John Mayall being the man whose former band members couldn’t seem to help launching mega careers back in the day. Sitting in the Rain being an obscure old track that eventually showed up on a 1969 compilation. Does it classify as a proper Mississippi Delta blues? Probably not. But it sure works on a rainy day.
“In which Keith Richard stumbles through a reggae classic that no white man has any business even touching and actually delivers something halfway worthy, maybe because of all the heroin related calamity he’d recently endured in Toronto. Found on the b-side of Run Rudolph Run, a 1978 Christmas single that went nowhere, except it eventually found me.” (Philip Random)
In which Allen Ginsberg drops in on the Clash during the Combat Rock sessions, the mike gets opened and he slam dances Metropolis, enlightens the populous. And so on, off into a mid-tempo ramble on the hungry darkness of living. Whatever evils were going down in 1981 – nobody in this crowd was looking the other way.
It’s 1969 and Malcolm John Rebennack (aka Dr. John) is deep into his Night Tripper phase with Babylon (both song and album) hitting as a strange and delirious warning of great trials and tribulations to come. Babylon being the great city-state of Ancient Mesopotamia that lasted more than two thousand years before finally dissolving into the sands of time. Babylon being the root of the word babble, that state in language acquisition, during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering all the weird and wonderful sounds of language, but not yet producing any recognizable words – confusion in a word, but not without a purpose.
Part six of the Solid Time of Change aired Saturday June-11-2016 c/o CiTR.FM.101.9.
Youtube playlist (possibly not the exact versions that were played). Podcast.
This is Randophonic’s latest countdown, the 661 Greatest Records of the so-called Prog Rock era, an overlong yet incomplete history of whatever the hell happened between 1965 and 1979 – not in all music, not even in most of it, but definitely in a bunch of it, particularly during those five years in the middle (1969-1974).
What is Prog Rock? Is it different somehow from progressive rock, or for that matter, rock that merely progresses? These may seem like simple questions, but they are in fact doors that open unto some of the most complex enigmas of our time, and thus as good a reason as any for a year of radio.
Part six of our journey went as follows:
Solid Time of Change #7 airs Saturday, June 18th at 11 pm (Pacific time) c/o CiTR.FM.101.9, with streaming and download options available within twenty-four hours.
In which the Eurythmics, at the peak of their 1980s pop success, take a sideways step and deliver the soundtrack to 1984 (the movie), which was pretty good in a harrowing, all-too-faithful-to-the-book sort of way. But in the end, almost none of the Eurythmics music made it to the final cut. Not because it was bad. It just wasn’t what the director had in mind. Philip Random recalls Room 101 getting lots of play on his car stereo during the prophetic year in question, “A nifty little nugget about torture, propaganda, the malevolent destruction of human souls. What wasn’t to love?”
Randophonic 