Sandy Denny solo live performance from 1971

Sandy Denny was not only a great great singer, but an inspired songwriter and performer. This footage was filmed around the time she released her first solo album, "The North Star Grassman and the Raven". Say no more really. Here she is at the height of her powers...

Reno Nevada - Fairport Convention, 1968

The original line up with the under rated Judy Dibble on vocals take on Richard and Mimi Farina's spooky folk classic "Reno Nevada" on French television from the late '60's. Richard Thompson's guitar is sublime and nice to see tiger on bass.

What is this...? A convention!!

Phil Spector, pre porridge duty, Boyce and Heart and on drums, backing vocals and cello Genie on an episode of I dream of Genie. Where's Hagman?  American T.V. doesn't get stranger or cooler than this...

More Music...

Philip K Dick – Science FIction Visionary

Philip K Dick 1928 - 1982

Since his untimely death at age 53, there has been an extraordinary growth of interest in his writings, which during his lifetime were largely ignored by serious mainstream critics and readers. Such is no longer the case, and the novels of Philip K. Dick frequently appear on university curricula devoted to modern American literature. But that is only the beginning of the transformation. Since 1982, when Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (based on Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) made its debut, eight feature films based on Dick's fiction have appeared, the other seven being Total Recall, The Minority Report, Screamers, Impostor, the French film Confessions d'un Barjo (based on Dick's mainstream novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist), Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly and the upcoming Next (April 2007). That's an average of roughly one movie every three years since Dick's passing - a rate of cinematic adaptation exceeded only by Stephen King. And there are other big-money film options currently held by Hollywood studios.

Philip K. Dick has done more than arrive. He has become a looming and illuminating presence not merely in American but in world culture, with his works translated into major European and Asian languages. There is even a bastard adjective - "phildickian "- that makes its way into print now and then to describe the baffling twists and turns of our times. An understanding of the basic facts of Dick's life not only casts light on the themes that predominate in his writings, but also brings to view a fascinating story in its own right.

The Early Years

He was born prematurely, along with his twin sister Jane, in Chicago on December 16, 1928. His father was Edgar Dick, his mother Dorothy Kindred - from her maiden name came Dick's middle initial. Jane died six weeks after her birth, a loss that Phil felt deeply throughout his life. As time went on, Phil came, with whatever justice, to blame his mother for Jane's death. His relationship with both of his parents was decidedly difficult, and made only more so when they divorced when he was five years old.

Sister Jane, his mother, and his father served as models for many of the characters who would populate Dick's fictional universes in the decades to come. In particular, the death of Jane - and Phil's traumatic sense of separation from her, an experience common to many twins who have lost their sibling - contributed to the dualist (twin-poled) dilemmas that dominated his creative work - science fiction (SF)/mainstream, real/fake, human/android. It was out of these pressing dualities that the two vast questions emerged which Dick often cited as encompassing his writing: What is Real? and What is Human?

Mother Dorothy retained custody over her son, and they eventually settled in Berkeley, where Dick grew up, graduated from high school, and briefly attended the University of California in 1949 before dropping out.

Starting in seventh grade, however, Dick began suffering from bouts of extreme vertigo; the vertigo recurred with special intensity during his brief undergraduate stint. In his late teens, Dick later recalled, he was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia - a label that terrified him. Other psychotherapists and psychiatrists in later years would offer other diagnoses, including the one that Dick was quite sane.

Leaving aside medical terminology, there is no question that Dick felt himself, throughout his life, to suffer from bouts of psychological anguish that he frequently referred to as "nervous breakdowns." His experience of these was transmuted into fictional portraits, most notably of "ex-schizophrenic" Jack Bohlen in Martian Time-Slip (1964).

A Genre of Ideas

In a 1968 "Self Portrait" he recalled the moment of discovery of the genre that would ultimately set him free to write of the complex realities of his own personal experience:

"I was twelve [in 1940] when I read my first sf magazine…it was called Stirring Science Stories and ran, I think, four issues….I came across the magazine quite by accident; I was actually looking for Popular Science. I was most amazed. Stories about science? At once I recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in the Oz books - this magic now coupled not with magic wands but with science…In any case my view became magic equals science…and science (of the future) equals magic."

This is not to say that Dick read only SF during his coming of age years. On the contrary, he was an omnivorous and devouring reader, taking in Xenophon's Anabasis, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the French realists such as Stendhal, Flaubert and Maupassant - all this and much more by his early twenties. Dick gave credit to the American Depression-era writer James T. Farrell, author of Studs Lonigan, for helping Dick see how to construct the SF stories that he sold in such numbers to the SF pulps in the early 1950s.

And even though Dick never lost his yearning to be accepted by the literary mainstream, he always regarded it as a kind of treason to deprecate the SF genre he grew up on and flourished in. As he wrote in 1980, two years before his death:

"I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers….This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming."

An Author Finds His Voice

From age fifteen to his early twenties, Dick was employed in two Berkeley shops, University Radio and Art Music, owned by Herb Hollis, a salt-of-the-earth American small businessman who became a kind of father-figure for Dick and served as an inspiration for a number of his later fictional characters, most notably Leo Bulero in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), who, in the memo to his employees that serves as the frontispiece to that novel, gruffly affirms the human spirit:

"I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?"

Three Stigmata, which deals with a terrifying Gnostic-style demiurgic invasion of earth by means of the eerily permeating hallucinogen "Chew-Z," so fascinated Beatle John Lennon that he considered making a film of it.

In the early 1950s, with the helpful mentorship of SF editor and Berkeley resident Anthony Boucher, Dick began to publish stories in the SF pulps of the era at an astonishing rate - seven of his stories appeared in June 1953 alone. He soon gave up his employment in the Hollis shops to pursue the economically insecure career of an SF writer.

In 1954, Dick later recalled with humor, he met one of his SF idols, A. E. Van Vogt, at an SF convention, where Van Vogt proceeded to convince the neophyte writer that there was more money to be made in novels than in stories. Henceforward, Dick's rate of production of SF novels was as remarkable as his story output had been. At his creative peak, he published sixteen SF novels between 1959 and 1964. During this same period, he also wrote mainstream novels that went unpublished, much to his anguish. To this day, it is his SF work for which Dick is best remembered, and justly so.

After a very brief failed first marriage in 1948, remarried four times - to Kleo Apostolides in 1950, to Anne Williams Rubenstein in 1959, to Nancy Hackett in 1966, and to Tessa Busby in 1973. There was one child born in each of the latter three marriages -respectively, his daughters Laura and Isa and son Christopher. During his lifetime, Dick was regarded with respect by SF fans and fellow writers, though his sales never came close to matching those of the most popular SF writers of his era such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert.

Dick received the Hugo Award in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, which tells of a post-World War II world in which Japan and Germany are the victors and the continental United States is roughly divided between them. In devising the plot, Dick employed the I Ching on several occasions and also integrated that divinatory text into the narrative itself - marking its debut in American fiction.

A Life-Changing Experience

In February and March 1974, Dick experienced a series of visions and auditions including an information-rich "pink light" beam that transmitted directly into his consciousness. A year after the events, in March 1975, Dick summarized the 2-3-74 experiences that would pervade his writing for the final eight years of his life:

"I speak of The Restorer of What Was Lost The Mender of What Was Broken."

"March 16, 1974: It appeared - in vivid fire, with shining colors and balanced patterns - and released me from every thrall, inner and outer.

"March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw the world did not compute, that I - and it - had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, 'This cannot exist; it cannot exist.'

"March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same time, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing."

There are those who are eager to create a "Saint Phil" who emerged from this experience. In that regard, it is wise to remember that Dick himself always bore in mind what he called the "minimum hypothesis" -that is, the possibility that all that he had undergone was merely self-delusion.

On the other hand, there are those who regard Dick as a charlatan who foisted upon his readers a pseudo-mystical revelation fueled by mental disorder. But surely a charlatan is one who insists on the seriousness and accuracy of his claims. This Dick never did. One has only to go and read VALIS (1981) to find a piercingly knowing humor in Dick's portrayal of himself as Horselover Fat:

"…Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked."

Those who insist on the "truth" or "falsehood" of Dick's experience of 2-3-74 are missing the central point: that those experiences provided him with the means to explore, with integrity, insight, and humility, the difficulties of making sense of any spiritual path in a relentlessly secular and cynical Western culture in which even apparent revelations can be instantly repackaged as popular entertainment.

On the Edge of Eternity

Dick died on March 2, 1982, the result of a combination of recurrent strokes accompanied by heart failure. In a 1981 entry in his Exegesis (an extensive journal he kept to explore the ramifications of 2-3-74) Dick wrote as focused a self-assessment of his aims and talents as a writer as can be found in any of his journals, letters, essays, and interviews:

    "I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history."

One can readily imagine this passage having been written by Franz Kafka in his diary. And it is among the great fictionalizing philosophers of the twentieth century - Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Rene Daumal, Flann O'Brien - that Dick's place in literary history lies. His uniqueness in this lineage is all the greater for his ability to have created great works in the broadly popular SF form. Dick remains compulsively, convulsingly readable. He is the master of the psychological pratfall, the metaphysical freefall, the political conspiracy within a conspiracy within a conspiracy. He is - as much as any contemporary writer we have - an astute guide to the shifting realities of the twenty-first century. 

More Unseen Hell's Angel Images...

These images were taken by LIFE photographer Bill Ray back in 1965, for an article on the outlaw biker gang the Hell's Angels, written by Joe Bride.

One of the images from the 1965 LIFE magazine article.

Rolling Thunder
From Jesse James to Tony Soprano, outlaws have always held a singular if ambiguous place in America's popular imagination: we fear and loathe their appetite for violence, yet we envy and covet their freedom. In early 1965, LIFE photographer Bill Ray and writer Joe Bride spent several weeks with a gang that, to this day, serves as a living, brawling embodiment of our schizoid relationship with the rebel: the Hells Angels. Here, in a gallery of never-published photographs, Ray and Bride recall their days and nights with Buzzard, Hambone, Big D, and other Angels (and their "old ladies") at a time when the roar of Harleys and the sight of long-haired bikers was still new, alien, and for the average, law-abiding citizen, simply terrifying. Above: Hells Angels, 1965 -- the one previously published image in this gallery. None of the pictures that follow have ever been seen before.
To see the full set of images follow this link: 
http://www.life.com/image/ugc1129811/in-gallery/47471/never-seen-hells-angels-1965 

Tim Buckley...

A brief over view of Tim' life and work. Words from Mojo on line article...

 
TIM BUCKLEY IS OFTEN SEEN as the last of Elektra's great "folk" signings in the connecting line from Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, Fred Neil and Phil Ochs. He appears to bridge the era of acoustic folk and the influence of rock from Los Angeles, but really he never belonged in either camp.
Born in Washington, DC, on Valentine's Day 1947, Buckley was raised in New York. His family moved to Orange County, California, when he was ten years old and at 17 he joined a Country & Western outfit, Princess Ramona & The Cherokee Riders. But his musical spirit would never be so easily channelled and two groups he formed with friends from Buena Vista High School - the pop-flavoured Bohemians and the more esoteric Harlequin 3 - pointed the way forward. Buckley, drummer Larry Beckett and bass player Jim Fielder played the LA clubs, where the Mothers Of Invention's Jimmy Carl Black brought them to the attention of Herb Cohen, who arranged an audition at the Crescendo, on the Strip.
"The band did a set of five or six songs," said Cohen, who died in March this year. "Tim was phenomenal. He looked great, and the voice was special even then. But Larry was not really a drummer, and Jim Fielder was nowhere near as good a musician as he would become. I brought Tim to Elektra."

Elektra boss Jac Holzman was smitten by Buckley's otherworldly voice after hearing a six-song demo. "There was a mysterious, almost ephemeral quality about Tim," he says today. Holzman signed him during the summer of 1966, and the debut album, Tim Buckley - recorded in LA by Paul Rothchild - was released in December that year, beating out the first Doors album by a month.
Holzman felt the album, as interesting as it was, served merely as an introduction to Buckley's talent. "It was an exercise in learning the studio and introducing Tim to its possibilities. The first album was training wheels for what followed. Some songs are really good - Wings, Song Of The Magician, perhaps Grief In My Soul - and there were moments of daring."
Buckley worked hard to promote his album, playing festivals, concerts, clubs, and campuses. Holzman: "Live, he was cotton candy for the girls. His songs reveal a sensitivity that women pick up on earlier than men, but they were the first [fans] he would lose later with his more ambiguous work."

Buckley's most obvious USP was that voice, which New York Times critic Robert Shelton described as "not quite a counter-tenor, but a tenor to counter with". However, within a year of his tantalising debut, Buckley was preparing something more challenging and sophisticated. He and Larry Beckett, now writing poetic lyrics, had a solid notion of how they wanted to shape Buckley's second album, Goodbye And Hello. Folk maven Jerry Yester - soon to join The Lovin' Spoonful - was assigned as producer.
"The first time I met Tim," recalls Yester, "was at Herbie Cohen's house. He played for Judy Henske, Fred Neil, and me. He sang with Jim Fielder on bass. Right out of high school, Tim was wearing a suit, a maroon tie, and his hair was slicked back. He was painfully shy. Fred Neil was his god, and I'm sure he dreamed his voice could have dropped an octave to sing like Fred. He emulated Fred's tragic side, too."
Yester fondly recalls a simpatico relationship with Buckley and Beckett.
"They just tickled me. They weren't about to let anyone screw them over. Firm in their ideals, they had that album all worked out, even down to the track sequencing. I would make suggestions - some they would take, others they wouldn't, but they were open-minded. My role was to bring Tim out, his uniqueness and the clarity of his vision."
At its best, such as the dramatic, impassioned Pleasant Street or the mood-shifting Hallucinations, Goodbye And Hello scores high, justifying Holzman's belief that the album was "a fully realised gem, a miracle." Buckley appears most at ease on the two mellower, more laidback songs: Morning Glory, with its wonderful understated arrangement, and the simple, dreamy Once I Was, inspired by Fred Neil after Buckley visited the sessions for Neil's recording of The Dolphins.
The album marked a turning point for its author. "It was very hard for me to write songs after Goodbye And Hello because most of the bases were touched," Buckley said in 1974. "That was the end of my apprenticeship for writing songs. Whatever I wrote after that wasn't adolescent, which means it wasn't easy to write after that, because you can't repeat yourself. The way Jac had it set up, you were supposed to move on artistically, but the way the business is, you're not. You're supposed to repeat what you do, so there's a dichotomy there."
Buckley guitarist Lee Underwood observed the dichotomy that the singer had identified. "Tim's approach was very much at odds with the laidback troubadour image. That image fit him during the early days, when he was a teenage folkie, but quickly became irrelevant and inappropriate as he matured."
Bruce Botnick, who was the engineer on the first three Buckley albums for Elektra, saw him change before his eyes. "You couldn't contain Tim Buckley's talent - a reflection of all the different sides of his personality. There were quantum leaps between his albums and an intellectual growth that's the mark of a great artist. It's never really conscious with someone like Tim Buckley or Bob Dylan - these people don't slice themselves up into pieces, it's all very instinctive, they have a vision."
Buckley toured Goodbye And Hello with a pool of musicians who were now exploring jazz roots rather than folk. It was this intimate group of players - featuring Buckley's own 12-string, Lee Underwood on lead guitar, and Carter C.C. Collins on congas, plus acoustic bass and vibes - who entered the studios to record what became Happy Sad.

Simply letting the tape roll, the musicians improvised minimalist tapestries around six of Buckley's new songs, of which two stretched beyond ten minutes. Elaborate poetic metaphors and intricate arrangements were out, and experimentation replaced the blithe romanticism of Goodbye And Hello. It would prove to be Buckley's defining album and his highest-charting, even if it only made 81, and it remained in the charts for three months after its release in April 1969.
Yet Jerry Yester has less than fond memories. He was in the middle of an album with Pat Boone when Buckley asked him to produce Happy Sad. Yester was now working in a production team with Zal Yanovsky, who had left the Lovin' Spoonful (and whom Yester would replace). Buckley's musicians ridiculed them for working with the straight-laced Boone but there was one bizarre consequence. The Pat Boone album Yester was producing - Departure - includes the first ever released version of one of Tim Buckley's most renowned compositions: Song To The Siren, unrecorded by Buckley till Starsailor two years later.
"After the rewarding and enjoyable experience with Goodbye And Hello, this was oil and water," says Yester. "Not so much with Tim, but with the band. He really didn't need any input from me on arrangements. The band was leading him at times, and I was there to help make it sound as good as possible."
Buckley had a different recollection. "I really loved doing that album. It was really a break-out time for me musically, and we had a ball doing that. The trick of writing is to make it sound like it's all happening for the first time. It took a long time for me to write that album, and then to teach the people in the band, but they were all great people so it was really a labour of love - the way it should be."
The music always came first for Buckley, as Holzman knew from the start. "He never felt any desire to be famous. He was purely musical and he wanted people around him who could facilitate his music. He was motivated only by a need for self-expression. When Happy Sad made the shift from Goodbye And Hello, the audience he had acquired began to drift away. You go to Lorca and Starsailor, and that process escalates - and he wasn't adding any new audience to compensate for the loss. Tim never cared about the numbers. Just the music.

"Happy Sad disappointed me at first," continues Holzman, "because I expect things to take off and go up, not to take off and go nowhere. In retrospect, that was tough for me to understand. Tim was drifting into a looser style, much jazzier, but there are fine, fine songs: Buzzin' Fly, and Love From Room 109 At The Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway) are compelling. It was something I didn't expect, and I realise more now that it was also very, very good. I did not see the perspective then; I do now."
Herb Cohen, who would continue to manage Buckley into the '70s, was just as rueful: "Tim committed artistic suicide in a way - certainly commercial suicide. Of course he did some stuff that was really good, strange as it was, but he wanted to develop something, and I don't know that he really knew what that was or whether he felt he had ever got there. There was no way that people could relate to albums like Lorca and Starsailor. People do now, and they try and figure out what that music was and where it was going, but the world at the time wasn't prepared for that. People would come to see him because of what they heard from the first two albums and they couldn't understand what he was doing any more. And they would stop coming."

During the autumn of 1969, Buckley recorded the near-instrumental Lorca - his final record for Elektra - and what became Blue Afternoon, plus part of his sixth album, Starsailor. Holzman gave Buckley his release, knowing he already had a potential new home with Herb Cohen's DiscReet label. Holzman hadn't heard Lorca in 40 years, but returned to it recently and realized "I totally blew it with Lorca. Even for me, so into evolution in music, I was not ready to accept Tim's streams of self-expression and the lack of modality on Lorca. Nobody Walkin' astonishes me in the way Tim uses his voice. If that's the last song he recorded for Elektra, he went out in flaming glory. How he got those voices on that album I can't imagine. Hearing it in 2010, I'm proud it is on Elektra. And it is on Elektra through no credit to me."

Those Strange Victorians and Their Unusual Hobbies...

This is quite unlike anything I have ever seen before. My favourite is "The Lower Five's drinking den being raided by the police". Them rats sure do look like the're having a good time of it...

From The Telegraph Newspaper.
A bizarre collection of stuffed animals that was broken up and sold around the world seven years ago has been reassembled for a one-off exhibition. The eccentric works of Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter, in which stuffed animals mimic human life, were sold for more than £500,000 in 2003. Celebrities including comedian Harry Hill, photographer David Bailey and artist Peter Blake snapped up pieces from the 10,000-item collection in Mr Potter's eerie Museum of Curiosities. For more images go to:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/8059876/Walter-Potters-Museum-of-Curiosities-bizarre-Victorian-collection-of-stuffed-animals-goes-on-show-again.html

The Kittens wedding from Walter Potters Collection.

The great fashion crimes of the Irish Republic...

Back in 1975, when Northern Ireland was up to it's eyeballs in blood and thunder, it seems the fellas in the Irish Republic were fighting their own heroic struggle, only their fight was with the twin evils of prog rock and glam fashion!!! Looks like the bass player has lost his particular battle...it's The Horslips of ...course. The snakes were obviously frightened out off Ireland by the flute players trousers and platform shoe combination! A nice piece off music and all that...

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.

Judy. By John Renbourn

Ken Russell 3 July 1927 – 27 November 2011

Original Film Poster

Ken Russell's adaptation of Aldous Huxley's "The Devil's of Loudon", is in my mind one of the greatest English film's ever made. The director, who died this week dared to take it where no one else dared to go. Not only is the film itself a masterpiece in film making, but also, the set design, casting, musical score and screenplay work together in such a way as to create a dizzying phantasmagorical and utterly compelling account of this infamous chapter in the history of the Catholic church in France. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave give the performances of their careers, and the film was banned in Italy by the Catholic church. Well, that's the least you can expect from Ken!


For a full obituary and short film about his work follow this link to The Guardians obituary of this film making force of nature. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/28/ken-russell-cinema-dies

He was larger than life in every way, and this was always reflected in nearly everything he was involved in.Ken Russell, film maker, documentary maker, writer and larger than life individual, 3 July 1927 – 27 November 2011.