33-1/3: Tago Mago

So ten days or so ago, I read Treble's review of the new archival Can live album--Live in Paris 1973--and it sounded good and noisy, so I ordered it.

Received it over the last weekend, and spent the first half of the week listening to it as I commuted to and from work, and I fucking loved it, especially the 36-minute first track. Karoli goes repeatedly off and then goes off some more.

Listened to Miles on Thursday, but on Friday I was back to Can. Pulled out Tago Mago and I knew I had a difficult relationship with "Augmn" but this time, man, I *communed* with "Mushroom" (Jaki Liebezeits DRUMMING!) and found the perfect descriptor for "Oh Yeah" in 'hippity-hoppety.'

So jumping off from there, my goal for this weekend was to read the 33-1/3 on the album I've had lying around. My guilty secret is that I've got about 20 in the series filed neatly on my bookshelves, next to my dictionary and the albums I've kept--but I've only actually read two or three.*

Actually did break into it today, yay me, and I'm not done yet, intend to finish tonight, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Don't know this Alan Warner cat--evidently he's a Scottish novelist, not the guy who wrote Trainspotting, but I guess similar except he's got no experience with heroin--and his approach is basically to take us back with him to when he was a pimply teenager discovering the music, taking the train into Glasgow where there's a decent record store, etc, as he tells us all the misapprehensions and wildy exaggerated imaginings he had about the band and their albums--most of them simply based on the album art and most of them way way off.

It's pretty great. He's become an expert on the band, so he slaps his naive younger self around quite a bit and thereby imparts some crucial info as well.

Good stuff, and let me get back to it.

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* Master of Reality and Reign in Blood and . . . oh wait that's it.

File under: Permission to dream