The Moody Blues – In Search of the Lost Chord (SML 711) (1968)

MOODY BLUES MISSING, FEARED UP OWN ASS

(West Hampstead, London, England) – Progressive rock band, the Moody Blues have gone missing without trace leading observers to speculate that the group have disappeared up its own ass.

“The warning signs were there,” commented producer Tony Clarke. “After an initial foray into relatively faceless Britpop R&B, the Moodies have spent much of the last year or so gazing at their navels; looking for answers, meaning, understanding, that sort of thing.”

“Things had come to a head with recent expeditions in search of the lost chord,” he explained. “But who knew where it was, let alone where to start.”

Experts point to a number of clues that they fear suggest the solipsistic band may have ventured deep inside its own jacksie in search of this mythical lost chord. ”Songs interpolating half-baked poetry, dilettante’s instructions on Mantra and ‘Yantra’ and a general seriousness of purpose all point to group with its collective head completely up its backside,” offered music writer Clifford Snotes.

“And now it appears they may trapped up there,” Snotes added.

“Actually,” he went on, like a spigot in desperate need of a new washer,  ”there is a surprising amount of charm in this mellotron-driven psychedelic period piece. The single ‘Ride the See-Saw’ bounces along nicely and, against all odds, the cosmically conscious ‘Om’ has hints of real sunshine pop majesty.”

“It’s just that they generally aren’t as vocally interesting as the Hollies or the Zombies or a musically interesting as the Pretty Things.”

Snotes made several further arguments about the Moodies’ “whimsy”, “pretentiousness”, “ominous glissandi string parts suggesting a dabbler’s understanding of Indian Classical music” and the like that were not very well put, but still point to the band’s brown eye as its current locus of operations.

It All Started Here (K 20025) and The New Age of Atlantic (K20024) (1972)

I used to have a scratchy copy of New Age when I was a kid (itself purchased from a yard sale), but I must never have played anything other than the Led Zeppelin and Yes tracks because I didn’t recognise any of the other songs on here. At the time, these were the only Lp versions available of Zep’s “Hey, Hey What Can I Do” (though it was the b-side of “Immigrant Song”) and Yes’ single version of Paul Simon’s “America”, which is so ridiculous I have to think they were laughing off-mic when they put it to tape. In fact, the rest of the record doesn’t interest me much even these day, apart from the Dr. John, being some bollocks singer-songwriter stuff and over-the-top sixeventies rock.

The title of This Is Where It All Started is vague and somewhat misleading. First of all, the antecedent of “It” is left tantilisingly unexplored and secondly, most of the music comes from the late 60s/early 70s quite a while after the time whatever “It” was had already pretty much got started. Still, an excellent overview of soul on Atlantic without recourse to the label’s biggest hits.

This 1972 90cm x 20cm poster/catalogue says 1967 Alan Aldridge to me.

The recent acquisition of this pair of iconic and worthy early 70s Atlantic Records compilations got me to worrying about the changing face of music compilations–from cheapo kitsch and genre defining scholarship in the past to their present ubiquity and consequent devaluation over the last 10 years or so. Will the comps of today have resonance with future middle-agers? Of course, the Thrifty Vinyl pages are littered with compilations of all stripes, K Tel soul albums, TV themes, Boogie, all kinds really (just click on the Compilations category to get a full flavour of the breadth) that “my parents had” or “was the first time I heard rap” or etc.

Though there is plenty of overlap, I would divide Popular music compilations into the following types: Label Promotion (see above); Top 40/Popular Reviews, both Contemporary and Retrospective; Genre Definition-e.g. C86, Spiritual Jazz, Good God!, or, er,  The Best Dubstep Album In the World…Ever; Sound-a-Likes; themed Magazine Comps; Single Artist Best Ofs.

Many contemporary and retrospective Top 40 comps from the past (e.g. those from Ronco, K-Tel, Time-Life, etc.) were, of course, available at knock down prices through mail order television ads or cut out bins. These days, the Now That’s What I Call Music series (which commenced in 1983!), and its attendant spin-offs, have a lock on the Top 40 market (with Ministry of Sound largely cornering the dance market) outselling most single artist albums several fold. It peaked in 1999 with Now 44 selling 2.4 million copies in the UK. Full-price but shortly available cheap at bootfairs, their very ephemerality remains part of the Now charm. I have done my own alternate series of CD compilations of Now! CDs of the two to three songs (e.g. Amerie’s “One Thing”) per collection I like which I like to call No, That’s What I Call Music.

At this point in history, one could argue that the various artist compilation is stronger than ever with wide-ranging, brilliantly collated records by boutique labels such as Sub Rosa, Revanent, Jazzman, Blood & Fire (RIP), Mississippi, Numero, etc., etc. The twin models for this strategy are Harry Smith’s idiosyncratic folk music collection and the Origin Jazz Library (OJL) label which virtually jump-started a renewed interest in American roots music in the 50s and 60s. Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets did likewise for garage rock.  Significantly, these projects were the brainchildren of single-minded individuals. The music fan of today is overwhelmed with a glut of budget, past-copyright titles by right thinking companies like Proper (who’ve done great Bepop and Ellington collections) and magazine CDs from the  likes of DJ, Muzik (RIP) and Mojo who offer monthly themed collections. I get Mojo and some of their comps ( like this and this among many others) are really good (though their whole-album or one-artists covers comps are almost always poor). It’s a proverbial embarrassment of riches, the tyranny of choice. But if you’re a serious collector who must have an entire disc of “Heroes and Villains” “feels” or 6 discs of Charley Patton’s Paramount sides and the attendant “orbit” than this a golden age where astronomical sums are no longer required to satisfy your cravings. I mean, you can get the complete Byrds collection, bonus track and all, for under £30.

And it’s all about the music, right? Well, yes and no. I like decent sound, completism and I’m a sucker for the packaging. But while I am one of those obsessives, I’ve come back around to better pruned compilations and albums-as-they-were re-issues–a couple years ago and I would have had the SMiLE Sessions box set, these days I’m happy with just the two Lps.

Given it’s ubiquity, I’m happy that my son has not resorted to illegal file sharing; but he’s found a clever hedge–the online mixtape. So he can download and legally listen to his awful Odd Future and Wocka Flocka music, picking and choosing his favourites for the old iPod. This is the thing that will resonate most to his middle-age self. And so it continues.

Procol Harum – A Whiter Shade of Pale/A Salty Dog (Fly Toofa 7/8) (1972)

I was really pleased two find this Fly Doubleback compilation (or “Toofa” as the catalogue number would have it) for a number of reasons. Firstly, Procol Harum’s debut and third records have been on “the list” (a sometimes literal, usually Platonic, docket of albums I simply must buy) since I spied 5 ***** reviews for them in the first Rolling Stone Record Guide a few decades ago. Quite why I’ve never managed to get them until now, I don’t know. Secondly, I only paid 99p for them at Oxfam. At Oxfam you say, the same Oxfam that charges £4.99 for good condition George Michael Faith records? The very same and I’ll tell you how it happened. I was in Rochester yesterday picking up a washing machine (Oh! The life I live!) and popped in to the chaz for a quick browse. The selection was wide, well-organised and only slightly overpriced with most stuff selling for between £1 and £4. In a bin marked “New Arrivals” I found the present item without a price tag. I assumed it would be at least £4, but took it up to the counter to get a costing, prepared to take it right back whence it came. It was nearly 5 o’clock on a Friday and the manager, having been consulted by the clerk said, “Is 99p alright?” Yes, it was and I declined a bag and let them keep the penny change.
But was it worth the 99 pennies and the decades-long wait? For sure, and I had a thoroughly pleasant Friday evening finding out. Given the times (1967), Pale is a surprisingly grown-up sounding collision of the Zombies’ minor-keyed somnambulance, Caravan’s prog japery, Traffic’s Brit-Soul Ray Charlesisms, the heavy-lidded surrealism of B. Dylan and the Band’s dual keyboard roots reverence, even as nothing quite measures up to the title track. The mono edition featured here does have some peculiar audio drop outs, as if the technology couldn’t quite capture what this musically muscular band were playing and simply got overloaded. Salty Dog (1969) is more ambitious, more consistent and better produced. Not totally without the tweeness that plagued English musicians immediately before and after (and during, obviously) the so-called Summer of Love, these almost entirely mid-paced Lps represent early, definitive examples of “sixeventies” rock in exegesis.

The label’s pretty cool looking too. Set up as a production company, Fly would lease their product to various labels then re-release back catalogue items capitalising on, say, Deram’s hard promotion work of a few years previous, as happened here when this re-issue outperformed the band’s contemporary live record in the UK album charts.

Hawkwind – Hall of the Mountain Grill (UAG 29672) (1974)

HAWKWIND “TOTALLY ON ACID,” CLAIMS LOCAL HIPPIE

(Columbus, Ohio)  After listening to Hall of the Mountain Grill by Hawkwind, local hippie and part-time North campus laundromat employee Noah “Tokes” Tockington has claimed that the British progressive rock group conceptualised, composed, produced and performed their 1974 Edvard Grieg referencing fourth studio album under the influence of the powerful hallucinogenic drug Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.

“Oh yeah,” elaborated the lank haired and tie-dye shirted Tockington, ”the ‘Wind must have totally been on acid when they did that Mountain record.”

Tockington reported his fairly obvious statement, which is bound to create little stir among the music community, subsequent to acquiring the album because the Barney Bubbles sleeve “looks like some freaky 1930s spaceship crash landed in Lake Erie” for “around a buck and a half” at a Columbus thrift store. He remains unsure about precisely which thrift store it was as he was “tripping [his] nuts off” at the time of purchase.

“Whoa!” he added appreciatively, while positively reeking of patchouli.

“And I’m sure I’ve seen that the back cover somewhere before.”

Mountain Grill's back cover by artist David Hardy

Local music writer Clifford Snoats concurred only insofar as Hawkwind “sounded like ‘Roxy Music meets Pretty Things on acid,’” but that “it would be presumptuous to say they were actually on LSD-25 unless you’d tripped with them [while they were making the album].”

Snoats went on and on, “While the extensive use of Mellotron and group improvisation featured on Mountain Grill is certainly a hallmark of music influenced by and created to enhance a psychoactive drug experience, the aggressive power chords on songs like ‘Psychedelic Warlords’ and ‘Lost Johnny’ are more suggestive of amphetamine use rather than entheogens.”

Meanwhile, “Tokes”, suddenly distracted by the oldies AM radio crackling in the background at the laundromat, made a further revelation: “Man, that Andy Williams was on acid when he did that ‘boys watch the girls watch the boys watch the girls go by’ song. What a mind-fuck!”

Yes – Relayer (1974)

I confess a genuine like of Yes and have owned several of their Lps up to and including Tormato (1978), but for some reason never managed to get hold of, let alone hear, this one, even during a particularly manic “Yes Phase” during my sophomore year of high school. So it was up to my old friend, the Ashford Boot Fair, to heave this up (along with several others) for only 50p.

There are precisely three songs on this album.  They includes long, technical, virtuosic, sometimes quite unpleasant, instrumental guitar passages enlivened with harsh effects. These are interspersed with bleating or, alternately, dreamy vocals.  So far, so Yes.  The bass guitar, however, is less pronounced on Relayer and the keyboards, by then-newbie Patrick Moraz, more colour washes than melody.  Indeed, apart from the concluding section of the side-long and uncharacteristically martial ”The Gates of Delirium”, melody rarely rears it’s pretty head, submerged, as it is, by riffs and flash and bludgeoning. Perfect for teenage boys to memorise and badger friends with: “You gotta hear this bit, man, it’s my favourite bit,” etc. etc.

I have always liked Roger Dean’s muted, somewhat washed-out gatefold cover, definitely more Middle Earth than Outer Space.  Apropos Wilberforces’ comments on record labels, check this baby out:

Peter Hammill – Chameleon In the Shadows of the Night

Grandfather:  What’s that you’re listenin’ to?

Grandson: Some old record I got from the used record store. It’s like from four years ago.  It’s called Who Needs Action When You Got Words by Plan B.

Grandfather:   Hmmm, back in my day, we listened to proper albums by album oriented artists like Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night by Pete Hammill.

Grandson (playing along): Oh, what are some of the songs?

Grandfather: Well, there’s “German Overalls”, “Slender Threads” and, uh, “Rock and Role”.

Grandson: Neat. How would you describe it?

Grandfather (absolutely hooked): It’s really dramatic, acoustic 12-string guitar driven singer-songwriter prog rock.  Pissing off the same cloud as Space Oddity or Aqualung.

Grandson (beginning to reel the old man in):  Cool.  What are some of the “prog” instruments they play?

Grandfather (still lapping it up):  Jesus, they play “tesseraschizoid warbling,” “screams in the night,” “bomber,” “banshee,” “gothic harmonium,” loads of awesome stuff.  Would you like to hear it?

Grandson (playing his trump card): FUCK OFF, HIPPIE!