"Dylan Deluxe" Preview - Exclusive Interview!

Nobody was more surprised than je when famed protest singer Bob Dylan dropped in [left, below - Ed.] to th' Isle O' Foam© yestiddy on a worldwide tour to promote the release of Dylan Deluxe, the long awaited legacy edition of his last album for Columbia in '73.

Relaxing poolside whilst [grammar - Ed.] Kreemé served her signature kidney n' rutabaga smoothies, Dylan was keen to put the record straight. It's a lengthy interview, and those of you who free-fall straight down into the comments (hi, Steve!) are going to miss out on possibly the most revealing interview the man ever granted.

BoB That album has been more misunderstood than anything I ever done. Ever. I got so sick at heart ... (shakes head)

IoF© Tell us the story, Bob. From the beginning.

BoB I was born in Duluth, nineteen -

IoF© (cutting in) Not that beginning. Of the album?

BoB Oh! Right. Yeah. It was a kind of fallow period for me. I wasn't writing much. I was in London, England, I remember, and Bowie, David, and me were in his apartment - flat, they call them, did you know that? It's like they have words for everything. Tuppence. That's like a buck. Fifty cents.

(long pause)

IoF© And? Bowie?

BoB Yeah. It was the end of the sixties -

IoF© It was 1973, Bob.

BoB - right. End of the sixties. It was like this fallow period for him too. He wasn't writing much. I don't know who came up with the idea, him or me, but we were suddenly talking about doing covers albums, you know, other peoples' songs. British beer is like soup. Real nutritious. They serve it in hospitals.

IoF© So you both decided to do covers albums?

BoB Right there. We were scribbling lists of songs we wanted to cover. David wanted to do a bunch of show tunes, Judy Garland, Ethel Merman. I was thinking of an American Songbook, standards, some obscure stuff, songs I liked singing in the shower. That was going to be the title - Songs From The Shower, like that Leonard Cohen album, only a double, there were so many. We got real fired up! Back in the states, Columbia weren't keen on the idea. Clive [Davis - Ed.] laughed at me, right there in his office. You can't fucking sing, Bob! Like it was a big joke, him and his asslicking ... asslickers ... I never forgot that. I went ahead anyway, got some musicians together, relaxed sessions, worked through my list. When I delivered the tapes Davis [Clive - Ed.] went, well, nuts, I guess. We fought, literally fought, throwing punches. At one point I hit him with this elk's head he had on the wall, stuffed hunting trophy, like he was this brawny outdoorsy type. He fell back through a glass coffee table, smashed it completely, and held up his hands, whimpering (tremulous, girlish voice) okay, Bob, I'll release it, but it'll be a single album, and you better fucking deliver on the next one or you're all washed up here!

IoF© Wow!

BoB Pathetic. So I did like this finger pistol at him and said there ain't gonna be a next one, Mary.

IoF© Ha ha! But in a sense he had a point, The album was trashed by everybody.

BoB Broke my heart. I was in this position where I couldn't defend it, so I kind of twisted the story, saying Columbia put it out without my knowledge or permission, playing the big evil corporation against the victimised artist card. I got back a little credibility. I lied to myself, I lied to everybody, and I crucified that sweet little album.

IoF© Bowie's Pinups was a success, though.

BoB He released that? 

IoF© Uh ... so, this deluxe edition?

BoB It's pretty close to how I envisaged it, only the title's the same as Davis chose, the fucking genius. Just a bunch of nice tunes, sung when I still had a voice. It's probably my favorite album of mine.

IoF© Thanks for dropping in, Bob!

BoB Thanks for the opportunity to get the truth out there, Farq. It's a weight off my mind. You want to loadup the album up for th' Four Or Five Guys©?

IoF© Gee! That would be swell!

Not That Gigi, This One Dept.

Awesomeness.

Gigi the movie not only hasn't worn well, it was dreadful in every way on release in '58, the year after Gigi Gryce appeared at Newport. Reminiscin', his last album, is from a couple of years later, and perfectly encapsulates the vibe of 'sixties jazz. It's cool as a frosted daiquiri, swings like a sandal from the toe of a party girl, and it's an orch-tette! Oboy!

Gryce, whose playing was influenced by his pal Charlie Parker, was an academic at heart, an introspective bookish type whose compositions were the product of a formidable theoretical knowledge. He worked extensively as an arranger and session musician, contributing to many great albums (such as Monk's Music) but retreated from the music business into public school teaching - a kind of Bizarro Sting, leaving a relatively slender discography as leader which rewards investigation.

This post authenticated by the Veeblefetzer Homologation Department, U.S. Department of Commerce

NOW That's What I Call Rock Groups Named After Hermann Hesse Novels! Part One

The publishers knew their demographic. Dig the quote, too.

I doubt Hermann Hesse paperbacks are being much read in coffee houses or stuffed into duffel bags anymore. Do TYPOT [The Young People Of Today - Ed.] read books at all? They seem to be permanently entranced by glowing rectangles. Maybe they're reading them on their phones? What am I saying? Of course they're not fucking reading books on their phones, especially not novels by dead white dudes and especially not pipesucking entitled German-Swiss dead white dudes trying to pierce the veil of mundane existence thru rejection of contemporary mores. Fuck that shit - here's a selfie of my oat-milk latte!

Back then, though. There were four Hesse cerebral core texts [we did that one already - Ed.] that got passed around - Siddhartha, The Steppenwolf, and if you were the bookish type, Demian, and The Journey To The East. These were cult books, but it was a big cult. We didn't sit around discussing them like Oprah's book club, giving them the academic analysis, we just read the fucking things because we needed all the help we could get piercing the veil of mundane existence, which was hard work, and took dedication and a bunch of drugs.

Hesse suffered depression as a boy, gave suicide a try, got put into a mental hospital. Worked in bookshops. Kept himself to himself. Read books, wrote. Got married, travelled to the East, not finding what he was looking for there, either. Separated from schizophrenic wife. During this time he became a successful author, the cerebral core texts [give it up - Ed.] appearing between 1919 and 1932. He wrote a shitload of other stuff, including the impenetrable Glass Bead Game, glomming the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, and died in 1962, just before drug-crazed rock bands started naming themselves after his works.

Steppenwolf is the best-known. A great name for a band. Mars Bonfire, a great name for a rock musician, wrote Born To Be Wild, and the rest is history.

Demian changed their name from Bubble Puppy (who wouldn't), but the big time eluded them anyway.

Bead Game [antecedently FoamFeatured© - Ed.] were the best thing in The People Next Door movie, an achievement perhaps just shy of a Nobel Prize, but why the gorgeous Echoes Of Sweet Medusa wasn't a great big fat hit remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the business called "the music". Loaddown includes their two albums.

This post made manifest thru the intercession of The Bishop Of Rome Motor Court, Pismo Beach.

Ineluctable Audacity Dept. - The Great God Pan At The Gates Of Dawn

Hard now to appreciate just how wildly experimental and startling that first Pink Floyd album was. It's either patronised as charming but hopelessly dated, or revered as the kaleidoscopic flowering of a madcap minstrel's cracked genius (an a-Syd album). That's two blind grabs at the elephant in a dark room.

Pan, yesterday

Start with the title: it's not on the front cover, it's not the name of a song, nor is it referenced in a lyric. It's a quote from The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame, one of the handful of children's classics adopted by the hippies as holy texts. The Piper is Pan, the horned goat-god, bestial, wildly sexual. Pagan. We're not talking Disney here, kiddies.

"This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!"

Meeting Pan is the culmination of the trip back to nature, to the source of magic, to the gates of dawn, or the Doors Of Perception - Heaven And Hell, the Magic Theatre. All this buried in the title to a pop album? Not for everybody - if you knew, you knew. Certainly it was deemed too arcane for the American market - Tower just stripped it right out.

In a radical break from EMI art department policy, the cover shot was lensed [oh very good - Ed.] by fashion photographer Vic Singh, using a prism given to him by George Harrison. No stylists, no special effects other than the lens, and the band in their work clothes - a kaleidoscopic moment captured forever. Today, it seems like just another generic psychedelic cover, but back then it was saturated with a-Syd intensity.

The music, for a start, owes nothing to The Beatles, who are widely credited with the invention of the sixties. Mostly composed by Barrett, it was a revolutionary clash of fairytale whimsy and cosmic soundscapes, much of it instrumental. Not instrumental as in surf music or The Shadows or RnB or jazz or anything else current at the time. Indescribably far out and mind-blowing, it was music of the spheres teetering on the brink of collapse but always underpinned by structure and order, prefiguring Kraut Rock. It's what you might expect when three formalist architectural students get inspired by a whirling dervish shaman. Nick Mason's drumming is supernaturally right, at once powerful and retrained, a tribal metronomic. Roger Waters' bass has that freakbeat power and pulse. Rick Wright is feeling his way, but never hits a wrong note, adding color and depth. And Barrett's guitar is a psychedelic scythe, a slashing blade. And his lyrics are frequently sublime:

Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew.
Floating down, the sound resounds
Around the icy waters underground.
Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania.
Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten ...

I was listening to this while chowing down on my gha-pow moo today, washed down by an icy tin of Kirin. In The Wind In The Willows, Pan grants his worshippers forgetfulness of their meeting, so their lives will not seem smaller in comparison. I was trying to remember seeing the Floyd in '67. It's all gone. Just memories of memories, ripples flattening from that original splash. False memory foam, froth on the daydream. But the music - my song-dream - is still as startling, all there at the tap of my phone, worlds and lifetimes colliding, as ineluctably audacious as ever.

Saucerful Of Secrets

I've forgotten the derivation of the title - I think it's another literary reference. The cover (the band's first by Hipgnosis) features what looks like a light show - much of it from a Strange Tales page. Doctor Strange is clearly visible on the original Tower release [above, at right - Ed.], but almost totally obscured on the U.K. edition. Strange! Other elements come from alchemical texts. Because 1968.

Generally perceived as a "transitional album", Easy-going Rog nixed Barrett's Scream Thy Last Scream and Vegetable Man, replacing them with his execrable Corporal Clegg. My version redresses this calumny, and incorporates contemporary singles in a reshuffled sequence you may find mildly satisfying. Oh - it's all in stereo, as the baby Jesus intended. To claim the mono version (which was the only one I had for many years) is in any way better is just perverse. Stereo was arguably part of the composing process - the band and Norman Smith knew what they were doing - widening heads, not narrowing focus. Loaddown in comments. Gee - is it ever swell!

How I Overcame The Shudder & Cringe Factor And Learned To Enjoy The Music Of Sting Dept.

 

Sting at the launch of his scrotum-scented candle range, yestiddy

It's his grinding, slatey-faced humorlessness. The leaden, witless, pompous self-seriousness. Can you imagine a worse person to be stuck with at a party than Gordon Sumner? As this was never even remotely likely, you'd think this wouldn't be an issue, and I could appreciate his music for what it is, but no. I've always loftily advocated art, not the artist, but made an exception for Sting. Something about his unique wonderfulness - singlehandedly saving the rainforest, marrying a posh bint (c.f. easygoing funsters Elvis Costello and John McLaughlin), dabbling in thespianism and vagina-scented Buddhism, bringing Jungian philosophy to the masses. All the while fending off unwanted advances from schoolgirls.

His interviews have that effortless quality of making you want to grab a lungful of fresh air. There's a doozy on Rick Beato's YewChewb© channel. Rick understands just how deceptively clever and sophisticated Sting's songs are, revering the guy as a composer and performer, but not as much as Sting, who has a Chapman stick up his ass and an expression on his pan that would do credit to a Merovingian emperor.

But I find myself suddenly enjoying his albums much, much more than I feel comfortable with. They're just so damn ... musical? And there's a bunch of tunes in there I find myself singing along with, such is their compelling melodic heft. Today's loaddown consists of Turtles, Nothing, and Tales, which is probably as deep as I want to wade. I'll still be looking over his shoulder at parties for someone more interesting to talk to - perhaps that insurance salesman keen to contact me about my extended car warranty - but I'm pleased that art, not the artist has passed its perhaps most stringent test.

Hammock Swinging Dept. - Bing, Satch, and Billy May

How are your cockles? A little lacking in warmth? Lower your pants and back up to the glow of this swell recording. Cut your bad self some slack. Forget your troubles, or at least nudge them to one side, for some sweet hammock swinging from couple of mellow herb enthusiasts wrapped in the musical embrace of one of the finest arrangers who ever twirled a baton. And it's recorded (as they used to say) by none other than Wally Heider. Hall O' Foam© inductee Johnny Mercer gets to tweak the lyrics here and there and add a couple of songs of his own. CD edition with worthwhile xtry trx.                        

Sharing the autochange spindle on the RCA Consolette are the sublime Fancy Meeting You Here, with Rosemary Clooney, Billy May, and engineered by Bones Howe, and Cole Porter's High Society soundtrack, here presented in a narrow stereo mix what a pal of mine done did.

Get Laid Thru' Poetry Dept. - Leonard Cohen

There's a whole shitload of guys what I'd rather of bin than my bad self. Guys what had th' handsomeness to attract dames like steaming schnitzengrüben at a yenta tennis brunch. Like Leonard Cohen, who got more tail than a sumo thong. Dames dig bookish types what gaze into their cleavage like they was composin' a poem. Pecking at an old mechanical-type typewriter before ripping out the paper and yeeting it into the trash bucket overflowing with previous failed attempts to capture some broad's fugitive beauty in the catcher's mitt of poesie. The scene plays out with a bottle of coarse red wine and urgent sexual intercourse, possibly on a nicely faded and stained floor rug, before a starlit stroll to a rustic taverna, more coarse red wine, slurred philosophy and a lot of cigarettes, passing out in each others' arms as the rising sun, having missed out on all the action, peers through the shutters.

Cohen's second album, Songs From A Room, bequeathed unto me the same get-the-fuck-out kick in the pants I got from On The Road a couple of years antecedently. His muse, Marianne Ihlen, in a towel, the typewriter, the exotic locale, all bespoke of a life that was rightfully mine. The man himself stares out inscrutably from a minimalist monochrome sleeve like some wanted poster of a gunslinger. This was hot on the heels of the White Album cover in clearing away the psychedelic debris of the sixties, suggesting a restart with a blank slate. But where the music on the White Album was an indulgent, sloppy mess, Cohen's made good the promise. Ten songs from a room, him and his guitar, singing to women. That's the secret; any man who's singing to women - not necessarily about women - is doing it right. They know. 

Recorded, as many singer-songwriter second albums are, as a "correction" to an over-produced first album, Songs From A Room made the rest of his career a recapitulation. He could have stopped after the first two albums (both included in the loaddown). Not saying he should have - that would be nuts - but almost uniquely in the field of popular minstrelsy he accomplished something original and beautiful and perfect right off the bat that distilled the spirit of poetry and love and freedom and all that great shit. Game changing. It can happen.

[Don't miss hyperlinks! - Ed.]

Herb-free Remedies Dept.

Cornucopiously FoamFeatured© antecedently [use search box, make request, quit whining - Ed.], Los Headhunters have put out consistently rewarding albums across the decades, with necessarily changing line-ups and *cough* tonal palette. Here's a couple of their most recent - there's another I missed, that apparently "feats" rap celebrities, which doesn't sound like much of a swing in the hammock to me, but these two deliver a satisfying and gluten-free listening experience, so do please set aside a few moments in your busy schedule to accommodate their offerings. Swell!

The Styrofoam Soul Of Bruce Springsteen

Initial impressions from the advance releases and promo clip on YewChewb were not good. Artificial. Fake. A bunch of actors pretending to put on a soul show. Springsteen bragging about his "kick ass" voice in front of his car collection. Gee whiz.

Springsteen has been styled into an "iconic" figure; a Kardashian bro, face hewn from wet clay with a picnic knife, a Play-Doh© Mount Rushmore. His bod is billionaire buff. He's incredible for his age! Well, he always was, only now incredible means not believable. Like other show-biz divas unable to accept growing old, he's spared no expense in his efforts to bequeath a beautiful corpse - pre-mummified, it will never rot and may be put on permanent display at the Smithsonian, hair gleaming black as a toad's back, teeth Chiclet-perfect, skin tight as a lizard's ass. Take a hinge at the cover of The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle [left - Ed.] to see what he's lost, what we've lost. Ah, but he was so much older then ... 

So the album, then. My attention wandered with me out into the garden after a few tracks. I'd been distracted by the irritatingly weak guitar on the first track - once you hear that, you can't put it away. Everything but the horns and the strings are played by nobody's first call soul brother Ron Aniello, and how was this ever entertained as a possibility, leave alone a great idea? Springsteen could have - and damn well should have, given the genre - assembled a "kick ass" band and recorded live. I'm no expert on soul music, but this I know - it's real, and it's righteous. It's also black. The only thing black about Bruce is his hair dye.

Critics have been giving the man respect for paying respect to the genre. Sam and Dave weren't respecting the genre. They were living it. Springsteen is living in some nightmarish Meta©verse, acting through an icon as convincing as Zuckerberg's. If anyone prefers his karaoke versions to the originals, then they will probably be white, already a Bruce fan, and have next to no soul records in their collection. Maybe a Best Of compilation they don't play much, but it's nice to have. In case someone checks. Springsteen sums it up on the album, when he testifies during the Zoom recording session of Soul Days - I wanna hear some Ray Charles!

Bruce, you got your five hundred million bucks for your back catalog - couldn't you have given the world something better than this record-your-own-album vanity project? It's too late for you to shut the fuck up, but I don't have to listen anymore. Amscray. Your work here is done.

EDIT: Adding dramatically to the content value of this post, Four Or Five Guy© Draftervoi gives us a glimpse at what a Bruce soul album could have sounded like, were he ever in the position to assemble a kick ass band. [Link in comments, cover at left - Ed.]

In The Garden Of Scented Sitars Dept.

I've *cough* "streamlined" the format of th' IoF© to make it simpler for my bad self, so not actively seeking submissions, but Sitarswami's comps are as rare as they are impeccably realised, and it's a pleasure and an honor to make an exception for his new three-disc sitar-centric collection, In The Garden Of Scented Sitars. His screed follows, as do my sleeve designs, brought to you thru the magic of DALL-E©.

In The Garden of Scented Sitars

A late-night Google search of my memory banks reveals that the sitar first entered public consciousness in early 1966, centered around a fifth-grade group art project. There were four of us huddled close to the school’s portable record player auditioning Rubber Soul. The three of us content to do the least amount of work acceptable had agreed with an idea put forth by our class’s sole long-haired boy: we make hand puppets of, and pretend to be, The Beatles performing a song off their latest record. Hazy recollection suggests we chose “Run For Your Life” for our quickly forgotten pantomime (was I Ringo or George?). I wasn’t a Beatles fan, due to my older sister’s short-term obsession, but “Norwegian Wood” tickled the tinder in my ten- year-old brain. Later that year, stoked by the release of “Paint It Black” and “Turn-Down Day,” the smoldering embers sparked into a slow, burning, infatuation.

If incense was the olfactory signpost of late-60’s flower power, then a sitar was the aural manifestation. On the strength of its 18, 19, 20, or 21 strings the sitar provided world music with its first inroad into western pop. Soon, the scent of sitars permeated society heralding a golden age. Its aromatic, yet sublime, spice spread into the far reaches of the entertainment industry -- from film soundtracks to comedy routines. Teen music magazines tried to follow the beat widening their reportage and fanciful profiles. In Hit Parader and Tiger Beat you could now devour articles on Ravi Shankar (“Ravi & Raga at Monterey Pop” or “It’s A Happening, A Sitar Sensation”) along with the Brian Goes Back To The Beach exposés and Zappa’s “Folk Rock is a Drag” Hagstrom guitar ads.

When some listeners proved allergic, science responded. Genetic experiments conducted by Dr. V. Bell at Danelectro laboratories successfully bred a sitar with an electric guitar. Creating, in retrospect, a questionable, if not-illegitimate, offspring and one who will not be heard in this article.

Smelling profit, record label executives used the whiff of a sitar to entice novice buyers. With fifty years hindsight, these cash-in attempts seem harmless, charmingly naive. Some, like Emil Richards’ Journey to Bliss, should be heard. Others (e.g., Flower Power Sitar by Rajput & the Sepoy Mutiny or Kali Bahlu’s Cosmic Remembrance on the glorious World Pacific label) aren’t listenable for more than a few minutes but manage to evoke a timeless “What were they thinking?” excitement. Proof that the western-pop-sitar craze had blanketed the globe was the album release, in India, of Balsara & His Singing Sitars’ Great International Hits, featuring “the exciting new sounds of sitars” playing classics like “Tequila,” “Edelweiss” and “These Boots Are Made For Walking.”

But it’s those few plucked or strummed moments of eternal bliss that we live for. When I hear sitar in any recording the endorphins flow and my mood elevates suddenly. Who can ask more of any instrument?

The bulk of songs found In the Garden of Scented Sitars were recorded in the 1960s. By the early 70’s the sitar had fallen increasingly out of fashion, but the seeds planted grew. Throughout the decades devoted musicians have tended to the garden and its admirers continue to record.

I’ve sprinkled a few familiar tracks along the garden path and rather than presenting the Four Or Five Guys© with well-considered and researched insight into each of the sixty-nine bouquets displayed, below you’ll find only random commentary and indiscriminate petals of thought. Let’s digress:

The Flower Power Atomizer

Brewer & Shipley wrote Noel Harrison’s (the UK’s answer to Nancy Sinatra) one toke beyond ode to her eyes and to her mind.

The ID Company lp features Inga Rumpf on one side and Dagmar Krause on the other. I&D had previously recorded together in the German folk-blues unit, the City Preachers, and it’s a bit unnerving to hear Dagmar sing a rollicking version of “An Old Shanty Town.” Inga went on to front Frumpy before going solo, while Dagmar joined Slapp Happy and Art Bears.

One side of (Farq favorite) Shawn Phillips’ non-lp single soars into Tim Buckley territory. You’ll find the flipside further along the path. [that's him in the top photo - Ed.]

Sheb Wooley, the “Purple People Eater” perpetrator, lays waste to the counterculture.

Sopwith Camel delivers one of my sitar favorites. Who could have guessed that harmonica & sitar would blend so magically?

Ravi’s student, Warren Klein, ex-Factory and Fraternity of Man, adds age-appropriate sitar to Beck’s latter-day downer.

Ron Nasty, not Elvis Costello or Jeff Lynne, would have been the perfect replacement for John Lennon in the reformed church of The Beatles.

Every garden contains a poison bloom: Here, the A-side of The Meditations’ juicy, unbelievably bad, 45 frees the inner man with an overripe Elvis Presley-styled recitation b/w a b-side (appearing later) so creepy it reminds me of an incident related by a friend’s wife. She worked the front desk of a chain hotel in a small college town where the Beach Boys stopped for a one night stand. When Mike Love registered, he invited her up to his room after the show “to practice Transcendental Meditation.” Inspirational TM lyric: “Follow sense into infinity/When our day-to-day life flowers and blooms /and I touch reality.”

At the Shrine of the Paper Sun

Meghana Bhat introduces sitar jangle pop.
Now playing: the finest sitar pop instrumental ever waxed courtesy of Ravi’s nephew, Ananda .

Pastor John Rydgren issues a stern warning of the dangers to be found in the garden, simultaneously creating new dimensions in the middle of reality.

The Trees’ original version of Jane Delawney was ranked #1 in an informal poll taken by fellow sitar-heads of “songs that should have included sitar.” #2) “Summer Breeze” by Seals & Crofts, #3) the Bonzo’s “Kama Sutra,” followed by, at #4) either (pick one) “Iron Man” or “Planet Caravan,” with The Kinks “Fancy” rounding out the top five.

Erstwhile Bruce Brown surf instrumentalists The Sandals combine sitars & monster mash.

It’s not The Kinks, but the Smell of Incense is nothing to sniff at and will give you some idea re: #5 above.

One reviewed opined “(Hiromasa Suzuki’s) backward journey along the lights and shadows in search of the musical and cultural sources of mainland Asia, from the gates of India to the roots of China...” To me, it’s an alluring mix of electric piano & sitar, thoroughly intoxicating despite the worst abrupt fade-out encountered in years.

Clark & Marilyn Burroughs were The Joyride. Clark sang tenor with the Hi-Lo’s, a late 50’s- early 60’s vocal group and replaced Curt Boettcher as The Association’s arranger at their insistence. His work for the group commenced with “Windy.”

A Hidden Path Discovered

ILYABT, a collage of snippets from the best sitar film soundtrack. Resistance is useless in the face of Brute Force.

Presenting The Petals and the high-flying mushroom infused folk-rock that made Milwaukee famous.

I’ve not heard sitar-flavored bluegrass but Fit & Limo’s take on The Dead leads me to suspect it might play well.

A longtime Beatle impersonator and Ravi’s lesser-known daughter cover a George b-side.

Brothers released the only non-Mountain/Leslie West album on Windfall records. The album’s cover art would provide a great alternative to Farq’s superb work found on this set.

I’ve excluded a conspicuous number of rare and precious, or popular, sitar gems from this post – no Traffic, no Rolling Stones, Chocolate Watch Band, Vince Donofrio, Alison Gros, John Renbourn, Pentangle, Elmer Gantry, ISB, Donovan, Pretty Things. Boeing Duveen, not even Joe Harriott or the Zodiac Cosmic Sounds. Sorry, maybe next time!

Kudos to Sitarswami for the swell sounds 'n screed!

Fill Your Head With Rocks Dept. - The Flocks

T.V.'s Ben Gazzara auditioning for Thunderbirds puppet show, yestiddy

Flock Rock swept the world back in (RSRCH. PSE ED) [Do ur own friggin' rsrch - Ed.]. IT'S FLOCKMANIA! screamed the headlines in 120pt sans. Teens worldwide "flocked" to buy Flocks Merch - headbands, bongs, limited edition tarot decks, Slinky©s, steak knife sets, arch supports, chew toys, fridge magnets, Hi-Waist™ old guy underpants, Flocks Sox©, and a host of other collectible collectibles now fetching up to .01 bucks on etunes! Yessiree Bob! Or not.

They were one of the many bands introduced to an uncaring world via the Fill Your Head With Rocks double sampler, which was distributed free to every household in Des Moines in a bold never-to-be-repeated marketing initiative. Today's post is the first in a series that will present entire discographies of every act featured on that precedent-setting album! Or not.

The Flocks were famed for featuring Jerry Goodman on violin, who went on to found Ben & Jerry's ice cream with Ben Gazzara [above - Ed.]. No, wait, that was someone else. Jerry Goodman left The Flocks to star as Fat Dude in long-running T.V. series Rhoda. (CHANGE IMAGE AT TOP PSE ED) [FUCK YOU - ED.].

Today's load-down includes their three chart-topping albums, including the rare Inside Out which was actually the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with Joe Venuti scraping the catguts. From '75, the year jazzrock flatlined, and also the year of my first marriage. Coincidence? I think not ...









Today's post made manifest thru the patronage of Portly Morty's Shorts Court© - "relaxed apparel for guys what don't give a shit"®!

Frayed Edges Of The Firesign Dept.

I got into the Firesign Theatre at Don't Crush That Dwarf, and liked them for all the wrong reasons. I'd read they were a comedy act, but they weren't making me laugh out loud like everyone on the internet is doing these days LOL!

They were unlike anything I'd ever heard, deep and mysterious and a little bit sinister, similar to the buzz I got from the EC Mad comics. They were full of references to unknown sources, references that the jokes depended on. If anything, this increased the attraction and upped the weirdness factor. I'd entered a whole new world of strange, as obsessively detailed as a Will Elder panel. Their first four albums remain endlessly replayable, with diminishing returns thereafter, but it's all good.

Having said that, here's some of their less good stuff to fill the cracks in your collection. Give Us A Break is a collection of short ads you'll want to listen to at least once, again and again! A Firesign Chat With Papoon is political satire - and we all know how powerfully mind-changing that is - from '72. No sleeve because some kind of promo release. Pink Hotel Burns Down is a ragbag archival set, with both Fabergé aggs and dust bunnies. And Stoned Live Radio is just that, four friggin' hours of stoned live radio.

This is for Michael Snorky Smith, who requested some Firesignage. Hit the search button for more!

Groovy Movies Dept. - The Final Programme

 

Adapted from Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius quartet The Final Programme, A Cure For Cancer, The English Assassin and The Condition of Muzak, Michael Fuest's The Final Programme (1973) is possibly the last gasp of Swinging London. Fuest is more a stylist than a director (his filmography is pretty wretched), and the movie is a team effort with input from the cast.

It stiffed at the box office, and in spite of an increasing reputation among hip cinephiles it remains difficult to find. It's not, amazingly, on YewChewb (although associated clips are, including the trailer), and piratical torrents are flatlining. Luckily, you're on the Isle O' Foam©, where rarity is commonplace, and the commonplace merely a place people have in common.

Moorcock hated the result, which is why you don't see his eminently filmable novels exploited for the silver screen (and possibly why it's not on the Chewb). But we don't have to compare it to the book or measure it by his intent, we can just slouch on the couch like the slobs we are and let it massage our cerebral cortex for eighty minutes. As one IMDB reviewer sez, it's funny, stylish, and erotic. A relentless visual and aural assault on the viewers senses, sez another. It's no lost masterpiece, but it deserves a home on th' Isle O' Foam©.

Beaver & Krause, frequent visitors to these balmy shores, provide the soundtrack (suitably futuristic Moog bleeps and swooshes), to which Gerry Mulligan and Eric Clapton contribute.

You need this in your life. To ask why is to indulge in pointless sophistry.

Loaddown includes both movie and book(s), if you're the bookish type.

Lone Voices Dept. - Shawn Phillips

Bright White appeared a year after Faces, and didn't perform quite so well on the U.S. and Canadian charts, which must have been a major disappointment for Phillips and A&M. It's generally thought to be his most commercial and accessible release, and the label did everything possible to make it fly, employing a roster of studio talent you'd be hard-pressed to equal: Chucks Rainey and Findley, Craig Doerge, Russ Kunkel, Danny Kortchmar, Jims Price and Horn, Bobby Keyes, Sneeky Pete, Lee Sklar ... with arrangements by Paul Buckmaster and Peter Robinson, and some air-frying guitar by the mysterious Tony Walmsley, whose soaring muscular sustain is a definite and unique plus.

Why wasn't it a massive hit? It's possible it got buried in the avalanche of major releases by better-known acts. 1973 was an extraordinary year; Dark Side Of The Moon, Raw Power, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Houses Of The Holy, Countdown To Ecstasy, the first Eagles album, Wake Of The Flood, Tyranny And Mutation, Birds Of Fire, Welcome, Solid Air, Let's Get It On, Catch A Fire, Band On The Run, For Everyman, 3+3, the first two Springsteen albums, Quadrophenia, Brothers And Sisters, Goats Head Soup, Headhunters, Holland, Dixie Chicken, Innervisions ... the list goes on. How spoiled we were back then!

Two nights sold out at The Orpheum, Minneapolis '73

And there wasn't a single. The title song didn't quite hit the sweet spot, struggling up to #62 in Canadia, where Phillips had a loyal Mountie and Lumberjack following. Maybe the slickness was a turn-off for the folkie crowd who'd adopted him. Who knows? It wasn't the breakthrough he needed, and A&M were to let him go a couple of years later.

But there's something else - the fan in me has loved and enjoyed this album through countless plays over the decades, but the critic in me notes a certain stiffness in his precision. Take The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle from the same year. Both albums open with some clavinet funk and climax with a cinematically romantic showstopper, but where Springsteen is natural and impassioned, a young man on the threshold of his dream, Phillips has an almost academic approach to his craft, already an old hand on his seventh album. Easier to respect than to love, perhaps?

Shawn has been FoamFeatured© antecedently - hit the search box!

How To Flush Your Music Career Down The Toilet Dept. - Mike Corbett And Jay Hirsh

Mr. Flood's Party

"Why hire a design department?" Jay Hirsh might have gushed back in '69. "I can do linocuts!" Linocuts are to art directors what Scotch tape is to surgeons. But they snuck the cover past Cotillion - part of Atlantic Records - and the album flopped into the racks like a wet fish and hung there until it stank.

The band - named after a poem about a drunk dude going up a hill - had recorded a fine piece of work that deserved to nudge into the national charts, and it looked like shit [left - Ed.]. You don't think it matters? Of course it matters. Quit being argumentative. It went up against Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Clear, Volunteers, Let It Bleed ... and a ton of other well-dressed albums that looked like a little time and money had been spent on the packaging. Albums you'd be happy to spend a little time and money on yourself.

The album's a bit of a monster. The singing is terrific, harmonies bang in the middle of the note. Acid-edged and funky acoustic guitars. Two smooth sidelong suites, nifty solos, proper thought-out arrangements and orchestration, varied instrumentation, changes of pace, intriguing lyrics - it checked all the boxes for a rock album in 1969. Except for a cover you didn't want to throw darts at.

Here's a great shot of their audience totally losing their shit at Steve Paul's The Scene. Note wild hippie ambience enhanced by album poster on wall. Note glamorous plumbing accents hanging from ceiling. Note cute chick giving her boss [center - Ed.] a handjob. 

Ahmet Ertegun, the Ahmet Ertegun, him, heard the album (they probably didn't show him the cover) and liked it well enough to give the two main players, Mike Corbett and Jay Hirsh, a follow-up album on his prestigious Atlantic label. He anted up for a stellar bunch of studio talent including Hugh McCracken (who got a title billing), Eric Weisberg, Russel George on fiddle. You'd of thunk that our guys would have wised up, but guess what happened. Take a hinge at the cover [left - Ed.]. Yup. They went for a linocut and paste-up type cut from a newspaper ad, like before. It's a fucking disgrace, maybe even worse than Mr. Flood's Party. It probably shows a dying peacock, or maybe an indigenous Amazonian ceremonial toupée. Or a chewed-up floor mop. We don't care. We just want it to go away, and it did, taking the album with it.

Tragically, the album's another keeper. They made the required transition from rock to country rock with talent, taste, dizzying chops, and above all, swell songs. This was 1971, when the album should have been, if not quite as big as American Beauty or Déjà Vu, then certainly a second-string hit they could have toured behind James Taylor or the New Riders or any act that knew when to hang up the linocutter.

Music to look away from.