From Rave-Up To Freak Out Dept. - The Butterfield Blues Band

Chick backing singers were big back then

 

The first rock band to stretch out with live improv was The Yardbirds [not above, have patience - Ed.]. They weren't the first to play US-style RnB, that would probably be Alexis Korner and some fat middle-aged bloke in glasses called Cyril, but it's a stretch to call them a rock group. Or interesting. So probably the Stones. 

But the Yardies [left - Ed.] were having a Rave-Up, as they called it, back in early '64, lifting audiences into a frenzy through improvisation (or playing what the fuck they felt like) rather than just turning up and trying to sound like the records. This was a seismic shift in rock music performance. I have no time for Clapton Cancelers. He's a fantastic and important guitarist and a fine songwriter, so shut up. You should extend him the forgiveness rightly given the old blues guys themselves, who weren't exactly bothered by wokeness. He was the first British rock musician to whip the audience into a froth with an improvised guitar solo, and later, the first to use a Les Paul, creating the sound of hard rock. The Kinks had already built the structure with 'You Really Got Me', in (guess when) '64. Where do Yer Beatles fit in? They don't.

On the other side of the world, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were extending the possibilities of rock guitar by having Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop in the same band. Yikes. Dylan witnessed how their electricity knocked folkies off their chairs at Newport, and got them to back him the next day. Yup. Not The Band.

Their first album [left - Ed.] appeared in '65, an authentic blast of Chicago blues from a rock band format. We need to talk about the cover. Note black dudes, the rhythm section from Howlin' Wolf's touring band. Black and white in the same band back then was pretty unusual. They're pictured standing in front of what looks like a head shop. Incense, herbs, oils ... quacks like a duck, right? But the internet is insistent that the first head shop appeared in '66, one whole year later. Hmm ... The Butterfield Blues Band sure were ahead of their time! A head, geddit?? It's like a play on words! Fuck you. And there's the font, which looks unremarkable today. The Beatles are sometimes credited with the first psychedelic lettering on an album cover (Rubber Soul), but the artist has denied any connection with or knowledge of the nascent psychedelic scene - the letters look like rubber, duh. Here, the great Elektra house designer Harvey S. Williams - carve his name with pride - uses the first recognisably psychedelic font that inspired Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso (and everyone else), two years before the Summer of Love. Does this matter? Of course it does.

But it's their second album from '66 I want to talk about [above top, and about time. I'll be in the bar if you need me, so don't. - Ed.], because it took The Yardbird's improvisational initiative and set a template for rock guitar performance (and, uh, jam bands) ever since. It's a groundbreaking and massively enjoyable album that often gets overlooked. Unlike the Stones' perfunctory eleven minute 'Goin' Home' in the same year - they were never a jam band - the 'East-West' title song is a thirteen minute, dynamically-structured improvisation featuring the raga-influenced playing we associate with '67. And no drum solo. It's totally groovy and far out. There's also a funkified version of the Monkees' 'Mary, Mary' which sounds entirely natural, a jazzy eight minute work-out of 'Work Song', the achingly soulful 'Never Say No', and, of course, some fine Chicago blues greased by Butterfield's raucous harp blowing. There's a live-in-the-studio feel and the whole album sounds as vivid as the day it was recorded.

What happened to relegate this great band to the where-are-they-now file? After a faultless and viscerally exciting couple of years, the PBBB squandered everything through dizzying lineup changes and entirely losing the plot. They went from authentically, unconsciously, psychedelic to Hallmark Hippie in the space of a few months, playing a song called Love March at Woodstock, ffs, adding horns, losing impetus. Blues rock was a global phenom, dominated by Cream, who not only did the extended live improv but had punchy, memorable and exciting hit singles that had nothing to do with the blues. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were yesterday's mashed potato, mostly unrecognised at the time and mostly forgotten since.

Today's deliverables catch them at their prime: the pre-first album recordings, a nifty soundtrack album featuring rare cuts, the first album, and 'East-West'.

 

This post inspired by a random appearance of 'East-West' on the Shuffle-O-Meter© on the road to Sakhorn Nakhon, which isn't pronounced like Foghorn Leghorn.

It's Time To Play The Music Dept.

Yes, by the third album the show was on the ropes. Kermit in rehab, Miss Piggy doing time in the Pork Bend Correctional Facility ... the years on the road had taken their toll. "It wasn't even us on the third album," Kermit says today. "It was a contractual obligation thing, put together without our knowledge. I didn't get a cent from it. None of us did."

Eventually, the band got their act together. Made movies, more TV shows. Garnered an entire new audience as well as welcoming back what was left of their old one. "We're older but wiser," Kermit laughs from his Winnebago on the set of Muppet Yo' Mama. "Sure, we each have our own management, fitness trainers, and once the cameras stop rolling we head for our homes and families. But occasionally I spin that first album, and yeah, I miss those days. We were punk before punk was a thing! I'm proud of that."

 

My thanks to Kermit The Frog for making time for me!

Randy Randomguy's Rusty Refrigerator O' Randomness! Dept.

LEGACY FOAM-O-GRAPH© COURTESY SMUTSONIAN INSTITUTE® - How many Objects Of Appalling Significance do you recognise, readers?

Older readers, which is you, may remember a regliar FoamFeature™ featuring Toxic Male Gazer Randy Randomguy? Or not. Anyway, Randy wants you to list your first ten, or whatever - first one or seven hundred and fifty-three would be jake because NOBODY CARES - songs on your listening device of choice set to shuffle.

Some of youse bums is too dumb to handle the technology, so you can join in the fun by listing the first ten songs you can remember. Or five, whatever. They don't have to be songs. First ten numbers from one to ten, anything. Just engage with the narrative here, okay?

Ed. [left - Ed.] sez: "Farq goes the extra mile to create wholesome content for you lousy freeloading bums, so the least you can do is help his internet initiative go viral by adding a comment, right? How hard can that be? I'M LOOKING AT YOU, FRANKIE FUCKNOSE!"

Well, no, the least you can do is nothing. You're good at that. But it will leave an aching void in your life; a sense of incompletion and underachievement that will cause you untold distress in the final moments of your life. "Oh noes!" you will croak, strapped to a gurney in a grimy service corridor of the Twilight Home as the Grim Reaper strides toward you, "I wish I'd joined in that random song list game on th' IoF©! NURSE! Is it too la- *kaffkaffkaff*" BONK.

Be a come-with guy. Cross the Rainbow Bridge with a light step.

Here's my top ten Rando songs as thrown up by Musicolet™ on a Samsung© entry-level device:

Dormant Love - The Shoes

See It Through - The Charlatans

Junkie Girl - Walter Becker

Ooh Mama Ooh - Moby Grape

Motherly Love - Frank Zappa

Heart Like An Open Book - Michael Franks

Born At The Right Tome - Paul Simon

Quelle Folie - The Sneakers

Back To You - The Flock

Jazz: Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold - The Bonzos

No surprises there, then. Primo lamestream Dad Rock, cut thick, the way you like it.

April Fool Dept.

 

The Fool's only album remains their first and last. To be fair, they weren't musicians first, or even much at all. They were acid-etched rainbow-eyed harbingers of the Aquarian Apocalypse, and the effect they had on Bakelite Britain, all brown ale and fag-ash, was explosive and over almost before it happened, like the Apple Boutique, like a dream.

The music's infinitely better than you might expect, if you're expecting something quite dreadful, and beautifully produced by Graham Nash. Yes, there's finger cymbals and recorders, bagpipes and minstrelsy, and groovy sounds abound, but it's at least as good as The Incredible String Band and/or Doctor Strangely Strange, better than Black Oak Arkansas, and if you let it float into your mind on a cascading breeze of yesterday's unicorns, you'll be a better person. Allmusic gives it four stars, which seems a little mean.

Light a joss stick. Tie a scarf to your tambourine.

 

This post funded in part by Wacky Wobblehead's Wildebeest World, Walla Walla, WA

 

 

 

 

 

The SMiLE You Send Out Dept. - Jack's Mix

Here ya go, Jack, have a new cover!

 

If like me you're a little too obsessed with SMiLE to be considered quite safe to be around, you'll embrace this new mix to your hollow bosom with hoarse hosannas and squirty tears. It's by Jack, that's his name, and it's on YewChewb and now it's downloadable here with a new cover. It's of the kitchen sink everything-in school, and there's extensive use of AI, so that may be a dealbreaker for you. If you listen to it as a piece of music, without any thought bias getting in the way, it's a lovely thing. I don't prefer it to (say) Thirty Minute SMiLE, because that for me has the original magic in its DNA, something indefinable soaked right into the mix of voices and instruments, all the Beach Boys, all Brian, an alchemy of people and time and place that will never happen again. But the beauty of SMiLE is that it will continue to inspire new interpretations (much like a canonical classical composition) and they can and should be enjoyed as just that; as performances of a work of art. Technology has enabled an entirely new field of music, and it'd be a missed opportunity if we closed our ears to it. None of this affects the original recordings, they're untouched. This is a performance of a composition. All performance is interpretive and not definitive.

Anyway, it flows like a river, and the new material seems very successful. In spite of leaving virtually nothing out, it lasts an entirely reasonable fifty minutes. It's a keeper. The beginning - dropping a dime into a jukebox - is inspired, and there are many wow moments throughout. Out-freaking-standing!

More SMiLEs here and there

 

This post homologated by Swivel-Eye Loons For SMiLE™