1 from 60

One small step and one giant leap I am

yet to make, and given a year – one hopes

when so many seem to be stumbling down

dead, silly old fools – there are plenty of days

for anticipation and practice. Arrived at the

precipice of Fifty and hanging on for life [how

mock morbidity is an art-form for deflection and

deferring], looking down is, I would guess, the

wrong way to be viewing things. Here I am

three hundred and sixty four days away from

twenty one thousand five hundred and fifty –

I have added the fractions and rounded up, all

time being precious – and at the very least such

sums reflect a creative mind secure if shifty.

Alvin Lee - Still On The Road To Freedom

Symmetry

There is a symmetry in the release of Lee’s final album Still On The Road to Freedom last year – sad to state after his death yesterday – in how its title echoes that of his first solo release of 1973 On The Road to Freedom, and the fact that the final track Love Like a Man 2 is a reprise of the Ten Years After classic from the band’s 1970 album Cricklewood Green.

Forty years after that initial solo album, this is a work that continues the thoughtful boogie and blues of Lee’s highly respected career, and as a solo artist the music was always more expansive than just blistering solos, not that those solos are unwelcome nor missing entirely. Indeed, opener Still On The Road to Freedom contains riffs that highlight Lee’s continued skill and speed, though it is masterful rather than blistering. Lee’s signature vocal is also very evident for example on chugging blues and fourth track Save My Stuff, graced with a short and simple acoustic solo, and instrumental focus given over to harmonica. There’s rock’n’roll in the jaunty I’m a Lucky Man and lively electric guitar throughout. Sixth Walk On, Walk Tall is a simple acoustic folk number, and that simplicity characterises the confident comfort of the whole, with no need to grandstand. Eighth Song of the Red Rock Mountains is an acoustic instrumental and it is beautiful, again simply realised but perfectly so.

There’s a wittily ironic reflection on the past with tenth track Back In ‘69, commenting on the hippie ideal compared with its lineage through to today [one imagines it observing on the most extreme and obnoxious example of someone like Ted Nugent] and again there is some brief but welcome guitar virtuosity. All the tracks are relatively brisk, as with penultimate Rock You, a funky number that could have happily grooved the listener for some time but simply teases at 1.35. It does, however, set us up for closer Love Like a Man 2 at nearly seven minutes, the longest track on the album. We finish on again a simple and familiar riff with the guitar work at times deceptively complex and skilled because it is there in the back and through the mix rather than foregrounded at volume. That is perhaps the finest example of Lee’s comfort with his talent and life as a musician, sadly ended too soon. There is a closing hidden track too on this album, which seems to empathise with that observation, a gentle and pretty acoustic solo that delights but is over very quickly. One thing we can say of Lee’s career is that he packed much of considerable value and worth into those 40 years, both critically and we can assume personally with a loving family who have observed on his death ‘We have lost a wonderful and much loved father and companion, the world has lost a truly great and gifted musician.’

Alvin Lee

Extraordinary web site, especially chronicling the Tens Years After years with rare photos and newspaper clippings - and much more: here

Alvin Lee - 19th December, 1944 - 6th March, 2013

Very sad to hear the news of the death today of Alvin Lee, phenomenal guitarist famously of Ten Years After. It is increasingly upsetting to see so many of the musical generation that shaped my interest in and love of music are passing on. My first experience with Ten Years After was buying their album Stonedhenge, which is still my favourite, especially Lee's own song Hear Me Calling. Like so many will no doubt feel, his performance at Woodstock [seen by me and millions of others in the documentary Woodtsock] could arguably be said to have stolen the show. It was, and still is, electrifying.

The Greatest Show on Earth - Horizons, 1970 - Top Fifty

Clever Stuff

Released in 1970 on Harvest, this is one of my favourite albums being special in having been purchased – I wish I could remember where – entirely on the strength of the cover, and perhaps where it was spotted: in London maybe, but I really have no recollection.

It is notable for the lead singer’s gravelly vocal and a horn section tailored to emulate the success of American bands like Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Chicago. There is also a strong organ presence, as on the swirling opening to first track Sunflower Morning. The singer Colin Horton Jennings replaced original American vocalist Ozzie Lane and the band’s apparent soul leanings [I haven’t heard anything before this album].

I think in many ways that though this is seen as progressive rock, and very much the Harvest label’s attempts to pursue and promote this genre at such an apt time, it is very much pop rock – the tunes having the former sensibilities with the horn arrangements wrapped around, and Jennings’ vocal giving it the clear rock credibility. Take second track Angelina which is a fine pop tune, but at 2 minutes into the song, it breaks to the melody’s instrumental riff that itself breaks into a superb freeform trumpet solo, the thumping riff continued in the background with horns and organ in unison. Third track Skylight Man is a weird amalgam of lounge horns, then fuzz, a little organ, then angelic vocals before that B,S &T pumping horn riff kicks in. I think it is quite distinctive in both its time and since.

Fifth Day of the Lady begins with a strange musical requisite of the time, a fairground ditty [with the noise of a door closing....?] which then converts to quite a pretty folk song with guitar and mandolin runs and close vocal harmonies. Sixth Real Cool World is a wonderfully pompous horn-driven number with semi-manic laughing and great downward organ rolls around the strident horns, and then a blazing fuzz guitar solo. This song has absolutely everything melodramatic and memorable. Seventh I Fought For Love is one of the most psychedelic, beginning with sustained fuzz guitar and a powerful organ combination, and then a soft vocal is treated to some exaggerated echo effects before Jennings’ signature rasp picks up the melody. There is a thumping – literally – interlude accompanied by organ and then staccato horns [again, echoes of B,S & T], and then it ends on some beautiful vocal harmonies, again pinched off by echoing effects.

The title song is a fourteen minute rousing concoction of more horns and fuzz to start, and then organ and horns dancing together, quite funky at times. There is a different kind of musical requisite here, the drum solo which is excellent [they always were, come on], then a bass with flute segment [with the fine flute solo played by Jennings], and it arrives back to another fuzzed-out guitar solo by Garth Watt-Roy which is then joined by Mick Deacon on organ: a genuine instrumental progressive gem of that period and genre, especially as the fuzz and organ end on an Iron Butterfly  heaviness and the song returns to its funky opening theme.

The album ends on an acoustic sweetness with Again and Again, Jennings singing sweetly to start and the flute providing a tinge of folk prettiness – that is, until the song moves into another pop-rock piece of heightened action. It is very clever, and very much a shame that this is an album that doesn’t seem to have attained the same status as others of this time. 

Jimi Hendrix - People, Hell and Angels

Astonishing?

My vinyl copy arrived today and though the album itself isn't astonishing [well it is because it is Hendrix, a paradoxical theme of this brief post] I have been excited as if this was the first time, an urge to relive I would guess what it was like all that time ago.

I would regard myself as a significant fan of Hendrix, buying his first three albums as a teenager when they came out and being blown away all the time; thinking Hendrix on Woodstock was phenomenal: that pronouncement on the anthem, and then the pure beauty of the lyrical guitar to follow and see out the close of the film [a snippet of this as Villanova Junction being the last track on this album]; going downstairs to my basement bedroom in Oakland, Iowa - an awful small American town of small-mindedness trying to close me in before I escaped forever back to England - to cry my teenage eyes out the day he died, and his posters all over my walls still today. I think that makes me a genuine fan.

But I really haven't followed the industry of releases over the years; not even the albums post Electric Ladyland - I have them of course, but I didn't/don't listen or care for them as I do those first three. All of this really as a preamble to the fact that whilst I understand there isn't anything that new on this album as it's been collected and heard in various versions all over the place - it is fresh enough to me not having followed those years of releases [like the much 'bigger' fans than me have done]. But even though these therefore have that sense of the new by not being known [and therefore technically not astonishing in their 'newness' but astonishing because Hendrix is the personification of that adjective] I do genuinely like the raw simplicity of the playing, which in that simplicity is still......you know the word.

Not much need then to really review individual tacks, though I'll comment that there is a soul and funky feel to quite a bit, most obviously on Let Me Move You, and opener Earth Blues is brilliant just in the playing of rhythm guitar, and then second Somewhere is signature fuzz and wah-wah - and with Jimi in such fine voice, and especially in the mix - then there's Hear My Train a Comin' which is a thumping version, and a glorious solo - so I could go on and review, but there's no need, and I just enjoy being a kid again every now and then so that's what I'm doing in listening.

Note how Some Awe gets in on the act, twice.

The Tower of Babel, ed. Rupert Loydell - like this press

I am very pleased to be a part of this project, a limited edition collection of writings on the idea/theme Tower of Babel. It includes an essay and original postcards and/or original painting by Rupert Loydell, depending on type of box purchased. Details here.

And Done

that sound of many sounds could just be inside

your head or my head

he said you said i said

                                         as if either matters when such

noise is made by so many morons

- and do you think you

hear the moronic ahead of my aural radar -

i could say fuck you in many languages but wouldn’t

stack them to detract and diminish any one salient,

resonant and crystal-clear vocal directing

he said you said i said

perhaps they all said the same at the same time the

same things that we are saying now

as if it matters when all is said

That Guy’s Story

It’s a full moon so I’ll have two/three/four shots

of Woodford Reserve, then throw out the last

ham hock and pig’s ear to the coyotes who can

sniff out and retrieve and disappear in their good

fortune.  I just want to turn off the brain, lie back

and listen to the stillness of the desert night.

What kind of noise does any of that make? Well,

the lady next door thinks it does and I said a lot

but kept from saying what I wanted about her dog

yelping. I asked if she heard any uncomfortable

noise from this side like ladies screaming for pleasure

in my back yard. I stood on my third step later and

let the entire neighbourhood know how I felt. It’s

Saturday and I’ll be an ass if she starts again tonight.

Jimi Hendrix - Original Posters

Just ahead of the release of People, Hell and Angels and receipt of my vinyl copy, I'm posting pics of three original Hendrix posters hanging on my walls at home, circa 1968/69 I would guess. I do have facsimile concert posters as well which I have already posted:

Ocean Colour Scene - Painting

Nostalgic Integrity

Not surprisingly, Ocean Colour Scene’s continued reliance on being influenced from the past appeals strongly to me, and the NME’s rating of 6/10 for this latest release and a criticism of that tendency endorses both their musical predispositions as well as mine.

All the tracks pretty much demonstrate their strong 60s affiliations, and a significant nod to the Beatles in harmonies and arrangements. Seventh Professor Perplexity reflects this well both in its title and the use of basic echo effects in the song; opener We Don’t Look in the Mirror, with the recorded voices of children at its start, is firmly planted in a mid to late 60s garden where Moody Blues flowers abound with their sweet fragrances. One of the stronger emotive songs is If God Made Everyone, starting acoustically to rise into a Whoesque/Daltry shout, the rhetorical angst aimed very contemporarily at Norwegian Simon Behring Breivik and his killing spree. A naive question certainly, but no less poignant for the asking. Tenth A Winning Side continues the earnest protest with a mother’s lament for her dead soldier son’s wasted life in war, presumably Afghanistan but universal both in its sentiment and that continued 60s/70s naivety which is only made so because such a question needs to be asked after all these years.

So, ‘earnest’ both in its lyrical concerns as well as homage to a musical past, this won’t therefore appeal to those searching for a new direction, but it is genuine enough as a tenth album from a band surviving firmly beyond their Britpop years with integrity.