However, the creative vision that made the first album so great was still intact. Two or three genres within a single song, lyrics that touch on romantic love in places but range far and wide for the most part and eclectic instrumentation mark almost all of the songs. The obvious exception being Second Generation Woman, composed and sung by future Blind Faith member Ric Grech. That one was conspicuously more conventional and was a minor hit for the band.
By the time the band made Fearless in 1971 Ric Grech had left, replaced by future King Crimson bassist John Wetton. The approach was quite similar, though with the eccentricity knocked up a notch or two. There were still plenty of compelling songs, like Spanish Tide, Burning Bridges and opener Between Blue And Me. This version of the album has a single from the same sessions added as bonus tracks.
Mr. Fan's links du jour o' th' day: https://www.mediafire.com/file/2y1qsk3a25x42ba/Fe@rle$$.rar/file
ReplyDeletehttps://www.mediafire.com/file/if7jnp8eb65pwvu/F@mily+Entert@!nmnt.rar/file
great stuff no matter the label
ReplyDeleteFabulous, fabulous band. Saw them live a few times and they were never less than brilliant.
ReplyDeleteThey could, on occasion, be a great blues band.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjdVOPiPPCE
Massive on the college circuit.
DeleteThat's a great track. Thanks, SS!
DeleteNEED FOR SCREED? Upcoming screedage coming up from Delta Del, Steve Shark, and th' Iof©'s Token Tomato, Babs! All upcoming!
ReplyDeleteSay, ya cheap grifting bum - why not submit screed and join th' happy gang on th' IoF©? What's that you say? You can't write? Doesn't matter - th' Four Or Five Guys© can't read!
Tomato, pronounced: “t’MAY-teh" not "t’MAYto" or "t’mAHto".
DeleteLooking forward to screed from Delta Del and Steve Shark.
There's a need for screed!
DeleteThanks Psychfan!
ReplyDeleteVery nice screed and download.
Thanks Psychfan, I enjoyed the first album you put up, and Fearless being with John Wetton I very much look forward to. Before he died a few years ago, John Wetton used to shop every Tuesday morning in the same supermarket as me, but I never had the courage to thank him for all the great King Crimson stuff he was involved with.
ReplyDeleteWetton was amazing with Crimson - a guaranteed goosebump moment for me is Wetton coming in with distorted bass over Bruford about two-thirds of the way through Fracture.
DeleteAnd as for the vocals and bass on "Starless"...sublime.
Agreed, great vocalist and bass player.
DeleteMr Shark, have you heard The Unthanks fabulous, unique version of Starless? I saw them perform it live, by the end I was sobbing like a big baby - hope you enjoy, if you don't know it.
You tube link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTEqXH9dB2g
It's a lovely version, and totally new to me, so thank you - it's beautiful. Just shows that if a song's good, it'll take a cover and take it well.
DeleteThank you again.
Many thanks for the screed, Mr Fan! Nice to see someone else who rates that often difficult second album. Lovely the way the band refocused for it.If there's a song more poignant than "Processions", I've yet to hear it.
ReplyDeleteThanks to all! A shame that Family never made it in America, but that's what music blogs are for. One more chapter to this story will arrive at a future date.
ReplyDeleteBoth these albums were very familiar to me at the time. Fearless in particular was one of the albums listened to at a chemistry-enhanced granular level during lie-out sessions in Malc's Mum's front room when we got back from the pub or whatever party we'd failed to pick up girls at. It's an amazingly dense and complex album with detail to reward attention. Do The Young People Today gather in groups to listen to music? To give it that much focus and get that much out of it? I doubt it. Thanks for prompting me to close my eyes to this wonderful music again, Mr. Fan! The circle of friends has long gone, the dope isn't there either, but the music remains, as fresh and new as it ever was.
ReplyDeleteI think what you describe is largely down to the medium itself.
DeleteA vinyl album to a 15 or 16 year old was a treasured and costly artefact - indeed, almost "holy".
My friends and I tended not to buy the same albums, so that listening sessions had more material. Plus there was no way of easily copying them to share.
Once cassettes came in, it was far easier to copy an album as a way of sharing.
Nowadays you don't even have to be on the same continent to share music and it's also very often "free".
So the old ceremony of communal digging of records is dead, and "sharing" is done over the internet, mostly through phones, and nobody sits through the equivalent of an album side without getting distracted by something else happening on their phone. How very horrible.
Delete... and vinyl as a format has made a strong recovery - outselling CDs (a dying medium) in some markets. But do TYPT (see above) get together as we did, in their equivalent of Malc's Mum's front room, to dig sounds? Of course they don't. They may have the vinyl, but the grooves are empty, and someone is messaging them RIGHT NOW ...
DeleteThere's also what seems to me to be increased use of ear/head phones, making listening to music an even more solitary pursuit. Personally, I hate them - I like to feel the air move a bit.
DeleteMost of our group listening was done at my friend Pate's house, as his Dad was a jazz buff and had a STEREOGRAM! (Pete's Dad eventually became Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Lane's roadie and PR guy.) Anyway, he was good with all that electrical stuff, so he built a PA for the band that Pete and I had and put his stereogram speakers in it, taking them out when we weren't gigging.
DeleteThose listening sessions included the Mothers, Cream, Mayall, Hendrix and the Butterfield Blues Band. We'd play the crap out of the records and then try and play the music in our band.
I played with Pete on and off for years - from about 1966 to 2010 when I relocated to France. I bequeathed all my vinyl - about 3000 albums - to Petewhen we moved and he still has it - including some of the very ones we listened to back in the olden days.
Music...isn't it great?
It's the best.
DeleteI saw them in December’72 when they played Glasgow University Union. It was the Christmas all-night beans and ELO had been booked to play. Notoriously flaky, they failed to show. The Union bigwigs sped down to Green’s Playhouse where Family had just finished playing to 3,500 drunken punters and offered them a carrier bag full of readies to play another set to 1,500 drunken students.
ReplyDeleteI was delighted by the late substitution and sold at the front, directly in front of Chappo. I called out, several times, for the B-side of a single, whose title I’ve completely forgotten. ‘What the hell, bad eggs don’t smell..’ are the opening lines. Chappo smiled indulgently and said ‘that’s a comedy number, mate’. I didn’t take the hint and hollered for it a couple more times. The third time I called out for it after another number, he called me even closer to the front. ‘ Come up here onstage and we’ll sing it together’. I was halfway through clambering onto the stage when reality bit. One, I can’t sing and two, I didn’t know the words, other than the first two lines. I, reluctantly, eased myself back among my mates, who were pissing themselves.
Following my abortive venture into prog stardom, I was wandering the corridors with my date when we encountered a very drunk Tony Ashton, their then keyboardist, who had a leather jacket bearing the spray-painted legend, ‘I’m a wanker’,on the back. Tony couldn’t find the dressing room, so we led him back. Got there and we were welcomed inside and had delightful chats with Rog and ‘Charlie’ Whitney.
Fifteen years later, Tony was one of my best mates in North London till his death. Lovely, sweet, funny, gentle, immensely talented guy.
Funny old world.
*Note from Farq* Ian is a personal friend and has a huge fund of first-person anecdotes (some unpublishable anywhere). I wish he'd contribute more but I'm grateful for what we get.
DeleteHey Mr Farq and the four or five. Been enjoying the music and the anecdotes along with the humour. A veritable island in this times.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone in the island have a link to find Jim Pepper's Everything is everything Witchi tai to album?
It was released here in Argentina by some esoteric label at the time (you'd be amazed by the things released here by then) and my Father had a much treasured copy. It got lost in troubled times.
Thanks in advance
Give me ten minutes (and give us a name!). I think I have it.
DeleteI have this: https://www.discogs.com/Jim-Pepper-Comin-And-Goin/master/181387 which unfortunately is one of the files I haven't gotten around to splitting yet, so it's all the tracks in one long file, but here it is anyhoo. Maybe it's what you want.
Deletehttps://workupload.com/file/2M9PTZd32E5
Deeply sorry about forgetting to introduce myself. Diego..
DeleteI'll check it, thank you very much Señor Farq.
ReplyDeleteI can help with the Everything album if required - crappy 128 bitrate though.
DeleteThanks Mr Shark. I listened to Sr Farq's archives and made for a good walk trough different styles but was not the record i'm looking for.
DeleteThe album you so kindly share is a more psychey-soulish affaire that other Island followers may hopefully find interesting.
I'll be very happy to listen to it in spite of the quality. When things get better I may try to find the album in some of its incarnations.
Thanks in advance for honoring the shark's tradition of Kindness, always neccesary around an island.
Still doing some push-ups to remedy my lack of tact as an island newcomer.
As they say in Animal House "Thank you,sir,may I have another?"
Greetings from the argentinian mountains.
I hope this is what you're after. Not the best SQ - a vinyl rip with a few issues - but listenable.
Deletehttps://workupload.com/file/EeNSPwpBeEj
Diego, try this one:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.mediafire.com/file/tciv7ador2aeas4/EVERYTH!NG+!S+EVERYTH!NG.rar/file
Dearest Mr Shark and Mr Psychfan You both hit the spot, thanks a lot indeed.
ReplyDeleteIncredible solidarity in this island. It speaks a lot of the people involved.
My Grandfather was director of a radio station in a distant subtropical town (province of Corrientes) and this, along with Zappa, Coltrane, Captain Beefheart and many others arrived as promotinal copies for radio play.
He tried some of them on the airwaves but the risk of hanging from the nearest tree with no clothes on diverted them to the family collecton with great pleasure for my father and myself. Not so much for the rest of the family.
As my Old Man got involved in armed revolutionary stuff, family split to avoid "dissapearing" like many others and most of the record collection was lost.
That's how important your input is to let me listen to this songs again.
Hope I didn't bore you with the tale but it somehow provides a frame for my musical formation since childhood.
Feel very lucky in spite of the hard times.
And so glad to find this island...
Cheers. Diego
This is fantastic stuff, Diego! If you feel like working it up into a piece, go ahead! Don't worry about English not being your first language. Please do write something for us!
DeleteI'd like to hear this story as well!
DeleteFamily were great on the 1969 Stones in the Park bill.(So were the Stones, especially the second hour when the cameras had gone). Their first LP had the best songs but the worst production, so much so that they had enough clout to remix and re-release some of it in 1970 - the album "Old Songs New Songs". Grech was a bit of a star, his arrangement on "Mellowing Grey" sounds fantastic very loud, and he got 3 songs onto "Entertainment" although his vocals are weak. Then disaster; he got tapped up for Blind Faith just before Family went on a US tour, and throughout that tour he just pissed about, which was one reason Family meant nothing there. The other reason was Manson of course. Unfortunate band name. And Grech just fell apart.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally my old mate Ian Starsmore reckons they weren't the same after Harry left.
Didn't know this, and now I do, thanks to you, Dave.
DeleteI remember the existence of the Old Songs New Songs LP. Too bad there's no reissue of that.
DeleteI have it, Psychfan, and will add it to your next Family FoamFeature©.
DeleteCool. Thank you!
DeleteThanks Psychfan! I am normally very hesitant to touch any music tainted with the label "Progressive Rock" (though I know plenty of great stuff has been lumped under that category). I always appreciate being guided to the good stuff by a trusted advisor such as yourself!
ReplyDelete