Author Archive

Various Artists “Zabriskie Point Original Soundtrack”

| Prog,Psych

All three major American counterculture movies of the late sixties benefitted from the new vogue for rock soundtracks. The Strawberry Statement mixed purpose-written orchestral themes with mostly familiar numbers by CS&N and Neil Young, plus the predictable but appropriate Something In The Air and Give Peace A Chance. Easy Rider thrummed along to a more eclectic but still fitting selection from Dennis Hopper’s record collection: Steppenwolf, Hendrix, the Byrds and stoned oddities from the Holy Modal Rounders and the Electric Prunes. But maverick director Michelangelo Antonioni’s choices for Zabriskie Point are more enigmatic, and the story of their choosing more bewildering.

The film itself, part wilfully perverse take on the late sixties student unrest, part classic road movie and part soft-porn skinflick, has been analysed to death; you either love it or hate it. The soundtrack album by contrast has received few reviews and deserves examination in these pages. The story goes that Antonioni commissioned the then hot acts Pink Floyd, John Fahey and Kaleidoscope (US) to create new music for various scenes in the film including the notorious desert love scene, which they duly did, and then summarily rejected almost all of this when delivered, instead delving into the back catalogues of these acts and others. (According to legend, the spurned Fahey was so affronted he decked the director forthwith.) The lengthy, dusty love scene was eventually orchestrated by Jerry Garcia’s solo guitar improvisations, and even then Antonioni insisted on a fussy edit compiled from four different improvs for the final seven-minute opus.

Perhaps the oddest thing is that despite all these creative shenanigans the soundtrack still works, both in the movie and as a long-player. Floyd’s opening Heart Beat, Pig Meat is an organ-driven sound collage that contains enough menace to convey the tension as the students discuss the upcoming strike, and their soft, Byrdsy Crumbling Land provides a fleeting but apt background to the start of Daria’s desert odyssey in the Buick though, as Dave Gilmour admitted, it could have been done better by any number of American bands. A brief spiralling segment of the Dead’s live Dark Star accompanies Mark’s liftoff of the stolen Cessna from the airfield at LA, while Fahey’s Dance Of Death, which is somewhat discordant but isn’t actually very morbid, plays after Daria hears over the radio of Mark’s gunning-down by the cops on his return to the airfield. Patti Page’s venerable Tennessee Waltz is an inspired choice for the old rednecks in the desert truckstop (and would cost Antonioni a small fortune to licence from the State, which owned the copyright). Garcia’s sweet, restrained playing provides a genuinely sensitive background to the balletically-choreographed desert orgy. And of course the explosive climax is tailor-made for Floyd’s climactic Careful With That Axe, Eugene, which appears in a re-recording unfortunately inferior to the wonderful original single B-side and with the alternative title Come In Number 51, Your Time’s Up. The two Kaleidoscope tunes Brother Mary and Mickey’s Tune, Roscoe Holcombe’s down-home I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again and the Youngbloods‘ Sugar Babe are all excellent, delightfully obscure country rock items which accompany various highway scenes out in the Mojave.

The movie also featured Keith Richards’s bluesy You Got The Silver, which for licensing reasons never appeared on the OST album, and Roy Orbison’s splendid but inappropriate So Young which played over the closing titles and was allegedly added at post-production without Antonioni’s permission, and is hence with some justification also omitted. The 2-CD Sony reissue offers on its first disc all the other soundtrack tunes in complete form apart from the truncated Dark Star, and on the other the four complete Garcia improvs and four pieces of the rejected Floyd material, most of which are interesting enough but sound rather raw and unfinished, presumably not having being polished up for the final takes, and hence really for Floyd completists only. The CD booklet offers as cover picture a bizarre solarised still of the film’s two principals au naturel and a really excellent essay on the soundtrack by David Fricke.

“Crumbling Land”

:) Original Vinyl | 1970 | MGM | search ebay ]
:) CD Reissue | 2010 | Sony | buy here ]
8-) Spotify link | listen ]

The Graham Bond Organization “The Sound of 65”

| Blues,Classic Rock,RnB

It’s a matter of record that the British Blues Boom of the sixties – as discrete from British Rhythm˜n’Blues, a similar but different beast – was originally created not by former rock’n’roll or Beat musicians but principally by ex-jazz players searching for a new authentic music. Its earliest practitioners came to the blues via skiffle, the ersatz rural American folk movement of the mid-fifties; subsequent ones via the brief vogue for revivalist traditional jazz at the turn of the sixties. Furthermore, the Blues Boom began not, as popularly thought, with erstwhile jazzman John Mayall’s landmark 1966 album Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton, but with the formation of Alexis Korner’s influential, ever-mutating Blues Incorporated in 1961. Bluesbreakers may be the defining record of the British Blues Boom, the one that induced a whole regiment of Beat guitarists to emulate Muddy, Wolf and BB, but by the time it hit the decks the ground had already been prepared by other former jazzers, notably Korner and his acolyte, the larger-than-life, manic-depressive Hammond organist Graham Bond.

Bond had started out as a bebop alto saxophonist in Charlie Parker vein, but at the turn of the sixties he switched to organ and, along with other high-profile jazz instrumentalists, began to concentrate on the twelve-bar form. Enlisting fellow Korner alumni Jack Bruce on upright and Fender basses, Ginger Baker on drums and (after rapidly firing early guitarist John McLaughlin) Dick Heckstall-Smith on tenor sax, Bond christened his outfit the Graham Bond ORGANisation, leaving no doubt where the engine room lay. The band immediately became a live tour-de-force on the London club circuit but, as with so many other artists who are ahead of their time, failed to find commercial success in terms of record sales; its albums weren’t even released in North America, where the whole concept of British Blues was initially treated as a joke. The ORGANisation lasted for two studio albums before disbanding shortly after Bruce and Baker, finding the bipolar Bond too difficult a taskmaster, departed for new challenges.

Compared with the straight-ahead purist electric blues of Bluesbreakers, the earlier Sound Of 65 shows a band attempting engagingly to pervert the blues in every conceivable direction. It combines the expected traditional blues covers (Hoochie Coochie Man, Got My Mojo Working) and instrumental R’n’B workouts (Wade In The Water, Train Time), reworked in distinctive, individual fashion, with lyrically naïve but musically adventurous Bond originals which move confidently in the direction of what would later be called jazz-rock. All the tracks are carried along by the sheer, rough-edged energy of Bond’s vocals and the irrepressible swing of the band’s ensemble playing, plus a remarkable cheap-studio production with plenty of reverb that gives the impression of a live recording. In fact the album was the ORGANisation’s well-honed live set with each number pared down to three minutes or less, the solos from Bond’s growling B-3 and Heckstall-Smith’s squalling tenor short and ferocious rather than extended and building. High spots include the flavouring of Wade In The Water with more than a soupçon of Bach’s Toccata, the spoof field holler of Early In The Morning, Bruce’s rumbling upright bass figures on Mojo, Bond’s and Heckstall-Smith’s wailing snake-charmer licks on Spanish Blues, and the eerie Baby Make Love To Me which is carried on just harmonised saxes, bass and drums and boasts lead vocal and braggadocio harmonica from Bruce. Only the mandatory (and thankfully truncated) Baker drum solo on Oh Baby and the maudlin closer Tammy (intended as a commercial single) conspire to lower the overall appeal.

The second and final ORGANisation album There’s A Bond Between Us offered a slightly wider musical range played with a bit less verve, and Bond’s pioneering use of the Mellotron (before the Beatles, Stones and Moody Blues discovered it) presaged his move towards progressive music. After an erratic subsequent career and involvement with hard drugs and Satanism he was mysteriously found dead under a stationary London Underground train in 1974: a sad end to one of rock’s most colourful characters. The BGO twofer combining both studio albums is a bargain; for a flavour of the band’s live sound, try Solid Bond, the posthumous Rhino release featuring the short-lived final line-up of Bond, Heckstall-Smith and Jon Hiseman.

“Baby Make Love to Me”

:D CD Reissue | 2008 | Repertoire | buy here ]
:) Original Vinyl | 1965 | Columbia | search ebay ]

Twink “Think Pink”

| Psych

You may not recognise the name John Charles Alder, but his musical DNA is already deeply ingrained within these pages. Drummer, percussionist and all-round looner Twink, whose nickname was bestowed by his waggish friends because his mass of (naturally) curly hair suggested a 1960s home perm product, thumped the tubs for psych maestros Tomorrow, kept time for the Pretty Things around the time of SF Sorrow and later became one half of the twin-kit power train of the Pink Fairies. Somehow amongst all this collective activity Twink also found time to record his only solo album, recorded in July 1969 and released on Polydor the following year. Besides being engaging in its own right, Think Pink is historically notable as perhaps the last hurrah of genuine old-school UK psychedelia.

Twink was a prominent member of the unique musical scene that sprang from the Notting Hill hippie enclave of the late sixties, characterised by a strong communal music-making spirit that placed enthusiasm above virtuosity and evinced a propensity for playing free concerts at every possible opportunity. The music was inevitably pharmaceutically influenced and displayed a reluctance to let go the elements of freakbeat and psychedelia, long after the more highbrow practitioners of those genres had progressed to the gentility of prog-rock. The likes of the (Social) Deviants, the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind retained a penchant for high volume, pounding rhythms, ultra-fuzzed guitars, simple, repetitive chord structures and lyrics of the most lysergic variety, and the musicians would meld and interchange seamlessly at each others’ live jams and recording sessions.

Think Pink, coming between Twink’s involvements with the Pretties and the Fairies, not surprisingly features contributions from the former’s John Povey, Viv Prince and Vic Unitt and the latter’s Paul Rudolph and Russell Hunter, as well as John Junior Wood from Tomorrow, John Honk Lodge from Junior’s Eyes and numerous other local acquaintances. Twink’s chief compositional collaborator was erstwhile Tyrannosaurus Rex conga-thumper Steve Peregrine Took. This motley crew, together with their various mind-expanding substances, produced a rambling collection of wigged-out chants, whimsical nonsense rhymes, wry fuzzed-up instrumentals, cross-legged acoustic workouts and genuine psych gems that defies any homogeneous description but will bring a nostalgic tear to the eyes of any former freak-culture adherent (if you can remember being there, that is). Production was by the Deviants’ mainman Mick Farren, and although production quality is pretty good it still sounds as if a hell of a party was enjoyed whilst the recordings were going down.

The album states its intent on the opener The Coming Of The One which simulates an acid trip more closely than anything else I’ve ever heard, with whacked-out wailings backed by backwards sitars and tablas. The cover of Twink’s own 10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box from his Aquarian Age days is far, far heavier than the original and features the first of many examples of downright Stratocaster/Big Muff abuse from Rudolph. Tiptoe On The Highest Hill has a similar feel to the Floyd’s Careful With That Axe, Eugene but offers Mellotron and various contrasting guitar sounds, whilst the following Fluid features Twink’s lady Silver on orgasmic moans (it’s better than that makes it sound, honest). Mexican Grass War fades in with a sinister military snare drum march and random guitar noise and builds to a percussion tour-de-force, while the anarchic Three Little Piggies is as silly as it sounds and could have been Syd Barrett on even more acid. Like I said, the whole package defies easy description (though the estimable Julian Cope described it splendidly as one trippy, hobbitty mindf*ck of the highest water) but remains relentlessly listenable to folk of a certain age and disposition.

The only CD reissue I’ve been able to find is clearly a bootleg on the Collector’s Digitally (sic) Recordings imprint from somewhere behind the former Iron Curtain. Somehow, however, I don’t think Twink and friends would be all that concerned.

“Mexican Grass War”

:D CD Reissue | 2001 | Akarma | buy here ]
:) Vinyl Reissue | 2001  | Akarma | search ebay ]
8-) Spotify link | listen ]

Michaelangelo “One Voice Many”

| Baroque,Folk,Psych

The use of the humble autoharp in rock may come as a surprise. Isn’t that the triangular doodad your elementary school teacher used to pull out of the cupboard to strum along to class sing-a-longs of Go Tell Aunt Rhody? And why take an instrument specifically designed for simplicity and bust a gut to play complicated stuff on it? Nevertheless, several intriguing instances of its use have come to light on rare albums from the late sixties and early seventies.

A zither is a small harp with its strings stretched across its soundbox; it has a beautiful, ethereal ringing sound, but is fiendishly difficult to play. To simplify matters, someone came up with the idea of spring-loaded bars that could be pressed down on to the strings so that felt pads under each bar deadened all the strings except those needed to sound a certain chord. Thus the auto-harp was born, and bingo “ a simple rhythm instrument with from 3 to 21 chords, each available at the press of a button. Almost immediately other folks started working out how to put all the complexity back into the autoharp by using it for playing melodies, and some of those Appalachian guys got pretty good at this despite the instrument’s patent unsuitability for this purpose. Then a genial sixties folksinger called John Sebastian customised his harp with an electric pickup, and rock autoharp was born. Sebastian’s playing was fairly limited, but a certain Billy Miller developed an astonishing electric autoharp technique with his late sixties Texas psych outfit, Cold Sun.

Classically-trained pianist and autoharp enthusiast Angel Petersen probably never heard of Billy Miller, but she certainly caught John Sebastian toting his harp around the Village and forthwith obtained a similar electric 15-bar model, making it the centrepiece of the mildly psychedelic folk-rock combo she christened Michaelangelo, after the name she’d already given her harp. In 1971 Michaelangelo (the group) came to the notice of Columbia Records through a fortuitous meeting with electronic music producer Rachel Elkind and her partner, the synthesiser genius Wendy Carlos of Switched-On Bach fame. An album, One Voice Many, was cut in New York with Elkind and Carlos producing, and the band’s major label future should have been assured. However, the story goes that Columbia president Clive Davis was perpetually at loggerheads with Elkind and conspired to have the album suppressed. It was released but received absolutely no record label backup and quickly disappeared. Dispirited, the band dissolved soon afterwards and the album became a collector’s rarity until reissued on CD almost forty years later.

Although likely to be described in current-day reviews as Acid Folk, One Voice Many’s signature sound is predominantly folk-Baroque, with the autoharp frequently sounding more like a harpsichord than the Fender Rhodes-like tone of Billy Miller, particularly on the Bach-influenced instrumentals Take It Bach and 300 Watt Music Box. Elsewhere, it sounds not unlike a Farfisa organ. Either way, there’s nothing remotely schoolmarmish about Petersen’s virtuoso playing. The picture of the band on the cover shows an earnest, studious-looking quartet, and the carefully-arranged music within generally bears this out, though it’s by no means sombre and there are some rocking and even exhilarating touches. The autoharp’s main foil is Steve Bohn’s clean, countrified electric guitar, and the two frontline players interweave their lines exquisitely within the four instrumental numbers. On the six songs, Petersen’s and Bohn’s respective lead vocals are workmanlike rather than attention-grabbing, but when harmonised and multi-tracked they produce a breezy, floating Harpers Bizarre-style texture. The highlights for me are the opening funky country-rocker West, the tinkling, twinkling 300 Watt Music Box, the pulsating generation-gap rocker Son (We’ve Kept The Room Just The Way You Left It) and the shameless sunshine pop of Okay with its whistled accompaniment. Avoid the 2007 Fallout bootleg and go for the 2009 Rev-Ola licensed pressing.

“Son (We’ve Kept the Room Just the Way You Left It)”

:D CD Reissue | 2009 | Revola | buy here ]
:) Original Vinyl | 1971 | Columbia | search ebay ]

Zerfas “Zerfas”

| Prog,Psych

Until recently this one was completely unknown to me; I bought it after reading a glowing recommendation from a Rising Storm commenter (nice to see the process working in both directions.) Gratifyingly, it turned out to be as good as its reputation.

It’s better still for being a vanity release from a bunch of unsigned but clearly precociously talented teenagers. It was lovingly cut over six months in 1973 at the tiny 700 West Studio in New Palestine, Indiana, using a four-track 3M recorder, plenty of overdubs, a lot of homemade wine and a hell of a lot of creative ingenuity. There’s no need for me to give a detailed historical perspective of the band, the album or the studio here, because it’s all available at the excellent website dedicated to 700 West and I couldn’t improve on that compiler’s excellent job.

Interestingly, the band members chose to add colour to their 1969-British-prog-rock style songs with the techniques of 1967 psychedelia, and the album stands as a fine psych/prog artefact despite being several years behind the timeline. The fun starts with You Never Win, which opens with a fade-in backwards version of the closing fade-out “ a simple but brilliant idea. I Don’t Understand launches with an eerie half-speed recording of small children’s voices, whilst the meandering instrumental heart of Hope is washed by shoreline effects. Much use is made elsewhere of backwards voices, backwards instruments, fade-outs, fade-ins, wild stereo panning, ring modulators, tape loops and leftfield echo effects, and even a blast from an elkhorn. However, the underlying compositions don’t rely solely on these touches for interest; the eight songs, all originals, offer an engaging variety of styles from the Born To Be Wild knockoff of You Never Win through the cosmic boogie of Stoney Wellitz to the lush progressive soundscapes of Hope, culminating in The Piper which appropriately recalls Pink Floyd’s earliest stoner offerings. The playing and singing are excellent throughout, especially considering the tender ages of the musicians; Herman Zerfas’s keyboards in particular are exceptional.

The word on the street among other reviewers of this album is that it’s the record the Beatles might have made if they’d stuck with the psychedelic formula after Pepper. Personally, I don’t buy this; these youthful compositions lack the distinctively whimsical signatures of the mature Lennon, McCartney and Harrison. To my ears there’s some Floyd influence, some Grape, some Dead, some Steppenwolf, some Allmans, maybe even some Steve Miller, but really such comparisons are unnecessary. This is a fine album by a fine band in its own right, and should be respected as such.

Finally, be sure to ignore the CD release by Radioactive, which is purportedly mastered from vinyl and has a poor sound to suit. The Digipak CD from Lion Records of Germany is another bootleg to be avoided.

“Stoney Wellitz”

:) Vinyl Reissue | 2008 | Phoenix | buy here ]

White Noise “An Electric Storm”

| Art,Electronic,Psych

One of the strangest releases of 1969 was this collaboration between David Vorhaus, an American orchestral double-bass player and composer with a background in avant-garde classical music, and Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, a pair of sound-effects engineers from the BBC’s Radiophonic workshop, providers of themes and incidental sounds for such shows as Out Into Space and Doctor Who. What drew these unlikely bedfellows together was a shared desire to create experimental electronic art music, at a time when Bob Moog’s early experiments in the US were still barely getting off the ground and available electronic sound generators were limited to military surplus oscillators and simple home-built circuits. The process involved endlessly overlaid electronic tones, percussion, vocal tracks and found sounds, assembled into recognisable pieces via hundreds of tape edits on a bank of six two-track Revoxes.

So what has all this to do with rock’n’roll? Well, the demos produced by Vorhaus and Co. stirred unexpected interest from Chris Blackwell, the innovative proprietor of Island, the burgeoning UK psychedelic/progressive music independent. As a result of its release on that respected imprint, the ensuing album, which took a year to assemble, was taken up by the most hardcore of those admirers of trippy sounds who’d already got past early Pink Floyd, Zappa, the Nice and other leftfield pioneers from the world of rock and who were prepared to tolerate the lack of rock instrumentation and flowing hair in the pursuit of true psychedelic weirdness.

A friend played me this album soon after its release, and I promptly declared it unlistenable. (Mind you, I’d also just declared Lennon’s Revolution 9 and Zappa’s Freak Out unlistenable, so that’s where I was at the time.) Forty years later my liberalised ears find these recordings irresistible. I know it’s a cliché, but this record truly is unlike anything else; probably the nearest thing to it is The United States Of America’s eponymous opus from the previous year, which similarly marries electronics, avant-garde composition and general strangeness but lacks the peculiarly British whimsy, emotional gamut and outrageous sonic variety of An Electric Storm.

Of the seven tracks, only the first five manage to approach conventional song structures. Four of these are quirky love songs involving various permutations of synthesised accompaniments with Ute Lemper-like vocals, the highlight being the simulated group orgasm voiced by a group of male and female vocalists on My Game Of Loving. By contrast Here Come The Fleas is a charming comic interlude reminiscent of the Floyd’s Several Species of Small Furry Animals, festooned with electronic bleeps, clicks and boings. Thereafter, any resemblance between the remaining tracks and music as conventionally understood in terms of harmonic structures is purely accidental. The lengthy, maudlin but beautifully-constructed The Visitation chronicles in cinematic fashion the revisiting of the girl with roses in her eyes by her deceased biker lover, while the closing Black Mass: An Electric Storm In Hell starts with a cod-Black Magic chant which segues into a full-blown, percussion-driven electronic rendering of a hurricane; its seven minutes were allegedly constructed in one evening when Island became impatient for the album’s completion.

If all this sounds difficult, that’s because it undoubtedly is. It’s also compulsive, fascinating and occasionally mind-blowing, and successive CD reissues in 1994 and 2007 indicate that there’s still a market of brave souls out there willing to give it a go. Are you brave enough?

“Your Hidden Dreams”

:D CD Reissue | 2007 | Universal | buy here ]
:) Original Vinyl | 1969 | Island | search ebay ]

Atomic Rooster “Death Walks Behind You”

| Classic Rock,Prog

Although it provided the background to my formative years as a musician, I’d be the first to admit that the late sixties/early seventies first wave of British progressive hard-rock veered wildly between creative sophistication and plodding self-indulgence. For every Led Zeppelin, there was a Black Sabbath; for every Deep Purple, an Edgar Broughton Band. (My apologies to adherents of those two combos.) Somewhere in the middle came the curiously-named Atomic Rooster, whose constantly changing line-up centred on keyboard wizard Vincent Crane released a series of undistinguished albums plus one genuine gem, the sophomore effort Death Walks Behind You.

Classically-trained organist and pianist Crane had been the instrumental cornerstone of wigged-out psych outfit The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, as witness his Hammond histrionics on their eponymous long-player. The Rooster should have satisfied Crane’s search for his own direction but, bedevilled by impatience, musical perfectionism and manic depression, he changed his style and his fellow musicians almost from year to year in search of a constantly moving and unattainable target. The second, and best, line-up teamed Crane with guitarist/vocalist John Cann, a.k.a. Du Cann, and drummer Paul Hammond. Cann had seen through the psychedelic era with Five Day Week Straw People and Andromeda and offered crunching rhythms and flyaway bluesy leads not unlike Ritchie Blackmore, whilst Hammond was a teenage tub-thumper with no real CV but just the sort of no-frills, aggressive style that Crane’s prevailing riff-tastic compositions demanded. In the best Jimmy Smith tradition, Crane played the bass lines on his pedals and on the bass-boosted low keyboard register of his B3. Between them they could sound as full as Deep Purple with two musicians fewer, and usually did.

At first sight slightly unnerving with its Dark Side imagery, but actually surprisingly accessible and in places even commercial “ Tomorrow Night would become a top twenty single in the UK – Death Walks combines mostly straightforward but tightly-executed riff-based chord structures and bass lines with formulaic Gothic horror-inspired lyrics, overlaying these with energetic, optimistic soloing by the two frontmen. The net result is surprisingly up if you don’t take the words too seriously and aren’t put off by the cover art featuring William Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar and clichéd shots of the band in a graveyard. Mostly eschewing the possibilities of overdubbing in the studio, the tracks are largely played live, as evinced by the BBC radio session versions of two of the same tunes offered on the CD reissue as bonus tracks. (I recall hearing that actual session back in the day, and it’s clear that the trio was a hot live act.) The lightest moment is provided by Tomorrow Night with its catchy riff, singalong refrain and brief, soaring solos, whilst the title track is the most ponderous, starting with eerie piano arpeggios and creaking into the most leaden of descending chromatic chord sequences. Cann kicks off the surprisingly funky Sleeping For Years with what became his trademark feedback introduction. The oddly titled Vug and Gershatzer are instrumentals on which the band’s undoubted musicianship is given free rein, Cann and Crane exchanging lines in fine conversational style on the former while the latter confirms that Crane wasn’t far behind Keith Emerson in the deranged virtuosity stakes.

Death Walks proved the commercial and artistic zenith for all three band members. Crane carried an ever-mutating Rooster into the eighties before taking his own life in 1989. Hammond was badly injured in a road accident in 1973 and played only at intervals thereafter. Cann formed a praiseworthy and briefly popular hard-rock quartet, Bullet, a.k.a. Hard Stuff, but moved post-punk   into uninspired power-pop which considerably diluted his talent. Recently he’s overseen the reissue of the Rooster catalogue and associated items on the excellent Angel Air label.

“Sleeping for Years”

:D CD Reissue | 2009 | Castle | buy here ]
:) Original Vinyl | 1970 | B&C | search ebay ]

PODCAST 23 UK Psych

| Podcast,Pop,Psych

THE RISING STORM

Running Time: 56:48 | File Size 78 MB
Download: .mp3
To subscribe to this podcast: https://therisingstorm.net/podcast.xml [?]

UK Psychedelia’s Finest Hour

The rediscovery of British psychedelic music over the last twenty years or so has unearthed a stream of rare recordings from the magic period, 1966-1968. It has to be said that quite a lot of these deserve to remain rare, and that many others have dubious psychedelic credentials, but some excellent previously passed-over stuff has also surfaced on a number of anthologies. The Rising Storm brings you (well, in my humble opinion) UK Psychedelia’s Finest Hour: sixty minutes of whimsy, Baroque, cod-Oriental and just plain electronic madness, all wrapped around lysergically-assisted lyrics and acid-drenched instrumentals. A sitar here, a Mellotron there, everywhere a Fuzz Face. A couple of copper-bottomed hits, a clutch of genuine obscurities and a whole bunch of unexpected curveballs from well-known names just passing through. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.

1. George Martin “Theme One”
2. The Who “Armenia City In The Sky”
3. Nirvana (UK) “Rainbow Chaser”
4. Traffic “Hole In My Shoe”
5. The Beatles “Baby You’re A Rich Man”
6. Tintern Abbey “Vacuum Cleaner”
7. The Ivy League “My World Fell Down”
8. Dantalian’s Chariot “Madman Running Through The Fields”
9. David McWilliams “The Days of Pearly Spencer”
10. Cream “Dance the Night Away”
11. Keith West “Excerpt from a Teenage Opera”
12. The Small Faces “The Universal”
13. Donovan “Hurdy Gurdy Man”
14. The Yardbirds “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”
15. The Aquarian Age “10,000 Words in a Cardboard Box”
16. The Rolling Stones “In Another Land”
17. Pink Floyd “Apples and Oranges”
18. The Pretty Things “Defecting Grey”

Koerner, Ray And Glover “Lots More Blues, Rags And Hollers”

| Americana,Folk,RnB

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but when white musicians decided to copy and adapt
black popular music forms in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties the result was all too often insipid,
sanitised shades of what had been urgent, emotive works. Fortunately there were exceptions:
Koerner, Ray And Glover may have been to all intents and purposes a white Sonny Terry And
Brownie McGee, but their version of the acoustic blues and plantation folk music was no less brash,
enthusiastic and full of energy than that of Sonny and Brownie.

Spider John Koerner, whose nickname allegedly derived from his being built like a harvestman
and walking like one, was an early reviver of the acoustic country blues and acapella field hollers
largely abandoned by the classic black bluesmen when they moved north from the Delta and
embraced electricity. Adeptly picking his weapon of choice, a seven-string non-resonator National
with an octave G string, and singing in a clear, powerful, distinctly non-black voice, engineering
student Koerner developed his catalogue of Leadbelly and similar covers and upbeat, lyrically witty
originals in the coffee houses around the University of Minnesota, frequently performing alongside
a teenage Bob Dylan (who compliments Koerner in Chronicles, Volume One). Encountering fellow
undergrads Snaker Dave Ray, who fingered a rare and mean Martin twelve-string and sang like
Muddy Waters, and Tony Little Sun Glover, a then unusual white exponent of blues harmonica, the
trio became official in time to benefit from the explosion of interest in authentic white folk music
around 1962.

Their first album, Blues, Rags And Hollers, appeared in a limited vanity run in June 1963 and was
quickly snapped up by Elektra for national distribution. The threesome had taped forty songs in one
twelve-hour session, recording as individuals, as duos (either Koerner or Ray with Glover) and just
occasionally as a trio, and when these were trimmed to twenty the resulting record was raw, gutsy,
one-take, down-home acoustic music, its jug-band feel propelled by Koerner’s favoured percussion
instrument, his foot, crisply recorded with plenty of reverb. The second album, Lots More Blues,
Rags And Hollers, appeared a year later. After a third and final collection, The Return Of, in 1965,
the group bowed to the inevitable decline in the popularity of unamplified folk music following the
British Invasion and went their separate ways.

It’s been said that the intensity of Lots More is rather less than that of the debut, but to my ears
the record displays more mature musicianship, classier songs and considerably more originality
in the performances, and thus it’s my preferred platter. Outstanding are Koerner’s solo Whomp
Bom which highlights his outstanding seven-string dexterity and distinctive vocal; the cover of
Muddy’s Honey Bee in which Glover’s buzzing, stinging harp wonderfully complements Ray’s
relaxed vocal and throbbing guitar; and Fine Soft Land on which Ray picks an astonishing riff with
a bottleneck on his twelve-string (only Leo Kottke comes close). Both albums are currently available
individually, augmented with bonus tracks, or as a twofer without the extras. The latter includes a
top-quality insert booklet with the original extensive liner notes plus a fine new retrospective.

Unexpectedly, I recently discovered in a charity shop a private-label reunion album the three players
had cut in 1996: One Foot In The Groove. The style hasn’t changed much; the heads are greyer,
the voices hoarser, but the enthusiasm is still audible in the songs and the twelve-strings chime as
sweetly as ever.

“Honey Bee”

:D CD Reissue | 1999 | Red House | order here ]
:) Original Issue | 1964 | Elektra | search ebay ]
;) MP3 Album | download here ]

Neil Young “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”

| Americana,Classic Rock,Country Rock

This record holds a very special place in my musical affections. In 1969, being still in the grip of the
Beatles, the British Blues Boom and the tail end of the psychedelic era, I hadn’t even heard of Mr
Young. One day whilst idling around London’s West End I strolled into the HMV store in Oxford
Street and heard the long central guitar workout from Down By The River playing over the PA. I
guess in my five decades of record buying I’ve bought an unknown album merely from hearing it
played in a store maybe four, five times; the most recent was Beth Orton’s Trailer Park about eight
years ago. Everybody Knows was my first such purchase. It’s still a mega-favourite.

Why did this record turn out so great? I think it’s a case of simple serendipity; everything seemed
just to fall into place at these sessions. Neil discovered exactly the right backing band, sympathetic
to his muse to an almost uncanny degree, as evinced by the unselfishly solid bass and drum
backing and the almost telepathic interplay between Young’s and Danny Whitten’s guitars. Neil’s
simultaneously fragile and potent voice has never sounded better, and the slightly ragged harmonies
are exquisite. The songs show their composer at a creative summit, and whilst they provide
prototypes for all of his future directions (the perverse electronica of Trans excepted), their variety
is surely unmatched on any single later album; from the distortion-laden proto-grunge of Cinnamon
Girl through the wry cod-Nashville of The Losing End, via the sparse, punky groove of Down
By The River with its crunching, wailing solos, and the understated acoustic beauty of Round
& Round. There’s a vein of sadness and despair that runs all the way through the album like the
lettering through a stick of seaside rock; in particular, Bobby Notkoff’s tremulous Klezmer violin work
on Running Dry should bring a tear to even the most jaundiced eye. And producer David Briggs
achieves a rare and gratifying symbiosis of warmth and clarity on the original vinyl waxing that the
latest CD reissue finally recaptures (earlier ones being less than perfect in this respect).

I know that I’m courting a flurry of comments by opining that Uncle Neil peaked this early in
his career, and that his second solo album is the best of his remarkable forty-year oeuvre. I’ve
subsequently absorbed pretty well all of his stuff from the simple, sunny country-folk of Old Ways
to the teeth-loosening fury of Ragged Glory, and I love and respect the man for the breadth of his
vision and his wilful, capricious determination to choose and change his own direction. However, for
me this one still holds the top spot. That said, anyone who wants to propose another Young opus as
the man’s masterwork is welcome to do so – with reasons given, of course. Over to you . . . .

“Running Dry (Requiem for the Rock)”

:D CD Reissue | 2009 | Reprise | buy ]
:) Vinyl Reissue | 2009 | Reprise | buy ]
:) Original Vinyl |  1969 | Reprise | search ebay ]
8-) Spotify link | listen ]