 #23 JAN/FEB 2007 by Larry "Fuzz-O" Dolman (except where noted) all day names from Year by Angus MacLise (1962) |
JAN 7 2007 (HOLLY DAY)
FIRST POST OF THE NEW YEAR?! Daily Blastitude?! What was I thinking? I guess those nine days of Yuletide are on their way to being about nineteen days -- Fahey was right, we really are gonna celebrate Christmas all year..... but jeez, I've gotta write something.....how about I just answer the question: what is blowing my mind right now? That's about the only question that I ever try to answer with Blastitude, and right now (11:15 PM, January 7th 2007) the answer is Fleetwood Mac, all eras. I realize Tony "Tango in the Night" Rettman has already told us this, and I've had a worn-out $1 copy of Then Play On right by the stereo for about a year now, but I didn't fully get it until this week when Ben Chasny (on the Six Organs of Admittance site) posted a link to a "Green Manalishi" vid, and I started checking out all the "related" vids over to the side (thanks StreetDreamer83!). This is really the first time I've heard anything else from the Peter Green era, and goddamn, the guy ruled. I mean, he looked cool as hell, all shyly stoned with the winsome beard, but when he took the stage he owned it, even when he was off to the side or in the back, singing the blues for real (lower case b all the way). Examples: "Rattlesnake Shake" on Playboy After Dark, appropriately enough a great song about masturbating, a raw "Oh Well", and the haunting sweet change-up instrumental "Albatross", a song that went to #1 on the UK charts. In fact, believe it or not, in the year 1969 Fleetwood Mac sold more records than the Beatles and the Stones combined. (At least that's what their then-manager says in Part 2 of this entertaining documentary.) So Green may have been a star but, as you can see from any of the linked performances above, the whole band was very important. I never thought I liked Mick Fleetwood, mainly because of his various bouts with ill-advised facial hair and ponytails, and of course those hanging wooden balls, but it turns out he was a very creative drummer, always coming up with unique proto-trance backbeats, thanks in no small part to a pre-Corsano ability to wield multiple mallets, brushes, and various auxiliary stuff (possibly even including the rhythmic clacking of a certain pair of hanging wooden balls?). John McVie was the perfect foil on bass, playing minimalist heavy blues, demurring to Fleetwood's flash in classic British stoic tradition (and his facial hair was generally excellent). And then there were the other two guitarists in the original lineup, Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan, both of them fine songwriters, soloists, and frontmen in their own right. And then, to make it even more interesting, they had not just one but two Syd-style acid casualties, with first Green and then Spencer wandering out of the band in a daze, about a year apart from each other. In the interim between Green's departure in 1970 and Buckingham and Nicks' arrival in 1975, they released a whopping six albums, and I've barely heard any of that stuff so I can't say too much about it. Those albums do have some supporters, and Bob Welch was a kinda funny dude who had at least a couple decent tunes, and one great one in the Fleetwood Mac song "Hypnotized," which I would occasionally hear on classic rock radio growing up -- here it is with one of those YouTube fan montages -- dig the eerie vibe, UFO pictures, and yet another genius Mick Fleetwood backbeat -- and while you're over there scoping Bob Welch don't miss his stunning "Sentimental Lady" music video from 1977 and his 10AM "wakeup call" at Cal Jam 2 with a suspiciously exuberant Ms. Nicks on backing vocals and tamborine (insert cocaine-in-the-morning joke.......... here). Of course, in 1975 the Mac hooked up with the Buckingham-Nicks duo and I know you know the rest, whether you want to or not. It was a different band than "the dirty old Mac" of "Oh Well" et al, certainly more commercial, epitomizing the super-rich L.A. soft-rock of the 1970s, everything that punk and hardcore were a movement against. But dammit, the music was still very good. Just look at this arena performance of "Dreams" from 1977. Stevie Nicks here is seriously one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on YouTube, if not with my eyes -- the apotheosis of the 70s rock star, and the song she's singing is haunting, gutsy, and emotional, with a truly awesome backbeat by Fleetwood and Mac, which allows Buckingham to do those skeletal volume-pedal guitar melodies which just float so much aura over the top. It's not like I'm some kind of Stevie Nicks sycophant either -- believe me, the nights weren't always this dreamy, and there's barely 5 songs by her I can think of right now. "Sara" was great, sort of like "Dreams" part two, but with more 'progressive' songwriting -- is it just me or does the band sound a little like something off of Can's Future Days in this live version from 1979? Of course "Rhiannon" would be the other definitive Stevie song, and you don't wanna miss this clip of the, um, charismatic young composer talking about its origins. I haven't even mentioned Christine McVie -- she's heavy too and by most accounts was the real frontperson 1970-1975. I don't know, I apologize for the wealthy rock star worship, but they had soul, and that's all that matters, no matter what the genre or how many records got sold..... JAN 10 2007 (QUARTZ DAY) VIOLENT
STUDENTS Friday
MAGIK
MARKERS Saturday
Gang
Wizard / Kevin Shields / God Willing / Celesteville / Unicorn
Hard-On EU tour! Thu-Sat Feb
15-17 - INC at Churchill's (Miami, FL) JAN 13 2007 (FIRST OCEAN)
I used to
tell you about every single release on the Sublime
Frequencies label in these pages, but at some point
in 2005, after they had put out over 20 releases in about two
years, I just couldn't keep up any longer -- and since then they've
put out close to 10 more, still consistently very good and often
great, with Guitars of the Golden Triangle: Folk and Pop Music
of Myanmar Vol. 2, Choubi Choubi! Folk and Pop Sounds
From Iraq, Ethnic Minority Music of Northeast Cambodia,
and Radio Algeria immediately coming to mind as recent
standouts. But right now the real stop-the-press news is their
brand new release from just this month, Guitar Music
From The Western Sahara by Group Doueh,
a true standout gem even in this sparkling company. see also: Neung Phak
live, films & dj sets with Alan Bishop & Mark Gergis.
Jan 19 2007
8:00P Jan 20 2007
8:00P Jan 21 2007
8:00P Jan 26 2007
9:30P Jan 31 2007
8:00P Feb 2 2007
8:00P Feb 3 2007
8:00P
JAN 14 2007 (DAY OF THE NEW WORLD)
Alice Coltrane made beautiful music. Playing Journey to Satchidananda every single morning was a longtime day-starter at the day job a couple years back, a ritual that has started up again this week. Why did we ever stop?......Robert Anton Wilson was (is) a great educator (or de-educator), offering a course (or anti-course) in the transcendence, or coexistence, of various reality tunnels. I've been digging into his textbook Prometheus Rising for a couple years now -- it's a pretty rigorous course, but there is plenty of payoff. Every chapter/lesson ends with a series of "exercizes" for further study and edification. You gotta love it when he says, at the end of the very first set, "If you think you have learned the lessons of these exercizes in less than six months, you haven't really been working at them. With real work, in six months you should be just beginning to realize how little you know about everything." ......... and now playing: Bill Fay Time of the Last Persecution. I realize this album is bleak and dark and all that, but every single time I put it on I sink into the grooves like I'm laying on a bed of (black) roses......also hitting the spot tonight are a couple of double CD sets: Mother of Thousands by MV & EE and the Bummer Road (Time-Lag) and the brand new anthology Inroads by Roy Montgomery (Rebis)..... JAN 16 2007 (DAY OF DUSK)
DAVE
PHILLIPS
KEIJI
HAINO/K.K. NULL JAN 18 2007 (DAY OF THE UNDERTONE) This Saturday the 20th (day after tomorrow) in Louisville, KY:
KARK JAN 25 2007 (SECOND OCEAN) After a full week of not posting anything, here's a post to tell you that I won't be posting anything for another full week. Going out of town. Away from computers. Can't wait. But before I go, what is blowing my mind right now? Not a whole lot. I did listen to an album by The Moonglows this morning and it was pretty glorious. Nothing like some sweet downtempo doowop. And, just like Kark (from the previous post) they were from Louisville, Kentucky..... The Films of Kenneth Anger Vol. 1 is finally on DVD and it looks great, especially after years of watching them on 9th-generation VHS dub. I'm happy to report that the Water Witch in Eaux d'Artifice is just as creepily inscrutable as he/she/it was in analog dub-o-vision, but I gotta admit that when it comes to Rabbit's Moon I prefer the 7-minute "kiddie version" with that ridiculous "things that go bump in the night" song, even though the 16-minute 'original' version as restored for the DVD has a -- here we go again -- downtempo doowop soundtrack that includes the exquisite "I Only Have Eyes For You" by the Flamingos. Anyway, while I'm waiting for Vol. 2 to come out I'm gonna reread Bill Landis's terrific Anger biography.... And hey, here's a relatively new album that relatively rules: Hot Ginger by Phantom Limb & Tetuzi Akiyama, very nicely put together by the Archive label. Phantom Limb is indeed an outgrowth of the PeeEssEye/Evolving Ear camp, hooking up with the subtlely renowned Japanese guitarist for a 30-minute quartet jam from June, 2006. Two electric guitars and two electric organs getting into deep and heavy soul-drones, with a welcome classic rock undertone seeping through.... and another great album from today has been Shazam! by The Move..... I've never been to the True Vine Record Shop in Baltimore but I hope to some day. In the meantime I've been digging their off-kilter and soulfully lo-tech website, especially now that they're conducting and posting some nice quick-hit interviews, with Twig Harper, Blaster Al Ackerman, and more.... that Blaster Al Ackerman LP I Am Drunk sure blasted me a couple months ago when I listened to it loud and alone in the car. Good thing I wasn't! (Drunk.) Four stars, I've been afraid to listen to it since.... FEB 2 2007 (DAY OF VOYAGE)
Day of voyage, how about that.... I've now been away from home an entire week and I still haven't put on a single record or even looked at a stereo. I did find a computer, though, hence this post. Actually, I guess there has been one record, Harvest Moon by Neil Young, going around and around on the CD player in the car. Man, I love that album. I'm probably not supposed to, and sure, it might not even be in my Neil Top 10, but there's just something perfect and ethereal about the way those songs sit together. Right now I'm thinking about the 10-minute album closer "Natural Beauty" and how the harmonica haunts the whole thing. I don't know if MV & EE are into Harvest Moon as much as they are the older stuff, but I'm definitely getting a Bummer Road feel from the way Neil's harmonica is the unlikely instrument that holds the whole arrangement together. The other thing that holds the whole album together and gives it that total dream vibe is the angelic backing vocals by Nicolette Larson (RIP) and, yes, Linda Ronstadt. On just about every song they ooh and aah and float in and out of the choruses at just the right places, you'd almost think it was Linda Perhacs and Christina Carter or something. What can I say, it's a sentimental favorite, and sometimes I wonder, as the world spins out of control with merchandise: as the proud owner of a dozen or so Neil Young albums and a decent record player, how much more do I really need? FEB 3 2007 (PLAINS OF PARADISE) And plains of paradise is about exactly right too, with the lovely Loess Hills in there to really make it roll, but it's like -7 degrees out right now, and grandma and grandpa and everyone else are in bed, so I might as well see what's good on the internet . . . . Did I say good? Great cover story/photo essay for the Baltimore City Paper by Carly Ptak, online version here (be sure to "view the slideshow"), another installment in her (and the Almanac's) ongoing musical-and-otherwise delineation of all the riches and complexity that live inside what we are supposed to think of as poverty..... and great statement by Alivia Zivich (of Aryan Asshole Records) on the alleged link between 'noise' and 'testosterone', in a new interview over at Dusted Magazine. Whole interview is nice, check it here..... FEB 4 2007 (THE LADEN BOUGH) Back in Chicago, tiny apartment, dirty freezing mega-city at six degrees below zero. No, I'm not writing a brand new 'cyberpunk' novel, but I am listening to a bunch of merchandise spinning out of control, random noise-type CDs that I can barely identify -- Harvest Moon what? Actually, To Live and Shave in L.A.'s Horoscopo just came on the box -- can't miss that one. Strong work, my friends, and so is Noon and Eternity. Heckuva double shot, and speaking of heckuva, I'm actually excited for an upcoming Chicago show (it's like I'm a kid again): Warmer Milks at the Empty Bottle a week from tonight (Sunday, Feb. 11)! Now, in apology for these last three posts being a total vacation diary, I'll segue outta here with a buncha upcoming Milks dates and, whaddayknow, a spring tour by the Shave.... WARMER
MILKS UPCOMING SHOWS: TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN L.A. APRIL/MAY TOUR: April May FEB 5 2007 (THIRD TWELVE) MV
& EE "GREEN BLUES" TOUR (already in progress) DEMONS
TOUR 06 Feb 2007,
20:00 07 Feb 2007,
20:00 08 Feb 2007,
20:00 09 Feb 2007,
20:00 10 Feb 2007,
20:00 11 Feb 2007,
20:00 12 Feb 2007,
20:00 13 Feb 2007,
20:00 FEB 8 2007 (THE WHITE SUN)
Goddamn -- Cayce Lindner of Flying Canyon, RIP. Their self-titled debut CD on Soft Abuse was one of the best new albums I heard last year (reviewed back in #20). The songs and production were everything psych-folk is supposed to be -- spooky, spacey, ethereal, balanced between delicate and heavy -- and Lindner took it up another level still with a rich and sharp vocal style, delivering stark and direct lyrics wrapped in hooks that made you remember and ponder. (For more on what Lindner had been doing, go to this thread over on I Love Music, where Justin Farrar of Quantum Noise has compiled a few recommended links.) FEB 10 2006 (DAY OF ICE) LIVE
2/10/06 ON WBLSTD (77.7 FM CHICAGO) FEB 11 2007 (FIFTH OCEAN) "Country legend Merle Haggard touts green energy" says one of today's Yahoo News headlines..... Speaking of Merle the Pearl, the Sublime Frequencies label, and various other very colorful energies, all and more are discussed in an extensive recent interview with Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, Sublime Frequencies, Alvarius B, you know) that has been conducted and posted by an Athens, Georgia-based online concern called Sweet Pea Review. Part of the reason it's so extensive is that each question by Sweet Pea editor J. Kaw is practically an entire post-graduate writing assignment all by itself, but at least he's serious, tackles big ideas, and understands where the Girls are coming from (he points out that, among other things, they are "exploring the space between literature and music"). He understands Sublime Frequencies too, and either way Bishop is unfazed by the questions and offers many generous responses, including one to Chris Bohn's editorial "hit piece" in The Wire from about a year ago.... SONG ALERT! This last Friday at work Ministry's 1995 cover of Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay" popped up on a co-worker's iPod. I didn't know such a thing had ever existed, but now I'm kinda obsessed with it. They play it as straight as they can, which ends up being glorious, a sloth-paced heart-sick junk-sick arena-rock future-Oi! heavy-metal ballad from hell, booming in my head all weekend. I'm so out-of-the-loop when it comes to file-sharing I actually had to go to YouTube and check out the original made-for-MTV video just to hear it again, but this morning it had been removed due to "use violation." Weird. The song can still be heard on YouTube here, with visuals that are actually a little better, but only use half the song, and part of the charm of the thing is the way it just keeps on going..... And oh, hey, here's a page about almond milk in medieval times, complete with recipe. Here in the modern times, it's my 3rd favorite drink in the world, right after water and coffee. (4th place is BEER.) FEB 16 2007 (THE PAINTED TIMBERS) LAYING
DOWN THE GAUNT-LET: FEB 18 2007 (FIRST DAY OF VERDUN)
CIRCLE FEB 20 2007 (THIRD DAY OF VERDUN)
Thought I’d take a little bit of time today to muse on one of my favorite lyrics: “But to live outside the law, you must be honest.” That's the big D talkin', from the 1966 song “Absolutely Sweet Marie”, side 3 of Blonde on Blonde. Just ten words, but it’s pretty much an entire goddamn guide to life. Lemmy might think so too -- 30 years after Blonde on Blonde was released he copped the line for the Motörhead song "Overnight Sensation," and arguably improved it a little (“To live outside the law, my dear you gotta give a damn”). Well, it turns out Dylan had done a little copping himself in the first place, as pointed out in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, in an impressive defense of plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem called “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Y'see, in a 1958 film noir called The Lineup, directed by Don Siegel, written by Stirling Silliphant, a character says, “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” Lethem figures Dylan saw it, and yeah, I guess he must've, huh? I thought about it again today because I was reading a little book called The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison, a real fun 1961 pulp sci-fi mix of space operatics and hard-boiled con-man stuff, and I came across this passage: “You’re a criminal," I muttered through clenched teeth, and spat on a NO SPITTING sign. "You hate the law and live happily without it. You are a law unto yourself, and the most honest man in the galaxy." So now I'm wondering, did Harry Harrison ever see The Lineup? And did Dylan read The Stainless Steel Rat? You never know, maybe that sci-fi geek Jimi Hendrix lent it to him.... AND IN OTHER NEWS.....
FEB 21 2007 (FOURTH DAY OF VERDUN) FROM SUNCITYGIRLS.COM/NEWS: "With deep regret, we must announce that Charles Gocher passed away yesterday in Seattle due to a long battle with cancer at the age of 54. He is survived by the two of us who adopted him as a brother 25 years ago and his many friends around the world. He will be missed more than most could ever know. Our thanks to everyone for their support and encouragement during the past three, very difficult years. Many of you were not aware that Charles was ill and that’s because he wanted it that way. Details of a memorial in his honor will be announced soon. ---Alan and Richard Bishop" Even 10 years of having my mind blown repeatedly by multiple Sun City Girls records didn't prepare me for finally seeing Charles Gocher play live at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, November 2002. He was great throughout the show, but at one point the man embarked on a full-fledged drum solo, in a style that funneled Elvin Jones, Buddy Rich, Han Bennink, and lots of other natural phenomena, human and otherwise, through all the humor, guts, weirdness, and passion of a true American individual. As the crowd hollered and laughed with joy, I clearly hallucinated that his drum kit was sliding forward to the front of the stage as he played, sort of like an arena rock concert drum riser gimmick, but on a much more human and mysterious scale. (Magic for thousands is easy, but magic for 300? 400? That's when you really have to be good.) At some point after Alan and Rick had joined back in, I realized that the drum kit was back where it had always been, of course. As great as he could sound on the records, seeing him live revealed so much more. (As one astute anonymous commenter on the internet described this week: "Charles sometimes played above the cymbals. Just played air.") And I'm sure anyone who ever saw a Sun City Girls show can remember with glee the way he would emphatically rise from his drum chair in the middle of a song or improvisation and continue playing while standing, darting all over his kit -- the energy level in the room, already uncommonly high, would rise right along with him. "If you get people watching, you can experiment. One of mine is to watch a person and throw in a rimshot every time they blink their eyes. Because eye-blinking is an involuntary response, they don't understand that I'm playing their eyes blinking. The more I hit the snare as hard as I can when they blink, the more they're going to blink their eyes.......We've always been into ecstatic kinetic motion, senselessly throwing ourselves around our instruments, turning people in the audience into instruments, playing people, playing the kinetics of crowd motion. Like when people are more interested in the social aspects of being there, or when you get enough people so that it's like an ocean-herd, warm waves moving through cold waves of water. We've gone out of our way to watch crowd flow and draw them into what we're doing." (Charles Gocher in "Invasion of the Tiniest Vikings," interview with Sun City Girls by Seymour Glass, Forced Exposure #15, Summer 1989) "He was standing on the chair, balancing on one foot and scat singing to a prepared tape, while also conducting," Rick explains. "He was freaking me out, man. We wanted him to join the band right then, and we didn't even know he played drums!" (from "Hiding in Plain Sight" by Mike McGonigal, Seattle Weekly, April 14, 2004) And, even before I could fully comprehend Gocher's musical skills, he had already blown me away as a writer. There was the "Riddle Child Abuse" piece in Forced Exposure #18, and the piece published on the insert that came with the Torch of the Mystics CD, but of course not even these prepared the world for the huge sprawling 1996 masterwork that was Dante's Disneyland Inferno. If Time Magazine put Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen comic book on their 2005 list of "the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present," I'm thinking this double-CD set should've been on there too. I now realize that it was very much a group effort, both lyrically and musically, but back when I first got it home and would put it on for rapturous and terrifying headphone sessions, I was basically convinced that the whole thing was emanating directly from Gocher's brain, with no actual musical instruments involved. "Sexy Graveyard," "The Brothers Unconnected," "A Man is an Insect is a Flame," "A Secret Revealed Unwittingly," "The Ballad of (D)Anger," "Let's Pretend," "Family of Nails"....so many classics, and that's just scratching the surface. I still believe that he and the band, regardless of what their primary medium might be, are the truest heir to William S. Burroughs my generation will see. Like Burroughs, Gocher had the ability to take what could seem like a straightforward narrative and patiently infect it with the fantastic and absurd and horrifying by steady degrees, and more importantly, he had the kind of GUTS that Burroughs had, a very rare thing. But, beyond the noir surrealism, his concepts could be completely unique from Burroughs, involving history, archaeology, intense philosophical inquiry, and more. Like everyone in Sun City Girls, he was/is a true multifaceted original. Right now, I'm thinking of two of his more gentle narratives, "The Bearded Hermes" and "Charles Gocher Sr." The former was recorded live on WFMU in 1990 and appeared on their 1993 compilation They Came, They Played, They Blocked The Driveway. You can listen to it here on WFMU's website, and below is the text of "Charles Gocher Sr." as it appears on Dante's, no further commentary necessary. Hello. My name is Charles Gocher, Sr. I was this gentleman's father. I was born in San Leandro, California, in 1906, and died in Los Angeles in 1964. Charlie was very young then. Right now, his song is paying homage to the past. You folks might not realize this, but every one person in each of your ancestral chains is very important to you, because without each link's role in continuing your lineage, you would never have been born. Listen to him as he plays his song, and its meaning will become clear. He's discovered a new method of cheating the cycles of Hindustan. He's donated his body to Columbia University's Musical Sciences Department. After he's passed through this form, the department will take his body, remove the skeleton, and hollow out the bone marrow. They will be used as instruments for a thirteen-piece orchestra. The eight bones that comprised his arms and legs will have trumpet mouthpieces attached to one end, and will be used as horns. The five remaining bone sections -- the rib cage, the hip bone, the shoulder bone, the back bone, and the skull -- will be used as the percussion instruments, with the hands and the feet serving as the beaters. The musicians will be instructed in the methods taken from his writings pertaining to improvisational music. During the orchestra's performance -- delivered annually on November 12, his birthday -- his internal organs, preserved in a canopic jar sitting on the stage front, will be guarded by a young Nepalese milkmaiden who, during the course of each ceremony, will fall into an ecstatic possession trance, and invoke his spirit in the same manner as he is invoking mine right now. Listen to his song. Let me leave you with one last thought: if his idea seems too preposterous, and if you don't believe in the reincarnation of the soul, how do you know that we're not all dead already? FEB 24 2007 (THE UNRECOVERED OCEAN)
BORBETOMAGUS
SATURDAY SUNDAY FEB 25 2007 (BODY OF LOVE)
BLUES
CONTROL * * * Saturday 3/3
@ 134 Louis * * * Thursday 3/8
@ The Bank * * * Friday 3/9
@ Cafe Bourbon Street * * * Saturday 3/10
@ Optima Shithole * * * Sunday 3/11
@ Empty Bottle * * * Monday 3/12
@ Lemp * * * Wednesday
3/14 @ Mini-cine * * * Friday 3/16
@ Spiro's * * * Saturday 3/17
@ House Of Tinnitus * * * Sunday 3/18
@ The Treehouse * * * Tuesday 3/20
@ AC Temple * * * Wednesday
3/21 @ Ruby Green * * * Thursday 3/22
@ Butcher Block Gallery * * *
Friday 3/23
@ The Icehouse * * * Saturday 3/24
@ Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar * * * Monday 3/26
@ Velvet Lounge * * * Tuesday 3/27
@ Big Jar Books * * * Saturday 3/31
@ Fort Sunshine FEB 27 (BROOM
DAY) I keep thinking
of Charlie Gocher because I'm feeling his spirit all over the
place, and I don't mean that sentimentally, I mean it empirically.
I feel it when I'm cooking dinner and there's more than one burner
going on the stove, or when I'm telling a tall tale to my son;
right now, there's a weird icy rain going on outside and, in all
seriousness, every time a delicate spiny flurry of the stuff hits
my window it sounds like something Charlie could and would fearlessly
play on the drums. To make a more obvious example, earlier tonight
I was listening to a little Birth of the Cool, and one
quick little Max Roach turnaround somewhere in the middle sounded
just like it could've been Charlie playing -- even the recording
quality suddenly had the same whiff as a SCG guerilla job. In
fact, all the jazz I've heard this week has made me think of Gocher,
from the very old-school stuff we were listening to at work (Louis
Armstrong, Gene Krupa), all the way to Coltrane's Live in
Seattle, an album he was something of an expert on. He loved
jazz and was, simply put, a great drummer in the jazz tradition,
a rare link to a culture not only pre-internet and pre-punk, but
even pre-rock. Many anecdotes have been posted here and there
since the announcement on February 20, and one of the good ones
on the Sun
City Girls MySpace page has him crashed in the backseat
of a car after a night of revelry, about to pass out, giving some
sound advice: "You gotta listen to Art Tatum." FEB 28 2007 (THE UNSPOKEN VOWS)
LIVE
ON WBLSTD (77.7 FM CHICAGO) BLASTITUDE
#23 CLICK
HERE FOR BLASTITUDE #22 CLICK
HERE FOR BLASTITUDE #21 CLICK
HERE FOR BLASTITUDE #20 AND HERE FOR MORE |
.jpg)
I've
done that this week too, and it was nice, but right now I'm listening
to Sun Ra, who often makes me think of Sun City
Girls, and vice versa (angels and demons at play, you know). Indirectly,
the folks at 
On Jupiter (aka Seductive
Fantasy) is
a little more upbeat, starting off with the title track, a joyful
and slippery June Tyson-led soul-jazz showcase, and then hitting
with the totally weird disco-funky "UFO" tune, which
mixes up bad-ass funk-band horn blasts (including a super-tough
trumpet solo by Ray), psychedelic wah-wah guitar, and, as usual
for the Arkestra, would-be driving rhythms lost deep in post-orbital
space-wobble, topped with an unstoppable hook of a chant. This
one goes "U....U-U-UFO," over and
over, sounding like some dusted Marvin Gaye sci-fi dream. On the
flip side, "Seductive Fantasy" stretches out for the
duration, a soulful epic that starts languid and pretty a la Omniverse,
but calmly works its way into some very knotty and out-there territory
before it's done. It goes just as far as the stuff from late 1960s,
but the trip there is slower, quieter and calmer. Just like 1940s
bebop subsided into 1950s cool jazz, it was inevitable that in
the 1970s, fire music would either burn out completely or have
to reduce heat to a simmer -- Ra often chose the latter option
and made a lot of beautiful music. 
But then again, we've got the sublimely titled Voice
of the Eternal Tomorrow (aka The Rose Hue Mansions of
the Sun) from 1980, and there's absolutely nothing
cool about it. This is terrifying fire music, one of the most
disorienting and raging forays I've ever heard from an Arkestra,
and that's saying something. About three or four minutes in, the
band drops out and Sonny tears into a downright brutal electric
organ solo, obviously plugged into his secret 'destroy planet
earth now' pedal. Elsewhere, the Arkestra employs a full-group
stop-and-start blast style that just devastates. The whole thing
really has to be heard to be believed, and when I say "beautiful"
it's a very specific kind of beauty, sort of like all the pretty
colors you would see if your very soul was hung out in front of
you on a clothesline, or if you were large enough to watch an
entire star system implode. 
