I’m going to try to assume you know your Jimi (but I’m wont to dissertate, so bear with me).
I’m going to assume that you either haven’t picked up Valleys Of Neptune yet because, understandably, you have your doubts… Or that you HAVE picked it up and you aren’t sure how good you feel about it. I’m going to do my best to help you.
Valleys Of Neptune is not a “lost album” in the sense that First Rays Of The New Rising Sun might be called a “lost album” … Of course, no one knows quite how First Rays would really have come together in Jimi’s hands, but I think Eddie Kramer and company did a close-to-perfect job with it, and any musician who isn’t familiar with First Rays should go out right now and get themselves a copy. Don’t download it, it won’t sound as good. If you can do the vinyl, do the vinyl. It’s the record that explains, to anyone who is wondering, just why it is that Jimi Hendrix and The Meters and Funkadelic, Sun-Ra, James “Blood” Ulmer and John Coltrane and Bob Marley should all be considered separate arms of one cosmic octopus.
And just about anything important that was left out of First Rays (like the sublime and lovely “Pali-Gap”) made it onto South Saturn Delta – which is also not a lost album, but a truly astonishing and revelatory collection of outtakes and leftovers. There are tracks I would have rather heard on South Saturn than the “original mix” of “All Along The Watchtower” … like maybe that amazing synth-sounding studio overdub onslaught version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that was on the original Rainbow Bridge soundtrack record.
But South Saturn did immeasurable good for the musical universe with the release of luminous studio versions of “Power Of Soul” and “South Saturn Delta”, studio jams on “Message To Love” and “Drifter’s Escape” (which alone satisfies the Dylan quota nicely), and otherwise homeless tracks like “Midnight,” “Bleeding Heart,” “The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice” and “Lover Man” … The picture felt very complete, and I wasn’t expecting anything more.
Though, to be fair, in the meanwhile, I have encountered lo-fi live tapes, home recordings and so forth, many of which would make wonderful releases if cleaned up a bit, though clearly only me and a few other freaks would get much out of them. I guess that’s what Dagger Records is for, but they’ve only put out a couple of things that really made me jump. There is an art to the outtake-compilation, and Dagger has not got it quite sussed.
OK, so, Valleys Of Neptune. I heard the title track on a box set of a radio show called Lifelines maybe fifteen years ago and it was life-changing. I was really excited that it was finally getting a real release, sonic spiffing and all, no radio-show banter talking over it. And the other tracks, didn’t look like I’d heard any of those, so, worth the $$.
And I am not disappointed. But I had to think about it some.
The first three tracks on Valleys include Billy Cox on bass. Billy is one of my favorite bass players, period. Anything with him on it is a joy. And he’s also the only one of the Hendrix musician crew who’s still walking around and playing music above the ground, which makes him a treasure.
Those three tracks include a cosmic-groove rendition of “Stone Free” that is really exciting and different. It felt a little weird when it passed through the air, though, and that turns out to be because the vocal and lead guitar come from a session that took place one month earlier than the session that produced the rhythm track.
Likewise, the title track, “Valleys Of Neptune”, attempts to blesh a vocal and percussion track from 1969 with a band track from 1970. The results are not bad, but…
I’m sure Jimi would have used the technology if he’d had access to it, but I also think he would have finished the damn recordings if he’d had the opportunity, and although I trust Eddie Kramer, it feels a little strange the way these tracks cut through time. I’m not ready to complain…
But I can feel it and it’s odd. I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t a single complete usable take otherwise, especially when there are vocal errors and similar tiny flubs or even premature fades in many of the other tracks (all 10 of which are taken complete from single recording sessions … no more digital flummery).
Anyway, the sound is great and the final product is a solid listen so I’ll leave it at ambiguous.
Track 3 is a very cool arrangement of “Bleeding Heart,” again with Billy Cox. Very nice. On to side two.
Back to the original Experience with Noel Redding on the drums. This “Hear My Train” is nice but probably not an essential listen… As opposed to either the live version on the original Rainbow Bridge album or the studio take on the Jimi Hendrix Experience box set. (There is a studio version of “Stone Free” on the box as well, but that one and this one are actually BOTH really worth hearing, as is the one on Fillmore Concerts… and all for different reasons). “Mr. Bad Luck” is mainly interesting as a preamble to the later, more fully-realized version called “Look Over Yonder” which can be found on South Saturn Delta. So, probably for obsessive collectors only. And “Sunshine Of Your Love” is mainly odd. I mean, it’s a fine performance, and they have a guest conga player which is neat, and the tones are great … it’s just odd. I’ve heard a bunch of great live versions of this and it works really well there, the crowd knows the tune but isn’t expecting to hear it from this band, it’s done as an instrumental and often as a long jam, and in some ways this tracks is more completely together than some other parts of Valleys. But it’s a weird thing to hear in the middle of a studio album home listening experience.
Which makes this, the halfway point, the point at which I started to understand the true character of this record.
One of my favorite Jimi recordings is the 1969 L.A. Forum concert which came with Lifelines. I’d love for that to get a full-on remaster in the manner in which Woodstock (correctly) and Isle Of Wight (maybe not so much) and lately even Monterey have been re-released and re-released, again and again. Each of those three is a milestone, and historic in some sense. Woodstock and Monterey are even really great concerts (though I understand there’s a bunch of stuff from Woodstock that I haven’t heard that maybe isn’t as good … whatever, that’s fine). But Isle Of Wight, for my money, just isn’t that good a show. Jimi is distracted and the energy is very weird. The music makes me see colors I don’t like. There are a few great tracks, “In From The Storm” being one I think I recall, but on the whole I don’t see that show deserving the treatment it gets.
Whereas L.A. Forum 1969 is a brilliant show by a band that is as good as it ever got. I want to say they play about seven tunes in an hour. Long, stretched-out versions of “Spanish Castle Magic” and “Tax Free,” and some great solo guitar pieces between tunes. “Sunshine Of Your Love” is there, and it really works. That “Spanish Castle” is by the way similar in feel to the studio take on the Jimi Hendrix Experience box set, but both are worth a listen as the group’s improvs flow differently.
Anyway, the band that recorded much of Valleys was mostly the band that played that L.A. Forum show. These are sessions from around that same time, right before Noel Redding left and right after Billy Cox came in, so a lot of the new material is half-formed (they’d been touring a lot, no time to write new stuff properly) and a lot of the other recordings are just whatever they’d been playing out, with whatever degree of inspiration they could pull together that day in the studio.
As a result, Valleys Of Neptune is closer in feel to, maybe, BBC Sessions than it is to First Rays. The revelation lies in the getting-to-hear-a-great-working-band-at-work, rather than in the development of new ideas about electric music and about how it relates to the recording studio and to human culture. Those themes are just beginning to be touched on in these sessions. But it is very nice to get a close and sonically awesome look at the 1969 Experience.
Bearing all of that in mind…
Side 3 includes an early version of “Lover Man” which is not presently coming to mind but which certainly does not offend; “Ships Passing Through The Night” which became the lush and groundbreaking “Nightbird Flying” on First Rays but makes for beautiful music in this early version with Noel on bass; and, strangely, a live-in-the-studio version of “Fire” which, although it is from the same session as “Train” and “Castle” on the box set, adds nothing that I can see to this collection (other than that they were doubtless playing it live nearly every night at the time … so it was probably a studio warmup?) and might be there as a draw to people who know Jimi only from the radio. Why a release like this would be catering to them is beyond me … same objection as to “Watchtower” on South Saturn.
Side 4 has a take of “Red House,” again not a tune that requires more exposure but it’s a fine, slow version which unfortunately fades before the end (in that sense not unlike the amazing “Electric Church Red House” on the Blues collection) and is representative of live versions from that time (L.A. Forum is a fine example, there are others) … and then two tracks which are among the real wonders of this collection: “Lullaby For The Summer” which definitely predates the mode of studio composition and approach to overdubs and guitar orchestration that we hear on First Rays, and “Crying Blue Rain” which is a warm breeze of a chill groove of a closer. Neither one is a definitive anything, but it’s nice to hear Jimi’s brain ticking, which it isn’t always doing much of on some of the other tracks. (Z says side 4 is her favorite.)
Along the lines of those two closing tracks, there are some jams on the box set and also a large number of bootlegs which consist of the grooves that made it into various songs on First Rays and South Saturn but in vestigial form and combined in different ways with bits that became parts of other songs. For those of you who haven’t heard those other jams and outtakes, these last two tracks (and “Ships Passing Through The Night”) will be actually, yes, a revelation, an inspiration, a conflagration of cosmic information.
Although the groove on Valleys is solid enough to dance around the house to, and the tones are crisp and thick and wonderful, the sequencing is too odd and disjointed for a smooth and flowing complete listen. So Valleys Of Neptune might best be thought of as mainly a reference material, a survey of a particular phenomenon, something like The Jimi Hendrix Concerts, whereas First Rays Of The New Rising Sun and South Saturn Delta are two of the most played discs in my collection (not just my collection of Jimi, but of MUSIC), even more so than the albums he completed during his lifetime.
Sonic Youth has released a series of records on their own SYR label, many of which consist mainly of improvisations recorded in their studio during rehearsals or between and among album sessions. Most if not all of these releases are labeled in languages which are not English. The reasons for this are obscure…
I own two of these releases (#1 and #2, I believe …) and I like them quite well. I’ve had #2 for longer and played it more often, so last night I got out #1 to listen to while reading a short story by Irvine Welsh (which mentions heroin only briefly so sppbt to his reputation … we’ll see how the collection progresses, but so far the writing is really solid good and I would recommend it, the book is called The Acid House).
The Sonic Youth record was mellower than I recalled, pleasantly droning and pulsating, and after a minute or two a little light went on in my brain and I realized it was one of those increasingly-common large-sized 45rpm releases, which I was playing at 33&1/3.
I let it go. It sounded good. I will listen to side two today in the same manner.
It has become typical that I prefer those large-size 45rpm releases when played at the wrong speed. This first came to light during Marc Cantlin’s visit to Los Angeles back in the spring of 2009… said visit documented here:
Right around that time I had purchased a record by Akron/Family called “Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free.” I sat down to listen to it and was really enjoying it a lot, really into it … and it took me half of side one (of four) to realize I was listening too slow. Or rather, the record was moving too slow. Perhaps I was listening too fast.
I returned the album to its intended speed and started over … to my great dissatisfaction. It was weak, lightweight, affected, even silly!* (On the other hand, I had discovered afro-grunge.)
Since that time I have found in my collection also a record by Omar Rodriguez Lopez called, I think, “Please Heat This Eventually” with guest Damo Suzuki which I’ve been playing on the wrong speed for years and never realized. It’s better that way, trust me.
* To be fair to Akron/Family, who are a worthy group, the album sounds pretty good, especially sides 2-4, if you have not just listened to it at the wrong speed first. Contrast is, in this case, everything.
I am greatly honored (again) to have my work listened to, dug, and raved about by the Arch-Drude himself, Julian Cope. You can read his rant here, about 2/3 down the page:
Among other things, he says that this disc “showcases both 5-Track’s role as natural instrumentalist freebluesman, but tends to overlook/underplay his excellence as a singer of freaked out-yet-enlightened field holler,” which is a WONDERFUL thing to hear. He also says, and this might even be better: “What I rarely get sent – and what makes 5-Track so unique – are songs of such calibre as ‘Floating Around’, ‘It Could Be Time’, ‘Hot Potato Pie’ or the be-all-and-end-all epic ‘He’s not Dead, He’s Just In Texas’.”
Current listening includes “Fight On, Your Time Ain’t Long,” a collection (sans liner notes) of acoustic gospel including a track by Bukka White and also a whole lot of amazing stuff I’ve never heard of with lines like “I wouldn’t mind dying / but I got to go by myself…”
This LP is fun to play GO to. Really. Just ask John Norwood. It’s on Mississippi Records, if that helps you any.
On cassette I am playing close attention to “Good As I Been To You,” an early-90s recording of acoustic folk-blues by Bob Dylan. Favorite tracks on there include “Blackjack Davey” and “Jim Jones” though “Froggy Went A-Courting” is hard to deny. Bob still using his ’80s voice for the most part. He settles back down through-out his next, similar, album, “World Gone Wrong” and has regained his fullness by “Time Out Of Mind” yea unto the present day. Go Bob!
And, of course, anything that sounds good in the rain is welcome on my turntable today. Time for coffee and staring into the clouds.
So there’s this little green record, and it’s been making me really happy.
I’ve been wanting to write about it for a while, but I wasn’t sure what to say about it.
I still don’t know what to say about it, except that I really like it, a lot.
The little green record is by TOMMY SANTEE KLAWS, and it seems to be called Apathetic Dental Technician 7″
Side A either has two songs or two titles, and they are: “Dead Leaves & Bumblebees” / “Crack & Chants”
Side B has one: “Methantiphon”
I think I’ve been listening to side B more … The music is slow and blissful, ethereal and also acoustically grounded. The human singing voices are unusual but lovely. The melodies are strong, timeless, and strangely un/familiar. The music reminds me of a way I’ve never felt. The vinyl format (and the green color!!) just add to to the vibration (I like to know something sizable is spinning rapidly while I listen … A CD doesn’t cut it, and mp3s don’t move no way nohow) …
This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever got from a band with whom I happened to be sharing a bill (Amanda Jo opened for them at the Highland Park Legion Hall). (Other extremely cool things from people I know would have to include Spleek Speaks by Marc Cantlin and anything by Matthew O’Neill)
To get your own copy of the Apathetic Dental Technician 7″, please investigate this link:
I picked up a record by Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter … I’ve always thought it was a beautiful band name, but a little outside my genre of interest (don’t really dig “country-rock” … excepting certain exceptions … see below) … though I bought Jesse and co’s split single with Steve Turner on BURN BURN BURN a few years ago and really fell in love with their song, “Moon Over Troubled Town” (but it always sounds different every time I play the record, which I guess is a good thing. I blame it on the labels being pasted on the wrong sides of the vinyl) …
The one I just bought is a full-length, called “Like, Love, Lust, and the Open Halls Of The Soul” … and I’m not sure what, if anything, I was expecting.
But I play in a few bands which include elements of country and also elements of rock, blues, funk, whatever … and that means those bands can be called, at least in part, “country-rock” … and that means it behooves me to find a place to stand in that alleged genre.
So I bought this Jesse Sykes album, thinking maybe a record by a country-and/or-Americana-inflected artist who I liked pretty well, maybe that could give me some ideas of how to position myself.
OK, well, it did that.
I’m a guitar player, but the guitar player on Jesse’s album isn’t the first thing I noticed (although he is wonderful). The first thing was her voice, which is astonishing. She sings like an old, old woman in a young woman’s body. She sings as if she lives in a burrow dug into soft earth in the roots of an old, old tree. It is wonderful.
And next I realized how badly the sounds were causing me to miss the Pacific Northwest. Bad enough to cry. It won’t leave my mind.
In this music there is rain, and pine-tree-lined horizons, distant mountains, and an awareness of mist. There is a cool humidity, a northern languidity, a massive heft of tone and a psychic impact delivered laconically but nonetheless with force.
The guitarist is Phil Wandscher. He’s great. I plan to study him closely in the future. And while I like what he’s doing quite a lot, I also know now how what I do is going to be different. Thank you, Phil, for the inspiration.
The production and mixing are very complimentary to this group. The musicians sound like epic stomping monster gods singing sweetly in the deepest darkest forests of the mythic overworlds. But the music itself is so intensely chill that I can only listen to one side at a time (there are four) lest I fall into a trance from which I will not emerge.
(And it’s solid background music, too … for Tai Chi, Yoga, feeding the cat, but a little too subtle to wash dishes to … that’s good, we need music like that)
…Exceptions being (”country-rock” that I like): “Exile On Main Street” and related Stones. Certain Bob Dylan records. Certain Neil Young records. Lots of stuff by Leon Russell. (I like just about everything these people ever did, but their output varies, as you probably know, in terms of genre).
And I like certain things (but not everything) by The Band, Ry Cooder, JJ Cale, Danny Barnes … the “country-blues” ie Robert Johnson, Skip James, maybe Elmore James (tho, yes, I know, that’s edging into a Chicago blues bag, but Elmore is early and influential enough that I think I can call his “blues,” “country”) … Things from the Harry Smith Anthology Of American Folk Music. Hank Williams 1.
Not sure what else I’d really put in this category to any major degree, tho of course there are elements in many and diverse places (Black Crowes, Earth, blah blah blah) …
Had the pleasure of a few days visit from Team Evan & Woody, roving Seattle musical tag-team.
In between playing a ridiculous amount of music with everyone we met, we stopped into Origami Vinyl and made some financially-ill-advised-but-aesthetically-sound purchases.
(Woody abstained from purchasing. Way to buck the culture!)
We started with Mr Bishop, whose tones are thick and mystic chops formidable. The first track is a lengthy unaccompanied rumination for middle-east-inflected electric guitar, featuring round, warm, diamond-edged tone that is just about everything I could want in a recorded guitar sound.
The band kicks on track 2, and from there on the songs are long and they groove mightily. Think about something between Medeski Martin & Wood’s “Shack-Man” and Marc Ribot’s 2nd Los Cubanos Postizos, “Muy Divertido” … but it is nothing like either of those, really. They are the closest reference points I can think of just now.
It was a brain-cleansing listen, from the beginning of side A straight to the droning, Joujouka-escent closing track on side B.
Then we threw the Tortoise platter on the table and basked in a whole big pile of oddly electronic sounding instrumental grooves for bass, drums, keys, and occasional sips of guitar, all of which was recorded PERFECTLY, the tones so big and round and warm that it could perhaps have been done on a 4-track. You could call that kind of sound “hi-fi lo-fi”. Totally amazing record.
We capped it with a listen to the “West Coast Post-Asiatic Sampler” record, vinyl edition. We were so caught up with examining the truly lovely multi-colored record itself that we failed to navigate the side-selection issue properly and listened to side 2 first. (Not that sides are anything like plainly marked on this release). But I think it was OK, and supplied a properly weird vibe to the end of the evening.
BTW:
A few nights later I stayed up with Woody listening to Tim Buckley’s “Blue Afternoon” and “Happy/Sad” records. I esteem “Blue Afternoon” highly in a wide array of ways, and although I have been intensely fond of “Happy/Sad” for years, I have generally thought of it as a gem made perfect by its very flaws.
Opinion revised. “Happy/Sad” is a perfect album. Period.
A couple of new-ish records have been making my life happier this week, and I want to tell you about them.
The one which I think has got the most spins (and the best album title by far) is “Free Your Mind And Win A Pony” by GOLDEN ANIMALS (http://www.myspace.com/goldenanimals). This is one of those weird little records that seems to have fallen through the cracks in the cosmic walls… And when I say “weird little records,” I should add that if I someday manage to make one of those records myself I will die a happy man.
The Golden Animals generate open-tuned desert psych that has a kinship to the first Doors lp, the second Beefheart record (”Strictly Personal”), The Rising Sons (with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder), and the first album by the 13th Floor Elevators. There are two humans in the band, Tommy Eyes and Linda Beecroft. Tommy covers the guitar work with four semi-hollows that chill on a stand behind him, each in a different tuning. Linda plays the drums like she’s possessed, or dosed, or both.
The record is fine to hang out with, and live they can really pull the energy together…
The other big number on my stereo right now is “Evolutionary Squalor,” by LIQUORBALL. Liquorball includes guitarist Grady Runyan. Grady’s guitar playing makes me very happy. Delays and wah-noise and things that I usually only hear on acid come yammering out of my speakers and fly in small circles around the living room couch, underpinned by a thick bass carpet, clattering drum grooviness, and a flock of saxophones, not to mention a lot of weird electronic noise. Things like this have been done before, and I’ve even done it myself (KAOS NITES, anyone?) but this one is definitive of the form.
If you want one, you have to email the band. But you can’t do that, cos they exist off the web-grid. Another band which includes Grady (The Bad Trips - http://www.thebadtrips.com) provides slightly more information (and another amazing record!!). Check out this blog for more info: NEW LIQUORBALL RECORD
WOODEN SHJIPS “Volume 1″ - which is really great but, being a collection of singles, sort of an odd listen. Side one starts with the adrenaline rush of “Shrinking Moon For You,” which is sort of the reason anyone would want to own this record as the original single is long out-of-print. It doesn’t rip quite as hard on 33 1/3 as I think it must on 45rpm, but what the hell, it sounds great. I play it a lot. LOUD, too.
The middle of side one is very spacey and strange, though not unpleasant, and then there’s another burn-em-up jam at the end.
I played side one over and over for a week or two and then forgot I even owned this record. I just finally discovered side two the other day. It has two tracks. The first one is dominated by a loud and pleasantly piercing lead guitar. I wish for more bass, but I know it doesn’t matter. When I want bass I will go and listen to, oh, LIQUORBALL or OM or something. This record is for what it is, and it is a fine guitar sound that they have delivered, and anyway track two (which goes on for years and could be twice as long without annoying me any) is mixed just the way I like. It sounds like a triceratops that got into the mushroom patch, singing as it stumbles around the brush.
By the way: WOODEN SHJIPS is a DANCE BAND. They say so, anyway… and not only do I believe them, I dance to their record.
This is essentially an album of electric mbira music, cascading and polyrhythmic and full of light and danceable and deeply dense, and in that way it is much like the other discs in the series. Disc 1 was devoted to a band called KONONO 1, and disc two was a compilation which included a terrific DVD. The backstory was that these bands came out of the jungle with their music and found that if they wanted to be heard over the traffic they had to build some amplification. The substance of the music was preserved, but the tones became mangy and electronic. Perfect for a certain kind of taste… and lucky me, I like stuff like that.
Although I believe there is more depth to some of the music on volumes 1 & 2, there is something about this new disc that is making me want to play it again and again. It may be one of those cases where lightness ends up being a virtue - unlike certain Royal Trux records which I love so much but can not bear to hear too often… cos it weighs too much, and I can’t take it.
But maybe not. Maybe this is just some good music at a good time. I’m thinking it might be the point where western music and traditional African music collide, in that a certain element of societal substance is sacrificed for proto-disposable jive listenability. But I could be wrong, and I hope I am, and I hope I still like this disc this much in 20 years.
