Along with experimental San Francisco sound collagists, Fifty Foot Hose, rock composer Joseph Byrd's band, The United States of America and his solo project, Joseph Byrd & the Field Hippies predicted the lo-fi arrival of Bill Holt's 1973 opus, "Dreamies".
From start to finish, this is a delightful record to listen to, and what with all the echoes, backwards vocals, and delays, this could have easily served as soundtrack material for "Twin Peaks." Spare yourself watching the third season, though. Nothing has been learned since it left the air twenty-five years ago. The new "Twin Peaks" is a bomb.
That Joseph Byrd guy asking if anyone has seen any field hippies.
That other Joseph Byrd band full of psychedelic experimentation, The United States of America.
Joseph Byrd chatting it up with actor James Coburn, 1968.
Back in the mid 1970s, Althea Rose Forrest and Donna Marie Reid were an anomaly in the reggae music business. Here were two extremely well educated, upper middle class teenage girls representing the artistic soul of Jamaica, an island nation with a still very high illiteracy rate whose economy almost solely depends on tourism dollars to, pun intended, stay afloat. They were militant and had a wicked gift for satire in their songwriting, making sport of their country and biting the hand that should have fed them for their talents. The smaller labels in reggae, such as Lightning, were well known for their patriarchal, shady business practices. Trouble for those guys was the fact that Althea & Donna knew how to play the game and were able to become the next big thing in reggae without a contract, and the big labels like Warner Brothers eager to sign them... and pay them due to their single for "Uptown Top Ranking" climbing to the number one spot on the U.K. charts in February of 1978. Unfortunately, their few singles thereafter posted minimal buzz, and Althea & Donna faded into the footnotes.
Keith Cross... Peter Ross... dudes... WHY did you guys cut only ONE album? Whatever, you could have kicked it off with any song, though it wouldn't have been the same. You gents were brilliant perfectionists, because you could have kicked it off with any song, but thankfully, you chose this song... THIS song...
...and that guitar solo at 2:15. Though, I really have no idea why the video runs twelve minutes. "The Last Ocean Rider" effectively docks at 6:47. Five minutes and thirteen seconds of dead air. Good on ya, YouTube video uploader person.
When the Brits took their love of breezy southern California rock and got that shit right. I picked this up for my first listen in 2012 and have been stupid for this record ever since.
Someone on Facebook said that they are annoyed by aliens from outer space with cyclops eyes who collect barbed wire and buy two of everything at the grocery store... and personally, I feel like I'm being attacked... I need my safe space.
In all seriousness, "20 Jazz Funk Greats" advertises a tongue planted firmly in cheek fib. Clearly, there is nothing jazzy nor funky about the music. This is take a lawnmower to your face industrial electronica, and I love every track. Secondly, the original release had only eleven tracks, not twenty. My later reissue contains an additional pair of tracks act the end: two live versions of "Discipline". It wasn't until the 2011 reissue that with the right amount of bonus tracks, they indeed gathered twenty jazz funk greats which aren't jazzy or funky at all. Third off, dig on their snappy threads on the cover.
I feel bad, though, that I'm only offering up an earlier reissue with only thirteen of the later fulfilled twenty jazz funk greats (which, yeah, aren't jazzy or funky in the least), so, I've gone ahead and added some images to this post which I trust are to your liking.
There are those albums that are so bloody brilliant from beginning to end realizing I hadn't previously heard of said record or band. Ever. "The Magic Shoemaker" by Fire is one of those albums. Fronted by Dave Lambert, who would later sing for The Strawbs. Now, The Strawbs, not only am I quite familiar with them, I especially love their output with Sandy Denny on vocals before she sent Fairport Convention into their proper legendary status with Richard Thompson.
Fire comprised of Lambert, Bob Voice, and Dick Duffall (Paul Brett Sage). "The Magic Shoemaker" is regarded a classic in the U.K. and is highly collectible. Original Pye label copies fetch upwards of $1,000 USD. The bottom line though, is the music, which rocks hard. You know how The Incredible String Band tried to go from being this lovely Scottish hippie caravan folk band (though steeped in that Scientology mess) and tried rocking hard about 1973 or so, and the result was all, nah, you lads and lasses are still this lovely Scottish hippie caravan folk band (though steeped in that Scientology mess), only quirkier now... well, Fire not only pulled it off, but broke some chairs in the scuffle.
This spectacular album was originally recorded and released by Skye Records (record label formed by Cal Tjader, Gábor Szabó, Gary McFarland, and Norman Schwartz) in 1969. The singers are sisters, Wendy Flower and Bonnie Flower, goddaughters of vibraphonist Cal Tjader. Their galactic vocals were backed by Larry Carlton on guitar, Jim Keltner on drums, and Mike Melvoin (father of Wendy Melvoin of Wendy and Lisa, they of Prince and the Revolution) on keyboards.
Why the hell should I bore you with my telling of The Space Lady story? This isn't laziness on my part... oh, no. No and no. This record is a delight to hear every time I put it on to nullify whatever static energy surrounding me is weighing down the air.
Many of these tracks are cover songs, performed on a battery operated keyboard with a delay pedal and sung in her pretty hushed voice. Her cover of Peter Schillings' "Major Tom" was rivaled only by The Langley School kids cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" from forty years ago (I mean, that David Bowie fella was all right and all, but...)
This is lo-fi synth pop goodness, or space music, if you prefer. It's a mitzvah.
Ever since the early 1990s, I've been an ardent admirer of the German psychedelic band, Can. I tested the waters with their period when Damo Suzuki (center of photo, in parka, below) was their singer, with "Tago Mago" (1970) and "Ege Bamyasi" (1972). They specialized in slow burn meditative acid folk while Suzuki sang in, shall we say, asemic vocals, that steadily erupted into hard driving psychedelia that hinted at prog and metal. The keeper of the keyboards, though, and founder of the group, was Irmin Schmidt (left in photo), who was previously a conductor with The Vienna Symphony. Before they became Can, the band's name was The Inner Space.
In 1969, Schmidt scored "Kamasutra: Vollendung der Liebe" with The Inner Space. I can't find even a scene of the original film online, however, the German label Crippled Dick Hot Wax! (gotta love the name!) released the entire soundtrack on vinyl and CD in 2009.
"Kamasutra" is a top notch recording that I easily place alongside Can's 1982 collection, "Onlyou". It sweeps through genres with style. FYI: that's Can's original singer, Malcolm Mooney on "There Was a Man" (track three).
There's Anthony Bourdain with Irmin Schmidt at Cologne restaurant, Ox and Klee last year.
"Wesley Willis was a friend of mine. He could really whoop a camel's ass. He gave a mean head-butt, too. RIP."
- says my friend Pam, who indeed knew and still loves Wesley Willis.
Wesley Willis played rock & roll. Wesley Willis played his "joy ride music" on a Technics KN keyboard. Wesley Willis, originally an "outsider" artist who rendered Chicago cityscapes. Having been abused throughout his childhood and survived traumatic experiences as a young adult, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his mid-twenties. He played shows for drunken, white suburban kids who were assholes to him and punk audiences who showered him with love, respect, and head-butts... and fourteen years after being claimed by leukemia at the age of forty, his strange, beautiful ball-point pen and marker drawings and music about the world around him and his inner self still sell hard.
Wesley Willis was a beautiful spirit. Wesley Willis forever. Wesley Willis, FTW.
Rock on, London. Rock on, Chicago. Mitzubishi: the word is getting around.
In 1992, I was working at a chain sandwich joint where the lunchmeat is still pumped full of nitrates and all the food tastes the same. Every day, I met a steady stream of humans, great, good, bad, shitty, indifferent, and comatose... and that was just my co-workers.
I even waited on G.G. Allin a couple of weeks before he died. He was really nice and well-mannered. That's another story.
At that time, the shop I worked at was flanked by a comic book shop and a place that sold records and compact discs, new and used. My existence was pretty much heaven for a young stoner such as myself.
One of the regular customers who came in for lunch every day was a serious record collector and shared my love for old school jazz and prog rock from the 1970s. Dude had a massive vinyl collection, I soon discovered when I went over to his house a block away. We traded tapes, and among them was "Mobo I" by Kazumi Watanabe and "Dreams" by Gábor Szabó. Watanabe was cool and all, but Gábor Szabó and that one particular album literally changed and deepened my appreciation of jazz. Here was this refugee who immigrated to the U.S. during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and in just a few short years would be playing guitar for Charles Lloyd and Lena Horne.
So, in 1968, Szabó already has his own label, Skye Records. He teamed up with bandleader/keyboardist, Gary McFarland... and Jim Keltner on drums, besides a fantastic roster of studio musicians (see reverse of cd cover).
The music offered is a cross-breeding of gypsy folk, west coast jazz, and psychedelic rock, imbued with the compositions of Manuel De Falla and Donovan.
It's 1983 or 1984 and I'm barely out of high school... dropped out sophomore year, actually. I was bored. Huntsville, Alabama was a town as culturally split down the middle as it was geographically, by a bracket created by Memorial Parkway running north and south, and I-565 (which arrived on the scene after I moved to North Carolina in late 1987) running northeast hooking from State Highway 72 to Chattanooga, and southeast dead-ending into Decatur. Within the eastern clump of that bracket is the hotshit pretty downtown area stretching toward Five Points and Monte Sano. Lots of trees and nice old houses, a synagogue well over a hundred years old, liberals and button-down lefties far as the eyes can surely spy. On the west side of the clump, there was poor, working class, and military families connected with Redstone Arnenal, PhD's in Engineering being churned out of UAH, and if you dared to take a day trip to a minor metropolis like Atlanta or Memphis, a baccalaureate would be heard asking such incisive questions like, "Whut'n'a hayull ya gonna go thur fer?"
However, there were pockets of culture, safe spaces if you will, on both sides of town. To the east was a coffee roaster/bar/music venue called The Kaffeklatsch and the independent bookstore in Five Points, Books As Seeds. The west side was defiantly dotted with Tattooed Lady Comics and Collectibles, Isis Books, The Booklegger, and Sunburst Records.
Although, it was that morning at Books As Seeds that a lovely young worker with an asymmetrical bob and owlish glasses and what Richard Brautigan recognized in other young ladies as a "rose meow smile" had me pegged as a sensitive artist type (it had nothing to do with the acrylic paint smeared on my jeans, I swear!), trapped me in her Brie Larson like gaze, and informed me that Richard Brautigan would be my cup of tea. For almost fifteen minutes she schooled me on all things Brautigan and gave me good backstory.
That girl was so friggin' right... and cute.
Books As Seeds had newer editions, but I suspected The Booklegger had most of the original paperbacks from 1967 to 1980... and they did indeed. Fifty cents to two dollars each and with a ten dollar bill I bought a small library which included Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Bob Kaufman.
I had no idea Brautigan recorded an album fourteen years previously, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Within a few months I learned of his suicide by shotgun and I was shattered. I breathed his words and would wander through Huntsville reading "The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster" to many concerned stares and very few knowing smiles. Thirty three years on and I love his writing just as passionately, but if I read his work aloud on the city buses of Charlotte, people would petition to throw that crazy old man into the insane asylum.
So, back about 1999 I received a couple of audio cassette copies of the original Harvest record from a fellow Brautigan fan in Gunnison, Colorado. I was finally able to connect Brautigan's voice with his words, that gentle singsong Pacific Northwest lilt and that mischievous chortle.
Besides his readings of poetry and short stories, we get Brautigan in conversation with his friend, Price Dunn and his girlfriend, Valerie Estes at home. Price and Richard keen that they should cook up some lunch, then Price flashes on, "Hey! I know what we could do, too... we could do something RADICAL... that could cause some strange, mystic vibrations in your kitchen..." suggesting that he could go to the store and get a pound of "real coffee." Richard sputters, "REAL COFFEE? IN MY KITCHEN? What'll I do with my instant?"
