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.

_________________

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

File under: Permission to dream

Dream

Dream

So I ran into my buddy Jeff Bagwell. We were both in our 30s or something.

I caught up with him as he was walking to his ride. I asked him, "Jeff, are you a metalhead?"

Suddenly, in the way of dreams, he's lying on the floor, leaning back on his elbows next to a heavy workbench, looking up at me.

"When I have to be," he says.

We're walking again and I'm trying to tell him about that time when the boss let me leave work early so I could go to the Metallica concert off Justice and then I came back to work after the concert was over, but Jeff is going on about left-handed pitching and I can't get a word in edgewise.

Finally he calls ahead to the driver of a ramshackle Chevy van and someone on the inside (there's four or five guys in black t-shirts sitting on the carpeted floor, I'll see) slides the side door open.

"Frantic," from St Anger is playing rather loudly within. We both start headbanging.

Jeff hops in, I don't. The van starts moving ahead slowly, side door still open, and I'm walking alongside, still whipping my head back and forth.

Bagwell is still talking to me, now it's about Kevin Brown's anger management issues. I wish I was going with them. But I'm not, and I'm going to have to tell Jeff about that Metallica concert some other time. The van door slides shut and it pulls away in a cloud of exhaust.

I turn around, dejected. Think I'll get a hot pretzel....

John Coltrane - "Greensleeves" from the album Africa/Brass

Listening to Coltrane's cover of "Greensleeves" for the first time. Nine or ten times over the last two days.

It's got a lot of the same lyricism that "My Favorite Things" does, the same modal, kind of raga feel, the same jawdropping glissando sound to his solos as he shifts the soprano sax up into hyperdrive--no, *through* hyperdrive, quickly tasting n-space and then bringing it back down into standard topology again.

Conjecture: If he had lived long enough Coltrane probably would have covered "Pure Imagination" too.

Where I Stand

Stupid and Silly

But I couldn't help myself

King Crimson (with Jon Anderson) - "Prince Rupert Awakes" from the album Lizard

After basically being an ostracized dork during elementary and junior high school, I made the social decision to become a stoner in high school. You know, just to have someone to hang out with. Worked out pretty well, gotta say. The entrance requirement was basically: Smoke Dope. That, and listen to rock music. I already did the second, and # 1 seemed pretty easy enough--which it ended up being!

So I was accepted into my peer group, and even managed to keep up my grades, but looking back, I was still a weirdo even by the relaxed standards of the stoners. To wit:

While the more graphically talented and mainstream musically of my high school burnout brethren were attempting to draw the Aerosmith logo on their duotangs, because of talent (non-existent) and taste (eclectic, of course) I was instead simply writing out weird prog song titles on my notebooks.

So I'm in 10th grade Vocabulary class, and my weird song title for the day is "Prince Rupert Awakes." Not even sure I'd even heard it as of yet, but clearly I'd heard of it, and if it was like that, if it was the second without the first, I was running ahead of myself as I so often did. Do.

Mr. Bloom as he proctors our open book quiz passes by, and notices what I've doodled, and almost sneers, looking down at me as I clutch my Bic Banana. "Some *rock* song, I assume?" And yeah, of course, but I'm not gonna admit it to him.

"No," I almost snarl back at this guy, this teacher, this . . . older person who doesn't *get* prog. But I catch myself and continue reasonably. "It's a fantasy novel by James P Hogan." I'd read a few science fiction paperbacks--maybe was even reading one then--by the Englishman Hogan. My uncle had given me The Genesis Machine, and the author's "Giants" series was really really fun, and boy was I glad I had Hogan's name at the tip of my tongue that day in first period, because I sure as hell wasn't going to give Mr. Bloom the satisfaction of knowing that I write the names of goofy prog songs on my notebooks.

Even though I did.

So Mr. Bloom says, "Oh . . . bring it in, I'll read it. . ." and moves off to the next desk, leaving me infuriated with just a touch of sophomoric shame. You . . . *entitled* so and so, I think. I wouldn't let you read "Prince Rupert Awakes," even if it just so happened to exist--which it DOESN'T.

Ha! Joke's on you!

And that was the end of that. Mr. Bloom didn't six weeks down the road ask me what ever happened with that book I was supposed to bring in? And I ended up getting an 'A' in vocabulary.

But you know what else? Lizard continued to sit in my record collection, unplayed over any of its grooves, including those of "Prince Rupert Awakes." My puny 10th grade brain thought, oh yeah, Jon Anderson PLUS King Crimson, should be awesome. But turns out, it was only OK. Fripp was in a weird period, you know? I'm more familiar with the song now, 'cause I've listened to the mellotron, piano and flute melange now more times as an .mp3 than I ever did on vinyl, but yeah: it's still only OK, Cosmic Jon's vocals notwithstanding.

Mr. Bloom--if he's still around, which he's probably NOT--would definitely think it was a whole kerfuffle over nothing.