Some 20 years after the death of Jerry Garcia that institution of counter culture The Grateful Dead have announced the gathering of the remaining core members Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart for the final time. They will reunite for three shows at the Soldier Field in Chicago over the Fourth Of July Weekend this year.
Ex member Bruce Hornsby, Furthur/RatDog keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio will all make appearances on this 50th anniversary of the group.
Weir told Billboard. "These will be the last shows from the four of us together,"
And here's the thing, with the passing of their guiding light all those years ago and in a world where you'd maybe think the The Dead were very much part of the 20th Century, the online booking agents Ticketmaster broke all sales records when the Chicago dates were announced and sold out in seconds with half a million queueing up for sales. "Requests for tickets are believed to be in the millions.".
No doubt the whole extravaganza will be captured for posterity in every known medium and in true Dead tradition every type of bootleg going. Failing that call into the Internet Archive after July where, apart from being the only group to have an entire category to themselves, you'll probably find some genius has uploaded the entire concert including the sound check! For as we all know, The Dead Heads are a law entirely to themselves.
So after all this time these Dead Heads were just lying dormant waiting for the final calling. Surely the like of this pop culture phenomena will not be seen again.
Here's 'So Many Roads' from their last concert together and their last performance with Garcia in 1995.
In spring 1965 a new club opened in what looked like a fairly typical West End public house. "The Scotch Of St James" was to become the centre of London for the next year or so, where rock stars and anyone who was anyone gravitated to the place as a matter of course.
Some of the northern groups had made the pilgrimage south to the city during the Beat Boom of 64 and like the other London bands, hanging out in between gigs in the West End (or Soho) where "The Scotch" was located (13 Masons Yard to be precise) was part of the off duty schedule. Just yards away from the unassuming exterior of "The Scotch" was the art gallery John Lennon first met Yoko. In very short time Masons Yard had become the bohemian hotspot of the West End. A couple of hundred yards away Soho begins proper where properties at the time were easy to get and affordable to rent. Hendrix on first arriving in the UK is said to have had his first flat near the market in Berwick St.
Jimi had first arrived in London at the beginning of September 1966 and took little time in making straight for the in-crowd and first played at "The Scotch" on 24 September. As someone once said the Swinging 60's was really just about 400 trendy people with everyone else looking on. It's a dead certainty that those 400 had ended up in "The Scotch" at one time or another during 1966.
Chris Welch, journalist with Melody Maker at the time -
"Many groups shared apartments and flats for a while, including The Animals. But not for long. You can imagine the fights and rows after a hard days' night revelling and jamming. But to make sure he didn't miss any of the action, Eric Burdon got his own flat above the Scotch of St James, one of the West End's trendiest night clubs, where he could literally drop in and catch Jimi Hendrix jamming and share a brandy or three with The Rolling Stones and The Beatles".
By December 1966 the original Animals had split, with now Burdon entranced by Hendrix and the ever evolving London scene he mixed with at the club, had changed his musical ideas away from driving r&b beat and by 1967 formed the New Animals and his version of the new psychedelia in California, moving there that year. By June 1967, Hendrix, Burdon and many of the musicians and bands that had hung out at the "The Scotch" less than 12 months earlier were now lining up at The Monterey Pop Festival along with the American bands of Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Mammas and Pappas etc and marking the first real sign of the Summer Of Love and that Love Generation.
Monterey was to be Hendrix's debut in America with the Experience, who along with The Who, had been recommended to the organisers by McCartney when the Beatles declined an offer to play the festival. Which was hardly surprising given The Beatles were by now a studio concept only.
That year Hendrix released - Are You Experienced and Axis Bold AS Love, The Beatles - Sgt Pepper, The Rolling Stones - Her Satanic Majesties Request, Eric Burdon and the New Animals - Winds Of Change.
Burdon's barmy take on psychedelia and probably the lesser known of the bunch had him reciting poems and beat like pros against sitars, guitars and all manner of stuff on one side with a heavier psyche blues rock on the other. The idea of it was crazy. The idea of it also being born in it's embryonic form in some small West End bar 10 months earlier was completely crazy.
Eric Burdon & the Animals - Winds of Change has just been re-released on 180 Gram Vinyl (and CD) as a mono edition. We're also reliably informed by the Audiophile LP Round-Up in Record Collector that hearing it on a record deck with a specialist mono cartridge makes all the difference.
Oh yeah and where the dickens do you get one of those from? Anyway the album is available from Sundazed
The photograph at the top of The Scotch Of St James was purloined from Kathy Etchingham's website who was Jimi Hendrix's girlfriend at the time and also has some rather fun stories taken from her book.
It's always a bit baffling as well as saddening when a legendary name in music falls on tough times and needs to go to the public to ask for some help. Such was the way for Harvey Mandel this time last year when he needed to appeal for funds to pay for his medical bills following a cancer diagnosis.
It sure illustrates, apart from how unfair the US medical system seems to us in the UK, but also how doubly unjust it is this pioneer of the guitar hasn't been rewarded sufficiently in his career to be able to deal with an unexpected health issue.
As it says on his website "A professional at twenty, he played with Charlie Musselwhite, Canned Heat, The Rolling Stones, and John Mayall before starting a solo career. Mandel is one of the first rock guitarists to use two-handed fretboard tapping.."
Maybe this latest box set of his first 5 albums will go some way to recovering the bank balance along with the well deserved retrospective on his work. His guitar playing certainly set new standards in an era when blues was being rewritten by many new musicians in the mid 60's with Mandel's style pioneering sustained notes and controlled feedback to the form.
As these early solo albums prove Mandel wasn't just content with repeating blues riffs but exploring his ideas beyond the guitar and into orchestration which is perfectly illustrated by the track "Cristo Redentor" from his first album of the same name in 1968.
It was a daring and for some controversial exploration for a blues man to take as the sublime string arrangement and vocal choir took the sound into completely different expression with the haunting and beguiling theme having far more in common with an Ennio Morricone film soundtrack than any axe wielding psychedelic blues. If you wanted that then you could turn to his work with Canned Heat which he was doing in the same late 60's period.
The follow up solo albums in the 'Snake Box' to 'Cristo Redentor' are 'Righteous', 'Games Guitars Play', 'Baby Batter' and 'The Snake' and what's more his YouTube Channel is good enought to provide lots of tracks from the boxset. Go and have a root around the selection and order from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com
The 'Snake Box' is a fitting tribute to the man which will no doubt be fully recognised when he tours Europe in March having successfully recovered from last years diagnosis. See HarvelMandel.com for further details.
Here's a piece of classic 1967 psychedelia in the form of the promo clip for "2000 Light Years From Home" taken from probably the most argued over Stones album ever, 'Their Satanic Majesties Request'.
Seen by many as the worst record the Stones ever made, for others a moment of Stones magic never to be reproduced again. Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds made the album his favourite Stones recording and frankly we're with him on this. Despite all the criticism of how the Stones had abandoned their rhythm and blues roots in a trendy move of the era to counter the seminal psychedelia of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper album, 'On Their Satanic Majesties' not only out psyched The Beatles with probably a better representation of just what an acid soaked year it had become but had intriguingly found the group abandoning up until then, a pretty slavish resistance to anything outside of rhythm and blues influenced rock and roll.
The studio sessions were also notoriously shambolic with hangers on and wannabe's flocking round their chosen ones. Even producer Andrew Loog Oldham walked out when the chaos had become too much.
Bill Wyman at the time
" it was a lottery as to who would turn up and what – if any – positive contribution they would make.."
Jagger was quoted as saying
"There's a lot of rubbish on Satanic Majesties. Just too much time on our hands, too many drugs, no producer to tell us, "Enough already, thank you very much, now can we just get on with this song?" Anyone let loose in the studio will produce stuff like that. There was simply too much hanging around. It's like believing everything you do is great and not having any editing"
Even Brian Jones chipped in at the time
"It's really like sort of got-together chaos. Because we all panicked a little, even as soon as a month before the release date that we had planned, we really hadn't got anything put together. We had all these great things that we'd done, but we couldn't possibly put it out as an album. And so we just got them together, and did a little bit of editing here and there." BAND QUOTES FROM WIKI ARTICLE
Down the years Keith Richards has also agreed with his band mates criticism calling the album "a load of crap" but also added he did like some of the songs "2000 Light Years from Home", "Citadel" and "She's a Rainbow".
Which is actually a good lump of the album. And yes, and there's the rub Keith, like it or not those songs have stood up remarkably well over the decades. Even to the extent that you were playing one at a recent Knebworth gig, remember? (er well probably not)
In fact the tracks sound brighter and more inventive today than in 67 when groups were experimenting far more broadly with music than they do in recordings now. Remember also this experimentation was done with real instruments and much manual handling of recording techniques.
The band had also, in keeping with the general chaos of the event, invited some willing helpers with backing vocals and other duties from Nicky Hopkins (piano, organ, mellotron, harpsichord) - John Paul Jones (string arrangement on "She's a Rainbow") - Lennon and McCartney (backing vocals and percussion on "Sing This All Together") - Ronnie Lane (backing vocals and acoustic guitar on "In Another Land") - and Steve Marriott (backing vocals on "In Another Land")
Who, it might be said , were all willing night trippers and sky pilots in 1967. And you don't have those guys hanging around without some magic floating about those sessions.
No, it's obvious that for the first time in those chaotic sessions The Rolling Stones were flying without a wire and they didn't much care for it especially on reflection. Not being in control that is and as we all know Messrs Jagger and Richards have always preferred it down nice and tight.
The Stones never did make another album in the same way. The diversity and chances taken in making this astounding piece of audio were never dared attempted again, mores the pity.
And the opportunity to have Brian Jones playing Mellotron, keyboards, guitars, flute, brass, soprano saxophone, electric dulcimer, recorder and percussion was soon gone forever.
The original album cover was suitably audacious to suit the recording, it came with a 3D panel on the front, and to go with the album a psychedelic video promotion of course, rare enough in itself for the time, of "2000 Light Years From Home" which was also released as a single in the UK.
With it's fabulous mellotron arrangement either by Nicky Hopkins or Brian Jones, a downright wicked bass riff from Bill Wyman and general eeriness of the track this surely has to be a sound that groups like the Moody Blues went on to explore further.
There is a disembodied unearthly sound about the whole album and "2000 Light Years From Home" embodies it perfectly.
Very good to see another independent vinyl label springing to their feet in the UK. Bristol's Stolen Body are certainly making enough noise to be taken seriously. They've got a list of interesting artists building and the latest release due in January is by Al Lover, a San Fransican producer (wots he doin' in Bristol then) with a back catalogue of garage and psyche. His new release 'Cave Ritual' is giving your ears 20 minutes of layered science fiction trance and a side of shorter tracks.
There's the briefest taste of that below.. (come on guys lets have a minute at least).
There's a Bristol Psychedelic Festival that the label are obviously all caught up with (Check their Facebook page) planned for 2015 plus further releases.
Stolen Body records also doubles up as a record shop selling vinyl from other labels specialising in garage rock and psychedelic rock (but not exclusively).
Much afoot down in Bristol then. See their website for some splendid noise and some tasty distribution for Rhino Records, and other classic bands of the genre. Even got 3 classic The Doors albums on 180 gram vinyl. Great stuff.
It's not easy to say exactly when Iron Butterfly's 1968 album 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' became the psychedelic equivalent of Spinal Tap, maybe it began back in the 70's when Cheech and Chong made a joke of the title in one of their loonatic stoner dialogues, but somehow unlike any other album of the spaced out psychedelic era 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' ended up being the name on the headstone of the hippy dream.
Quite unfairly really because any amount of the groups that became fashionable in the couple of years that psychedelia fashion existed, and that's all it was, could have just as well represented what became a standing joke aimed at the beads and long hair subculture as Iron Butterfly, if not more so.
The track that's always been at the butt of the gag is the title track with it's meandering 17 minute jam and guitar solo. It's been said outside of the 3 minutes where the repeated chant like song is taking place the rest of the noodling is largely pointless. Again, a bit unfair to have that levelled at the band because that 14 minutes sounds no more than a brief excursion compared to the lengths Grateful Dead would go to with their extemporisations, it was best to pack sandwiches for one of their festival gigs, yet somehow they have ridden high, that being the right expression, on plaudits of "we are not worthy" ever since and poor old Iron Butterfly have just ended up as the Iron ButtOfJokes.
Where do you think Led Zeppelin got the idea for their name then?
In fact in 1968 a 17 minute track was not only a revolutionary length of time for any piece of rock and roll to last but Iron Butterfly's most well known song had become like a beacon of freedom for broadcasting music. Imagine the joy a DJ had in being able to have an on air break while the track played out. Time it right and you could get to the cafe and back before the end. Well maybe not with the jocks on American Forces Radio broadcasting from Europe, probably Germany, during the Vietnam war. Where in the south of the UK if you were lucky you managed to tune into the late night phased airwaves, the sound fading in and out on the old AM bandwidth during the midnight hours, you'd hear the DJ announce 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' as if it were the very password for the underground on mass to gather, and then follow that with the enforced duty the Forces network required be broadcast to all "you GI's out there" .. "and don't forget people 'Stay Off The Grass'", cue Iron Butterfly and then 17 minutes lay ahead for that midnight sojourn. Or whatever.
And who indeed wouldn't fall into the spell of that moment of tantalising underground rock and roll. Absolutely no Iron Butterfly jokes in those days.
What's more the album, surprise surprise, had two sides to it and the other was not one track but several. And they represent a fine selection of late 1960's San Francisco psychedelic rock by some fine players.
It has to be said Iron Butterfly have been grossly neglected over the decades so it's very good news that the album has been reissued with their singles A and B sides as bonus tracks. For anyone missing a piece of the late 60's psychedelic jigsaw 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida Expanded Edition (CD)' is an album well worth getting hold of.
Here's "My Mirage" from side one of the original.
Yesterday Fox News ran a screen flyer to one of their ad breaks on how The Byrds "Turn,Turn,Turn" was the No1. single 50 years ago! It wasn't.. but then that's Fox News for you.
It's next year The Byrds would be celebrating their 50th anniversary, and later in the year their first top selling single "Mr Tambourine Man". All very nice if The Byrds were still active. Crosby would definitely give it a go and McGuinn would definitely not. A recent interview in 'Uncut' Magazine revealed the extent of his divide with the past began back in the 80's when one more road trucking tour with at that time The Rolling Thunder Revue had convinced him it was time to go solo and quit the heavy traffic that comes with full size bands. Which is very achievable when you have a back catalogue as influential as McGuinn's, his solo performances still include some of those classic Byrds songs.
But what really separates him from many is a real hands on approach to how he produces his current work. In particular his output on the web.
He's had his Folk Den Project for years.
His web site has continued to give access to all his other projects. He records independently in his own studio (check out the Digital Recording Setup or his website map for loads of other stuff)
His wife Camilla and tour manager, runs his blog which is really a travelogue postcard of the places they go to on tour but fun to see and hear what they do all the same.
And most impressively of all has no record label "Who do you think would get all the money?".
And his final words on the whole reunion thing?
"I'm not afraid to talk about The Byrds. I just don't want to be in The Byrds"
Here's a good sample of his home base and him doing a reworking of that Byrds classic "Rock And Roll Star". And doing a pretty sharp job playing that limited edition signature Rickenbacker 360 12 string.
Wonder if he's still got those shades?
nick nicely (always spell lower case by the way), is an enigma. He's spent decades making psychedelic music in one form or another yet it wasn't until 2008 he made his first live performance. Wearing a sheet over his head naturally. His occasional live performances have continued that fine tradition.
His strange tale of nearly success commercially began back in the 70's and continued into the 80's until he found himself pretty much at the apex of the acid house/rave movement of the early 90's with friend also DJ producing a mix of house beats and psychedelia.
It was also a period which might be seen as when the esoteric needs of many outweighed the needs of the few left doing last decades thing. Rock musicians, new agers, acid house DJ's, acid jazz groups, the rise of Madchester rock and roll all had a common thread comparable to it being seen as a second resurgence of psychedelic influences. It had a similar vibrancy and feel, chemically induced or otherwise, with an open freedom in sound making that should have lasted a lot longer than it actually did. But as ever, when there's a sniff of something different from a fast growing underground in pile a whole load of major labels with their self styled producers all with an eye for the next big thing. Which inevitably means the end of the dream.
Once commercialised or branded by the production team the resulting debris from the talent search is suitably demoralised and the artists usually go and do something different anyway or else the new scene quickly becomes the old scene and just fades away. It's happened to every new phase in popular music culture. Probably everything else too. Change is inevitable.. so is exploitation.
When the time came for the exploitation business to arrive at nick nicely in the 90's maelstrom he turned his back on it screwing up another chance of commercial success. Who knows though, there is nothing certain about giving your music up to someone elses vision, especially when the vision is financial.
Having dropped out of sight for a few years the resurfacing of nicely in the 2000's has been with compilation albums and these occasional solo performances with the mention of a forthcoming album which in 2011 was duly delivered in eccentric nicely form... on cassette. It sold out,
In 2012 Fruits De Mer, having not forgotten about the nicely back catalogue, released a limited 7" vinyl single of a new version of one of his successful recordings "Hilly Fields", marking it's 30th anniversary. That sold out too.
And now at last this September has seen the release of nick nicely's only second full length album 'Space of a Second', and this time it gets the works on vinyl, cd and download.
It's an album that is full of psychedelic surprises, twists, turns, songs, songs which are just snatches of melody, instruments layered then isolated, super phased vocals that come and go, it's a mosaic of psychedelic sound that has nothing to do with the 60's or any other era. It's defined only by a man that has spent most of his life playing with sound and evolving from each decade.
It's impossible to say even when these tracks were recorded. How did the song or part of the song evolve in the first place. An album of restless curiosity. This is psychedelic music of the 21st century. An outstanding piece of work.
The Pig Light Show was the work of Marc L Rubinstein once the 60's light show for Bill Graham's Fillmore East in New York as well as the Al Heyward and John Sheridan Capital Theatre in New Jersey. All his images were personally created on overhead projectors, slide projectors with colour ripple wheels along with other effects and lights, (but he aint saying what they are)
Today he creates them in his studio at home and transforms them into digital files which then get tweaked to replicate the multi projector images of the 60's. Many using the same projectors and light shows that made Pig Light Show famous. These are real images and nothing was made by a computer, algorithm, fractal imager or any other device. Although he does create on a computer, every image is created by him. THE REAL PIG LIGHT SHOW
"These effects are "tested" in these videos to see how they might work with music before I try them in live concert events, though many like them just like this best. You can from time to time see how I redo a piece of music with different effects then just created. My live work is always improvised from the over 35,000 effects clips I have created".
Marc L Rubinstein
Seeing Rubinstein's light show projections on video is the visual equivalent of listening to audio in analogue. In live shows the equipment is as different as a record player is to an mp3 player.
The patterns may be replicated similarly in computer generated effects but there is a real perceptible warmth about these images that digital just cannot capture in the same way. Today they seem like a disappearing art form.
And here is the old liquid light show master turning his hand to a track called "Circles" from the old garage psyche masters 'The Electric Prunes' . The accumulative effect of which is like a 4.30 minute trip in slow motion, and that's even the singing. Amazingly they released a new album earlier this summer called 'WAS'.
"From the brand new The Electric Prunes CD "WaS" given a bit of "official" Pig Light Show love for my dear friends of the band (James, Jay, Steve, Walter and Ken "the new guy") and in memory of original Bassist and friend Mark Tulin who we lost WAY too soon".
It's quite extraordinary that after some 50 years the band and Rubinstein should meet again inside this one video.
The Electric Prunes album from their website.
Marc L. Rubinstein's channel is full of classic tracks set to his light shows
In August 1967 Pink Floyd released their first album 'Piper At the Gate Of Dawn'. It was to be a year that very nearly defined the 60's, for Pink Floyd it most certainly did. These were the highlights of that year and which produced 3 singles alongside the LP and a series of gigs that became legendary with Syd Barrett's songs in the ascendance. Things were to never be quite the same again.
1967
Feb 1st : Pink Floyd spent the day recording parts for the Syd Barrett songs 'Arnold Layne' and 'Candy And A Current Bun' at Sound Techniques Studios, Chelsea, London. Floyd also turned professional on this day after signing a deal
March 27 - Sound Techniques Studio, Old Church Street, Chelsea: Pink Floyd begin recording a demo tape of six songs to shop to record labels. Joe Boyd produces with John Wood engineering.
March 4 - Pink Floyd: "Arnold Layne" / "Candy and a Currant Bun" [UK release]
March 30 - Pink Floyd: "Arnold Layne" [Columbia DB 8156, UK charts #20]
May 16 - Pink Floyd: "See Emily Play" / "Scarecrow" [Columbia release UK]
May 29-30 - London: "14-Hour Technicolour Dream" at Alexandra Palace: the Who, the Move, Pink Floyd, the Pretty Things, Soft Machine, the Social Deviants, Tomorrow, Alexis Korner, the Creation, the Graham Bond Organization, etc.
June 17 - Pink Floyd: "See Emily Play" / "Scarecrow" [Columbia release. US.]
June 22 - Pink Floyd: "See Emily Play" [Columbia DB 8214, charts, UK #6]
July 6 - "Top of the Pops, BBC Lime Grove Studios, Shepherd's Bush, London 6 July, 1967. A mimed performance of See Emily Play was featured on Top of the Pops. Broadcast on BBC1 at 7:30 PM. (video above)
July 29 - London: International Love-In at Alexandra Palace featuring Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Pink Floyd, the Blossom Toes, the Apostolic Intervention, the Creation, the Nervous System, Tomorrow, Sam Gopal, Arthur Brown, and Ginger Johnson
Aug 4 - Pink Floyd: Piper at the Gates of Dawn [Columbia LP release]
Sept 1 - London: UFO Festival at the Roundhouse begins featuring the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Tomorrow with Keith West, and Pink Floyd
Sept 2 - London: UFO Festival at the Roundhouse continues featuring the Move, Soft Machine, Denny Laine, the Nack, Fairport Convention, and Pink Floyd
Oct 1 - Pink Floyd arrives in US for first tour
Nov 17 - Pink Floyd: "Apples and Oranges" / "Paint Box" [Columbia release. US]
Dec 22 - London: "Christmas on Earth, Continued . . ." at the Olympia Grand Hall featuring Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, the Animals, etc.
Esoteric Records have recently put out a re-release of one of the 60's real cult obscurities. This short lived band, if that's what you could call them in the conventional sense, were better known here in the UK for a track on a CBS sampler "Rock Machine Turns You On" from 1968. The track "I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar" by the equally oddly named 'The United States of America'.
The only album they ever released, and subsequently failed to sell, was the self titled "The United States of America" has now steadily gained wider recognition over the years and acknowledgement for it's importance in the left field world of psychedelic and avant garde rock of the 60's. That and the highly collectable price that always goes with these rarities. An original and even rarer copy in it's plain manilla sleeve which wrapped the cover preferred by CBS (pic below) is now hundreds of dollars as most owners of the album at the time tore that off to get at the record inside.
And if today's 68,000 YouTube hits on one of their songs had been transferred to sales at the time the story might have been different. As it was this group of like minded musicians and vocalist Dorothy Moskowitz very soon found they were rather more of unlike minds and they folded after a failed attempt to tour and promote their debut album. The gigs had a rough start with equipment failures due to the amount of gear, there were all ready power plays in the band for leadership and to top that lot off they were all busted for Mary Jane during the tour.
The performances they did actually produce were best described as more performance art than all out rock.
But what this lot did leave behind is something of a unique experience in music of the day.
"...at a time when there was a receptive audience for “underground music” which combined musical experimentalism with radical social and/or political lyrics – other examples, in their very different ways, including the Velvet Underground (who shared a common background in the New York experimental music scene; according to Moskowitz, Nico at one point tried to join the USA), Frank Zappa (whom Byrd considered a niche-marketer "subsumed in a self-referential loop", Love's Forever Changes, Country Joe and the Fish, and Jefferson Airplane".
WIKI ARTICLE
This album is completely uncompromising. You'll lock into the goings on in one track and then find yourself thrown in a collage of distortion, hard rock, avant garde electronic the next. One minute marching bands colliding with fuzz keyboards and delicate singing. And unusually for the day not an electric guitar in sight apart from the fretless bass.
Here's a short track called "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and possibly the most conventional in terms of psychedelic rock on the record. Below that is the full album.
The remastered re-release on Esoteric (part of Cherry Red Records) has extra tracks and various printed ephemera. Get it from here
You know the name Nuggets. It's that fab compilation vinyl album of garage beat and psyche from the mid - late 60's, or as was properly titled 'Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era'.
The original album was released by Elektra in 1972 and overseen by Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records, and Lenny Kaye, who later went onto be lead guitarist with the Patti Smith Group (shrewd choice there by Patti with Kaye being one of the first to use the term "punk rock" on the Nugget sleeve notes. And yes punk rock did first begin in the States and not the UK as some might like to believe).
Anyway all of that is now well documented rock history, but it is one hell of a good chunk of vinyl if you haven't got one yet.
The point is in June this year and slipping under the radar somewhat was a reunion called "Summer of Nuggets 2" at the New York City Winery, and joining Lenny Kaye were various and assorted guests all gathered in to recreate those throbbing beat songs of the era.
Here's a little seen clip from the night with Lenny Kaye, Glen Burtnik, Tony Shanahan, Jack Petruzzelli Jay Dee Daugherty and the Red White 'n' Blue rhythm section playing 'She's About a Mover' which is a 1965 song by the Sir Douglas Quintet.
Although in this clip you won't be seeing much of the band because the camera was operated solely by someone who had his lens on one thing. The Nuggettes. !
And The Nuggettes were rather unsurprisingly two go-go dancers who wiggled and shimmied in proper 60's fashion, even down to the white knee length boots.
During the evening the bands do a pretty good job of keeping the beats moving but you can't help but think that maybe with a couple of them using music stands to read the music this might have lost some of the early reckless spirit of the originals. It would have been good to see some young dudes trying their hands at this stuff.
Still, except for the last shot and the drummer in the background we don't get to see any of the band in this clip because of course we'll be going go-go dancing.
Lets go go.
Fruits De Mer are building the electronic music section of their label very nicely. Another high quality recording, this time a double album 'Sonar' by Craig Padilla.
Padilla has been evolving this his electronic symphonies for some years now. You'll recognise the sound instantly. This clip has that compelling "Rainbow in Curved Air" Terry Riley vibe and the modernist electronic composers of the 70's influece.
It'll be those vintage synths that do it everytime.
'Sonar' is a compilation of recordings by Craig Padilla from 1996 onwards, none of which have appeared on CD or vinyl before. Although they span nearly 20 years of recordings, Craig and I selected them to provide a consistent feel across four sides of listening -- music influenced by the kosmische sounds of the 70s, but fed through 21st century equipment. Immerse yourself.
And it's not difficult to immerse yourself in this clip from 'Sonar'. And below that the Tubular Bell like 'Velvet Moon' All the order details are here
What an enigma Quintessence were.
Born out of the Ladbroke Grove scene in the late 60's, although none of the band were Londoners, they evolved a sound which you could liken somewhere between the improvising and jamming of The Grateful Dead and a percussive drive with peace and love lyrics of a sort of folksy Santana. The songs were more chants and narrations than tunes.
Their performances were something like a late 60's 'happening' and a mini festival.
To set the atmos before the band played, incense sticks were placed around the venues or on stage, audiences mostly sat on the floor and joined in the chants and rhythms with anything they could get their hands on. The smell of weed and incense permeated the air as the band built their music to a crescendo. It what was to say the least, a heady experience being at a Quintessence gig.
Hardly surprising then, when it came to transferring that particular alchemy to the reality of two sides of vinyl, it struggled to transfer. Not to say they were rubbish albums but anyone seeing the band live and went out to buy the new album hoping to capture a similar experience were in for a let down.
A live recording of Quintessance would have been a more suitable release. But not so easy or cheap for a band in the making to be dragging a mobile recording unit around, particularly between 1970-72 when they were at their peak.
It seems in those 3 years Quintessence were playing just about everywhere in the UK and Europe. College tours, festivals, radio broadcasts, free events, they even packed The Albert Hall twice! But still not seeing an abundance of vinyl sales despite all that.
Regardless, their record label Island Records, stuck with them and still expected big things for Quintessence until quite inexplicably the band turned down the chance of playing The Carnegie Hall in the States..... wow!
Why? Because they wanted more money! Which has to be said comes as something of a complete about face when it comes to the bands ethos up to that point in time. If they'd said it was for their own idealistic reasons. eg. the 60's evergreen "not selling out", you'd have a sort of understood no matter how gormless the decision would have been. But not enough money?
You see the leading light of the band was one Aussie, Ron "Raja Ram" Rothfield, a trained flautist and a devotee of the spiritual yoga teacher Swami Ambikananda. The majority of the band were of the same persuasion and had changed or been renamed individually to the more exotic sounding - Shiva Shankar Jones, Sambhu Baba and Maha Dev (the other two original members less inclined to that luxury were Allan Mostert and Jake Milton)
The bands lyrics always revealed this 'love' and 'devotion' to their spiritual guidance. The "music" and "spreading the love/message" was always the bands reason for being. Again, an oft repeated idealism in the late 60's.
You'll hear an example of that in the clip below where they extol these virtues in their song "Freedom".
"you've got to turn your back on fortune and fame".
So you can imagine turning down the Carnegie Hall because of the paycheck is a bit odd coming from a band that spent many a gig at free festivals. And admirable sentiments as their lyrics might be, but completely at odds with how the music business works mind you, when it came to pressing their message home in America, Ron "Raja Ram" Rothfield had wanted more wad from Chris Blackwell at Island Records. Blackwell, who up until this point had been staunchly supporting Quintessence lost interest, big time. Well you can see why that happened.
It also has to be noticed there may have been something of a flaw in the social karma of old Ronnie "Raja Ram" has he seemed to also have the knack of sacking or falling out with some of his fellow musicians. But for good or bad the band soldiered on for a few years but nothing really blossomed in quite the same way again and by 1980, Quintessence had burnt it's last joss stick. Although even that was more than respectable given they'd managed to get through punk music's late 70's clean sweep.
Which is rather ironic because if they'd held on another few years they'd have been as at home with the arriving New Age audience as they would have been in their Ladbroke Grove hippy roots.
Quintessence are still remembered enthusiastically by those that were there at the gig's in their peak days and if they never did get to make the big selling album the one thing that did go down in history for them is they played the first two Glastonbury Festivals (Fayres) in 1971.
This clip of them is taken by an amateur who managed to get very close to them on stage at Glastonbury in 1971, and although limited in camera shots or angles he managed to record the only known footage of them at the festival, along with some of the audience. The sound is quite good considering there's no sound crew for this lone shooter and you do get a terrific feel for the way the band performed.
"Freedom" cuts off abruptly at the end as the band go into one of their fantasy narration songs called "Giants".
Just a couple of years difference and the Quintessence story could have all been very different. It's often like that in rock and roll.
Headpress Publications 'the Gospel according to unpopular culture' latest release looks to be an excellent tome of wierdness from the music scene and the subculture surrounding Laurel Canyon. A place that many entered but few made it to the end of the decade and the early 70's. The stories are legion but not too many books tackle a subject which is still surrounded in mythology, especially now many of the participants are no longer around to confirm or deny the stories that have come out of that hippie dream.
The last decent analysis, if that's what you could call it, was the rivetting 'Waiting For The Sun' by Barney Hoskyns which first came out in 1996. Pick that up if you ever see one.
Now David McGown's 'Wierd Scenes Inside The Canyon' promises an equally compelling view from the heart of rock and roll in those halcyon 5 or more years.
"Members of bands like the Byrds, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees,the Beach Boys, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, CSN, Three Dog Night and Love,along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor and Carole King, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills."
Get that.. "bucolic community". Well that 'pleasant aspect of the countryside and country life' didn't last long.
"there was a dark side to that scene as well. Many didn’t make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would like to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians and intelligence personnel – the same sort of people who gave birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all the canyon’s colorful characters – rock stars,hippies, murderers and politicos – happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation."
"One of the strangest, most iconoclastic books ever written about music" and if that hasn't peaked your interest then the underground world of Headpress is not for you.
WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE CANYON - Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream is available now as an exclusive, pre-release special edition hardback only from here at Headpress
If in the career of an artist they're able to write or produce just one piece of successful music (commercially or not) that goes onto live in the memory they've completed something outstanding. These are rare moments in time that go beyond words or pictures. There is something captured in those recordings of the very air they breathed, the essence of the world they lived in at the time.
Such was the session in late summer 1967 made by Dr John 'The Night Tripper' when a largely unknown group of musicians and characters gathered together in the Gold Star Studios in LA, California.
The end result in those heady days of psychedelic revolutionary freedom was something no other artist has or come near to producing again. No listener had heard the like before or has since. It was unexpected, puzzling, unique and just plain tripped out. This was an underground that no one quite understood. It was born of New Orleans, and the Cajun Bayou, and even by it's eventual release in 1968 'Gris Gris' was still a million miles away from the popular sounds of rock at the time.
"When the music was all done and the master tapes sent to Atlantic Records, I focused on getting a release date for fall of 1967. The didn't happen. The execs at Atlantic didn't quite know what to make of this stuff I sent to them. When I talked to Ahmet Ertegun, he wanted to know what to call this type of music, "What am I gonna tell my promotion men? 'What radio stations gonna play this crap?.." "
Harold Battiste - producer, arr, bass/clarinet/perc. From Unfinished Blues. Memories Of New Orleans Music.
Extract - Uncut. April 2014.
'Gris Gris' has just been remastered and re-released by Real Gone Music. There are no extras, no remixes, and no messing with this monumental piece of musical history.
Here's the entire albums 33 minutes (the old master version).
A haunting and mesmeric sound from The Children Of The Mushroom. They came from Thousand Oaks, California and made just one single recorded in 1967 and released in 1968, then by 1969 they reformed into a different group leaving behind this collectors item for future generations. A classic piece of psychedelic of the era.
Members included Jerry McMillen (guitar, vocals, flute), Bob Holland (organ), Al Pisciotta (bass), Dennis Christensen (drums) and Paul Gabrinetti (guitar, vocals).
From the comments section on the video one of the original members Dennis Christensen, even informed us all "Bob Holland used a VOX Jaguar...".
Thanks Dennis, it's always good to hear from a child of the mushroom.
Here's the B Side 'You Can't Erase A Mirror' and below that the A-side 'August Mademoiselle' .
We don't hear Randy California's name mentioned often these days so as it's his birth date today, born 20th Feb 1951, it might be a good time to remember... boy could he play.
He was in Hendrix's band The Blue Flame as a 15 year old and was considered to join The Experience in it's formative years in the UK, but his parents thought him too young to leave school (ouch that must have hit the kid).
He went on to form Spirit a few years later.
Randy never made it through to the new century, died on 2nd January 1997 when rescuing his 12 year-old son after he was sucked into a riptide in the surf off Hawaii.
Here's the multi layered psychedelics of his "Hey Joe".
There's loads of them machines. It's easy to get confused, Machine, a Pink Floyd tribute band, then there's The Machines, a UK punk band, then there's that Florence and her Machine, and then there's The Machine, the ones from Rotterdam. Holland.
"The Machine pair molten stoner rock riffs with a fair dose of retro psych for good measure. The band also excels at incorporating acid-blues jamming that lifts their performance into outer space.” Roadburn Festival
Yeah right they're the ones, and so far with just three gigs to do this year because they're recording a new LP.
But look at the gigs, a large chunk of Europe in just three hops.
Feb 01 2014 : Depressivefest - Moscow (RUS), Apr 25 2014 : Berlin (GER), Apr 26 2014 :
Desertfest - London (UK).
And here's a track from their last album 'Solar Corona'.... which is a bit of a good title don't you think.
Defintely a very authentic sounding stoned 70's feel about this. But then the Dutch know how to take that and work it out. The vocals are good in this too and all wrapped up in a few lines. Here's the sublime 'Infinity'.
Here's a piece of genuine psychedelic rock ephemera, and a rare one at that.
A record very much with sentiments of the 60's but slightly out of it's time and luck when it came to greater recognition. The band 'Plant and See' released only one LP in 1969. It was also the first recording by their lead singer, songwriter and guitarist Willie French Lowery (1944-2012), a fascinating character (see more here) who was a native American Indian, member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, he later went on to publish over 500 songs of various styles (gospel, rock, country, R&B), performed with The Allman Brothers, and Clyde McPhatter.
But here in 1969 and more in a post psychedelic period of rock 'Pant and See' were possibly one of the first multiracial groups in rock, with African American drummer Forris Fulford, Latino bassist Ron Seiger, and Scottish-Irish backup vocalist Carol Fitzgerald joining Lowery on these recordings originally released by White Whale records.
"White Whale, already on the brink of dissolution, lacked the resources to effectively promote the album, which contravened the standard race, place, and genre-based markets of the day.
Shortly after its release, the band regrouped as Lumbee, Lumbee’s 1970 album 'Overdose' is, like 'Plant and See', a rare and highly collectable psychedelic classic; it attracted the attention of the Allman Brothers, whom Lumbee joined on tour in the early 1970s."
lightintheattic.net
The self titled 'Plant and See' LP more recently had a lavish re-release in quality vinyl and original artwork by the Paradise Of Bachelors label but even that has now disappeared from stock.
Here's the track "Poor Rich Man" from the album, with it's "The Pusher" type opening guitar riff and some neat vocal arrangements. It's lyrics encompassing much of the bands multicultural stance and the plight of the underdog.
"Got a find us a place, a place where we belong".
Let's hope some other label has the good sense to find a place where this little gem belongs.
