"... but the old men understand" Dept. - Van Morrison and David Gilmour

"Oi! Dave yeh gert gobshite! Oy was gave dis badge by the Quaine of Oirland, and yew wasn't!"

Van Morrison has been trying to out-do John Zorn in uncontrollable incontinence of new releases. Every album - "dropping" every couple of weeks or so - that isn't a cold bowl of bile-n'-spite stew, garnished with oxygen tent sax solos, is desperately clutched at by fans as some kind of return to form, even if that form was set sometime in this useless century. So Orangefield is a pleasant surprise - it's a genuinely enjoyable, good-spirited, well-played and sung live album from 2014, and why he decided to release it now is as much of a mystery as anything he does. On the basis of my recommendation you'll rush out and buy it, but there's an ear canal-crimping @192 in the comments, should you be a lousy grifting bum intent on bringing the music industry to its knees.

The sleeve design looks like Alice Coopers School's Out, and Hotlegs' Thinks School Stinks, but there's a warm human interest story behind it, very possibly the first - and last - in Van's career. Look it up, and have a hankie ready.

Dave "call me David" Gilmour can hold his own with both George Ivan and Rog Waters in the "fuck me I'm one fucking miserable millionaire, me" stakes, and his solo career has been a lesson in underachievement. Even rabid Floyd fans (anyone who hung in there after Dark Side, basically) lost interest in it half way through the first side of that first album nobody can remember the title of even though it was just his name. The best you can say of Gilmour's solo career is that it's modest - he's made like three albums in fifty years, and only his wife bought them. So turning in a pretty swell piece of work at this late stage is as welcome a surprise as Orangefield.

Is it fantastic? No, but it's the kind of album you'd have bought back in the day and "got into" without feeling ripped off. Which for an Old Dude is some achievement. Maybe a little bit fantastic.

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Rholonne Déodoranté's Classy Classification Class Dept.

Wholesome diet, strict discipline, clean thoughts, inspire classroom diligence

We like to pigeonhole music by genre ("file under popular"), but sometimes the definition doesn't quite fit. Rholonne Déodoranté, th' IoF©'s Religiousness Inclusivity Officer, teaches a popular course here at th' IoF©'s Modern Academy For Girls And Yes Okay Boys Who Want To Be Girls Jesus Christ Who Cares. The following text is copied direct from her course notes.

"Defining genre in popular and other forms of music is primarily a marketing tool used by the music business to target a consumer base. It also serves a valuable retail function in guiding consumers quickly and efficiently to their favored type of music. But sometimes the definition is hard to classify - music may crossover genres. Today's project is the Thorinshield album from 1967 because of course it is. Frequently referred to by reviewers as being sunshine pop, it has very few of the motifs and tropes associated with that genre."

 

 

 

Thorinshield were basically a duo, Bobby Ray and James Smith, augmented by drumster Terry Hand. Ray is FoamFeatured Antecedently™ HERE The production team is A-list; Steve Douglas, Chuck Britz, Hank Cicalo, and Wally Heider, so it's a little puzzling that the overall sound and feel of the album is less lush than you might expect. Arrangements are by Perry Botkin Jr., whose dad played some very nimble guitar for the Billy Mills Orchestra on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show.

The album takes a few plays to get its hooks in, but its subtle individuality is absolutely worth your time. File under: quality.

This post rendered lint-free by Bertie Bristles Brush Barn, Pork Bend, FLA.

Sheer Lou-nacy Dept. - Metal Machine Disco Music

 

"If you get through four sides you're dumber than I am," said Lou, talking about his RCA kiss-off Metal Machine Music. If that double album wasn't enough, he'd planned a 12" disco version to ram the final nail into the coffin of his contract. It didn't fly. RCA kept him on the roster until Coney Island Baby limped out the following year, and the word on the street was Lou Who? But there's a white label test pressing out there, with the ten minute extended version on one side, and a five minute radio edit [as if - Ed.] on the back. We know that Lou used a PAiA programmable drum set, and the whole thing is just terrible enough to be an Art Statement.

 

 

The pressing got one public play, at David Mancuso’s Loft on lower Broadway. Metal Machine Disco Music got frisbeed into the crowd barely a minute into the groove. "It was a joke," said Mancuso, "but like all of Lou's jokes it wasn't funny." Reed never referred to it again.

Maybe its time has come. Probably not. Here it is anyway.

Vangelis Papapapathanathanassiou - King Of Free Jazz!

Vangelis Papapapathanathanassiou? Hairy-chested and slightly scary Greek composer of stirring synth anthems, he who once punched out an entire press conference because they thought he was Demis Roussos? Free jazz?

Hear me out. We're here to talk about Beaubourg, one of the least understood and most misunderstood albums of the twentieth century. But first we need to define terms: free jazz is associated with a saxophone being ritually abused over a cacophony of random percussion. But in its purest sense - improvisation free of musical structure, it absolutely applies to Beaubourg.

It's solo Vangelis, making shit up as he goes along, using a couple of Yamaha CS-80 analog synthesizers, with a side order of ring modulator, instead of making a sax sound like it wished it had never been born. In accordance with the strict rules of free jazz (no musical form has more rigid rules), he eschews melody, harmony, rhythm, and thematic development. Anybody can do that. If I could find a piano I'd eschew the fuck out of it right now. A child of five could.

But Vangelis is an absolute master of his instruments, and his hands are guided by instinct, inspiration, and superhuman skill, whereas mine could just as easily be fixing a sandwich. And lordy, his hands are busy. Coaxing these sounds out of a pair of CS-80s, in real time, is a virtuoso performance. So what? you opine, a sneer distorting your unlovely face, it sounds like shit to me hahalol.

This is what makes the music so ultimately satisfying; discovering what went into it. It's not unapproachable noise, a random result of pure chance. There is variation in mood, hints of melody, but it's the abstract sound that becomes so compelling, even addictive. It's analog/organic, and if you read my antecedent screed on Bernie Axolotl you may remember his quote: all notes played by hand. There's no looping here, no samples, no sequencing, and minimal overdubbing, maybe none (what do I know). There's a wild genius behind this, and to dismiss it, as some do, as a cynical contractual kiss-off to RCA is to display a musical ignorance of which they should be ashamed, them ignoramuses.

It is gawjuss, is what it is. A blissful soundtrack to ordinary life. Try listening to it - as loud as you can take - as you go about your grubby quotidian routine. Shopping for beans at your local discount superstore. Boosting the catalytic converter from your ex's Ram Truck, or getting your bunion pared. Beaubourg will make your universe seem unutterably strange. Let it work its subtle and extraordinary magic.

As an inducement, here's some slightly more accessible, but much less accomplished, Vangelis:

Swinging London scenemaker Giorgio Gomelski booked studio time in '71 to see if there was any mileage in teaming Van the Man with session jazzbos and fringe rock musicians. It led nowhere, and the tapes were shelved, to be released later very much against Van's wishes by a thieving bunch of crooks. Don't think of these as albums, which they ain't. Think of them as an opportunity to hear a bit of experimental improv for its own sake.

The Dragon gets the nod from fans, with its recognisably rock-adjacent sounds, but Hypothesis appeals for its Brian Odgers/Tony Oxley rhythm section, fresh from the mighty John McLaughlin's Extrapolation sessions.

 

 

 

 

 

Hilariously, there is online debate as to the most consistently accurate, pitch-wise, release of Beaubourg. Go for it!

Eden Ahbez - The Complicated Life And Times Of A Simple Man

Photographs of Eden Ahbez have one thing in common - an expression that does not radiate the contentment you might expect of someone who devoted his life to finding heaven on earth. He looks intensely unhappy. Not even a twinkle in his eye, the hint of a smile. Laughter is a lesson best learned early in life, and young George Alexander Aberle didn't get much chance to be happy.

Born poor in Brooklyn, 1908, sent to an orphanage, Aberle grew up in the depression, becoming a hobo, criss-crossing America in poverty. He got jobs where he could, played a little piano, and ended up in California, the promised land. In the 'thirties, he found welcome and a shared ideology with the Wandervogels,  a bunch of peaceful anarchists, mostly German, who'd rejected contemporary society and lived according to the back-to-nature tenets of Lebensreform. The Nazis had outlawed the movement, but kept the bits they liked - chasing each other naked through the woods, mostly - for the fun-loving Hitler Youth.

Aberle changed his name to Eden Ahbez, cut the soles off his shoes, sat in a tree and learned to play the flute. The first hippie? Not even close. Will Pester fled Germany to California in 1906 to escape military service, growing his hair and practicing free love and lap steel guitar in a Palm Springs shack, when shacks were the only real estate in Palm Springs, and Pester - almost unimaginably - the only white resident. Pester basically wrote the whole Hippie manual half a century before Today Malone sold flowers on Haight Street.

The original Nature Boy, Will Pester, inventing Americana, yesterday. Habitually naked, he dressed formal for the shoot. Note signed postcards - a source of tourist income - in shirt pocket.

Pester acted as mentor to Ahbez, who became the nominal leader of the Nature Boys.

Gypsy Boots top left, health foods pioneer and inventor of the smoothie. He'd later swing into Steve Allen's TV show dressed as Tarzan. Eden, looking unsure of himself, front left.

Ahbez wrote poetry and songs, and composed Nature Boy - ostensibly about Pester - in 1947 while living in a cave. The tune comes from a Jewish song - he’d learned Hebraic melodies at the Brooklyn orphanage. He finagled sheet music to Nat King Cole, who sat on it for a while before realising what a potential hit it was and hunting down the composer, then living rough under the Hollywood sign in some kind of personal manifest destiny. Cole's recording was a monster, monster hit, number one in the charts for eight weeks in 1948, spawning many cover versions by the biggest stars of the age. After royalties were settled, including a generous cut for a previous user of the original tune, but leaving out Dvorak and the anonymous traditional Czech folk composer who would have had an equal claim, Ahbez made a shitload of money which he didn't particularly want, or even need. Money couldn't stop his adored wife from dying of leukemia, or his son from drowning. Heaven on earth continued to elude him.

He cut an album in 1960, Eden's Island (The Music Of An Enchanted Isle). It was no match for even post-army Elvis pablum, and sat ignored in the easy listening racks alongside the straightest and squarest. These days, it's frequently referred to as a "masterpiece", and it would be wonderful if that were true. But he can't sing, and spoken word stretched over an album of bland exotica, featuring his uncertain flute playing, seemed like a product without a market.

Eden Ahbez was an honest, loving man at the genesis of a culture that would spread around the planet, a man who got lucky with one immortal song. He died in '95 after a car crash, aged eighty-six.

SMiLE, guys! Eden n' Bri, Gold Star Studios '67. Maybe the timing of the shot was unfortunate, but these guys aren't exactly communicating here. That's a wood flute Eden's holding. In case you were wondering.

This piece is a massively abbreviated account of an incredible, complex, and still largely undocumented life. An internet search will turn up a wealth of material.