“From the earliest, best, least over-played phase of the Steve Miller Band‘s million mile odyssey through the culture (it’s still going on, apparently), three songs that all sort of flow as one. You know it’s still the 1960s when it’s a white guy singing a sort of psychedelic blues and doing a relevant job of it. Somehow that didn’t much manage to survive into the 1970s.” (Philip Random)
You didn’t get to hear much of Sly and Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On when the album was new in 1971-72, certainly not if you were stuck out in suburbia. But what little you did hear was enough to make it clear: the 1960s were over, with only crushed and dying flowers left in their wake. A darker, meaner time was on us, even if many were still pursuing deep space extraterrestrial explorations of a personal kind.
This one’s from the second and last album Eric Burdon recorded with War, and a sprawling four-sided epic it was. But Mr. Burdon, who’d lived the 1960s the way you were supposed to (ie: beyond the limit), just wasn’t up to it. He crashed and burned one night on stage and showbiz being showbiz, War carried on without him, because they were really just getting started, like a beautiful new born child.
“NYC proto-hipster types Bongwater take on a Moody Blues classic and pay it no respect at all. That’s just how things were in the 80s. The 60s were officially a bad trip and, if you were halfway cool, you were doing everything you could to bury them. Because they really did need to be dead for a while, so they could be reborn out of some caustic storm of superlative noise. At least that’s what it felt like at the time, the so-called Winter of Hate.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 