The La's

The La's only official release

The La's were a group from Liverpool, England. Noel Gallagher was once famous for saying that Oasis, or rather he was going to finish what The La's started (or words to that effect). Sadly the Mancunian mouth doesn't even come close. I'm not knocking Mr. Gallagher here, don't get me wrong, the guy's written some nice tunes, but Lee Mavers and his scouse mates were always in a different league, musicaly, melodically, lyrically and philosophically.

The La's released one self titled album in 1990, which every home should have,  a handful off brilliant singles, some BBC sessions and since their demise, a hodgepodge of compilations, lost recordings, rarities, alternate takes and live stuff. 
Lee Mavers has become somewhat of a living legend, a sort of scouse Brian Wilson, reclusive, mad cap, inconsistent and always seemingly on the verge of a brilliant come back with threats of a new and even better LA's long player. But unlike Wilson he has yet to deliver. That doesn't take anything away from the perfection of the first album. 
The LA's were also a great live band. I saw them twice in their touring heady in the late 1980's and on both occasions were brilliant. I wish the same could be said for the likes of The Stone Roses who somehow eclipsed the LA's as the great saviours of British guitar music back in 1989.

"Room Full off Mirrors" Jimi Hendrix Experience...

Not the widely known version from the Rainbow Bridge soundtrack. This version, which to my mind is far superior, is a lot darker with a real sense of brooding and malevolence. Jimi's vocal are on top form, and the guitar break is searing and concise. Hope you enjoy this one from the vaults. The film was made as a tribute to the great man, and in honour of the 40th anniversary of his parting with this life.

"Chelsea Girl" – Nico

"Chelsea Girl" released in 1967

Angi by Davy Graham

This tune by Davy Graham is considered the well spring for all other 'folk blues' tunes that came after it. Every guitar player who ever wandered down the road of finger picking, folk guitar has mastered his own version.
Bert Jansch famously recorded it after Davy Graham's version, twisting it and turning it into his own tune. Paul Simon was so taken by the tune that he not only recorded it himself, but borrowed the majority of the tune's structure and turned it into "We've got a groovy thing going Baby" for Simon and Garfunkel. And now my attempt. I'm more or less influenced by both Davy and Bert's versions, taking elements of both to turn out my own version of this classic, ageless tune.
The film I made to accompany it is largely culled from the Peter Whitehead film, "Tonight let's all make love in London". I've chopped it up a bit and added some of my own footage. I want to convey the feeling of urban movement that the song conjures up. Buildings, bridges, traffic and human traffic. A city at night, a city on the move, people going places, anonymity in the crowd. The heartbeat of a city.

Davy Graham

How to Record an Album With a Blown Mind...

The majesty of Alexander 'Skip' Spence's late 60's ragged folk/ psych masterpiece "Oar".

Oar by Alexander 'Skip' Spence.

Before 'Oar'
The road to 'Oar' for Skip had been exciting, joyous, manic, unpredictable, dangerous, dark and eventually plain old insane.
Skip's first brush with fame came in the original line up of San Francisco psychedelic stalwarts Jefferson Airplane. Skip not only played drums but co-wrote some of the best early airplane songs including the gloomy psych folk hit "Blues From an Airplane" and wrote "My Best Friend" released on the groups "Surrealistic Pillow" L.P. He was fired by the autocratic Marty Balin for missing an Airplane gig.

After leaving Jefferson Airplane, Skip joined Moby Grape, the greatest almost-rans of the late 60's West Coast scene. During the recording of the groups second album "Wow" in New York, Spence, who had always been fond of altered states, seems to have gone right out of his mind and flipped over to the dark-side. After putting a fire axe through his band mate Don Stevenson's door, he headed downtown to the studio where the rest of the band were working, in his pajamas, axe in hand seemingly to finish the job he had started. After being apprehended, Skip was arrested, booked and shipped off for a six month stay at New York's notorious Bellevue Hospital.

It's here where the story of 'Oar' really commences. Skip was released from Bellevue with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a head full of songs, however he was still under contract to Columbia records. After being given a guitar by Fender, and playing his songs to record producer David Rubinson, Skip bought a chopper with an advance from Columbia and headed to Nashville where he wanted to record his record, presumably away from anyone he might run into from his not too distant past, and, so it was that Skip arrived in early December 1968.

Skip during his time with Moby Grape.

'Oar'

Skip recorded 28 pieces of music in six days between December 3 and 12 and by the 16th was back on his chopper and gone, West to California and oblivion. He alone handled all the vocals, played bass, drums and acoustic and electric guitar; and produced the finished album with the help of Mike Figlio, a Columbia staff engineer. 

The simple instrumentation upon which Skip hung his transcendent and ghostly vocals, was partly due to the constraints of recording on an old three track machine at Columbia, and partly due to Skips one man recording band ethos. And it's these factors along with Skips extraordinary songs that combined to make Oar sound like nothing else at the time and almost nothing since. Writing for Rolling Stone in 1968, Greil Marcus described the L.P. thus, "Much of Oar sounds like the sort of haphazard folk music that might have been made around campfires after the California gold rush burned itself out – sad, clumsy tunes that seem to laugh at themselves as Spence takes the listener on a tour through his six or seven voices..." He goes on to compare Spence, somewhat erroneously to Wildman Fischer and the album to Bob Dylan's "Basement Tapes".

"Little Hands"

The original album, opens with a gentle strum of acoustic guitar followed by a stab of  electric guitar against marching band drums, liquid bass and the glorious, folk gospel off "Little Hands". Skips snake guitar wraps around his strange, shimmering vocal.
"Cripple Creek"

The dark and eerie "Cripple Creek", written about a cripple in his wheelchair and sung in a baritone equal parts Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, fizzes with Spence's rattling acoustic rhythm and pretty, flamenco like flourishes. 
"Diana"

"Diana" is both sung and growled by Skip in an otherworldly, broken and pained voice, hung on rattling disjointed acoustics, fractured drumming and faraway soaring electric fills. It's a spooky unnerving song, not a million miles from Arthur Lee & Love. 
"Margaret – Tiger Rug"

This odd song is held together by a disjointed, clanking bass and more military drums with a strange lyric influenced it seems by his time in Bellevue. Skips vocals are delivered in a half sung, half spoken, off key, almost jokingly shambolic manner. Childlike would be the accurate word. The song  staggers to it's conclusion before cutting dead. 
"Weighted Down (The Prison Song)"

Skip's soul laid bare and accompanied by that beautiful, mournful baritone and his lightly strummed acoustic. The feeling is dread, doped and heavy, but also a weary kind of comfort and release. Skip's words come to us like some old time spiritual salvation hymn. The weight of the delivery saturates the listener and pulls us into Skips broken down world. 
"War in Peace"

Skip guides us from the depths of his soul to the heavens with the gloriously stumbling and tripped out "War in Peace". Skip's delivery is a high pitched whistle of a whisper, heavily delayed and reminiscent of some of the late Syd Barratt's solo work. Full 'band' here with Skip taking the song to task with double lead guitar, chugging rhythm and great bass and drum interplay. All topped off with Skip's strange bird whistles and ethereal whispers. He finishes off with a nod to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love' in the closing guitar run. 
"Broken Heart"

"Broken Heart" comes on like some lost Hank Williams hymn from the mid 50's. But Hank never wrote lyrics as off the wall as this.
"All Come to Meet Her" 

This is Skip at his most fragile and most beautiful. Soaring wordless harmonies that morph into lyrics. Skip's elastic twang of guitar echoes the vocals throughout, all set against the bony, skeleton bare rattle of Skips drums. Unnerving but gorgeous, heart warming as some ancient and lost gospel hymn.
"Books of Moses"

This cracked biblical epic is seeped in the same kind of fear and dread conjured up by the murder ballads of Robert Johnson and Leadbelly. With it's strained, demented vocal and dark twanging acoustic guitar set against a radiophonic workshop of rain, thunderstorms and howling wind, it's a 50's B Horror Movie set to music. The results are chilling, until it segues straight into the up beat and comedic "Dixie Peach Promenade (Yin for Yang)". It echo's the Moby Grape track "Just Like Gene Autry (A Fox-trot)". This however, would be it's slightly deranged, sex starved, hillbilly cousin after too much moonshine and not enough beaver!
"Lawrence of Euphoria"

The strangeness continues to grow with the jocular, bouncy and defiantly unhinged "Lawrence of Euphoria". Skips great, thumping, strummed bass carries the song along against a willfully, out of tune yet triumphantly strident one chord guitar accompaniment. Again, Skips vocals are half sung half leered into the microphone.

"Grey/Afro"
The albums closer is the meditative, prayer like "Grey/Afro". Skip is in strange, swampy and alien waters, swimming in a heavily phased and swelling mix of strummed bass and splashing drum fills. It's hypnotic, spoken in tongues atmosphere comes on like a lost ship at sea being tossed around in a tempest of sound. Skips voice comes and goes like the wind, a lost soul crying out from beneath the stormy, boiling sea of sound.

After 'Oar'

Oar, unsurprisingly sold little on it's initial release, and was resigned to the lost classic bin. Skip headed West and continued to play throughout his downward spiral into schizophrenia. He joined various line ups of a reformed Moby Grape over the yeas. He contributed a track to the 1996 X-Files album, recorded with old friend Jack Cassidy. The track was never used, deemed to weird for the sci-fi programme. 


30 years after it's release a tribute album was releasedt. It featured among others, Robert Plant (who'd always been a champion of both Skip and Moby Grape), Beck, Wilco and Robyn Hitchcock. 

Sundazed released Oar in an expanded edition which included the lost second half of "Grey/Afro" titled "The Time has Come". And a further nine tracks, some incomplete from the original Oar sessions.


Skip passed away on 16th. April 1999 after living for some years with his girlfriend in a trailer park in Santa Cruz, California.  Keep on clapping, little hands, and shine on, shine on, shine on.


All authors own work.

Thelonius Monk...

I can't really say enough or get enough really, of this great, great musician who was born in North Carolina in 1917, but will forever be associated with New York, The Five Spot, Bop and of course the piano.

Thelonius was an outsider, an on the edge artist, Thelonius was underground! and way ahead of his time and his peers. No one looked like Monk, no one played like Monk and he was largely ignored for the early part of his career.  After losing his licence to play, due to him having the notorius Bud Powell in his motor vehicle and getting busted for possession of narcotics,  and after a residency at the Five Spot, a small restaurant in New York City, Thelonius finally started to get the recognition his talent was due. Through it all Monk seemed oblivious, always dancing (quite literally) to a different drum. The man lived to play.

And his playing was lyrical,  full off air but totally on the edge, as if at any moment he may fall off and crash land, but never did. Monk was a true individual, and a great artist.

I sometimes think, you know, where did these guys come from, I mean what dimension!! Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Ornette Coleman? All very different and all individually brilliant. What was it in the early part of 20th Century American history that produced these men and their music, these magicians, these shamen of sound? Well I don't rightly know, but the evidence of that magic, that 'altered musical reality' is here in spades in this great documentary. Mo Monk please...

Glengarry Glen Ross Speech...

Alec Baldwin's great speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross". Coffee's for closers!!

coloured balloons

Happy Birthday Penguin Books...

1970's Penguin Design

Penguin books is, are 75 years old  ( BBC World Service). The world wide publishing company was founded in 1935 by the late (Sir) Allen Lane, 1902 – 1970.

His mission was to provide high quality, paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Essentially this meant that the great unwashed could buy and own books of their own. Literature, poetry, non – fiction and plays were emancipated from the classroom, the library and the University and the man in the street had the chance to educate himself. The books were a great success, so much so that by March 1936, ten months after the company's launch on 30 July 1935, one million Penguin books had been printed.

History
From the outset, design was essential to the success of the Penguin brand. Eschewing the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were colour coded according to which series the title belonged to; this is sometimes referred to as the horizontal grid. In the central white panel, the author and title were printed in Eric Gill's sans serif and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books".

The initial design was created by the then twenty-one-year-old office junior Edward Young, who also drew the first version of the Penguin logo. The colour schemes included: orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime fiction, cerise and white for travel and adventure, dark blue and white for biographies, yellow and white for miscellaneous, red and white for drama; and the rarer purple and white for essays and belles lettres and grey and white for world affairs.

Between 1947 and 1949, the great German typographer Jan Tschichold redesigned 500 Penguin books, and left Penguin with a set of influential rules of design principles brought together as the Penguin Composition Rules. Tschichold's work included the woodcut illustrated covers of the classics series (also known as the medallion series), and with Hans Schmoller, his eventual successor at Penguin, the vertical grid covers that became the standard for Penguin fiction throughout the 1950s.

New techniques such as phototypesetting and offset-litho printing dramatically reduced cost and permitted the printing of images and text on the same paper stock. In May 1960, Tony Godwin was appointed as editorial adviser, he sought to broaden the range of Penguin's list and keep up with new developments in graphic design. To this end, he hired Germano Facetti in January 1961, who was to decisively alter the appearance of the Penguin brand. Beginning with the crime series, Facetti canvassed the opinion of a number of designers including Romek Marber for a new look to the Penguin cover. It was Marber's suggestion of what came to be called the Marber grid along with the retention of traditional Penguin colour coding that was to replace the previous three horizontal bars design and set the pattern for the design of the company's paperbacks for the next twenty years.

By the end of the 1960s, Penguin was in financial trouble. Ultimately, the company was bought out by Pearson Longman in August 1970, some six weeks after the death of Allen Lane. A new emphasis on profitability emerged and, with the departure of Facetti in 1972, the defining era of Penguin book design came to an end.

Controversy
Just as Lane well judged the public's appetite for paperbacks in the 1930s, his decision to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence in 1960 boosted Penguin's notoriety. The novel was at the time unpublished in the United Kingdom and the predicted obscenity trial not only marked Penguin as a fearless publisher, it also helped drive the sale of at least 3.5 million copies. Penguin's victory in the case heralded the end to the censorship of books in the UK. In the same tradition of courting controversy, Penguin published Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust which accused David Irving of Holocaust denial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin for libel in 1998 but lost in a widely publicised trial.

Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005
More recently, the design element of the Penguin paperback, was celebrated in the 2005 publication "Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935 – 2005". The book looks back at seventy years of Penguin paperbacks, and charts the development of British publishing, book cover design and the role of artists and designers in creating and defining the Penguin look.