Steve Winwood - "Night Train" from the Album Arc of a Diver

"Night Train" from Arc of A Diver played on the way home, and it got me thinking of the time I saw Steve Winwood in Europe.

A little internet research just now and I can tell the tale: That my grandfather had decided he would take me to Europe after my high school graduation on or around the 15th of June 1983.

While Europe is pretty amazing even if you limit yourself to the parts your grandparents might dig, for the most part the excursion was exactly the whitebread sightseeing kind of trip you'd expect when you're with your grandparents. But on a couple nights they handed me some dough and let me run around the town we were in on my very own. And I of course did the things an 18-year old kid would: those having to do with drugs and rock 'n' roll. When we were in Amsterdam, for example, I hit the world famous Milky Way and bought and then consumed some Afghani black hash, the cottonmouth then averted with a bunch of skunky Dutch beer. And in Luxembourg, on the 20th, I went to see Winwood at the Théâtre Municipale.

It's a long time ago now, but I still do remember a long and excellent version of the same song I heard this evening while driving home. It's funny: Because I remembered "Night Train" so clearly, I'd long thought that this tour Winwood had done, and this show I had seen, was in support of Arc of a Diver, but I'm realizing only now that in fact the tour was behind Talking Back to the Night.

I really don't remember much of the concert, but I've found it interesting to find that this guy here says that the show was in his "top ten gigs of all time." Not going there, but I definitely remember, and always have remembered, the experience as being one of an ace rock 'n' roll show.

Found the image next door on eBay, and looking at the back of the T-shirt now, I see that the gig I attended in Luxembourg is not even listed. Winwood had been in Brussels on the 19th and was in Saarbrucken on the 21st; I guess they decided to turn the day off into a payday sometime after the tour was booked and the merch was manufactured. I seem to recall coming across a small handbill for the event--rather than a grandiose poster--during the day while I was touring with my grandparents, which would reinforce this idea I'm getting that the show was scheduled and promoted last-minute.

Another, and probably the most vivid, thing I remember about this concert is that, arriving early, I hooked up and started chatting with a pair of Luxembourgians who were sitting next to me. I babbled something about Yes no doubt, and they recommended in return Barclay James Harvest. I mentioned Kansas, and they had no clue at all. Then the house lights went down and the three of us enjoyed the show as you do. The band was energetic, and the crowd was enthusiastic, and an encore got played, and Winwood said good night, and the house lights went up and the drummer threw something into the audience landed a few rows behind us, I figured it was a rag or whatever and I bid my newly met friends good night, told them well met and they said: hold on.

They said yeah, let's sit here and talk a bit more while the crowd files out, and I said sure, why not, time's not precious I'm on vacation. And we talked some more rock and roll, can't remember what but I'm sure it was pleasant enough, until the theatre was basically empty, one of the guys climbed backward over his seat and then crawled over a couple more until he found what he was looking for.

Climbing back towards us, he explained in a lowered voice that in European countries with harsh drug laws, and Luxembourg was that, it was fairly common for musicians passing through to toss their fans a bone so to speak in the form of little drug packets tossed into the audience.

I'd never heard of such a thing before, and I've never heard of such a thing since. but Luxembourger prog-rock brother sure enough had some dope in his hand when he arrived back in our row.

So I hung with my buddies a little longer. With no small aura of paranoia, we left the theatre and found a thousand-year old bridge or something nearby that gave us some cover from the long arm of the Duchy's law while we smoked the pot and let the buzz spreads it wanton fingers through us.

Then the moment was gone, and my Central European buddies and I parted for good, and I wandered stoned and more than just a little paranoid through the dark stone streets of Luxembourg for a short time, trying to and eventually succeeding in finding my hotel.

Good memories brought on by a good song.


Steve Winwood - Night Train.mp3


File under: Multi-instrumentalist Rock

Syd Barrett - "Wouldn't You Miss Me (Dark Globe)" From the CD Opel and Meat Puppets - "Lake of Fire" From the album Meat Puppets II

In which we pass under the revealing Historia infrared two examples of naïvist artistry, each different, but somehow still the same.

"Dark Globe" was originally released on the Barrett album in 1971, but that one must have been recorded on one of Syd's manic days, and the nearly shrieked vocal performance makes it--without appearing to be insensitive to poor Mr. Barrett's mental state at the time--rather unpalatable.

The alternate take presented here was released on Opel 17 years later. I much prefer the sedate vocals you hear on the Opel version, as they limit the chaotic sprawl to comprehensible levels. Syd is either unwilling or unable to consistently count time, and lyrics end up getting crammed into the end of a measure, while guitar downstrokes are stuttered, bunched together, or stretched out, as the Madcap Barrett found necessary.

Yet it somehow works. I think that the more downbeat manner in which the song is sung allows the listener to focus on the odd time Syd is keeping, which, while always threatening to completely implode the song, never quite does.

Seems like the typical response to "Dark Globe" is to remark upon its sadness, but I think that's probably projection, the listener projecting his knowledge of Barrett's life onto the song. Which is not just an incorrect approach, I think, but also an unfair one.

Syd asks "wouldn't you miss me at all?" one last time, strums his guitar six more times, the song ends, and it seems nothing but charming to me.

Somehow Syd brought the whole thing home, you know? His achievement is similar to that of one of those people who build, like, a model of The Hermitage out of wooden matchsticks: no-one serious would use the raw materials they did, and they really had no right to finish, but somehow, through a little cussedness and a certain little obliviousness to the ways things are supposed to be done, they did.

"Lake of Fire" quite simply bleeds electricity; it sweats pulsed electrons, and when turend up loud enough, you can see how the excess current pools silver at the base of your speakers.

In that way, it's in severe contrast to the starkly acoustic Barrett tune. But, as Barrett does in "Dark Globe," Curt Kirkwood keeps only the most cursory time for himself as he warbles and meanders his way through "Lake of Fire." He crams his lyrics in wherever he's got a bit of space, ends his lines early, or starts them late, according to no real method I can discern. And when the tune finally does end, it seems to have done so successfully only in spite of itself.

Though the question remains whether Barrett had been capable of a more disciplined performance, I myself don't think the song could have turned out much better than it did on Opel.

The Kirkwood Brothers, on the other hand, despite their legendary appetites for debilitating chemicals, were both sane enough and capable enough to have produced a more orthodox delivery of their song. Given what we know about their early records, Curt made "Lake of Fire" hang together in the ramshackle way that it does simply to annoy those who expected something more normal.

But a more regularized performance would have been inferior, as anyone who's heard both the original from Meat Puppets II and Nirvana's cover from the Unplugged CD can attest. The cover not only doesn't bleed the electrical, it also don't stich the lines together like a crazy quilt.

It don't do that scrapyard naïvist thing, which, though seeming simple, or even retarded, on first listen, is upon repeated exposure, very special indeed.

Syd Barrett - Opel - 1 - Wouldn't You Miss Me (Dark Globe).mp3

160 kbps mp3, up for six weeks

File under: Psychotic Rock


Meat Puppets - Meat Puppets II - 10 - Lake of Fire.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for 6 weeks

File under: Feeling Arizona