SOUNDS FROM THE FUNKY GOAT

Joni Mitchell - For The Roses (1972)

2011-09-17T16:37:00.000-07:00

"I want to take you higher." When I quote Sly Stone here, I'm not thinking of a descent into drug oblivion, the dark flipside to the hippy dream, I'm actually thinking of artistic ascent: how can an artist already as good as Joni has been on her first four albums get any better?

I love all Joni's albums up to this point, passionately. She is, and I say this unreservedly and unashamedly, my musical goddess. And it continues to blow my mind how fabulous so much of her output both was and is, and, for me, For The Roses hits some highs that are like choirs of cosmic angels in orgasmic epiphany, and what's more, it's a natural high.

Where Blue's cover photo bespeaks internal turmoil and intense emotions, on the cover of For The Roses she's a Nordic nature girl, blond, beautiful, and clad all in green velvet, elfin in her beauty, inhabiting a Tolkienesque setting of pure natural splendour. I'm guessing the picture was taken near her Canadian retreat. And, for those who, like me, yearned for Joni's love in our teen years, what capped all this off was the insert, which (in my LP version at any rate) had a photo of her buck naked, staring out to sea, stood atop some rocks. Seen from the rear, and from quite a distance, her perfect body nonetheless lived up to the promise her music and lyrics seemed to make: in as far as female perfection can be realised, this is it! And what's more, the music is magnificent. And, to cap it all, this was released in 1972, the year I was born. A meaningless coincidence, perhaps. But redolent with the kind of 'synchronicity' we humans are so wont to find in the patterns of our lives.

This is the first of her albums to commence with a piano based song: 'Banquet' continues her habit of leading off with a strongly poetic number - "I took my dream down by the sea / Yankee yachts and lobster pots and sunshine" - in which, in this case, she's looking at the banquet of life ("Some get the gravy / And some get the gristle / ... Though there's plenty to spare"), from the vantage point of her British Columbia beach retreat. Whether the banquet itself, or the fortune cookie referred to in the last stanza, are real or imagined is hard to tell, but as usual, Joni effortlessly shifts gears through different levels, from the personal and specific to the general and abstract. Her piano playing has been developing, and, like her guitar playing, is very distinctive, mixing chords, licks, and lines, and frequently following the vocal phrasing which, as is normal with Joni, is anything but normal.

Having referred to drugs before obliquely or in passing, she now tackles the theme head on, perhaps as a result of having gone out with James Taylor for about a year, around 1970/71, prior to recording this album (there's a great story here from a guy who's record store they visited, after closing time, near christmas, in 1970). This is, in a way, an interesting foretaste of the direction she would take when she went more in a more electric/band orientated direction, with albums like Court And Spark, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns and Hejira. It's the first time on record that it sounds like a full band, despite previous instances of tracks with bass guitar and drums, and the lyrics are very urban and gritty, reminding me of a feminine take on Iceberg Slim, whose excellent book Trick Baby (which deals more generally in prostitution and all-round hustlin' and scamming, rather than drugs, but shares a dark urban flavour with this song) I read some years ago, whilst I was, pardon the affected hipster patois, jonesin' on a Joni jag.

Here's an extract of her lyrics for 'Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire':

Red water in the bathroom sink

Fever and the scum brown bowl

Blue steel still begging

But it's indistinct

Someone's hi-fi drumming Jelly Roll

Concrete concentration camp

Bashing in veins for peace

Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire

Fall into Lady Release

We've come a long way from the pastoral idylls of 'Sisotowbell Lane', or even the suburban hippy haven of Laurel Canyon as celebrated in 'Ladies Of The Canyon'. In fact her bleak urban poetry is so powerful I want to give you another hit:

A wristwatch, a ring, a downstairs screamer

Edgy-black cracks of the sky

"Pin cushion prick fix this poor bad dreamer"

"Money" cold shadows reply

Pawnshops crisscrossed and padlocked

Corridors spit on prayers and pleas

Sparks fly up from sweet fire

Black soot of lady release

It's interesting to me that two of my favourite singer songwriters, Tom Waits and Joni, both started out sounding sweet and innocent, and both felt the allure of the gritty urban scene, and jazz related culture. This track alone is enough to connect Joni's vein of beatnik lowlife to Waits circa Blue Valentines, and Heartattack And Vine. And of course, she would continue down this road on later albums, with themes such as that of 'The Jungle Line', which I'll be discussing when we get to The Hissing Of Summer Lawns.

Track three is one of my favourites from the album, and in fact one of my all time favourites in the Joni Mitchell songbook, 'Barangrill'. After the urban drug hell of the previous track this is like the sunnier side of the beatnik dream. Joni's Kerouackian vibe is strong, and comes over well in the lines of the opening verse:

Three waitresses all wearing

Black diamond earrings

Talking about zombies

and Singapore slings

No trouble in their faces

Not one anxious voice

None of the crazy you get

From too much choice

The thumb and the satchel

Or the rented Rolls-Royce

And you think she knows something

By the second refill

You think she's enlightened

As she totals your bill

You say "show me the way

To Barangrill"

Barangrill becomes a mythical Utopiua, and the waitresses are a combination of siren, muse, and boddhisattva. Joni observes all this, and their easy-seeming ways, contrasting it with her own 'crazy', torn as she is between the rock 'n' roll queen's life of luxury, and the "thumb and the satchel" (already a dichotomy she's been increasingly aware of in songs like 'Carey': "My fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet / And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne"), that would later seem to be a theme on almost the whole of the Hejira album, with tracks like 'Refuge Of The Roads'. But for the present, at least on this song, the mood is relatively light, as witness the following extract of the last verse:

The guy at the gaspumps

He's got a lot of soul

He sings Merry Christmas for you

Just like Nat King Cole

And he makes up his own tune

Right on the spot

About whitewalls and windshields

And this job he's got

But with Joni it can never be that simple, and she finishes the song by singing:

And you want to get moving

And you want to stay still

But lost in the moment

Some longing gets filled

And you even forget to ask

"Hey, Where's Barangrill?"

And I have to say, this little bit of the song kills me, every time. It's a Zen insight into life: caught in the gap between wanting to change and improve, and wanting to be satisfied with things as they are, lost in those moments some longing does indeed sometimes get filled, in a transient way. And in those moments, even within the bigger picture, we do indeed forget to ask 'Which way Utopia?' Genius, pure genius. And this song also combines fabulous guitar, beautiful vocal melodies, and one of the best woodwind arrangements ever, bar none. At this stage of her career, Joni is getting the best from her talented sidemen. Some might say that later on (exactly when you think this happens is probably a variable matter of opinion) her musicians might occasionally overdo it. Not so here, Tom Scott's contribution to this track is sublime.

In this live recording of the song (below) she talks, in her intro, about the philosophical search for the meaning of life, and how she "started seeing gurus everywhere". Ironically, she says she was at a very low ebb, and therefore thought that everyone was more enlightened than her: "So I walked into this restaurant one day, and I thought I saw my guru... As a matter of fact there were three of them [the waitresses mentioned in the opening line], and I was so spaced out that I was sure that they were The Trinity, you know?" But the resulting song, certainly on the album version, manages to turn this 'saudade' into something beautiful and uplifting, albeit still tinged with melancholy.

'Barangrill', live, 1972, with a great intro explaining the origin of the song.

An interesting footnote to this, one of my absolute favourite Joni numbers, is that Mark Murphy has recorded an excellent cover of it (and as noted elsewhere, a good cover of a Joni tune is, in my opinion, a rare thing), on his album II, which I discovered here.

The next two piano numbers, 'Lesson in Survival' and 'Let The Wind Carry Me', continue the soul-searching theme addressed in 'Barangrill', but in a different manner, both also taking in romantic love, and, in the latter, some family history. These are both good songs, great even, by normal standards, but I'll gloss over them and concentrate on the songs that have most power for me, and the next of these sees Joni back on guitar, singing the bleakly haunting title track, 'For The Roses'. Sounding harmonically and melodically like it could've been on her debut album Song To A Seagull, a mark of the continuity as well as the development of her talent, it's both a threnody for the lost love she shared with Taylor, and her disenchantment with the 'music biz':

Remember the days when you used to sit

And make up your tunes for love

And pour your simple sorrow

To the soundhole and your knee

And now you're seen

On giant screens

And at parties for the press

And for people who have slices of you

From the company

They toss around your latest golden egg

Speculation well who's to know

If the next one in the nest

Will glitter for them so

I guess I seem ungrateful

With my teeth sunk in the hand

That brings me things

I really can't give up just yet

Now I sit up here the critic

And they introduce some band

But they seem so much confetti

Looking at them on my TV set

Oh the power and the glory

Just when you're getting a taste for worship

They start bringing out the hammers

And the boards

And the nails

Feeling crucified on the cross of her creativity by a music business that just cares about the bottom line, Joni retreated to her log cabin in British Columbia, with her dog, as referenced later, in the lyrics of 'Electricity':

Well I'm learning

It's peaceful

With a good dog and some trees

Out of touch with the breakdown

Of this century

And so she ends for 'For The Roses' alone in nature:

I heard it in the wind last night

It sounded like applause

Chilly now

End of summer

No more shiny hot nights

It was just the arbutus rustling

And the bumping of the logs

And the moon swept down black water

Like an empty spotlight

Brilliant! The connections she makes through her poetry, from one image and concept to another, are really stunning. The more I listen to the music, and the more I write about, and really concentrate on the words, the meanings, and artistry it took to put all this together, the more I am in awe of Joni Mitchell's talents. And at this stage of her career she seemed to just be exuding pure music. But she obviously wasn't entirely happy, as For The Roses preceded a year long hiatus, and a brief (thankfully) self-imposed withdrawal from making and recording music (at least publicly).

'Electricity' finds Joni in band mode, with Wilton Felder (of The Crusaders) on bass and Bobbye Hall (a female percussionist with an enormous and impressive CV) adding congas and tambourine. And it's a magnificent folk-jazz masterpiece, simultaneously of the moment, and a sign of where she might be going next. The lyrics are phenomenal, using electricity, wiring, servicing and so on, as metaphors for feelings, including, of course, love. Fabulous! The feel remains band-like for 'You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio', but with more of a folk-rock feel, Graham Nash supplying a Dylanesque harmonica solo, and Bobbye Hall again adding congas. This number was apparently something of a riposte to a request for something 'more commercial' from 'the suits', and, perhaps ironically, it paid off, becoming Mitchell's biggest charting hit to date.

'Blonde In The Bleachers' starts out sounding like another typical Joni piano ballad, but by the end of the song it's morphed into her newly-evolving mix of folk-rock-jazz. Again she's lamenting her chequered past in the rock'n'roll business:

Feeling it hot and cold

You're in rock 'n' roll

It's the nature of the race

...

She tapes her regrets

To the microphone stand

She says "You can't hold the hand

Of a rock 'n' roll man

Very long

There's another mention of a child left behind (as in 'Little Green', a nod to her own daughter), and there's the bittersweet self-awareness of the contradictions between the freewheeling freedom-loving rock 'n' roll dream - "it seems like you've gotta give up / Such a piece of your soul / When you give up the chase" - and what's lost - "the unknown child / So sweet and wild / It's youth / It's too good to waste" - and the impossibility that the ephemeral way of life can have a lasting solidity. And that brings us back to the last verse of 'Let The Wind Carry Me':

Sometimes I get that feeling

And I want to settle

And raise a child up with somebody

I get that strong longing

And I want to settle

And raise a child up with somebody

But it passes like the summer

I'm a wild seed again

Let the wind carry me

'Woman Of Heart And Mind', live.

This all brings us to the next of my favourite tracks from the album, 'Woman Of Heart And Mind', the guitar part of which is utterly sublime (also featuring the talents of Felder and Hall on bass and congas, and what chords, especially the final one!) in which she more or less explores and depicts herself:

You think I'm like your mother

Or another lover or your sister

Or the queen of your dreams

Or just another silly girl

Before dissecting her lover's stance:

All this talk about holiness now

It must be the start of the latest style

Is it all books and words

Or do you really feel it?

Do you really laugh?

Do you really care?

Do you really smile

When you smile?

You criticize and you flatter

You imitate the best

And the rest you memorize

You know the times you impress me most

Are the times when you don't try

When you don't even try

But what really comes over is the blues of her own sense of loss and disappointment:

I'm looking for affection and respect

A little passion

And you want stimulation-nothing more

That's what I think

But you know I'll try to be there for you

When your spirits start to sink

If you listen carefully to this album, I think you can hear a woman who's almost having to live like a man, in a male dominated world - the music business as it was then - and is feeling the loss of certain aspects of her femininity as a result. Lady readers, your comments would be welcomed here: as a guy I might have it all wrong! For evidence I submit two more lyrical extracts. First this, from the end of 'Blonde In The Bleachers':

N.B. it's in quote marks here because this is what 'she says' when she's up there, regrets taped to the microphone stand.

"You can't hold the hand of a rock 'n' roll man very long

Or count on your plans with a rock 'n' roll man very long

Compete with the fans for your rock 'n' roll man for very long

The girls and the bands and the rock 'n' roll man"

Here she sounds, despite being a star every bit as big in her own right as many of her male associates, like another groupie, squeezed out in the scrum as they try and get a piece of some 'heroic' male superstar! One thinks this all must've been affected by her relationships with such men as Graham Nash and James Taylor, both of which, one might hazard the guess, provided her with great material for songs, but wounds and 'lessons in survival' to boot.

My second piece of evidence is Joni as the archetypical feminine flower child, and I don't really mean by that Joni as hippy chick, but rather as 'woman' - soft, gentle, receptive, etc. - from the lyrics of 'You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio'. Tongue in cheek they may well be, but many a true word is spoken in jest:

Oh honey you turn me on

I'm a radio

I'm a country station

I'm a little bit corny

I'm a wildwood flower

Waving for you

Broadcasting tower

Waving for you

Now, before writing what I'm about to say, I've listened very carefully to these lyrics on the recording, several times, and I'd wager good money that what she actually sings is "I'm a wild open flower", not 'wildwood', as the jonimitchell.com website has it. Admittedly she sings this crucial bit very indistinctly - and in my opinion that very fact lends weight to my contention that she's saying the more saucy of the possible versions - so it could perhaps not be 'open' after all. And there's also the fudged double entendre of whether he or she is the 'broadcasting tower. But, whichever it really is, the meaning of the lines rhyming 'flower' and 'tower' couldn't be any more explicit to the savvy listener.

Having engaged in a good deal of soul-searching, Joni rounds off this superb album with a meditation on love and music, in 'Judgement Of The Moon And Stars (Ludwig's Tune)'. The Ludwig is of course Beethoven, and the song's about love, music, love of music, the music of love, and so on. To what degree it's really about Beethoven in any specific or historically accurate way I couldn't say. Certainly she seems to be trying to imagine a kind of empathetic connection between Beethoven and herself. One might think this presumptuous and arrogant, but given Joni's tortured artistic personality and musical genius, I think it's an entirely natural and justified link for her to make.

Joni had said from quite early on that she wasn't a singer, but a composer, and here she gets to indulge her first most overtly orchestrated section of music, the middle of the piece sporting numerous arranged parts, from multi-layered vocals, woodwinds, keyboards, and strings. She's already travelled down this road bit by bit, adding various instruments, extra layers of harmony, and even the highly wrought arrangement for 'Barangrill', mentioned earlier. But here the self-consciously classical influence is stronger, and more portentous. Although her music got ever denser with her more electric albums, she wouldn't go do anything else quite so self-consciously 'classical' until the album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, and 'Paprika Plains' in particular. And of course much later, in 2002, she put out travelogue, which features two discs worth of material, old and new, set against lush orchestrations.

This is one of the best albums from a superlative talent, and it's hard to measure the real height of such artistic achievement. So I'll let Joni have the last word. As a description of her view of Beethoven, of herself, or just the artistic endeavour, these words are, I hope you'll agree, pretty powerful:

You've got to shake your fists at lightning now

You've got to roar like forest fire

You've got to spread your light like blazes

All across the sky

They're going to aim the hoses on you

Show 'em you won't expire

Not till you burn up every passion

Not even when you die

Come on now

You've got to try

If you're feeling contempt

Well then you tell it

If you're tired of the silent night

Jesus well then you yell it

Condemned to wires and hammers

Strike every chord that you feel

That broken trees

And elephant ivories conceal

Credits: (sourced from allmusic.com, wikipedia and the original album liner notes)

Joni Mitchell - vocals, guitar, piano

Wilton Felder - bass

Russ Kunkel - drums

Graham Nash - harmonica

Bobbye Hall - percussion

Tom Scott - woodwind, reeds

James Burton (credited as "Jim Burton") - electric guitar on "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire"

Stephen Stills - rock'n'roll performer on "Blonde in the Bleachers"

Bobby Notkoff - strings

Betjeman's Best British Churches

2011-09-16T00:41:00.000-07:00

Another book review? Oh well... I do love books, and this is my only blog, so here goes...

Betjeman's original book covered twice as many churches (approximately 5000). This new shiny hardback coffee table version is lavishly illustrated, and as a result cuts the number of churches covered in half, at roughly 2,500... still plenty! First I'd like to point out before going any further that I'm not Christian. I am, using A. C. Grayling's pithy phrase, a naturalist and free-thinker. Nonetheless, I, like this country and our culture, am steeped in the ever-evolving Christian tradition (I was brought up Christian, and went to several churches, none of which were deemed beautiful enough for inclusion here!). And the legacy on our landscape, and in our lives, from our language to the sights and sounds we deem typically English, are all bound up with the history of Christianity. And, regardless of all this, some churches are just very beautiful. I've often liked stopping at a random church and wondering around inside, connecting in my own quiet, personal and meditative way, with all that life and history. So this book was a must.

I confess I know little about Betjeman outside this book, except that he was a poet, and indeed poet Laureate for a while. When reading his introductory essay, it struck me that Betjeman chooses to spell the word 'show' using the rather archaic British variant 'shew', which is fittingly antiquarian, but irritates me mildly, as I feel, and indeed my brain is wired, through learning commonplace English, to think that it should be pronounced to rhyme with shrew, stew, brew or few, of for that matter pew: that's how it looks! In light of this I was not initially sure I go with the TLS quote on the cover which effusively describes Betjeman's introductory essay as 'pure gold'. In fact at first I found it more crabbily and fustily conservative (rather like some of the church wardens you may bump into when visiting churches using this book), if very erudite and occasionally quite funny, as for example: "If the path leading... wealthy unbelievers ... key from there." (p23) Well, that's certainly priceless, but not necessarily because it's 'pure gold'!

He also, as well as making some very prescient remarks, says a few things, which, to my mind at least, are a little odd, such as "It must be admitted that spirituality and aesthetics rarely go together." I guess this depends on you how you define spirituality, a nebulous term at the best of times. But many admirers of culture, including eminent scholars of religion, for example Diarmid MCulloch, stress the great contribution religion makes to our aesthetic culture. Quite apart from own mainly Christian heritage ( which has plenty in it that's clearly pagan), one need only think of the incredible non-figurative arts of Islam, the rich iconography of Buddhist mandalas, or the great traditions of religious music, to wonder if perhaps Betjeman has made a mistake with this particular pronouncement. In the context where he makes it, it is more plausible - he's lamenting the restorations and addition to a church that are, by and large "practical and unattractive", and begs that we remember "however much we deplore it ... [these ugly things] have been saved up for by some devout and penurious communicant.' Whilst this sonorous phrasing has an appeal, its rendering of the 'spiritual' is open to debate. And the quote that follows is dour Puritanism, and despite England's break with Rome, I don't think that Christianity, or humanity, for that matter, was suddenly and totally bereft of aesthetic awareness. Indeed, that's more than half the attraction of this book: these churches are frequently very interesting, and often, in part or in whole, quite beautiful. It I'd true, there are some horribly oppressive Christian buildings across these islands, and even some of the churches we've visited using this book belong in that category, but fortunately they're in a minority. however, when he follows his line of thought to the conclusion that "Conservatism is innate in ecclesiastical arrangement" I can't disagree. But perhaps this pinpoints the difference between religion and spirituality?

"Who has heard a muffled peal and remained unmoved?" Well, ironically part of the appeal of hearing church bells to folk like me, nowadays, is the comparative rarity with which you hear the sound. In the times where I've lived close by a regular ringers church what has annoyed me is not that "they are reminders of Eternity" (in the whole I get along well with Eternity and any reminded I get of her), buy that I'm being reminded of a belief which I don't share, and a belief whose omnipresence, and even perhaps omnipotence, is, thankfully, receding.

One little criticism is that the photos which illustrate points being made in the introductory text give only the village/town name, and then the church name, but not the county. This could very easily been included, and would have been very useful in determining if the church shown is within easy reach. So, for example 'EAST SHEFFORD: ST THOMAS', which happens to be on the page I was on when this shortcoming struck me, could so very easily have been 'EAST SHEFFORD: ST THOMAS (Berkshire)'.

A Tolkien Tapestry - Cor Blok

2011-09-16T00:20:00.000-07:00

Eh? A non-musical post?

As a life-long lover of Tolkien's vast Middle Earth mythos, I'm always intrigued by artistic developments related to it. For several years I'd been aware of, and very intrigued by, the few and seldom-seen LOTR-themed images by the mysterious and exotically named Cor Blok. Some (e.g. The Game Of Riddles, or The Cow Jumped Over The Moon) I really didn't like, but others (Frodo's Vision On Amon Hen, or The Battle Of The Hornburg II) were tantalisingly compelling.

Every now and again I'd trawl the web in search of more Cor, and every once in a while I'd be able to add another poor quality 72dpi jpeg to my scant collection. I longed to discover a book of Blok's LOTR art. But such a thing didn't seem to exist. Now it does, and now I've got it. My excitement at the prospect was such that I pre-ordered it as soon as I learned of it's existence, before it had even hit the shelves. A slight delay in it's arrival only heightened anticipation.

Well, now that I have it, I must confess I'm a little disappointed. I'd hoped, as had Tolkien before me (Tolkien and Blok corresponded, even meeting once, and Tolkien thought highly enough of Blok's art to buy several pictures, including his own favourite - and one of mine also - The Battle Of The Hornburg II, even considering Blok as a potential candidate for an illustrated edition of LOTR), for more in the vein of the second of his Battle Of The Hornburg artworks. It's no surprise that this piece also adorns the cover; it's probably amongst the best in the book, and certainly amongst those with the broadest appeal. Feedback on the recent Tolkien calendars of 2010 and 2011, both featuring Blok's art (and of both of which I'd been blissfully unaware of!), show that his take on things Tolkienian is not favoured by all. That didn't ever bother me. But, truth be told, even seen in a favourable setting, as here, in a well printed and well put together book, some of these pictures do seem rather poor (Bill Ferny Hit By An Apple is the picture I like least!).

Blok's an interesting, intelligent guy, and his intro to the book is a good, informative read. Some of his ideas and artworks succeed. But some don't. There are several reasons: the method employed for most (but not all) these pictures doesn't always translate brilliantly into print (and these are very good quality reproductions), with the silk-paper layering and underpainting effect not as tangible as might be the case when seen 'in the flesh'. This method also meant Blok's art is all on the smaller side, a constraint which may have fed into another choice he made, regarding his stylistic approach - in essence he leaves out a lot of detail, both in terms of figures and settings, but this is especially noticeable in terms of contextual detail - which I feel is a ploy that's frequently responsible for any weakness these pictures may have, and is at odds with the approach Tolkien took, in which details of character and setting are so important.

Nevertheless, as well as a sizeable chunk of work that I feel is less successful, there are a lot of pretty solid pieces to enjoy here, and some really great artworks. Ironically, given Blok's avowed policy of leaving out 'unnecessary' detail, the aim being to give the viewer more imaginitive elbow room, the pictures I think work best are those depicting events or scenes on a grander scale, in which the figures are smaller. This befits the grand narrative sweep of Tolkien's world. And in fact Blok himself, quite rightly, observes, in a note on the picture titled Weathertop, one of his successes to my mind, that "landscape with Tolkien serves not merely as a backdrop to the action: it contributes greatly to the atmosphere".

Occasionally he departs from Tolkien's narrative 'facts', as in Slaying Of The Nazgul (of which scene there are three versions: interesting in that they illustrate how his ideas evolve), where he has Eowyn slay the Lord of the Nazgul with a spear rather than a sword. That seems like justifiable artistic licence, as it really adds compositional drama. But when, in his second version of The Hobbits Sacking Bilbo's House, he has stairs to a second floor... No, that's just wrong! Remember the description of Bilbo's home in The Hobbit: "no going upstairs for the hobbit"! Nevertheless, the second version of this picture remains the better of the two, with the medieval influence on the composition being an effective idea.

Overall I'm not too keen on how he handles figures. The idea of 'less is more' is great, but I just don't like how he's done it. Learning how this style evolved out of his own invented 'Barbarusian' mythos is fascinating, but it doesn't necessarily cause one to like it any better. This said, there are occasions where the approach he's adopted does work remarkably well, such as 'Gandalf Relates His Adventures'. Undoubtedly though, one of Blok's strengths is how he stands out from the crowds of more conventional 'sword and sorcery' type illustrators. In fact I like him better sometimes the more abstract his figures are: his final LOTR piece, 1962s The King Of The Nazgul, for example, which is almost like a hyper minimalist de Kooning painting (from the latter's brief B&W period, with approx 95% of the detail stripped out) is, to my mind, far better and more sinister than the earlier painting, The Sorcerer King, made circa 1958/9, which looks banal in it's naivety, and ridiculous rather than ominous.

Despite these criticisms, and despite a degree of disappointment, Blok's work remains unique in it's relation to Tolkien, and it has an otherworldliness to it that chimes well with the monumental act of creation Tolkien achieved in building his whole mythos. And on a positive note, there are many delightfully atmospheric pieces here, my favourites, like Amon Hen and Hornburg, but also the previuosly unspublished Weathertop, The Last Bridge, Country Of The Trolls and The Petrified Trolls, depict larger scenes, and include more landscape and context, but even some of the figure based or minimalist paintings work very well to, for example The Firework Dragon II, Gandalf Persuades Bilbo, and the very evocative and highly stylised The Crebain, or the darkly moody Legolas Shoots The Nazgul Down.

As a body of work, Blok's Tolkien Tapestry, gathered together here for the first time, in its most complete (thanks to the arduous sleuthing of editor Pieter Collier, who tracked down several pieces that had gone off the radar) and well printed manifestation ever, is intriguing, perplexing, sometimes dissatisfying, and occasionally brilliant, and I'm really glad Harper Collins put this book out, allowing me to really get to grips with this until now elusive Scandinavian interpreter of Tolkien's bestselling masterpiece.

Can I recommend it? Well, not without circumspection, and a few provisos. But, if you're a Tolkien nut, and open-minded and eclectic in relation to art, then yes, I would recommend it.

Joni Mitchell - Blue (1971)

2011-09-12T23:45:00.000-07:00

A Himalayan range of dizzying cloud capped peaks. Music so potent you have to mind how much you dose yourself up on it.

I recently had a couple of separate conversations with two friends in which we discussed different aspects of artistic talent. There was some overlap in things we hit upon. Whilst Tim felt that you could usually quite easily identify an artist's peak achievement, and he used the term in the singular, and that this achievement would kind of sum up all that's best about that artist, Patrick had an even more blunt way of putting it: all the crap that any artist produces is worth it, for the occasional diamonds!

Well, I think there's an element of insight in both these observations. But for me, certain artists - Woody Allen, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell - have a pretty big corpus of fairly consistent excellence. If the average artist can only hope for one Monadnock, standing like an erupted shark's tooth in a plain of otherwise flat less-than-brilliant achievement, there are nonetheless those few who have Himalayan ranges filled with peaks that are so high they seem to threaten to pop our thin atmosphere. And indeed, there is an element of danger in their works, as they cut so close the skin and the bone.

Blue is most certainly such an album. Continuing to enrich her palette with a broader range of sounds, the balance between guitar-based (well, actually several are played on dulcimer) and piano-based songs is, for the first time, about even. Russ Kunkel, the fantastic drummer and percussionist with the famed 'mellow mafia' rhythm section known simply as 'The Section', makes his second appearance on a Joni recording, adding more to this recording than he did to Ladies Of The Canyon, and, Joni herself makes dulcimer a new core voice in her repertoire, with its distinctive jangly sound. There's also a new departure visually, in that the cover is not adorned by a Joni original, but instead features a very stark blue-hued montone full-frontal close-cropped facial portrait. The photograph, taken (acc. to Wikipedia) by one Tim Considine, is perfect, reflecting the melancholy intensity of the music within.

Listening to the album again for the first time in several years, I realised that it wasn't as piano-heavy as I'd recalled, and in fact the Appalachian dulcimer is as strong a musical voice on the album as the piano, eclipsing even the guitar, with 'All I want', 'Carey', 'California', and 'Case Of You' all played on this unusual instrument.

Below is a clip of Joni playing an early version of 'All I Really Want' (commenting "here's another really new one that isn't quite finished"), after a quick lesson on the history of the dulcimer, and a story about the origin of her own instrument. Fab!

Joni plays 'Carey' live in the early 80s.

Performing California for the BBC in 1970.

'Little Green' and 'This Flight Tonight' are the only normal guitar numbers, and given Joni's penchant for unusual tunings, even they are far from ordinary. 'This Flight Tonight' is particularly notable for the very low open tuning Joni employs, and the sliding blues-influenced figure that keeps recurring. Over at jonimitchell.com they break it down as follows:

The tuning for this song is similar to a variation of open G ( DGDGBD )that has the bottom string tuned right down to a very low G. The actual key for this song is Ab though, one semitone above G, so the tuning you need is Ab Ab Eb Ab C Eb.

The resulting drone from the lowest strings gives the song a very distinctive sound and feel. It's a technique she employs elsewhere to great effect, for example on 'The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey' (Mingus), albeit that on that occasion she goes for a very different vibe. Here she is playing 'This Flight Tonight' in 1972:

Jason Ankeny at Allmusic starts his piece on the album thus "Sad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album." And he's bang on. It certainly is "forthright and poetic", and Joni's songs really can be described as "raw nerves". In fact the review of Blue is amongst the best review I've read on Allmusic, and I use that site all the time whilst researching my Drummer magazine articles...

One of the things that I've found about this album, as great as it undoubtedly is, is that, of all the Joni albums (talking now strictly about the golden-streak of records starting with her debut and running somewhere into the latter part of the seventies), it's amongst the hardest to take in one sitting. Why? Well, for me, it's the emotional intensity of it. 'Little Green', written for her daughter, given away when Joni herself was very young, simply destroys me every time I hear it.

Child with a child pretending

Weary of lies you are sending home

So you sign all the papers in the family name

You're sad and you're sorry but you're not ashamed

Little green have a happy ending

I think you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be touched by this song. And, in addition to the emotional punch it packs, it's musically wonderful, her guitar playing like plangent harp, and her vocal lines enigmatic in their mixture of unusual winding melodies, that are yet effortlessly delivered with a voice that seems capable of going anywhere it pleases, with a kind of liquid charm.

Here she is playing 'Little Green' in 1967, four years before it came out on Blue.

It's also some of the more intensely confessional piano ballads that, whilst individually magnificent, can, if taken together, become somewhat cloying. The tendency towards maudlin self-doubt and criticism that began to be apparent on 'For Free', is not just aired here more freely, but is in fact studied, dissected and concentrated, as in the intense closing number 'The Last Time I Saw Richard', in which she sings (from Richard's point of view in the song)

All romantics meet the same fate someday

Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café

You laugh he said you think you're immune

Go look at your eyes they're full of moon

before ending the song with

I'm gonna blow this damn candle out

I don't want nobody comin' over to my table

I got nothing to talk to anybody about

All good dreamers pass this way some day

Hidin' behind bottles in dark cafes dark cafes

It's getting pretty bleak! And in the title track, an absolute gem of a song, she sings

Acid, booze, and ass

Needles, guns, and grass

Lots of laughs lots of laughs

before musing

Everybody's saying that hell's the hippest way to go

Well I don't think so

But I'm gonna take a look around it though

In the parlance of the times, this is some pretty heavy stuff, man!

But, at the end of the day, as Jason Ankeny says, over at the allmusic.com preview for Blue, "Unrivaled in its intensity and insight, Blue remains a watershed." Amen to that!

Credits:
Gary Burden - Art Direction
Tim Considine - Cover Photography
'Sneaky' Pete Kleinow - Guitar & Pedal Steel Guitar
Russ Kunkel - Drums
Henry Lewy - Engineer
John Mayall - Composer*
Joni Mitchell - Audio Production, Composer, Guitar, Keyboards, Piano, Vocals
Stephen Stills - Guitar & Bass
James Taylor - Guitar, Vocals
Steve Thompson - Composer*

* Mayall and Thompson share composer credits with Joni on one track, 'California' (credited as Mayall, Mitchell, Thompson), all other songs are solely Mitchell.

Joni Mitchell - Ladies Of The Canyon

2011-09-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

The cork's off and the genie's out of the bottle.

Modern music's most magnificent musical goddess takes us all on a trip to musical heaven, expanding her palette as she rapidly matures.

Joni's third album starts with the familiar duo of guitar and vocals, sounding, initially at any rate, very much like her first two records. 'Morning Morgantown', is an evocative, descriptive song, and finds Joni sounding elfin and youthful as she sings "The merchants roll their awnings down / The milk-trucks make their morning rounds". But then piano steals quickly into the mix, as do subtle percussive sounds, already heralding developments which, by the end of the album, make this a real departure from her previously super-minimalist soundscape.

Track two, 'For Free', is newer territory yet, being the first fully fledged piano-based song to appear in her recorded catalogue. It's also the first time we hear Joni sounding self-conscious, guilty even perhaps, about her status in the 'music biz', a theme whose implications she would explore ever more as her career developed. And it also anticipates the rather bleakly melancholy vibe, which, coupled with her distinctive touch on the piano, here taking form as a rolling triplet-based feel, which would be such a characteristic part first really big album sales-wise, the justly lauded and famous 'Blue' album.

'Conversation' adds subtle brushwork drumming to Joni's stealthily expanding palette, also adding recorder and flute ('For Free' already having brought in clarinet) to her own ebullient harmony vocals, and us the first time she sounds a bit catty: jealous of another ladies' man she writes scornfully of her rival "she speaks in sorry sentences, miraculous repentences, I don't believe her"!

Track four, the title track, sounds melodically and harmonically very like earlier songs, but the degree of maturity and sophistication she's attained by this stage is staggering. It's also wonderful for being a celebration of womankind. What a great subject for a song! Clearly showing that she's more than a narrator or purveyor of self-indulgent confessional emotional catharsis, she celebrates a gaggle of her female Laurel Canyon companions. How wonderfully unlike the self-aggrandisement of the seemingly never-ending tides of successive 'me-generation' style rappers and pop tarts this is: these ladies won't pop a cap I'm yo' ass, or diss you cuz you aint got enuf bling or rep or whatever, they'll perhaps bake you some brownies instead. And any song where the lyricist celebrates chubby kids and cats - "all are fat, and none are thin" - is alright with me. Go Joni!

'Willy' presages the piano-centric vibes of Blue, and it's beautiful, but like Blue, it's so shot through with, well, blue. The melancholy edge to much of Joni's music is the aspect I find simultaneously alluring, compelling, and disturbingly narcotic.

The intro to track six hints at things to come, from Hejira to Hissing Lawns and Paprika Lawns. Called the arrangement, the title is clever for not just describing the lyrical content, but also the side of Joni that is pure composer. It's not exactly 'classical' music, but it's certainly boy just pop either. The chord she ends with is sublime, as are the challenging lyrics: 'you could've been more' she admonishes, over a chord that is neither pop, classical, jazz or any other 'type', it's pure music, sound, chemistry, humanity... genius!

The back-to-back brilliance of Chelsea Morning and Woodstock illustrate Joni's effortless seeming excellence: one minute she's, pardon the phrase, tossing off an upbeat acoustic 'folksy' ditty, whose darker message - "pave paradise, put up a parking lot" - seeps through despite the ebullient harmonies and the slightly forced sounding laughter as she delivers the casually brilliant sign off, and the next she's looking to her electric future as she tinkles on (oops, sorry again) an electric piano. Again, whilst she celebrates the blissful innocent apotheosis of the flower power generation at Yasgur's Farm it's already elegaic, and despite the optimism of those times Joni still locates us firmly outside paradise - "we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."

And all this leads to the masterpiece that is 'The Circle Game'. Not amongst her most famous songs, it's nevertheless amongst her best (mind you, her catalogue is littered with jewels). Where STAC felt self-conscious, TCG feels totally natural and uncontrived, and yet STAC kind of paved the way, preparing the ground, if you like.

Here's a great clip of Joni performing 'The Circle Game' way back in 1966, long before it finally appeared on LFTC.

Joni's first two albums already marked her out as a new and brilliant voice in modern music, and with each new recording she just seemed to blossom and grow. If you don't already own this album, you really have to buy it. And yes, I know, Joni's rich enough to not need your dollar (and often sounds more than a little bitter these days, perhaps making her Starbucks deal strangely appropriate). But art this good deserves recognition and reward, all the way down the line.

Credits:

Terry Adams - Cello, Clarinet

Don Bagley - Cello Arrangement

Milt Holland - Percussion

Jim Horn - Baritone Saxophone

Paul Horn - Clarinet, Flute, Wind

Russ Kunkel - Drums

Henry Lewy - Advisor, Engineer

Joni Mitchell - Arranger, Composer, Cover Art & Design, Design, Guitar, Keyboards, Piano, Vocals

Lookout Mountain United Downstairs Choir - Vocals (Background)

Saskatunes - Vocals (Background)

Joni Mitchell - Clouds

2011-09-09T00:27:00.000-07:00

The flowering of a Canadian genius.

Adorned by a beautiful self-portrait, much more successful than the rather more dated (but admittedly sweet) cover she did for her debut, Joni Mitchell's second album, like her first, is dominated by the Spartan combination of her voice and guitar.

The C.S.N. connections of her debut - David Crosby produced it, Stephen Stills plays on it, and she was in a relationship with Graham Nash - give way to a more independent stance. Whilst David Crosby's minimalist production helped establish a template that this album follows, Rothchild's production is, if anything, even starker. Crosby favoured quite a lot of rather wet reverb, most noticeably on Joni's guitar, and all told Song To A Seagull is just a little muddier sonically. Rothchild helps bring Joni's voice and instruments even closer to the listener. Her already superb instrumental skills sound even better as a result, and we can thank Rothchild's production for this.

Whilst Song To A Seagull had a very little bit of piano on 'Night In The City', Clouds is entirely given over to stringed instruments, predominantly guitar, but also dulcimer, and perhaps others, like zither and mandolin. 'Tin Angel' starts the album, and it's a very strong opener. Despite lines such as "In a Bleeker Street café, I found someone to love today", it sounds more like a threnody or elegy than a celebration of new-found love. But that's Joni for you! This only serves to make the striking contrast with the next song even starker. This next song, 'Chelsea Morning', is the first of her more famous numbers, and is the embodiment of joyful simplicity. But it's still Joni, so she plays it in an unusual tuning. The lyrics are fabulous, here's a small sample:

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning

And the first thing that I saw

Was the sun through yellow curtains

And a rainbow on the wall *

Blue, red, green and gold to welcome you

Crimson crystal beads to beckon

Oh, won't you stay

We'll put on the day

There's a sun show every second

For an explanation of why there's an asterisk (*) in there, go here.

Here's a clip of her playing 'Chelsea Morning'.

Everybody who knows Joni will know 'Cheslea Morning' and 'Both Sides, Now', and both these songs which are not just well-known hits, but small masterpieces. With 'Chelsea Morning' she pulls off an upbeat feel far more convincingly than she did with 'Night In The City' on her debut. 'Both Sides, Now' had been a hit for Judy Collins, before Joni's own career had got off the ground. Indeed, much of the material on her first two albums was already written before she'd released anything commercially in he own right. And until she got her solo career going, she may have appeared destined to be a writer/composer, rather than a performer. I mean no respect to Judy Collins, but compare her version of 'Both Sides Now' with Joni's and Joni's is on an altogether different level. Collins' version is still a good one - it's a great song after all - but it's done just like any other over-produced pop of the day. Mitchell's own rendering is so much more personal, and as a result, timeless.

Mitchell also turns in her first a capella performance, the anti-war song 'The Fiddle And The Drum', which, earnest and well-written as it is, isn't anywhere near as compelling - especially out of it's Viet Nam era US context (one hears the more topical and resonant power it had at the time more potently in some of her live bootleg performances from back in the day) - as the astonishing 'Songs To Ageing Children Come'. Personally I find 'The Pirate of Penance', on her debut, somewhat too self-consciously clever (I still love it, and by anyone else's standards it'd be a masterpiece, but in relation to Joni's own body of work it's less successfull). 'Songs To Ageing Children Come', on the other hand, is not only self-consciously clever, but entirely convincing. Playing in a sonorous and resonant open-tuning (there's a transcription of it here, which I've not tried yet) she harmonises her way through an unusual chord progression. It's certainly very mannered, and I've read many reviews of her albums where people dismiss it. But I think it belongs to her experimental thread, and as an artist this kind of exploration is essential. Sometimes it works, as it does here, and on 'The Circle Game', on Ladies Of The Canyon, or, even more experimentally, on Hejira's 'The Jungle Line', and sometimes, perhaps, it doesn't. But then again, these are perhaps quite subjective judgements. Certainly I think that a sing like 'Songs To Ageing Children Come' pave the way for later songs, like 'The Circle Game', so an experiment expands the palette, and can later be reabsorbed and seem, relatively, more mainstream or 'normal' And that's what great artists do, they expand our consciousness and our perception, they add new faculties to our way of perceiving the world, or rather, they uncover truths we already knew, but hadn't quite articulated so well ourselves.

All the songs on this album are excellent. 'That Song About The Midway', 'The Gallery', and 'I Think I Understand' are all very strong, demonstrating that even the lesser-known numbers aren't filler. Even the songs I'm less keen on, for example the religious/occult themed 'Roses Blue (there's certainly something like a hammer-dulcimer or zither on this one!) are very good. Almost all the lyrics are about personal relationships, and Joni is very articulate on this, her (apparent) favourite subject. But it's also her powers of poetic observation that make the songs so achingly emotionally strong:

Here's the opening two verses of 'Tin Angel':

Varnished weeds in window jars

Tarnished beads on tapestries

Kept in satin boxes are

Reflections of love’s memories

Letters from across the seas

Roses dipped in sealing wax

Valentines and maple leaves

Tucked into a paperback

And she also gets pretty philosophical. Here's the whole of 'I Think I Understand':

I Think I Understand

Daylight falls upon the path, the forest falls behind

Today I am not prey to dark uncertainty

The shadow trembles in its wrath, I've robbed its blackness blind

And tasted sunlight as my fear came clear to me

I think I understand

Fear is like a wilderland

Stepping stones or sinking sand

Now the way leads to the hills, above the steeple's chime

Below me sleepy rooftops round the harbor

It's there I'll take my thirsty fill of friendship over wine

Forgetting fear but never disregarding her

Oh, I think I understand

Fear is like a wilderland

Stepping stones and sinking sand

Sometimes voices in the night will call me back again

Back along the pathway of a troubled mind

When forests rise to block the light that keeps a traveler sane

I'll challenge them with flashes from a brighter time

Oh, I think I understand

Fear is like a wilderland

Stepping stones or sinking sand

That's some pretty heavy stuff, and certainly not candyfloss pop! And then there are the cosmic ruminations of 'Songs To Ageing Children Come'. Some might think this sort of thing pretentious. Personally I think it's profound, and it really speaks to me. For every insightful and articulate Joni there are legions of mindless pop-tarts dealing out oceans of inane trivia. give me a drop of Joni any time:

Songs To Ageing Children Come

Through the windless wells of wonder

By the throbbing light machine

In a tea leaf trance or under

Orders from the king and queen

Songs to aging children come

Aging children, I am one

People hurry by so quickly

Don't they hear the melodies

In the chiming and the clicking

And the laughing harmonies

Songs to aging children come

Aging children, I am one

Some come dark and strange like dying

Crows and ravens whistling

Lines of weeping, strings of crying

So much said in listening

Songs to aging children come

Aging children, I am one

Does the moon play only silver

When it strums the galaxy

Dying roses will they will their

Perfumed rhapsodies to me

Songs to aging children come

This is one

Hey Joni (as Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo memorably sang on Daydream Nation), I certainly 'hear the melodies in the chiming and the clicking and the laughing harmonies'. She certainly is "a beautiful mental jukebox"!

The album ends with Joni's aforementioned rendition of her own classic 'Both Sides Now', and rather than Judy Collins' perfectly good but rather dated version, Joni's recording is a true timeless classic. And what a way to end an album! Here's a great version of her playing the song live at '2nd frets', in 1966, in which she tells how the idea for the song was born whilst reading Henderson The Rain King, a book by Saul Bellow. The album version is better, actually, but hearing her sing it live, and tell the story of how it came into being is just wonderful.

Here are the words:

Rows and flows of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere

I've looked at clouds * that way

But now they only block the sun

They rain and snow on everyone

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It's cloud illusions I recall

I really don't know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels

The dizzy dancing way you feel

As ev'ry fairy tale comes real

I've looked at love that way

But now it's just another show

You leave 'em laughing when you go

And if you care, don't let them know

Don't give yourself away

I've looked at love from both sides now

From give and take, and still somehow

It's love's illusions I recall

I really don't know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud

To say "I love you" right out loud

Dreams and schemes and circus crowds

I've looked at life that way

But now old friends are acting strange

They shake their heads, they say I've changed

Well something's lost, but something's gained

In living every day

I've looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It's life's illusions I recall

I really don't know life at all

I've looked at life from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It's life's illusions I recall

I really don't know life at all

Credits:

Henry Lewy - Engineer

Joni Mitchell - Cover Art, Guitar, Producer, Vocals

Paul Rothchild - Producer

Ed Thrasher - Art Direction

Allmusic also credits Stephen Stills (allegedly on bass and guitar, but I can't hear any!), nor do I hear any keyboards, also credited to Mitchell by the allmusic.com credits page. One thing that they certainly get right is that it's a "stark stunner", although I don't think it's so much the "great leap forward" David Cleary calls it. Song To A seagull is a brilliant start, and Clouds is a fantastic development.

Changing up the vibe at SFTFG

2011-09-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

I hope some people are still reading my blog? It's been a long while since I regularly posted. Well, in truth, I've never managed to post with anything like real regularity!

I've decided to change the approach to my blog. I started it because I wanted to share music as many others have done, and many still continue to do. However, from an ethical perspective (something a bit like the Buddhist idea of not taking the 'not-given') - never mind the legal one - I feel I can't share copyrighted music. This is basically and fundamentally because I'm a musician, and I myself want, in a world such as ours now is*, to make a living from my own musical 'work'. And so I must respect the work of others. If music is out of copyright, or has never been copyrighted (e.g. bootlegs from concerts), then I might still share it, as long as there are no ramifications to prevent me.

But, as a rule, I'll be aiming, somehow, not exactly sure how yet, to have audio samples that readers can listen to, but not download. There are numerous options for doing this, and if any of you have helpful suggestions (I'm aware, for example, of Soundcloud, but as yet not very au fait with using it), please get in touch and let me know. So far I've updated just a very few posts (Jobim/Aguas de Marco, Beefheart/Decals, and a couple of the Earth Disciples posts), with Soundcloud tracks. I'll try and do more in this vein as soon as time allows.

For those who might be interested, I write a monthly column for Drummer magazine (UK), called 'Recycled', in which I cover a classic or obscure album every month - I'm fast approaching 100 issues/articles, for this esteemed publication - writing about everything from the band to the historic context, but obviously with a drummer's eye view. I'm also an Amazon Vine reviewer, and have written over 150 reviews on Amazon's UK website, ranging from highly informal 'fan-boy' ejaculations, to more 'serious' pieces, most of which are written out of pure passion on my part, but a number of which are part of the Amazon Vine program.

I'm going to attempt to write a short review as often as possible for a period of time, in order to start covering a big chunk of my favourite music, and, once I know how best to, I will aim to include at least one audio track with each post (where that's appropriate). Please do leave comments/feedback!

* Whether or not I think the way the world is now - economically speaking - is the best we could have, well, that's another matter altogether!

Joni Mitchell - Song To A Seagull

2011-09-08T00:39:00.000-07:00

Joni: my teenage heroin.

Some might think I misspelled the word heroine in my sub-title: I didn't.

As a teenager I discovered Joni Mitchell through some cassettes my parents had. One in particular featured a compilation of various Joni tracks. I became utterly addicted to this cassette, listening to it compulsively for years. Then, under the pretext of buying my mum birthday and christmas presents, I began to amass what was, in reality, my own collection of Joni's brillliant albums.

Joni developed an amazing guitar technique, partially as a means of coping with having had polio as a child, and the picking and strumming you hear on Hejira and elsewhere is already evident here, along with the harp like arpeggios and unusual tunings. This album is notable in her oeuvre for being almost entirely stripped down to just Joni's voice and guitars, as was her next one, the equally brilliant albeit better known Clouds. There's almost no piano at all - the only piano I can hear is a rather jangly honky tonk part, mixed low in the background of 'Night In The City' - which might seem surprising to those who know Joni best from such albums as Blue. This pared down approach really works superbly well. Thank goodness for David Crosby's sympathetic and sensitive production: Joni is neither drowned in syrupy orchestral settings, nor bolted onto a rock group, to make her more 'now', as so frequently happened elsewhere in popular music!

I have to confess that as much as I still love this music, I can't listen to it as much as I once did. I could quote the magnificent opener 'I Had A King' - "I can't go back there anymore" - but fortunately it's not quite that bad! One reason for this is that this music is so incredibly potent, and, for me at any rate, brings out certain melancholy associations. But I believe that this 'saudade' is actually inherent, even in the harmonies, never mind the lyrics. In recent times this tendency towards the maudlin has made latter-day Joni seem bitter, even sour, at times. But here, as she starts out, the sheer beauty and power is simply enchanting and compelling.

And, as she was keen to point out from the outset, she's no ordinary 'folkie'. She saw herself as a poet, artist and composer, and indeed she was all three. Her lyrics are often beautiful poetry that stands well alone, her cover artworks adorn many of her albums, and are always endearing, engaging, and apt for the records (this particular album's original artwork isn't her best, but it does have a certain period charm), and her music, well, as the title of this review suggests, it's dangerously, powerfully, addictive.

My personal favourites from this album are 'I Had A King', 'Michael From The Mountains', 'Marcie', 'Nathan La Franeer', 'Sisowtowbell Lane', 'The Dawntreader', 'Song To A Seagull', 'Cactus Tree' ... ummm ... As you can see, pretty much the whole album is, to my mind, sublime. Only the slightly more upbeat 'Night In The City' doesn't quite ring true for me, and 'The Pirate Of Penance', pure gold by common standards, is, in Joni's elevated canon, a little too mannered, or 'clever', for my tastes. On her next album she pulls off upbeat ('Chelsea Morning') and clever ('Songs To Ageing Children Come') much more successfully.

For me track one alone, 'I Had A King', would make this album worth having. Joni has said elsewhere that she views her own early work as that of an 'ingénue', and it's certainly true that she matured and broadened her scope in multifarious ways as she progressed. But nevertheless, for a first album this is jaw-droppingly brilliant. Even if the lyrics of 'I Had A King' do display a youthful preoccupation with fashion fabrics - "drip-dry and paisley", "leather and lace" - there's also poetic genius ("I had a king, in a salt-rusted carriage / Who carried me off, to his country for marriage too soon / Beware of the power of moons"), amazing insight for one so young, and musical prowess that, through singularity of melodic and harmonic conception, really make her music stand out from the crowd, then and now. And, as noted earlier, nearly all of this massively underrated album comes up to the high standard of this incredibly strong opener.

Another very strong example of her formidable creative powers is 'Nathan La Franeer': expanded from the observations of a cab ride, it becomes a universal paean to loneliness and alienation, and portrays the urban experience in a way that I, as an ex-Londoner, can all too readily identify with, and yet, all the while, it remains a thing of profound hair-raising beauty. This song also features a wailing noise, credited as a 'banshee', which sounds, just as it should, like a wailing female spirit portending death!

Joni Mitchell is, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest female singer-songwriter and poet/composer there has ever been. Only Brazil's Joyce Moreno comes anywhere near her (they share initials: what a strikingly odd, if perhaps meaningless, coincidence!). This is the first nugget mined from a very long, rich vein of musical gold, and for me it's a treasure whose worth is way beyond mere monetary value. Priceless and essential.

Joni playing 'I Had A King', live. You can hear her tuning her guitar before she starts. Joni is infamous for her use of many and varied alternative tunings, which are of course very much bound up with her very distinctive melodic and harmonic style.

Lyrics: I reproduce here the lyrics to track one, 'I Had A King', one of my favourites from this stunning album:

I had a king in a tenement castle

Lately he's taken to painting the pastel walls brown

He's taken the curtains down

He's swept with the broom of contempt

And the rooms have an empty ring

He's cleaned with the tears

Of an actor who fears for the laughter's sting

I can't go back there anymore

You know my keys won't fit the door

You know my thoughts don't fit the man

They never can they never can

I had a king dressed in drip-dry and paisley

Lately he's taken to saying I'm crazy and blind

He lives in another time

Ladies in gingham still blush

While he sings them of wars and wine

But I in my leather and lace

I can never become that kind

I can't go back there anymore

You know my keys won't fit the door

You know my thoughts don't fit the man

They never can they never can

I had a king in a salt-rusted carriage

Who carried me off to his country for marriage too soon

Beware of the power of moons

There's no one to blame

No there's no one to name as a traitor here

The king's on the road

And the queen's in the grove till the end of the year

I can't go back there anymore

You know my keys won't fit the door

You know my thoughts don't fit the man

They never can they never can

Credits: (adapted from the Allmusic.com entry on this album)

David Crosby - Producer

Art Cryst - Engineer

Lee Keefer - Banshee

Joni Mitchell - Cover Art, Guitar, Vocals, Banshee

Mark Roth - Photography

Stephen Stills - Bass, Guitar

Ed Thrasher - Art Direction

Lost Earth Disciples album 'Universal Man' rediscovered!

2010-01-09T03:15:00.000-08:00

See The Earth In Space by The Earth Disciples

UPDATE: today (8/10/2011) I uploaded the track above - 'See The Earth From Space' - which is the opener from the lost second album Universal Man, by the great band , The Earth Disciples. Followers of my blog will know that I fervently hope for (and am working towards, albeit slowly) a day when the complete Earth Disciples will see the light of day as a de-luxe 'special-interest' re-release.

Wowzers! I'm writing this in a state of high excitement, having just received from the U.S. a CD, thanks to Reggie Austin and Reggie Harris (bassist and drummer respectively) containing recordings taken from an acetate (discovered by Skip Taylor, famous as manager of Canned Heat, amongst others, whose name you can just make out on the publicity photo shown here*) of the Earth Disciples lost 2nd album Universal Man.

Currently playing in my headphones is the opening track, a sprawling 6/8 odyssey called 'See The Earth In Space', the most overtly jazzy tune I've heard by the Disciples so far. A glance over the titles reveals a slightly more overt political consciousness at work: the first album, with titles like 'Serenade Of A Summer Butterfly', 'Spirit Of The Bells', 'La Bahemia', 'Earth Island Ferry' and 'Native Planet', evoked a kind of cosmic eco-consciousness, and a psychedelized summer warmth, where the titles on Universal Man seem to hint at more beneath the skin, 'Coronation Of The Sphinx' contrasting with 'Iberian Peasant', and 'Revolutionary Soldier' sitting right next to 'Lullaby For Little Ones'.

Another title with a political charge to it, and a martial military snare beat as an intro, is 'Portrait Of America', which segues into a jazz waltz after the slightly unusual musical departure of the intro. What this clearly shows is that the band weren't resting on their laurels, but pushing further in their sonic explorations. Rudy Reid (can anyone help us locate Rudy, or find out what's become of him?) plays lovely shimmering jazzy acoustic piano for the first time on this track, having up 'til now chosen to play electronic keys. The music continues to be a very strong alloy of different sources. 'Coronation Of The Sphinx' returns to a more blues rock influenced groove akin to material from the first album, but the production sounds crisper and fatter, and this helps bring out Reggie Harris' beautifully crisp drumming, his deftly articulated rolls around the snare, hats and tightly tuned toms on this tune being a real delight. I really hope they can locate master tapes for this stuff, as it's superb. The psychedelic guitar solo by Jimmy Holloway is awesome, but sadly mixed a little too low for full fat enjoyment.

'Universal Man' enters on a super tight super crisp deep-fried chicken scratch guitar figure, with Austin's drums entering with big beautifully tuned low tom action, and then an ebullient Hammond groove starts driving down your cerebral cortex, with Holloway's cosmic axe once again tickling your synapses beautifully... man, this is some seriously good music! What kind of world do we live in where this gets passed over? Not as immediately homogenous as their first album, I think Universal Man perhaps has more depth and variety, as the band dig in and stretch out. What a shame they didn't get the support they deserved, who knows where they might have gone?

After a long extended intro, in the second (or is it third?) part of 'Revolutionary Soldier', which approaches the density of prog rock or classical music in the scope of the arrangement, comprising many varied sections, the band come as close to a reprise of material from Getaway Train as they get, and are none the worse for it, as their debut is a great lost classic of instrumental psychedelic soul. Five minutes into this number, the magnum opus of the album, the groove goes up several gears, showcasing another fantastic solo from Holloway, but now over a furious 2/4 beat. The enegry is palpably visceral and exciting, the dynamics truly spectacular. Then they come down and out of this sonic epiphany, reprising an earlier section, dominated by melodious guitar and hammond organ, before finally building towards a climactic ending.

After the intensity of 'Soldier' comes the gentle closer, which lives up to the title 'Lullaby For The Little Ones'. Very much a band aware of the nuances of light and shade, with a great dynamic rapport, despite the overall softness of this last number, sadly their last ever tune waxed, they nonetheless wring a deep emotional intensity from their performance. I wonder what the vibe in the band was at this time? Having had one album out already, and undoubtedly aware that it wasn't being pushed as they might wish, did they have any idea this might be their last outing in the studio? It doesn't sound like it, as the music is strong, joyful, and overwhelmingly positive.

I'll be updating this post as more info comes in: the search for the masters of both albums goes on, as the big idea is a 'Complete Earth Disciples' release at some point, with a comprehensive remastering of their whole ouevre. If you have any pertinent info, pics, memories of the band in concert etc, please get in touch.

I won't share this music here without the consent of the band, or proper legal clearance, esp. as the aim is to see all the material re-released. But here's some basic info to whet your appetite for the planned re-release:

Tracklisting:

See The Earth In Space (6:00)

Iberian Peasant (7:12)

Portrait of America (3:34)

Coronation Of The Sphinx (4:35)

Universal Man (6:03)

Revolutionary Soldier (8:07)

Lullaby For Little Ones (2:36)

Personnel (as far as I know, the same as the 1st album):

Reggie Austin - Bass guitar

Reggie Harris - Drums

Jimmy Holloway - Guitar (poss also keys and bass)

Rudy Reid - Keyboards and piano

Any info from any quarter about the dates, location, producer/engineers etc would be greatly appreciated.

* Many thanks to both Reginalds, Austin and Harris, for sending me some wonderful archival pictures (which I hope will see the light of day in an article on the band's history some time soon), of which this is one, sent to me by Reggie Austin in this instance.

Aguas de Marco (Waters of March) - Disco de Bolso (1972)

2010-01-06T00:18:00.000-08:00

Aguas de Marco by Seb Palmer

Hi, just thought I'd share my discovery of this link, where I discovered info about the first release of Jobim's masterpiece 'Aguas de Marco', over at Loronix's groovy blog. I'm a long term fan of Jobim, and yet it was only relatively recently that - having seen him with Elis Regina on Youtube playing this song - I realized Tom was a flautist, as well as guitarist, keyboard player and singer... in addition to being one of the world's great contemporary composer and songwriters. What a man!

Loronix's download is from a single that was a free insert, given away with a Brazilian magazine, and is, as far as I know, the first known recording of this great song. They play it a bit fast for my liking, and the audio quality could be better, but as a document of the song, it's priceless. It's just guitar, upright bass, drums, vocals and flutes (overdubs by Tom himself perhaps?), including a vocal part that does a kind of shekere impression. It's nice to hear Tom exploring a different feel from the way he later did it, with the flute being particularly distinctive as the song plays out.

This isn't my favourite version of the song, but it's great to have it. And get a load of that cover! Sublime... Tom looking cool and groovy with his flute, sat by a tree, with a beautiful Brazilian babe, whose shapely body is clad only in a bikini sporting a musical motif, giving Tom just the right kind of inspiration. Even the tinted duo-tone style, and funky old school typography conspire to make this a real gem.

Enjoy!

Earth Disciples - Update

2009-01-31T14:46:00.000-08:00

Listen to 'Spirit Of The Bells', via the above Youtube clip.

UPDATE to the UPDATE! Since originally posting, EMI have made this album available for download via iTunes. I don't think the band will benefit from any sales, which is sad, and I'm still keen to unearth their follow up album and put the lot out, remastered etc, so anyone with leads, please get in touch.

I recently had an article published about the Earth Disciples album Getaway Train in the UK mag Drummer. During my research for the article I got in touch with drummer Reggie Harris. Here's a short quote from Reggie that didn't make it into the article:

“The story of The Earth Disciples is a long one, starting in Chicago, Illinois. The bass player (Reggie Austin), guitar player (Jimmy Holloway), and myself, met in high school, and played in Reggie Austin's brother's band (Johnny Robinson, piano). We played high school dances and local events. Oscar Brown Jr., a well-known jazz artist from Chicago, came to our school to do a show, including local talent from school and [the] surrounding area. The show was called Opportunity Knocks. At the end of the show Oscar took us on the road to New York, and on to Los Angeles. After the tour, some band members returned home. I stayed in Los Angeles. Oscar was looking for a pianist, and that’s when I met Rudy Reid. I moved in with Rudy and called Jimmy to come and play. After Jimmy moved in, we wanted to be reunited with Reggie Austin. We sent for him in Chicago; The Earth Disciples were formed.”

Guitarist Jimmy Holloway was the son of famous jazz saxophonist Red Holloway. Sadly, Jimmy passed away quite some time ago. I've speculated as to whether Reggie Austin's piano playing brother, Johnny Robinson (brothers with different surnames?), is the same Johnny Robinson who did Memphis High, but I don't know. Since my piece was published I've also tracked down bassist Reggie Austin. The two Reggie's are pleased to find there's still interest in their music after all these years.

My wish is to have the album remixed and re-mastered for re-issue, and, get this: there's another album in the can somewhere... At least there should be, as the Earth Disciples certainly recorded a follow up. The prospect of a de-luxe 'Complete Earth Disciples' package is quite exciting to me. If you dig these righteous soul brothers, leave me some feed back and comments, as I'm trying to gauge the level of interest in them and the viability of a reissue.

The pic of the single above is from my copy of the 7", and the image below is from my copy of the album. Left to right they are: Reggie Austin, Reggie Harris, Rudy Reid, and Jimmy Holloway. My thanks to Reggie Austin for this inside info. He also has some good stuff to tell about the shots on the loco, but that'll have to wait for another time!

ps - If anyone knows the whereabouts of Rudy Reid, please get in touch!

And just to reiterate: if you want to hear the Earth Disciples, message me in the comments section. I'm exploring possible reissue options with the band and trying to find the masters and who has licensing rights etc. I cottoned onto the band thanks to the excellent Four Brothers Beats blog, which seems to have gone 'invite only' at some point, meaning that if you're not one of the select invited few you'll not be able to download via that route. Throwback Music have also listed Getaway Train before, but again, it's invite only (as of my last visit), so currently there are no active download options I know of. As I'm looking into helping the remaining Disciples find a way to make the music available again commercially I don't feel it'd be right to just give it away here, much as I'd like to share the goodness!

Azteca - Pyramid Of The Moon (1973)

2009-01-26T14:31:00.000-08:00

I first heard Azteca here (but the link no longer works, I'm afraid), courtesy of Alpax's posts over at the 'Call It Anything' blog.

A monstrously huge ensemble, sometimes numbering as many as 20, formed by brothers Pete and Coke Escovedo (father and nephew of Sheila E, most famous herself as an associate of Prince), Azteca put out two monster latin-jazz-rock albums on Columbia in the early 1970s: a self-titled debut, in '72, and this one, in '73. There's a link personnel wise here with my previous Courtial post, in that Coke Escovedo, Errol Knowles and Bill Courtial are on both.

Check the personnel on this album! The connections go way deep: Santana, Herbie, the west coast Latin scene. Some heavy cats, and a hip chick! What can I say but, if you're not already familiar with this excellent group, get hip! What a magical musical time this was. Azteca's debut has been reissued and can be bought new (when in stock!), albeit at a fairly steep price (it's a Jap import, put out on Sony Japan, so unless you hail from those Pacific isles you'll most likely end out paying quite a bit for carriage and excise, never mind the cost of the actual CD).

Also noteworthy is the superb artwork, by Bruce Steinberg, a real renaissance man of the funky West Coast scene (most famously associated with the mighty Tower Of Power), who sadly died fairly recently (Dec 2007). His Aztec style roundel, which the band used on both their album covers, incorporates guitars, horns and a circular keyboard motif... Moy groovy Mr Steinberg!

Azteca reformed in 2007, leading to a new album and a DVD, neither of which I've yet had the pleasure of seeing or hearing. Make friends with them on MySpace.

Tracklist:

Someday We'll Get By
Mazatlan
Find Love Today
Whatcha Gonna Do
New Day Is on the Rise
Mexicana, Mexicana
Red Onions
Love Is a Stranger
A Night in Nazca

Personnel:

Errol Knowles, Wendy Haas, Rico Reyes - Vocals
Pete Escovedo - Percussion & vocals
Tom Harrell - Trumpet
Pat O'Hara - Trombone
Bob Ferreira - Tenor sax, Flute
Mel Martin - Tenor, baritone and soprano saxes, flute
Bill Courtial, Neal Schon - Guitar
George Muribus, George DiQuattro, Mike Nock - Keyboards
Flip Nunez - Organ
Paul Jackson, Tom Rutley, Tony Juncale - Bass
Lenny White, John Brinck - Drums
Coke Escovedo - Timbales
Victor Pantoja - Conga & vocals

Courtial - Don't You Think It's Time (1975)

2009-01-26T14:07:00.001-08:00

Another redirect from the goat. This one's been posted a number of times... I first heard it here. I'd just like to add my own reflections to what other folk have (or haven't) said about this album.

Keb Darge included 'Losing You' on his Deep Funk Vol. 3 comp (that's where I first heard of these super-bad super-dudes), and I've also heard that it was on a Luv 'n' Haight Cali Soul comp too. 'Losing You' has a killer piano driven groove, akin to the (new) Rotary Connection's 'Black Gold Of The Sun', but faster, with brilliantly executed and punishingly speedy right handed 16ths from drummer Geoff White.

I love everything about this album: from the nutty but natty duds the guys are sporting on the cover - kind of Renaissance, or Dutch 17th century - to the wonderful grooves within. Title track 'Don't You Think It's Time' is reminiscent of mid 70's Herbie grooves like the opening section of 'Hang Up Your Hang Ups', and the deliciously titled 'Corn On The Cob' is an ace funky fusion instrumental workout with a good taut groove. And there's plenty more to enjoy!

Here's a YouTube video I found of 'Losing You', the best known track from this album:

Tracklist:

Don't You Think It's Time
Thank You Baby
Time To Explain
Best Of Friends
Poem For Helen
Losing You
Love Nevermore
Take The Time
Corn On The Cob
Time

Personnel:

Bill Courtial - Guitar
Errol Knwoles - Vocals
Pete Escovedo - Congas
Edward Williams III - Bass
Geoffrey White - Drums
Jose Najera - Percussion

Tom Waits - tracks from Paradise Alley (1978)

2009-01-26T13:13:00.000-08:00

I'm really only interested in the Waits tracks on this album: the Paradise Alley OST was released originally by MCA in 1978, to coincide with the general release of a Sylvester Stallone directed strong-man movie of the same name. This was Stallone's directorial debut, and the first of his many attempts to recapture the magic and glory of his original breakthrough achievement with Rocky, for which he both wrote the story and, of course, starred in the title role (John Avildsen directed that movie).

I've not seen the film, but I would like to! - UPDATE: got it on rental from Lovefilm, and will be watching it soon, yay! - Stallone himself sings several of the other tracks, which is, ummm... interesting. It was hearing all the live versions of 'Annie's Back In Town' on various Tom concert boots that lead me to finally seek out the Paradise Alley OST. 'Annie's Back In Town' is a really great song, but the other Waits contribution to this OST, 'Meet Me In Paradise Alley', whilst okay, is a bit workaday, judged by Tom's own high standards.

I can't remember where I found the poster image, but the shot of Sly & Waits at left is from a scan of the back cover of the album, which I found at the fabulous Tom Waits Library, a brilliant Waits fan site run by Dutch dude Pieter Hartmans.

Tom Waits - Tonight In Person (BBC), 26/7/79

2009-01-22T02:34:00.000-08:00

At long last, a new downloadable post. Sorry for the delay... Life can get busy! This is an MP3 version (at 224 kbps) of a great soundboard recording taken from a performance Waits recorded for the BBC. Apparently there is a film version of this concert. If anyone can share that then please get in touch, and I'll post a link. Waits performs brilliantly, including a number where he improvises a bit and then does a rap about finding a clothing store open at 3am and buying a suit! This goes by the name of 'With A Suitcase', and is unique to this gig I believe. Waits is occasionally accompanied by sax, upright bass and drums (don't know who I'm afraid, that info would be appreciated). The audience clearly dig Waits, but are typically polite and British in their reserve. 'On the Nickel', performed solo at the piano, is a personal favourite. And 'Kentucky Avenue' always blows my mind.

'Red Shoes' is interesting in this format: it's hard to hear exactly what's going on keys wise, but there's some minimal Hammond type sounds, and interesting use of acoustic piano. Is he strumming the strings? ' Step Right Up' sounds somewhat turgid here, especially when compared with the Small Change version, on which Shelly Manne plays like a monster. In fact I don't think this tune translates so well to the live setting, at least not as far as the recordings are concerned. Being there would doubtless have been something else. 'Burma Shave' makes a showing in one of it's many and varied 'proto' versions, which makes for interesting and enjoyable listening. I might do a 'Burma Shave' special posting at some point, 'cause the evolution of this number is fascinating, and what a great song he finally waxed for the Foreign Affairs album, sublime in my view!

Tracklist:

Wrong Side Of The Road
With A Suitcase
I Never Talk To Strangers
Step Right Up
On The Nickel
Red Shoes
Burma Shave
Kentucky Avenue
Small Change
Closing Time

download

If anyone can tell me who plays with Tom on this I'd be grateful. The image at the top of this post is sourced from the fabulous tom waits library (a brilliant if scarily obsessive Waits resource), and is a still from the video footage of the performance.

Sleeping On It... Wake Up To Hutson!

2009-01-03T16:35:00.000-08:00

Shoot... bit of a winter recess for me there. I only just got into this blog lark, and things got so busy I couldn't post anymore for a spell there. So, I'm gonna get ready and post me a whole bunch more of those Mitchell and Waits boots. For now tho' just a quick 'heads up' for Leroy Hutson's sublime Hutson album.

This recording is so damnably good it's forcing me to go out and get a new set of decent speakers, as cranking up the Harmann Kardons on my Powerbook just ain't cuttin' it! 'Lucky Fellow' is the standout track, but in truth the whole album stands out like a beacon of brilliance, and that's no mean feat in an era flooded with sonic loveliness. I'm not posting a link to a download on this one, you gotta go through the proper channels and pick up a copy of the Soul Brother Records reissue. Glad to see some fellow UK cats keeping the faith on this stuff. Can someone - anyone - enlighten me as to how to get playable/streaming sample tunes into ye old blog? I'd like to have 'Lucky Fellow' available here as a taster.

Back to the funk: funk you should buy...

2008-10-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

When I ripped Beefheart's Decals album I also ripped my vinyl copies of RAMP's Come Into Knowledge (at the time only available new on vinyl), WAR's Younglood OST (from a cassette!), and Grover Washington's Mister Magic (vinyl). All to 192 kbps MP3. I'd love to post those entire rips, but ethics prevent me: I said I'd only put up out of print or otherwise unavailable material, so I'll stick to that principle. However, if I can't put up the whole albums, I will at least try and find a legal way of putting up taster tracks:

RAMP's fabulous album has oft been visited by compilers, particularly for the two super mellow nuggets 'Daylight' and 'Everybody Loves The Sunshine', admittedly the two best tracks on the album. There are lots more goodies on display here tho', like the title track, and 'Try, Try, Try'. RAMP have even enjoyed something of a renaissance thanks to the interests of global crate diggers and funk freaks, playing London's Jazz Café recently. In addition to the aforementioned delights of this album, if you feel you need more reasons to be tempted to shell out for it, then check try and get a listen to 'American Promise'. It's the other end of the sonic spectrum from the aforementioned tracks: a hard grooving single riff from start to finish. Assuming you can track it down, then turn it up loud and enjoy the grease of this hard fonkin' groove! Buy the Blue Thumb Originals CD reissue from Amazon (UK) here. Ramp were (and possibly still are): Landy Shores (Can that possibly be a real name? It's fabulous! Somehow I suspect it might be a contractually requisite pseudonym.) on guitar, Nate White on bass, John Manuel drums, and Sharon Matthews and Sibel Thrasher singing. It's gotta be Roy Ayers who's pitching in, uncredited, on keys. The horns aren't credited either. There's a good article on the band at digisoul.co.uk.

'Flying Machine' is my favourite track from WAR's Youngblood OST, with an almost Afrobeat/Samba rhythm, reminiscent of Tony Allen's mega-funky grooves for Fela Kuti, served up by drummer Harold Brown. He cooks up a beat so tasty my mouth waters just thinking about it! Lonnie Jordan's keys work is fabulous, mixing a Latino vibe in with his funky soulful jam-band feel, and Charles Miller's flute solo really cooks. You can buy the album new, and very cheap, from Amazon (UK) here. Other cool tunes include 'This Funky Music Makes You Feel Good', which lives up to the promise of the title, the cool walking bass jazz groovin' of 'Superdude', complete with film dialogue, the super-mellow sounds of 'Youngblood and Cybil', and another feel good gem 'Sing A Happy Song' which has a fantastic broken up minimal groove in the verses.

Grover looks so, ummm, cool on this cover! So cool that Ty has gone and ripped off the idea for album Closer... Hmmm!? But neither of these covers can match the bonkers Provisao Do Tempo by Brazilian genius Marcos Valle, where the one time bossa wunderkind has transformed into a sub-aqua bearded hippy freak... Now that really is cool! Title track 'Mister Magic' really is the nuts: you just gotta love it! Eric Gale's super funky/bluesy guitar is wonderful. I just love his style and feel, and what a soulful solo! And Harvey Mason on tubs... it doesn't get any better than when the Harv' is laying it down! 'Earth Tones' gets pretty damn cosmic too. Get it cheap, on a shiny new CD, from Amazon (UK) here.

Different Drummer vs Mama Heartbeat: an interview with John ‘Drumbo’ French

2008-10-27T05:12:00.000-07:00

I interviewed John French back in mid 2005, when he was fronting a reformed Magic Band, and touring in support of their CDs Back To The Front, and 21st Century Mirror Men. I did the interview off my own bat, hoping to get it published in the drumming magazine I regularly write for, but they didn't run the piece. Sad really, as French is a real underground and under-sung drum hero, in my mind at least. I guess this is old news now, but rather than let it languish, and since it contains info about French and the whole Beefheart/Magic Band story I've not read elsewhere, I thought people might be interested. So, here's the article as it was submitted to the magazine (I cut quite a lot: this article is approx. 2,000 words, whilst the full transcription is close to double that!). I hope you enjoy it!

Achieving cult status with Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, John French has, over twenty years since they disbanded, reformed The Magic Band, causing Simpson’s creator Matt Groening to weep for joy. After seeing them in action at The Junction in Cambridge, I caught up with French to discuss drums, life with the Captain, and why he’s put the Magic Band back together.

What got you started on the drums?

“I loved music, and my family was very musical. My father played guitar, and my uncle played guitar and violin, and was very good on both. During Prohibition my father was a bootlegger. They’d have weekend parties where they turned the house into a café, have people over and entertain them. When I was thirteen I saw an Elvis Presley movie called Kid Galahad, I was very impressed by this dude who kept time by slapping his knees! Simultaneously a school chum started playing drums. Watching him, I saw that the snare drum was played with the left hand, the ride cymbal with the right, and the kick drum with the right foot. I learned how to play by slapping my knees!

It was the Surf era: The Beach Boys were out, and there were lots of instrumental Surf bands, like Dick Dale and The Deltones, and The Surfaris. I listened to a lot of that, and most of it was the same beat. I got into it because by talking about music you could relate to girls. Then somebody gave me Time Out, by The Dave Brubeck Quartet. I started trying to play along and realised I couldn’t. So I learned how to play in 5/4, 7/8 and all these odd time signatures. This was all before I had a [drum] set. I was still slapping my knees! Then I got some drumsticks, and started playing on the bottom of a plastic trashcan, it was yellow, and really ugly! My parents bought me a second-hand kit for $75 at Ed & Mary’s Fix-It Shop. They didn’t know anything about drums, neither did |! It was three toms, a bass drum, and a hi-hat. No snare! I started listening to Sandy Nelson, because he used toms a lot! He’d do these solos loosely based around a Gene Krupa style. It was all tom-toms, and I really loved it! I’ve always liked incorporating the toms into patterns.

I got involved in school bands, and the drum and bugle corps. I had the same music teacher as Frank Zappa. My father worked with Doug Moon, one of the original guitarist’s with The Magic Band. Doug came to the house and he kept asking me “why don’t you come to this jam?” I’d say, “No, the guys’ll make fun of my kit”. Later on my father bought me a brand new set of Slingerlands. I’d heard of Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band by then, and I knew Doug. They needed a bass drum pedal once, so they borrowed mine. I didn’t want to join the Beefheart band at the time. I was dismayed by the heavy drug use; they were all older, and they seemed dysfunctional.

Despite his reservations, John did become the drummer for The Magic Band. He went on to tell me more about that experience.

Don [Beefheart’s real name] would be in bed ‘til noon, one o’ clock, when I’d come over to rehearse. His mother would be trying to get him out of bed; he lived with his mother and his grandmother. It seemed like everything at that point was a dead-end. I was facing Viet Nam. I figured I was gonna get drafted and probably die when I was 19! I was thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?” Don was taking a lot of drugs. Several times he thought he was dying. We’d rush him to hospital, and it’d turn out it was an anxiety attack, but he thought he was having heart attacks! I was thinking, “What have I got myself into?” But I was determined to tough it out and see if it would go somewhere. I started feeling better when Safe As Milk was released, and we actually got a contract. I thought, “Maybe we have a chance, ‘cause we’re getting radio airplay”. Ry Cooder had joined, but at our first real performance Don walked off the stage, and Cooder quit the band. I realised this was a big mess, and was probably not going to get any better. But I was 18, and the prestige of being in the band [they’d already tasted regional success, scoring a local hit with ‘Diddy Wah Diddy’] overshadowed a lot of other things.”

So you persisted…

“Don was a very persuasive salesman! On the drums I did pretty much what I wanted. Don maybe wrote twenty percent of the drum parts. He’d vocalise, or sometimes sit down [at the kit] and attempt to play. I’d get the idea of what he was going for. He could have been a good drummer! When you see the big change [when Beefheart’s music morphed from slightly psychedelic blues rock into full on musical surrealism] is when Don started writing on piano. He would write sections and I would transcribe them. As I transcribed these parts I became very keen on the rhythms he was using. I’d been introduced to Salvador Dali’s work, and I loved how some of his paintings had a dual image, it’d be two nuns walking through a gate, but it’d also look like a skull. I thought that was a great idea, to have more than one thing going on, so why not do that with music?

I would notate parts, things that were impossible to just sit down and play, and I’d make myself go through them very slowly. Sometimes I’d spend 6 or 8 hours on one measure. I’d take the main gist of a guitar part, and use that for one part of the rhythm. And if the chord was ringing, I’d use the hi-hat to ring along with the chord, and then I’d combine that with the rhythm of another part. It’s a very unique style that nobody else has really attempted to do. It’s very hard, and it’s not a commercial commodity that’s gonna put money in your pocket!”

That was the Trout Mask Replica period. How about Lick My Decals Off, Baby, when you had two drummers in the band?

“I’d been kicked out of the band and replaced by a guy who didn’t even play the drums, who was given my name! Then he was replaced by Art Tripp, who’d left The Mothers. I came back into the band because Art refused to play my drum parts, and Don felt that they were integral to the music, so he asked me back. Art wasn’t the kind of guy to sit down and learn complex rhythms on the drums; he spent most of his time playing pool! He was a trained musician, so he could read anything. When he looked at my drum parts he realised it would take ages to develop the co-ordination, and it wasn’t something he wanted to do.

Bullied and brow-beaten, and, on one occasion ejected bodily from the band, French has been in and out of Beefheart's orbit numerous times. Here John recalls how this love-hate relationship worked.

Each time I rejoined the band there was this honeymoon period, but then the ugly demons would start to rise, and the control would start. For instance, Don insisted during rehearsals for Doc At The Radar Station that we spend several hours listening to Chinese opera! We only had six weeks to put this album together, and it was a very difficult album for me because I was playing guitar. I was just gritting my teeth. It was either that, or his tantrums and personal attacks. Rehearsals with Don were often talking sessions, like a cult situation. He’d turn on someone and put them in the barrel, humiliate them in front of the rest of the band.

He said, “You guys gotta realise, the public wants me, they don’t care about the rest of you”. This feeling was pervasive throughout the entire time I worked with Don. I didn’t mind so much that I wasn’t being interviewed, or getting any attention (I didn’t even get credited for being on Trout Mask Replica!). What did bother me was the internal relationship Don had with his players: he didn’t have enough respect for what they’d done.”

How was it, seeing Beefheart and the music being critically lauded, but, within the band, being bullied and financially insecure?

“I think the initial “I’m gonna control this music” thing had to be a sort of bully-ish approach. But once he had people like Bill Harkelroad, Jeff Cotton, Mark Boston and myself, that was no longer necessary. He should’ve realised he could’ve backed off with the dictatorial B.S. and dropped the macho attitude, and just been a normal human being. We were working all day long on his music; we were definitely on his side! At the time of Trout Mask I was saying to Don, “why don’t we do something more accessible, make some money, and take the audience with us”. But he was mooching off his mother, and wasn’t aware that we were all bankrupt! He realised too late. But because of what he’d already done, it was a disappointment [when Beefheart released the more accessible albums Blue Jeans & Moonbeams and Unconditionally Guaranteed] to the small fan-base he already had.

He was in competition with Frank Zappa, I think that’s one of the reasons he went so far out. Frank was actually playing accessible music. Another thing was that being in Frank’s band had a sort of prestige, the instrumentalists would go on and play in other groups, they were wanted. Who was going to want a Beefheart musician? Half the public didn’t even think we knew how to play!”

And post Beefheart?

“When I left the band the last time I felt I was totally useless to the world. There really wasn’t anywhere for me to go. Henry Kaiser liked my drumming, and was a big fan of the Beefheart band. I did a couple of things with him. But Henry didn’t have the discipline to sit down and learn difficult parts. He was doing something new every six weeks. It seemed like the focus was on quantity, not quality! He associated himself with people like myself, people considered to be critically acclaimed or whatever, and sorta used that to boost his own name. I like Henry, but after a while I became disillusioned with that. It was obvious that he didn’t have the same purpose or motivation that I did.”

And now, in a strange twist of fate you’re fronting the Magic Band, in Beefheart’s place, singing and playing harmonica, as well as drumming.

“That’s very fulfilling, that’s what I want to do. But what I’m most interested in now is doing something, sort of an extension of what the Magic Band did, trying to pick up the mantle, but at the same time making it more accessible.”

Why go back to this music now?

“There’s nothing out there like this going on. Nobody’s taken up the mantle. A lot of bands say they’re influenced by it, but I don’t hear it in their music. It’s a whole area of music that’s never been explored. So I’m gonna go back and explore it!”

John French recommends:

Let There Be Drums - Sandy Nelson: "Heavily influenced my playing because of the use of toms and melodic drums that played patterns rather than rat-a-tat solos to dazzle and impress".

Alone Together - Max Roach & Clifford Brown: "'Mildama' by Max Roach amazed me".

Cozy & Jack - Jack Sperling and Cozy Cole: "Sperling did it all, big band, Dixieland, staff drummer for NBC, and studio work. His set was in the studio when we recorded Safe As Milk, which I took as a good omen”.

Live at Carnegie Hall - The Dave Brubeck Quartet: "[They] looked like geeks, but played so well together, and experimented with odd time signatures, introducing me to completely new concepts".

Live At Birdland - John Coltrane: "My intro to Coltrane. Just about anything with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones in the rhythm section shows a one-ness seldom found in groups today".

For more on the Magic Band and John French visit the website: www.themagicband.com [Sadly it appears The Magic Band's website has become defunct!]

Footnote: the band I saw at The Junction, comprised mostly of Beefheeart alumni, was: French on vocals, harmonica and drums, with Michaell Traylor on kit most of the time (Traylor was the only band member at The Junction who hadn't been part of a Beefheart fronted Magic Band), the amazing Gary 'Mantis' Lucas on guitar (he played with Jeff Buckley on Grace), with Mark ‘Rockette Morton’ Boston on bass and Denny ‘Feelers Rebo’ Walley on second guitar. They played excellently, to a poor but enthusiastic house, but - due to the absence of the original power crazed maverick megalomaniac weirdo known as The Captain - it was a bit like admiring a vintage car that has had its engine removed... a bit odd!

Joni Mitchell - Live at Club 47, Cambridge MA, 1968

2008-10-20T03:25:00.001-07:00

Ah... mo' sweet Joni for you! This time it's that good ol' stuff I was talking about in the previous post. This is actually a gig released not long before her first album came out on Reprise, an impending event she mentions on the gig. The sound's pretty good overall, with a few wobbles and glitches, but pretty amazing considering the age/provenance of the recordings. It's also interesting to realise how old some of these songs are: here she is performing 'Morning Morgantown', in '68, and yet it didn't get onto an album until Ladies Of The Canyon in 1970. Joni is flying solo here, the audience appears to be spellbound, and who can fault them for that? Joni is the embodiment of musical magic, for my money at any rate.

She sings and plays fabulously, but also with a sweet human frailty, of a piece with her whole vibe. Her talk between songs is great too: she seems relaxed and easy, and clearly enjoys giving some background to her compositions. Of special interest to Joni lovers will be the songs not available on mainstream releases, like 'Gift Of The Magi', 'Ballerina Valerie' and 'The Way It Is'. Whilst these less well known numbers are a pleasure to discover, they're not quite mind-blowing lost gems, but neither are they sub-standard. No, really they're just further confirmation that her talent is and was a bountiful and o'erflowing thing.

Tracklisting: Cactus Tree / Conversation / Morning Morgantown / Gift of the Magi / Chelsea Morning / Song to a Seagull / I Had a King / Night in the City / Ballerina Valerie / Pirates of Penance / The Way It Is / Dawntreader / Both Sides Now

Joni Mitchell - A Day In The Garden, Yasgur's Farm, Bethel, NY 15/08/'98

2008-10-20T00:22:00.000-07:00

In the long run I want to go back to Joni's earlier stuff: as with Waits I prefer the first flush of youthful talent, musically speaking, but, again like Waits, she's a real artist, and as they both continue to produce wonderful art, well, you gotta love 'em! Anyway, this was the first one I found in my archives, and after a listen I thought, well, dang-nab it, it may be more modern Joni, but it's bloomin' marvellous, so up it goes! The band is: Larry Klein bass, Brian Blade drums, Mark Isham trumpet, and Greg Leisz on pedal steel and lead guitar.

As well as her own fabulous originals, which, as proven by 'Happiness Is The Best Facelift', continue to be strong both musically and lyrically, there are a number of jazz standards. But, and very refreshingly, they are treated in anything but a standard way. Just taking the first two alone, 'Come Love' and the much covered 'Summertime', Joni and her magnificent band manage to make these songs spookily personalised. She really is an artist, and I love her for that.

As mentioned in her intro, and referencing her own absence from the original Woodstock, it took Joni 30 years to "get back to the garden", and lot of muddy water passed under the bridge in those years, but it has to be said, better late than never! The audio quality of these recordings is fabulous. I've posted them as 192 kbps MP3 and they sound fine to me. I might re-post at higher res if I get the time and the demand.

Tracklisting:

1 Hejira
2 Comes Love
3 Happiness Is The Best Facelift
4 Summertime
5 The Crazy Cries Of Love
6 No Apologies
7 Sex Kills
8 The Magdalene Laundries
9 Black Crow
10 Moon At The Window
11 Slouching Towards Bethlehem
12 Just Like This Train
13 Big Yellow Taxi
14 Trouble Man
15 Woodstock

I have to mention the 'Crazy Cries of Love', because it's a fabulous thing to write a song about: she introduces the song with sufficient candour and clarity to leave us in no doubt as to exactly what kind of crazy cries of love she's singing about! Even in this post-hippy, post-Kinsey, and supposedly highly permissive society, it speaks volumes of our sexual culture that we're all so buttoned down. But not all of us are: I have memories of being woken by the sounds of untrammelled passion way back in the London days of my youth on a number of occasions... right on lovers!

"Woe Is Uh Me-Bop!" Lickin' Captain Beefheart's Decals Off, Baby.

2008-10-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Bellerin' Plain by Seb Palmer

I ripped mp3's from my vinyl of this way back, in the days when I had a functioning turntable, before I'd heard of blogs, or even knew what 'ripping' was, in cyber-techno-audio-speak! I did it via Logic and a Tascam two-track AD converter, i.e. my super-micro mini home studio set-up. The resulting files were 192 kbps MP3, and sound alright to me! Other bloggers will have posted this, but as it's my own rip, and as I love this album with an almost proprietary jealousy, I'm putting one of my ripped tracks up, via Soundcloud, anyway ... so there!

If you dig this, and you know you ought to, then you might also like this. It's some out-takes (band without vocals) from the sessions for the album. Also worth checking is the short promo film, allegedly produced to promote the album, but so off-kilter that it ended up being banned! And shown below is an image of a promo sticker that was included with some versions of the album. I bought mine second hand, in a record shop in Cambridge's Silver Street, long gone now (anyone remember the name of that shop?), and there was, alas, no sticker.

I love this album: it's more focused, precise and together than Trout Mask, and more intense and playful too. Gallons of ink have been spilt on describing it, so, if you need to know more check here & here, or better yet here (allmusic, wikipedia and amazon.co.uk respectively). All I want to say is that this is brilliant, original, and uncompromising music, played supremely well by excellent, sensitive players. Particularly noteworthy are John 'Drumbo' French's brilliant brittle drums, Art Tripp on marimba and traps - what a dude! - and those fabulous guitar instrumentals. Wow man, it's mind blower! In fact, as everybody in the band does such a sterling job, let's give them due props, and acknowledge who they are/were:

Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) - vocals, harmonica, saxophone
Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkleroad) - guitar, slide guitar
Rockette Morton (Mark Boston) - bass guitar
Drumbo (John French) - drums, percussion
Ed Marimba (Art Tripp) - drums, percussion, marimba

Tracklisting: Lick My Decals Off, Baby / Doctor Dark / I Love You, You Big Dummy / Peon / Bellerin' Plain / Woe-Is-uh-Me-Bop / Japan in a Dishpan / I Wanna Find a Woman That'll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have to Go / Petrified Forest / One Red Rose That I Mean / The Buggy Boogie Woogie / Smithsonian Institute Blues (Or The Big Dig) / Space-Age Couple / The Clouds Are Full Of Wine (Not Whisky Or Rye) / Flash Gordon's Ape

A Lewis Taylor Miscellany

2008-10-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure not everyone will agree with me on this, but, for my money Lewis Taylor is as close as the UK has got to a Jeff Buckley type of polymath muso-genius in recent times (Taylor covered Buckley's 'Everybody Here Wants You, on Lewis II). I'm surprised to find myself sharing a position - oo-er - occupied by Elton John (he tried to hype Taylor some time back). Anyhoo, my biggest gripe with Lewis is that he's such a control freak and perfectionist he can't work with anyone else. At least, that's what I've heard, and what I surmise from his music mostly being written, arranged, sung and played all by his bad self. It's also a massive indictment of the industry that it doesn't cultivate, nurture and facilitate a talent like Taylor's. It seems he's one of those mavericks who seem unable to get himself across. Perhaps he should've just been put in a gilded cage, fed through some kind of tube, and allowed to create, perhaps even being cloned, so he could have a band?

These tunes are numbers that (as far as I know) didn't make it onto any official album releases. Some appeared on b-sides and the like. I actually think that some of this stuff is his absolute tip-top best. 'Cherry Blossom', 'Lewis III' and 'Waves' are all, in my perhaps less than humble opinion, the work of someone cursed with a gift of singular fantabulousness ... if you get my drift. My only real criticism of any of this music - far outweighed by the merits it has in abundance - is the rhythm programming: should've had real drums Lewis! Such deliciously organic music, with guitar, bass, keys, vocals and everything all being so fluid and real... real drums would've been the best bedrock. But hey, I'm a drummer, whaddya think I'd say!

Most of the world has missed out on this precious gorgeousness, don't you be a schmuck too!

Tracklisting: A Little Bit Tasty / Cherry Blossom / Got Me Thinking / I Dream The Better DreamI / Lewis III / Pie In Electric Sky / Trip So Heavy / Waves

I was also contemplating posting Taylor's homage to Captain Beefheart: a reworking (it's perhaps a partial or incomplete project ... don't really know much about it) of the legendary Trout Mask Replica album. Just like Lewis to do something most people wouldn't even consider, or, having thought of it, would dismiss as not 'viable product', but Lewis, like Beefheart before him, marches to a different (and sadly in Lewis' case, synthesized) beat! But, as the link above will show, jinkzmusings has already uploaded it. If his link ain't working shout me and I'll post the tracks. Not for the faint hearted! I will however be posting Beefheart's next album - the phenomenal Lick My Decals Off, Baby - when I get the time.

Tom Waits - WMMS Coffee Break Concert - 1975

2008-10-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

Another Tom gem for you, and one of his final solo outings... I could listen to these tunes over and over, and hey, so can you now! This time he's on the air for Cleveland station WMMS, on their Coffee Break show. Unlike the Howard Larman interview for KPFK, the interviewer here, Kid Leo ("sitting in for Matt The Cat"), in attempting to strike up a cool rapport with Waits elicits the first signs of the ornery mule familiar to so many who've had the privilege/misfortune of interviewing him. In using phrases like "laidback Lenny", and with attempts to buddy up to Waits, we can sense Tom bristling a bit, which seems to almost cause an allergic reaction, as Tom coughs and snivels throughout the interview sections, and he's noticeably resistant to Kid Leo's requests for certain songs. That said, he does open up quite a bit, and that makes this a great document of the young Waits.

The performances, both musical and verbal, are impeccable, and the audio quality is great (this was originally taken from a sound-board recording, and is presented here as 192 kbps MP3). In a quick verbal detour with the DJ, when discussing influences, Waits uses a favourite phrase: "passing out wolf tickets". In trying to find out what the hell he meant I discovered that, in an interview for Playboy in 1988, he attempted a definition himself: "Another one I like is wolf tickets, which means bad news, as in someone who is bad news or generally insubordinate. In a sentence, you’d say, “Don’t fuck with me, I’m passing out wolf tickets.” Think it’s either Baltimore Negro or turn-of-the-century railroadese." This is from his 'nocturnal emissions' period, where his shows featured a lot hipster beat-speak raps, his verbally florid monologues in which his gift for wordsmithery and the alchemy of imagery get full rein... and it's great!

This show also finds Waits slagging of The Eagles when discussing their cover of 'Ol' 55', which, according to Barney Hoskyns, in his great book Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967-1976, Waits regretted later on: "I was a young kid... corkin' off and being a prick... I talked to Don Henley about that, and I apologised and I took it all back and we patched it up". Humility and contrition from Mr Waits? We like it! He further elucidates the Catch-22 of youthful aspirations to stardom and consequential ego issues succinctly thus: "It was saying "Notice me" ... followed by "Leave me the fuck alone", sometimes in the same sentence". He's an articulate ol' bugger our Tom, and you gotta love him, warts and all.

Tracklisting: Drunk on the Moon / Interview / Eggs and Sausage / Interview / Better Off Without A Wife / Interview / Putnam County / Ol 55 / Interview / Nighthawks Postcards / Interview / Warm Beer and Cold Women / Ghosts of Saturday Night / The Heart Of Saturday Night

Charles Kynard - Your Mama Don't Dance - 1973

2008-10-15T05:25:00.000-07:00

I actually have this record in storage somewhere, but with no turntable I can't digitise it just yet. I mention this 'cause this posting is taken from some .flac files I found (here, here, and here). Obviously .flac files are intended to help with audio quality, but these are nonetheless quite noisy... hi-res dirt in the grooves I suppose. Still, this was such a formative album for me, I had to put it up. For now I'm posting 320 kbps AAC files. If/when I get a new turntable I'll try and post a cleaner version.

My dad bought this at a car-boot sale at the old folks home where my grandpa lived out his last years. I think he paid 50p for it, what a bargain that was! This was the first place I heard the delectable grooves of 'The World Is A Ghetto', 'Summer Breeze' and the mightily funkalistic 'I Got So Much Trouble On My Mind'. This all instrumental album starts and finishes with Stevie Wonder covers: first up a great version of 'Superstition', with Kynard taking the melody on his fat and greasy Hammond, and closing with a nice reading of 'You've Got It Bad Girl'.

Recorded in 1973 for Bob Shad's Mainstream label, the cast for the album is a dream ticket who's-who of funky cats: as well as Kynard himself, there's bass-meister Chuck Rainey, who I grew to know and love through his work with Steely Dan (check his nifty bass solo here on 'So Much Trouble'), guitarist Arthur Adams (wicked throughout, you gotta love his volume knob-twiddlin' solo on 'Superstition'!), and groove assassins Paul Humphreys and Ray Pounds on kit. Dunno which of the two drummers played on which tunes, but the slinky grooves of 'Mama Jive' and 'Zambezi' are pure rhythmic pleasure, and I love the buzz rolls at the end of 'Summer Breeze'. There's some fulsome horn charts too, courtesy of Richard Fritz, which lean towards soundtrack/big band vibes in places, with unison figures, stabs, punches and the like, kind of karate horns if you will.

Tracklisting: Superstition / The World Is A Ghetto / Momma Jive / I Got So Much Trouble On My Mind / Your Mama Don't Dance / Zambezi / Summer Breeze / You've Got It Bad Girl

I should mention the tremendously groovy Shad Shack blog at this point, curated by the ever resourceful 'cheeba'... what a great site! I love the trend for these discog style blogs. There are others too, so be sure to check these: Impulse, Flying Dutchman, CTI/Kudu, Strata East, MPS, and Muse. There are possibly some others out there as well, if you think I'd be interested, leave me a message in the comments section. The blogosphere is where it's at!

I'd like to say how much love and respect I have for the people whose passion for music leads them to spend so much time and energy sharing it with us all. Of course - and as a musician I've really got to say this - if you really love the artists, then buy their product where and when you can.

Earth Disciples - Getaway Train - 1969

2008-10-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

UPDATED 18/12/09 - Most of the text below is 'as was' when written, but since some things have changed, here's a quick update: EMI have made this album digitally available via iTunes (and probably other outlets too). I think that the band were long ago cut out of any money from the album, as the label it was on has changed hands on numerous occasions. I'd still like to see their follow up found and the whole lot put out as a 'Complete Earth Disciples' package, but that looks fairly unlikely, as even the guys in (or connected to) the band, can't locate masters. I've updated the Four Brothers Beats' link, as they've moved their blog here: 4BB. I'm not sure that the album is available anywhere in blog-land right now, but since it can be bought... go buy it! And anyone with info on masters or acetates for the follow up, please get in touch.

I can't take credit for discovering or sharing this fabulous album, that goes to Soulbrotha and co. over at the exceedingly tasty Four Brothers Beats blog.

The music is a sublime blend of jazz, funk, soul and rock, and like much great music, really defies categorization, surpassing such pigeon-holing, and existing on an altogether higher plane. The musicianship is of a very high level, with the drums and guitar deserving special mention. The music manages to marry passion and intensity with mellow subtlety and a real lightness of touch... amazing! This is SOUL music in a truly spiritual sense of the term: four guys groovin' on a cosmic sonic trip... hearts, minds and bodies fused into a new single entity.

Talking of a 'single entitly', here's a pic of the single they released from the album, along with a Youtube video of the album's title track (which was also the A-side of the single.

Recorded in 1969 for Sonny Lester's Solid State label (SS 18064), the band comprised Rudy Reid on keys, Red Holloway's son Jimmy Holloway on guitar (and poss keys also), Reggie Austin on bass, and Reggie Harris on drums. I'm researching this album for a forthcoming article, to be published soon here in the UK. I don't want to give too much away just yet tho', so, as the 4BB guys say, let the music do the talkin'!

I made the composite cover aw from pics at Throwback Music, who also had a link to the album at one point, but their blog has been invite only for some time.

Tracklisting: Getaway Train / La Bahemia / Life Cycle / Earth Island Ferry / Bitter End (Pt. 1) / Native Planet / Spirit of the Bells / Rollin' Over / Serenade of a Summer Butterfly / Bitter End (Pt. 2)

Tom Waits, Live – 16/12/75 – ASI Studios, KQRS Minneapolis

2008-10-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

Recorded at ASI studios, for the Minneapolis station KQRS, under the auspices of the implausibly named Steve Fingerett, most of the opening seven minutes runs under the ‘Nocturnal Emissions’ title, and features Tom doing a high-octane finger-poppin beatnik rap: “with all due candour, I really don’t do this for a living, I’m really a labour organiser for a maternity ward”. He runs down a whole heap of his metropolitan double-talk, caught halfway between a Kerouack-ian reverie and a stand up comedian’s schtick. Recorded Dec 16th ’75, this is some months after he ‘d waxed the Nighthawks at the Diner album at Wally Heider’s studio, and he draws heavily on that material, jamming it all together. The intro to ‘Eggs & Sausage’ continues the banter, and is as unhealthily pleasurable as the kind of food he’s singing about.

Sound quality is good overall, with only a few bits of unwanted noise during ‘Better Off Without a Wife', and some kind of tape-op glitch in Tom's encore 'Putnam County'. During ‘Semi-Suite’, which has a nice long rambling intro, he slips in a little ‘As Time Goes By’ quote, which he eventually put down as the intro to ‘Bad Liver & a Broken Heart’ on the sublime Small Change album. ‘Spare Parts’ returns to the toe-tapping finger snappin’ beat vibe, and he manages to slip portions of ‘Diamonds on My Windshield into his rap, along with his patented ‘automobile passing by’ impersonation (seeing him do this on the Austin City Limits film is great, track that down if you can).

“’Scuse me, I usually vomit… but this is gonna be a tasteful programme”.

Tracklisting: Intro / Emotional Weather Report / Eggs And Sausage (Intro) / Eggs And Sausage / Better Off Without A Wife / Semi Suite / Spare Parts / Ghosts Of Saturday Night/The Heart Of Saturday Night / New Coat Of Paint / Warm Beer And Cold Women / Virginia Avenue / San Diego Serenade / Putnam County / Ol' '55

Tom Waits, Live at Ebbets Field, Denver - 10/8/74

2008-10-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

This is an absolute peach of a recording: Tom’s on top form, and the audience are clearly diggin’ on him big time. This was actually released at one point under the title Dime Store Novels (I got a copy from Amazon, but as it wasn't an official release it got stepped on pretty quickly), but I’m putting up a version I got from the archive of the very generous GG, which has a great little intro not included on the Dime Store CD.

In term of Waits’ delivery, nearly all the songs here are performed fairly close to the officially recorded versions, except that Tom’s performing solo ('Foggy Night' is less relaxed rhythmically, sounding somewhat clipped here). As well as Tom’s inimitable spiel, there’s a song you won’t find elsewhere in his catalogue (least-wise I haven’t heard it elsewhere): the Utah Phillips country tune ’Good Night Loving Trail’, which is excellent in itself, and also benefits from a nice intro: “ah, hush up now I’m trying to sing this damn thang now… I ain’t opening the show tonight!” Some of Herbie Cohen’s gigs for Tom had been hardcore ‘baptism under fire’ scenarios!

Tom sounds quite soused at times, tho’ whether this is stage-sottedness or genuine alcohol oblivion isn’t clear, as he sings and plays very well. This really is good enough to be enjoyed as a solo performance counterpoint to the fabulous Nighthawks at the Diner. All in all, a very relaxed night in with Tom, and highly recommended.

"Operator number please..."

Tracklisting: I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You / San Diego Serenade / Good Night Loving Trail / Diamonds On My Windshield / Ice Cream Man / Please Call Me, Baby / Better Off Without A Wife / The Ghost Of Saturday Night / Big Joe & Phantom 309 / Semi Suite / Ol' 55 / On A Foggy Night / Martha

Tom Waits - 12/8/’73 - KPFK Folk Scene

2008-10-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

A youthful Waits for you on this one, playing solo, accompanying himself on keys or guitar (upright bassist Bob Webb was scheduled to appear on the programme with Tom, but couldn’t make it). Between songs Tom’s interviewed by DJ Howard Larman for the programme Folk Scene, a programme he and his wife Roz produced and aired for the Los Angeles KPFK station for many years. Compared with Tom’s infamously obtuse and sometimes surreal responses to interviewers for most of the last 20/30 or so years, Larman gets a fairly open, relaxed, and informal response from the great man, perhaps due to the as yet unsullied innocence of the fresh faced young troubador.

This is an endearing window onto the young Waits at work, and he raps quite freely about his formative years, and the musical processes and influences working on him at that point. I chose the picture of Waits shown here ‘cause I like him with all that hair, and it’s also him pretty much as he was looking on the cover of the Music World magazine mentioned by the DJ. The lady in the pic is Bobi Thomas, and they’re showing off Tom’s first tattoo! Note that the scroll over the heart is at this point blank! The pic’s apparently from early ‘74, so this recording may have featured Tom sporting even more hair! I guess that’s something we can only muse upon, given this is a radio spot…

It’s a great recording, clean and clear, and with good info from Tom about growing up and getting into music and so on. Some of the versions are brilliant, like ‘San Diego Serenade’ and ‘Semi Suite’, whilst others were performed better elsewhere, like ‘Rosie’ and ‘Ice Cream Man’. ‘Depot, Depot’ is outright strange compared to the album version, but that makes it all the more interesting to hear, tho’ it has to be said the reading on Heart of a Saturday Night is far superior. The music is very good overall, and the audio quality is ok, with just a bit of trebly wobble on the piano, but it’s the talk in between that adds a lot of historic interest. Tom signs off with ‘Big Joe’, at this stage admitting that he doesn’t know who actually wrote the song, but telling us that it was “the first real folk song that just knocked me out… gave me the chills”.

Another TW gem for y’all to enjoy!

Tracklisting: Virginia Avenue / Interview / San Diego Serenade / Interview / Ol' 55 / Interview / Semi Suite / Interview / Fumblin With the Blues / Interview / Rosie / Interview / Depot Depot / Interview / Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You / Interview / The Heart Of Saturday Night / Interview / Ice Cream Man / Interview / Big Joe and Phantom 309 and Interview

Tom Waits - Live @ Ebbet's Field, Denver, 19/2/75

2008-10-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the very generous GG - you know who you are - for sharing his FTP booty with me. This is the 'Wolf Remaster', supplied here as 224 kbps mp3. This is a great, very clean recording, with an excellent balance between Tom's voice and instruments (it's just Tom, accompanying himself on guitar and keys), and the audience. Tom's in top beatnik mode here, starting off the night's entertainment with an excellent finger-poppin rap-only version of 'Diamonds On My Windshield', followed by a fledgling version of the 13th/aug guitar chord cycles of the 'Foggy Night' travelogue, with a nifty intro on public transport versus cheap automotion... Then there's the piano based 'Eggs & Sausage', in what sounds like an early incarnation, with some nice bluesy trills.

'Ice Cream Man' and 'San Diego Serenade' keep the piano backing going, and are performed straight up, before a wry spiel: "we'll get to all your favourites... 'I Left My Shorts In San Francisco'...", which leads into a monologue reading of the Red Sorbine nugget 'Big Joe & Phantom 309'. The audience are clearly rapt, and Tom finishes his tale very much in the same way he does on Nighthawks. Classic stuff! Back at the piano, we're treated to a jaunty version of 'New Coat of Paint', followed by the nocturnal emission that is 'Spare Parts', and the ol' favourite and set closer 'Ol' 55'. But they want more, so the MC joins in cajoling Tom back out: Tom drops the low E on his guitar to a D, and raps a while, finally hunkering down for the double whammy of 'Ghosts of...' & 'Heart of Saturday Night'. The segue is, just like the music itself, utterly sublime! They love him so much we get a further encore: "I was right in the middle of pleasurable piss" complains the old curmudgeon, before finishing with 'Nobody', a new number at the time... "kinda naugahyde" he explains in typically elliptical fashion.

Enjoy the genius of Waits here.

Tracklisting: Introduction / Diamonds On My Windshield / On A Foggy Night / Eggs And Sausage / Ice Cream Man / San Diego Serenade / Big Joe And Phantom 309 / New Coat Of Paint / Spare-Parts / Ol' 55 / The Ghost of Saturday Night / The Heart of Saturday Night / Nobody

Hello & welcome to 'sounds from the funky goat'!

2008-09-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

Having enjoyed the postings of so many others generously sharing music that is otherwise unavailable, I thought I'd like to pitch in too. My first post is going to be a bunch of early Tom Waits bootlegs. These are for you GS, let's hope this works!

The title of the blog has links to my outside interests as a musician, and doesn't mean this is a funk only zone. I'm quite proudly eclectic and wide-ranging in my tastes, and this blog will reflect that. The only principle that I aim to adhere to content wise is that it should be music not commercially available at the present. If you're a musician or any other type of music industry figure and you know otherwise concerning any of my postings, let me know and the offending post will be updated, to replace the download link with a link to where you can purchase the relevant item.

A quick note on the download links: I've incorporated them into the body of the text, at points that I think are fitting. You won't find links saying 'download here', nor will the links always be in the same position within the posting. Personally I don't like links being in the comments section, 'cause it's a faff, but on the other hand I like the idea that you have to read the text in full and find the link... or work a little for your reward!

Also, if you download from me, then I'd really appreciate a comment. I was a bit tardy in getting into this myself (I'm steadily working through posts to thank those I've taken from), but I've come to appreciate that those of us who are labouring to share our musical love appreciate the feedback. What's especially nice to find is a link to some other goodies... now that's what I call sharing the love!