The band known as Yes from when they were still just hard working wannabes (a guitar genius and a keyboard wizard short of achieving true escape velocity). Like future teenagers, drunk on stolen psychedelics, joyriding in dad’s spaceship, trying to get the damned thing off the ground, not quite getting there, but beautiful anyway. And it rocks.
In which the Moody Blues go deep and wide and high, and remind us why they were once considered pretty darned cool. Philip Random recalls listening to Melancholy Man a lot while reading Lord of the Rings for the first time “… as a mostly uncool, pre-driver’s license teen with absolutely nothing better to do one long hot summer, stuck in somebody else’s cottage, there being only one even remotely decent album in the vicinity – This Is The Moody Blues (who knows how it got there?). I still think of Bilbo Baggins finally getting old whenever I hear Melancholy Man and I didn’t even know what melancholy meant at the time, just felt it anyway, all that deep sorrow and regret, particularly once the mellotron sweeps in for the kill.”
Frank Zappa took no prisoners with the cover for 1970’s Weasels Ripped My Flesh. And fitting it was for the music found inside – equal parts brilliant and painful, particularly the suite of stuff that finishes Side Two, starting with doo-wop anti-flower power anthem Oh No! and then onward via Orange County Lumber Truck to the flesh tearing finale that was the title track. It has been argued that the whole hippie thing stopped right here. Certainly the Mothers of Invention already had, Weasels Ripped My Flesh being one of two albums to be released after their demise. Though Zappa would, of course, quickly reform them for further assaults upon society through the first half of the 1970s.
The Mothers of Invention, Engelse groep bij aankomst Schiphol *17 oktober 1968
As the story goes, Bob Dylan hated us all by 1970 – his audience that is. Which led to the four slabs of vinyl called Self Portrait in which he ambles through a weird mix of everything but the kind of music that was going to singlehandedly trigger a peoples revolution. Just ditties, sidetracks, half-assed Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot covers, and perhaps strangest of all, a take on Blue Moon that actually works. Because it genuinely does just sound like a lonely Jewish guy who got lost somewhere in the north country, and now he’s sitting in the dark, looking up at the second full moon in less than a month, crooning away.
“A Cat Stevens gem about being profoundly somewhere that managed to not overstay its welcome in my ear drums. Top 40 radio didn’t play it much. It wasn’t on the Greatest Hits album that everybody and his big sister owned. You had to actually play the album Tea For The Tillerman to hear it, or find a movie theatre that was cool enough to be showing Harold and Maude.” (Philip Random)
Edwin Starr was the big voice behind War (what is it good for?), one of the great singles from 1970, or any other year for that matter. Here he’s pulling back a bit, weary of it all just wanting some way out of the madhouse of modern life.
Randophonic 