The Oscar Peterson Trio 'Walking The Line' [ 1970 ] upc 4029759113447 MPS label 2016 CD reissue, Edel Germany
Random Jackson 5 selections tonight. Shame people forget how prolific they were. Theres about 10 studio albums and another 10 or so albums worth of officially released outtakes, most as good or better than the stuff that made the albums!! Also, a lot of their deeper cuts from their funk era are just gnarly bangers. There are goods to be found if you care to mine
i often get on a R&B trail and find just how deep and prolific a particular artist was. R&B was strong in the 70's.
Today I listened to--some of this has been logged already, forgive please the repetition--Playing with Fire, The Perfect Prescription, and Sound of Confusion by Spacemen 3. If religion, regardless of the truth or falsity of its doctrines, is connected with certain types of experience that are in some sense authentic regardless of their origin, then (if that is granted) I can say that the catalyst for such experiences, for me, is first and foremost music, and I suspect I am not the only person who would say this at a place like this. And drone rock is one of the primary precipitators of this kind of experience, and, if I may say so, the one that least needs a supplement of certain substances to be effective in this regard, as it seems to do something with the brain waves even in lieu of this factor. In short, I have been undergoing freaked-out quasi-religious passions of ecstasy over the past week or so with the catalog of Spacemen 3 as the soul-conveyor. I would insist, with regard to S3, that no matter how you rate the various parts of their catalog, their core sound is established on Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To, the Transparent Radiation EP, and above all Sound of Confusion, as well as every live show they played throughout their career (although for its sound quality--no small matter for music of this type--Live at the New Morning, Geneva, Switzerland, 18.05.1989 is the most effective live recording of the band). The other studio works find them exploring to an extent, and their core sound is not one that accomodates much exploration, as it is a pounding drone. Their experimentation, embodied on albums like The Perfect Prescription, Playing With Fire, and the somewhat boring Recurring, and culminating in the Spiritualized sound (and presumably also in Pete Kember/Sonic Boom's post-Spacemen material, which I haven't explored as much), is all to one extent or another attempts to achieve with a kind of ethereal drone what the original concept found in the pounding drone. This stuff is wonderful, but cannot be properly understood without first digesting what I have identified as the core stuff above. It requires to be met halfway--by no means a criticism--in a way that the early and live stuff does not. All "OD Catastrophe" or "Roller Coaster" require is that you turn on the stereo, and they will do the rest. Beginning with The Perfect Prescription, in short, one must pay attention. Continued below, as I am on one of my detailed posting trips and must give smoke breaks.
How the heck did I get here?! Jackson 5 sampling > Kasabian - West Ryder... > Kate Bush - The Sensual World > vigorous Grateful Dead discussion > Bathory - The Return Isnt music wonderful?
I love their debut. It seems to be viewes poorly but its a great alternative to, say, the Stones' debut if im in the mood
After listening to Playing With Fire, TPP, and SOC, I played "Hypnotized" from Recurring a few times. This is, for all intents and purposes, a Spiritualized song. Pierce and Kember were no longer collaborating on Recurring, and the personnel on this track is identical with the personnel on the first Spiritualized recordings, including Lazer Guided Melodies, and--helping himself to a large portion of Kember's sound, even while not requiring his services on the track--Pierce here hits on the sound that will carry him through several future albums. "Hypnotized" is the best track on Recurring, which gets rather dull in parts, and is far too long. The momentum from this led me to listen to Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space for the first time in a year or so and, while the experience was profound, it was much more so having it played in the listening context described above. Although I skipped the first two Spiritualized albums (which I have listened to bits and pieces of this week, however), Spiritualized in general makes much more sense having gone through in order the pounding drone-->ethereal drone S3 sequence. Even in Spiritualized there's something really groove-oriented about Pierce's songwriting, but weirdly coupled with a kind of lush maximalism. The earliest songwriting was droning on one or maybe two chords and repeating some lines about drugs/religion (not "drugs and religion," as they are not differentiated), sometimes ones as mundane as "I feel good!" Pierce slowly added to this palette without ever really breaking from it, so a song like "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space" is not so a transition into lush Beatles-y maximalism, but rather a maximalization of minimalism--even as he repeats the same lines over and over, he layers other repeated parts on top, and all of it is set to an actual bona fide melody. It is not, I think, a diminishment of this to say that it makes nowhere near as much sense listened to in a vacuum, without going through Pierce's prior career and development as a musician and songwriter. Nowhere is there a transition point from grabbing someone else's riff, and repeating it over and over while repeating a single line from someone else's lyric, to being a "songwriter"--rather, there is a continuous development, and at some point the result is both minimalist and maximalist. Even on Ladies and Gentlemen, the refrain of one song is "Come Together," another takes most of its lyrics from a John Prine song, and even in the original version of the title track one of the layers of the round is Elvis's "Can't Help Falling In Love." But here, as it is even in the very earliest recordings, there is something strikingly original about the borrowed tunes. Spacemen 3, more than any band aside from the Ramones, discovered that part of the sound of rock can be more powerful than the whole; Spiritualized, on the other hand, tries to make the rock sound quantitatively more than it is rather than less, and in that sense it is a departure but one which is not, again, marked by any sort of a break. And the continuity is striking if one recognizes that for both bands, the sound is trying both to resemble and to stimulate an experience like the first stages of an opiate buzz crossed with the beginning of an acid trip, framed as a religious experience. Anyway.
Extremely underrated; even as, if it were the only record of a Nuggets-type band it would be touted, it is generally considered a flawed early draft (which in some ways it is).
"If religion, regardless of the truth or falsity of its doctrines, is connected with certain types of experience that are in some sense authentic regardless of their origin, then (if that is granted) I can say that the catalyst for such experiences, for me, is first and foremost music, and I suspect I am not the only person who would say this at a place like this. And drone rock is one of the primary precipitators of this kind of experience" I should add that this is explicitly what Spacemen 3 were about, trying to trigger transcendent religious-type experience via the combination of drones and drugs.
Hair and Skin Trading Company, band with members of Loop. I've never listened to this before; this is absolutely fantastic:
Yes, and don't forget James Burton who also was Elvis's guitarist. Probably the go to guy in the 60s and 70s for some killer rock n roll and country Telecaster playing. And he played with everyone! Glen D Hardin was also in Elvis's TCB band. And later played in Emmylou Harris's Hot Band.
