EyeMusic 66

 

History of America

Chicken and Egg...

America’s eponymous debut album seemed curious in being launched on the back of their seminal hit single A Horse With No Name and yet this track didn’t appear on it. The reality is this isn’t the exact chronology of that release: it came out initially in 1971 to apparently only moderate success, but after recording some additional material, including the then Desert Song – latter renamed AHWNN after going down well in live performance – it was re-released in 1972 with the song included and going to number 1 in the United States.

That didn’t make any difference to me. I already had the first release as I bought it soon after radio play of A Horse... here in England, where the three main band members lived, but obviously before the re-release. It became an instant favourite and a song filling then and full now of poignant memories encompassing falling in love – I probably should just leave it there as a finite romantic observation – but also all of the other paraphernalia attached to growing up in the early 70s.

The three core members of Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek were living at an American Air Force base in West Ruislip, London – attending London Central High School – and I felt I had an affinity with them, also an American living in England, and the comparisons stretch even further from there: I listened to great music; America made it.

Their musical map was plotted on the geography of west coast harmony a la Crosby, Stills and Nash, but it is a definable enough terrain. Beckley and Bunnell have distinctive vocals, and indeed continued as the band after Dan Peek left in 1977 (he passed away in 2011), and their songwriting and acoustic guitar playing are idiosyncratic within this expansive genre.

A Horse With No Name is the fifth track on the re-release and it is the simplest of acoustic strumming with a melody line that is almost monosyllabic over a driving beat up to the memorable chorus. What carries it there, of course, are the obtuse but mesmerising lyrics, the la la, la la la la harmonising providing a hiatus for reflection on what has been intoned by the ungrammatical storytelling of there ain’t no one for to give you no pain: screw double negatives if it scans. The transformation of the desert to sea, the significance of nine days, the release of the horse, the exhausted naming that ends up observing things, and humans, that are loveless – it is a wondrous landscape of meaningless words creating meaning if we just listen and absorb.

The album ends on the Pigeon Song which I have always liked and sung aloud for the sinister nonsense of its hillbilly nihilism: Well I had me a pigeon / By the name of Fred / But I done shot him / In the head // Had me a railroad / Down on the ridge / But I done blowed up / The bridge // Had me a dog / He was my best friend / But to him / I done put an end // Had me a farm / Sittin’ pretty on the hill / But if you look / It ain’t there still // I don’t know why I done it / Honest it ain’t like me / But I ain’t sad now I done it /‘Cause a baby boy has got to be free.

(chapter from my memoir Holding On to Me in Lockdown)

 

Kaya Street - The Soul Sessions

 

 

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Space Music 40

 

Eye Music 65

 

Southern Fried Groove Queens - That's When the Blues Begins, album review

A Stonking Tribute to the Blues

I fired up the stereo because it was a cd to play, and glad I did. I listen to so much digital music at the pc (though let’s be clear: it’s through a Marshall Stanmore III speaker, that usually on 50, right in my face) but the stereo volume was way up from last time I used, and on opener Rattle Down, it begins with snare and hi-hat setting a beat, guitar suggesting itself, and then on 30 seconds, the blues raucous really begins with all that volume set and ready to make me beam a smile. What a start!

Second That’s When the Blues Begins is not just the title track, but also a composition by UK Blues supremo Julia Piper – sadly passed – to whom this EP is dedicated. Hall and Piper’s ‘re-imagining’ of this is a funky blues with thundering chorus emerging from its swamp layers.

 

Lucy Piper (Julian’s daughter) is on drums, and Lee Hall is on guitars, vocals and harmonica. I’m going to go ahead and say it: on this track the singing reminds me a little of a young Jack Bruce.

 

Authentic Delta blues, the whole also reminds me of classic British blues in all of its repurposing glory (if you'll embrace the paradox...). There is wonderful stomp and sublime slide; a driving rhythm of drums propelling this fine duo – check out the slithering and the beat on Nobody’s Fault But Mine.

 

The final on this fine tribute and showcase is Trouble Come My Way, and this is glorious. Hall has a great voice, and this sultry blues is graced with the rhythmic boom of drums, a haunting harmonica, with the tandem vocal&guitar melodic line both soothing and brooding.

 

 

Southern Fried Groove Queens has played locally a number of times and I have definitely missed out, no doubt, on a memorable live experience. Perhaps I can put that right one day, but for now I have the genuine joy of this EP, which is now on its third play as I come to the end of this highly recommending review.

 

To buy (and you should consider) you can contact Lucy here: https://www.facebook.com/lucypiperdrums

 

 

Celebrating One Million Page Views

It only took fourteen years...

I began this blog on 6^th January 2011. In that year I wrote 432 album reviews (maybe a live gig or two). This year I have made only 23 posts – most being my themed album cover ones – with only 7 album reviews.

In this genuinely potted history, I do want to balance that ‘decline’ detail in reviews with the announcement that my site has to date had one million page views! That’s 1,016,779 to be precise: a figure I only confirmed yesterday (having last checked and posted when it was just over 700,000).

 

I have always loved and listened to loads of music, and do so now as much as back in 2011. But back then, I wanted a place to write (love of writing and a need to write) and thus set up the music blog. I felt I had a lot to say about past and contemporary music.

 

Having retired from teaching in 2010, I had more time to write, and did so intensely on Some Diurnal Aural Awe (that 'daily' reference the impulse and design). Long story short, my writing focus has shifted from music reviews to poetry, but domestic commitments have changed over that period to significantly lessen the time I have for album reviews. I listen to the music when writing other things: as I wrote this, it was St. Vincent - Todos Nacen Gritando.