Monthly Archives: January 2017

849. mind at the end of the tether

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It’s 1987 and Tackhead are already delivering it, even as Public Enemy are talking about  bringing it. The Noise, that is. Big beats, no bullshit, as many samples as you can jam into two inches of audio tape. And in the case of Tackhead, genuinely hot playing, because they were most definitely a band. “I seem to remember the original 12-inch single version of Mind at the End of the Tether being the better one – stronger, less cluttered. But the version on the Tape Time album speaks its the truth regardless. Superlative and loud and surrounded by tracks of equal cacophony. If you truly wish to know what the latter part of the mid-80s felt like, start here.” (Philip Random)

27. The Solid Time Of Change

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Installment #27 of the Solid Time of Change aired on Saturday January-21-2016 (c/o CiTR.FM.101.9).

Podcast (Solid Time begins a few minutes in). Youtube playlist (incomplete and somewhat inaccurate).

The Solid Time of Change is our overlong yet incomplete history of the so-called Prog Rock era – 661 selections from 1965 through 1979 with which we hope to do justice to a strange and ambitious time indeed, musically speaking.

solid-crop-27

Part Twenty-Seven of the journey went as follows:

  1. Santana – A1 funk, every step of the way
  2. Jesus Christ Superstar Original London Cast – heaven on their minds
  3. Jimi Hendrix – third stone from the sun
  4. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – earth hymn [1+2]
  5. Elton John – Madman Across the Water
  6. Klaatu – around the universe in eighty days
  7. FM – one o’clock tomorrow
  8. Agitation Free – you will play for us today
  9. Agitation Free – Khan el Khalili
  10. Agitation Free – Ala Tul
  11. Magma – de futura

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 page.

851. she’s like heroin to me

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“The Gun Club were punk badasses out of L.A. who did much of the dirty work of rescuing the blues way back when, releasing them back into the swamp where they belong, or as I remember someone shouting in my ear in the late ’70s sometime, ‘Punk killed the blues, and a good thing too.’ But good things never die, do they?  They just mutate, reinvent, re-emerge, with 1981’s Fire Of Love all the evidence required: the full-on rush of punk and the muck of the bayou (that crossroad where the real stuff never dies), maybe put it at the service of some dangerous poetry about a girl so heavy, she’s like heroin – never misses the vein. Hell yeah.” (Philip Random)

gunclub-1981

852. I Me Mine

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It turns out that I Me Mine was the very last Beatles track to be recorded, and it makes sense — a rant on the topic of ego from George Harrison who’d always had a hard time getting his songs on the albums — something he was about to make up for, big time. But that’s another story.

beatles-imemine

853. clear as the driven snow

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“There ought to be a law that when a band changes its sound as thoroughly as the Doobie Brothers did in the mid-1970s, it should also be required to change its name, if only so future generations don’t get forever stuck confusing the cool, rocking stuff with the soft, latter day sponge ball stuff.  Anyway, for the record, the Doobies peaked in about 1973 with an album called The Captain and Me that didn’t just boast mega-hit rockers like China Grove and Long Train Runnin’, it also had a stretched out mini-epic called Clear As The Driven Snow. Apparently it’s about cocaine abuse, but it’s always been more of a marijuana fave of mine.” (Philip Random)