Monthly Archives: June 2017

743. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

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If you were a little kid in the late 1960s early 1970s, your life was full of this kind of stuff. Various pop orchestras taking on the hits of the day, delivering mostly average versions. But every now and then, someone got it just right, like Roland Shaw, whose take on the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service theme is punchier, more revved up, better than the original in pretty much every way. The perfect soundtrack for bombing around on your banana bike, rooting out all the evil geniuses who were plotting world destruction from their suburban lairs two blocks over.

744. the visitors

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“Listening to Abba is like having a bath, then going to bed with freshly cleaned sheets. Or so I heard it put way back when, the 1970s. But by the time the 1980s hit, the culture no longer had time for such luxuriant cleanliness. So Abba effected a change, got darker, deeper, paranoid even. Which worked for me, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard The Visitors popping up at a wedding.” (Philip Random)

(photo: Michael Ochs)

745. Now is the Time

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It took samplers a while to get cheap enough to fall into the hands of sort of folks who could figure out how to truly make them sing, with Greater Than One (mostly long forgotten now) one of the first to get what now seems bloody obvious. That is, take Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech, add an opera sample or two, plus various odd ball sound effects, even some Sandinista era Clash and Brain Salad Surgery Emerson Lake + Palmer, then just lay everything over some cool grooves and call it a song. And the thing is, it worked brilliantly, it humanized the machinery, and it abruptly reinvented the music of the near future as an impossibly odd and yet beautiful Frankenstein’s monster of possibilities wherein the entirety of recorded history was just lying there, waiting to be treated, twisted, appropriated, manipulated, abused and exploited. But then, of course, the f***ing lawyers got involved.

GreaterThanOne

38. The Solid Time Of Change

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Installment #38 of the Solid Time of Change aired on Saturday May-27-2017 (c/o CiTR.FM.101.9).

Youtube playlist (sadly 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-39

Part Thirty-Eight of the journey went as follows:

  1. National Health – squarer for Maud
  2. Pink Floyd – interstellar overdrive
  3. Procol Harum – in held twas in I [edit]
  4. Moody Blues – nights in white satin
  5. Moody Blues – The Dream
  6. Moody Blues – have you heard [part-1]
  7. Moody Blues – the voyage
  8. Moody Blues – have you heard [part-2]
  9. Strawbs – new world
  10. Strawbs – the life auction
  11. Strawbs – ghosts
  12. Mike Oldfield – tubular bells [pieces]

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.

746. healing

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The genius of Todd Rundgren is that he can do anything – pop, soul, rock, prog, abstract avant whatever. The worst thing about Todd Rundgren is that’s exactly what he does a little too often — anything and everything all at the same time, and it all just ends up getting in the way of itself. But not so the title track of Healing (which ends up filling all of side two). It’s 1981 and drum machines and synths and sequencers are the cool new toys of the moment, and, genius that he is, Todd knows exactly how to play with them, to genuine therapeutic effect.