By the time Soft Machine stopped counting their albums, they stopped counting for anything much, becoming just another super-proficient jazz rock combo, losing the indefinably fluid quality that made them unique, even after line-up changes that would have crippled any other band.
Third was a monster of an album. Even the sleeve seemed somehow massive. A double album with only four tracks? Yow! What could that sound like!? Even in an era when side-long compositions weren't too rare, Third was pioneering, uncompromising, and out-bloody-rageous. It came with a gold price sticker on the front - I remember 39/11 but that's probably wrong [39/11 is around 23c US today - Ed.].
Flashback to the party to which [grammar - Ed.] I lugged my newly-purchased copy of Third, in the absence of a girlfriend (the two would prove to be incompatible). Anyway, you didn't take girlfriends to parties, you went to parties to get free drinks and impress girls with your toxic masculinity and deep knowledge of blues rock guitarists, then miss the last bus and walk home alone in the rain. What a time to be alive! Waiting for the ideal moment, I cued it up on the stereo only to discover there is never an ideal moment to cue up Third at a party. In my blissful ignorance, I thought the three minutes of tar pit anteater gargling that introduce the thrilling main theme of Facelift would be appreciated by teen revelers tiring of T Rex and Slade or whatever it was and I would get nods of respect from the guys and come-hither glances from the girls. My wrongness became immediately apparent. The scratch over that intro remained a useful reminder never to try that shit again.
In retrospect, maybe I should have played Moon In June, or Slightly All The Time. Or Out Bloody Rageous. Better I should have taken Motown Chartbusters, because Christine Williams was into Tamla, and I was desirous of getting into her pants. Anyway, joke's on her because I still hunker down in my headphones for the duration of Third and I bet she's entirely forgotten Motown Chartbusters and harbors to this day a secret regret she never let me get in her pants.
Here's the inner gatefold, showing my guys waiting for some girls to show up. Note groovy beverage table, Wyatt's groovy shirt, Ratledge's groovy shades.
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| "What time is it?" "Ten." What time you tell them?" "EIGHT FUCKING THIRTY for the fiftieth fucking time I told them HALF PAST EIGHT!" [pause] "Where are they then?" "I don't fucking know." "Fancy a pint?" |
Third, as you may have guessed from the title of this piece - assuming you read that far - qualifies as a Perfect Ten because no part of it can be improved, including the cover. It is an astonishing piece of work. But because this is th' IoF©, where quantity is quality, I'm throwing in a bonus contemporary album of them at the Albert Hall - the first rock group to ever play at the prestigious BBC Proms (Promenade Concerts). Pearls were clutched.
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| Iconic cover by Isle O' Foam© Art Department o' Art Dept. That's a full-color photograph - London was like that in 1970. |
Added to the deliverables, this here swell Cuneiform archival collection, from the Third era:.
What search engine do you use? I've just discovered this, which is damn good -
ReplyDeletehttps://www.qwant.com/
This seems alright--care to say more about why you like it. I am forced by the powers to be to have some stuff on Chrome and remain weirdly wedded to Fire Fox...teh kidz mention Duck Duck Go in their putative fear of tracking, but get their news from Tik Tok
DeleteIt's French, which in itself is a good thing. No oligarchs or Nazi billionaires snooping and harvesting. The results are not led by advertising or any concerns other than relevance.
DeleteI use Firefucks, too. Not in love with it but over the years it's been reliable, works with my old O.S., and I can customise it to a bare minimum. Duckduckgo has been my default search engine until qwant.
Never been a social media-type guy. Th' IoF© is as social as I want to get, but I monitor the youngs on imgur, which gives a useful (and mostly saddening) insight into their world.
Soft Machine are girl kryptonite. So was/ remains about 75% of my music collection. The discovery of Todd Rundgren and Hall and Oates significantly increased my hit rate, though a misplaced "Dogfight Giggle" on Todd's "A Wizard, A True Star" once significantly interrupted a much sought after coupling. I learned to put side 2 on first, so the deed was done by the time I wanted to turn the record over.
ReplyDeleteAnyone who accomplished the beast with two backs within an album side's duration is a Sex God in my books. Did you keep your socks on?
Deletere London's period grim-ness: IIRC 'The Adventures Of Barry McKenzie' (1972) is full of references to copious dog-shit in Earl's Court
ReplyDeleteI followed him in Private Eye (until the dentist scene made Ingrams cancel it), and had the paperback collection, but you're referring to the film (which I never saw)? Saw Barry Humphries live - the best one man show I ever saw.
DeleteCripes, you've hit the recess of me memory box here - I was indeed present at this Prom in 1970 on August 13th. It was a "late night prom" commencing at 10pm and jolly good it was. The Soft Machine performances were preceded by music from Terry Riley and Tim Souster. Earlier the same evening I had attended a normal prom concert (7pm start) at which a varied programme of music by JS Bach was played. I am now going to dig out me Softs collection and give 'em a spin. Good stuff Farq.
ReplyDeleteYou saw Terry Riley and Soft Machine on the same night? I am not worthy. *bends to kiss hem of Man from Mordor's garment*
DeleteSorry, Motown Chartbusters it is, pants or no pants. Those bass lines...Rundgren is a good call, though "Slut" is not much of a girl magnet, at least in my experience.
ReplyDeleteIn case anyone cares: the guy in the background (of whom only a leg is visible) is WDR Radio Disc Jockey Winfried Trenkler, in whose flat the photo was taken. And the bare feet in the foreground belong to his girlfriend.
ReplyDeleteI own the Japanese Blu-Spec CD2 edition of Soft Machine Third, which I find significantly better than all the other versions I've heard, which is saying something with my 72 years old ears.
By the way, I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, which also claims not to record my activities. Recommended.
I care. Passionately. This, for me, is news. Thank you.
DeleteDoes the Japanese Blu-Spec CD2 edition of Soft Machine Third include the scratch at the beginning of Facelift?
Re DDG, see above reply to eric. Give qwant a spin.
Everyone should make their own scratches on records. But without joking (always a stupid idea): I have always been so annoyed by scratches or other noises on records that I have tried to exchange many of them. I even returned a Pink Floyd Saucerful LP once because I noticed something strange about the sound, but the dealer said the LP was perfectly fine, which it was. Later it turned out that the recording was too muffled for my taste (the MONO edition sounds better, by the way). I'm not a big HIFI enthusiast, but to this day there are always things that get on my nerves.
DeleteThat's what always amuses me (too strong a word) about vinyl fetishists. The number of shitty records I had to return (or live with) outweighs the pleasure I got from the "warm analogue sound".
DeleteAs to Saucerful, I had both stero and mono, on vinyl. I'm generally not in the "mono is better" camp, and especially not for Floyd albums - Norman Smith knew his way around a stereo desk, and the effects were an integral part of Floyd's head-widening appeal.
My pimp of Saucerful (here: https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2023/03/iof-spatial-additions-dept-special.html ) has been called "a quantum improvement" on the original, and who am I to disagree?
That was in 1968 and back then there was nothing other than analogue (the word didn't even exist in this context). Today I can no longer understand that either, maybe it was because of my inferior stereo system. But I'm actually not unhappy about the introduction of digital, especially because of ‘no scratches’.
DeleteYes it was, and no there wasn't. CDs were perceived as sounding "cold" on introduction, and so vinyl suddenly became "warm" in comparison, no matter how shrill and hissy the pressing and/or production had been. MP3 was generally set at 128 in the early days, and nobody complained about "loudness" or "brickwalling" until higher rates became the norm and we were able to squint at waveforms (in Audacity, saving a file @ 320 is rated "insane" quality).
DeleteIt's the music that matters, and it can move you (or not) through any medium, at pretty much any measured "quality". It's the emotional response that matters, not the clinical. Scratches interrupted the emotional response like picnic wasps.
I can only agree with that. Perhaps the current nonsense talk about sound quality is due to the fact that music today is often just sound instead of content.
ReplyDeleteAnother little anecdote: when King Crimson's Lizard was released, I got one of the first copies that came out of the pressing plant (I worked in a record shop at the time). And for that reason alone, the LP was flawless except for one ‘little thing’: ‘Farewell the temple master's bells’ POK POK POK (one time left channel, one middle, one right) ........................... a pressing error as was common at the time: an air bubble. I tried again and again, but the piece became inaudible to me until I got a CD edition a few decades later. But that's not the end of the story. It took me a long time before I didn't miss the now missing POK POK POK.
And another ............... : Recently I made a compilation of Papa Lightfoot songs and put it on my blog: https://schnickschnackmixmax.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-complete-papa-george-lightfoot.html
and a commenter asked me if I could make it available in FLAC because ‘Mp3’s are an insult to the Artist!’
May the Lord (or whoever is in charge) have mercy. Not on this one, but on me!
"music today is often just sound instead of content"
ReplyDeleteMy latest attempt at getting down wiv ver kids was downloading "choke enough" by Oklou. Everything about this screams cresting the zeitgeist, including the tile, and the clever cover design, very considered and composed, much like the music, which slid by like an ice cream mist, very beautiful, at times hinting at The United States of America and Tonto's Expanding Headband. Really, really skillfully put together and ... pleasant. And I can't remember a single tune, or song, or break or whatever. It's about sound and mood. Which is what pretty much all music is about if you strip away the melody and the song structure. I'm happy the youngs are pleased with so damn little. Mood. Feels.
The Emperors new clothes? I remember, my friends who were early adopters of CD, raving about the quality. Having spent over fifteen years buying vinyl I was reluctant and late to CD and wasn’t really convinced by its clean sound, however for convenience I did buy them for about ten years. However I didn't replace many records with the new CD format. These days mp3 sound fine to me.
DeleteDr. Fu, I’ve checked your blog over the years and grabbed some goodies, thanks. Also re: King Crimson's Lizard, I picked up a copy signed by the 1972 band and Jo Ann Kelly (I assume she was the support), my pressing was fantastic, one of the best sounding vinyl records I own.
Are the young people happy with their music? I doubt that, although I don't know any of them personally, but what do I know about these things? But if that's the case, that's fine by me. But that's not what I wanted to say. Perhaps my knowledge of English is not good enough, perhaps the subject can't be dealt with in three sentences, not to mention the translation programmes, which don't always work perfectly either. So in my last comment I wanted to explain that the Lizard LP became for me (the German word for it is UNHÖRBAR) what the translator wrote as INAUDIBLE, but meant UNLISTENABLE. (I realised too late) Both words are the same in German. We could continue this discussion until the day we die without being able to make ourselves understood. Therefore, the matter is not over for me, but it is closed.
ReplyDeleteHave I missed the link or is there none?
Greetings
Paul
I wouldn't worry too much about trying to express yourself so perfectly (in any language) that the odds of your being misunderstood are acceptably close to nil. Expression is never a guarantee of comprehension or appreciation, least of all here on the internet. Expression is more rewarding for the expressor than the expressee - the workout it gives that lump of mildly electrified meat in your bone-box is valuable and healthful.
DeleteI do think the youngs are happy (in a shaded sense) with their music, in whatever form they take it, and if it's sometimes puzzling to me, what made me happy as a teen was also puzzling to my parents. I see a difference in perception, based on personal history: to my parents, my records were unlistenable noise - the "shock of the new". Contemporary music sounds pleasant, always familiar, unexceptional, unengaging, never shocking. Our "generation" had our own music that was specifically made to stir things up, to excite, to offend, to demarcate. None of those reactions are possible today. In a wider sense, I believe the youngs are sick in heart because of the times they have to face; blaming previous generations for the state they're in (the Broken State Of America, in particular) is a natural enough response but does nothing to change anything for the better. We all have to deal with the here and now, all the time, everywhere.
I'll upload the albums later today!
THREE (count 'em!) albums for th' price of NONE!!!! HURRY HURRY HURRY to benefit from these THROAT-SLASHINGLY CRAZY PRICES!!
ReplyDeletehttps://workupload.com/file/S75cd38KFYj
Thank you very much. I have many recordings of the songs from Soft Machine Three (and have listened to them all and they're all rather good), but when the push comes to shove I prefer the original (especially the blu-spec version).
ReplyDelete"Third" was my introduction to Soft Machine in terms of buying their albums and to be honest nothing since has quite lived up to it's perfection, though I still grab everything I come across. Many thanks for this.
ReplyDeleteBrian