Early: Six-Song Set Edition

One thing I miss about being a DJ is putting together a a good set of music. This week I had a lot of songs I wanted to post but didn't really have a lot to say about them, so I thought I'd put a bunch of them together in one post. So, these songs are meant to be listened to sequentially.


The Squires: Aurora

[purchase]

You may not have heard of the Squires, but you know their guitarist quite well: Neil Young. He was quite enamored with the Shadows' guitarist Hank Marvin when he recorded this instrumental single in Winnipeg in 1963 at his first recording session.


Vashti: Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind

[purchase]

Before she recorded her seminal Just Another Diamond Day album, Vashti Bunyan released a few pop singles as "Vashti" under the tutelage of Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. This one, her first, was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and released in 1965.


Lyme and Cybelle: Follow Me

[purchase]

Warren Zevon didn't hit his stride until the late '70s, but he started out his musical career in the sixties as one half of the duo Lyme and Cybelle, along with Violet Santangelo. "Follow Me" hit 65 on the pop charts in 1966. Zevon went on to release a little-heard solo album in 1969, then work as the Everly Brothers' musical director in the early '70s before he finally found his groove.


The Parliaments: (I Wanna) Testify

[purchase]

George Clinton's 1970s Parliament/Funkadelic empire started as a simple doo-wop quintet from New Jersey known as the Parliaments. "(I Wanna) Testify", from 1967, is probably the most well-known the the Parliaments' singles. It's already a long way from their doo-wop beginnings, possibly because Clinton was the only member of the group able to travel to Detroit for the recording. When the song became a hit, he assembled a new group of musicians to tour, and the P-Funk dynasty began.


Kaleidoscope: Egyptian Gardens

[purchase]

In the late '60s, there were two important bands named Kaleidoscope--one in the UK and one in California. This is from the California band, who are most well known for giving the world multi-instrumentalist David Lindley. Before he was sideman extraordinaire to the '70s California singer-songwriter movement (Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, Crosby & Nash, etc.), he was part of this eclectic psychedelic group. The Middle Eastern-influenced "Egyptian Gardens" is the opening track on their 1967 debut album, Side Trips, an album that also takes in blues, psychedelic pop, old timey music, and vaudeville.


Red Onion: African Mask

[out of print]

Red Onion brings us back to that fertile New Brunswick music scene in the 1990s. Frontwoman Laurie Berkner went on to greater fame as a maker of music for kids, but I've always liked this psychedelic-influenced song from a cassette EP Red Onion released in 1995. Smokin' bass provided by All Gods' Children's Adam Bernstein.

Trains: Train Song

Vashti Bunyan: Train Song

[purchase]

Being a coverblogger means discovering the past through the present as much as it means rediscovering the familiar through good coverage. Case in point: Vashti Bunyan's 1966 single Train Song, which I recently went back to after hearing the stunningly anachronistic harmonies Feist and Ben Gibbard bring to their recent version of the song on Dark Was the Night, this year's incarnation of the Red Hot and Blue compilation, which has been sweeping all the big indieblogs for the last few weeks.

Feist and Gibbard are nothing to sneeze at, of course, and their cover certainly does the song justice. But Bunyan's original is the true trainsong, bringing the light ch-ch-ch of a latenight train to her guitar, layering the miles of memory on top with strings and lead guitar, finally floating her etherial lyrics of travel and longing over the whole thing. It's the perfect cinematic atmosphere for the sentiment, and a happy development for all of us that the modern freakfolk movement has helped us rediscover Bunyan, thus prompting the 2007 rerelease of this reel-to-reel.

Note: As Dark Was the Night is both new and for charity, I'm not sharing the Feist/Gibbard cover; if you're an indiefolk fan who hasn't heard it yet, samples can be had here.

Boats: Trawlerman's Song

Vashti Bunyan: Trawlerman's Song

[purchase]

There was a side-bar discussion recently among the SMM authors regarding the fact that very few female artists have been featured on this blog (until now I think Joni Mitchell and Natalie Merchant are the only ones). I don't think this is a big deal. For whatever reason, 85% of my own library is by male artists. I don't begrudge this, and I'm not at all interested in equal opportunity purchasing or listening. However, the discussion did introduce a challenge of sorts. Just for fun, I immediately started searching my iTunes library for a female who sang something about boats!

[Correction:  We've posted a lot more females than I thought!  See comments below.]

Vashti Bunyan is that female. Bunyan's story is actually quite interesting. She recorded a single album, Just Another Diamond Day, in 1970. It was received warmly at the time, but quickly fell out of the public eye and went out of print. Soon after, Bunyan retired from the music business and became a mother, a gardener, and animal keeper. However, during her retirement a quiet but steadily-growing interest began to develop for her work. Her album, difficult to come by for obvious reasons, eventually became a high-priced collectors item - one copy selling on eBay for $2000!

Finally, Just Another Diamond Day was re-released on CD and Vashti Bunyan's fame began to soar among folk and "freak-folk" artists and fans. Devendra Banhart is her most outspoken fan, naming her as one of his most direct influences.

Although she has now released a second CD, coming about 30 years after the first, I would recommend avoiding it and sticking with the original.

Just Another Diamond Day is one of the most melodic and bucolic albums that I own. It is less like listening to a CD and more like wandering through the countryside and happening on a woman sitting on a fence with a guitar singing for her own pleasure, or perhaps for children or her livestock.  Every song is an intimate experience with the artist.