Discoveries: Rid of Me

PJ Harvey: Rid Of Me

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I have a confession...

I don't have a time line of discovery and growth like many of you. Since I was old enough to sing along with music I've liked the same thing...catchy pop or rock songs, preferably with female vocals. I often am frustrated with myself because I can't seem to go the extra length to give the same effort to finding good new music with male vocals as I do to the ladies. I try to quell my frustration over this by remembering that there's a lot of people that are the opposite of me, that discount musicians because they ARE female, and therefore it's good to have a few people like me around to even the score. As it is, when I visit blogs I often will scroll through and pause the longest for those with band photos with women in them. I've even found some male vocal bands simply because there's a female in their band and therefore I gave them a try...sad, I know, but when there's as much new music out there on the internet as there is these days, you find whatever ways you can to narrow down the search for something you'll enjoy. And hey, maybe that's just my thing, and everyone has their thing.

There was a time when I didn't even realize this about myself. It took a male acquaintance in high school to bring it to my attention. It's senior year, the seniors have a lounge area to themselves where they can spend their free periods, otherwise known as study halls, and I have my CD folder out and am paging through. The guy asks to look at it. He pages through at it and says "so you only listen to girls?" and I am surprised, why would he say that? And he continues "every CD in here is by a woman". I seriously hadn't noticed. So he says he only has one female artist in his collection but that she's amazing because no other female artist he's heard has the seething power he likes (his favorite band was The Jesus Lizard) as this lady and asks if I've heard of her, it's someone named PJ Harvey. I hadn't. So he gave me his headphones and played me a song. At the time I wasn't sure what to think, I hadn't heard anything like it before. It took me a few years to finally get one of her CDs, and then another, and another...you get the idea. This was the song he played me.

Discoveries: Empty Pages

Traffic: Empty Pages

Purchase:

I hope FiL doesn't mind me copying his flow chart - a good idea is a good idea, so here's mine:

Bee Gees / Elton John > The Clash / The Specials > Dylan & the 1970's > Everything Else

Each of these periods has discovery moments that I could write about and talk about for hours. For this post I'm going to focus on the third phase of my musical development. I was introduced to the music of the late 1960's and early 1970's when I was a freshman in college. I had been steeped in all things punk, post-punk, and new wave for the previous several years, and it was time for a change. The music scene was getting stale as the edge wore off of bands like The Cure and R.E.M. and other bands like The Smiths simply broke up.

At this time a couple of us took a road trip to Salt Lake City to visit a friend who had previously lived in my hometown of Fresno, California. While we stayed at this friend's house we got to know his incredibly cool father. I couldn't believe a dad could be like this! He watched the best movies, he listened to great music, and he had an excellent and decidedly irreverent sense of humor. He may not have been the best dad in the traditional sense, but he sure was fun to hang out with.

At one point during our visit my friend's father gave us a cassette tape of Traffic's album, John Barleycorn Must Die. As we drove north on I-15, at almost exactly the point pictured above, we slid the cassette into the car stereo.

Most everyone reading this is familiar with the feeling that you occasionally (rarely, actually) get when you hear new music: Oh man, this is good. I'm going to want to pursue this!

That's the feeling I got when I heard track one of John Barleycorn. I purchased the album the moment I returned home. This album led me to Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Young, The Who, and eventually to our blog-mother Joni Mitchell. I spent the next several years listening to music produced from about 1968 to about 1974. John Barleycorn was a deep vein that paid dividends for years to come.

Discoveries: Hungry, So Angry

Medium Medium: Hungry, So Angry

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I haven’t listened to the radio in quite some time. Do they still have those contests where the seventh caller wins a prize? In the 1980s, I listened to college radio, courtesy of WPRB out of Princeton University. In those days, they played a lot of punk, which I didn’t like and still don’t. But they also played some new wave that was strange enough that even MTV wouldn’t touch it. (For our younger readers, yes there was a time when MTV was all music videos, and they played things commercial radio tried to ignore.) Anyway, WPRB had those give-aways I mentioned, and usually the prize was an album or tickets to a show. They started playing this song by a band no one had ever heard of, Medium Medium, The song was Hungry, So Angry, and I loved it. Looking back at it, I can describe it as a funk song with new wave style vocals and a dissonant sax part. At the time, I just knew that it really cooked. So, one day the DJ had a contest. The prize was Medium Medium’s album, but there was a catch. To claim the prize, there was also a show ticket, and you had to go to the show to get the album. The show was at City Gardens in Trenton, and that is the beautiful structure you see above. City Gardens was a converted warehouse on the outskirts of the city, and it was known to attract a bad element. Also, I only knew one song by the band. Did the rest of their songs suck? I had been burned that way before. Still, free is free, so, with more than a little anxiety, I went. And you know what? It was great! The energy that I so loved on the record was all there in person. The band had incredible energy, and the rest of their songs were just as good as this one. And I went to a show in big scary Trenton, and nothing happened to me. After that, I became a regular there whenever they had a new wave show.

Epilogue: I have no idea what became of Medium Medium. The album was called The Glitterhouse, and the purchase link above will take you to that same album, but it has been repackaged and retitled Hungry, So Angry. City Gardens lasted a number of years after that, but it is gone now. But this song is available, so I can’t be the only one who remembers it. And it still sounds as good to me now as it did then.

Discoveries: Starship Trooper

Yes: Starship Trooper

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Let me give you an abbreviated history of my teenage musical obsessions:

The Beatles -> Heavy Metal -> Prog Rock -> Everything Else

For this post, I'm going to feature the third element in this flowchart. It was 1986, and I was a freshman at Rutgers. I had been deep into heavy metal for the past two years, but college was already expanding my musical horizons. One of my dorm mates was, like me, not really part of the "in" crowd. And like me, he was very into his music. However, while I was banging away to Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, he was deep into ELP and Yes. We both influenced each other musically, but i definitely got the better part of that deal. For while ELP have not aged particularly well, Yes has become one of those groups I always find myself going back to, like visiting an old friend.

And I remember the exact moment I fell in love with Yes: I was laying on the floor of his dorm room--possibly in a bean bag chair--with headphones on, listening to The Yes Album, bathed in the warm sunlight shining through the dorm room windows. No mood-altering drugs were involved, yet it all seemed so...blissful.

Fragile, Yessongs, and the then-recent 9021Live: The Solos soon followed, and I was hooked. I got my hands on every Yes album I could, then expanded into ELP, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Genesis, and King Crimson. And they led to the whole pantheon of "classic rock" and jazz artists that made up the bulk of my listening time in college. It really wasn't until the end of my college stay that I started getting interested in more contemporary music.

But so much contemporary music is "hear" today, gone tomorrow. A song like "Starship Trooper" I could listen to forever.

The photo accompanying this post is a shot of my dorm room circa '86-67. Hard to believe but at the time, those cassettes you see there were my entire music collection. Oh, how times have changed!

Discoveries: Lovers in a Dangerous Time

Bruce Cockburn: Lovers in a Dangerous Time

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I always wanted to be a writer. My mother was a reporter for a local newspaper, and she always told us what a chore it was to write up the meetings she had to cover. But she would sometimes get a feature assignment, and then her eyes would light up, and we would hear all about what she was working on. My father was not that interested in writing. His thing was making things work. We were the last family in the universe to own a working black-and-white TV, and that was my father’s doing. He also liked to get numbers to do his bidding, and he dreamed of me becoming a mathematician. But he ruined that, and he was the one who inspired me to write. That’s because my father expressed his love for me by sharing stories. He made sure I read all 14 of L Frank Baum’s Oz books, and he introduced me to the Andrew Lang fairy tale collections. So I took to writing science fiction and horror stories.

Of course, I also grew up surrounded by music. So most of my nonfiction reading was about music. I was lucky to have access to some of the best music writers, including Robert Palmer in the New York Times, and Timothy White and others in Musician magazine. And I always read the reviews. So, I remember reading about a musician from Canada who was new to me. Palmer wrote about how Bruce Cockburn had spent time in Nicaragua living among the Sandinistas, and had written an album about it. And then I saw the review in Musician, and I knew I wanted the album. Stealing Fire opened with Lovers in a Dangerous Time, and I knew my sources had led me to something good.

Putting all of this together, I realized that I was on a path back then whose nature I did not fully realize at the time. I was on my way to becoming a music writer myself. I don’t know if I will ever be as good as Robert Palmer or Timothy White, but that is what I strive for in my writings here and on Oliver di Place.

Pipes and Woodwinds -> Discoveries: So Flute

St. Germain: So Flute

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For our new theme this week, we'll be sharing discovery stories - those tales of sudden connection, when a new artist or song arrives in your ears so strongly that the moment becomes fixed in your memory. Sharing those few defining moments in the development of an audiophile's development should prove to be a great way to glimpse into the minds and souls of our little band of bloggers, and expect it's going to be an interesting week.

I shared this particular story last year, but it bears repeating - and not just to introduce a song that has turned out to be the greatest road trip soundtrack-starter ever.

My first trip to Amsterdam was as an adult, in March of 2000; my wife had just miscarried after several years of earnest attempts at bearing a first child, and although the doctor advised against flying, we really needed to get away from it all. I have fond if somewhat inevitably hazy memories of a week museum-hopping and roaming the castles and small rustic villages of the countryside, sitting by the side of canals eating bread, cheese, and salami -- about all we could afford on my teacher's salary.

But my strongest memories from that week are of St. Germain's Tourist, an album whose jazz-informed rhythms, jazz-club instrumentation, and long, trance-inducing tracks emanated from what seemed at the time like every coffeeshop and bar, providing the perfect atmospheric soundtrack to what otherwise could have fast become an insular and morose period in our lives. I bought the disc at overseas prices -- a comparative fortune, back then -- and have kept it with me ever since. Rose Rouge is one of the shorter pieces on the album, but it really blows away the blues, even now.

...and so does So Flute, come to think of it.

Pipes and Woodwinds: Behind Blue Eyes

The Chieftains with Roger Daltrey: Behind Blue Eyes

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To finish out my posts for this week’s theme, I wanted a song that had both pipes and woodwinds. For that, I knew I would need The Chieftains. The Chieftains began life as an Irish traditional band, one of the best. But, in 1991, they were looking to make a live album, and leader Paddy Maloney wanted to do something to make it special. So he invited Roger Daltry of The Who and Nanci Griffith to participate. It was a decision that would turn out to be very important to The Chieftains. Since then, most of their albums have included collaborations with artists who wouldn’t normally be thought of as traditional artists of any sort. In the process, The Chieftains have made fascinating connections between their music and those of their guests. It doesn’t always work, but the results are never dull. With Daltrey and Griffith, it did work beautifully.

Behind Blue Eyes, as rendered here, shows that Roger Daltrey could have been an Irish ballad singer in another life. The woodwind here is Matt Molloy’s flute. The pipe is the Irish version of the bagpipe, the uilleann pipes. It is played by Paddy Moloney.

Pipes and Woodwinds: Roland Kirk Edition

Roland Kirk: Mingus-Griff Song

Roland Kirk: Mood Indigo

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Rahsaan Roland Kirk was a one-man woodwind section. He could play three reeds simultaneously, and then go right into a flute solo (as he does on Ellington's "Mood Indigo"). He also modified his horns to produce unique instruments like the manzello and the stritch. and he was fond of throwing a siren into the mix whenever the mood struck.

He was often seen as a novelty act by the jazz purists of the day, but eventually came to be recognized as one of the truly unique voices in the genre. Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson nicked a fair bit of his flute style from Kirk, and they even recorded a cover of his "Serenade to a Cuckoo" on their first album.

The two songs I'm sharing in this post originally came from the live album Kirk in Copenhagen, recorded in October 1963 and released the following year (predating is adoption of the "Raahsan" moniker). Years later, the tracks were reissued as part of a mammoth 11-CD boxed set that included a much-expanded version of the Copenhagen album with the songs resequenced in proper order, putting these two tracks back-to-back. Not only do they make for a nice contrast in tempos, but at the end of the "Mingus-Griff Song" track, he explains how he will play "Mood Indigo" with the three reeds simultaneously playing different parts of the original arrangement. It's worth stating explicitly that Kirk is the only horn player on these tracks. Kids, don't try this at home!