The first single to be released for the forthcoming album Hand me Down; CDs and Vinyl are expected November 2020.
MANIC MONDAY
she features in Bank Holiday Monday's live Folk on Foot 2 broadcast featuring Richard Thompson & Zara Phillips, Kate, Eliza Carthy, O'Hooley and Tidow, Johnny Flynn, The Unthanks and many more featuring 7 (SEVEN) hours of music!!!
Friday, May 22, 2020
WILFUL MISSING
"You Ain't Going Nowhere"
I have been flying down in the easy chair . . . . .
One of my favourite bands has posted a lockdown song, a variation on Bob Dylan's 'You Ain't Going Nowhere and its delicious!
Sad to say their website has gone but you can find their work over at Bandcamp and I highly recommend every album, EP, badge and utterance!
Well there's more this morning but it is a footnote in my opinion and Plain and Fancy have posted links to 'Love - Live In England' 1970 of Arthur touring where he was more accepted and even had a bigger fan base than at home but it is not the band of Forever Changes as we have said. Arthur, dropped from Elektra and the band having collapsed from drug use (sic), he tried and put together a more power pop band than before and sold the idea to Blue Thumb whilst there are tinges of the old numbers Andmoreagain, Bummer in The Summer, even My Little Red Book this is a forlorn attempt. For completists only I reckon. Worth checking out if only for the notes from Lindsay Planer Love - Live in England 1970 - The Rockasteria
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Well it's a
LOVE FEST!
One of the most regular posters of cool, Silent Way, has by sheer coincidence reposted a Love album over at the wondrous Floppy Boot Stomp this morning. It is curiously one of the weirdest additions to the Arthur Lee and 'Love' canon ever released and I am never sure quite what I make of it. By the early seventies it is well known Arthur was at best struggling, hanging with Jimi Hendrix (it has often been alleged it was Lee who introduced Jimi to heroin but Arthur is on record as having said he hated junk and never developed a habit, it having certainly finished off the band that featured and showed such strength for Da Capo and Forever Changes but the struggles to find a new sound post 'Four Sail' and 'False Start' by this time Arthur again changed the entire lineup of band members from an exclusively black group of colleagues or associates. To then name the album 'Black Beauty' produced by these guys, again under Arthur's 'direction', never sat quite comfortably for me but his play with words and love of language would have appealed to Arthur's humour and no mistake. He undoubtedly would have enjoyed my middle class white boy discomfort and found it hilarious.
Now Silent Way has posted an item that is not the later release remastered effort some years later and whilst extended it isn't the same as the one Plain & Fancy posted links to and listed by me t'other day. For that reason alone I post it here and I do find it fascinating. It somehow sounds like the musical style is going backwards to earlier more naive times. It contains pop and starts sounding like soul type classics even featuring instrumentals. (Whilst I always rated Arthur as a guitarist his command of language is so curiously absent on any instrumental mock Booker T and The MGs stone cold classic sound is a curiosity to say the least. He does reclaim the poetic higher ground later on but there is nothing to match the earlier late sixties masterpieces.
Silent Way says:
On the whole, this particular line-up sounds perfectly rough and unrehearsed, generating a tense energy on “Skid” and “Stay Away” even as they suggest a band still figuring out exactly what they can do together. It’s a strong album, but it’s not another Forever Changes, whose accomplishments in retrospect were unrepeatable, or even another Four Sail. On the other hand, Lee wasn’t aiming to craft something in that vein. Still, especially considering the professional setbacks he had faced in the years leading up to Black Beauty-- which includes being dropped by Elektra and shuffling through a series of independent labels.
The Unreleased "Black Beauty" Album and Assorted Rarities Studio soundboard recordings @ 160
Track List: 01 The Ninth Wave 02 Rumble-Still-Skins 03 Soul Food 04 Luci Baines 05 It's The Marlin, Baby 06 Everybody Jerk 07 Slow Jerk 08 I Been Trying 09 My Diary 10 I'm Good & Evil (Do What I Do) 11 Midnight Sun 12 Walk Right In 13 Skid, Not Really A Friend 14 Beep Beep 15 Stay Away 16 I Got To Find It 17 Lonely Man 18 Where Were You 19 You're Just A Product Of The Time 20 Give Me A Little Energy 21 Feathered Fish #1 21 Feathered Fish #2
Arthur Lee - Memorial
For comparison the Rockasteria posted this the remastered version back in 2017 and both are worth checking out of course. I listened to the reboot from Floppy Boot this morning and it is fascinating and very good quality as you would expect. Again as per the notes on the Rockasteria pages they have texts about the items posted there and it is worth a read if nothing else
Tracks1. Young And Able (Good And Evil) - 3:242. Midnight Sun - 3:333. Can't Find It - 3:464. Walk Right In (Gus Cannon, Hosea Woods) - 3:235. Skid (Angela Rackley, Riley Racer) - 2:526. Beep Beep - 2:147. Stay Away - 2:478. Lonely Pigs - 4:259. See Myself In You - 3:0310.Product Of The Times - 4:1111.Thomasine And Bushrod (Title Song From The Motion Picture) - 2:2612.Arthur Lee Interview - 22:1613.Every Time I Look Up, I'm Down - 3:3214.Nothing - 3:0615.Keep On Shining - 5:5616.L.A. Blues (Tom T. Hall) - 3:02All songs by Arthur Lee except where notedTracks 1 to 9 recorded Spring-Winter, 1973 at Valentine's, North Hollywood, CA; Paramount Recording Studios, Hollywood, CA; Wally Heider Studios, Hollywood, CA.Track 10 Recorded Live at Boston Tea Garden 1970Tracks 13-15 Live at Electric Gardens, Glasgow, 5/30/1974
All this below from one of my favourite Facebook sites and publisher ROUTE (@Routebook) I have bought their book on Fairport Convention and they are just a brilliant publisher of music books Route books stack up nicely. Route online . . .
On this day in 1966, Bob Dylan and the Hawks played the ABC Theatre, Edinburgh. A reviewer for the Daily Mail complained, ‘Throughout his performance Dylan repeatedly turned his back on the audience and posed for his personal cine photographers.’ On the tour, Dylan was making a documentary commissioned for Stage 66, an ABC TV series due to be broadcast that autumn. When Dylan crashed out, that deadline was missed, but the resulting footage saw the light of day in Eat The Document, a film Dylan edited with his friend Howard Alk after dismissing D.A. Pennebaker’s original edit as being too much like the previous year’s film, Don’t Look Back. It’s clear from Eat The Document that Bob was not interested in a straight concert film. Pennebaker was concerned Dylan was too focused on making a home movie and to his eternal credit, while Bob was on stage, Pennebaker did capture a lot of stunning concert footage. With the original rushes now safely archived at The Bob Dylan Centre at Tulsa, it’s only a matter of time before we get to see it in its glory. In the meantime, Swingin’ Pig has patiently pulled together the as-yet released footage (from Eat The Document, No Direction Home and other snippets) into a 48 minute film of concert footage, following the same set list that Bob performed each and every night. #Dylan66#JUDAS
The Best of Elston Gunn in 1966 from Swingin’ Pig on Vimeo. On this day in 1966, Bob Dylan and the Hawks played the Odeon Theatre, Glasgow. The previous day had been concert free, so Bob did some filming for the documentary he’d promised ABC. They filmed a jam session in his room at the North British Station Hotel, on George Square, and went out to watch a police dog display and a marching band of pipers. The songs they played in the hotel room were new compositions, possibly for a new record that never saw the light of day. After the tour Bob went home and crashed, literally. At the Odeon on the 19th May, it was the usual confrontation with the audience. Before Like A Rolling Stone, the crowd were chanting for ‘the real Bob Dylan’. Bob replied, ‘He couldn’t make it through the second half. Bob Dylan got very sick backstage and I’m here to take his place.’ The animosity spilled over into the North British Station Hotel. A waiter arrived at the door bringing food and suddenly screamed at Dylan, accusing him of being ‘a traitor to folk music’. Dylan’s driver-bodyguard Tom Keylock – on loan from the Rolling Stones after Bob’s regular helper Victor Maymudes had left the tour – quickly bundled the man out of the room. He recalled: ‘He pulls a knife on me. I’ve still got the scar to prove it. So I gave him a good kicking.' The band’s tour bus was also attacked. Barry Feinstein recalled that a girl fan punched Bob in the face. Welcome to Glasgow! #Dylan66#JUDAS Here are the songs recorded at the North British Station Hotel
Wrapped up with Love!
So after the previous entries about 'Love' and their seminal work 'Forever Changes and its 50th Anniversary someone asked for all the links to Arthur's extent work which frankly are all over at The Rockesteria anyway but still this gives me the opportunity to say the only other albums that really interested me were the eponymous first and Da Capo, Four Sail was ever a curio and the rest were pretty hard to like for me footnotes and a totally different band anyway.
It took Arthur to get Baby Lemonade behind him to do the 'Forever Changes' concerts and touring (Glastonbury anyone?) to make for a swan song and I hope his last years after his release from a six years of a 12 year prison sentence (Lee fell foul of the 'three strikes and you're out' draconian nonsense for negligent discharge of a firearm and allegedly shooting guns in your garden is never a good idea in my experience. However it wasn't even Arthur it would seem but a neighbour. That it was a false claim seems to have stood for nought and fully expecting to get off Lee was shocked to be sentenced. Hopelessly misrepresented in court and before a corrupt prosecutor later convicted himself of misconduct the charges were later over turned but not until Arthur had served over 5 and half years inside) I think judging by his activities afterward the years after seemed suitably joyous although short lived unfortunately. I have said earlier that I was due to see them at the local Zodiac venue here and only at the last minute did Arthur find he had to cancel due to ill health [acute myeloid leukemia] and foolishly in hindsight I wish I had gone to see what Baby Lemonade pulled off on their own but took my disgruntled money back instead. Inches away from a lifelong ambition right there . . . . . . . .Arthur passed away in 2006 aged 61 and way here's the rest from the best (links here)
I've always got a song in my back pocket," Arthur Lee told me when I interviewed him in the early '70s, somewhere about the time his RSO album, Reel to Real, was about to be released. Indeed, for a legendry cult artist whose mood swings and erratic behaviors seemed to work at cross-purposes with the delicate arrangements and melodies of his best work (though his forays into Hendrix-influenced hard rock shouldn't be discounted), his discography is extensive and intriguing in its twistings and turn-turn-turnings.
Influenced by the Byrds (whose former road manager, Bryan Maclean, became his most important sidekick in Love), Lee had been an organ player in the Booker T. mold with his first instrumental band, the L.A.G.'s; but when long-haired musicians started infiltrating the Sunset Strip, he donned a pair of weirdly-shaped sunglasses, stepped out front vocally, and landed a deal with Elektra Records — one of their first non-folk signings.
Love's first three albums with the label are classic examples of going-for-baroque: reinterpreting Burt Bacharach ("My Little Red Book") and Billy Roberts ("Hey Joe") in the guise of jingle-jangle folk-rock, taking on the Stones with an 18-minute track in "Da Capo," and practically templating garage-rock's drag-strip acceleration with "7 & 7 Is." Their third album, Forever Changes, orchestrated and flamenco'ed and filled with rhyme-of-consciousness lyricism, is one of rock's most star-crossed accomplishments; the last sight I had of Arthur Lee, on a stage in Williamsburg a year or so before his untimely passing, was performing that work with all its tremulous quaver intact. Love hardly ventured forth from LA during their glory era, and so it was doubly gratifying to hear Arthur sing himself across the years.
Some of those years were spent in prison, stretches seemingly self-destructed by Lee's short temper and paranoia. Judging from Five String Serenade, they were creatively lost to us as well. This was the last major album Arthur made before taking a called third strike and finishing out the century behind bars for waving a gun about in public. Recorded in Los Angeles in 1992, released on the French New Rose label the following year, it contains some of Lee's most affecting work, from the minuet stateliness and melancholy of the title track — which has been covered by Mazzy Star and the White Stripes — to such full-out rockers as "Seventeen," which attempts to overtake "7 & 7 Is" on the straightaways ("7" can't be beat, fueled as it is by nuclear power).
"Somebody's Watching You" frames Lee's look over his shoulder in a setting that's two steps down the Strip from the Seeds; "Pass By" is blues in the Jimi 12-barroom mode, reminding of Lee and Hendrix crossing paths as black men in a white psychedelic garage scene. "You're the Prettiest Song" is the prettiest song, without the barbed hook Arthur usually planted in the second verse. His voice, like a lithe Sam Cooke or Johnny Mathis, slides from the back of his throat in slight vibrato.
Finally released from jail after seven years, reunited with Baby Lemonade, he returned to the fore and gave rapturously-received renditions of his body of work before he passed on in August of 2006. He was no stranger to comebacks. "I never went away," he told me when we met. And still hasn't.
I have been struggling with entries on a couple of Facebook groups dedicated to John Prine especially since his death from Covid-19 to listen to most things people post and even the delightful Emily Barker of whom I am a great fan, had covered a wonderful version of John's 'Hello In There' dedicated to the worlds "seniors" (I couldn't listen to it with tearing up and having to stop and I told her so!). There have been exceptions and they seem to be earlier concerts and songs. I found this concert from 1995 in Dallas Texas for the Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings tour. It's a doozie! Now I think I mentioned this was available for download over at the blogspot BBChronicles who has the entire concert there(see below). What I hadn't thought to check was that it was available on YouTube also. It IS! The full concert with no visuals and some separate tracks too. This tour coincides with my discovery of John's work. I have said earlier on that I discovered him through two singer songwriters, Bonnie Raitt ('Angel From Montgomery') and Nanci Griffith ('The Speed of The Sound of Loneliness') both of which and I am never quite sure which I hard first but it was like Bonnie who I followed for years before discovering John but also Nanci who we saw live here in the UK on her 'farewell' Blue Moon Orchestra tour. I distinctly recall hearing the songs and thinking 'Who wrote this stuff?' and went out and bought the compilation album Great Days:The John Prine Compilation album of 1993 so it was in great anticipation when 'Lost Dogs' came out and I love that album maybe above the others but I tend not to rank them . . . . . . . it just means a lot to me. Check it out.
I have always been fascinated by aspects around art whether it be portraits of artist, biographical details, pictures from family snapshots where they lived, people they loved, as they were/are in photos and self portraits but also images of scenes as they are now from their most famous paintings also. Where artists lived and their work in landscape seen in the real. One such is the wonderful work of Dutch photo artist Karin Borghout whose website dedicated to the work of Vincent Van Gogh is full of such things some examples follow below
So a view we all know from Van Gogh's eating but taken as a photo in situ just fascinates despite cars and contemporary detail. But there are works reconstructed from Vincent's oeuvre that take the smaller subjects as it were and the artist has reconstructed these also
Plain & Fancy have followed up the posting of the Love masterpiece 'Forever Changes' 50th Anniversary Rhino collection with the historically interesting 'Four Sail' of the following year (1969). Arthur by now has given up on the previous band mates citing their junk habits as being insurmountable within months of completing and touring to promote the seminal album. As albums go it is of course still highly listenable but 'Forever Changes' and the personnel issues mean that Arthur will never again reach such dizzying heights again. The liner notes alone here put Arthur Lee's side of things and contain links to further reading on the matter which are truly fascinating. Now Kyle Hoffman is welcome to his opinion here of course but citing 'Four Sail' as his favourite Love album is wilfully perverse if you ask me. 'Forever Changes' is the seminal poetic statement from Arthur Lee (and co-writer Bryan MacLean) their tour de force if you will. This album purchased by yours truly when it came out made me go backwards firstly and revisit their first two previous albums. Their first I found difficult and floundering somewhat but indicative of things to come. 'Da Capo' was the forerunner later that same year to show what portents might be had towards 'Forever Changes' and remains a still favourite album by the standard line up of Arthur, Johnny Echols, Bryan MacLean, Ken Forssi and Alban "Snoopy" Pfisterer. Augmented later on Da Capo by adding Michael Stuart replacing 'Snoopy' on drums and Tjay Cantrelli on wind instruments saxophone, flute, with some percussion. The account of the affects of heroin addiction on the band courtesy of their roadie Neil [Rappaport] is particularly distressing and proved disastrous for any future promise the band might have been destined for (see below cover notes). It wasn't long before Rappaport was found dead and Lee maintained "three or four members" of the band had developed serious junk habits that made any further artistic collaborations pretty much impossible (some were later to recover and figure later in the revival but at that time it seemed a long shot at best). I don't care for 'Four Sail' anywhere near as much as 'Da Capo' let alone 'Forever Changes' which still stands as always in my top ten albums of all time and more often in the top three.
My favorite Love album is Four Sail (Elektra 1969). None of the original band members save for Arthur Lee are on this one. This album is an extraordinary voyage across genres. If it wasn’t so diverse and well-executed I might have written this album off as “pretentious, too proggy, jammy, etc…” but the musicianship is superb and tasteful, and everyone minds each other’s boundaries even at the album’s most intense moments.
The album opens with “August,” which wails away for five minutes. “Your Friend and Mine” is the perfect counterpoint/follow-up to the opening track; a beautiful baroque pop tribute to a friend who’d overdosed and died. The lyrics are heartfelt, yet vague enough to be played at any funeral.
“I’m With You” is a very fluid and sweet uptempo number. “Good Time” starts out smooth as a pebble with a muted jazz guitar tone, and then transitions back and forth into shaking foundations and rocking the fuck out. “Singing Cowboy” rocks with a soulful mannerism and an awesome extended break. “Dream” is just a damn good ballad about nothing in particular, with really cool overdubbed whispers.
“Robert Montgomery” sounds like Eleanor Rigby only for just a second, then turns into a totally different song. “Nothing” seems to be written about exactly that. The weird, enigmatic lyrics hint at this having been a leftover for the Forever Changes album that didn’t get recorded.
“Talking In My Sleep” is an absolute treat with exemplary vocals and some odd harmonies that are totally reminiscent of Queen. I have long speculated that Freddie Mercury and/or Brian May dug this and used it as a sonic blueprint for part of their sound. “Always See Your Face” is a sweet and beautiful soul ballad which was featured in the movie High Fidelity. The brass treatment gives it a very English feel.
One of the recurring themes throughout this album is the doubled vocals. Listen to the way Arthur Lee adeptly recorded another nearly identical vocal track over the original takes, making only subtle differences (sometimes in pitch, and sometimes with lyrics).
It is my opinion as a long-time musician and songwriter that there is not a bad tone or a single poorly-recorded instrument on this album. From croon to howl, shout to whisper, Arthur Lee covers just about every verb in the vocalist’s lexicon. I can’t be sure that Arthur Lee was responsible for writing every song on here, but the bottom line is, I’d like to see more musicians dedicate more effort and attention to detail into crafting songs like these. They are irregular and odd, yet somehow wonderfully palatable and diverse. They are original and enjoyable, excellently non-linear, and most importantly turn your brain on. Four Sail, indeed.
by Kyle Hoffman, October 14, 2014
Tracks 1. August - 5:08 2. Your Friend And Mine - Neil's Song - 3:50 3. I'm With You - 2:43 4. Good Times - 3:33 5. Singing Cowboy (Arthur Lee, Jay Donnellan) - 4:48 6. Dream - 2:49 7. Robert Montgomery - 3:29 8. Nothing - 4:48 9. Talking In My Sleep - 2:49 10.Always See Your Face - 3:29 11.Robert Montgomery" (Alternate Vocal) - 3:35 12.Talking In My Sleep" (Alternate Mix) - 2:55 13.Singing Cowboy" (Unedited Version) (Arthur Lee, Jay Donnellan) - 5:52 All songs by Arthur Lee except where noted
