replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
"mantras which we use which are word combinations, we get the audience to participate and speak back to us and this elevates consciousness and what we try is to actually raise up the vibrations of the audience and ourselves to a more God-intoxicated state"
I lump Quintessence mentally with Jade Warrior - and not just because both were on Island.
I am surprised Jade Warrior have not been rediscovered during this whole rehabilitation of New Age and edge-of-ambient Fourth World-ism that is ongoing. Perhaps the musicianship is just too obtrusive.
Ah well, looky here
".... Floating World (1974), a complex concept set themed around the Japanese philosophy of Ukiyo, with the songs revolving around two interrelated and interlaced series of compositions. According to AllMusic, ts "sheer diversity of sounds and moods, the constant clash or gentle intermingling of Eastern and Western styles, and the set's glittering atmospheres made Floating World an undeniable masterpiece". The band's foray into what would later be labelled world and ambient music came parallel to that of Brian Eno, who described Floating World as an "important album"
Mind you, it's not all floaty flutey stuff - "Snake", on Last Autumn's Dream, is fierce and raw with a really gnarly guitar texture.
I was thinking there was something affinitive in Jade Warrior's all-gates-open worldy-influenced sound / approach to the Traffic-and-solo-members diaspora of the '70s (one of the non-original members of Traffic, Rebop Kwaku Baah, would join twilight Can in fact).
Well, it seems that Steve Winwood played some role in with Jade Warrior's getting picked up by Island, after their Vertigo run of albums came to an end. Winwood also contributed moog and piano to Waves.
Somewhere I have an Antilles sampler from mid-decade, full of this sort of drawing-on-influences-beyond-rock-beyond-the-West-even vibe - the drift + discovery post-psychedelic thing that punk abruptly brought to a rude terminus.
It's this one - actually from 1977, so already slipped behind the times
This kind of thing - very flutey actually. Winwoodwindy.
Jade Warrior are still going on and in fact put out an album last year.
I also vaguely associate Quintessence and Jade Warrior with Osibisa - perhaps more for the record artwork than the music itself.
Jade Warrior did have a production company association with a different Afro-rock band, Assegai
I suppose the common thread here is looking outside the West for musical and spiritual nourishment (albeit in the case of Osibisa, it's musicians from outside the West bringing their vibes into Anglophonospheric rock).
The kind of traffic - and Traffic - abruptly ended by punk, which recentered the flux around a purist core of rock.
Only for similarly sort of pangloba impulses to creep back just a few years later in post-punk and industrial - Pop Group, 23 Skidoo, The Slits to an extent.... Poly Styrene and Lora Logic after X Ray Spex ..... mostly inflected in a mock-tribal way.
Another common thread (meaning the Old Wavey horizon-widening music) is the flute (flute nowhere to be heard in the postpunk versions of same, I don't think).
Which reminds me: I've been hatching as counterfactual in which the flute supplants the electric guitar as rock's dominant instrument.
The gist of it starts with the fact that Kraftwerk was initially a Florian Schneider-led venture, and the focal instrument was Florian's flute. The line-up was fluctuating, with Schneider the only constant. Not long after the first album came out Ralf Hutter left the band for eight months. For a moment there, Kraftwerk was Schneider plus Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, but no Hutter.
The turning point in my alternative history is that Giorgio Moroder somehow gets to hear ‘Ruckzuck’, a tune on the first album that's propelled by a raspingly percussive flute-riff, with Schneider's overblowing creating a gritty, distorted, rock-like feel. He is blown away by this and goes to meet them, and manages to persuade Schneider and co to simplify and restructure the tune so that it works as a dance track for the discotheque crowd. During this process, the motorik beat that Neu! developed in our world becomes integrated with the Giorgio-sculpted Kraftwerk sound. The combination is electrifying.
Released as a single, "Ruckzuck" becomes a smash hit worldwide - a bit like a flute-powered "Spirit in the Sky". Teenyboppers are stomping to the maddening flute-riffage down the discotheque.
Moroder formally joins Kraftwerk and with his pop instincts merged with the Neu!-that-never-was's rhythm drive, the group score a series of follow-up hit singles. A craze erupts across the world for the flute as riff-rhythm engine rather than wafty sophisto-texture. Kids drop the electric guitar and pick up flutes - also clarinets and oboes and bassoons and piccolos.
On the second Kraftwerk album, Florian & Giorgio, the first side is taken up with six tautly focused and hooky songss. But side two is taken up with a 23 minute side-long expansion of "Rucksuck" - sort of "In A Gadda Da Vidda’ meets “Love To Love You Baby”. Moroder has experimental, ambient-leaning tendencies latent within the hit-chasing commercialism, as can be seen by our timeline's Moroder solo album Einzelgänger, which is not far off things Cluster were doing, or indeed side 2 of Autobahn.
This allows flute-rock to become more just a teenybop novelty craze - it wins over the heads too. John Peel plays the album's second side 3 times in a row on Top Gear.
There is a reorientation amongst various existing groups.
Jethro Tull are already working along these lines but get pulled in a more populist direction, jumping into the chart fray with a series of hits.
The balance of power in Hawkwind tilts in flavor of the flute. The band rename themselves Hawkwoodwind. ‘Silver Machine’ becomes an electric flute / bassoon monster and actually does even better in the charts, hitting #1 and staying there for four weeks.
A bitter power struggle takes place within the fledgling Roxy Music, causing Bryan Ferry to quit in a fit of pique. Andy Mackay becomes the dominant figure and the group are reoriented around an oboe and clarinet frontline, with Eno processing the instruments. In tribute to the inspiration from Kraftwerk, Mackay renames the group Ruckzuck Musik.
Mike Oldfield recasts Tubular Bells as a woodwinds dominated project.
Pete Frampton abandons guitar and learns the flute and oboe, combining them with talk box, with huge commercial success.
Meanwhile Bob Moog rethinks his instrument and instead of a keyboard interface devises a blow-through-a-tube interface.
Prince Charles and the City Beat Band - who in our timeline were minorly successful funk artists, with Charles singing and playing an electronic wind instrument called the Lyricon - are as big as Prince in the 1980s.
Does this mean that the Old Wave, bolstered by the electrification of classical-music instruments (violin, cello, etc as well as woodwinds) and the consequent necessary premium placed on virtuosity and technique, lasts forever? Or would New Wave, focused around the reclamation of the electric guitar, happen anyway?
Perhaps Andre 3000 and his record somehow leaked through from the parallel universe where popular music went down the flute path?
Sophisto / West Coast / singer-songwriters with expansive jazz-leaning tendencies (Steely Dan, Little Feat, Joni.)
Bluesy-rootsy (tasteful division) (Southern-inspired - Ry Cooder, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - and sometimes from the South - Allmans) (also country rock - Poco etc)
Bluesy-raunchy (lumpen division) (cock rock, boogie, hard 'n' heavy).
And then there's Dylanism.
i.e. songwriting that is literary, often history-informed, allusive, bookish.
Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Tom Waits, The Band .... song as story, poem, parable, mini-play
That in turn prompts an oozing-with-erudition critical response *
Under which you would file this fellow...
If a passing mention of Woodrow Wilson is your kind of tipple...
Now this here tune is reckoned to be Warren Zevon's supreme masterpiece
Everybody's restless and they've got no place to go
Someone's always trying to tell them
Something they already know
So their anger and resentment flow
But don't it make you want to rock and roll
All night long
Mohammed's Radio
I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful
On the radio, Mohammed's Radio
You know, the Sheriff's got his problems too
He will surely take them out on you
In walked the village idiot and his face was all aglow
He's been up all night listening to Mohammed's Radio
Don't it make you want to rock and roll
All night long
Mohammed's Radio
I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful
On the radio, Mohammed's Radio
Everybody's desperate trying to make ends meet
Work all day, still can't pay the price of gasoline and meat
Alas, their lives are incomplete
Don't it make you want to rock and roll
All night long Mohammed's Radio
I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful
On the radio, Mohammed's Radio
You've been up all night listening for his drum
Hoping that the righteous might just might just might just come
I heard the General whisper to his aide-de-camp
"Be watchful for Mohammed's lamp"
Don't it make you want to rock and roll
All night long Mohammed's Radio
The appeal bypasses me, as does the promised profundity.
Admittedly the tune has been going round and round and round in my head for days - but this is not something I have enjoyed. Actually reminds me in mood and tone of "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen, another unwelcome brain worm.
Apparently a lot of Zevon-supporting critics kvetched about the effrontery of Linda Ronstadt taking on such a subtle piece of writing - complaints galore that she bulldozed through its multi-levelled ironies.
In Stranded, Linda-admirer John Rockwell mounts an impassioned defense of her skills as an interpretive singer. Defiantly asserts that Ronstadt does a fine job with her similarly contested and deplored take on Elvis Costello's "Alison" (like the Zevon tune also on Living in the U.S.A.) and insists that her rendering of "Mohammed's Radio" surpasses Warren's original through the power and clarity of her pipes and her richer emotionalism.
Having listened to the first two, best-regarded albums, my assessment of Warren Z is:
The voice is a fairly unwieldy instrument, which is not necessarily a problem (indeed a voice can be too wieldy). But the timbre edges on unpleasant. At any rate, nuthin' special.
The melodies are samey and often a tad hokey
The rock is clean and punchy but again nothing to write home about
Reboiled hardboiled, echoes of Day of the Locust and Raymond Chandler.... plenty of that Angelenos-critique-their-own-decadence thing...
I heard the General whisper to his aide-de-camp
"Be watchful for Mohammed's lamp"
Don't it make you want to rock and roll
All night long Mohammed's Radio
This stuff about the General and the aide-de-camp puts me in mind of the Captain in "Hotel California".... Is allegorical the right word?
As the New Wave raged all over the U.K. in 1977-78, Old Wave - and specifically the LA sound - was never more ascendant in America. Fleetwood Mac, Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Eagles, Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan... all selling astronomical numbers of albums.... Andrew Gold... Joe Walsh... Bob Welch... Zevon getting plaudits if not hits and stats.... ditto Tom Waits... Rickie Lee Jones is round the corner and perhaps the last gasp of that sound.
The records all seem to have the same players on them.
So Zevon, as much favored writer of songs with this set, protege-pal of Jackson Browne, employing the same musicians, backing harmony vocals from Nicks & Buckingham & Bonnie Raitt & Glenn Frey... couldn't be more Old Wave
But some critics saw Zevon as New Wave in spirit - acerbic words, "toughest rocker" on the West Coast.
By "tough" they seem to refer both to his lyrical eye and this sort of clumpy heavy-booted sound...
Clearly the work of session musicians and famous friends.... it doesn't have that distinctive band-voice, the sound of a true gang.
You could imagine almost anyone in LA at that time fronting these records.
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* "a similarly literary, erudition-soaked form of critical response"
An example of the kind of appreciations WZ got back then: a Washington Post piece from 1978 by a music critic I'd never heard of before: William C. Woods. Like the Stephen Holden review of Hissing of Summer Lawns, what's immediately noticeable to the modern eye is that the records are treated entirely as literary creations, with barely a single mention of the music:
THE GUN is on the food, nested like meat against the potatoes: naked lunch.
This is the notorious liner art on "Excitable Boy," War-comic if you can take it, and compelling even if it takes you away - an announcement that the songs inside will be slugs, both hollow-point and nickle-plated.
"Slugs," of course, is a word that leads a nice parade of meanings: a belt of whiskey, a fist in the face, a bullet, a false coin and the thing that crawls on your roses. All of these metaphors vibrate hotly here, stirring the excitement that has turned Zevon, in the last few months, from a minor cult figure into a major one. And if the mass audience still eludes him, despite the success of his "Werewolves of London" single, this glossy supper of murder suggests some reasons why.
The picture is a crib. It shows Zevon's students (and he'll have those even after he's exhausted his fans) how they are to parse his verse. In good modernist fashion, the poet has even made the job harder, telling one interviewer that the snapshot is "suggestive in various ways on various levels . . . a satire of the album or an embodiment of it."
Or both. But it's mainly as the latter that the image takes on real interest, since most satire is cheap business, and being against violence is as boring as being for it is vile. Zevon is aware of this tension, and his wish to be seen as occupying neither stand has prompted him to raise the issue even more often than his critics do. He told New Times that while he might like to think of "Excitable Boy" as satire, "it may be just a violent album," and repeated the notion more fully for a reporter from Ampersand: "It would be easy to say that 'Excitable Boy' is just a big satire on the fact that violence has become the greatest escape entertainment in America . . . But it may be that there is a violent strain in this album that is more real than satire."
It may be. But there's a literary tone, more pronounced than either of these possibilities, that locates Warren Zevon's work well within the mainstream of American popular prose. Such a claim sounds unfounded if we note only his subjects, but it can be substantiated with a look at how his dialectic plays itself out on every level.
Zevon's sense of history, in particular, is special; it is a sense announced in a song about Jesse James on the album "Warren Zevon" and enlarged by the viciously enchanting "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" on "Excitable Boy."
"Roland" is awesome. Its sound is that of an IRA or border ballad; its story comes from an ex-mercenary friend of Zevon's; its theme is genuinely mythic in scale, its subject is appalling and its conclusions are ambiguous.
Roland, a Christian prince in the medieval chanson, is in this update a Danish mercenary killed in Africa by a one-time colleague in pay of the CIA. Headless, his ghost kills his killer and then becomes eternal, showing up 10 years later "in Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine and Berkeley" where it makes a psychic contract with Patty Hearst, who "heard the burst of Roland's Thompson gun and bought it." What saves this conclusion from the taint of guerrilla chic is the double meaning of the last line; "bought it" can mean either to agree to the gun or to die by it. Or both.
Zevon has said that the song's co-author tells him the story is "true," but it clearly has literary antecedents, including A.E. Housman's mercenaries who "saved the sum of things for pay," and Hugh MacDairmid's retort, "It is a God-damned lie to say that these/Saved . . . anything."
For in his songs full of memory and firearms, of drink, drugs and so-sad-to-see-good-love-go-bad, Zevon is after an art so rich that, to be seen whole, it has to be heard as a play of opposites. "Roland" advances this art of opposites, transfiguring both the Housman and MacDairmid poems and offers as well the understanding that history is no less a product of imagination than fiction, and that, like art's, its performances tend to be repeated.
As form, Zevon says his work intends to "unify the realms of classical music and popular song." As content, it sets stories of the perils of family life and erotic attachment against legends of violence in the unconscious and a history of it in the American past. And as total structure, it puts visual images into narrative sequence and often opposes perverse lyrics to palliative tunes. So - although he's a heavy-voiced rocker with a band that can burn out the wires - it's these literary qualities that have made a good many critics turn greedily toward him. He's what they can recognize: a writer, and a dammed good one.
He can do in two lines a novel of family life that Walker Percy would admire ("Well, he went down to dinner in his Sunday best . . . And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest"), and, in one more, another story of love in the ruins (" . . . he raped her and killed her, then he took her home"). Zevon even falls prey to the writer's common vice of role consciousness (his narrators wield Smith-Coronas as well as Smith & Wessons), and he knows that the hardest part of his job is "being miserable between songs." It was getting the words right that kept "Excitable Boy" so long in the can. "If I have a strong instinctual feeling that the writing's not there," Zevon told critic John Rockwell, "I stall." He also seeks co-authors, offering friends fragments he's fond of but can't finish, like a Renaissance painter handing the background over to an apprentice.
In this light, the comparisons to Sam Peckinpah, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer and Nathanael West that keep cropping up in discussions of Zevon's work are not surprising. What's really impressive is that they may soon be unnecessary.
He is on the edge of being a writer whose immediate output need be compared only to the earlier stages of its own development. Song after song offers evidence that Zevon is working very close to his unconscious, his "dream protocols," his reptile brain. He has a strong perspective on history, a deep sense of myth and a will to mind his madness.
Take a look at a single technical element of fiction - point of view. While most writers of rock can't get beyond solipsism, Zevon is rarely identical to his narrator. His songs are sung not only about but by Western outlaws, African mercenaries, junkies, farm boys, failed suicides, urban psychopaths, Mexican aristocrats, men who see werewolves where vampires belong and the oversoul of rock 'n' roll itself. The interplay between these personae and their imagined audiences structures the fantasies that feed the imaginations of Zevon's following, who in turn feed themselves into the songs: At his concerts, there are always a few fans wearing werewolf masks.
It can be an alarming picture. Contrasting his brushes with physical danger in Spain with the sense of psychic dread that dogs him in his native land, Zevon has suggested that " . . . America, there may be a greater idea of violence than there is a reality of violence in other places that don't inspire as much paranoia. And that's what ends up being my expression in laying the largest handgun made right on the dinner plate."
It's home cooking, too, Zevon's wife's, from whom he was recently separated. And if the parsley potatoes look good enough to eat, the gun looks real enough to fire.
By physically casing his visual songs within so graphic an image, the poet uses the package itself to insist that his audience match his complexity of vision with their ambiguity of response: The point is not to wreck the listener's appetite, but to make him wonder just what it is he's really hungry for.
Upping the ante between artist and audience is a classic ploy of serious American popular art. Writers and rock stars, filmmakers, court fools and poets who want it all - honor, fame, and cash - must seek a mass audience via familiar forms while simultaneously undercutting their chances of success with unfamiliar and socially dangerous content, thus risking not the anger of the audience, which certifies the artist's power, but its indifferences, which confirms to him his lack of special worth. Critic Greil Marcus, who convincingly explores popular art on the basis of that notion, has shown this particular artist's relationship to it:
"To attempt to reach a popular audience - which is what good rock 'n' roll singers like Zevon do for a living with songs about headless African mercenaries, nice boys who do in their girl friends and the like - is no easy thing, nor any sort of trivial act. To attempt to unsettle a popular audience, which is what artists like Zevon do for their own peace of mind is much harder: You may put out the strongest stuff you know, and it may bounce right off the audience or be absorbed without a shudder."
As if in confirmation, Zevon offers a number of songs on other subjects altogether - lost love, rock itself - that seem also loaded with lines about the risks and rewards of the author/audience relationship. In "Johnny Strikes Up the Band," the hero is "guaranteed to please/back by popular demand"; in "Mohammed's Radio," a voice is trying to tell an audience "Something they already know/So their anger and resentment flow/But don't it make you want to rock and roll?"
And in "Accidentally Like a Martyr," the narrator puts two kinds of sorrow and separation together:
"Never thought I'd have to pay so dearly
For what was already mine . . ."
Appropriately, Warren Zevon's personal history contains what must be a mix of fact and legend.
A native Californian once befriended by Igor Stravinski, Zevon had a nomadic youth all over the West before settling in Los Angeles as a self-taught classical composer. He later wrote commercials for Gallo wine, toured as musical director and pianist for the Everly Brothers, played clubs in San Francisco and Colorado, and in 1975 spent a year in a bar in Spain before being brought back to Los Angeles by songwriter Jackson Browne, who urged Zevon to record and toured with him in 1976. The same year, Zevon's first "official" album, with his name as its title, was released to some acclaim but small sales. (There is a mysterious earlier album, never mentioned except as being "never mentioned.")
These connections to the high council of southern California rock (Linda Ronstadt has also recorded his songs and sung on his albums) cut a trail for a better reception for "Excitable Boy"; ironically, there are very few songs on the record that aren't far superior to the work of its sponsors. The only insipid tune in the collection, "Tenderness on the Block," is one co-written with Jackson Browne.
Elsewhere, Zevon's words are so concretely chosen that it's an insult to call them symbols, though they invariably structure meanings that take a fierce delight in self-concealment. The best work is close to minimal: in "Lawyers, Guns and Money," the stanzas are only footnotes to the title, which has already told listeners what they need to talk their way out of what they can't shoot their way out of or buy their way out of.
Formal explication of "Ronald," minimalist theories of "Lawyers, Guns and Money," and hints of biographical criticism would seem to put us at some distance from the wop-bop-a-lop of primordial rock 'n' roll.
But the majority of Warren Zevon's songs take fixes on more usual pop topics, like young love or death from an overdose, and the best of them tend to memorialize the peaks and gutters of pop culture: While not New Wave in sound, "Execitable Boy" mocks punk rock in story; "Night-time in the Switching Yard" dismembers disco; "Werewolves of London" remembers Carnaby Street as a source of fashion in clothing, fantasy and song.
"Werewolves" also contains a diet of metaphor so rich as to demonstrate the recklessness with his talents that has signaled Zevon's admirers to be careful in their praise. And there are other songs whose elusive nature doesn't always win through the caution their charm arouses. It's not clear whether a line like," "Your face looked like something/Death brought with him in his suitcase," gets, or gets in, its own way.
Moreover, Zevon as a stage performer hasn't yet devised a style to match his singing, and a powerful public presence is still prerequisite to pop stardom.
But this is quibbling. With rock seemingly split between tired Texas traumata on one hand and disco bohos suited up like preschoolers in plasticine on the other, Warren Zevon has arrived in the nick of time - not to be the long-awaited Next Big Thing in rock, but to dispel the illusion that we need one.
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You know what, though? If I wanted to read a book, I'd read a book.
This 1977 compilation of works by women electronic composers was recently reissued.
Interestingly the neutral title - New Music For Electronic and Recorded Media - doesn't draw attention to the femaleness of the contents.
I picked up an original copy many years ago and by coincidence dug it out and gave it another spin not so long ago - the first time since acquisition. And noticed something about the inner sleeve:
What's that bloke with the mustache doing amid the array of portraits?
It's Pauline Oliveros having a little joke - submitting some bow-tied baldie's photo in lieu of a proper portrait.
Something else that caught my eye - how very different Laurie Anderson presented at that time, from her later New Wavey image...
Is normcore the right word?
Here's another pic of her from 1977
Her two musical contributions to New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media are fairly different from the United States / "O Superman" / Big Science type stuff.... spoken word elements, but much more naturalistic.
Pauline O's inclusion is her classic Puccini subversion
Another goodie is Laurie Spiegel's "Appalachian Grove"
Here's the original back cover with liner notes from Charles Amirkhanian, who seems to have instigated the compilation.
Both from albums of electronicized versions of Holst's The Planets released the same year - 1976.
Wonder which came out first and who was the more pissed off?
Tomita's has the edge I think for its frolicking stereophony and shimmery reverb
Gleeson's sound palette is a bit flatter and duller
Tomita's flickers are that much more scintillating and well, mercurial, darting hither and thither .... tickling your ears in an almost ASMR-y way
Strange because if Gleeson had done something as far-out as his contributions to Herbie Hancock's Sextant, than he would have won the battle.... perhaps having to be tied to the score held him back?
Used to love listening to Holst's Planets as a boy, "Mercury" was a favorite, but my ab fav was "Neptune".... so eerie and oneiric... I used to listen to it sprawled on my parents's bed half-swooning into the mystic mist billowing out of the old-fashioned sideboard-style radiogram
So let's compare electronorenditions, shall we?
Again, Tomita the clear winner.... the machine Gleeson is using is a cruder and clumsier instrument than his rival's
But where I think the Tomita electronic rendering brings out dimensions to "Mercury" not available to Holst, when it comes to “Neptune, the Mystic” think the original orchestral template creates a diaphanous, elusive quality that electronica makes too clear and bright...
Here's a whole playlist of orchestral interpretations of "Neptune"
Songs about bees, or from the perspective of a bee
It's wonderful to be alive
To be a bee in this beehive
It's tough as nails, it's smooth as silk
It's milk and honey, without milk
I work with flowers, it's my work
From this, there's no way that I can shirk
No-no-no-no-no, there is no complex philosophy
It's just because I'm a bee
Unlike the skunk, I do not smell
But I have a thing and it stings like hell
As heroes go, I'm unsung
But step on me and you'll get stung
You'll get stung
The cutest bee I've ever seen
Is our own big, fat sexy queen
It's true she hasn't got such great legs
But you should see the girl lay eggs
It's wonderful to be a bee
Although there are billions just like me
This hive of mine, I call it home
There is no place like comb sweet comb
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Busy bee
Buzzing all day long
What's the hurry?
There's surely something wrong
I can't rest while the sun and the stars are so bright
'Cause your friends are picking flowers
Take away all my light
But you see busy bee
It's all for love
People pick them
You lick them all for love
Lalalalala...
She was a virgin, of humble origin
She knew of no sin
Her eyes as bright as the stars without light
We spent all the night
Prototype versions
I always associate Tintern Abbey with their contemporaries The Virgin Sleep, whose "Secret" , I just noticed, contains a reference to "the queen of the bees" - alongside many other creatures of the field, all hip to some kind of pantheistic-pastoral gnosis that the singer's sworn not to disclose.
Partly it's the "virgin" thing as in "she was a virgin of humble origin / she knew of no sin", but also the general bucolic-psychedelic vibe and the connection to children's storybook anthropomorphism (Wind in the Willows, Dr. Doolittle et al).
The willow tree by the wishing well
Saw the fireflies dance but he won't tell
It's a secret he'll keep but he knows very well
I know
The field mouse runs from his nest by the road
To tell the news to the friendly toad
They think they're the only ones that know
But I know
I know 'cause I was there
Having my tea with a teddy bear
I won't tell, I wouldn't dare
'Cause I promised
Dragonflies tell it to the trees
Butterflies hear it in the breeze
They go tell it to the queen of the bees
Now she knows
Ask the wizard or the wise old owl
Or the badger though he's not in the crowd
They don't know anyhow
But I do
I know and so does the swan
He knows what's going on
He won't tell you just as long
As I'm here
The blackbirds talking in the trees
Tell the seagull who flies the seas
The sparrow hawk knows but then he sees
Everything
Spider spinning his web of silk
Watching the ducks down by the mill
He'll keep the secret
Until he's ready
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A "setting" of a poem by Larry Beckett
I am a bee out in the fields of winter
And though I memorized the slope of water,
Oblivion carries me on his shoulder:
Beyond the suns I speak and circuits shiver,
But though I shout the wisdom of the maps,
I am a salmon in the ring shape river.
Composer's Notes. Harmonic structure: a set of horizontal vocal lines
is improvised in at least three ranges, the vertical effect
of which is atonal tone clusters and arhythmic counterpoint.
Performance: the written melody is to be sung, after which
the lines of lyric are to be reordered at will and sung
to improvised melody, taking advantage of the opportunity
for quartertones, third note lengths, and flexible tempo.
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Yet another Bee side - Thinking Fellers Union 282's "Hive", which imagines the happy obedient life of a drone bee – “feel comrades all around… immersed in buzz and honey dripping down”
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That Tim Buckley voicescape is one of my absolute all-time gobsmacking mind-blown forever favorites.... Don't know why it's not more celebrated or talked-about. Easily the equal of equivalent things done at this time by your Nonos and Parmegianis.
(In a class I did on experimental vocals, I played "Stairsailor" and another song from the album - "Jungle Fire" or maybe "I Woke Up" - plus the most unloosed erotomanic-glossalalic sections of "Get On Top" and "Devil Eyes" from Greetings from LA. This class was the prototype for a whole course I later did called "The Elastic Voice". I really thought the students would be utterly blown away by Buckley but they reacted oddly - seemed to find his voice grating. One said they felt his singing style wasn't properly "supported" - i.e. he'd never had formal instruction in how to use his voice properly and safely, and consequently was audibly damaging his vocal cords, would soon get nodules. This what made them feel uncomfortable, as trained singers themselves - they could feel what it would mean physically to produce such sounds)
Tintern Abbey... again, one of my favorites pieces of music ever. Just the cymbal sound alone - it always makes me picture pollen motes in a woodland clearing, irradiated by sunlight streaming through the leafy canopy. Now which Brit invented that style of broken drumming? Does it come from Ringo on "Rain" and "Tomorrow Never Knows"? Love the Wordsworthreference of the group's name - a foundational poem of English Romanticism and pastoral pantheism. Kinda amazing that Tintern Abbey never made it, during that long moment of "Itchycoo Park" and "Hole In My Shoe". Astounding also that "Bee Side" was the literal B-side (good joke!) of "Vacuum Cleaner", another sublime Britpsych classic (if oddly titled - I have no idea why!). I believe this was Tintern Abbey's sole single. Indeed the group's only release during their own lifetime. Much much later an album of bits and bobs - unreleased recordings - came out in 2021 with the title Beeside: The Complete Recordings, but sadly nothing else really approaches the heights of "Bee Side" and "Vacuum Cleaner".
Loudon Wainwright III - I remember him being a Peel favorite, sticking out like a sore thumb amidst the postpunk and the outright punk-punk and the reggae etc.... but amusing / intriguing even then. Somehow I've never got around to "doing" him until now. "Bee Side" is a clever, droll, imaginative tune. But not as clever, droll, imaginative or consternating as "Rufus Is A Tit Man". What can it be like walking around as a performer/singer-songwriter yourself and knowing your Dad wrote that about baby you?
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Not really a song about bees
Great guitar playing, beamed straight across time from San Francisco circa 1968
Decided not to dial back the saturation on this image, as the dingy yellow-brown seems to convey the already-curdled-even-then aroma of this three-day event.
Old Wavest of the Old Wavest here must surely be Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance. Only two rungs below last night headliner Bad Company
A whole day - as buffer zone? - between that and the opening night's appearance of the Steve Marriotts All Stars
Climax Blues Band, Steve Gibbons Band, Barclay James Harvest, John Miles, Baker Gurvitz Army, Nazareth, Status Quo
But who the hell are Jack the Lad and Snafu?
For total hang-overs of the Sixties, you got Pretty Things and Procol bleedin' Harum
The issue contains a Special Souvenir Supplement of pieces based around the Great British Music Festival line-up - including cover stars Bad Company.
Hark at that zip, made of leather laces. With the leather stitchwork, it fairs screams LOOK AT MY LOINS. In this photo, there's also a weird sort of pube-tinged camel toe effect. Talk about "cock rock".
Plus Sounds writers predictions for '76
Roogalator! Kokomo! Boxer! John Bennett Band! Graham Bell! Mr Big!
A few New Wave-ish names poking in there, though - Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman, Dictators, The Tubes (attitudinally if not sonically), Motorhead (attitudinally but also a tiny bit sonically), Chris Spedding (well, as a gun for hire - he'd been a Womble - but "Motorbiking").
Last Exit is Noo Waver Sting's first, extremely Old Wave entity, a fusion-ish outfit
But that whole issue of Sounds can be delectated over here at this amazing repository of Old Wave (and pre-Old Wave) music papers and trade periodicals
Snide coverage of the Great British Music Festival from New Musical Express - "but where was the great?"
Ah looking at the ticket the first night is on the last day of 1975 - New Year's Eve - a Wednesday, so that issue of Sounds would have come out, in London if not the provinces, on that very day (the Sounds issue date is the Saturday - Jan 3 - as was the norm with the weekly music papers, but you could get hold of them a few days before the official publication date)
Imagine spending New Year's Eve in the Olympia suffering through that lineup.
Well, there's Thin Lizzy - and bottom of the bill Doctors of Madness. But still...
Now wait a minute - I don't know if there was a GBMF in '77, but there was one in '78, with a New Wave made-over line-up
Not completely made-over - Quintessence of Old Wave Hall of Famers Lindisfarne headline the middle night, there's also Frankie Miller, Bernie Torme, Bandit, Slade, and old trooper John Miles plugging away. And David Essex.
But the first night prominently showcases the next generation.
I had literally never heard of the Great British Music Festival in any of its iterations - clearly t's not entered the annals of fondly remembered Old Wave fests, even to the extent of Bickershaw Pop Festival of 1972 or Deeply Vale Free Festivals 1976 onwards
But otherwise there is a surprising dearth of documentation or reminiscence about TGBMF
Except Doug in Comments points to a usage of a photograph taken at the first festival of a well known "idiot dancer" infamous for dancing in the nude although not here
As used on the cover of The Chemical Brothers's 1999 album Surrender
I remember Ed from Chemicals telling me (when I interviewed the groop aroundSurrender) that what he liked about raves - as opposed to nightclubs - was the "sexless uniformity" of the mass experience, nobody posing or trying to look chic. So an event like GBMF or Knebworth or Reading probably be in that continuum... the opposite of the in-crowd, the mod / Northern Soul / New Romantic / rare groove continuum
Oasis at Knebworth would be a merger of the rock festival and the rave unity vibe.... as had been Stone Roses at Spike Island earlier
The crowd slumped on the concrete floor of the Olympia reminds me a bit of what people said of the ambience at the Futurama festivals in Leeds.... indeed the NME reviews of those festivals described as drear returns to the festivals of the pre-punk Underground era.... a nouveau hippiedom.... the New Wave reverting to Old Wave.
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