Music About Music Part 2 - 60s Cali

Mamas & The Papas sing about the 60s Cali scene although weren't they originally from New York? It's really hard to watch John Philips now since he's become a rotten scoundrel in my mind after finding out about the alleged incest he committed to his daughter. I can get past these sort of things usually with the music but I think it's seeing him and the image he projects ie. a sort of innocent non-threatening lame yet money hungry hippie. Hey the rock world is full of scoundrels (cf The Stones, Led Zep, Gary Glitter etc). The thing with someone like Gary Glitter he seemed so mental it wasn't such a stretch what he got up to. Anyway innocence is very questionable in rock innit? It seems the more you project innocence, the more you are hiding how fucked up you are (cf. The Beach Boys, The Cocteau Twins).

The Beach Boys sing about an earlier version of themselves. How LA is that?

Love/Sex as music or is it the other way around?

How fucking good is Carl Wilson's voice! How much do you wanna punch Mike Love in the face though? Better than The Ronettes version, I reckon. No Brian in the clip. The other dude is Bruce Johnston. He wrote some fine Beach Boys songs like Disney Girls, Tears In The Morning etc. In the 70s he ended up collaborating with Elton John a fair bit. He even sang backing vocals on Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Oh...................how could I forget?

'For the Music is your only friend/Dance on fire as it intends/Until the end'

*What a unit! What A performance! Jim's Swagger! Fucking funny too.

Lord Of The Rings - Bo Hansson

On The Hi-Fi Part 43

Bo Hansson - Lord Of The Rings

For years I've avoided this album for some reason. I mean I love me kosmische and synth based gear but I think it was the title that put me off. I thought it was probably music for Tolkien nerds and trainspotters. Anyway I finally took the plunge and hey, due to my ignorance, I've been missing out. There's way more guitar than I imagined but it's got plenty of Moog and organ too. Guitar-wise it's a little reminiscent of the more outre moments from Robbie Krieger, like if he'd been tripping on acid in the desert for five days straight sweltering in the hot sun. I guess for me this sound conjures up images of arid dusty plains, scorching heat, sand dunes and cacti rather than middle earth. In amongst the beautifully evocative atmospheres it even gets a bit groovy in places. Lord Of The Rings is just the right side of good psych prog. This is another Swedish gem from the early 70s along with LPs from Algarnas Tradgard, Harvester, Trad, Gras Och Stenar and Handgjort

Children Of The Sun

Heard this in a restaurant the other day and thought it was like 60s Scott Walker doing a lost Doors track. It took me a while to find what it was but here it is!

Don't forget this bewdy from the 80s.

And this one! Wow.

Hotel California

I just read Barney Hoskyns's Waiting For The Sun and it's pretty good up until the late 70s when he starts to rush through punk, paisley, metal through to Hip Hop. I'm a Beach Boys, Byrds, Burritos, Love, The Doors, Gene Clark kinda guy so when it got to The Eagles, Linda Rondstadt, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Brown and ugh James Taylor I thought I'd probably stop reading as my interest waned but man they were all so fucked and took so many drugs it was absurd. Anyway what I'm gettin at is the biggest impact* The Eagles had on me, apart from hearing their songs on the radio growing up ad nauseum, was the inner of the gatefold sleeve of Hotel California.  While in about year 8 in High School me and a bunch of friends watched this video about backmasking, satanism etc. in rock at one of my friends houses whose dad happened to be a teacher at our catholic School.  The video would have been produced by some kind of American fundamentalist christian group to scare the kids away from that evil Rock n Roll. I vaguely recall stuff on The Beatles, Led Zep and Queen and their use of satanic backmasking. The main thing I remember however was the dissection of the lyrics to Hotel California and the study of its cover. From then on that cover became a spooky artifact. It was in my home. I don't recall anyone ever playing it but the cover was often perused with spooky delight. At other peoples houses we'd go through the record collections to invariably find the album cover to check out the dude up there in the 2nd of the 3 windows upstairs. He was meant to be the devil or something. It was pretty creepy whatever he was. The Hotel according to the video was some kind of satanic church...'you can check in anytime you like but you can never leave'...... Anyway I should check and see if that video is on the youtubes.

*I loved Don Henley's Boys Of Summer (One of my all time fave 80s tunes!), I bought the 7", but I probably didn't even realise until much later that he was the dude in The Eagles.

RIP RAY MANZAREK

You know what I loved about Ray apart from his skills on the organ, piano, bass and even marimba was that he stayed enthusiastic about the Doors right through his life. He really believed in them and knew they were great. He never dismissed them as juvenalia like many artists would. He knew they were the best musical days of his life and they would never be repeated. He was still inspired in the sleeve notes of those last reissues from like 2007.