Monthly Archives: July 2017

705. mea culpa

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“In which David Byrne and Brian Eno step outside of the Talking Heads for a bit and end up changing music forever. No, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts didn’t invent sampling (Holger Czukay was already messing around with disembodied voices inside and out of Can), but it did rather open the floodgates, with Mea Culpa proving ideal for heroic doses of LSD, assuming you were up to it. Which I wasn’t at least once — a gloomy January dusk, a riverbank in the flight path of the local airport, with a church in the distance. I became convinced a plane was going to crash into it. I don’t remember the rest.” (Philip Random)

Eno+Byrne-tea

706. Icarus Ascending

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In which we are reminded that it wasn’t Peter Gabriel’s split from Genesis that condemned them (and us) to the various attainments and atrocities that would come to define them through the 1980s – it was Steve Hackett‘s. Look no further than Please Don’t Touch, Hackett’s first post-Genesis solo excursion (he was still in the band for 1975’s Voyage of the Acolyte), its epic conclusion in particular. And yes, that is Richie Havens (the hippie folk guy that saved the day at Woodstock) laying down the heavy vocal gravity.

steveHackett-1978

707. Alaskan polar bear heater

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In which Severed Heads remind us that there’s joy in repetition, or maybe just madness; and truth in the notion that many of the so-called Industrial artists of the 1980s only got worse as they got better at figuring out their instruments and related technology, got to sounding more and more like normal musicians. In Severed Heads case, that means they’d peaked long before I ever heard them via any number of cassette only releases. But fortunately, that truth eventually found me via Clifford Darling, Please Don’t Live In The Past, a double vinyl compilation full of delightfully strange and, if needs be, antagonistic excursions. Alaskan Polar Bear Heater seems to concern a cocktail.

SeveredHeads-cassette

43. The Solid Time Of Change

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Installment #43 of the Solid Time of Change aired on Saturday July-8-2017 (c/o CiTR.FM.101.9).

Youtube playlist (not entirely accurate).

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-43

Part Forty-Three of the journey went as follows:

  1. Led Zeppelin – when the levee breaks
  2. Yes – roundabout
  3. Yes – Ritual [edit]
  4. Who – Dr Jimmy
  5. Who – the rock
  6. Who – love reign o’er me
  7. Gong – Radio Gnome Invisible
  8. Gong – Flying Teapot
  9. Gong – The Pot Head Pixies
  10. Gong – The Octave Doctors And The Crystal Machine
  11. Gong – Zero The Hero And The Witch’s Spell
  12. Gong – Witch’s Song/I Am Your Pussy

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.

708. somewhere over the rainbow

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“I first heard Bobby Blue Bland‘s take on this masterpiece of yearning wafting over a backyard barbeque sometime in the early 1990s. And it was good. I believe I was playing croquet at the time, taking it very seriously, understanding that it was far more than just a game, that it was in fact a working metaphor for the great and imponderable complexity of the universe, and man’s place in it, the games we really must play in order to reconcile it all for our small, but ever expanding brains and imaginations. I’m sure the LSD and Tequila helped.” (Philip Random)

(image source)

709. Oddfellows Local 151

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Come 1987, REM had already conquered the world of indie-cool with four solid albums of ever increasing finesse, articulation, even a hint of crossover commercial success. Which made album #5 Document pivotal in terms of what might happen next. Yes, it continued the commercial ascendancy, but it also went the other way with the likes of Oddfellows Local 151, a track that Peter Buck referred to at the time as either the worst thing they’d ever done, or the best, he wasn’t sure yet. Either way, its deep fried southern weirdness expanded the stage for one of those outfits who, love ’em or hate ’em, still had a long way to go.

REM-1987-live