Author Archives: Randophonic

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About Randophonic

For now, I'm best thought of as a radio program. Sometimes it may seem I'm all the work of one person, other times many. What matters is the program.

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

710. I must not think bad thoughts

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In which first wave American punk band X (straight out of LA) rein in the intensity of their attack a touch and rather brilliantly nail down the zeitgeist circa 1983. Which was that, come year three of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, humanoid reptiles were in full ascendancy. Look no further than the radio dial. Where was any band that mattered? Nothing left to do but tell the truth.

X-1983

711. Panic in Detroit

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“As I remember it, David Bowie hit the suburbs of the Americas in comparatively slow motion. First came Space Oddity (a big deal AM radio hit in early 1973, some three years after it had hit big in the UK), then Ziggy Stardust (various album tracks popping up on FM radio), by which point you were starting to see pictures of the guy. Beyond freakish. Which were backed up by the inevitable rumours (that he actually was an alien, that he and Elton John were secretly married). But by the end of the year, all that stuff was settling, and it was the music you couldn’t ignore. So Much Great And Strange Music. So much so that a track like Panic in Detroit didn’t get near the attention it deserved. If only for the riff. You could base a whole genre on that riff. Which, it’s arguable, the Rolling Stones already had. But that’s another story.” (Philip Random)

Bowie-1973