Monthly Archives: February 2017

825. I lost my head

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Gentle Giant were weird even for a so-called prog rock band, determined to push every envelope available, and then some. Philip Random recalls discovering them on TV late one night. “One of those live concert shows. 1976, I’m pretty sure, because I was still in high school. They immediately reminded me of Jethro Tull, except they just took everything further in a wigged out medieval sort of way – tooting recorders, plunking harpsichords, tutting strange harmonies. And then things got to rocking and and heads were most definitely lost.”

826. for the turnstiles

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Neil Young, reluctant rock star, still smarting from the heroin deaths of two good friends, sits on a vague beach on a vague day and plucks his banjo, waxing skeptically (if not cynically) about the nature of the game he’s playing. Apparently they were imbibing a lot of strong hemp product during the recording of this album. You’d never know.

neilyoung-1974

29. Solid Time of Change

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Installment #29 of the Solid Time of Change aired on Saturday February-18-2016 (c/o CiTR.FM.101.9).

Podcast (Solid Time begins a few minutes in). Youtube playlist (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-29

Part Twenty-Nine of the journey went as follows:

  1. Buffalo Springfield – broken arrow
  2. Electric Light Orchestra – Shangri-La
  3. Aphrodite’s Child – the system
  4. Aphrodite’s Child- seven trumpets
  5. Aphrodite’s Child – Altamont
  6. Tommy James + the Shondells – crimson and clover
  7. Barclay James Harvest – suicide
  8. Barclay James Harvest – hymn
  9. Gentle Giant – the runaway
  10. King Crimson – cat food
  11. King Crimson – groon
  12. Fleetwood Mac – oh well
  13. Genesis – ripples
  14. Genesis – in the rapids
  15. Genesis – it
  16. Genesis – watcher of the skies [live]

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.

827. Mozambique

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Sometimes the true genius of Bob Dylan is revealed not via some high reaching paradox infused poetry of chaos and apocalypse (or whatever), but when he’s just casually tossing something off, like this little ditty about grooving away in exotic Mozambique, found on 1976’s Desire, his last truly necessary album of the decade, unless you had a hunger for fire and brimstone and long trains slowly coming.

dylan-1976-makeup

828. waiting for the end of the world

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“In which young Elvis Costello smartly, smugly reminds us of what we were all doing back in 1977, and probably last week for that matter. For me, it started when I was maybe seven, flipping through one of those Time-Life picture books about the planet Earth. It told me the world was going to end in about four billion years. An inconceivably long time for sure, but still The End. In a small, yet significant way, everything suddenly changed, such that a few years later, when I started getting clear on things like the arms race, the Doomsday Clock, global thermo-nuclear war, Apocalypse in our time – well, it wasn’t such a big deal, I was already waiting for it.” (Philip Random)

elviscostello-aimistrue

829. dig a pony

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A comparatively un-heard Beatles track (found on Let it Be), and one that John Lennon (its composer) wrote off as ‘a piece of garbage’, and yet it still made it to that famous rooftop concert. “What it is, is kind of loose, kind of incomplete, kind of confusing. In other words, it’s the truth about the Beatles as things were all falling apart. I’ll take it over Long And Winding Road any day, or Yesterday for that matter.” (Philip Random)

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