It's not widely known that Eric Clapton is one of the world's foremost Hummel© Figurine collectors. For the uninitiated, Hummel© Figurines are small porcelain models of children engaged in happy pursuits, often folklorique [French: folkloric - Ed.] in nature. I first discovered the connection whilst leafing through an old copy of Porcelain Miniatures Magazine in the dentist's waiting room, where I lighted upon an article featuring the collection of none other than Old Slowhand himself. Posing as a Hummel© enthusiast, I approached Mr Clapton for an interview, which I am pleased to publish here as a FalseMemoryFoam© exclusive. The interview took place in Mr Clapton's lovely Tudorbethan mobile home at Britain's swank Winnersh Triangle estate, in the lee of the Lidl warehouse.
FMF: That's a lovely collection!
EC: Yeah. I've been collecting for, you know, a long time. Yonks.
FMF: When did you acquire your first figurine, and which one was it?
EC: Actually Ron Wood [guitarist with the Rolling Stones beat combo - Ed.] turned me on to Hummel©. He inherited his Gran's collection and used to carry one of the little fellers in his pocket as a good luck charm. Can't remember my first though. Maybe the little girl with the basket of apples? That's a good 'un!
FMF: John Mayall was a porn addict, wasn't he?
EC: Eh?
FMF: What drew you to playing the blues?
EC: Er ... the money? Look at this little guy! [holds up figurine]
FMF: Wow! He's got a button on his lederhosen missing!
EC: I know! The detail! They was originally painted by nuns. Blind nuns.
FMF: Apparently Layla was going to be a single album.
EC [carefully replacing figurine in display case]: Yeah. I wanted to do an album of my own songs. Rock songs.
FMF: That first solo album was disappointing, wasn't it?
EC: I did a first album?
FMF: Patti Boyd was going to be on the cover of Layla, wasn't she?
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| Hi! I'm a Hummel©! |
EC: Oh God. Patti. [covers face with hands, sobs uncontrollably for several minutes] Yes, that was one of the reasons it never came out. You couldn't see her face or nothing, but she didn't want the world to know she was the inspiration for Layla. Beautiful cover, too. Beautiful girl!
FMF: What other reasons were there?
EC: Tom [Dowd, record producer - Ed.] wanted it more bluesy. Pissed me off. "Play the fucking blues, Eric!" I'd cut this fantastic album, and he was like, play the blues? So I says, okay, Tom, I'll play the fucking blues if you make it a double album, and I don't have my name on it. I had him over a barrel, really.
FMF: Where did you get the cover?
EC: Junk shop. Two quid with frame. Hideous piece of old rubbish. I did everything possible to scupper that album. Derek and the Dominos? Seriously? It was a fucking joke!
FMF: Is that the rare black-face Little Drummer Boy there?
EC: I always hated the blues. Depressing. Who wants to listen to depressing music?
(At this point, Mr Clapton's nurse arrived for his wipe-down, so I made an excuse and left. The original single-album Layla will be viewable in the comments after I give Cody her monthly review. )
Paul McCartney got it right when he said Hello Goodbye was the best album the fab moptops ever made [See click bait shop, March - Ed.], but a couple of their other albums have been given the supreme honor of space on my iPod, and they're both improvements to the originals that you, the home hi-fi enthusiast, can accomplish yourselves from household materials and a little old-fashioned can-do gumption! Yessiree Bob!
As even the least informed Beatles fan knows, there were more tracks recorded for Sgt. Pepper than made it to the album. Why they didn't, and why the album is improved with their reinstatement, is what we're going to look at now. Firstly, it's not a question of groove time. Adding the missing songs results in a fifty-minute album; long, but do-able at the time of release. There are two reasons why Northern Song, Penny Lane, and Strawberry Fields (all recorded during the album sessions for the album) were left off. It was current practice not to put singles on Beatles albums, because fans would feel cheated at buying the same song twice. This is not a concern today, when Beatles fans happily buy as many versions of the same song as possible. When Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane were pulled as a single the songs became ineligible for the album. Nuts by today's standards, but there you go. It's not hard to speculate why Northern Song got axed. In spite of some criticism from certain quarters it stands up well to the Lennon/McCartney compositions, and is arguably more interesting ("better" if you like) than Within You Without You. It got cut because it would have given Harrison unprecedented groove time on an album, something L/McC might have been uncomfortable with. Neither reason should concern us today. Reinstating these tracks is bringing them home. The only other context you're going to hear them in is record-label marketing projects (the MMT album, and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack) that had little or no Beatles input other than signatures on a contract. Reinstating these songs isn't screwing around with the classics. It's not sacrilege. It's artistically, historically, and musically the right thing to do. The only problem is - and it's an enjoyable one - programming the tracks so they fit with the album. Adding them at the end as "bonus" tracks doesn't work. They need to be integrated. Cutting into the impeccably engineered segués is neither an option or necessary, nor is altering the original track order. You can either solve the problem yourself, or click in the comments to hear how I did it. The result is an album that sounds complete and correct and natural. I never now play the original edited release because it sounds like there's something missing. Which there is. Beaucoup.
Compleating Revolver involves slipping in the associated singles and B-sides, making a 16-track forty-minute album - again, totally do-able. I think altering the track order is permissible here, and even necessary. I was never happy with Taxman as lead track for a number of reasons, but Tomorrow Never Knows is a natural and epic finale. Again, the easy way out - of adding the tracks as "bonus" material at the end - is unsatisfactory. I toyed with using Robert Freeman's rejected circular design for the cover, but rejected it in favor of this colorful outtake from the sessions, as I did for Pepper.
Neither of these solutions claims to be definitive, and there may be technical aspects that could be improved. You may, if the idea doesn't make you throw up your pale hands in horror, prefer your own solutions.
When teen prom bands heard Sgt. Pepper they realized their snappy suits, ruffled shirt collars, and keg-party dance moves were starting to look straight outta Squaresville. More worryingly, they noticed the chicks in the audience drifting away to the long-hair dudes slouching in the shadows. Ever mindful of the need to improve artistically and continue to get laid, they retreated to the studio to craft their own Sgt. Peppers.
Paul Revere & The Raiders were among the first to be second in line with their superfine Something Happening album, which naturally stiffed, alienating their milkshake teenybopper fanbase without convincing acid-dropping heads they were riding the FURTHUR bus. It also had a grotesquely cheap cover (not the gorgeous Peter Max design you get here ABSOLUTELY FREE) just to kill any possibility of an impulse buy. Do an image search if you want to see just how important sleeve design is, and how dumb record companies could be.
John Fred & His Playboy Band were, if possible, squarer than a square dance in the town square of Squaresville, Square County. Obviously uncomfortable with the Age of Aquarius, they took a deep breath, draped themselves with love beads, and came up with their generation-defining and status-quo-threatening Permanently Stated album. And they had the nous [French for us - Ed.] to dress it up in a fab sleeve, too. That's one of the first uses of that computery/psychedelic font on a pop album, like you care.
It says something bad about me that I enjoy both these albums as much as their "real thing" inspiration. They're guileless, mindless fun, and their transparent opportunism is part of their charm. And musically, they're professionally put together (both these bands knew how to deliver a great show) and a treat for the ears.
Downloads are weighted with the usual CD-era penalty tracks, compromising their artistic integrity but pleasing the lazy freeloader in all of us.
I can forgive Neil Young for serving up decades of stale refried hash, because I don't have to gobble it up. Every few months he frisbees the latest return-to-form pancake across the lake to the elderly groupies groveling arthritically on the other side, and the Neil Young Appreciation Society is incontinent with gratitude. "He has given us reason to live!" they sob.
And I can forgive him extending his wayward genius into endearingly half-assed High School science projects like the flashlight-battery powered Lincoln, and the fucking Pono, because they keep him out of the studio, where he does the most harm.
What I cannot forgive him is lassoing Lukas Nelson and his fine, excellent, very good band The Promise Of The Real for backup musicians when they should have been doing that greatest of all things, their own. They didn't need the gig, and they're too good for him. Here's their recorded œuvre [French for egg - Ed.]. If for some illogical reason you haven't heard this stuff, now's the chance to catch up before the new album "drops" this summer, so you can lie about always having been into the POTR, man.
Dude's a dude, dude!
And what a great picture it is. Without knowing who it is we can tell the story here - a couple of guys just gone their separate ways. Nothing to say to each other any more. They're both walking away with the defensive hands-in-pockets, hunched shoulders attitude common to young men at that time. Early seventies, and the UK's brief burst of psychedelic color was gone like a train. Hair, coats and faces were worn long. The "counterculture" - such as it was - was becoming politicized in the cities or dispersing into idealized rural communities isolated from anything approaching actual work. The common denominator among young people was dealing with the death of the dream; living was suddenly about survival, and the vacation was over.
Keith Cross and Peter Ross have interesting histories - if you don't know them, they're worth the research. They came together to make one of the loveliest and most surprising albums of the uncertain times that haunting cover image reflected so accurately. It may be a great photograph, but it's a terrible cover for the album. You'd expect a dour, depressed set of songs, some plodding white-boy blues. And you'd be wrong. Bored Civilians - great title - is as close to sunsoaked West Coast vibes as any UK musicians got. The opening track, The Last Ocean Rider, is simply luscious - seven minutes of harmony singing building into an ecstatic wave of guitars - when the pedal steel hits in, you're blissed out. If you like this - and you will - you'll embrace the album like an old friend.
Although that image is artistically true - neither musician has fond memories of the album - it must have crippled sales. But that broken relationship resulted in an album that everyone who's heard it cherishes forever.
This is the Korean (I think) re-release with the added single as a real bonus.
Assembling a what-might-have-been final Grateful Dead studio album is a fairly common exercise among shut-ins and teeth-sucking seniors with nothing better to do. The source material is all out there, and it's a matter of personal taste what you paste in and where. Apart from the chronologically dubious (and so what - lyrically and musically it fits) last track here, this is probably as successful a try as any. It's not the material that makes it one of the weaker Dead albums, which is potentially right up to par for their later years, it's the inevitable unfinished sound and the weaker-than-usual vocals. But we don't care about that, because we're Dead fans, man. If given the polished (and I use that word as a compliment) production values of their later recordings, this album would have been a fine last bow from a band who never got enough credit for their studio work. The boilerplate DeadHead© stance that the studio albums are negligible is just hooey. There's not a single Dead album that's a waste of anyone's time.
Lookit my cover! [click to enlarge - Ed.] Note skellington! Note roses! Note apocalyptic San Francisco earthquake photograph with dude calmly walking toward collapsing building! Hoo boy! Some fun, huh?
In 1976, Clive Davis [Arista Records head - Ed.] performed an intervention in Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, his private SWAT team forcibly extracting Steven Soles, T-Bone Burnett and David Mansfield in mid-performance at Carnegie Hall. Dylan carried on as if nothing had happened - in fact, he claimed later not to have noticed. Davis gave them a sixteen trillion dollar contract [can this be right? - Ed.], most of which which got spent on catering - the band were notoriously fussy eaters - and a correspondence course in vinyl upholstery repair. "In case the music thing didn't work out for us," Burnett famously said, "we got a trade to fall back on."
Given the sacks of money shoveled from the back of a Brinks truck into the band's communal double-wide trailer at Tar Pit Springs, NV., Mr Davis might have been a little disappointed with the lack of return on his investment. His decision to eschew conventional retail business models and sell the product exclusively from door to door dressed as Heidi may have had something to do with their lack of commercial success. The three of them returned to their fall-back career in vinyl upholstery repair, operating out of a lock-up at the junction of Walmart Ave. and Charles Manson Parkway at Tar Pit Springs. Asked if he has any regrets, Mansfield laughs off the whole affair. "Lookit what we gots here! A steady income, a roof over our heads, and th' respect of th' local community! Tell me vinyl upholstery repair ain't th' rock n' roll of th' future!"
Anyway, here are their three (count 'em!) albums, which are super-fine and not a
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| Mommy I'm scared! |
little weird. There's a slightly bitter edge, and a tendency to preach, which gives the band its unique flavor. And the cover of Statue Makers Of Hollywood is the stuff of a Lynchian nightmare. I'm, like, WT actual F is going on here? I've also tossed in AT NO EXTRA COST TO THE HI-FI ENTHUSIAST a rare live recording of them from '76, from the days when Clive "Call Me Heidi" Davis had the coke-fuelled light of hope in his eyes.
EDIT: Mumbles Dupree scribbled the following screed - in crayon - they don't allow him anything sharp - and threw it over the yard wall for us. Frankly it differs in detail from my exhaustively researched account, so caveat emptor [Latin: empty the cave - Ed.]:
(Mumbles writes:) So being of the right age, but not quite, several guys (a crew, if you
will) decided to settle just outside of Santa Fe in mid 1976. We resided
in a small unpainted, unstuccoed, flat roofed cinder block 2 room
building with running cold water, no water heater, a wood stove, and a
spendid outhouse, that (with the door flung open) had a spectacular view
of sunrise over the Sangres,(Rio en Medio.)
I digress, a few miles
away was a bar called Shidoni which later became a bronze foundry/art
gallery. Who was the house band that late summer/early autumn for 2
weeks?, you might ask. Well, it was none other than the aforementioned
Alpha Band.
David Mansfield, Steven Soles, T-Bone Burnett (now
well-known to most)and a semi familiar face, Matt Betton. Matt was from
the next town over (back home), his family owned a local music shop.
Anyway
fresh off the road from touring with Senor Zimmerman as part of Rolling
Thunder, they plied their trade nightly and made for some pretty
fantastic evenings of musical entertainment and comradery.
Then they
were gone, like Kaiser Soze, headed west I suppose to boost their
fortunes & fame. Hope you enjoyed a little bit of history or
whatever.
The story of the "lost" Hendrix albums is told in full over at the deadhendrix blog, but here's an extract, reprinted without permission:
When
it came to footing the bill for the Record Plant sessions, neither
Jeffery [Mike - Hendrix "manager" - Ed.] nor Warner Brothers wanted to pay, so Douglas [Alan - independent producer - Ed.] paid, and the
tapes went into his library, and it was this material - his own tapes -
that Douglas now went through. He brought in hotshot engineer Tony
Bongiovi to help pull the album together, and Warner Brothers
demonstrated their faith by throwing 100,000 bucks on the motel bed - a
shitload, by any standards.
As
Douglas knew, there were no songs in a state of completed production,
so the criteria were: some great guitar, and a good vocal - exactly what
Hendrix had always brought to the table. Although there was a lot of
material which met these criteria, the fact that there was nothing Jimi
had signed off on - the tracks were incomplete - necessitated a re-think
as to what constituted a Hendrix album. And there was the unignorable
impact of the changing times: in 1975, Hendrix had been dead for five
years. These days, that's a quick turnround for a new album from a
"major act" (pardon my mirth), but back then, for the music business, it
was a generation. The era of back catalog strip-mining enabled by the
CD was some way off, and a whole new audience had emerged - more adult,
more sophisticated, listening to an entire new generation of acts that
had little to do with the cultural values - or the sounds - of the
sixties. Acts who were recording with studio facilities that were
undreamed of back in Hendrix's day. Some context: Steely Dan and the
Eagles were already on their fourth albums, Little Feat their fifth.
Springsteen was up to Born To Run. And punk was set to kick everything
over the following year, albeit briefly. None of these albums sounded
like sixties music, all were extremely polished, and to put out a bunch
of old tapes claiming that it was new Hendrix product would not only
have been cynical, it would have been commercial suicide, drastically
eroding the public’s interest in Hendrix, whose Experience albums were
gathering dust in bargain bins across the U.S.A.
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| Hi! I'm Cody! |
Douglas
and Ostin thought alike - let's do it right, and give Hendrix a new
lease of life. So Douglas chose to invent the remix album, even though
the art had yet to be recognised. Bill Laswell, respected uber-remix
producer and longtime friend, has this to say: “What matters is that
Douglas knows what Hendrix did and he knows what Hendrix could have
been.” As always, the people in the know, know.
Douglas used new
musicians (not sampled loops and beats and computers - a band of real
live musicians) to create a new Hendrix album, with a contemporary
sound. The musicians he chose had to be technically expert enough and
professional enough to work with recordings where time-keeping hadn’t
been a priority - where they often had to re-record four bars at a time,
repeatedly, to accommodate shifts in Hendrix’s beat that had been
missed by his accompanying musicians at the time. Douglas knew the
limitations of those original musicians, and he knew that to get them
back in the studio to correct and improve their own work in this
endlessly painstaking way would be asking both too much and for trouble.
The musicians he chose were seasoned professionals, and exactly the
caliber of musician that Hendrix would be playing with if he’d lived -
it's asinine to claim that Hendrix would still be in a power trio of old
buddies in the mid-seventies.
Without in any way downplaying Mitch Mitchell's
inspirational playing and irreplacable role in the original Experience,
Allan Schwartzberg is the best drummer you'll hear on a Hendrix record.
Called in by acts such as James Brown, Mountain, Kiss, Gloria Gaynor,
and Roxy Music, Schwartzberg served a long apprenticeship in NY jazz
clubs. Jimmy Maelen has played percussion with just about everybody.
Jeff Mironov, a superb in-demand session guitarist, didn't have an
individual style or sound that might compete with Hendrix, and as such
was the perfect choice. Bob Babbitt played bass in Motown's legendary
house band the Funk Brothers, for Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Marvin
Gaye, the Temptations, and many others. It’s to the Hendrix fan’s shame
that they have more respect for Noel Redding (a guitarist,
let’s not forget, who was at the right place at the right time and
wearing the right clothes) than for one of the greatest bass-players in
the world.
There’s
something else about these productions that can’t be stressed strongly
enough, and that is widely missed and unappreciated - Douglas never does
anything Hendrix didn’t. He never introduces anything for which Hendrix
himself hadn’t set a precedent. Playing with other guitarists. Using
back-up vocals. Stripping in new tracks by different musicians. Using
overdubs. All these techniques had been employed by Hendrix. If Douglas
had added Hollywood strings, or a Mariachi trumpet section, or the
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or synthesisers and a drum machine, then maybe
the charges of disrespect would have had some basis. And if those
suggestions sound ridiculous, it’s worth remembering that in March ‘69
Hendrix said, “I’m having a string section and the Mormon Tabernacle
Choir” on First Rays. But Douglas’s approach was rigidly purist, almost
minimalist. A band of real musicians, playing live in the studio,
Hendrix coming through the ear goggles. Standard recording procedure for
a real record.
Objectively,
Midnight Lightning sits very well with Crash Landing - it uses the same
musicians and original material from the same period. The two best
tracks are superior to anything on Crash Landing, and if the two albums
had been released as a double, no inconsistency would have been
apparent. Midnight Lightning reached the US Top Fifty, a disappointment
after Crash Landing, but no disgrace when you consider the competition
from Dylan's Blood On The Tracks, Springsteen's Born To Run, Fleetwood
Mac's eponymous genre-definer, and the astonishing Horses from Patti
Smith, presaging the punk revolution a few short months away. That a
Hendrix album charted at all in those times is almost miraculous. But
interest had waned, the impact was muted, and the sense of repeating a
formula with diminishing returns was inevitable.
Crash Landing and Midnight Lightning are remarkable successes on every level.
They give us a whole new insight into where Hendrix was at and where he
was going in his last months, and they sound like mid-seventies
Hendrix. The discography is richer for them, and yet they are shunned
like lepers for reasons that become more bizarre with each passing year,
and less forgivable with each listen.
In
1988, thirteen years after the release of Crash Landing, producer
Lennie Niehaus stripped off all the original backing tracks to the
soundtrack to Clint Eastwood’s Charlie Parker bio-pic Bird, leaving only
Parker’s solos, and overdubbed new parts played by contemporary
musicians, recorded in stereo. The album was lauded for being a
“technological miracle that sublimated Bird’s performances without any
sacrifice of his original sound. If Bird was with us today, this is
unquestionably the way he’d want to sound.” The sleevenotes to the
critically-acclaimed and Cannes award-winning soundtrack album boast
that it “has no parallel in recording history.”
You thought you had every officially-released Brian Wilson album? Got this? Path Of Life isn't by any means a lost classic. First, it's not lost, second, it's not classic. But it's pretty damn fine - better than [YOUR SECOND LEAST FAVORITE BRIAN WILSON ALBUM] anyway. And it has What Love Can Do on it, which is a lost classic. A song that has melody like an orange has juice. Every damn line a hook, and a chorus that lifts your heart on a blue summer wave. A huge thumping hit single in my mind at least, it (dis)appeared on an obscure compilation, got beaucoup YouTube plays, but even Brian knows this ain't the sixties any more. Except in his mind. It's not the only great song here - Southern California and [YOUR CHOICE HERE] are very nearly as sublime.
So what we got? A ten-song full Brian Wilson solo album (not a compilation from various sources) that recapitulates his classic West Coast themes - there's even a car song - conceptually bookended, with a subtle undercurrent of spirituality that doesn't drag. Hidden in plain sight all this time. For someone like me, who'd rather have the worst of Brian Wilson than the best of just about anyone else, it's a valuable addition to his œuvre [French for egg - Ed.]. Note to Beach Boys Factbots - I don't care who helped him out here. I never have.
I saw Brian at the Smile concert in Paris, and the warm rush of love that went up from the audience as he took the stage was unlike anything I've ever experienced. His light makes the world a brighter place.
Building on the soar-away success of our bold Free Wi-Fi initiative [see postagens mais antiguas - Ed.] popular Cultural Outreach Director Cody has come up with a surefire winner with our timely and provocative Free Money feature!
Who doesn't need money? More to the point, who doesn't need more money? Today, FalseMemoryFoam© answers that universal need! How can you capitalize on this almost unbelievable offer? Why, it's as easy as AB3! Simply print out the note shown here at your local Kinko's and present it to the teller of the bank next door. Don't forget to sign it - banks don't accept anything without a signature. And leave your TransAm double-parked outside with its motor running. And say thanks, Cody! as you roar into the sunset, your pockets bulging with more cash than you ever dreamed of! Hoo boy! Some fun, huh?
You're The Strawberry Alarm Clock. You got it all. Go-Go gigs on the Strip, movie appearances, hot singles, albums dressed nearly as great as you. And you can play your instruments. You're one lucky SOB. Oh, there are moments when you're a little pissed that the (finger-waggle) rock establishment doesn't take you seriously, thinks you're a "plastic LA band", but that's their loss right? How many of the cute chicks lining up around the block have even heard of Jann Wenner? [me neither - Ed.] How much more fun could you squeeze into your life? None to both, I'm guessing. Oh, and you have one of the greatest names in pop. You and the Chocolate Watch Band. If you had to be someone else you'd be them.
The SAC (as we fans like to call 'em) started off as Thee Sixpence, and their recordings are presented to you here in compact easy-to-use format that's sure to be the envy of the gang down at the soup kitchen! Then we rush headlong down the centuries through our own Irwin Allen-style Time Tunnel to end up at their last - and probably last - album, which you probably haven't heard of. Maybe having two titles confused people; it's called Wake Up Where You Are, or It's About Time, depending on which internet screed you're squinting at. No matter, it's a great album, one of the few essential re-union albums. Don't be put off by the few reworkings of their old hits - they're fantastic. There's an extended twelve-minute version of Sit With The Guru! Unfortunately it's extended by a drum solo. But never mind. Wander off into the kitchen and pretend it's the bar at a live gig until it's over, and go back to shout for an encore!
Whenever I see my Pavlov word psychedelic in a new album review, I always give it a listen. Unfortunately the review is written by a *shudder* Millennial who thinks psychedelic is a kind of pasta sauce, and the album was made by 'young people' [today's middle aged - Ed.] for whom a strummed electric guitar, placeholder vocals, and a touch of fuzz tick the boxes for that all-important Slate review. But very, very occasionally - almost never, statistically - something wonderful happens and a flower blooms among the weeds. Such as the UK's The Fernweh (me neither) and US visionaries Steady Sun.
The Fernweh (look it up) are seemingly influenced by (not chanelling) the Three O'Clock, Trees, Tudor Lodge, and maybe Appletree Theatre, all good sources, but they come up with something that is distinctively their own. The instrumentation is accoustic/electric, the songs diverse and memorable, the lyrics interesting and thoughtful, songs are actually arranged, and the singing, well, it's bloody lovely, mate. Talent and skill and good taste in every groovy groove. Very slight demerits are the drummer's dogged reluctance to move away from the snare drum, and a filthy wretched cover which actively prevents sales. So I did them a new one and here it is.
Steady Sun have one of the hardest-to-remember band names in the history of hard-to-remember. I've forgotten it again. Anyway. One reviewer opined that this was 'shoegaze' music, which shows how far back his musical awareness stretches, if nothing else. No, it's not shoegaze. What it is, is, is an unlooked-for and totally authentic reiteration of the Paisley Underground sound. From the very first bars of the first song you'll be in a shimmering swirl of wonderfulness. The drugged-out and lovely melancholy that the Rain Parade captured so effortlessly is here, and so are great tunes, great tones, great everything.
You should really jump over to your favorite on-line record store and buy these, because nobody else did, and they're keepers.
Lookit the nice picture whut I done did for ya! Grumpy dudes stuck on the freeway in Los Angeles in 1965. If you were there, what do you think you'd hear coming from the car radio? You'd hear this, from the same year, and in much the same fidelity. News items about Hell's Angels. Upcoming Byrds concerts. The latest Pop Hits. You'd be spinning the dial, too [Millennials! spinning the dial is like clicking or swiping! - Ed.], just like the anonymous genius who taped these precious minutes for the future you live in right now. Play it in the car next time you're stuck in traffic and wonder what happened to radio, to music, and your waistline.
EDIT: This comment from Jonathan F. King is worth more than my post, so I've added it here (thanks, Jonathan!):
"I was there then, taped stuff off the radio all the time with my little
reel-to-reel ... and it all sounded exactly like this. This seems to be a
spliced-together set of aircheck chunks from two of L.A.'s top AM
stations in that day: KHJ and KRLA. First up is the KHJ short-timer
Tommy Vance, brought over from London shortly after the launch of their
pioneering Top 30 format in early 1965. Vance's first I.D. comes at
marker 8:43. He's back at 11:44 to promote upcoming appearances by the
Byrds (!) at two suburban department stores. (Their rise to fame with
"Mr. Tambourne Man" was so sudden that they still had to honor a bunch
of crappy commitments they'd made beforehand -- including a show at my
high school around the time of this tape. They looked pissed) More
music for a long spell, then at 43:15 we find ourselves on KRLA-AM
instead, a short way up the dial from KHJ, for a newscast in their
inimitable style -- lots of timpani and bellowing choristers. The
newscaster is Thom Beck, a founding member (later) of the satirical
performance group The Credibility Gap. The selection of news stories is
distinctive for a rock and roll station in a giant metro market in 1965,
though you can't tell from Beck's melodramatic basso narrative what
his, or the station's, editorial sentiment might be. At 45:45, sports
news. At 49:35, Bob Eubanks signs on, then spins a Bob Dylan track,
"Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window," about which there's another
story altogether, but I'd hate to digress. It keeps on like that until
it runs out, soundig exactly like my 10th-grade bedroom after dinner."
[I think Ed Fray may have some Credibility Gap recordings - check link at right - Ed.]
I first bumped into Her Majesty a few years back at Wayno The Winos Mag's n' Album's Xchange, Gowanus [NY - Ed.], where she'd just grabbed a copy of the first, self-titled, album by Morning [Vault, 1970 - Ed.]. "It's the mono, so one is frightfully glad to add it to one's collection!" she gushed, hunting for the 75 cents in her purse. I confessed to having only the stereo, but had she heard their second, Struck Like Silver? Turns out she hadn't, so she invited me to give it a spin at one of her weekly Royal Record Club meets.
It was a couple of years before my parole was served, but eventually I made the trip to Merrie Olde Englande with my treasured copy of Struck Like Silver [Fantasy, 1972 - Ed.], where Her Majesty was pleased to receive me in the splendor of her charming home, which is Buckingham Palace, I shit you not. The Royal Record Club meets every Tuesday afternoon, and is attended by celebrity vinyl enthusiasts such as George and Anal Clooney (big country-rock fans!), Beyoncé [a pop singer - Ed.] and beaucoup Minor Crowned Heads of Europe, each arriving with an album to be spun on the Queen's impressive radiogram which is also a high-class drinks cabinet. Very cool! The atmosphere was informal, though respectful, and Her Majesty passed among us with a costly bowl of Twiglets© while we listened.
It was a great privilege to turn Her Majesty onto that second album, and there was a general agreement that both records were "underrated" and essential components of any self-respecting country-rock collection. Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein, was particularly impressed, praising the "exceptional artistry of the vocals" and the "faultless songwriting". He confessed to slightly preferring the first album for its "authentic psychedelic inflections."
Maybe I'll share other Royal Record Club discoveries, maybe not.
Blister-packed for your convenience, False Memory Foam© presents today four epochal albums as they very nearly might have been, from a past that's yet to come. There's nothing unfamiliar about The Kaleidoscope's Side Trips except the color cover. It's stereo (mono on request), no bonus tracks, mixing ... nada. Just this retina-blistering cover. It's a cornerstone album to anybody's psychedelic shack, from the time when there were no expectations, nothing to live up to or live down, and that spirit of innocence and bonkers experimentation runs through all these albums. It's almost impossible now to imagine a time when all this was being done for the first time - nobody was channeling [Millennial-speak for "copying" - Ed.] any other act, or ticking the boxes on a style menu like today's barrista bands. It was fresh, thrilling, and fun. And it still is.
Country Joe & The Fish's first album is here presented in the original mono, with the original, unused, cover. I've long maintained it's a better album than Sgt. Pepper (which I like well enough), to general snorts of derision. I like it better, then - will that do? It captures the swirliness of the times like a genie in a bottle. The mono is neither better nor worse than the stereo. On headphones, I'll take the stereo. Pumped through a JBL sound pod, the mono. However you listen to it, listen to it. Timeless beauty and wonderment.
The Charlatans' first album, on Kama Sutra, was never released, because the suits were uncomfortable with the anti-drug song Codine. Presumably they wanted a pro-drug song? Given their scanty discography, the band recorded a shitload of tracks, most of which eventually saw a legit release. But they only recorded nine songs for the Kama Sutra album, and they're collected here with the rarely-seen original cover - the label even got the slicks printed up before they got cold feet. I've avoided the current archival tendency to pile on tracks from other sessions, so it's a very short album. Also very great.
We're never going to please Grateful Dead purists, whom I'm sure will get very sniffy at this assemblage of pre-first album Warlocks tracks. But nuts to them and their setlists. This plays like a coherent (and decent length) album, and it's scarily good. Like the Charlatans, these guys were so ahead of the times they were invisible. Mindbending stuff. Mike Stax [Ugly Things Ed. - Ed.] once told me he couldn't stand the Dead, but this early incarnation came close to getting a nod of approval. I done a spiffy op-art cover incorporating the great Herb Greene photo and some primitive copy-shop type distortion. The title of this piece comes from the second song in this set.
More has been written about Astral Weeks than any other album. Don't take my word for it - count the words on the internet yourself. I'll be here when you get back. You're not going to find anything new here on False Memory Foam©, where Old is the new New. My own opinion would only be lost in the well-deserved praise heaped on it. There's also a lot of wordage describing its inception, and that's where today's Small Package Of Value comes in. Up until recently, these recordings were mythic, believed lost if they ever existed. It's The Boy himself, immediately prior to going into the recording studio, performing material from the upcoming album live in Boston. This "hateful little guy", the sullen sulky drunk that nobody could work with, somehow managed to pull something of eternal beauty out of the wreckage. There are intimations of it here - it's like the run-up to the album, the Artist feeling his way blindly into it, not knowing where he's going, just knowing he's on the way.
I put in a lot of work - at least thirty minutes, that's a day for me - on the cover. It uses an actual photograph of the actual artist actually playing at the actual club in these actual recordings! Hoo boy! I sanded down the background so we can focus on that extraordinary blouse The Boy is wearing, and did a kind of Astral Weeksy frame for it. If you already have the recordings, dress 'em up nice with this, anyway.
The quote in the heading? Sometimes the Artist is not the best judge of his Art.
Pop-psych before the category existed, from when pop music could be anything you choose, without rhyme or reason. Spanky & Our Gang's third album missed the Summer of Love by a couple of crucial years. By 1969 most groups had ditched the kaftan and beads for denim bibs and Amish hats, but Spanky's gang gave the kaleidoscope a final twirl. They may not have been first with any of the ideas and effects here, and in 1969 it might have seemed they were a straight Mamas & Papas harmony group jumping on a paisley bandwagon from which the wheels had already fallen off, but with the luxury of hindsight we can appreciate this for what it is - a pop masterclass, maybe masterpiece.
The production is head-widening. The studio resources and talent that made possible recordings of this complexity and quality are simply not an option for contemporary musicians. Millennials' archly superior "lo-fi æsthetic" [barf - Ed.] is the street bum "choosing" to wear the same clothes again today. It's all they have. The studio system - now dismantled - that grew from Hollywood movie studios branching out into pop music came with a legacy of exceptionally gifted musicians, arrangers, and studio technicians, and that legacy can be heard here, in this last gorgeous flowering of sixties pop. It's an album that validates stereo recording, itself sneered at by pop purists, and demands a great set of headphones, preferably leopardskin.
We'd have to wait six years for the next - and last - S&OG studio album, the equally ignored (and beautiful) Change, where the patchouli and love beads had been completely replaced by woodsmoke and stetsons. Just in time for Richard Hell to rip everything to shreds.
Don't you wish there was a Frank Zappa record you could play at any time, from your son's B'rit Milah [Britney/Miley pop duet album - Ed.] to your own funeral? Something nice n' easy, like Sunday morning? Something that wouldn't bring a blush to the cheeks of the gurl next door? Well, this ain't it, but it's close. No lyrics, so nothing sweat-inducing here. No actual rawk music, nothing atonal or challenging. Almost.
This is a single-track compilation/mix/edit of Frank's chamber music pieces, the sweet little melodic moments he'd throw into the mix just to show he could do this stuff standing on his head. You try standing on your own head sometime, and you'll get a glimpse of his genius. Being Frank, of course, there's still beaucoup of weird-ass chord changes, time signatures more complex than algorithms, and tunes that sound as if they're being played sideways by tin toys.
The cover - one of my very favorite images of Frank - was taken as part of a Life magazine photo-feature about rock stars and their parents. There was a swell shot of Grace Slick with her mom in their palatial home, too. I could be wrong about all this.
Anyway, here's thirty minutes - Verve album length - of Frank's cocktail audio. A little nostalgia for the old folks.
This is an amusing little piece I found while performing a routine home invasion to support my crack habit. You never know what you will find on these expeditions! It was only some years later that I got around to playing it, after a career hiatus in Joliet, and it has some musical as well as historical merit. The liner notes give no information about venue and dates, but the album was pressed by Fontana in 1967, and I'm guessing they're live recordings from Ronnie Scott's famous Soho [London - Ed.] club in the same year. The future jazzrock fretmelter is here in mellow mood, "sitting in" with a couple of different line-ups. Put on your jazz beret, light up a Gauloise, and imagine yourself wondering what the fuck you're doing at Ronnie Scott's when all the dolly-birds are a few blocks away at The Marquee. Which is probably what Johnny McLaughlin was doing.
