Just to age myself even more, I got that Spirit box set which includes the first four albums plus another album and a soundtracks and singles, outtakes and whatever else they could squeeze on five discs. Hot damn this shit is good. Always loved these guys. Poor bastards were not big enough to be really popular but too big to be considered a cult band. Spirit were the band whose manager cancelled their Woodstock appearance so they could play a high school auditorium in nearby Binghamton. Well, they got paid for playing Binghamton, there was that. But imagine playing a set to a few hundred people when you were could have been playing for hundreds of thousands a helicopter flight away. It shall be.
Category Archives: Rock
Shootout at the Fantasy Factory
Hearing this tune always reminds me of my pre-punk rock life. If you’re old enough you had a completely different existence before you first heard the Ramones or Sex Pistols. We liked lots of hippie music and had lots of hippie thoughts, though I can’t remember most of them. Anyway, I used to have this album. It was the Traffic album that had what, three songs? Maybe four or five, I can’t remember. Apparently all the touring and drugs was taking its toll on the songwriting. Sometimes I feel so uninspired, Stevie sang in his most mournful rock star voice, sometimes I feel like giving up. Subtle. And then there was Roll Right Stones, which I always assumed was another of those Winwood way cool English jazz hippieisms I never could figure out—the lyrics to Low Spark of High Heeled Boys on the previous record took me years of exegesis. Turns out the Roll Right Stones are actually a trio of megalithic monuments out in the English countryside dating back to the Neolithic. We didn’t have Wikipedia in the seventies, so I just figured it meant cool or groovy or keep on truckin or whatever. I wasn’t the brightest kid. Whatever the title means, Roll Right Stones does eventually cook, even wail a bit, but it felt like half a Dead show before you got there. The fucker takes up about half the record, not so much filling out side 1 as it did slowly ooze over it, filling in just enough grooves to please the record company. OK, maybe that was harsh. But it is a long stoned song. The title track was great, though, and kinda weird. It was the Traffic tune that people who loved Baby’s On Fire liked. You’d hear the tune a lot on FM for a while, though I haven’t heard it in years. Which is odd because I still listen to Traffic pretty regularly, and still love Steve Winwood’s voice, even if you can’t tell by the attitude above. I wrote most of this some time ago, I think during that nasty heat wave, hence the grumpiness. It happens.
Oh, Rebop Kwaku Baah. Almost as fun to write as it is to say. He cooks on the title cut. Rebop Kwaku Baah. That’s twice.
All the Young Dudes
This was the anthem of all us disaffected teens in the early 70s and we had no idea why, it just was, somehow. We hadn’t a clue what it was actually about, we just figured it was about all us shambling young and clueless dudes and dudettes, and it meant, well, who knows. Whatever. Metaphors were still a little beyond us (it’s one of the last linguistic concepts the brain gets a handle on, metaphors, until just before we reach adulthood and there they are, metaphors, and suddenly Bob Dylan makes sense.) No, we were still at that precious age where everything is literal and things are things and dudes were, well, dudes. Its lyrical structure is pretty complicated for an anthem—they’re usually simple, We Shall Overcome, like that—and it’s got a lot of cool rhymes, and that all night/suicide/twenty five/speed jive/stay alive/twenty five it opens with could’ve come right out of Cole Porter. Bowie had never done better word wise, and never did again, not that we could have known that then, we were 15 and didn’t know anything, though we didn’t know that either. All we really knew was that chorus with all the young dudes singing all the young dudes, and we’d join in, all the young dudes joining all the young dudes singing all the young dudes. It was probably the only feeling of being part of a youth movement that wasn’t some old hippie thing we had in the early 1970’s, though what sort of movement that was we hadn’t a clue. Just us dudes singing about us dudes. It was our anthem. And ya know, it still gets me when I hear it, every single time, and it probably always will. I’m a dude, yeah.
S.H. Draumur
Finally found the S.H. Draumur double CD with all their vinyl on it. That Internet thing again. I had all their vinyl, sold it in one batch to a guy at a garage record sale, who was thrilled, and listened to the earlier version of this double CD I had just gotten, which I immediately lost. That was probably 25 years ago. Now, at last, all the way from Iceland and the last copy they had, I get this. The lovely InstaCart lady (very lovely, in fact) brought it with our Total Wine order, with the white wine for the wife and the apfel schnapps für mich. You got this thing here from Iceland, the InstaCart lady said, lashes aflutter. Hot damn, I said, Thanks. I’d been waiting a while. For some reason customs always gets involved, like it’s actually a little package of that hideous Icelandic dessicated shark. Then they sniff it, see it’s a CD, read the voluminous paperwork you have to add in Iceland to ship anything anywhere not part of the Greater Iceland Empire, which is all in Icelandic, which no one at the U.S. Customs office can read, I’m sure—I mean who can?—so they eventually give up and let it go. A week or so later it’s left on our steps for the lovely Instacart lady to find. There’s a reason for everything. Actually, this CD reissue was released a decade ago but only in Iceland and ever since we sold the rooftop condo in Reykjavik we don’t get over there much. But I got this new double CD now. I actually do. Nice packaging, too, extra live tracks, all the lyrics and a long historical essay, everything in Icelandic. As are the lyrics, every single word of them, right down to those to those groovy weird letters for the voiced and unvoiced TH. (English had those. Don’t ask.) I like to think it’s because Icelanders don’t particularly give two Paul Weller fucks about anyone outside Iceland. Which just makes this even cooler. Anyway, I don’t listen to much rock anymore, I notice, I’m way more into jazz and African and Latin and Brazilian and all kinds of wacky metrically skewed ethnic shit, these things happen, but S.H. Draumur was one of my favorite rock bands ever, and twenty five years later it still is, turns out, so I’m one pleased old punk rock motherfucker, he says, and plays it again.
Epilogue: You can try Bad Taste Ltd, out of Rekyavik, for all your Icelandic music needs, like this double CD, if they have any left). And you adventurous postpunk etc music nuts ought to have plenty of Icelandic musical needs, as it remains as musically creative a place as you’ll find on this crazy little sonic planet we’re on. Bad Taste are a couple great guys whose English is much better than mine with a helluva catalog and I highly recommend them. Google them, as I’m way too lazy to look up the link. Gunni Hjalmarsson—aka Dr, Gunni in a later life—who wrote, sang and bassified in SH Draumur (and in a follow up project Bless) is still around, too. Back in the innocent punk rock pen pal days of the analog 80s we swapped letters and music and to be honest, I got the much better in the swaps, and soon I knew more about Icelandic music than maybe anyone in LA. You’d be amazed at how far you can get as an Icelandic music expert in Los Angeles. This spacious office, the BMW, the secretary with the legs? That’s right, all due to those packages from Gunni. A zillion years later I still have a mess of that stuff too, and certainly all the cassettes. He’s a terrific writer too, and in English, which I hate, as I can’t read Icelandic at all (well, I can pronounce it, and you are all mispronouncing Björk) so of course Gunni translates his own stuff, not that I’m jealous or anything. (Monolingually jealous? Moi?) Maybe he translated the lengthy notes that are tucked into the CD booklet too. And now I can’t think of a clever close to this epilogue. Fuck.
OK, I lied about the rooftop condo in Reykjavik.
Buffy Saint-Marie again
Buffy Sainte-Marie off somewhere at the Bottom Line in 1974.
Though always my favorite of the singer songwriters, it’s funny to see what a challenge she proved to photographers who almost invariably failed to capture her intensity. It’s a shame, really, because in the days before video and online performances, photographs and vinyl were the only way most people ever got to experience a musician. Good photographs could make a legend, to this day we tend to recognize the artists who photographed well. Buffy Sainte-Marie was perhaps a bit beyond what photographers could see then, not that you could blame them, publicity and stereotypes were all about wind blown hippies or Joan Baez, and Buffy was neither. Still, photographer Waring Abbot caught a glimpse of something here on a spring night in New York City in 1974.
A long time gone
Some blistering guitar work in this linked video by Mike Bloomfield with the Electric Flag at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Flag, alas, were one of the acts that didn’t make it into the movie, which is a shame as Bloomfield was at the top of his game. But then the Electric Flag not making director Pennebaker’s final cut was really just another in the long line of missteps and misfortunes, mostly self-inflicted, that has left Mike Bloomfield perhaps the most forgotten guitar hero of them all. Indeed so forgotten that it’s startling to hear him speak in this clip from the Newport Folk Festival (about 3:20 in, just past Son House) because unlike his now legendary sixties guitar hero brethren, almost none of us has ever heard him speak. So dig his rap, the rushes of words, fragments of sentences, full of beatnik speak and musician jive and sounding incredibly like Jimi Hendrix, actually, whose voice we all have memorized. It must have been the way serious young players talked in the joints and road houses and cafes on the circuit in the early-mid sixties, where both Mike Bloomfield and Jimi learned their trade. And though some of you, perhaps even most of you, might not recognize Mike Bloomfield by name, you definitely know his sound–that’s him on Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, indeed all over Highway 61 Revisited, and that was him raising hell with Dylan at Newport. The second half of the sixties was an amazing period for Mike Bloomfield–Dylan, Paul Butterfield (East-West was one of the rock’n’roll game changers back then), The Electric Flag, Super Session–but he disappeared up his arm in the seventies and ceased to be entirely before the eighties even got started. A long time comin’ is a long time gone.
Eddie Money
Eddie Money was punk rock to me. Or was that Meat Loaf. Yeah, Meat Loaf. Eddie Money was Meat Loaf to me, but also punk rock. No, that was the Ramones. The Ramones were punk rock to me, Eddie Money was Meat Loaf to me, and Meat Loaf was, I dunno, maybe Pat Benatar. Anyway, RIP.
Paint It Black you devil.
Somewhere there is a man about seventy who considers the perfectly placed Hot Damn! he shouted at 5:40 on the live Midnight Rambler to be his great contribution to rock’n’roll, and he’s right. I always marveled at that guy’s hog calling skills. And you don’t worry about his fate like you do about the chick out of her mind on something who screams her brains out contrapuntally throughout. He was probably just a kid from New Jersey. She might have joined the Manson Family.
Was it the guy dead center that yelled Hot Damn? The Buddy Holly looking dude? Really?
Long, Long Time
Linda Ronstadt’s Long, Long Time must have been a huge hit in LA in 1970 because you’d hear it regularly on the local FM stations for years. All the teenage boys would freeze and listen and sigh. I hadn’t heard it in a while, and maybe the effect is accentuated on this iPhone, but why did producer Elliott Mazer bury her in the strings? Not right away. It’s all Linda Ronstadt for a minute, almost like Kitty Wells, and you’re hooked. But from then on Mazer starts piling strings on by the regiment full, and Linda’s battling to be heard over the arrangements. They’re everywhere, these charts full of lush baroque things growing like triffids, filling every available space. At one point the harpsichord is louder than she is. It’s almost like a Phil Spector thing, Tina Turner batting Phil’s Wagnerian demons on River Deep, Mountain High. Linda finally wins in the end, though, even if the strings and that strutting harpsichordist get to do their dirge thing for a bit too long after her vocal fades, though I suppose the logic of the arrangement demanded it. These things require patience. At last they’re done. That’s a wrap, Mazer said, and maybe someone went to chuck a few too many cellos and violas into the Cumberland. Anyway, a lovely tune.
An appallingly bad cover photo. Somebody should have been fired.
Chimera
Flipped on the radio and it’s Loan Me A Dime and talk about nostalgia, like a foggy Sunday morning in Isla Vista, or late night hippie sounds on KNAC out of Long Beach way back when this was the ultimate long playing FM song for a while, Boz Scaggs before Low Down, still in boots and jeans and a beat up cowboy hat. It starts out slow, just this side of a dirge, but builds into a rollicking piano pumping blues, and Duane Allman laying down lick after lick of the meanest Muscle Shoals lead guitar you ever heard for several exuberant minutes. You hope it never ends. But it does, finally, after thirteen minutes, fading out with the band still rollicking and Duane Allman still on fire, and you can’t believe you were lucky enough to hear it again because almost nobody actually had the album. It was just this amazing thing you heard on the radio, and it was hippie long, long enough to smoke a whole joint to. A big bomber joint even. And if the deejay then spun Voodoo Chile or Low Spark or that long medley off Abbey Road you know he’d been out back smoking that joint. But that was nearly half a century ago. This deejay today segued (if you can call it that) into a coked out Eagles cut and ruined everything. The vibe was gone, poof, instantly. Life In the Fast Lane. What’s the opposite of nostalgia? Because that’s what this was. Memories of being stuck in the mid seventies and looking like I’d never get out.
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