1103. the bird

“Nobody’s ever going to care that much about what happened in 1997 unless they were born or maybe they lost their virginity, or they saw God on some acid trip. But the rest of us were all fixed on the End by then – the turning of the millennium, the future if we had one.  Maybe that’s why Tranquility Bass’s mega double album Let The Freak Flag Fly made so much sense. Techno-hippie types getting lost in the music and likely a whole lotta drugs (a full thirty years after the Summer of Love) on some unnamed Gulf Island, mixing everything up, wondering what god must look like.  Someone had to.”  (Philip Random)

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1104. paint work

The unfriendly passion of Fall main man Mark E. Smith finds weird perfection in a six and half minute riff that seems to have something to do with painting. The work of it. Shit happens, friends disappear, strangers interrupt, war is declared. You got to f*** it all off, keep at your work, else nothing ever gets finished. Which is rather how Paint Work sounds. Unfinished, yet nicely so.

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1105. Cortez the Killer

Mr. Neil Young and his horse friends at the very peak of their shambolic grandeur.  We credit and/or blame the Bolivian marching power that was all the rage at the time if you were a certain class of rock star or movie director (or the kind of person that hung with them) way back when in that cultural depression between the death of the Elvis and the Sex Pistols and whatever the hell happened next. Some have argued nothing — the world ended and it’s all been a feedback loop every since.

1106. dog breath, in the year of the plague

From the album Uncle Meat, wherein Mr. Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention mostly reject any notion of pursuing a consistent, definable direction, but settle instead for pretty much everything in all directions. And almost no one complained, except a few assholes in the back, but they all quit the freak scene soon anyway, and became Eagles fans.

1107. this is tao

As the album cover put it, “Never retract, never retreat, get the thing done and let them howl.” Such is Tao. As for Sons of Freedom, we’re still waiting for their proper reckoning as one of the great ROCK bands of the 1980s, particularly on that first album.

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1108. no opportunity necessary, no experience needed

It’s 1970 and the band known as Yes haven’t really figured out who they are yet, being still a couple of instrumental wizards short of achieving true escape velocity. Which doesn’t mean this re-imagining of an obscure Richie Havens song isn’t a pile of fun, all jazz riffs, stolen TV cowboy themes, and whatever else could be made to fit.

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