Dreamweavers Dept.

Why we looked to musicians for spiritual guidance back in the late sixties is not so much of a mystery. Drugs, of course. Aldous Huxley's door was smashed to splinters by anyone who scored a tab. Pop and rock musicians, who tend to have inflated egos already, bragged about how their egos had been destroyed - they'd become prophets, seers and sages, and Tin Pan Alley was now Xanadu. Rock lyrics were full of references to the shining progress of the seeker after cosmic truth. Concerns of the heart were seen as childish - the mind is what mattered.

The idea of pop singer as mystic adept with a message from beyond might be ridiculous, and much of the message was cliché at best, meaningless at worst, but there is something there that's worth recognising through the trappings; the recognition of wonder in the mundane. Something beautiful, beyond words. Which is where the trouble lies when you start to write about it, or worse - sing.

Here's a couple of dreamweavers, in all their naiveté [naivety - Ed.]. Bob Ray was half of Thorinshield, whose album is not as successful as this. Marc Brierley gave up music in '73, emerging for a lone gig in 2017.

Music to be listened to by candlelight. 

Oh Boy! Win A Swell Prize In This Grand Competition! Dept.

As the last competition got such a wretched wresponse from youse bums - the first one I ever won outright - the bar has been lowered to enable even the meanest intelligence - probably yours, pal - to take part!

Study the above pitcher [above - Ed.], prepared at great cost by the FMF© Department Of Art Department Dept. It's their rendering of the cover to a well-known - although possibly not to you - "Long Playing" LP "pop" record - but UH-OH! Can you spot the mistakes those klutzes made?!?

Simply circle incorrect details with ball-point pen and turn your screen around so I can see it!

There's a Swell Prize for the winner(s), so why not take a couple of minutes break from scratching your balls to join in the fun! Invite th' gang around for an Oh Boy! Win A Swell Prize In This Grand Competition! Dept. party! Set out lines of brown scag, Tupperware© bowl of poppers, and hire a couple of elderly crack whores to pretend to be hot for each other on the mattress in the garage! Again!

Let's do this, people!

From Soup To Nuts Dept.

We all [assumes STEVE SHARK - Ed.] have them tucked away in our collections of music, I'm sure - obscure albums by obscure bands who we think should have had a more successful career in music, but never made it for one reason or another.

So, look, here's SOUP.

Led by an extremely talented guy called Doug Yankus, Soup impressed a lot of people - including Clapton and Hendrix apparently - although they mainly stayed a local act, coming out of Wisconsin with the occasional foray into the New York area.

Yankus' first proper recordings were with a band called The Private Property of Digil, taking in influences from the Byrds - yes, there's some 12 string jangle - and even a touch of Beach Boys. Nice enough stuff, but not a whole lot different from what other people were doing in 1967 and 68.

Deciding to go quite a bit heavier, Yankus then formed Soup - a power trio in which his guitar playing really blossomed, showing him to be one of the most talented players of his generation, in spite of some very obvious rough edges.

Their first album, Soup, was a home produced affair, with one live and one studio side in a plain brown paper sleeve with mimeographed liner notes, which they sold at gigs. It contains some fabulous guitar playing - most notably on a 16 minute slow blues, I'm So Sorry, which has Yankus letting rip with some licks I've never heard before or since. Yes, it's rough and raw, but it really is something special. This is, apparently, what drew people to their gigs. I can see why.

I'm Just Not The Man To Be Tied is a tad jazzy with Yankus scatting along with his guitar. Then there's the very West Coast sound of Tennessee and the almost Love/Lee acoustic vibe of Veronica. The music isn't exactly what you'd call polished but there's enough there to see the potential the band had.

Soup's second and last album - The Album Soup - is a far better produced affair which is more rooted in melodic rock, with a welcome use of harmonies, which might have benefited the previous album in the less rocky numbers. Yankus' guitar is still evident, but he's playing more for the song than for his instrument. However, that said, it lacks the drive of their previous offering and at no time does Yankus' playing really catch fire.

After Soup, Yankus eventually hooked up with John Hiatt in White Duck, who cut two albums of pretty generic country-tinged rock. Yankus then continued with Hiatt, who embarked on a solo career with Hangin' Around The Observatory on which Yankus featured. I have no idea what he did after that, but he was dead at 32 from diabetes-related disease.

Fortunately, Doug's brother Chris has made a large amount of Soup's music available on YouTube and there's ample opportunity to hear what people raved about - their live performances.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChdepjYpXBQQw6GmYMILWDg/videos

Here's a cracking version of Sonny Rollins' Oleo which shows off Doug's jazz playing.

I reckon Doug could have been huge - he certainly had the chops to be a world class player - although it was probably a case of the wrong music at the wrong time. By the early 1970s, there was a move away from guitar-led heavy rock, and power trios were a little out of fashion.

Three albums in the comments for you - Digil, the debut album, and The Album Soup.

The Sound Of Celluloid Dept. - Terry Riley

Most people's gateway to Terry Riley is pop drug hit Rainbow In Curved Air. Then they generally take a step back for the drier and more demanding In C, and maybe edge forward through his disappointing collaboration with John Cale into the sonic swamp of Persian Surgery Dervishes, then ... kind of lose interest.

That's how it went for me, anyway. It wasn't until the 'eighties that I started grabbing everything I could find by him, which pre-internet wasn't an easy thing. His massive discography is scattered across many labels, and benefits from cherry-picking. The early stuff, when he sounded like Terry Riley, is always stacked on th' IoF© spindle, but I can live without his later collaborations with "edgy" classicists - all his collaborations seem to subtract rather than add - and none of the many performances of contemporary repertoire standard In C quite catch the magic of that first edition.

Riley isn't rated at all highly by contemporary music snobs - he's seen as amateurish, vulgar, embarrassing, and messy; four words I remember from snooty critiques. Well. you know, fuck them. Rainbow will always be one of the loveliest things I can do to my head. 

Here's three relatively obscure soundtracks by the great man; Les Yeux Fermés (AKA Happy Ending), Le Secret De La Vie (AKA Lifespan, with a later and better cover), and No Man's Land. None of which I've seen, but inking this screed has made checking their availability my task du jour.

EDIT: A search in the usual internet bazaars for both No Man's Land and Happy Ending yields some surprising results, but not the movies I want to see.

Play Some New! Dept. - Musée Mécanique

Relax, girls, they're married!

Wake up, granddad! It's 2008, and the Portland Sound is the happeningest thing since - ooh - the Boston Sound! Portland teens know "where it's at", and the latest local combo to set the charts alight is Musée Mécanique [Fr. - museum mechanic - Ed.]!

All kidding aside, this homely bunch of geeks cut a nice couple of albums back then, but the mood is somnolent, melancholic, and more inclined to get audiences nodding out than dancing in the aisles. Doesn't sound like the kind of thing you might like? Me neither. But I do - there's a strange and very idiosyncratic beauty to it. They weave a tender trap.

And they're that rare thing, a band whose members recorded nothing else after the band split - at least according to discogs. They probably all took corner offices on Wall St., or reverted to particle physics or whatever studies they interrupted for this musical curiosity. Maybe they spontaneously teleported back to 19c. Arkham, whence they were summoned in some arcane ritual. There are some things man was not meant to know.

If you're in the market for something a little different, lock yourself into your study, set your armchair where you get a view of the endless sea under strange constellations, and give these albums - From Shores Of Sleep, and Hold This Ghost - a spin on th' Victrola.