One of those Leonard Cohen songs you just never seem to hear. Possibly because it’s too long, though more likely because it’s thus far eluded the grasp of half-baked MOR interpreters. “Some people seem to hate this song. Probably because it is so long and relentless in its truth, as simple as a man with his hand out on the winter street, bitterly cold, barely hanging on, and all he asks is that you not ignore him, that you not just pass him by one more time.” (Philip Random)
“I stumbled onto Tom Waits through the movies (the songs he did for Francis Coppola’s One From the Heart mess, the beat hipster he played in Coppola’s Rumblefish, the idiot on the run in Down By Law) so I guess it makes sense that I think of him more as a showbiz guy than the essential musical force that some seem to. Yeah, he can lay down the gravely depths, but how much of that is just acting, pretending, NOT real blues, soul, whatever. But then you hear something like Hang Down Your Head, which is the kind of song Bruce Springsteen only wishes he could write, and you realize you’re probably wrong.”
“In which the Spacemen 3 sing the somnambulant praises of being so f***ing high, you may as well be hanging with God’s own son. Found on their first album and a bunch of other places, it’s rumoured to be completely concerned with heroin. But don’t be fooled, kids. Heroin’s a liar. Ain’t no heaven on earth.” (Philip Random)
Speaking of that Indonesian monkey chant that Vic Coppersmith-Heaven had so much fun with in the early 1980s, here’s Jade Warrior from almost a decade previous, taking it on from a more acidic angle. Jade Warrior being one of those outfits that made the pre-punk 70s such an endlessly cosmic delight, dropping a steady diet of instrumental non-hits, that mostly tended to just float along, with occasional eruptions.
Vic Coppersmith-Heaven (now there’s a name) was a sound guy, producer, engineer (big in the early days of punk and before), who somewhere along the line, got his own thing going, tripping out some very earthbound grooves and sounds, including working with a certain monkey chant (from both beyond and before time) indigenous to the Indonesian backwoods. “I found Pengosekan on on 1982’s Music + Rhythm, a fundraiser for Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival and, in retrospect, one of my essential compilation albums of the decade. So-called World Music started there. At least, it did for me.” (Philip Random)
Even Stevie Wonder could see it by 1972 – just how f**ed up everything was, particularly if you were stuck in the ghetto, and the whole world was a ghetto in 1972, even that quaint, white, dull as death suburb you called home. Yet there was still hope, there had to be, because the music was just so beautiful.
Randophonic 
