Monthly Archives: December 2016

879. Hey Joni

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“A Sonic Youth song about Joni Mitchell (or so I think I read somewhere years ago), found on 1988’s Daydream Nation, a four-sided psychedelic monster if there ever was one (even if it did show up in a most un-psychedelic year). Or whatever. I’ve always had trouble putting words to Daydream Nation kicking as it did through all the gloom and permafrost of its time, like an unexpected future full of cool and fierce and infinitely complex noise, and in that complexity hope, I guess. Because I did need it.” (Philip Random)

sonicyouth-1988-02

880. hope for the heartbeat

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNthGqPb9nY

Bill Nelson first got some notice via the ill-fated glam-art-prog-whatever outfit Be-Bop Deluxe for whom he sang and unleashed gobsmacking guitar wizardry. But come 1982’s The Love That Whirls (diary of a thinking heart), his fifth solo release, he’d ditched the guitar, gone all-in with keyboards, drum machines, tape loops, the future in general. And hopeful it was in an artful sort of way.

billnelson-1982

 

24. The Solid Time Of Change

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Instalment Twenty-Four of the Solid Time of Change aired Saturday December-3-2016 c/o CiTR.FM.101.9.

Podcast (Solid Time starts a few minutes in). Youtube playlist (incomplete and not entirely accurate).

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.

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Part Twenty-Four of the journey went as follows:

  1. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – solar fire
  2. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – as above so below
  3. Strawbs – queen of dreams
  4. Moody Blues – in the beginning
  5. Queen – in lap of the gods
  6. Queen – she makes me (stormtrooper in stilletos)
  7. Queen – in lap of the gods … revisited
  8. David Bowie – big brother
  9. David Bowie – chant of the ever circling skeletal family
  10. Rolling Stones – she’s a rainbow
  11. Wings – nineteen hundred and eighty-five
  12. David Essex – rock on
  13. Van Der Graaf Generator – darkness [11-11]
  14. Steve Miller Band – in my first mind
  15. Steve Miller Band – the beauty of time is that it’s snowing [psychedelic B.B.]
  16. King Crimson – happy family
  17. Brian Eno – the great pretender
  18. Residents – The Eskimo Edit

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.

881. Pluto the Dog

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Manfred Mann started with jazz in his native South Africa, switched to the blues in early 1960s Britain and eventually got some international pop success. But come the 1970s, the times they were a-changing again. Now it was Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and things were getting expansive, progressive even, with Pluto the Dog a funky little number that featured the the kind of wigged out synthesizer freakout that the free world has never had enough of, then or now.

manfredmann-1973

882. this is pop?

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Note the question mark in the title. This is XTC telling it like it was in early 1978 – everybody confused about the new wild sound that was tumbling out of the punk eruptions and eviscerations of the previous year. But what was it? New Wave, claimed the marketing types, but that didn’t mean anything. That was just a way of selling stuff that wasn’t disco or metal or prog or just boring old rock. What it was, was pop, bullshit free, for the moment and all time.

xtc-1978

883. announcement

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_qq0oiMoWY

Side one track one of possibly the greatest album ever, Negativland‘s Escape From Noise isn’t a song, but an announcement. Which is appropriate for 1987, it being a year where music didn’t suck so much as NOISE suddenly felt way too relevant.  And nobody’s ever done NOISE as superlatively, as hilariously , as relevantly as Negativland, from suburban San Francisco (or is it Oakland?) – wherever Contra Costa County is.

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