The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
Death Don’t Have No Mercy; Feedback; And We Bid You Tonight
Running time: 73.05
Current CD: Rhino RHI743952
Further listening: Anthem of the Sun (1968); the 2-CD Fillmore East: 2/11/69 (1997); or the 5-CD So Many Roads (1965–95) (1999)
Further reading: There are almost literally more books, fanzines and websites than you can count. The American Book Of The Dead: The Definitive Grateful Dead Encyclopedia (Oliver Trager, 1997) is a start. Also, Dead To The Core: An Almanack Of The Grateful Dead (Eric Wybenga, 1994) and Garcia, by the editors of Rolling Stone (1999); www.dead.net
Download: iTunes
In the autumn of 1969, having spent eight months in the studio recording Aoxomoxoa, The Grateful Dead were deep in debt to Warner Brothers. No one was so stoned or unrealistic as to believe that the highly experimental Aoxomoxoa was going to recoup all that money, so someone had a bright idea: put out a live album, easily culled from the many shows the band was playing in the Bay Area. Not only would such an album finally showcase the band at its spacey, jamming best, it would be incredibly cheap to make.
The Dead took a state-of-the-art 16-track recorder to gigs at the Avalon and Carousel ballrooms, and from those shows came Live/Dead, a double album that, according to Lenny Kaye’s review in Rolling Stone, ‘explains why the Dead are one of the best performing bands in America, why their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists.’ The album kicks off with a great version of Dark Star, 23 minutes of jazzy jamming. ‘They’d usually only play Dark Star if they were pretty high,’ said Caroline ‘Mountain Girl’ Garcia. Not just high: this is music from deepest space, as if someone had recorded the sound of a star exploding then slowed it down to its dreamy, pulsing elements. The song’s great appeal was that no one – neither audience nor band – knew where it was headed.
‘People loved it for the mystery of it,’ said manager Rock Scully. Robert Hunter’s first lyrics for the Dead speak volumes about where the band were coming from at the end of the ’60s: ‘Shall we go, you and I while we can?/Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds.’ While clearly this was music for altered states, the band were always quick to point out that pulling it off required plenty of rehearsal time. Phil Lesh’s The Eleven, named for its highly unusual 11/4 time signature, was based on the rhythmic calisthenics the band performed during practice, in which part of the band played 11 beats while the rest played 33 or even 66. ‘It was really designed to be a rhythm trip,’ said Lesh. ‘It wasn’t designed to be a song.’
The Dead were genuinely experimental, following each other down strange paths and hoping they’d find their way back, as on the frenzied storm of noise that is Feedback. ‘It was like somebody tossing a bloody chicken into a school of piranhas,’ marvelled Mickey Hart. ‘For a few minutes you’d be out on the edge with the roaring animal all around you, and it was always an open question whether it was going to go back into its cage or not.’
Kevin Ayers
Joy Of A Toy
Urbane ex-Soft Machine chap goes to Majorca and pens a slice of classic ‘anglodelica’.
Record label: Harvest
Produced: Peter Jenner
Recorded: EMI Studios, London; 1969
Released: November 1969
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Kevin Ayers (g, v); Robert Wyatt (d); Mike Ratledge (k); Hugh Hopper (b); Rob Tait (d); David Bedford (k, p); Peter Mew, Sean Murphy, Ian Knight (e)
Track listing: Joy Of A Toy; Town Feeling; Clarietta Rag; Girl On A Swing; Song For Insane Times; Stop This Train (Again Doing It); Eleanor’s Cake (Which Ate Her); Lady Rachel; Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong; All This Crazy Gift Of Time
Running time: 41.30
Current CD: Harvest 5827762 adds: Religious Experience (Sing A Song In The Morning); The Lady Rachel (extended first mix remix); Soon Soon Soon; Religious Experience (Sing A Song In The Morning); The Lady Rachel (single version); Sing A Song In The Morning (single version)
Further listening: Whatevershebringswesing (1970)
Further reading: Why Are We Sleeping fanzine; www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ marwak/ (fan site)
Download: HMV Digital; iTunes
Taking its name from a track on Soft Machine One, which in turn had been taken from an Ornette Coleman composition, Joy Of A Toy evocatively captured its performer before he was burdened with the trappings of cultdom or the requirements of trying to be a pop star. Although he’d retreated to Majorca to write the songs for this album, only the singalong title track, The Clarietta Rag, and Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong convey any sense of carefree sunny climes (and the latter was mainly a legacy of Ayers’s colonial upbringing in Malaya, at that). In fact Joy Of A Toy is an unmistakably English, at times (as on the sombre Town Feeling) resolutely urban record full of drizzly streets and hungover memories of last night’s party.
Song For Insane Times, a bittersweet freeze frame full of astute cameos, perfectly captures the post-Summer Of Love spirit of ennui, disillusion and detachment that was abroad in the late-’60s. Both lyrically and musically it would have sat easily on Soft Machine Two had Ayers stayed with the band he helped form. (Incidentally, the voice captured in a snatch of studio dialogue at the beginning of Song For Insane Times, for a long time rumoured to be Syd Barrett, is in fact Robert Wyatt.) Lady Rachel, a mainstay of Ayers’s live set, was written for his daughter. Girl On A Swing shimmers like heat haze on a summer’s day with some beautifully delicate piano played by arranger David Bedford (soon to join Ayers’s band The Whole World). Stop This Train (Again Doing It) was, like Why Are We Sleeping? on Soft Machine One, inspired by the teachings of Gurdjieff, the mystic and philosopher who has also inspired the music of Robert Fripp, Kate Bush and Keith Jarrett, among others.
‘Gurdjieff ’s teachings were the lightning bolts that formulated my later ideas,’ Ayers told MOJO. ‘You develop a fairly comfortable little story and then slip something startling in as if nothing had happened.’ Joy Of A Toy is full of such moments. As the man once said, ‘Banana’.
Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band
Trout Mask Replica
The most radical-sounding record of the 1960s.
Record label: Straight/Reprise
Produced: Frank Zappa
Recorded: Whitney Studios, Glendale, California and Ensenada Drive, Woodland Hills, California; March–April 1969
Released: November 1969
Chart peaks: 21 (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Zoot Horn Rollo AKA Bill Harkleroad (g, flute); Antennae Jimmy Semens AKA Jeff Cotton (g); Captain Beefheart (bass clarinet, ts, soprano sax, simran horn, musette, v); The Mascara Snake AKA Victor Hayden (bass clarinet, v); Rockette Morton AKA Mark Boston (b, narration); Drumbo AKA John French (d); Doug Moon (g); Dick Kunc (e)
Track listing: Frownland; The Dust Blows Forward ’N The Dust Blows Back; Dachau Blues; Ella Guru; Hair Pie: Bake 1; Moonlight On Vermont; Pachuco Cadaver (S/France); Bills Corpse; Sweet Sweet Bulbs; Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish; China Pig; My Human Gets Me Blues; Dali’s Car; Hair Pie: Bake 2; Pena; Well; When Big Joan Sets Up; Fallin’ Ditch; Sugar ’N Spikes; Ant Man Bee; Orange Claw Hammer; Wild Life; She’s Too Much For My Mirror; Hobo Chang Ba; The Blimp