Weeley Festival, 1971

I'd go again: all those great acts. And Ted's cider. Though to be clear, we took that with us.

Maggot Brain - Eddie Hazel and Funkadelic, 1971

Feel the Parlance and Shit

When I checked, I was surprised I hadn't written about this song before. That said, if you like guitar music, especially psychedelic guitar and you know this 10 minute gem, there isn't really anything I can write that will add to your existing awe. If you haven't heard it before, then you can't really like psychedelic guitar music because you don't know this epitome of the genre. There's Hendrix of course at the apex, but this is a singular contribution by Eddie Hazel right up there on a level par.

George Clinton speaks the opening lyrics to this otherwise instrumental body-and-mind musical massage:

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y'all have knocked her up.
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit.
Come on Maggot Brain
Go on Maggot Brain

and what follows moves between scream and caress where fuzz and wah wah and delay, coupled with an acoustic underlay but most importantly the sweetest melody to - in the parlance of the day, and without the need for other enhancement - blow you away.

The YouTube version below cuts out the spoken introduction, which is fine.

Richie Havens - Alarm Clock, 1971 - Top Fifty

Deserved Ripples

I was saddened to hear of the death of Richie Havens, who passed, aged 72, on the 22^nd April. This is a sentiment and line becoming all too frequent of late, but not surprising as musicians with whom I grew up as a teenager – so themselves already or just being established musically as young adults – are of an age where this will be more common.

Having been away in the Lakes last week I have only just found out. So the sadness is deepened a little by the fact that Haven’s death did not register more widely. If at home I would have ‘heard’ as I touch base daily with music sites for reviews and information, but even though I was able to go to a local cafe to use their WiFi for quickly checking emails, and I got a daily newspaper and watched the TV news, his death hadn’t registered enough to be reported. Lesser ‘popular’ stars would, I’m sure, have created larger if less distinguished ripples.

Quite by coincidence, I had during the week been thinking about my musical Top Fifty [see – even when away from home and not writing on the blog I am somewhat consumed by the insular world it provides for me] and wondering if Richie Havens should have a place there. He is without doubt a favourite artist of mine. It is his distinctive vocal – at times quite a growl, but at others a soft and resonating folk vocal – and of course the guitar playing, open-tuned with a famously, aggressively strummed style. This style was brought to my attention and so many others with his opening performance at Woodstock – obviously through the film version – and his mesmerising and commanding stage presence with, as we now know, impromptu jamming as he was asked by the organisers to extend his performance as other acts were held up in traffic [if you are from another planet and haven't seen/heard, check out the stunning Freedom here].  

It isn’t his death that sways me to include Alarm Clock in my Top Fifty, but it does provide me the opportunity to honour him by its inclusion. This is one of the first few albums with which I grew up musically and in many other respects, so it was played a considerable amount. It is beautiful – the song I am listening to as I write is the self-penned [with Roth and Margoleff] End of the Season, with its unusual, for this album, orchestral accompaniment, acknowledged on the album as a string arrangement by Bill Shepherd, but surely it is a Moog Synthesiser dominating the background. It is a lovely song with Havens’ deep vocal and the heightened drama of that arrangement.

The title track is quite a bluesy number, Havens’ signature rhythm driving the beat and Paul Williams providing some funky lead guitar. It has a jamming/live element that appealed particularly then, reminiscent of the Woodstock performance [the cd version runs at 7.17 to accentuate this feel, compared with the vinyl at 5.17].

Havens was a great interpreter of others’ songs, especially the Beatles, and Alarm Clock opens with a beautiful cover of the beautiful George Harrison number Here Comes The Sun. Third track Younger Men Grow Older is another Havens/Roth song and its apparent gentle lyricism about age and wisdom and hopes for the future encapsulates perfectly the ideals of the Woodstock generation, that initial sweet focus tempered ruefully by reflections on the destruction of war and assault on the environment. Fourth track Girls Don’t Run Away, written by Havens, is gorgeous, if plaintive, and lyrically also reflects well on preoccupations of this generation, here the ‘generation gap’ and a mother who does not understand/appreciate her daughter, and an urge that the daughter should stand up for herself and seek independence. Such musical folk excellence was heightened by a storytelling which so deeply tapped into the contemporary listeners’ thoughts and feelings. 

January 1941- April 2013

John Martyn - Bless the Weather, 1971 - Top Fifty

Bless John Martyn

If I was only allowed one album out of all that I have and even all that are available from forever, it would be John Martyn’s Bless The Weather. And if similarly I was only allowed one song out of all those available in the infinite musical universe, it would be Head and Heart from this album.

This third solo album presents John at his sweetest – the sweetest songwriting, the sweetest vocal and the sweetest guitar playing, all as on opener Go Easy with its honeyed guitar chords and the youthful vocal register so different to the gruff slur and growl of John’s eventual vocal instrument. Second and title track Bless the Weather is of course a classic in the broadest sense but also in Martyn’s oeuvre, the distinctive slap guitar playing of John himself and then the accompaniment of great pal and genius double bass player Danny Thompson, a match made in whatever sonic heaven oversees such musical gifts bestowed on this aural world and where John now roars and jokes in a Scottish accent utterly incomprehensible and yet innately and cosmically endearing. The expressions of emotion in both these opening tracks reflect all of the happy hope and positive romanticism for life and love we all then had a right to wish for and now embrace  wherever it was achieved and still endures - whatever loss being tempered by the beautiful expression of that initial idealism.

John with Danny

Third track Sugar Lump reminds us that John was also a rocker and a rogue - the boogie rhythms, the punchy harmonica and the guitar licks presenting his other great musicality; the lyrics reflecting his naughtiness, his wicked charm [of course there’s a long blues tradition of lyrical innuendo aped here, but John was also hilariously obscene when performing, especially in his expletive-laden banter with Danny on stage]: Get down mama to my sugar cube/Get down mama, won’t you try to make it move, my sugar cube.

Tracks four and five, respectively Walk To The Water and Just Now, are further examples of the felicity Martyn had with prettiness in melody and sentiment at this time, the former graced with the surprise of steel drums, the latter the simplest and yet sweetest strummed guitar with piano accompaniment presenting a gorgeous song, reminiscent of a folk sound honed on his two previous albums with then wife Beverley.

John and Beverley

And then there is sixth Head and Heart, a song gently but profoundly honest in its expression of love where fear is so much a part of its declaration. The guitar work is again classic Martyn with the slap and pluck of the rhythm and then quick lead licks, Danny Thompson bending his notes and running them up and down in that magical partnership, and the lyrical poetry of lines like

Only got my fate

A bird above you

You know we all get scared from time to time

Love me with your head and heart

Love me from the very start

Love me with your head and heart

Love me like a child

Seventh is the plaintive beauty of Let The Good Things Come with Beverley echoing lines in the background, and eighth is another in the treasure chest of these sweetly crafted gems, the tender Back Down The River – guitar and vocal in the sweet symbiosis of this folk quintessence and time in Martyn’s career.

Not really true - Island was shrewd and commercial enough to see the greater potential in John going solo; and it is technically his third solo album

The penultimate instrumental Glistening Glyndebourne introduces the jazz aura that would become an increasingly strong influence in Martyn’s writing and performance, but more importantly, it introduces the electro-acoustic cosmos of Martyn’s guitar world, here presented through the echoplex prism which electronically echoed and repeated and swirled the beautiful melodies and skills of John’s playing. As I have written elsewhere, it was at Essex University in Colchester where I first heard John playing with his echoplex, having gone to see and hear this acoustic folk god which Bless the Weather had introduced, when at some stage in the set and suddenly without warning John flicked a switch somewhere on a machine and in my and most other unsuspecting heads, and this psychedelic tsunami of echoing sound surged through the PA which, as they say, blew me away. If there was one musical experience that I could relive, it would be this special and extraordinary one which to this day amazes in its recalled surprise and joy.

The album closes on another surprise, John’s simple version of Singin’ In The Rain with all its folk jollity and skill in the guitar playing.

It must be obvious that even though I am not going to produce a chronology for my whole Top Fifty – whenever eventually finished – this album will definitely be at the top. It is there first and foremost for the music, but also for the memories of a time in my life where such perfection in that music and honest joy in its lyrical expressions encapsulated genuine content. The encapsulation also of full awe – no diminishing qualifier for this album!

In The Dark

Van Der Graaf Generator - Live at Weeley Festival 28th August, 1971

Came across this bootleg recording recently and it is a great capture of the energy and experimentation that was VDGG at the time and at a festival I have written before about attending, not that I recall as much as I would like, for example whether I saw this performance or not. But any excuse to mention this amazing festival again, and post some images of it that were placed in the cover design for this recording. I did see VDGG a few times, though again when and where is hazy, but once was at Felixstowe. Ultra-brilliant psychedelia and stagecraft.

There are very few recording of the Weeley Festival: there is mine which I really must transfer off its cassette onto some cleaned and preservable format; there is a little of King Crimson that I have from somewhere else, and there is a vinyl of the Pink Fairies' performance that I purchased some time ago which is virtually unlistenable - bastards didn't advertise that in the promotion.