5 posts tagged “prog”
One of the great things about the sharity blogs is that many of the albums ripped, uploaded, and blogged are done so by fans. While some bloggers just cut and paste the Wikipedia or AMG entries for albums into their blog posts, others write a couple "why I like this record" paragraphs, and for me that often influences me to download and have a listen rather than pass. If a band has a fan who can articulate the reasons for their fandom, that makes a good case for me possibly liking it too. (On the other hand, even the worst bands have fans; ultimately the proof is in the listening.) So that's how I happened to be listening to the "second German only LP of excellent funky prog" by early 70s British blues-rock band Rumplestiltskin. I found it to be all right, with some inspired passages, but mostly rather plodding. And then track six opens up with a wildly funky guitar lick, and I had high hopes for the song; an acoustic guitar comes in, that doesn't bode well, but maybe it'll pick up; then some drums, not very funky, but still promising; and then it all fizzles out into a milquetoast vocal verse:
Things pick up in the middle of the song, with an uplifting "wizard gospel" chorus and then a repeat of that opening guitar lick, but it winds right back down. That got me thinking of the whole practice of crate digging (scouring boxes of old records for long-lost songs that might pack a modern dancefloor) and groove mining (scouring boxes of old records for long-lost songs that include funky bits that might be sampled and repurposed as a dance record rhythm loop); is that good? Is it right just to pick and choose bits of old records out of context without trying to appreciate the original organic whole that they came from? Well, it was trying to appreciate the whole that had me listening to the record in the first place, and I tried, but really I just like those few bits and pieces. And I don't think it's my fault for being shallow, I think the original organic whole just isn't good enough. (The second part of the description I quoted above is "by UK session/library heroes Alan Hawkshaw, Clem Cattini and Herbie Flowers amongst others," one of those others being guitarist Alan Parker. He laid down plenty of funky licks for library records; I'll try to dig up one or two prime examples for a future post.)
Then there are modern records which are little (or nothing) more than drumbeats; Shawn Lee has done several of them, and even James Brown's legendary drummer Clyde Stubblefield has made some. Some put some music over the beats, but not enough to make an actual song. Take the recent EP by MRR-ADM (Michael Raymond Russell & Adam Douglas Manella):
Finally, there are some works that need no manipulation to be recontextualized: for instance, Black Sabbath's heavy metal classic "Supernaut" needs little, if any, tweaking to fit into an industrial-groove set (but that hasn't stopped Al Jourgensen from covering it--twice):
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.
I don't only trawl through my archives, or the dusty corners of my brain, searching for music from decades past; I also keep half an ear open for music that's happening right now. Once in a very long while something new will pin my "Oh yeah!" meter; yesterday it was discovering Italian band Morkobot (or, as they write it, MoRkObOt) on the Anthem of the Space blog (not one that I explicitly monitor, but they send updates to Totally Fuzzy, which I do). MoRkObOt operate at the intersection of prog rock, noise, and electronica, which is a combination I don't recall hearing for several years, at least. I also discovered the video embedding feature of last.fm, which allows me to present the following MoRkObOt clip:
While I'm playing with last.fm, I might as well drop another video onto the blog. Here's a band I actually first heard on broadcast radio! Remember that? Of course it wasn't a commercial station, it was WICB, the Ithaca College radio station. The band is the Klaxons, the song I heard on the radio was "Gravity's Rainbow," the CD was a family favorite for a few weeks, and the video is for "Atlantis to Interzone":
On an unrelated note, I was particularly pleased with today's necktie.
