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.

Create Your Own Roadshow Dept. - Terence McKenna

Here's Big Mac posing with a bunch of crap, basically. Credit: ©High Times

 “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”

Terence McKenna died at the turn of the century, as the fingers were tightening on the trigger. At least he didn't have to be embarrassed by the failure of his prediction that 2012 would see a global evolution of human consciousness. It's always a mistake to hold the calendar - any calendar, no matter how deeply etched in stone - to ransom in this way, because it has no meaning or application outside its own artificial parameters. Zappa told part of the curly tale in Greggary Peccary, and it's a disappointment that McKenna, who believed in the redemptive and transformational power of chaos, should also believe in such a weaponised piece of bureaucratic control magic as the calendar. But don't follow leaders, as the best of our leaders say. 

Literate/articulate proponents of the psychedelic are pretty rare. Timothy Leary with his blarney-stoned gift of the gab, Richard Alpert with his academic helix twist, Ralph Metzner (the Quiet One) and Curiosity McKenna were in the Thinking White Guy tradition (nothing inherently wrong with that) of Aldous Huxley in trying to attractively package the experience in language. Where the whole deal comes apart is, of course, we have to eat. For a lot of people, this means buying food. Which means having money. Which may involve working for it. And floating with the Eternals above Nazca isn't an attractive skill-set on your resumé. Embracing chaos isn't compatible with punching the clock except in the sense of shattering time, and your employer isn't likely to accept experiencing the ineffable void as an excuse for not turning up at the sausage factory. Caveat emptor - any celebrity telling you to drop out is either making money in some way from that message, so he can eat, or living off his parents.

Which is not to say - heavens to Betsy! - that the psychedelic experience is to be avoided, or is invalid or irrelevant. It's necessary, dammit. Here's Terry again, on the glitterball, behind the eight ball, having a ball:

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

A convenient approach to the man and his life, should you be desirous of making it, is in today's loaddown, detailed in the comments. Thinking about the psychedelic is the next best thing to being it, and in some ways more useful. Let's eat!