present on the first 3 LPs is still in place (unlike those 80's wax that didn't really meet the required standard demanded from anything remotely connected to the cheerian name)...bad trip guitar screach and seismic thuds creep and crawl over an hours worth of da-blues, gospel and stoner swill which enhances a heavy bong hit to gonesville every time its spun...

janis joplin

2010-01-06T02:44:00.000-08:00

...this is janis out in frisco and surrounding' environs in the early 1960s, roundabout late 62/63 working alone and with a couple of other long forgotten beatnix, which is where the disk title comes in as although this ain't strictly north beach clubs and coffee houses as such it is north beach in its outlook, its beatsville all the way...made up of tunes from old weird amerikkka (kinda like the stuff mother mccrees were putting down), its full of 1920's blues/country blues/hokum and folk ditties that came down the pike to be rescued by the revivalists of the left back in the late fifties...real nice hours worth of janis just wailing and strumming for a few select layabouts in the know, essential listening to see that her vocal style was already intact before she hooked up with those freakrockers big brother, their ampage would just give her the strength to make it bigger ready to blow away the ballroom crowd...

...recordings made around the winter of '63 in various beatnik holes on grant avenue where the layabouts hung out grooving on old time country blues, still hung over from the folk revival...janis is accompanied by different cats but mainly the show, even at this early stage belongs to her, wailing out like some undiscovered blues singer from the nineteen twenties...hopped up on some good mexican reefer janis is connecting with the ghosts from long gone hazy days, coming on like an old victrola shellac brought to life, breathing existance and new meaning into songs that had been lost for 30 years (or at least untill harry smith got busy)...cats who've heard some early janis will want to dig this and cats who ain't got down with this period are going to flip at how good it is, these jams are real, not phony and polite folk warbling...

...taped at jormas pad in mid '64 this is a fine quality sounding glimpse at pre frisco hippy fame jamming just for the fun of it all...jorma's picking is real nice and janis grooves along easy if slightly tentatively while margaretta k. provides some avant style percussion via her typewriter...this all has a special beatnik vibe that is a must to hep cats digging the change from '50s culture to free speech vietnam '60s...a short but special token from bygone times and could sit real well next to mother mccrees disk...

...from the start the sound quality is very good and the tunes are real cool...sam andrew provides a great reminder of big brother with his psycho-ballroom guitar screach and the rest of the kozmic combo kick up a funky racket...the whole thing kicks off with a fairly upbeat janis being interviewed for swedish broadcast...recorded april 1969 at the start of janis's euroland jaunt...dig it all, indeed all cats must...

...very nice audience tape from when janis appeared for the first and only time in london during april 69 as the last date of her euroland tour...during the breaks in the tunes we hear the cats round the taper giving forth with opinions etc, all helping the evening into the NOW so the listener kind of gets the vibe this is the first time for all concerned, let the show unfold (once more)...the audience really dig janis and are totally on it with enthusiasm all the way through, they dig the attitude and realness that flows from performer to the gathered mass of heads and rock royalty(beatles/stones pay homage to the blues shouter from the new world)...janis lays down a few of her patented raps, and tells all that she really digs the london groove, its where its AT...this is history going down here as janis is accepted in the capital of HIP...the kozmic blues band are a bit lumbering in places but then they'd been gigging most of the year(and would work solid to the end of it) so it aint surprising...

...its with this slice that we see jj starting to work for the suits as they get busy with shenanigans to turn her into something she's not, which is a cross between stax review hambone and a sultry nightclub chanteuse...it's easy to see with hindsight which is always 20/20 where the leaches thought they were heading and how the cash might be gotten from citizens reading about this new music wild woman but it really didn't jibe with her mentality to be any of these things...it's a good enough wax, as all joplin disks are worthier than most but the hysterical pleading soul (here soul should be applied advisedly, as a style more than a feeling, which of course she had plenty of) vibe was not really the way that was needed as others had and would do this much better...another example of muddleheaded thinking going the wrong way down a one way street...in another universe far far away she gave the suits the finger and stayed with the cats who knew her and loved what she could do...

...janis and her full tilt boogie are experiencing some sound problems during this gig and in fact surely it sounds like the stage is still being built at one point, but with that taken into consideration this is a mostly great blowout of funky janis getting down with the groove...though being in the middle of a heavy touring schedule and tired of travelling she extols the virtues of rock'n'roll and tries to get the audience to get loose, not to be so uptight, she's come to rock and she needs everyone to let go and boogie down on the one (renta-pig trouble seems to be going on when the audience do actually start the freak dance)...her band let rip with some great (nearly) mind fried rock but if anything is happening its that big brother could easily stayed working with janis, they would have kicked out the jams just like theearly days, cats needing some proof only need check as far as the last track for the stone solid truth of the matter, dig how BB would have slammed this groove into the rightous place where the stoned soul beatnik lives...during some of janis' raps it comes obvious that stardom don't sit too well with her, she'd be better as part of a collective effort, like BB&HC, but by now its too late to stop the media circus (it would stop for janis in a couple months but that was a heavy price for freedom), janis needs the support of equals not a backing band, hired in for one reason, to supply the sound but not the comradeship, not the vibes, janis needs a reciprocal situation with all the cats pulling in the same direction...janis is behind some southern comfort, giving her the courage and impetus to get up on stage, but she'd been a whole lot more groovy with the holding co. and some reefer, really being able to soar to the heavens on an electric-freak-jazz-R&B groove, she'd be totally at one with the universe, not alone earthbound, hanging out with squares most days...getting down to the facts, this show gives 100% of what was and what could have been, the groove is loose but could have been more out there, communicating on a different level, a more aware level, audience and band as one intermingling mind/body/soul taking off for the planets, a sun ra trip for hippys....as an aside dig the MC at the end treating the audience as a commodity, telling them when to stand up then telling them to sit down, what a square...

...janis and her band are late going on tonight and the MC has to abate the crowd with some explaination about having had their gear stolen earlier in the day and a new bunch of equipment had to be found and that is why the show is late starting...anyone totally believing this must have the gear with them because a load of hippies stealing equipment lock stock and barrel is somewhat hard to swallow, their general ineptitude makes for the deal to go wrong before it's started...more likely janis was too strung out to get with the time to get on stage and get some rocking going...when they do get on stage they get down with some funk soul rock screech and janis gives off some down home urban shouting and the audience settle in for a late evening with the 'wicked woman', the rock goddess who will set them free from the constraints of a straight jacket society...unfortunately for janis she could not set herself free from society or the life that was mapped out for her by unscrupulous bread heads at the record company or management (the wonderfully exploitative al grossman) so she sank into the booze and smack which bought on entirely new problems so the vicious circle of society / alcohol / heroin kept on turning, least till early october 1970 when some kind of sweet relief was offered and taken...the gig represented by an audience recording on this early boot is from august 12 and was to be her last public engagement and she's kind of getting really wired, giving off some extreme vibrations like she's reaching for something / someone unobtainable yet she continually strives but never comes to the end of the quest...the set list is familiar and the raps between songs have all been heard before, interestingly the audience seem not to get any prurient enjoyment from the joplin expose raps so that must be down to the 'sophisticated boston' hick town mentality more than anything else closer to home...the band are getting some of janis frenetic energy which they translate into some heavy soul blasting, letting rip trying to carry janis further, to the place she so wants to be, to the now unachievable nirvana...

...released in 1972 this double waxing consists of one slice with big brother from '68 and the quicky reunion in early 70 with the other being recordings with full tilt crew recorded on the great train trip of the same year...with the big brother sides the first track kicks things off in top fashion with great freak-screach-guitar backing janis's belting vocal and the whole kaboodle is a blast the whole way...what is really fine and dandy are the raps that joplin lays on the eager audience which more than make up for the obvious fact that this was really no more than a record company exploito cash in...

...a very nice and goodly snootfull of exploito mop up on these 2 coasters consisting of some patented chipper freak-screach from big brother and some plaintive blues belting from jj's later days...a sad last look at what was once a beautiful freaky proposition...well cool stuff and worthy of some spintime in any cats book...

seeds

2010-01-05T20:25:00.000-08:00

...one of the most sussed rock'n'roll combos of all time...these cats had the sus from the getgo when all others had not a clue...in the city of the angels the beatnix, hooligans and riffraff galore came to check the seeds whose talents were legendary on the burgeoning underground scene and also with the local top40 following chicks...one, and possibly their most important talent was conceptual continuity in the riff department and cosmic life affirming poetry...when it came to recycling riffs the seeds had and have no competition...these cats wrote the greatest rocking riff ever with 'pushin' too hard' from the first LP and they had the forsight to know that a riff if used correctly will last a lifetime...the use of the phrase 'night 'n day' shows frontman sky had a cosmic awareness that the sun will shine in the morning allowing for another day to follow the previous night, a wonderful sense of the positive allowing for light to shine at the end of the dark tunnel that often envelops the troubled soul...another talent was becoming the stones during the lady jane velvet collar period...if ever a small rest was taken from the riff that ruled these cats had visions they were the stones of the sunset strip and became wistful and hep with beautiful chelsea kings road vibrations which in turn lead to sneaky hep lyrics that included many pharmaceutical references...the main track on this platter has got to be the 14 minute jam that ends the proceedings, showing that they knew the moves in trance jamming(possibly)better than the velvets and thats a monumental feat in any cats estimation...one of the truely bossest combos to ever walk the walk of the hollywood alleyways in the dangerous hours between night and day...

...3rd LP from these LA punksters, doyens of the sunset strip, dropped in early '67, just in time to cash in on the emerging flower power craze that was hitting big in certain locales (sky has tried many times in the past to claim credit for starting the whole flower power shenanigans, skys belief in his own importance to groovy times is paramount to understanding the incredible vibe that comes from these tunes)...extremely cool sounds that really need the headphones to get that extra buzz...some punk snobs dont want to deal with this one, as its a bit off the tracks thats normally trodden by this combo, what with all the sound of extra instuments in the background that help give it that hep summer of love vibration, but if and a cat reads the liner notes they'll see that any other sounds not emanating from the group is purely in the listeners head, so that clears that up...great wax and still lots of fun with skys up to the minute flower poetry...

honey ltd / eve

2010-01-05T20:06:00.001-08:00

...a little known LP that came and went on the LHI label out of hollywood in 1968, so small was the stock copy it may not have actually been properly released to joe public...its real punchy studio produced off kilter sunshine pop, a disturbed lounge groove, but the lyrics are the thing to check with this biscuit...anti vietnam and drug comedowns are whats going on and that aint too usual with this kind of gear...cats digging the mamas'n'papas when they were messed up and falling apart will get a strong buzz off the grooves...mainly self penned (with a great version of louie louie) and compliments other efforts that could be deemed similar such as the feminine complex from nashville who were getting their one and only disk ready roundabout the same time...a mighty fine sound and extremely worthwhile and thats a fact...

...when honey ltd called it a day sometime in '69 a few months went by as they individually looked around the hollywood scene to get the vibes, to pick up on the groove and maybe grab a piece of the latest trend, the laurel canyon laid back and funky style which was grabbing imaginations and mood of the times...again there's a nice amalgam of vibes from carole-king-style-tapestry-mellow-R&B to gospel in a delaney&bonnie downhome-hollywood reefer haze...country-soul rocking lounge moves suit the studio musos attitude to doing the session, but if they'd had some younger cats laying down a groove this would have been a stoned buzz (maybe the LA GETAWAY cats, joel scott-hill/johnny babata/chris ethridge would be cool)...like with the honey ltd wax there's more going on here than just the tunes, theres a mixing of generational styles, but they could not push it to the younger set who were digging joni/CSNY/ronstadt, plus others who're too lame to mention(remember)...the cover with its handmade look was certainly in vogue with the denim-funky-cheesecloth ideas but seems somehow already out of date, it looked like they were faking it but in many ways they were a precursor to the coming decade when the record company squares discovered cocaine and tried to peddle M.O.R as hip and vital sounds, though that ain't no reflection on this wax...again on the LHI imprint and its fate was sealed from day one, it sank without a trace, not even getting as far as the bargain bin, this wax just didn't like to travel past the sunset strip...

loading zone / sons of champlin

2010-01-05T19:52:00.000-08:00

...from san francisco, back in the day these jazzy hippy cats laid down a solid offering of horn rock with plenty of soul and R'n'B flavour to keep it flowing...doesn't completely connect on first or second hearing but run it through a few times and gradually the juice is rinsed out and the whole thing perculates real nice...loading zone were regular on the ballroom scene in old 'frisco and any cat can see they would kicked it with a mighty roar live...

...this freewheeling frisco r&b rock and soul funky green machine knocked out this happening piece of horn rocked vibed double biscuit in late '68...real punchy sound full of goodly hep jazzbo rocking grooves and social hippy lyrics make this a nice trip...turned out to be their finest hour as they never really captured the groove again and the enthusiasm thats sprawling out here was never this immediate on later wax...dig this long lost early biscuit from these reefered beatnix...

cleanliness and godliness skiffle band / notes from the underground / ph. phactor / new tweedy brothers

2010-01-05T08:06:00.000-08:00

...the cleanliness and godliness skifflers were a folk/ country folk/ hokum/ jazz ensemble specialising in combining all the above labels into one whole LP, their only LP under this name, which is an entirely satisfying half hour of string strumming grooves...there's a fine good humour pervades throughout, dig the title, getting into all corners, everywhere there's a good buzz going down...terrific playing but not at all studied, well suited to being on the vanguard label, and not so on elektra, that label though magnificent tended to come on a as somewhat serious organisation, vanguard always had room for a smidgen of fun at least in amongst all the worthy folkies and balladeers...the masked marauders disk came to life via strange circumstances, starting off as no more than a review of a fictitious album involving such luminary cats as mick jagger/ john lennon/ bob dylan all knocking out some tunes in the studio, for fun and no more...the review, basically making fun of the new bootleg record craze that was happening with everyone falling over themselves to get some unheard dylan tracks, or get hold of the beatles album that apple won't release, driving themselves crazy with desire for this new form of record (illegal)...when the review was published in 'rolling stone' magazine cats started wondering where they could get this disk and after some enquiries at the magazine office came to no avail it was decided that may be it didn't exist...then out of nowhere appeared this strange looking record accredited to the masked marauders so it did exist after all, only this didn't have dylan/lennon/jagger exalting in the wax, but it did have the cleanliness skifflers cutting a few tunes in the style of the 'superstars' (a seriously big hit of hash is needed to really think this has bob/john/mick on it)...it did not sell anyway as the vibe for the disk had depleted in a few weeks and so it went to the cutout bin and into obscurity, surfacing in the late seventies during the punk years but to no real applause, just another hippy prank...

...if a quick piece of journalistic shorthand can be employed for sake of brevity the notes represent nothing less than a hippyfied amalgam of american musics of the twentieth century (and by extension back aways before the dawn of the nineteen hundreds)...jug band and blues rub noses with jazz (both old and modern get a look in), bluegrass twang, plus a liberal dose of hokum, with lyrically this being a solid gasser, dope humour falling over itself with cool fun...these cats get nice and blurred in the studio with copious green being consumed to get that tight but mellow vibe, it's all flowing with groovy karmic vibrations to give the righteous cat a kiss on the chakra, these cats are solid players but never to the point of staid, there's a loose feel hanging over the preceedings...produced by no lesser personage than sam charters, bluesologist and country joe / fish studio handler, this wax has a few hippy tricks up its sleeve, fazing and echo to name but two effects that come on most welcomely, nicely nice...this was the only long play record they managed to get out but a small and beautifully formed masterpiece of late sixties frisco counter culture rock...

...the marvelously named ph. phactor were one of those 'frisco' bands that were on the periphery of the transition from folk rock to ballroom psych, the place where early dead / !great society! / early big brother meet...hailing from further up the west coast the phactor got themselves hooked up with the hippy explosion coming from the acid soaked streets of san francisco and managed to parley their jug band shenanigans into a one off single 45 deal, choosing to cover an old country blues standard, 'minglewood blues' which went promptly into obscurity with the band, after a few gigs to their name, following closely behind...what did eventually turn up in the late 70s was a semi bootleg LP of italian extraction (copywrite laws not applying in this 'forward thinking' country) consisting of a few tunes they managed to lay down before oblivian called as it did for so many cool combos at the end of the 'sign a hippy band' record company frenzy...a very nice assortment of sounds all based around the blues/jazz/hokum/psych axis, all given a shot through with some righteous reefer humor, making for a good feeling each and every time its spun...

...these cats seem to have the right idea when it came to laying down the tuneage and that's to keep any pretentions of 'production' and any other such fangly-dangly ideas of 'improvement' well away from the case in hand...with the tweedys they come into the room, switch the tape on and record the racket, that's all that's needed with them, it's already in the sound, the vibe is locked into how they play, the right combination is stirred in at source point, not after or during recording...it's only combos who ain't sure of their worth that need help in the sound dept....here's a right nice amalgam of beatnik folk and goodtime vibes fed through a kaleidoscope of grooves taking in such high priests of swill as the elevators and the velvets and mixing it with some hep gaggle from such chilled combos such as 'everpresent fullness'/'notes from the underground'/'charlatans'...failing to schmooz any and all record co. cuboids or parlez their wares into some stretched out ballroom psych has ensured they've become enshrined in west coast mythology...came in a box as we all know, good things come in small packages...