“Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation being arguably The Greatest Album Ever assuming you don’t mind a pile of noise mixed up with your raw yet mystical guitar stylings, Kissability being the kind of nugget that would’ve torn the charts apart in a better, cooler world. But good luck with that in the Winter of Hate, which is to say, 1988. Twenty years on from the Summer of Love, and trust that it rained every f***ing day. Nothing else to do but daydream.” (Philip Random)
Part nineteen of the Solid Time of Change aired Saturday October-22-2016 c/o CiTR.FM.101.9.
Podcast (Solid Time starts about five minutes in). Youtube playlist (incomplete and not entirely accurate).
This continues to be Randophonic’s main focus, our overlong yet incomplete history of the so-called Prog Rock era (presented in countdown form) – 661 selections from 1965 through 1979 with which we hope to do justice to a strange and ambitious time indeed, musically speaking.
Part nineteen of the journey went as follows:
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.
John Kongos, who isn’t known for much else, loops up some genuine African drumming (way before it was the thing to do) lays a groovy pop song on top and cracks the British Top 5 at a time (1971) when that was simply not an easy thing to do. Philip Random recalls first hearing it on his second trip to Britain. “Mid-90s. well on my way to getting drunk at a very old pub in Nottingham. My immediate thought was wow, somebody’s done a helluva job with that Happy Mondays song. I had it backwards, of course.”
In which the Soft Boys take a strong swipe at original Pink Floyd front man Syd Barrett’s last at least half-lucid moment (lucid enough to realize he was losing it, turning lysergically from man to vegetable). “No, it’s not up to the original. How could it be? But this list is limited to stuff I actually own, and no way am I going to pay a hundred plus bucks for a 7-inch single, what with children starving in Texas and all. Also worth noting, Underwater Moonlight, the whole Soft Boys album in question, is well worth the trouble.” (Philip Random)
Adrian Belew was the guitar phenom of the late 70s, early 80s – started with Zappa, got snagged by Bowie, moved through Talking Heads, then straight to the front of the great King Crimson resurgence of 1981. A solo album was inevitable but ultimately (inevitably) disappointing. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t leave us with at least one monster party track, the Big Electric Cat that was the cool DJ’s best friend for a good long while. “Just slap it on and watch the room go off. Even the frat boys seemed to dig it.” (Philip Random)
Donovan b-side from before he started up with smoking banana peels, going all sunshine superman. The image is of a young back country Scottish guy doing a pretty solid early-Dylan-beat-vagabond thing, then stumbling into London just in time to catch things at the brink of starting to swing, trying to make sense of it, digging the slowness.
Randophonic 