Two, maybe three weeks ago… cruising along in the overtaking lane on the world-wide super-wait, and hey… what’s this hoving into view at www.raphacondor.cc/blogs/..?
Its entitled A Knife, A Fork, A Bottle… and as sure as eggs are eggs – it’s the latest in a pretty much matchless line of Tom Southam’s thoughts and, as is fairly often the case, it’s a bit of word-play from him that doesn’t involve his profession but the next best thing… music.
In this instance, Tom and his Rapha / Condor / Sharp cohorts (including Kristian House, the reigning British Champion and the effervescent Dean Downing – all under the watchful eye of Bald Eagle (aka John Herety, the R/C/S team manager) are heading to the city of blinding lights.
First on the agenda, a spot of promo for their Rapha pay-meisters before heading upstate to indulge in a serious bit of racing at The Tour Of The Battenkill which is staged in Washington County.
This trip involves taking the silver-bird for as many hours as it actually takes – up a bit, along a bit, down a bit… bump, bump, bump… and clearly Tom’s i-Pod has been primed for the task…
So much so, that he’s posted his thoughts on the subject matter at hand.
But, while beguiling as his selection is – and I’ll tip my Trilby in a chapeau sort of manner to his proposals… here is a suggested companion CD to his original compilation.
Lets kick off with Take Me For A Night In New York – Elbow Bones & The Racketeers which, in brief, was a quasi amalgam of Dr Savannah & Kid Creole – under the baton of the zoot-suited ringmaster August Darnell himself.
This tune was the opening cut to their one and only record – but, it’s the full-length, six minute or so 12” version (a video of which is easily found on YouTube) that really late-night swings from its big-drums kick-in right through the truly sublime horn arrangements all topped off by a yearning, starry-morning-dewey-eyed, Cory Daye vocal.
Whats next..? Gawd, but there’s so much to choose from and… I think it should be…
Harlem Shuffle – yes, there’s the Stones version from 1986 but it’s the bump ‘n grind Bob & Earl original that cuts the mustard this end. It didn’t much bother the chart-compilers in America but the opposite was true in the UK when it slid gracefully into the top ten during 1969. Still sounds like it was recorded yesterday too.
Empire State Of Mind – ok, ok, I confess – after Grand Master Flash bewitched an unsuspecting world with his Wheels Of Steel and Tom Tom Club hit first base with Wordy Rappinghood, pretty much the entire genre of Rap and self became uneasy bedfellows…
I simply couldn’t get a grip on all that clutch-your-crotch / wear-your-jeans-halfway-down-your-arse and sport dark-glasses-indoors bollox until… Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ total out-of-the-park homerun with its entirely glorious hook that fizzed the airwaves from Brooklyn to Fulham Broadway Station.
King Of The New York Streets – and, long ago, Dion DiMucci was precisely that. The man who gave up his seat in the plane that took off from Iowa on a frozen winter’s night in 1959 that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper had a string of majestic 60’s hits (The Wanderer et al) before drink and drugs took hold.
Cleaned-up and having found God along the way, this is culled from his Dave Edmunds’ produced 1989 magnum opus Yo Frankie (that album also includes Written On A Subway Wall on which Paul Simon sings).
On Broadway – there are a zillion different versions of the timeless classic from the collaborative pens of Mann/ Weill / Leiber & Stoller that was first made famous by The Drifters (with a young Phil Spector playing guitar)…
For my money, however, the uber-reading is by the Kidderminster-kid – Jess Roden… originally demo’d in London, re-worked under Allen Toussaint in Memphis, re-mixed by Chris Blackwell in London and the opening cut on Jess’ first solo record. A stunning cut above the rest.
Take The 'A' Train – Billy Strayhorn’s classic / Duke Ellington’s signature tune that’s about as synonymous with the Big Apple as any song could be. It’s a toss up between Dave Brubeck’s version or Ella Fitzgerald demonstrating just how scat-singing should be with Brubeck winning by a short head.
Walking Down Madison – written by Johnny Marr and Kirtsy MacColl and opening cut to her Electric Landlady album… but… it’s the ‘6am ambient mix’ which gets the vote… looped percussion that resonates the city’s street drummers – the guys who sit on the sidewalks and ply their beats on tin cans and upturned plastic paint-tins… “from an uptown apartment to a knife on the A train, its not that far; from the sharks in the penthouse to the rats in the basement to the bag lady frozen asleep on the church steps… its not that far… I can show you if you’d like to…” A voice like no other.
The Apple Stretching – this paean to the city that barely sleeps wakening-up was originally included on Ms Jones’ Living My Life album (the last of her Sly & Robbie-centric Compass Point trilogy). Grace’s bitter-sweet snarl matched to the rolling thunder which is Sly & Robbie’s ridim section is, however, at its optimum on the hard-to-find eight+ minute version of Melvin Peebles’ original Broadway tune.
Hey, Manhattan – from the prolific pen of chief Sprout, Paddy McAloon – peerless lounge-lizard lyrics in amongst a beguiling swirl of Thomas Dolby infused strings and harps and an all-too-rare outing for Wendy Smith’s backing vocals. Genius stuff… Don’t believe me..? Try these rhyming couplets for size then:
The Brooklyn Bridge stretches below me
A billion souls all dying to know me
Well here I am ! Loaded with promise
And knee deep in grace
What I want is here on my face and
I feel like I own the whole damn place
Hey Manhattan ! Here I am !
Call me star-struck Uncle Sam.
Strolling Fifth Avenue
Just think… Sinatra's been here too
These myths we can't undo they lie in wait for you
Doesn’t get much better than that…
Downtown Train – its highly probable that Tom Waits’ grand-children will never need to work with the dollars their grandfather will have earned via covers of his songs.
This, 24-carat masterpiece is from his Rain Dogs album – and, for those who only know the ‘other’ the original makes Rod the Mod’s version sound pale, paltry and… well, basically pretty shit actually. Weirdly, though, that was the one that got Rod a Grammy nomination… which probably goes a long way to proving that people who judge those sort of things have limited (not to say, peculiar) taste.
With Tom’s song, you actually feel like you’re goin’ downtown.. a long, hard day up on 33rd and 9th and going home via Cortland Place or Rector St… That’s the difference between genius and plagiarism.
New York, New York – impossible to leave out (sorry Tom)… and despite Ms Minelli’s brave stab, there’s only the one that’ll do here. Yep, Ol’ Blue Eyes tonsils wrap themselves seamlessly around the song that’s about as synonymous with the city as any.
Last Exit To Brooklyn – the theme from the film from the book of the same name - Hubert Selby’s 1964 novel that documented working class Brooklyn of the 50’s seen through the eyes of all manner of low life including junkies and alcoholics.
The whole album’s worthwhile actually – a stunning soundtrack by the twang-meister himself – Mark Knopfler.
Times Square – three versions to choose from and, you know what… I’m really not sure which to go for.
There’s the live one from Blazing Away, Marianne Faithfull’s album recorded in St Anne’s Church in Brooklyn on which La Faithfull’s sixty-a-day voice is at its cracked finest; there’s her studio original from Dangerous Acquaintances and there is co-writer Barry Reynolds’ own from his hard-to-find solo album, I Scare Myself.
Damn, decisions, decisions…
Hooverville – biggish (British) hit for The Christians (and, yes, they were all named Christian) that centered around the popular name for the shanty towns that grew up in the Depression era in Central Park (among other places) that were named after US president Herbert Hoover.
First We Take Manhattan – torn again; should it be Jennifer Warne’s from Famous Blue Raincoat, should it be the bard’s original with its stir-fried concoction of synths (well, that’d be souped-up Leonard-style) or Joe Cocker’s windmill-armed Sheffield steel throat-like-gravel roar?
Cohen’s own – from his 1991 Live In London - just shades it
Downtown – Petula Clark, Frank Sinatra, The Killer Barbies… errr, nope… it has to be Athens, Georgia’s be-wigged finest - The B52’s… final cut on their eponymous debut – original vinyl copies of which came shrink-wrapped with their first 45, Rock Lobster.
And, finally…
Fairytale Of New York – a stone-ground, bona-fide classic and probably (very probably) the greatest Christmas song ever written.
Yes.. there is a version by Coldplay (honestly..!) and a truly terrible one by someone called Ronan Keating with Maire Brennan (Clannaad's chanteuse who, frankly, should have known better) and Kristy Moore chips in one of his own but… Shane, his no-teeth and band of drunken reprobates – The Pogues – trading bickering, hopes-crushed-insults with Kirsty MacColl win the day.
Little known factoid – Kirsty wasn’t actually due to sing on this, she only provided guide-vocals since her then husband Steve Lillywhite was producing the Pogues at the time. However, MacGowan liked what she’d done and the rest as they say, became history. And, for the uber train-spotters (factoid collectors) out there, a version survives that pre-dates the Shane / Kirsty version… we digress.
From those first minor chords… its all bittersweet call and response…
You took my dreams from me, when I found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I built my dreams around you..
But then… just as we get to the instrumental bit underpinned by “The boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay”... I’ll share a secret… when those drums and strings come in (at 3.24 exactly) I start to tear-up… because … the lost longing of Christmases passed is all forgotten...
That’s the moment of healing; its like the start of the most delicious waltz down a snow-filled 5th Avenue – when nothing else matters; you’re sailing in redemption, wrapped within the arms of the one you love.
Now… where the hell did I put that number for BA..?
Showing posts with label prefab sprout. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prefab sprout. Show all posts
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Twist In My Sobriety
The first gun-metal-grey streaks of dawn knife their way across the slow-to-materialise sunrise-skyline while the tugboats plough their way up the oh-so-still Hudson; up river a couple of hours by train and turn left, inland a bit and over the hills and not too terribly far away… and, there’s Woodstock – forty years ago this weekend – oh, boy.
But first, look left and there’s Union City on Jersey’s shore; home to the Union Dry Dock upon which Blondie shot their helicopter-led, day/night-time video for the track from Eat To The Beat that, curiously, was never issued as a single in America yet reached #13 on its first outing in the UK. A song penned by the ubiquitous Ms Harry together with bass-player Nigel Harrison, one time native of Princess Risborough, itself not too far down the road (or up, depending on one’s direction of travel) to one of the legendary UK venues of the seventies and eighties, Friars Aylesbury.
And home, at that point in time, to one of the very best independent record stores in all of Britain – run by a couple of music aficionados (Steve and Sue) and owned by the man behind Friars itself – Dave Stopps. Just a small middle-England market town yet one which boasted not only that tiny shop which was stuffed to the gunwales with must-have domestic vinyl as well as the very latest, de-rigeur imports but also an absolute must-go concert venue whose reputation was such that it could justifiably claim to have been pivotal within the development of a number of acts; Genesis (like ‘em or loathe ‘em) would be one of many.
I lost count rather a long time ago of the number of times I made that one hundred-plus mile round trip; seeing some extraordinary acts in the process – Queen (as one example) supporting… now, who was it… pretty sure that’d have been Cockney Rebel. Otway and Wild Willy Barrett; the Ramones; Jess Roden not long after the release of his first solo record in tandem with Iguana when they’d become the imaginatively named Jess Roden Band; Lindisfarne; String Driven Thing; Mott The Hoople who, for one reason or another, will always be associated with that particular gig; OMD; Osibisa – that was a hot night indeed – and of course… Stackridge… nights when Let There Be Lids rang out loud, proud and clear; the Saw Doctors of their day – a band who never sold a great deal of records yet who were utterly irresistible live.
Friars was also a jumping-off point to the US for so many bands of that era touring new albums.
Hey, Manhattan – look, there’s the Carlyle where Kennedy stayed… The Brooklyn Bridge laying before me… Paddy MacAloon’s paen to the city of blinding lights from Langley Park To Memphis; and off to the right, the signs for Queens that’ll eventually lead to the Whitestone Bridge, immortalised in Sonny Condell’s song on Tir Na Nog’s third, Matthew Fisher (the court-case-winning organist from Procul Harum) produced, magnum opus Strong In The Sun; just a little below that would be other signs for Jackson Heights – the group formed by Lee Jackson from the ashes of The Nice when that band imploded and Todmorden’s favourite son, Keith Emerson took his organ and knives off to fill enormadomes with Lake and Palmer. Jackson Heights, of course, variously featured both Mike Giles and Ian Wallace on drums – both, equally, stalwarts of King Crimson with the former also part of the long-forgotten duo MacDonald & Giles who recorded their one and only, eponymous, album for Island – the gatefold cover featuring both arm in arm with their ladies of the time, perhaps wives of now.
Further still up on the Jersey-side there’s Hackensack – giving of itself (by name) to Nick Moore’s band that formed in 1969 to release just the one, Roger Dean cover-designed, Polydor album Up The Hardway which, by all accounts (cement-hard-rock not exactly being my forté) is quite a considerable collector’s piece some forty years after the warmth of that and other vinyl hit the shelves of record stores up and down, across the length and breadth of… days when the newspaper adverts proudly proclaiming ‘available at your local record shop’ meant exactly that.
Now, there’s barely a record store at all.
At present, in the UK, there’s something like four-hundred independent record stores trading; in 2003 – there was well over a thousand. And, way back then – there must have been in excess of five times that number.
Do I bemoan the days of vinyl passed?
Yes… actually… I rather do.
Because there is no longer any real experience that goes with the purchase of a new recording.
Look at it this way – nowadays, the new (for sake of example) Bob Dylan waxing sits alongside a Beatles 2010 calendar in a book-shop; Waterstones, Barnes & Noble – take your pick, they’re one and the same. Woolworths (r.i.p.), Boots the Chemists, Sainsburys, Tescos, Wal-Mart or WH Smiths – their ‘record’ departments trotting out top forty as if there was / is nothing else to tempt the eager punter with. Fill up with petrol or diesel and take your pick from dozens of compilations that sit right next to the crisps, nuts and chocolate bars in any Shell / Mobil garage. Did you crave the new U2 album? Available at cut price when you purchased a cappuccino at Starbucks.
And online – what’s really there? A huge mass of… stuff – you can look but can’t touch. And, about as enticing a manner of shopping as glancing at the cellophane-wrapped top shelf volumes in an immigrant run, seedy newseller’s in East London.
The online process is… well, there isn’t a ‘process’ as such. Think about it for a moment – you dial up your latest, all singing, all dancing version of I-Tunes and log in to the I-Tunes store. So far, so ok – but, what greets you? Their (beastly) recommendations – which aren’t really theirs at all – nope, corporate label X or Y has ‘paid’ to have their ‘product’ ‘promoted’.
There is no possibility – any longer – of wandering through the racks, looking through album sleeves; all the cds that are for sale are so heavily protected by being put inside security coffins that, the simple pleasure described above is no longer available.
And here, maybe, is where the grey area is – for me at any rate – no longer grey. This is where black becomes the new white.
And… it comes down to the one, single, word – product.
And, many years back, it got me into a whole heap of trouble… for daring to question my (then) paymasters at EMI. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to 1972. Act one, scene one – the EMI annual sales conference.
I’m twenty years old (ok, so that means you now know how ancient I really am). The venue is some terribly swish London hotel and all of us nonentities (ie, sales reps) are there in our best haircuts, suits and kipper ties.
Some of us – self included – had beards; they were all the rage back then and, I confess, I rather thought I looked a little like a young King Charles – the first of that line who, you’ll recall, had a minor disagreement with Parliament which ended with one single blow of a well-sharpened axe when his head rolled onto a sawdust laden scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, one chilly Tuesday lunchtime, the 30th day of that particular January in 1649.
The great and the good were there from ‘head-office’, those inhabitants of the hallowed turf known as Manchester Square – the office building that featured, rather fetchingly I always thought, on not only the cover of an early Beatles album but also on the blue and red double-compilations of later years.
Many of them sported beards too. And, one by one, they took their turns up at the lectern in front of a slide-show to deliver a ‘presentation’ of their new ‘product’ for the coming autumnal sales drive.
And what delights did they and the relevant label-heads from the EMI distributed labels of the time have to tempt us all with..? Well now, 1972 was, of course, the year when quadraphonic sound came out to play… remember that or never heard of it? No… ok then, a little refresher – quad sound meant that you had to buy a load more audio equipment (amp and two more speakers being the bare minimum) and, in essence, sit in the middle of the room with the speakers cunningly positioned so that the sound… surrounded you.
It was a little like sitting in amongst the violas if orchestral was your preferred take on music or being uncomfortably close to Jon Lord and his Hammond if that’s what musically got your rocks off.
Quad meaning four and… speakers set in four corners of one’s room wasn’t a bad first step. Did it work… well, it was an interesting audio experiment but, really nowhere near as sophisticated as the kind of surround-sound you get in film theatres today.
The boffins loved it (of course) as did my pub-landlord of the time. Late night sessions with him and his wife just outside of Newbury (he was a monocled, Swiss baron and she learned the art of cooking Steak Dianne from the French bloke who actually invented the dish) playing Elgar, Wagner and Vaughn Williams at colossal volume whilst imbibing too much whisky saw to much of that year… as did the bar bill which saw a goodly portion of my EMI wages.
So… what did we get… hmmm… Deep Purple and Machine Head (and yes, they released a quad – or Q4 – version); Babe Ruth, Pink Floyd and Obscured By Clouds, a Gallagher and Lyle album, most probably Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy A Thrill which was on ABC but, so far as I recall, that was distributed by EMI at the time (and did anyone actually know that a steely dan was a name of a dildo-variant… I think not); there’d have been a Gensis album – Foxtrot; Island would have weighed in with the first Roxy Music offering. The Music For Pleasure label would have given us a Magic Roundabout album and Twiggy – that was the year of The Boyfriend. There was ELO because Roll Over Beethoven had already clogged up the summer airwaves and The Shadows – of course there was a Shad’s album, there always was… and… yes, The Wurzels too – on the Starline label. Oh my, such delicious memories.
And, up they trotted, one by one, to extol the virtues of this or that… piece of… product.
Ultimately the assembled company were introduced to a new high-up-in-the-ranks chap. I think he may well have had a beard too. His name was… Bob. And, for the life of me, I can’t recall his surname. No matter… Bob had a background in… canned food. And, during his speech, extolling the virtues of the fabulous EMI, he used the P-word a great deal.
Later that evening, there was the company dinner at which we were all jumbled up with regard to seating – meaning that you’d have someone frightfully important hosting a table which’d be filled with people within the organisation but all from disparate backgrounds and jobs.
I was on Bob’s table.
And, after partaking a couple of glasses of the well-chilled, I was in belligerent mood and took him to task for using the P-word.
How on earth could he justify calling the music that an artist / act had sweated over for (perhaps) weeks / months and which had been committed to vinyl with a cover / jacket / sleeve that had been equally lovingly designed (so long as it wasn’t on Music For Pleasure) and… term the end result… product.
So far as I was concerned, that was equating music to baked beans.
And, it was as fundamental as that.
And so, in no uncertain terms, I made my views known
What I didn’t know – at the time – was that the canned food company from which he’d been recruited was called… Heinz.
Needless to say, my opinions didn’t go unnoticed and a severe dressing down was my reward a few days later, administered by my area manager, one Jimmy Parmenter… a kindly soul who did what he had to with, I believe, a heavy heart since he equally well knew that what drove me was passion. Equals – was it any wonder / surprise that I jumped the EMI ship at the earliest possible opportunity to join Island in ’74.
Passion – it drove me then, it does today and will until the day I bowl up at the pearly gates… and its passion about music. I’m just not passionate about music seen as / termed as / known as / referred to as… product.
Which, basically, is all one gets nowadays.
Unless…
Trawling around the wild west wait a lot earlier this year, I came across an absolutely fascinating site. It was almost as if it’d been built purely to satisfy me / my kind of person… One quick look and I immediately knew that DB, holed up in his Aunac lair in the rural idyll that is the Charente would love it… and… in fact, pretty much everyone I knew who loved… music.
I fizzed the link across to France. Two days later came the reply which I’ll paraphrase here… thanks hugely for sending that link, it is indeed amazing and fully satisfies my vinyl-junkie cravings. However, you’ve not endeared yourself to the wife, she unplugged me after five hours spent online, gazing avidly – claiming that was enough for anyone. I plan to have another look when she’s out shopping tomorrow.
And the site… its called 991.com.
Its run by a couple of blokes who’ve set up what could be, loosely termed, the ultimate vinyl-junkie’s fix – they specialise in rare or hard to find, vinyl and other recordings. In short, a collectors site.
And, I’d argue strenuously that its probably the very best out there.
A few weeks after discovering said site, I’m parked up in my borrowed car in a once and almost forgotten backwater in Kent – the home of 991.com. It’s as non-descript and somewhat run-down as the warehouse looming large before me.
The façade belies the interior, however. Because, once through the portals, it’s a different matter altogether – a veritable treasure-trove of vinyl / cd – long forgotten jewels are racked cheek by jowl and all lovingly tended / catalogued by staff who care equally passionately about… the music.
In one respect, I’m almost glad of my suitcase existence since it precluded the purchase of a great deal laying before my eyes.
Yes, its an online shopping experience but… what sets it apart from the rest is this: the manner in which everything is laid out is as close as it can (online) get to browsing through the shelves and racks of yesteryear. Its (almost) as good as sifting through the imports bin in a shop that simply doesn’t exist any longer. Its also markedly different – and all the better for it – from the other collector’s sites out there because, the cataloguing is done / written up by people who one just knows would have worked in one of those stores; the kind of people who’d have unpacked a gleaming new import, inbound from the States way back when, and immediately played it to a shop-full of curious customers.
What could make it better... hmmm, only one thing - and, that'd be the boffins at 991.com installing a facility to play bits of music (a bit like they have on I-Tunes).
This weekend, forty years ago, half a million – give or take a few – trudged to and from the mudbath that was otherwise known as Max Yasgur’s farm in Sullivan County, upstate New York.
The counter-cultural revolution was in full-flow yet man had, but a few days before, walked the Sea Of Tranquillity having journeyed to the Moon on board Apollo 11 while Jimi Hendrix closed out the three day Woodstock Music & Arts Fair by de-constructing the Star Spangled Banner – one was a product of man’s invention, the other as eloquent a musical statement as can be made that, no matter how many times its is heard or viewed, could ever be described as… product.
But first, look left and there’s Union City on Jersey’s shore; home to the Union Dry Dock upon which Blondie shot their helicopter-led, day/night-time video for the track from Eat To The Beat that, curiously, was never issued as a single in America yet reached #13 on its first outing in the UK. A song penned by the ubiquitous Ms Harry together with bass-player Nigel Harrison, one time native of Princess Risborough, itself not too far down the road (or up, depending on one’s direction of travel) to one of the legendary UK venues of the seventies and eighties, Friars Aylesbury.
And home, at that point in time, to one of the very best independent record stores in all of Britain – run by a couple of music aficionados (Steve and Sue) and owned by the man behind Friars itself – Dave Stopps. Just a small middle-England market town yet one which boasted not only that tiny shop which was stuffed to the gunwales with must-have domestic vinyl as well as the very latest, de-rigeur imports but also an absolute must-go concert venue whose reputation was such that it could justifiably claim to have been pivotal within the development of a number of acts; Genesis (like ‘em or loathe ‘em) would be one of many.
I lost count rather a long time ago of the number of times I made that one hundred-plus mile round trip; seeing some extraordinary acts in the process – Queen (as one example) supporting… now, who was it… pretty sure that’d have been Cockney Rebel. Otway and Wild Willy Barrett; the Ramones; Jess Roden not long after the release of his first solo record in tandem with Iguana when they’d become the imaginatively named Jess Roden Band; Lindisfarne; String Driven Thing; Mott The Hoople who, for one reason or another, will always be associated with that particular gig; OMD; Osibisa – that was a hot night indeed – and of course… Stackridge… nights when Let There Be Lids rang out loud, proud and clear; the Saw Doctors of their day – a band who never sold a great deal of records yet who were utterly irresistible live.
Friars was also a jumping-off point to the US for so many bands of that era touring new albums.
Hey, Manhattan – look, there’s the Carlyle where Kennedy stayed… The Brooklyn Bridge laying before me… Paddy MacAloon’s paen to the city of blinding lights from Langley Park To Memphis; and off to the right, the signs for Queens that’ll eventually lead to the Whitestone Bridge, immortalised in Sonny Condell’s song on Tir Na Nog’s third, Matthew Fisher (the court-case-winning organist from Procul Harum) produced, magnum opus Strong In The Sun; just a little below that would be other signs for Jackson Heights – the group formed by Lee Jackson from the ashes of The Nice when that band imploded and Todmorden’s favourite son, Keith Emerson took his organ and knives off to fill enormadomes with Lake and Palmer. Jackson Heights, of course, variously featured both Mike Giles and Ian Wallace on drums – both, equally, stalwarts of King Crimson with the former also part of the long-forgotten duo MacDonald & Giles who recorded their one and only, eponymous, album for Island – the gatefold cover featuring both arm in arm with their ladies of the time, perhaps wives of now.
Further still up on the Jersey-side there’s Hackensack – giving of itself (by name) to Nick Moore’s band that formed in 1969 to release just the one, Roger Dean cover-designed, Polydor album Up The Hardway which, by all accounts (cement-hard-rock not exactly being my forté) is quite a considerable collector’s piece some forty years after the warmth of that and other vinyl hit the shelves of record stores up and down, across the length and breadth of… days when the newspaper adverts proudly proclaiming ‘available at your local record shop’ meant exactly that.
Now, there’s barely a record store at all.
At present, in the UK, there’s something like four-hundred independent record stores trading; in 2003 – there was well over a thousand. And, way back then – there must have been in excess of five times that number.
Do I bemoan the days of vinyl passed?
Yes… actually… I rather do.
Because there is no longer any real experience that goes with the purchase of a new recording.
Look at it this way – nowadays, the new (for sake of example) Bob Dylan waxing sits alongside a Beatles 2010 calendar in a book-shop; Waterstones, Barnes & Noble – take your pick, they’re one and the same. Woolworths (r.i.p.), Boots the Chemists, Sainsburys, Tescos, Wal-Mart or WH Smiths – their ‘record’ departments trotting out top forty as if there was / is nothing else to tempt the eager punter with. Fill up with petrol or diesel and take your pick from dozens of compilations that sit right next to the crisps, nuts and chocolate bars in any Shell / Mobil garage. Did you crave the new U2 album? Available at cut price when you purchased a cappuccino at Starbucks.
And online – what’s really there? A huge mass of… stuff – you can look but can’t touch. And, about as enticing a manner of shopping as glancing at the cellophane-wrapped top shelf volumes in an immigrant run, seedy newseller’s in East London.
The online process is… well, there isn’t a ‘process’ as such. Think about it for a moment – you dial up your latest, all singing, all dancing version of I-Tunes and log in to the I-Tunes store. So far, so ok – but, what greets you? Their (beastly) recommendations – which aren’t really theirs at all – nope, corporate label X or Y has ‘paid’ to have their ‘product’ ‘promoted’.
There is no possibility – any longer – of wandering through the racks, looking through album sleeves; all the cds that are for sale are so heavily protected by being put inside security coffins that, the simple pleasure described above is no longer available.
And here, maybe, is where the grey area is – for me at any rate – no longer grey. This is where black becomes the new white.
And… it comes down to the one, single, word – product.
And, many years back, it got me into a whole heap of trouble… for daring to question my (then) paymasters at EMI. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to 1972. Act one, scene one – the EMI annual sales conference.
I’m twenty years old (ok, so that means you now know how ancient I really am). The venue is some terribly swish London hotel and all of us nonentities (ie, sales reps) are there in our best haircuts, suits and kipper ties.
Some of us – self included – had beards; they were all the rage back then and, I confess, I rather thought I looked a little like a young King Charles – the first of that line who, you’ll recall, had a minor disagreement with Parliament which ended with one single blow of a well-sharpened axe when his head rolled onto a sawdust laden scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, one chilly Tuesday lunchtime, the 30th day of that particular January in 1649.
The great and the good were there from ‘head-office’, those inhabitants of the hallowed turf known as Manchester Square – the office building that featured, rather fetchingly I always thought, on not only the cover of an early Beatles album but also on the blue and red double-compilations of later years.
Many of them sported beards too. And, one by one, they took their turns up at the lectern in front of a slide-show to deliver a ‘presentation’ of their new ‘product’ for the coming autumnal sales drive.
And what delights did they and the relevant label-heads from the EMI distributed labels of the time have to tempt us all with..? Well now, 1972 was, of course, the year when quadraphonic sound came out to play… remember that or never heard of it? No… ok then, a little refresher – quad sound meant that you had to buy a load more audio equipment (amp and two more speakers being the bare minimum) and, in essence, sit in the middle of the room with the speakers cunningly positioned so that the sound… surrounded you.
It was a little like sitting in amongst the violas if orchestral was your preferred take on music or being uncomfortably close to Jon Lord and his Hammond if that’s what musically got your rocks off.
Quad meaning four and… speakers set in four corners of one’s room wasn’t a bad first step. Did it work… well, it was an interesting audio experiment but, really nowhere near as sophisticated as the kind of surround-sound you get in film theatres today.
The boffins loved it (of course) as did my pub-landlord of the time. Late night sessions with him and his wife just outside of Newbury (he was a monocled, Swiss baron and she learned the art of cooking Steak Dianne from the French bloke who actually invented the dish) playing Elgar, Wagner and Vaughn Williams at colossal volume whilst imbibing too much whisky saw to much of that year… as did the bar bill which saw a goodly portion of my EMI wages.
So… what did we get… hmmm… Deep Purple and Machine Head (and yes, they released a quad – or Q4 – version); Babe Ruth, Pink Floyd and Obscured By Clouds, a Gallagher and Lyle album, most probably Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy A Thrill which was on ABC but, so far as I recall, that was distributed by EMI at the time (and did anyone actually know that a steely dan was a name of a dildo-variant… I think not); there’d have been a Gensis album – Foxtrot; Island would have weighed in with the first Roxy Music offering. The Music For Pleasure label would have given us a Magic Roundabout album and Twiggy – that was the year of The Boyfriend. There was ELO because Roll Over Beethoven had already clogged up the summer airwaves and The Shadows – of course there was a Shad’s album, there always was… and… yes, The Wurzels too – on the Starline label. Oh my, such delicious memories.
And, up they trotted, one by one, to extol the virtues of this or that… piece of… product.
Ultimately the assembled company were introduced to a new high-up-in-the-ranks chap. I think he may well have had a beard too. His name was… Bob. And, for the life of me, I can’t recall his surname. No matter… Bob had a background in… canned food. And, during his speech, extolling the virtues of the fabulous EMI, he used the P-word a great deal.
Later that evening, there was the company dinner at which we were all jumbled up with regard to seating – meaning that you’d have someone frightfully important hosting a table which’d be filled with people within the organisation but all from disparate backgrounds and jobs.
I was on Bob’s table.
And, after partaking a couple of glasses of the well-chilled, I was in belligerent mood and took him to task for using the P-word.
How on earth could he justify calling the music that an artist / act had sweated over for (perhaps) weeks / months and which had been committed to vinyl with a cover / jacket / sleeve that had been equally lovingly designed (so long as it wasn’t on Music For Pleasure) and… term the end result… product.
So far as I was concerned, that was equating music to baked beans.
And, it was as fundamental as that.
And so, in no uncertain terms, I made my views known
What I didn’t know – at the time – was that the canned food company from which he’d been recruited was called… Heinz.
Needless to say, my opinions didn’t go unnoticed and a severe dressing down was my reward a few days later, administered by my area manager, one Jimmy Parmenter… a kindly soul who did what he had to with, I believe, a heavy heart since he equally well knew that what drove me was passion. Equals – was it any wonder / surprise that I jumped the EMI ship at the earliest possible opportunity to join Island in ’74.
Passion – it drove me then, it does today and will until the day I bowl up at the pearly gates… and its passion about music. I’m just not passionate about music seen as / termed as / known as / referred to as… product.
Which, basically, is all one gets nowadays.
Unless…
Trawling around the wild west wait a lot earlier this year, I came across an absolutely fascinating site. It was almost as if it’d been built purely to satisfy me / my kind of person… One quick look and I immediately knew that DB, holed up in his Aunac lair in the rural idyll that is the Charente would love it… and… in fact, pretty much everyone I knew who loved… music.
I fizzed the link across to France. Two days later came the reply which I’ll paraphrase here… thanks hugely for sending that link, it is indeed amazing and fully satisfies my vinyl-junkie cravings. However, you’ve not endeared yourself to the wife, she unplugged me after five hours spent online, gazing avidly – claiming that was enough for anyone. I plan to have another look when she’s out shopping tomorrow.
And the site… its called 991.com.
Its run by a couple of blokes who’ve set up what could be, loosely termed, the ultimate vinyl-junkie’s fix – they specialise in rare or hard to find, vinyl and other recordings. In short, a collectors site.
And, I’d argue strenuously that its probably the very best out there.
A few weeks after discovering said site, I’m parked up in my borrowed car in a once and almost forgotten backwater in Kent – the home of 991.com. It’s as non-descript and somewhat run-down as the warehouse looming large before me.
The façade belies the interior, however. Because, once through the portals, it’s a different matter altogether – a veritable treasure-trove of vinyl / cd – long forgotten jewels are racked cheek by jowl and all lovingly tended / catalogued by staff who care equally passionately about… the music.
In one respect, I’m almost glad of my suitcase existence since it precluded the purchase of a great deal laying before my eyes.
Yes, its an online shopping experience but… what sets it apart from the rest is this: the manner in which everything is laid out is as close as it can (online) get to browsing through the shelves and racks of yesteryear. Its (almost) as good as sifting through the imports bin in a shop that simply doesn’t exist any longer. Its also markedly different – and all the better for it – from the other collector’s sites out there because, the cataloguing is done / written up by people who one just knows would have worked in one of those stores; the kind of people who’d have unpacked a gleaming new import, inbound from the States way back when, and immediately played it to a shop-full of curious customers.
What could make it better... hmmm, only one thing - and, that'd be the boffins at 991.com installing a facility to play bits of music (a bit like they have on I-Tunes).
This weekend, forty years ago, half a million – give or take a few – trudged to and from the mudbath that was otherwise known as Max Yasgur’s farm in Sullivan County, upstate New York.
The counter-cultural revolution was in full-flow yet man had, but a few days before, walked the Sea Of Tranquillity having journeyed to the Moon on board Apollo 11 while Jimi Hendrix closed out the three day Woodstock Music & Arts Fair by de-constructing the Star Spangled Banner – one was a product of man’s invention, the other as eloquent a musical statement as can be made that, no matter how many times its is heard or viewed, could ever be described as… product.
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