Mark-Almond, where the hyphen matters! Some weeks ago Steve Shark entertained us all with some three sided albums and we've recently discussed double albums so I now give you a one sided album. Not that it was physically one sided, it's just that I love one side and can't stand the other and yes you're right neither side has Tainted Love on it.
Now, just to get this straight from the start I have always been in awe of anyone who can play a musical instrument, sing or write a song. I can't do any of that and so I don't feel comfortable criticising a piece of music. I know that I couldn't even start to produce a bad bit of music never mind a good bit, but let's just say that I hardly ever turn the record over.
Jon Mark (vocals, guitar) had been a folk singer in the early sixties and then in the mid sixties was guitarist, arranger and sometime songwriter for Marianne Faithfull followed by a spell in the short lived Sweet Thursday, with Nicky Hopkins amongst others. Johnny Almond (sax, flute and backing vocals) came up through Zoot Money's Big Roll Band and The Alan Price Set before forming The Johnny Almond Music Machine.They then met as part of John Mayall's band featured on Turning Point and Empty Rooms both from 1969. Following which they teamed up with Tommy Eyre, Piano and Roger Sutton, Bass to form Mark-Almond.The band have variously been called, jazz, jazz rock, blues, prog rock, jazz pop rock, and so on, take your pick, I'm no expert at pigeonholing.
Their first lp, simply called Mark-Almond, but sometimes called Mark-Almond I to differentiate it from their second, is the one under discussion today. I've been listening to this lp on and off since about 1973. My sister, for some reason had it, not sure why, all her other albums were by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. She mustn’t have rated it too highly as she didn't seem to notice when it slipped into my prog rock collection. To my mind side one is sublime and side two is not.
"The Other Side" starts off pleasantly enough with some almost medieval sounding acoustic guitar and flute noodling. The "funky" bass then comes in and should perhaps be seen as a warning that not all was going to be well. Then at 4 minutes 21 seconds it's all over. The vocals start wailing and I can't take anymore. To me it sounds like a different singer to side one, but the lp credits Jon Mark with lead vocals with the other three as vocal harmonies, so I'm none the wiser.
They went on to make other lps which I've tried to like but sadly had to lump in with side two of the above. Reluctantly I've had to satisfy myself with just half an lp. Jon Mark went on to produce many albums of ambient music after emigrating to New Zealand and Johnny Almond became a session musician and settled in San Francisco touting his saxophone around bars and restaurants.
To give Babs some time off I'm asking for your choice of one-sided LP. If anyone says side two of Mark-Almond then I'll gladly get out my stanley knife and we can split it down the middle.
Older readers will remember Nobby from his Children's Hour radio show, "Uncle Nobby's Nap Time".
Nobby - the load is yours to up!
ReplyDeleteOne sided lp? guess I'd say autobahn kraftwerk
ReplyDeletelove to love you baby /donna summers
ReplyDelete"Try Me, I know We Can Make It" - Side 1 of Donna's "A Love Trilogy"
DeleteI can listen to it now but at one time, David Bowie's Low album. At party's, side 2 was a real showstopper.
ReplyDeleteI once burned a disc with 4 or 5 versions of The City on it. Now I can't find the file I made or the disc I burned. I'll look again tomorrow. Got a road trip coming up and now I want to hear it. Thank you Nobby for the reminder. Always loved that side of the album.
ReplyDeleteIf you find it, don't feel shy about sharing it. I'ld be intersted in hearing 'em all.
DeleteI once owned this LP, but sold it in the 80's, this might be a good time to rediscover it, if only for side one. Tommy Eyre their keyboard player had a very interesting career, including musical arranger for Wham/George Michael.
ReplyDeleteNo need to sit on my lap to qualify for today's offering, and George, don't do that...
ReplyDeletehttps://www.imagenetz.de/cTpng
Then again, how many albums are for all intents and purposes one sided because they frontloaded it with all the good stuff and then threw all the filler on side two.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the same thing, OBG. It's even worse with CDs, which can be longer and you can't turn the damn thing over to see if there's any good stuff on the other side. A 70 minute CD means that you're in for the long haul and you might not stay the course.
DeleteI'd lay money on most people rarely listening to a whole album anyway, these days. It's just too easy to cherry pick the tracks you respond to positively and ignore the rest.
Steve, I agree about cds being too long to get through in one sitting, I rarely played more than one side of an lp at a time but would vary it between side one and two and then play another side of a different lp. As you say this wasn't possible when cds came out and invariably I would only ever play the first few songs. The mp3 age has improved this because I play everything on a portable mp3 player, pause it when I want and then start again from where I left off and hence listen to all of the songs on an album.
DeleteThe Mark-Almond lp has always frustrated me, because it is an lp that I discovered by chance without anyone recommending it and so I feel quite protective towards it, up until seeing the comments above I have never met anyone that knows it. I dig it out every couple of years and really enjoy side one and think oh yeah let's give side two another chance, surely you must be able to enjoy that as well. But every time its a big No!
I discovered Meddle about the same time and was blown away by Echoes and disappointed that side two was not similar, but I still grew to like the individual songs even though they were so different.
I bought the Mark-Almond album when it came out, and I agree with the one-sided argument presented here.
Deleteit's sad we listeners no longer have patience. it is the main ingredient of great art and we spit it out. i stand accused and sentenced to miss out on so much. my excuse is that i am afraid to miss out on so much.
ReplyDeleteShortening attention span is definitely part of growing older, too. I can't sit through an entire movie, or get through more than a few pages of a book before my attention wanders - and sometimes me with it.. Thank god for vintage radio shows - half an hour is such a do-able duration. But I do still listen to entire albums (as opposed to CDs) - that half-hour rule is rarely exceeded by an album side.
DeleteCount me in for the "listens to entire albums" group. And since I grew up on CD's that's still my medium of choice. Afterwards, it depends on what you do. I rarely have the time to just listen to music, so having an entire CD run through is not some sort of chore.
DeleteWhat I do much more, now that I pick up music on the internet and have some basic knowledge of audio software, is I cut and paste stuff to my needs. Which, for a number of artists means, I'd rather keep one killer comp rather than three nice but filler-rife albums. If I weed out the filler (or, you know, shorten songs a little if they run long) beforehand, I don't have to worry about wanting to skip stuff later...
Shortening tracks on comps - it's the first time I've heard of anyone doing it. Why not if you get a good comp you enjoy?
DeleteSimilar to OBG, I had a load of prog/kosmische albums on mp3, many had one or two good tracks, so now I have a rather splendid 2/3 hour long various artists prog/kosmische comp that I can listen to all the way through, rather than 12 albums taking up space. I've not got into shortening tracks though.
Delete"Shortening tracks on comps - it's the first time I've heard of anyone doing it. Why not if you get a good comp you enjoy?"
DeleteWell, I mean the record industry has done it on more than one occasion, due to time constraints or, well, god knows, sometimes as simple as different editions having different edits.
I get why some folks don't want to go there - leaving the art intact and all that, but hey, this stuff is for my enjoyment, so for me they're fair game. It's also an absolute minority of tracks I should add...
The free editing tool Audacity was a revolution for shortening songs that I always used to fade out on mixtapes back in the analog days, like "Therapy" by The Damned. I adore that song, but it peters out around the four minute mark.
DeleteI have a CD player with a feature that allows you to program a running order for individual discs. Each time you reinserted the disc, the player "remembered" your choices (which songs to play first, which ones to skip, etc.)
I used to believe in listening to the entire album as the artist intended it to be heard, but albums got bloated in the CD era (as others have mentioned), and I'm not getting any younger.
One sided albums...
ReplyDeleteAbbey Road is a definite for me. I always play side 2 - never side 1. I suspect I'm not alone.
There's a fair few one sided albums from the psychedelic era - namely many of those with a loooong wig-out piece. Love's Da Capo is a classic example - a perfect side one and then just Revelation on side two. I've played side two once, to my knowledge.
Oh, and if ever anyone needed confirmation that Christgau is an arse, he dissed Da Capo's first side, but quite liked Revelation.
DeleteI thought of Revelation lying in bed at night. It made the impending heat death of the planet seem not such a bad thing after all. And yet, and yet - there are people on the internet who claim it's not only the most fantastic thing on the album but the best thing Love ever did. It's garbage. A Grade Z blues jam stretched out to fill a side because Arthur Lee was too damn lazy to write an album's worth of songs - don't believe the story that Jac Holzman wanted to show what the band were like live - there were simply no more songs, and the album was due ...
DeleteThey're totally new listening wise to me, Nobby, so I look forward to hearing what I purposely ignored. They joined Mayall after Mick Taylor left and I didn't like the results at all. I then avoided the pair. I can now hear what I missed.
ReplyDeleteOh I like The Turning Point very much - it was about the only thing Willard and I had in common. I also like Almond's first solo album, before he went to the States to be righteously humbled. The second solo album even carries what is basically a critical drubbing from Ralph Gleason. Almond was so eager to be accepted into the U.S. jazz scene he thought having Gleason's name on his album would be enough.
DeleteMayall had three great guitarists - Clapton, Green and Taylor - and I was waiting for a fourth. He/she never came.
DeleteFarq, you mentioned Willard, I used to follow his blog religiously until he called it quits... Any idea what happened to him?
DeleteHe retired, with virtually no warning (unless posting the "Goodbye Cream" album counts. I'd followed him since the early days of Never Get Out Of The Boat (when he didn't care about bitrates and "didn't do covers"!).
DeleteSo did I, he posted lots of good stuff though...
DeleteI think his followers posted more good stuff than he did. I remember Steve Shark there. There was a lot of commitment and investment from his followers.
DeleteI posted there as well as dr.feelgoed ;-)
DeleteThe British have never figured out what a saxophone is for. They still assume it's supposed to played by a baggy-pants'd music hall performer who shouldn't be taken seriously, and appear embarrassed the instrument at its sonic peak in postwar rhythm and blues. I have a dream of a cutting contest in heaven where David Bowie faces off against Big Jay McNeely and the loser has to move to hell. Turning Point is pretty good though. I enjoyed the summer of 1969.
ReplyDeleteAlways looking to expand my musical knowledge and always loved the saxophone. Not aware of Big Jay McNeely - can you recommend a starting point?
DeleteNobby - if you like Floyd Dixon, you'll like Big Jay "The King of the Honkers"
DeleteTry this one: https://workupload.com/file/TZH29v42TfH
festoonic - here's another cutting contest, British saxophonist Evan Parker vs. Big Jay McNeely. Big Jay goes to hell in a bucket. And then there's Ronnie Scott, Stan Tracy, and John Dankworth.
Don't forget Tubby Hayes and John Surman!
Delete... and Elton Dean.
DeleteHey Babs, if I just send you a bloody big hard disk drive could you just download your entire record collection please. In the meantime thanks for Big Jay and his honkers.
DeleteIn the early 80's I met a couple of people who like to 'trip'. They told me I had to hear An Electric Storm the debut album by electronic music group White Noise from 1969, but warned me that when they tripped they only play side 1 (Phase-In), because the other side was "too much maaaan". Anyway I wasn't tripping and they played side 1, it is quite a fabulous trip without lsd.
ReplyDeleteI've since bought the album and can report that the first track on side 2 (Phase-Out) called The Visitation is really spooky/trippy but very good. The last/second track on side 2 is a bad trip, and recorded quickly to finish the LP. Honestly the album is really only let down by one track, and really worth checking out if you like Delia Derbyshire from the Radiophonic Workshop. It is a headphones album.
That's about the last album I'd listen to while tripping. Either side.
DeleteMiles Davis’ “Bitches Brew”, with ”Pharaoh's Dance" on Side 1, and "Bitches Brew” on side 2 - take your pick.
ReplyDeleteDylans’ “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”
Trane’s "A Love Supreme" Side 2.
Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” on “Live/Dead”, and “The Other One" on “Skull & Roses”
In the early 70s, I saw Mark-Almond several times as an opening act, in mostly two to three thousand seat rooms, here in Manhattan. Most of the time they were mismatched with the headliner, and did not go over well with rowdy fans, especially with the more “Heavy” bands.
Here’s an FM broadcast of The Mark-Almond Band live at The Troubadour Nightclub, in West Hollywood, California. The cover states it’s a 1973 gig, but I’m led to believe it’s actually from 1971, but not broadcast until 1973
Enjoy
https://workupload.com/file/JrFFFCpBTuf
Thank you for The Troubadour, Babs, and thank you for the permission to edit out the vocally bit on Love Supreme, bit harsh on 3 sides of Blonde on Blonde, though but.
ReplyDeleteRoxy Music's Siren ... Side One is great: side 2 sucks. Same with Bowie's Let's Dance. And (not sure if this qualifies) ... my life.
ReplyDeleteSorry Nobby but I'm not finding that disc. If it helps there are versions of The City on 1978s Other Peoples Rooms and on 1981s The Last & Live. I also had a bootleg from BigO that was in Ohio 1970 but those links are dead. But thanks to you & Babs I now have two versions to begin again.
ReplyDeleteHere's two that I had forgotten about. One says Live 1972 and the other says Unplugged - Live in London circa 1971. So by the miracles of modern technology you are back up to 4!
Deletehttps://www.imagenetz.de/fa65z
Thank you Nobby. Now I can make a new disc for the car that will be the same only different. I appreciate your efforts.
ReplyDeleteNow where did I put the blank discs? maybe out in the yard. I'd better go look.......
Great stuff, Nobby. Only one I could think of was the Firesign Theater's "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All", which is almost unfair. It's not that side one is bad, but the Firesigns really topped themselves on the flipside with "The Further Adventures Of Regnad K'cin".
ReplyDelete