Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band • Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969)

I completely missed the anniversary. Earlier this month, 40 years ago Frank Zappa summoned the Captain and his Magic Band to his home studio for a preview of their assembled album. Dressed in Sunday best (after all, it was Easter) intently they listened. The Captain was overjoyed, the Band relived. Perhaps now they would be free of his artistic and physical cruelty. A year of living in absolute poverty and under near cult like circumstances had payed off. Little could they imagine that in the years to come, in reverent awe, people would still speak of this work.
For as wild as free jazz was, and that by 1968/1969 it was perfectly OK to sit and play your bongos in the dirt, nothing sounded like this. Keeping to the credo of mutations, with their awkwardly placed limbs causing a shambling gate, causing fear and revulsion to all they encounter, the music has the same frightening assault on the senses. To the untrained ear the music sounds wrong. Clashing time signatures - every instrument sounds in conflict. The Captains wounded animal howling vocals laying lyrics that are products of schizophrenia yet are deeply insightful. Ironically they seem to be concerned about how mean humans can be to each other. This is just too much for dull minds...
There have been scores of musicians that have attempted to incorporate the Magic Band sound, but it just hasn't worked. What makes the playing here so unique is the amount of control that is cleverly disguised. To the untrained, this just seems like a sonic free for all. If it was it just wouldn't have worked.
Little hints of regular rhythm here and there, but the melding of free jazz and delta blues seems to obscure anything below the surface. But if you stick with it you'll get it, just throw out the preconceived notion of what comprises a song. This is the sound of nature. Anima does not compose straight lines, and that rule applies here. A melody may only need to play 7 bars even though the song is 24 long, but it works. Any more and there would be excess, and in reflection of the times when album tracks were getting longer and longer the songs are economical. Can you imagine any other band getting 28 pieces on a double album?
1969 was the watershed year for 60's wretchedness - Woodstock, the accession of the Grateful Dead come readily to mind, but thankfully we have from that year an album that transcended music and became art.

Please click on the review title for the track: Hair Pie I / untitled / dialog / Hobo Chang Ba. These were taped at the Trout Mask House when the album was to be recorded there as a "Ethnic Field Recording". While they lack Vliet's vocals, his absence shows how complex and almost Rites Of Spring like the music is.

Sun Dial • Other Way Out (Tangerine, 1990)

What are the elements of Deja Vu? It was once isolated to a fine gauze not unlike ectoplasm but some how less definite. As my colleagues and I finally were able to get the filament to materialize in the sterile confines of the glass tank, a cleaning person opened a window in the research facilities hallway and that very motion came a vague hint of a draft. With that seemingly insignificant action, the element was some how able to be whisked away and we were left with the feeling that we had seen this before, but couldn't tell why...

Sun Dial's Other Way Out album has that same quality. While released in 1990, with eyes closed you would swear that you were listening to a contemporary of early Pink Floyd or Czar. Didn't this band play U.F.O., why do I think I saw them open for The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown? I think I even have the concert poster around here some where, it was an Osiris production...

Their act of confounding time travel must be applauded. It was fashionable to embrace psychedelia then in idea, but the secrets of the kingdom was still slumbering. For as many portals were sighted, very few would open enough to let two people though at a time. Some how this three piece band was able to. The whole album reeks of a lived in past. Guitars are thick and intelligently distorted, real drums pound with conviction, straight forward bass playing, fazed vocals, and exotic flutes and percussion abound.

Knowing a good thing and being incredibly prolific in their first year of existence, head Sun Dial Guitarist Gary Raymond released a number of compilation tracks and reissued Other Way Out with different covers and track listings. Here is where things get confusing. No mention is made of what tracks were from the above mentioned compilations. As of 2006 Other Way Out is on its fourth reissue, now a double CD with the second disc containing outtakes and compilation tracks. The well know version of the album released on UFO Compact Discs was a relative contemporary of the Tangerine issue but had different mixes of the songs.

Either version is a stunning debut that very few pull off, and the lauding offered at the time was well earned. About the time of release, they made a short tour of the United States with The Fur and Skin Trading Club and I was lucky enough to see them. This would be I believe their only tour, and if they toured again in this configuration. Subsequent Sun Dial recording would have only Raymond as a mainstay and the quality of records suffers. His side project Quad continued the same lysergic quality that has made Other Way Out a perennial favorite among connoisseurs, but regretfully the Quad recordings were limited issues and are now hard to come by. Hopefully he will one day release them on CD.

Until then we still have these recordings to sit back and let the intangible element known as Deja Vu to caress your ears.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Plains Of Nazca take one

Kenneth Anger (2.3.37 - )

February 3rd marks the 82nd birthday of Kenneth Anger. If for some odd reason you don't know that name, how you have survived through this journal is beyond me...that said, Fantoma has released in the past year or so two DVDs collecting his films. Go watch.

Much has been written about how he almost single handily started the music video, or that this was the first gay cinema to receive a wide audience, and his connection to The Rolling Stones / Led Zeppelin / Charles Manson, etc. All of that is true, but if you can watch the works with out the post modern malady of explaining everything, you will be rewardingly immersed in a world of frightful symmetry - Jungian ideas flying toward your subconscious with strobe light precision, and the self shrouded mysteries of Magick tantalizingly revealed.

For someone with a vast reputation he has surprisingly a small catalog. There are rumors of other titles, but either they are part of Anger's own myth making or they do exist and will be shown after his passing. I am never sure which to believe. But what is available is enough to keep me coming back. With each viewing I find new visual layers not perceived from the last time. These are films shot on limited budget yet they are amazing in their opulence. For a few minutes - his longest work runs roughly 38 minutes, the outside world falls away and you are transported to the time of Busby Berkley and the smell of opium...it is for these feats of Magick, I say Salute!

Blue Öyster Cult • Secret Treaties (Columbia, 1974)

When a mathematically inclined woodland creature admonishes you for your absence, you get writing...

Last night I was wandering around in the near frigid weather with a good friend, N. No Aswang is he, but not unlike the dreaded creature who disembowels it's self from it's lower torso to hunt, N's brain during the evening leaving the constraints of the day behind and is equally free to roam. As we wandered from place to place, he informed me in his inimitable way that perception is 9/10th of everything, and that his original perception of me was someone who is brooding, even slightly mean. But of course he has come to see the error in judgment. Yes, I have a perpetual furrowed brow, but it is just from contemplating how to perform some social operation better...

The same could be said of Blue Oyster Cult. Almost everyone is aware of the later hit singles - Don't Fear The Reaper, Godzilla, or even their somewhat flaccid peon to starlet Joan Crawford. And regretfully due to their ear crushing volume and less than welcoming imagery, they get lumped in with the lowest of Heavy Metal acts - Black Sabbath, et al. This is the disservice of perception. For if one peals away the electric Tod Browning airs, you have one of the more thoughtful loud bands, who by 1974 would unleash a thinking mans Sir Lord Baltimore.

Secret Treaties continues with Richard Meltzer's obscure Science Fiction lyrics from the previous albums, but this time it's welded to histrionic pop hooks and sonic textures. One wonders if there was a conscious effort by the band to adopt the sound of David Bowie, but because they were a bunch of Smarty Pants from Long Island, it comes off as the toughest guys at Creation Convention...Pissed off, the band is looking for Phil Suling, they were suppose to go on after the Red Sonja panel but they have been bumped for the Dr. Strange inkers meet and greet.

There is this wonderful mock villainy at play here, something that the aforementioned Black Sabbath just couldn't pull off. Granted when listening to either 'Sabbath or BOC, everyone most likely is stoned, but with BOC playing on the turntable I doubt the glue sniffers were in the room.

The overt downside to BOC is not being blessed with a band member possessing a great voice. The Jack Bruce school of vocals meets here, but the playing is so lethal and direct you almost welcome it. Without this flaw the band would have been the too imposing, making the music hard to enjoy.

While digging around on line I came across these two fascinating artifacts: BOC in concert with the supporting act Iggy & The Stooges, and then later in 1974 BOC with T.Rex. With the Stooges and T.Rex reaching their nadirs, what those evenings must have been like...

Word must be said to the passing of Ron Ashton. At their worst the Stooges sounded like Yummy Yummy Yummy played by a bunch of high functioning autistics, but at their best - which is often, it's true nihilistic joy. And there was Ashton's guitar giving a quick lesson on the difference between simple and simplistic.


Please click on the review title for selected track: Flaming Telepaths.

Rotary Connection • Peace (Cadet Concept, 1968)

Far be it for me to be a Scrooge - more likely I am the ghost of Christmas yet to come... Yesterday I had mentioned this album, and in the spirit of giving I am here to share what has to be the worlds only Psychedelic Soul Christmas LP.

The Rotary Connection was the brain child of Marshal Chess - to be a sort of hip 5th Dimension. Like most studio bands the personal is interchangeable, the only two mainstays in their 6 album out put were Mini Ripperton and Cadet arranger Charles Stepeny. For what ever reason the band never really excelled nationally, remaining a mid west region secret.

If Spector is regarded as the Richard Wagner of rock, then Stepney was the poor relation from the Chicago south side. While never straying too far from R & B, the arraignments of Peace fit comfortably with Hendrix influenced guitar heroics and and classical music. Floating above what could have been a horrible stew of ideas is Mini Ripperton's stunning voice. I played this album for some friends last year and they had thought her wailing on Silent Night was that of a theremin.

After one's ears get over the amazing production and playing you hear the lyrics, and that's where the one two punch connects. These are socially concerned topics, not your standard banal Merry Christmas tomes. Peace from war, poverty, consumer greed, and getting high to add extra color to the holidays is what the lyrics ask for. As much as I love Peace, I will concede that the production was probably too slick for the kids and the words too shocking for the squares. Both camps missed out, showing how alike they were after all...

Friends, I will let the illustration above left by Osmond Pittmann from 1899 say it for me.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Silent Night (instrumental).

The Beatles • Christmas Time Is Here Again! (Lyntone, 1967)

Seasons greetings! I may have been silent for a while, but do not fear for I have not abandoned this little endeavor. While I am still regretfully without a new place to practice my terrestrial skills, in this down time I have broadened my ears, and will soon share the bounty.

There are many Christmas records out there that always seem to get a spin no matter how atrocious they are.Band Aid's Do They know Its Christmas Time, or ELP's Father Christmas are two fine examples. And as has been proven time and time again the ones that smack of true genius get left behind. I had originally planed to share one of my absolute favorites; Peace by the Rotary Connection, but since Christmas is soon upon us, and inspiration has detoured me I will post one of my other top ten's - The Beatles 1967 Fan Club record.

I must confess - I am not a big fan of The Beatles. Without going in to my general disdain (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah) for them, I do have a liking for the 1966 to 1968 recordings. Most of all the Christmas messages from that time period. As the psychedelic age flourished, these recording amount to the equivalent of avant guard out takes; non sequitor radio plays, electronic music, cut ups, and all other forms of stoned humor. As other pop bands from that era fell on their faces trying to emulate The Beatles, for The Beatles it came as second nature. What is Sargent Pepper but a normalizing of Stockhausen, and admitting this grudgingly who pulled it off the best?

1967's recording finds them in God like unity, foreshadowing Monty Python's Flying Circus British absurdest humor - Lennon and Harrison as two ladies on a game show, or Ringo giving what is probably another Paul is dead clue; "Hello, hello? Operator, I've been cut off! It's an emergency! Cue dramatic orchestra strike, followed by the lyrics "O.U.T. spells out..." This recording practically drips LSD. All of this is caped off with a Peter Blake like home made cover by John and Ringo, with back cover art by Julian Lennon.

The remaining two Christmas singles would more reflect Luc Ferrari type audio verity, and while interesting do show the irreparable split that had come; Paul playing a Christmas song, John and Yoko walking around their estate, Ringo plugging his latest film, or George giving his time on the single to Tiny Tim. In light of these tracks, what was the big deal with Revolution #9?

Please click on the review title for selected track: Christmas Time Is Here Again!

The Mothers of invention • We're Only In It For The Money (Verve, 1968)

How different would my terrestrial teen age ears have been without the Mothers? They were the gateway for me to the world of "other"; music concrete, 20Th century classical, tape music, etc.

When I was first turned on to the Mothers of invention, and this album in particular, it was in Easter 1987. A friend and I had by chance encounter made the instant friendship with these two for lack of a better word freaks. His name was David, and regretfully the girlfriends name escapes me. He and her were older than my companion and I by a good 10 years. I'm not sure how I came to talk to them, but by the end of the day we all had become fast friends. Perhaps this is testimony to teenage naivety, or two 30 somethings desperate to relive the innocence of the first Be In held 20 years earlier, but all for of us stood out like sore thumbs in the tail end of Reagan's 1980's so a kinship was struck.

We all went back to David's apartment, who's location I don't recall, but it was the proverbial crash pad of someone with money. Darkly painted walls, well placed modernist lithographs hung on them, attempts to keep furnishings with the style of the railroad apartment. This place was everything a teenage mind feverish to escape the then still 50's suburbia of eastern Queens.

To say we didn't get stoned would be a lie. Nothing heavy, but we smoked pot and to my friend and I relatively unused lungs it certainly worked like it should. That night in an expansive state I heard three records that would forever spoil music for me. The first was second Silver Apples record - "Contact", The Electric Prunes "I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night), and The Mothers of invention's "We're Only In It For The Money". Nothing on the radio sounded like this. Screw the Beatles, they were overthrown from the opening seconds of You And I's airplane sound. By the time The Mother's LP was placed, my mind was sufficiently opened to all sort of sonic possibilities. While the preceding records all sounded fantastic and would dictate what music I would prefer from that night after, the edge was given to Zappa's lyrics. Falling somewhere between insightful and singable, he was completely saying a clear screw this to conformity - even if that conformity at the time was being practiced by Hippies. So amazed by that record, I requested to my hosts to play the record again...they we're more that happy to oblige.

Like all good altered states it ends and come the morning we all bid goodbye. While my friend and I saw them around a few times after here and there, the magic as all spent in that one evening...

So what to make of We're Only In It For The Money now? Even after a ill conceived CD remix by Zappa in 1986, and subsequent return of the (relatively) original mix later, none of the punch has been lost. The social commentary is sharp as ever, and the mixture of garage band and Music Concrete / 20Th century classical is jaw dropping. There is a cohesive whole to the LP that few before and after have had. Sargent Pepper is avant lite compared to this. I'm sure the Beatles heard of Stockhausen, they may have even had one of his recording's lying around in their homes, but Zappa lived and breathed the music. And as such, when it came to using unusual sounds, there isn't a taming town to their capabilities.

As the sonics is amazing, so is the packaging. Turning Sargent Peppers graphics inside out - literally, Zappa had created the ultimate fuck you. The Pop Art harmony of Peter Blake is given a swift kick to the balls by Carl Shenkel. Where the Beatles are surrounded by their idols (how egotistical can you get?), Zappa and Shenkel create a Dadaist nightmare crowd of anti hero's (Nosferatu, Jack Ruby), Freaks (members of United Mutations, and a young Don Vliet), machinery, and Jimi Hendrix...he doesn't play on the record, but appears as a honorary Mother.
Using the Sargent Pepper's inside photo as template for the cover, in either a move that skewers The Rolling Stones drag photo shoot for Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby. Standing In The Shadows? or calling the Fab Four a bunch of ladies, there sits the Mothers snarling and uneasy. A bunch of old guys in a teen age rock and roll band, now in dresses and wigs.

Staring out in Mona Lisa deadpan is Jimmy Carl Black (as stated on the record: "Hi boys and girls, I'm Jimmy Carl Black, and I'm the Indian of the group. heeh hehh heh"), who passed away this week at the age of 70.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Who Needs The Peace Corps?

11/04/08 - an election, 11/05/08 - a birthday

So the United States has a new President...it is hard to get my mind wrapped around that idea...the nightmare that was not unlike the barely nameable cosmic horrors that came to plague the small Vermont farming community of Appleton has come to an end. Surely you'll recall? For the sake of time those who don't remember the case will get the shorthand version; large sentient invertebrates living in local wells, allowed entry here by Jeb Malford's aligning certain properties just right in the hopes of saving his farm, locals becoming sick, the public disintegration of one Nelly O' Toole (age 7) at the towns school Christmas play, general upheaval leading to their dispelling and concurrently a surge in church membership...to the best of my knowledge they things are still residing in the town wells. You never really get rid of them completely. There they sit, having sacrificed the weak of their sect content in the knowledge that human attention spans are short. It will just be a matter of time before the great work begins again, and they can bring down their masters from the stars.

It is with this insight that I must say this warning. Liberals see Utopias. Utopias that will exist forever once reason is reached. Neo Cons on the other hand see Empire, and understand seasons.

Beside the election, another event far more personal is that of my birthday. Without going into much grousing about how the aging process is disappointing, where did the time go, where are my keys, etc. I bring you one of my favorite songs about growing old and refusing to go along with the idea.

Please click on the blog entry for selected track: Jefferson Airplane - Lather.

Nico • The Marble Index (Elektra, 1969)

I had reason to return recently to the Burrough of my birth. A long time associate has taken ill and is in the hospital. Traveling to the Crab Nebulae is easier, even if it does require a bone marrow replacement upon re-entry. But not complaining (at least not to my associate) I went...
As he lie in repose I could not help but marvel anew at the revaluation I had upon seeing a family member in the same state - everyone looks so small laying in a hospital bed. It's as if the body prepares for the final act of disappearance...

My associates distress is a mere infection of the leg and he'll be out in no time, so there isn't any need for worry. yet his recovery almost cheats the idea of a medical facility. While it is true they bring life into this world, spend enough time on Earth and they eventually become a repair shop. The flesh falters - life, eventually it'll kill you...

After my visit I had taken opportunity to walk around Downtown Flushing...How much has changed, and sadly not for the better. Where once eldritch buildings stood reflecting an amalgam of styles - Victorian through Art Deco, now everything has pretty much become just another shopping district where every building a glass box better to show off the merchandise residing inside. How sad that the RKO Kieth's sits a rusting mass. If a building could be said to be in a coma and kept on life support, this is it. With not enough potently commerce from it's rehabilitation, there it lies in state. The once grand marque now skeletal, glinting in the Autumn afternoon, as a anti beacon at the end of Main Street.

When one finds themselves in this mood of despairing nostalgia mixed with marvel what does one do? Well, since it's downtown Flushing you go get a roast pork bun, only to find that even that the place you bought them from is gone too...

Little did I remember what I had on my iPod that day. On the train ride in I was listening to various 45's and the Tea Company LP, by the time I reached the Hospital the last song was done playing; Make Love Not War with it's liberal cribbing from Help!. When I had left my associate the first notes I hear come through the earphones are that of a heavy piano chord, followed by airy celesta tones. The Marble Index's brief prelude was playing, clearing all that came before it.

The eight songs that follow occupy a unique space. On Nico's second album she abandons the folk rock approach of her first (Chelsea Girl). That album always sounded like a lesser extension of The Velvet Underground & Nico. And why not? Half of the songs there were written by either Reed or Cale, and the Velvets minus Mo Tucker often supply backing. On the Marble Index it's as if Chelsea Girl never existed, or could have even been done by the same person. The songs are all written by Nico and it is like she's invoking a Psychedelic Dark Ages. While Judy Collins or Odetta were updating sea shanties, Nico was delving deeper to Europe's past looking for melodies from the Black Plague.

Over Nico's simple harmonium sea saw style of playing, John Cale layers on musical accompaniment that at times are at odds to the quiet songs. On Lawns Of Dawn, the song is a example of Catatonia - repetitious lyrics that make little sense when repeated out loud are bathed in all forms of studio trickery. The quiet Celestia, deep tremolo bass, something that sounds like a slowed down Crows caw, slightly rhythmic slapping all swirl around her, sucking you down the Rabbit's hole. For a record recorded during 1968 and released almost a year later, nothing sounded even close, there just isn't any president. There were a few downer records released before it; Jefferson Airplane's Crown of Creation, HP Lovecraft's II, or even Pearls Before Swine's Balaclava, but almost as if out of nowhere is The Marble Index. It would take the 1980's Goth movement to utilize the sounds trail blazed by Nico and Cale, the melding of Slavic song form with Fluxis playing.

But before it can all be surmised as just proto art music for future generations of depressed teenagers, there is a deceptively simple song called Frozen Warnings. Nico's voice, surprisingly
strong when singing her own compositions is accompanied by layers of Cale's treated viola and organ. Building along the lines of minimalism, going from low C to high, it becomes a moment of clear beauty and respite in a often rewardingly harsh listening environment.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Lawns Of Dawns

Rudy Ray Moore • 1927 - 2008

Get the hearse warmed up, there's one more for the bone yard...
I first became aware of Moore sometime in the mid 1990's. Then - like now, I was going through a bout of unemployment. In that loafing time I was fortunate to have free time and access to a VCR through a then associate.
Kim's Video had just opened a branch at the former site of the Saint Mark's Baths. The 3rd floor of that former Bacchanal indoor pool was given to video rentals. At this point of the 1990's the gates of obscuria were creaking open. I often equate this to convergence of two events; CD production was becoming cheep, and almost everyone had a computer. Information was beginning to be freely shared. As so often when ancient knowledge is played with there are some down sides - fungoid entities with indefinite body shape are invoked resulting in their attempting to reclaim the Earth, or diseases that normally would only cause blindness in lampreys is modified to attack foreign peoples, such malfeasance is tempting.

It was in this proverbial Library of Alexandria that while paroozing through the Blaxploitation video isle loaded with titles I had only heard of, my eyes came upon one that made my mind stop in it's paces; "The Human Tornado".
Pulling out the box I had no reason to read the blurb on the back. The grainy photocopied cover with passable artwork was all I needed to know. There depicted was a stiffly drawn middle aged black man his fist caught in mid air swing, bad guys and their cars strewn in the air, buildings breaking apart, my eyes were on fire! It then dawned on me...this was the often spoken with absolute reverie...Dolemite...

I immediately paid the rental fee and brought it back to my then associate Mrs. D. We sat in jaw dropping awe as Dolemite Kunk-Fu'd in his tacky polyester pants, read dialog as if he just learned it that morning, destroying all logic going from scripted sentence to rap, and had no shame in exposing his person naked while in bed with a woman half his age. This one love making scene brings the roof down...literally...along with the walls and the floor.
This was heaven - true Mrs. D and I had seen Soul Cinema before, but there was nothing like this. Adding to that what were the odds that this was playing anywhere outside of Newark or Watts.

About the time of this discovery, Moore seemed to be having a career revival. There were small roles in low budget movies, ie: Bapps, and a return to live dates on the East Coast. By then when he was remembered there was the usual lip service that he was the God Father of rap. Absolute hogwash...Moore's humor while at it's base is blue, concurrently it was free of meanspiritedness, something that raps practitioners are proud of.

On one of Moores east coast dates he plaid Maxwells in Hoboken. How could I not go? As often the case seeing a legend coming out of retirement one is shocked as to how old the famous become. And there he was, on Maxwells small stage performing like someone's dirty Grandfather, admitting to his age (or at least around it), still sharp as in youth. Every raunchy line intact - no doddering around, no fumbling. Best of all he eschewed the urge to update his act. Jokes had clear beginning's, middles, and ends. It was all Borscht Belt via the Chitin' Circuit. Like so many other smaller performers he had a merchandise table set up. Besides posters and CD's there was the Official Rudy Ray Moore Back Scratcher, with extra reach...for your nuts...

The second time I had seen him was at the Lakeside Lounge, located on the Lower East Side - and regretfully in the year or so from the Maxwells gig the ever insatiable hipsters had elected him the must know of the moment. There was little if any give and take with the audience. Buy now he was regarded as an animatronic museum piece. His performance was still as sharp as before, but the crowd wanted the wild man of the 70's movies, and when presented with Moore sans Kung Fu and multiple camera shots, lost interest. There was a intermission leading to a second set, and growing weary of the room I elected to just catch him the next time he came to town. I don't believe he ever played here again...

So Rudy, as you leave this sometimes humorless mortal coil and travel stellar I bid you farewell. Confident that you will suffer no "Rat soup eating Motherfuckers" anymore.

Please click on the obituary title for selected track: The party goes on, part 2 - Crack me some nuts / Grow by the minute