In which Neil Young waxes sad and beautiful about leaving home and finding himself on an asphalt highway bending through libraries and museums, galaxies and stars. Found on the acoustic side of 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, the album where Mr. Young faced the punk whirlwind, found it relevant, and thus ensured that (unlike most of his contemporaries) he would neither burn out nor fade away, but keep on keeping on.
It’s 1972 and Gordon Lightfoot, Canada’s greatest ever upright (but never uptight) baritone folkie, is standing tall amid the wasteland of stoned hippies and corrupt elders that defined the times, tilting diligently at windmills as nobility demanded. Because somebody had to do it.
In which the alien aka David Jones aka David Bowie comes clean and reveals he’s really human after all. “I remember hearing this a lot in 1980 – memories of Ronald Raygun running hard for the White House, the hostage thing ongoing in Iran, a clash of civilizations apparently … the realization of how utterly doomed and damned we all were if couldn’t find a common humanity beneath all our bullshit gods and politics. The supreme challenge of learning to live with someone else’s mental and spiritual health issues. Same as it ever was.” (Philip Random)
Part Twenty-Two of the Solid Time of Change aired Saturday November-19-2016 c/o CiTR.FM.101.9.
Podcast (Solid Time begins a few minutes in). Youtube playlist (incomplete and 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 Twenty-Two 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.
Joe Higgs (the man who taught Bob Marley how to sing) delivers yet another sort of lost hit from way back when, that murky part of the 1970s when reggae still hadn’t really been discovered by the rest of the world and yet, no coincidence, was probably at its best.
George Dekker (straight outa Jamaica) delivers a timeless anthem of rather uplifting despair, if such is possible. Because things are always getting worse, just turn on the news, which is no reason to stop moving. “I remember a work friend whose younger brother was dying of Hodgkin’s. She loved this song. I’d ask her how things were. She’d raise a triumphant fist and declare, Things Are Getting Worse.” (Philip Random)
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