The Jimmy Castor Bunch are mostly known for their one-off mega-hit whose sexual politics were dubious even in 1972. The shock is just how good the rest of the album is — a blast of funk fused psychedelic soul that’s as serious as life, truth and death.
Part eighteen of the Solid Time of Change aired Saturday October-8-2016 c/o CiTR.FM.101.9.
Youtube playlist (not entirely inaccurate).
This continues to be Randophonic’s main focus, our overlong yet incomplete history of the so-called Prog Rock era (presented in countdown form) – 661 selections from 1965 through 1979 with which we hope to do justice to a strange and ambitious time indeed, musically speaking.
Part eighteen of the journey went as follows:
Fresh episodes air pretty much every Saturday night, starting 11 pm (Pacific time) c/o CiTR.FM.101.9, with streaming and download options available within twenty-four hours via our Facebook.
“From the earliest, best, least over-played phase of the Steve Miller Band‘s million mile odyssey through the culture (it’s still going on, apparently), three songs that all sort of flow as one. You know it’s still the 1960s when it’s a white guy singing a sort of psychedelic blues and doing a relevant job of it. Somehow that didn’t much manage to survive into the 1970s.” (Philip Random)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUzRJmEPuSc
In which ex-Beatle John cries foul at the imprisonment of his friend John Sinclair (artist, shit-disturber, manager of the MC5) who was busted for two joints of marijuana, thrown in jail for ten years. Welcome to Richard Nixon’s America. Found on 1972’s Sometime in New York City, an album which was not well received at the time. Or as Philip Random puts it, “Definitive proof that Yoko really can’t sing and John, for all his musical genius, still has to at least try for a album to be even half-way good. Feel free to skip this one, except John Sinclair, of course.”
“In which then still young Neil Young draws the obvious connection as early as 1974 between the vampire’s bloodlust and western man’s need for oil. In other words, we’re junkies, willing to kill for a fix. And kill we mostly blatantly did in 1991. And then again in 2003. No Blood For Oil said all the anti-War posters and placards, but they were missing the point. The oil was blood. It still is. And we’re still killing for it.” (Philip Random)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEx1C9O7lVk
In which the Moody Blues go deep and wide and high, and remind us why they were once considered pretty darned cool. Philip Random recalls listening to Melancholy Man a lot while reading Lord of the Rings for the first time “… as a mostly uncool, pre-driver’s license teen with absolutely nothing better to do one long hot summer, stuck in somebody else’s cottage, there being only one even remotely decent album in the vicinity – This Is The Moody Blues (who knows how it got there?). I still think of Bilbo Baggins finally getting old whenever I hear Melancholy Man and I didn’t even know what melancholy meant at the time, just felt it anyway, all that deep sorrow and regret, particularly once the mellotron sweeps in for the kill.”
Randophonic 