3 posts tagged “mars volta”

The new Mars Volta album (The Bedlam in Goliath) has me listening to all the old ones again, so I'm not ready to move on from them yet.  Here's a video of a highly-abbreviated "L'Via L'Viaquez," one of my two favorite songs from my still-favorite Mars Volta album, Frances the Mute:

The Mighty Boosh's Rudi and Spider are not based on The Mars Volta, as far as I know, but they definitely share a common ancestry.  Big-haired dudes playing funky prog-rock are just part of the zeitgeist, I suppose, the New Sound for the 21st Century:

I'm not the first one to notice that "Goliath" from the new Mars Volta album sounds like King Crimson's 1969 prog-rock classic, "21st Century Schizoid Man," but I did arrive at that conclusion independently.  At just after the 4-minute mark they abandon all pretense that they're doing an original song (compare to "Schizoid" at 2:08):

Okay, so Cedric's lyrics and vocal melodies are different.  Still, I think "21st Century Schizoid Dude" would have been a better song title.

As happens so often, King Crimson's original song was another I learned about in reverse.  In ninth grade I was completely taken by Canadian AOR band April Wine.  "Roller" was one of my radio favorites, especially the part in the instrumental break where the three guitarists trade off the descending six-note motif.  That was on the First Glance album, their first after adding third guitarist Brian Greenway.  I rushed out to buy the next album, Harder...Faster (a little double entendre there, get it?), when it came out in 1979, and played it over and over and over.  The last song on the album is "21st Century Schizoid Man," sung by Greenway (instead of bandleader Myles Goodwyn); the jamming and stop-start unison playing on it is far beyond anything else they ever attempted.  It took about a year for me to connect the song to King Crimson, which then opened up a whole new world of music to me.  Here, then, is April Wine's version:

Cranking up The Mars Volta's Frances the Mute album the first time was revelatory, and it had me jumping around for days.  I caught up with their other albums afterwards, but none of them quite did it for me the way Frances did.  And now they have a new one out, as you may have heard, The Bedlam in Goliath.  They have also released five cover songs as bonus tracks.  One of them is "Memories"--

Listening to that the first time I recognized the tune; it took me a minute but I placed it as a song from Material's 1982 album, One Down.  It's a nice breather from the electronic funk of the rest of the album, and significant for being sung by a pre-solo-career Whitney Houston:

I had always assumed this "Memories" was either original to Material or an obscure R&B cover, but The Mars Volta listed it as a Soft Machine cover.  And sure enough, the first version of The Soft Machine--Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, and Mike Ratledge--recorded it in 1967 with producer Giorgio Gomelsky.  It never got beyond the demo stage, but has been released several times on "Soft Machine early years" albums:

But wait, there's more!  It wasn't actually a Soft Machine song originally, but a song written by bassist Hugh Hopper in the pre-Soft Machine band The Wilde Flowers.  The Wilde Flowers first recorded it as an instrumental, then added lyrics for a 1966 recording, with Robert Wyatt singing but not drumming:

Hugh Hopper joined The Soft Machine after their first (demo) recording of "Memories," and in 1969 the new SM lineup --Hopper, Wyatt, and Mike Ratledge--recorded "Memories" once again... but as The Wilde Flowers!

And that's only a part of the rather amazing history of this little song.  Luna Kafé has the definitive article on "Memories," the Dutch Progressive Rock Page has a complete Wilde Flowers chronology, and Richie Unterberger gets some interesting tidbits from Daevid Allen himself about the early Soft Machine.  I obviously still have a lot to learn about the swiftly-shifting alliances of those nascent prog rock years.