OK, having just said I wasn't going to make this post, I'm gonna go ahead and make it anyway.
I just happened to randomly find, searching in private mode for "1973 music", a pro-shot performance of Roxy Music playing "Ladytron" live in Montreux. I had no idea this even existed, and from the view count it seems like neither does anybody else! So I wanted to take a little time and talk about the three live videos of Ladytron from the Eno period I know of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCzhAeukF1A
This is the first and most famous one - Roxy Music's breakthrough TV appearance. I've known and loved it for ages - it appears on the fantastic "First Kiss" bootleg of Eno-era BBC sessions. Video of it has been circulating since at least the '90s.
I didn't, though, know the exact date (the broadcast date turns out to be June 20, 1972). I knew it had to be early on, as Ferry hadn't cut his hair yet. While I was looking up the exact date I ran across this article that gives more context:
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/roxy-music-ladytron-the-old-grey-whistle-test-1972/
Now, I had no idea whatsoever of Whispering Bob Harris's sneering put-down in his intro - because it doesn't exist any longer! The Old Grey Whistle Test is one of those BBC programmes notorious for not being preserved in the archives. The Roxy Music performance beats the odds by still existing, as do all the clips from the episode. What doesn't survive, however, are any of the presenter intros!
It seems, then, that Roxy Music made their television debut on a TV show hosted by the chairman of the Fuck Roxy Music league. Here's Harris's surviving intro to their second appearance a year later:
https://youtu.be/j2R8sZ4SlXI
Even though this intro obviously exists, it has been trimmed from most of the many rebroadcasts of the song. Bob Harris is still shit-talking Roxy Music. I don't judge him for that. We all have our own hills to die on, all of our own topics that drive us, against our better judgement, repeatedly look like total berks in public. I see no reason to have any animosity towards Bob Harris in a world containing Graham Linehan.
Anyway, it is true that Roxy Music on this appearance come across as, well... they're pretty extra on this. Which is why I love it, of course. It's fantastically, ludicrously over the top. It's also, though a little rough around the edges. Ferry misses his intro. Their stagecraft is a bit tentative. Ferry's hair is long and not particularly flatteringly styled. In some shots you can see their band logo, which looks like glitter applied to a cardboard box. The wardrobe is amazing, for sure, but they're carried by the wardrobe and the music. Pretty much everything they're wearing is shiny, and it's that quality that holds them together visually. I mean for God's sake not only are both Eno and Ferry wearing animal prints but they're not even _complementary_ animal prints.
It's that outro. A long and crazy duet between Manzanera's guitar freakout and Eno's knob-twiddling. Absolute heaven. How could it get any better?
Well, it didn't, immediately. Their next TV performance of Ladytron was on November 25, 1972, on a show called Full House. This show is now solely remembered for having Roxy Music perform on it; everything else about it has been overwritten by the Olsen Twins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0--qm-yj3w
This performance of "Ladytron" is just not as impressive. Mostly this is down to the staging. The lighting is pretty poor on this performance; everything is dark. It's no real reflection on the band - I've heard other performances of them from around this time and they were at a peak. They were doing amazing 18-minute versions of "If There Is Something". Not to say that they're perfect - Mackay's oboe solo is noticeably sloppy. One can tell overall Ferry has improved. The haircut is doing wonders for him, and he's got a better sense of how to play to the camera. Most of it is shot in closeup with fades, with long shots being these De Palma pans. Manzanera is more confident as a guitarist as well - his soloing here is more shredding, less reliant on Eno's knob-twiddling to evoke pure noise. In some senses yes it's a step back.
So the one that has me posting this is a video from Roxy Music's last tour with Eno, from April 29, 1973 in Montreux. It says it's from a "festival" but it doesn't exactly look like a rock festival - looks like your typical live performance for TV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56eeYrYKSh0
There's a lot more rock and roll bravado at play here. The mixing is great. Unfortunately the broadcast doesn't include the intro, but Mackay absolutely kills his oboe solo, legs akimbo in a power stance (did he wear a codpiece? His outfits do tend to draw a lot of attention to that area) while Thompson whacks holy hell out of the skins. Ferry glistens with sequins and sweat. At the end of the song Manzanera and Mackay are jamming with each other like they're in the fucking E Street Band or something, just incredible power and energy. Eno is, as usual, in the back with his reel recordings and synths, wearing a suit with shoulders that make him look like Quasimoto. To make up for the missing intro, the jam goes on longer than even the OGWT performance, with a long slow fade into Eno's noise outro. I am just blown away by watching this, the idea that they could find a way to match their stunning Old Grey Whistle Test recording.
It was the way of the future for them. Ferry would go on to write even better songs. The band without Eno would grow more confident, exude even stronger rock energy. They weren't the same without Eno - that tentative, over the top weirdness from '72 would vanish - but Eno is on record as saying that he thinks Roxy Music were better after he left, and I can't argue too hard with his assessment.
Sunday, 31 May 2020
Queering and Unqueering in Popular Media
An intrinsic part of writing an ongoing character is character revision. Very few characters emerge fully-formed from the head of Zeus.
It's a fraught exercise. Since characters, unlike humans, have no independent existence outside of the mind of the observer, they face backlash, hatred, rejection at every corner. We know about them only through third parties - someone says "This is who Superman is" and if we don't like it we can get very upset indeed.
Because I understand myself through these characters. Because "queer erasure" erases me. It took me forty years to reach even this basic simple point in my life because humans don't come fully-formed from Zeus either, because from birth we have all been told who we can and can't be.
Queerness, then, is a particularly fraught form of character revision, a battle fought over and over on every media front. Do I exaggerate to call it a life and death battle? I'm alive. I have friends that aren't. Of course the world is complicated but my experience is that it's really hard to be happy and functional without also being able to be who one genuinely is.
That's a pretty heavy introduction and what I'm trying to talk about is a little bit lighter than that. I want to talk about accidents, people stumbling around blindly in the dark trying to express a truth they don't quite understand, horrible mistakes like Silence of the Lambs, Roxy and Poison in Final Fight, that awful mid-'70s episode of that doctor show time has forgotten where Dr. Kildare or Marcus Welby or some asshole like that convinced a man he wasn't _really_ gay, and mistakes I rather like, like "Lola" by the Kinks. I want to talk about that old character in the Legion of Super Heroes, I don't remember the name, who was written as implicitly gay and then when they panicked and tried to straighten him out the only way they could think to do so was by making him trans instead.
I'm not quite up to doing that well today, so instead I'll leave you with this thumbnail sketch. If I'm going to write about something today, I feel like it needs to be something at least somewhat important. I can't come on here today and just talk about the three different live videos of "Ladytron" from when Eno was in the band, to do so seems trivial and insulting. Another time perhaps.
It's a fraught exercise. Since characters, unlike humans, have no independent existence outside of the mind of the observer, they face backlash, hatred, rejection at every corner. We know about them only through third parties - someone says "This is who Superman is" and if we don't like it we can get very upset indeed.
Because I understand myself through these characters. Because "queer erasure" erases me. It took me forty years to reach even this basic simple point in my life because humans don't come fully-formed from Zeus either, because from birth we have all been told who we can and can't be.
Queerness, then, is a particularly fraught form of character revision, a battle fought over and over on every media front. Do I exaggerate to call it a life and death battle? I'm alive. I have friends that aren't. Of course the world is complicated but my experience is that it's really hard to be happy and functional without also being able to be who one genuinely is.
That's a pretty heavy introduction and what I'm trying to talk about is a little bit lighter than that. I want to talk about accidents, people stumbling around blindly in the dark trying to express a truth they don't quite understand, horrible mistakes like Silence of the Lambs, Roxy and Poison in Final Fight, that awful mid-'70s episode of that doctor show time has forgotten where Dr. Kildare or Marcus Welby or some asshole like that convinced a man he wasn't _really_ gay, and mistakes I rather like, like "Lola" by the Kinks. I want to talk about that old character in the Legion of Super Heroes, I don't remember the name, who was written as implicitly gay and then when they panicked and tried to straighten him out the only way they could think to do so was by making him trans instead.
I'm not quite up to doing that well today, so instead I'll leave you with this thumbnail sketch. If I'm going to write about something today, I feel like it needs to be something at least somewhat important. I can't come on here today and just talk about the three different live videos of "Ladytron" from when Eno was in the band, to do so seems trivial and insulting. Another time perhaps.
Saturday, 30 May 2020
Ephemera
One of the effects of the way I live my life is that I pay a lot of attention to minor details. I don't know why that is. On my good days I like to say that I revel in ordinary life. On my bad days I think of it as a form of hypervigilance or rumination. Whatever the reason, there are things that other people notice that I don't, and conversely things that don't seem to matter to other people that are important to me.
Here's an example. At work we have this "incentive program" where they ask us to complete a number of activities which are supposed to "keep us healthy". It's not a popular program. I tend to think of it as another example of Silicon Valley snake oil, something that's supposed to provide "deliverable outcomes" but is implemented in such a fashion that it's easy to interpret as gatekeeping.
Anyway. 20 points for viewing inspirational quotes! I do this every day for six months of the year until the computer tells me I have enough points and then I stop. This quote stuck out to me:
Garden Your Body
Getting Active Card
"Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are our gardeners." - Shakespeare
“Shakespeare”! Well, you know, Shakespeare wrote a lot of things. Hardly a proper citation. Well, no matter, I can always Google the quote and find the source.
Othello! Act I, Scene 3. Roderigo is complaining to Iago that he is too much in love with a woman to control his feelings.
IAGO
Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost'rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. Whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion.
So, Iago – who has long been widely considered the most evil of Shakespeare’s villains – is here counseling Roderigo. Virtue? Nonsense! Love? Nonsense! No such thing. There is nothing but what we ourselves will, and it is this will which will in the end triumph. Iago continues:
IAGO
It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man. Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies! I have professed me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdurable toughness.
A lust of the blood! Drown cats and blind puppies! Well, I’m bloody inspired, for sure.
It gets better than that, though. I do seem to recall - and I haven't verified this, so it could be hearsay - that "will" was Elizabethan slang for sexual potency. So, in some sense, this "motivational" quote, in context, is telling us to for God's sake, go on and fuck something already!
What's interesting to me is that this presents a well-known text as a palimpsest, shorn of the (honestly sort of crude and offensive) meaning intended by the author and given a, err, sort of panglossian gloss. I'm not a stickler for original intent; it's interesting in an academic sense but seems to have little bearing on how we live our lives. When understanding why things happen, why they are the way they are, knowing the objective truth is, of course, invaluable, but it is also valuable to know what people, in practice, believe and why they believe it.
I have a book by a gentleman by the name of Maurice Rickards entitled "The Encyclopedia of Ephemera". It's a big coffee-table book guide to all of the weird things people collect. Opening to a page at pseudorandom I find, on page 200, "Lunacy Papers". You can see why this is of great interest to people today. I understand myself today better if I understand how people under other circumstances, in other conditions, lived their daily lives. This in turn makes me more critical of the ephemeral conditions I am living under, the nonsense we live with and take for granted.
I attach here a few bits of ephemera. The first is something printed on the back of an ATM receipt from the downtown Beaverton Fred Meyer. It reads:
cash is freedom
cash is social
cash is control
in a sans serif font, the last word of each line bolded. This is accompanied by a picture of a dog sticking its head out a car window.
My initial response to this was that it was a weird twist on a Bazooka Joe wrapper, but there is, I think, more going on here than its placement in the pantheon of questionable advertising.
(Here, for instance, is a 1906 poster for Mackintosh Toffee which I find endlessly amusing and have tacked up in my work cubicle:)
No, revisiting this wrapper today it reminds me of nothing so much as the Wacky Aunt memes a friend of mine keeps posting. It's easy for me to get a bad feeling from a lot of them. They are designed to propagate superficially without the people viewing them or passing them on really thinking about the deeper meaning they might have, and a lot of them, honestly, they're pretty defensive about behavior that I would consider to be potentially abusive. Example: "If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best." Accompanied, like this photo is, with a stock image which bears no apparent relation whatsoever to the text. Life imitates Un Chien Andalou.
With ephemera like this, authorial intent is difficult to actually divine. I need to take things like these in a Baudrillardian sense and read it contextually, with no reference to intent.
The repeated slogans mostly evoke to me the three slogans of Oceania from Orwell's "1984", Oceania's credo so to speak:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
It's not just that these statements are absurd, it's that, as with any credo, their truth value is irrelevant. They are empty slogans repeated, in places where they cannot meaningfully be questioned, until they are taken to be true. Linguistically it springs from not just Orwell's Newspeak but from Carroll's Humpty Dumpty.
So I have it on my makeup mirror as a memento. I'm not likely to forget the absurdity of this world but I keep it around in case I'm tempted.
The other thing I have is from the back of a Splenda packet I had with my tea this morning.
It reads:
Be Happy!
It drives other people crazy!
"Be Happy" is in bold and italics. This has a childlike drawing of a smiling mouth below it in red.
Maybe I am really disconnected from the world, but I do find it shocking. This, to me, evokes Conan the Barbarian's answer to the question "What is best in life?"
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
I guess there a lot of people who really do genuinely live by that ethos. I have a hard time whenever I am confronted with that reality.
Here's an example. At work we have this "incentive program" where they ask us to complete a number of activities which are supposed to "keep us healthy". It's not a popular program. I tend to think of it as another example of Silicon Valley snake oil, something that's supposed to provide "deliverable outcomes" but is implemented in such a fashion that it's easy to interpret as gatekeeping.
Anyway. 20 points for viewing inspirational quotes! I do this every day for six months of the year until the computer tells me I have enough points and then I stop. This quote stuck out to me:
Garden Your Body
Getting Active Card
"Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are our gardeners." - Shakespeare
“Shakespeare”! Well, you know, Shakespeare wrote a lot of things. Hardly a proper citation. Well, no matter, I can always Google the quote and find the source.
Othello! Act I, Scene 3. Roderigo is complaining to Iago that he is too much in love with a woman to control his feelings.
IAGO
Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost'rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. Whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion.
So, Iago – who has long been widely considered the most evil of Shakespeare’s villains – is here counseling Roderigo. Virtue? Nonsense! Love? Nonsense! No such thing. There is nothing but what we ourselves will, and it is this will which will in the end triumph. Iago continues:
IAGO
It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man. Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies! I have professed me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdurable toughness.
A lust of the blood! Drown cats and blind puppies! Well, I’m bloody inspired, for sure.
It gets better than that, though. I do seem to recall - and I haven't verified this, so it could be hearsay - that "will" was Elizabethan slang for sexual potency. So, in some sense, this "motivational" quote, in context, is telling us to for God's sake, go on and fuck something already!
What's interesting to me is that this presents a well-known text as a palimpsest, shorn of the (honestly sort of crude and offensive) meaning intended by the author and given a, err, sort of panglossian gloss. I'm not a stickler for original intent; it's interesting in an academic sense but seems to have little bearing on how we live our lives. When understanding why things happen, why they are the way they are, knowing the objective truth is, of course, invaluable, but it is also valuable to know what people, in practice, believe and why they believe it.
I have a book by a gentleman by the name of Maurice Rickards entitled "The Encyclopedia of Ephemera". It's a big coffee-table book guide to all of the weird things people collect. Opening to a page at pseudorandom I find, on page 200, "Lunacy Papers". You can see why this is of great interest to people today. I understand myself today better if I understand how people under other circumstances, in other conditions, lived their daily lives. This in turn makes me more critical of the ephemeral conditions I am living under, the nonsense we live with and take for granted.
I attach here a few bits of ephemera. The first is something printed on the back of an ATM receipt from the downtown Beaverton Fred Meyer. It reads:
cash is freedom
cash is social
cash is control
in a sans serif font, the last word of each line bolded. This is accompanied by a picture of a dog sticking its head out a car window.
My initial response to this was that it was a weird twist on a Bazooka Joe wrapper, but there is, I think, more going on here than its placement in the pantheon of questionable advertising.
(Here, for instance, is a 1906 poster for Mackintosh Toffee which I find endlessly amusing and have tacked up in my work cubicle:)
No, revisiting this wrapper today it reminds me of nothing so much as the Wacky Aunt memes a friend of mine keeps posting. It's easy for me to get a bad feeling from a lot of them. They are designed to propagate superficially without the people viewing them or passing them on really thinking about the deeper meaning they might have, and a lot of them, honestly, they're pretty defensive about behavior that I would consider to be potentially abusive. Example: "If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best." Accompanied, like this photo is, with a stock image which bears no apparent relation whatsoever to the text. Life imitates Un Chien Andalou.
With ephemera like this, authorial intent is difficult to actually divine. I need to take things like these in a Baudrillardian sense and read it contextually, with no reference to intent.
The repeated slogans mostly evoke to me the three slogans of Oceania from Orwell's "1984", Oceania's credo so to speak:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
It's not just that these statements are absurd, it's that, as with any credo, their truth value is irrelevant. They are empty slogans repeated, in places where they cannot meaningfully be questioned, until they are taken to be true. Linguistically it springs from not just Orwell's Newspeak but from Carroll's Humpty Dumpty.
So I have it on my makeup mirror as a memento. I'm not likely to forget the absurdity of this world but I keep it around in case I'm tempted.
The other thing I have is from the back of a Splenda packet I had with my tea this morning.
It reads:
Be Happy!
It drives other people crazy!
"Be Happy" is in bold and italics. This has a childlike drawing of a smiling mouth below it in red.
Maybe I am really disconnected from the world, but I do find it shocking. This, to me, evokes Conan the Barbarian's answer to the question "What is best in life?"
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
I guess there a lot of people who really do genuinely live by that ethos. I have a hard time whenever I am confronted with that reality.
Friday, 29 May 2020
Homegrown Prog
Trying to work myself into some lighter fare. Having difficulty. I can get to the point where I'm exploring weird little corners but actually explaining those corners is challenging.
Part of trying to cut back from old places that aren't working for me is trying to find new places. There's a local radio station called XRAY here in Portland, sort of along the "freeform" way of doing things. I got out of the habit of listening to the radio back when I lived in Indiana, but here there's radio that plays human-curated music of interest to me.
But since I am a digger, the other day I got around to digging. What DJs are on the station? What sort of music do they play? What can I learn from it?
And honestly I learn a lot more by listening, and I'm starting to develop the patience for it again. But the thing I found by digging that I don't think I would have come across if I didn't... DJ Cozmic Edward's radio show at 6 AM on Saturday morning. He did a show a couple weeks back called "Homegrown Prog".
https://xray.fm/broadcasts/34337
This is the sort of thing that drives me to look for things. I was previously vaguely aware of the existence of the sort of music on this broadcast. Mainly I am aware of it through the writing of Ash Ra Tom, a '70s record obsessive with a particular interest in a nameless genre that he describes as "Midwestern Progressive Rock of the 1970s". Here's his list, which I note that he just revised earlier this month so it's pretty up-to-date:
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/ashratom/usa-midwest-ontario-progressive-rock-1970s_early-80s/
The music DJ Cozmic Edward's radio show doesn't have the strict geographic demarcation of Tom's list, but from listening to the music I hear a distinct stylistic kinship to the bands on the list. Not only is it good music, this is music that is more obscure than even groups like Random and Graced Lightning known only to a few obsessive freaks.
See, I've sort of evolved in my thinking about "lost media" from focusing on things that are already gone to things that might one day be gone. All of the missing Doctor Who episodes were destroyed when I was an infant, long before I had even heard of the show. It's great that so many have been recovered, but I can't help but think that it's easier to keep things from being lost in the first place than to recover them when they're gone.
And what is in danger of being lost? Things nobody cares about. Things so few people care about that nobody even remembers they exist. Things with few copies of them made. The radio station records of the 1970s and 1980s seem to me to be a textbook example of endangered media.
DJ Cozmic Edward credits the work of Tony Coulter for bringing the music to broader attention. Coulter is an unbelievably knowledgable WFMU DJ who has brought uncountable numbers of recordings to wider prominence and I'm not surprised to hear of his involvement. Oddly enough it seems much of the rediscovery of the 70s radio station recordings comes from a resurgence of interest in soft rock, rather than progressive rock. Earlier waves of revivalism, such as Irwin Chusid's "outsider" movement, focused bizarre music, strange and odd music. Music which is in some sense really the opposite of the soft rock here, which is smooth and professional.
This is something that Ash Ra Tom brings up in his list on Midwest Progressive Rock - the biggest-name examplar of this sort of music is Kansas. America never really had a lot of homegrown progressive rock bands, and I'm starting to conclude that a lot of it was label gatekeeping. American labels, it seems, were just not interested in signing or promoting the bands making music like Kansas, even in the days when Emerson, Lake, and Palmer could headline major music festivals and fill stadiums.
I can't say this is a great loss to posterity. I'm not going to excoriate the evil labels for not spending enough time promoting the well-done but ultimately unexceptional work of privileged suburban white kids. I am going to say that I do like a lot of this music and I'm glad to have a chance to hear it, glad that some of it at least has not ceased to exist, love that in 1978 a band called Trout Fishing in America recorded a prog tune called "High in the Highlands" for a record made by radio station KDKB in Arizona and that I can hear that song now.
I'm not a huge fan of the song, exactly - there's better songs in the hour. But I am, of course, a Richard Brautigan fan.
I had to look and see if the record is even listed on Discogs. It's not. Discogs lists two bands called Trout Fishing in America. One has no info on it at all except that they released a single called "Proto 1 / Bun Hugger Boy". No label. All I can find is that it was pressed by Wakefield Manufacturing, which was a defunct pressing plant in Phoenix. Maybe it's them! Hard to say:
https://www.discogs.com/label/367883-Wakefield-Manufacturing
The other are apparently much better known - they even have their own Wikipedia page!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trout_Fishing_in_America_(duo)
They mostly make children's music, it looks like, and were based in Houston during the time this record was made. I guess they got played on Dr. Demento and NPR and are on one of those Putomayo comps as well.
Incidentally, best band name I found researching this list "Stickler of the Ultramundane". They were apparently an Ohio-based Doors knockoff band who put out one EP. Not on Discogs. Googling it in quotes gives you one link to an Ebay auction that's ended.
Part of trying to cut back from old places that aren't working for me is trying to find new places. There's a local radio station called XRAY here in Portland, sort of along the "freeform" way of doing things. I got out of the habit of listening to the radio back when I lived in Indiana, but here there's radio that plays human-curated music of interest to me.
But since I am a digger, the other day I got around to digging. What DJs are on the station? What sort of music do they play? What can I learn from it?
And honestly I learn a lot more by listening, and I'm starting to develop the patience for it again. But the thing I found by digging that I don't think I would have come across if I didn't... DJ Cozmic Edward's radio show at 6 AM on Saturday morning. He did a show a couple weeks back called "Homegrown Prog".
https://xray.fm/broadcasts/34337
This is the sort of thing that drives me to look for things. I was previously vaguely aware of the existence of the sort of music on this broadcast. Mainly I am aware of it through the writing of Ash Ra Tom, a '70s record obsessive with a particular interest in a nameless genre that he describes as "Midwestern Progressive Rock of the 1970s". Here's his list, which I note that he just revised earlier this month so it's pretty up-to-date:
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/ashratom/usa-midwest-ontario-progressive-rock-1970s_early-80s/
The music DJ Cozmic Edward's radio show doesn't have the strict geographic demarcation of Tom's list, but from listening to the music I hear a distinct stylistic kinship to the bands on the list. Not only is it good music, this is music that is more obscure than even groups like Random and Graced Lightning known only to a few obsessive freaks.
See, I've sort of evolved in my thinking about "lost media" from focusing on things that are already gone to things that might one day be gone. All of the missing Doctor Who episodes were destroyed when I was an infant, long before I had even heard of the show. It's great that so many have been recovered, but I can't help but think that it's easier to keep things from being lost in the first place than to recover them when they're gone.
And what is in danger of being lost? Things nobody cares about. Things so few people care about that nobody even remembers they exist. Things with few copies of them made. The radio station records of the 1970s and 1980s seem to me to be a textbook example of endangered media.
DJ Cozmic Edward credits the work of Tony Coulter for bringing the music to broader attention. Coulter is an unbelievably knowledgable WFMU DJ who has brought uncountable numbers of recordings to wider prominence and I'm not surprised to hear of his involvement. Oddly enough it seems much of the rediscovery of the 70s radio station recordings comes from a resurgence of interest in soft rock, rather than progressive rock. Earlier waves of revivalism, such as Irwin Chusid's "outsider" movement, focused bizarre music, strange and odd music. Music which is in some sense really the opposite of the soft rock here, which is smooth and professional.
This is something that Ash Ra Tom brings up in his list on Midwest Progressive Rock - the biggest-name examplar of this sort of music is Kansas. America never really had a lot of homegrown progressive rock bands, and I'm starting to conclude that a lot of it was label gatekeeping. American labels, it seems, were just not interested in signing or promoting the bands making music like Kansas, even in the days when Emerson, Lake, and Palmer could headline major music festivals and fill stadiums.
I can't say this is a great loss to posterity. I'm not going to excoriate the evil labels for not spending enough time promoting the well-done but ultimately unexceptional work of privileged suburban white kids. I am going to say that I do like a lot of this music and I'm glad to have a chance to hear it, glad that some of it at least has not ceased to exist, love that in 1978 a band called Trout Fishing in America recorded a prog tune called "High in the Highlands" for a record made by radio station KDKB in Arizona and that I can hear that song now.
I'm not a huge fan of the song, exactly - there's better songs in the hour. But I am, of course, a Richard Brautigan fan.
I had to look and see if the record is even listed on Discogs. It's not. Discogs lists two bands called Trout Fishing in America. One has no info on it at all except that they released a single called "Proto 1 / Bun Hugger Boy". No label. All I can find is that it was pressed by Wakefield Manufacturing, which was a defunct pressing plant in Phoenix. Maybe it's them! Hard to say:
https://www.discogs.com/label/367883-Wakefield-Manufacturing
The other are apparently much better known - they even have their own Wikipedia page!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trout_Fishing_in_America_(duo)
They mostly make children's music, it looks like, and were based in Houston during the time this record was made. I guess they got played on Dr. Demento and NPR and are on one of those Putomayo comps as well.
Incidentally, best band name I found researching this list "Stickler of the Ultramundane". They were apparently an Ohio-based Doors knockoff band who put out one EP. Not on Discogs. Googling it in quotes gives you one link to an Ebay auction that's ended.
Thursday, 28 May 2020
The Right To Be Forgotten
I find it perversely hilarious whenever someone over in Europe speaks of "the right to be forgotten". There's a sort of bleakness to such theorising. The "rights" they are proposing are so far from my experience, so far from my reality, that they're hard for me to take seriously.
To me, being forgotten isn't so much a "right" as an inevitability. Given enough time, everything will be forgotten. Everything we are, everything we know, will be lost.
I struggle against that, have struggled against that for a long time. There's a lot of the fear of death in there, of dying not just bodily, but of dying so completely that nobody remembers I existed. That prospect has been a hard one to come to terms with.
As I get older, as I change, it gets more complicated than that. There are things about my past I would genuinely like people to forget, because being reminded of them causes me pain. The name my parents gave me, for instance - it hurts me to be called by that name.
Mainly, I think, because it's hard for me to recognize that I am no longer that person, that I have changed. There's a thing that a lot of people like me do, is we take recent photos of ourselves and put them up against old photos of ourselves from before. I have this strong desire to prove to myself and others that I have changed, that I'm not who I once was.
That's what "the right to be forgotten" is, right? The right to be recognized for who we are, not for who we were?
I don't have control over that, and that is a hard thing for me to deal with sometimes.
I try to stay off social media, but I am dimly aware of some of the challenges Black Dresses have been going through.
I believe it is reasonable to expect others to not make a mockery of one's personal trauma. Like, I feel silly even having to say that, but I do. Devi didn't put her trauma out there in the world so that other people could make fun of it.
It's a big world and there are a lot of fucked up people in it. That's not an excuse thing, that's just, you know, there are people who can't or won't treat their fellow human beings with basic respect. As much as it pains me to say it, I understand that happens. I understand, too, needing to pretend otherwise, understand the pain when that facade breaks.
"Forgotten", I guess, that's not really the right phrasing. I can't forget who I was, where I am, what this world is. I just wish I didn't have to be _reminded_ of these things all the fucking time.
To me, being forgotten isn't so much a "right" as an inevitability. Given enough time, everything will be forgotten. Everything we are, everything we know, will be lost.
I struggle against that, have struggled against that for a long time. There's a lot of the fear of death in there, of dying not just bodily, but of dying so completely that nobody remembers I existed. That prospect has been a hard one to come to terms with.
As I get older, as I change, it gets more complicated than that. There are things about my past I would genuinely like people to forget, because being reminded of them causes me pain. The name my parents gave me, for instance - it hurts me to be called by that name.
Mainly, I think, because it's hard for me to recognize that I am no longer that person, that I have changed. There's a thing that a lot of people like me do, is we take recent photos of ourselves and put them up against old photos of ourselves from before. I have this strong desire to prove to myself and others that I have changed, that I'm not who I once was.
That's what "the right to be forgotten" is, right? The right to be recognized for who we are, not for who we were?
I don't have control over that, and that is a hard thing for me to deal with sometimes.
I try to stay off social media, but I am dimly aware of some of the challenges Black Dresses have been going through.
I believe it is reasonable to expect others to not make a mockery of one's personal trauma. Like, I feel silly even having to say that, but I do. Devi didn't put her trauma out there in the world so that other people could make fun of it.
It's a big world and there are a lot of fucked up people in it. That's not an excuse thing, that's just, you know, there are people who can't or won't treat their fellow human beings with basic respect. As much as it pains me to say it, I understand that happens. I understand, too, needing to pretend otherwise, understand the pain when that facade breaks.
"Forgotten", I guess, that's not really the right phrasing. I can't forget who I was, where I am, what this world is. I just wish I didn't have to be _reminded_ of these things all the fucking time.
Monday, 25 May 2020
Skullfuck Vs. The Dancing Bears
I have this elaborate headcanon around the band The Grateful Dead, who I don't actually like, who I genuinely believe are terrible, but who I listen to all the time. It's complicated.
In my head, the band known to the world as "The Grateful Dead" are actually two separate bands. The first, active from 1966-1974, was known as "Skullfuck", and the second, active from 1977-1995, was known as "The Dancing Bears". These two bands had the same members, played a lot of the same songs, and are commonly grouped together by their fans. The difference is one of purpose and intent. Skullfuck, you see, were a drug band masquerading as a rock band. They toured mainly as a pretext for distributing large amounts of LSD around the United States and beyond. That's not to say that they didn't genuinely did love music. All of them loved music, couldn't get enough of playing it, particularly when they were high, which was always. But since they were constantly high, their abilities to perform were limited. While most of them were, individually, decent-to-great musicians, they couldn't sing in tune, couldn't play unison riffs. Despite this they made some extraordinary music, and a lot of it was recorded to tape, because their drug connection was also a huge recording nerd.
It was a precarious and unpleasant existence. They were always being harassed, always under pressure, and having a lifestyle based entirely around drug abuse didn't necessarily make them the most emotionally healthy human beings. Eventually, at the end of 1974, it all fell apart.
But it didn't stay that way, because none of them really had anywhere else to go. So they got back together, after a couple years, as the Dancing Bears, who were the rock and roll band Skullfuck were pretending to be. They were still high all the time, still completely dysfunctional, and on top of that worn down, worn out, broken. But this time, the music came first. They were capable of things as the Dancing Bears that they weren't as Skullfuck. Primarily, they could function as a business, which they didn't quite manage before. They had a large and devoted fanbase, and the Dancing Bears wanted to play music for them, not slip acid in their tea.
My personal allegiance is to Skullfuck. I think the Dancing Bears had some OK stuff. I can see why a lot of people go for them. They could play as a band in a way Skullfuck seldom did. But they also lacked the complete unpredictability, the feeling that they were teetering on the edge of chaos, that things would fall apart at any second. It was there, mind you, but when it came out it was mostly just sad rather than transcendent.
So here's my emerging theory. The question is, what made Skullfuck quit playing a song? Nobody ever really has an answer to that. They start playing songs, they quit playing songs, there's no reason for any of it most of the time. My emerging theory is that they have a certain approach to songs - they're puzzles that they try to figure out, and once they figure it out to their satisfaction, they move on to something else. Well, you know, why else quit playing a song, right? With most bands, the tour's over, you work up new material, you work up a new set, you rehearse that, but Skullfuck didn't work that way. They almost never figured out how to actually play a song before performing it in concert. Their live debuts of songs are notorious for being train wrecks. They're disaster artists.
So to distract myself from life today I have been working through a list of material they played and quit playing before October of '74, and listening to the last performances, to see how it holds up. Here's what I've come up with.
Here Comes Sunshine: See, this was an odd one, they didn't start playing it until '73, and then they played it once at the beginning of '74 and that was it. God only knows. In this case, the last performance is pretty good, but it's the second to last performance that's the one that's really acclaimed as the best ever. Who knows why they played it at Winterland on Feb 23, 1974? It was a weird one-off. They didn't have time to come off with new material. Whatever the case: This doesn't quite follow the "last = best" pattern, but it gets pretty close!
Bird Song: Another "dropped in '73" beloved song. There's only a couple of these and I haven't heard most of them. This one didn't even make it to the end of '73, dropping out after a performance on Sep 15. This one, like a lot of the ones that'll follow, only survives on an audience tape, which means most deadheads haven't and won't hear it. And you know what, yeah, I will say this is one of the great ones. One can quibble as to whether or not it's better than the Veneta or Vancouver versions, but it's genuinely up there. Mostly what lets it down is that Jerry's singing is pretty bad. You know what? It usually was.
Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks): There's kind of a good reason they quit playing the Pigpen songs, being as he left the band to go die and all. Also, they did bring this one back before the hiatus in October '74, but I'm deciding to tactically ignore that for now (haven't heard it, might later). That said, this absolutely does fit the pattern. The last performance of Pigpen's "Anthem of the Sun" closer took place on May 11, 1972. I'm iffy on Pigpen as a whole. A lot of his time in the band consists of him exhorting men to try and fuck women at great length, and that's not the sort of thing that super interests me. This is a goddamn ripsnorting performance, though. I know, really controversial opinion, stop the presses, Kate says that a Dead performance on the Europe '72 tour is good. Ah, you know, maybe it gets a little overlooked, this performance? I mean, I overlooked it, coming is it does like right after the longest and actually possibly the greatest Dark Star ever performed.
Turn On Your Lovelight: Probably the song most associated with Pigpen, and another one that had its last performance on the Europe '72 tour. In this case, though, I'm gonna break with precedent and say this isn't the best version. Again, we're talking about something I never liked much in the first place, so that might not count for much. Still - it's even shorter than the "Live/Dead" version, and the "Live/Dead" version, believe it or not, is one of the briefer versions he did. Even at only 12 minutes it's an ordeal, though.
Good Lovin': Yep, another Pigpen tune they quit doing after Europe '72. Last performance: May 25, 1972. Fantastic version? Check. Arguably better than the version from the Fillmore East Apr 1971 gigs. The thing is by this time the band doesn't just let Pigpen's, uh, "charisma" carry the whole thing along; they've genuinely figured out how to support him while still making things interesting. This just isn't something that happens much in his earlier performances. He overpowers the rest of them. They vamp while he goes to town. In these performances he goes to town and they go to town and if it's not quite the same town they're sort of in the same general vicinity.
Alligator: Pigpen's other "Anthem of the Sun" tune. Last played: April 1971 Fillmore gigs. I don't like this song and never much have. The jam from the Family Dog on Nov 1, 1969 is decent. That's all I can say for it. Here they play the song and there a too-long drum solo and some jamming that some people do like and I just don't much.
Ripple: Another one they quit playing in April '71. This one is part of that whole "Americana" thing they did mostly between '69 and '71. Good songs but but they never quite managed to nail songs like these live and electric. Honestly this side of them just worked better in the studio, as far as I can tell.
Clementine: An obscure one for sure, never released on a studio album. Also a textbook example of "well, good enough, moving on" - after a year's absence they brought it in January '69 back for one of the early shows recorded for Live/Dead, did the best ever version of it, and never played it again.
Cosmic Charlie: A fan favorite for some inscrutable reason. It's kind of a dumb goofy song, but there are some decent enough versions that don't sound like some kind of sub-par Flo & Eddie comedy music. One of these versions, unsurprisingly, is the final performance from early '71. As these things go I prefer the version from Oct 24 1969, which actually segues pretty well from "The Other One", probably purely by accident.
Dancin' in the Street: Another Pigpen tune! People fucking love its later disco incarnation for some reason. Last performance: New Years' Eve 1971->72, as a set opener no less. It's sort of a mixed bag, but only because there's some dumbass deciding to give a play-by-play on whatever tasteless debauchery is occuring on stage while they're playing. The actual performance... well, the jam from May 6, 1970 is unquestionably better, but on that version the performance of the actual song portion is so cringeworthy that I actually edited out the bit with the singing. This one is way more digestible in its entirety.
Death Don't Have No Mercy: Last played Mar 21, 1970. Audience tape only, but a super, super fine version. Theory supported.
The Eleven: Another audience tape, Apr 24, 1970. Epic, all-time version. Last=best, absolutely.
St. Stephen: This one, on the other hand, dragged its heels around for a while after "The Eleven" was dropped. It took its final bow on Halloween 1971, and frankly it sounded kind of anemic and lethargic by that time. This is another one of the "psychedelic" era tunes that comes across to me as a little fussy and overwritten, but a lot of fans seem to like that sort of thing.
Viola Lee Blues: Here's another one that had its last performance on Halloween - this time Halloween 1970. The band were clearly in a shitty mood that day and half-assed the whole concert, including this last-ever version of Viola Lee Blues. The previous performance, from a Fillmore East show in July, wasn't too much to sing about either. On the other hand, the THIRD-to last performance on May 2, 1970 was indeed all-time. Still, it's a bit of a stretch to say that this fits the pattern. Viola Lee Blues did _not_ go out on top.
New Potato Caboose: Lesh's number from side one of Anthem of the Sun, however, definitely does fit the "last = best" pattern. Last performed on Jun 8, 1969, and it kills.
In my head, the band known to the world as "The Grateful Dead" are actually two separate bands. The first, active from 1966-1974, was known as "Skullfuck", and the second, active from 1977-1995, was known as "The Dancing Bears". These two bands had the same members, played a lot of the same songs, and are commonly grouped together by their fans. The difference is one of purpose and intent. Skullfuck, you see, were a drug band masquerading as a rock band. They toured mainly as a pretext for distributing large amounts of LSD around the United States and beyond. That's not to say that they didn't genuinely did love music. All of them loved music, couldn't get enough of playing it, particularly when they were high, which was always. But since they were constantly high, their abilities to perform were limited. While most of them were, individually, decent-to-great musicians, they couldn't sing in tune, couldn't play unison riffs. Despite this they made some extraordinary music, and a lot of it was recorded to tape, because their drug connection was also a huge recording nerd.
It was a precarious and unpleasant existence. They were always being harassed, always under pressure, and having a lifestyle based entirely around drug abuse didn't necessarily make them the most emotionally healthy human beings. Eventually, at the end of 1974, it all fell apart.
But it didn't stay that way, because none of them really had anywhere else to go. So they got back together, after a couple years, as the Dancing Bears, who were the rock and roll band Skullfuck were pretending to be. They were still high all the time, still completely dysfunctional, and on top of that worn down, worn out, broken. But this time, the music came first. They were capable of things as the Dancing Bears that they weren't as Skullfuck. Primarily, they could function as a business, which they didn't quite manage before. They had a large and devoted fanbase, and the Dancing Bears wanted to play music for them, not slip acid in their tea.
My personal allegiance is to Skullfuck. I think the Dancing Bears had some OK stuff. I can see why a lot of people go for them. They could play as a band in a way Skullfuck seldom did. But they also lacked the complete unpredictability, the feeling that they were teetering on the edge of chaos, that things would fall apart at any second. It was there, mind you, but when it came out it was mostly just sad rather than transcendent.
So here's my emerging theory. The question is, what made Skullfuck quit playing a song? Nobody ever really has an answer to that. They start playing songs, they quit playing songs, there's no reason for any of it most of the time. My emerging theory is that they have a certain approach to songs - they're puzzles that they try to figure out, and once they figure it out to their satisfaction, they move on to something else. Well, you know, why else quit playing a song, right? With most bands, the tour's over, you work up new material, you work up a new set, you rehearse that, but Skullfuck didn't work that way. They almost never figured out how to actually play a song before performing it in concert. Their live debuts of songs are notorious for being train wrecks. They're disaster artists.
So to distract myself from life today I have been working through a list of material they played and quit playing before October of '74, and listening to the last performances, to see how it holds up. Here's what I've come up with.
Here Comes Sunshine: See, this was an odd one, they didn't start playing it until '73, and then they played it once at the beginning of '74 and that was it. God only knows. In this case, the last performance is pretty good, but it's the second to last performance that's the one that's really acclaimed as the best ever. Who knows why they played it at Winterland on Feb 23, 1974? It was a weird one-off. They didn't have time to come off with new material. Whatever the case: This doesn't quite follow the "last = best" pattern, but it gets pretty close!
Bird Song: Another "dropped in '73" beloved song. There's only a couple of these and I haven't heard most of them. This one didn't even make it to the end of '73, dropping out after a performance on Sep 15. This one, like a lot of the ones that'll follow, only survives on an audience tape, which means most deadheads haven't and won't hear it. And you know what, yeah, I will say this is one of the great ones. One can quibble as to whether or not it's better than the Veneta or Vancouver versions, but it's genuinely up there. Mostly what lets it down is that Jerry's singing is pretty bad. You know what? It usually was.
Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks): There's kind of a good reason they quit playing the Pigpen songs, being as he left the band to go die and all. Also, they did bring this one back before the hiatus in October '74, but I'm deciding to tactically ignore that for now (haven't heard it, might later). That said, this absolutely does fit the pattern. The last performance of Pigpen's "Anthem of the Sun" closer took place on May 11, 1972. I'm iffy on Pigpen as a whole. A lot of his time in the band consists of him exhorting men to try and fuck women at great length, and that's not the sort of thing that super interests me. This is a goddamn ripsnorting performance, though. I know, really controversial opinion, stop the presses, Kate says that a Dead performance on the Europe '72 tour is good. Ah, you know, maybe it gets a little overlooked, this performance? I mean, I overlooked it, coming is it does like right after the longest and actually possibly the greatest Dark Star ever performed.
Turn On Your Lovelight: Probably the song most associated with Pigpen, and another one that had its last performance on the Europe '72 tour. In this case, though, I'm gonna break with precedent and say this isn't the best version. Again, we're talking about something I never liked much in the first place, so that might not count for much. Still - it's even shorter than the "Live/Dead" version, and the "Live/Dead" version, believe it or not, is one of the briefer versions he did. Even at only 12 minutes it's an ordeal, though.
Good Lovin': Yep, another Pigpen tune they quit doing after Europe '72. Last performance: May 25, 1972. Fantastic version? Check. Arguably better than the version from the Fillmore East Apr 1971 gigs. The thing is by this time the band doesn't just let Pigpen's, uh, "charisma" carry the whole thing along; they've genuinely figured out how to support him while still making things interesting. This just isn't something that happens much in his earlier performances. He overpowers the rest of them. They vamp while he goes to town. In these performances he goes to town and they go to town and if it's not quite the same town they're sort of in the same general vicinity.
Alligator: Pigpen's other "Anthem of the Sun" tune. Last played: April 1971 Fillmore gigs. I don't like this song and never much have. The jam from the Family Dog on Nov 1, 1969 is decent. That's all I can say for it. Here they play the song and there a too-long drum solo and some jamming that some people do like and I just don't much.
Ripple: Another one they quit playing in April '71. This one is part of that whole "Americana" thing they did mostly between '69 and '71. Good songs but but they never quite managed to nail songs like these live and electric. Honestly this side of them just worked better in the studio, as far as I can tell.
Clementine: An obscure one for sure, never released on a studio album. Also a textbook example of "well, good enough, moving on" - after a year's absence they brought it in January '69 back for one of the early shows recorded for Live/Dead, did the best ever version of it, and never played it again.
Cosmic Charlie: A fan favorite for some inscrutable reason. It's kind of a dumb goofy song, but there are some decent enough versions that don't sound like some kind of sub-par Flo & Eddie comedy music. One of these versions, unsurprisingly, is the final performance from early '71. As these things go I prefer the version from Oct 24 1969, which actually segues pretty well from "The Other One", probably purely by accident.
Dancin' in the Street: Another Pigpen tune! People fucking love its later disco incarnation for some reason. Last performance: New Years' Eve 1971->72, as a set opener no less. It's sort of a mixed bag, but only because there's some dumbass deciding to give a play-by-play on whatever tasteless debauchery is occuring on stage while they're playing. The actual performance... well, the jam from May 6, 1970 is unquestionably better, but on that version the performance of the actual song portion is so cringeworthy that I actually edited out the bit with the singing. This one is way more digestible in its entirety.
Death Don't Have No Mercy: Last played Mar 21, 1970. Audience tape only, but a super, super fine version. Theory supported.
The Eleven: Another audience tape, Apr 24, 1970. Epic, all-time version. Last=best, absolutely.
St. Stephen: This one, on the other hand, dragged its heels around for a while after "The Eleven" was dropped. It took its final bow on Halloween 1971, and frankly it sounded kind of anemic and lethargic by that time. This is another one of the "psychedelic" era tunes that comes across to me as a little fussy and overwritten, but a lot of fans seem to like that sort of thing.
Viola Lee Blues: Here's another one that had its last performance on Halloween - this time Halloween 1970. The band were clearly in a shitty mood that day and half-assed the whole concert, including this last-ever version of Viola Lee Blues. The previous performance, from a Fillmore East show in July, wasn't too much to sing about either. On the other hand, the THIRD-to last performance on May 2, 1970 was indeed all-time. Still, it's a bit of a stretch to say that this fits the pattern. Viola Lee Blues did _not_ go out on top.
New Potato Caboose: Lesh's number from side one of Anthem of the Sun, however, definitely does fit the "last = best" pattern. Last performed on Jun 8, 1969, and it kills.
Saturday, 23 May 2020
Criminal status: Fulfilled
The first time I heard about the Internet was when the media reported on the rtm worm. The rtm worm, for those not aware, was a major system-wide crash of the Internet. This worm was named for its creator, a man by the name of Robert T. Morris. In my mind I think of him as a "kid". Looking at him in Wikipedia, he does have a youthful look about him - the picture of him is from when he was about my age, but he looks significantly younger than I do. I wouldn't peg him from that picture as 40-something.
I think I really thought of him as a "kid", though, because of the stereotype of the teenage hacker. At the time the worm struck, he was 22 going on 23, a grad student. Older than a lot of the hackers on the Internet these days.
The thing that struck me, at the time, about the worm is that it was a failure. Morris had rushed his work, gotten sloppy with it, and as a result it failed in his goal. His goal, essentially, was to, as I understand it, root the entire Internet. The Wikipedia article temporizes on this issue - the article states that Morris stated that his intent was to "highlight security flaws", which is a nice bit of euphemism, a nice bit of obfuscating code, if you will.
Whatever the intent, like the old programmer's meme says, Morris didn't always test his code, but when he did he tested it in production. As a result, instead of just taking control of the computers it accessed and terminating, it copied itself again, and again, and again. Oh, it asked if there was already a copy there, but a statistically significant percentage of the time, it decided to ignore the answer. This is a textbook bad programming practice. It is in the textbooks because people who write code do it all the time. And why shouldn't they? Asking a question and ignoring the answer is is behavior regularly exhibited by human beings.
The result was that, for far from the last time, the Internet was overwhelmed with garbage. The worm was, in some sense, an extremely early practical example of what has come to be known as a "denial of service" attack.
The Internet proved shockingly easy to break, and break badly. The damage took a week or more to repair. Wikipedia says: "The Internet was partitioned for several days, as regional networks disconnected from the NSFNet backbone and from each other to prevent recontamination, as they cleaned their own networks."
What was the aftermath? Pretty much the same as the aftermath of every Internet security breach since. Patches were hastily made and distributed. Presumably shortly thereafter patches were issued to fix the things the patches broke, simply because that's been the result of every "emergency patch" I've ever seen since.
Nobody, it seems, gave much thought then as to what implications this incident might have for the Internet on a basic structural level. With decades of work, these geniuses had come up with something that _worked_. More than that, it was, they were convinced _good_. It was freedom. The basic argument - I wasn't there, but I have seen this basic argument repeated by Very Intelligent Men many times since - goes something like this: Why should they change the basic infrastructure of something that had done so much good for them just because some dumb kids couldn't use it properly?
John Gilmore - the creator of the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and "civil libertarian", not the brilliant saxophonist who played for decades with Sun Ra - famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
This is the optimistic, tech libertarian way of phrasing this statement. It occurs to me now that an equally valid way of phrasing the statement would be to say that the Internet interprets security as damage and routes around it.
Some people who were around in the old days lament the loss of the Old Internet. I can't say. I arrived at the beginning of the watershed event that forever washed away that place, the Eternal September of 1993. For a time there were things I missed about the way things were. But although I spend a lot of time living in the past, nostalgia was never really my bag. The Grand Old Age of the Internet, from what I can tell, was a crusty beardo sausage party full of guys who had little better to do than argue about evolution vs. creationism, for some Godforsaken reason, guys and who expected everybody else to conform to the way they did things instead of being open to what newcomers had to say and attempted to regulate the boundaries of their little party mainly through the tactical deployment of withering scorn. I tried that approach myself, for a while. The approach failed and made me miserable, and I have tried to give it up.
Some people, I guess, some people never had to come to that reckoning. Some people were more successful at getting their way than I was.
Morris was put on trial, because what he did was clearly a violation of a law that had just been passed, and he was convicted, sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050. He fulfilled his criminal sentence in 1994.
The "Early life" section of Wikipedia's article on Morris begins:
"Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris (cryptographer) and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior Morris was a computer scientist at Bell Labs, who helped design Multics and Unix; and later became the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA)."
One is left to assume that Anne Farlow Morris is, through some quirk of fate, younger than her son, although if so this fact doesn't meet Wikipedia's stringent notability guidelines.
Morris grew up in the same county I did. The county shares his name, in fact. Morris County. He graduated from a prestigious Jesuit high school, Delbarton, and went on to matriculate at Harvard. I applied to Delbarton, in fact, and was accepted. My dad wouldn't get me go there, though, because he had heard that the priests there were pederasts. My dad often said things like that. We usually ignored him, because he was crazy. He refused to budge, though, and I had to content myself with enrolling in the advanced placement program a highly prestigious _public_ high school instead. The world Morris grew up in is very much the one I grew up in, is what I am saying.
So it doesn't surprise me terribly to learn that Morris's criminal conviction didn't appear to hurt his long term career prospects much. I suspect that his notoriety may perhaps have advanced his career prospects. Professor Robert Tappan Morris, Ph.D., went on to be a cofounder of the venture capital firm Y Combinator. Probably a lot of other people still think about what he did when he was 22. I wouldn't be surprised if he was exasperated by it. It's frustrating, after all, when all people see in you is a mistake you made more than half a lifetime ago.
Personally, right now I don't the mistake was his. I think the mistake was bringing the Internet back up again, patching the bugs, not giving any thought to the idea that his actions might have wider implications, might be more widely revealing about the future of the Internet. November 1988, it seems to me in retrospect, was a rare opportunity for reflection, for broader consideration, for, in corporate terms, _root cause analysis_. So far as I can tell, that root cause analysis wasn't done then. It can't be done now, I don't think. I have my ideas, and my conclusions, and I could probably even state them more directly... but who would listen? What would be the point? It would just be another fight.
Things are going to go the way they are going to go, and there's not much voice I have in it. Roving online mobs are going to continue to attack and harass trans people on Twitter, and nothing will happen about it because that would be "censorship", and the Internet interprets censorship as damage. The Internet doesn't, hasn't ever, interpreted the following things as damage: abuse, threats of violence, misinformation, disinformation. All of these things are things which, under the Internet's model, are "bugs" to be "patched out". You know what, though? I think there are a lot of people who would tell me, with varying levels of candor, that it's not a bug, it's a feature.
I think I'll stop here.
I think I really thought of him as a "kid", though, because of the stereotype of the teenage hacker. At the time the worm struck, he was 22 going on 23, a grad student. Older than a lot of the hackers on the Internet these days.
The thing that struck me, at the time, about the worm is that it was a failure. Morris had rushed his work, gotten sloppy with it, and as a result it failed in his goal. His goal, essentially, was to, as I understand it, root the entire Internet. The Wikipedia article temporizes on this issue - the article states that Morris stated that his intent was to "highlight security flaws", which is a nice bit of euphemism, a nice bit of obfuscating code, if you will.
Whatever the intent, like the old programmer's meme says, Morris didn't always test his code, but when he did he tested it in production. As a result, instead of just taking control of the computers it accessed and terminating, it copied itself again, and again, and again. Oh, it asked if there was already a copy there, but a statistically significant percentage of the time, it decided to ignore the answer. This is a textbook bad programming practice. It is in the textbooks because people who write code do it all the time. And why shouldn't they? Asking a question and ignoring the answer is is behavior regularly exhibited by human beings.
The result was that, for far from the last time, the Internet was overwhelmed with garbage. The worm was, in some sense, an extremely early practical example of what has come to be known as a "denial of service" attack.
The Internet proved shockingly easy to break, and break badly. The damage took a week or more to repair. Wikipedia says: "The Internet was partitioned for several days, as regional networks disconnected from the NSFNet backbone and from each other to prevent recontamination, as they cleaned their own networks."
What was the aftermath? Pretty much the same as the aftermath of every Internet security breach since. Patches were hastily made and distributed. Presumably shortly thereafter patches were issued to fix the things the patches broke, simply because that's been the result of every "emergency patch" I've ever seen since.
Nobody, it seems, gave much thought then as to what implications this incident might have for the Internet on a basic structural level. With decades of work, these geniuses had come up with something that _worked_. More than that, it was, they were convinced _good_. It was freedom. The basic argument - I wasn't there, but I have seen this basic argument repeated by Very Intelligent Men many times since - goes something like this: Why should they change the basic infrastructure of something that had done so much good for them just because some dumb kids couldn't use it properly?
John Gilmore - the creator of the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and "civil libertarian", not the brilliant saxophonist who played for decades with Sun Ra - famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
This is the optimistic, tech libertarian way of phrasing this statement. It occurs to me now that an equally valid way of phrasing the statement would be to say that the Internet interprets security as damage and routes around it.
Some people who were around in the old days lament the loss of the Old Internet. I can't say. I arrived at the beginning of the watershed event that forever washed away that place, the Eternal September of 1993. For a time there were things I missed about the way things were. But although I spend a lot of time living in the past, nostalgia was never really my bag. The Grand Old Age of the Internet, from what I can tell, was a crusty beardo sausage party full of guys who had little better to do than argue about evolution vs. creationism, for some Godforsaken reason, guys and who expected everybody else to conform to the way they did things instead of being open to what newcomers had to say and attempted to regulate the boundaries of their little party mainly through the tactical deployment of withering scorn. I tried that approach myself, for a while. The approach failed and made me miserable, and I have tried to give it up.
Some people, I guess, some people never had to come to that reckoning. Some people were more successful at getting their way than I was.
Morris was put on trial, because what he did was clearly a violation of a law that had just been passed, and he was convicted, sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050. He fulfilled his criminal sentence in 1994.
The "Early life" section of Wikipedia's article on Morris begins:
"Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris (cryptographer) and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior Morris was a computer scientist at Bell Labs, who helped design Multics and Unix; and later became the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA)."
One is left to assume that Anne Farlow Morris is, through some quirk of fate, younger than her son, although if so this fact doesn't meet Wikipedia's stringent notability guidelines.
Morris grew up in the same county I did. The county shares his name, in fact. Morris County. He graduated from a prestigious Jesuit high school, Delbarton, and went on to matriculate at Harvard. I applied to Delbarton, in fact, and was accepted. My dad wouldn't get me go there, though, because he had heard that the priests there were pederasts. My dad often said things like that. We usually ignored him, because he was crazy. He refused to budge, though, and I had to content myself with enrolling in the advanced placement program a highly prestigious _public_ high school instead. The world Morris grew up in is very much the one I grew up in, is what I am saying.
So it doesn't surprise me terribly to learn that Morris's criminal conviction didn't appear to hurt his long term career prospects much. I suspect that his notoriety may perhaps have advanced his career prospects. Professor Robert Tappan Morris, Ph.D., went on to be a cofounder of the venture capital firm Y Combinator. Probably a lot of other people still think about what he did when he was 22. I wouldn't be surprised if he was exasperated by it. It's frustrating, after all, when all people see in you is a mistake you made more than half a lifetime ago.
Personally, right now I don't the mistake was his. I think the mistake was bringing the Internet back up again, patching the bugs, not giving any thought to the idea that his actions might have wider implications, might be more widely revealing about the future of the Internet. November 1988, it seems to me in retrospect, was a rare opportunity for reflection, for broader consideration, for, in corporate terms, _root cause analysis_. So far as I can tell, that root cause analysis wasn't done then. It can't be done now, I don't think. I have my ideas, and my conclusions, and I could probably even state them more directly... but who would listen? What would be the point? It would just be another fight.
Things are going to go the way they are going to go, and there's not much voice I have in it. Roving online mobs are going to continue to attack and harass trans people on Twitter, and nothing will happen about it because that would be "censorship", and the Internet interprets censorship as damage. The Internet doesn't, hasn't ever, interpreted the following things as damage: abuse, threats of violence, misinformation, disinformation. All of these things are things which, under the Internet's model, are "bugs" to be "patched out". You know what, though? I think there are a lot of people who would tell me, with varying levels of candor, that it's not a bug, it's a feature.
I think I'll stop here.
Thursday, 21 May 2020
Speedrunning
My mind is sort of wandering a bit this morning. Watched the Summoning Salt video about the Ninja Gaiden world record progression and it had me thinking about speedruns and why they interest me.
To me, the current popularity of speedrunning is not un-related to "Pac-Man Fever", which the world was in the throes of in my very young days.
I seldom got out to the arcades, seldom got the opportunity to play Pac-Man, and then not for very long because those machines were quarter-eaters and I did not exactly have lightning reflexes. Instead I watched the cartoon, ate the cereal, listened to the record (not "Pac-Man Fever", a _different_ Pac-Man knockoff record), and read the books.
The book I had was what we would now call a "strategy guide", an in-depth explanation of How To Win At Pac-Man. There was no "winning state" that anybody knew of. "winning" meant to play for as long as possible with as little money as possible, to attain what we would now recognize as a "flow state".
A key component of a flow state, as I understand it, is an altered perception of time. We cease to be cognizant of time passing. I was reading an academic article yesterday on older trans women's experiences which brought up the notion of "trans time", the idea that trans people experience time in a different manner than cis people do. I'm a little skeptical of the concept. I'm not sure how one could empirically document or replicate it. Differentiating things which are intrinsic to the trans experience and things which are not is a difficult undertaking.
But it is true that I do not always experience time in a direct manner. I sort of assumed that this was a universal human experience, this sense of chronological disjunction. I mean, I read "Slaughterhouse Five", I knew about "flashbacks", I knew that time was relative. I face certain issues as a result of being, biologically, 13 and 44 simultaneously, but they don't seem all _that_ novel or interesting to me.
(Fuck it, I don't pass, why should time?)
For me speedrunning isn't a matter of "winning" or "beating the clock". There's certainly a John Henry aspect to it, of beating a machine, but a large part of the goal of leisure for me is to bring about the irrelevance of time. So I tend to gravitate towards very long speedruns. The media experiences I seek out are either short or hyperextended, either a hall of mirrors or an endless corridor. Preferably with as few events in them as possible. Events are something for my rational mind to grab onto, ruminate on, forcibly pulling me out of the flow state. Work which defies meaning, which defies rational analysis, is invaluable to me because it gives me permission to just exist, to just enjoy something as it is, without staying up at 3 AM wondering if that man is right in the head, if he knows something I don't.
Well that went nowhere I expected. Hell with it, I'm posting it anyway.
To me, the current popularity of speedrunning is not un-related to "Pac-Man Fever", which the world was in the throes of in my very young days.
I seldom got out to the arcades, seldom got the opportunity to play Pac-Man, and then not for very long because those machines were quarter-eaters and I did not exactly have lightning reflexes. Instead I watched the cartoon, ate the cereal, listened to the record (not "Pac-Man Fever", a _different_ Pac-Man knockoff record), and read the books.
The book I had was what we would now call a "strategy guide", an in-depth explanation of How To Win At Pac-Man. There was no "winning state" that anybody knew of. "winning" meant to play for as long as possible with as little money as possible, to attain what we would now recognize as a "flow state".
A key component of a flow state, as I understand it, is an altered perception of time. We cease to be cognizant of time passing. I was reading an academic article yesterday on older trans women's experiences which brought up the notion of "trans time", the idea that trans people experience time in a different manner than cis people do. I'm a little skeptical of the concept. I'm not sure how one could empirically document or replicate it. Differentiating things which are intrinsic to the trans experience and things which are not is a difficult undertaking.
But it is true that I do not always experience time in a direct manner. I sort of assumed that this was a universal human experience, this sense of chronological disjunction. I mean, I read "Slaughterhouse Five", I knew about "flashbacks", I knew that time was relative. I face certain issues as a result of being, biologically, 13 and 44 simultaneously, but they don't seem all _that_ novel or interesting to me.
(Fuck it, I don't pass, why should time?)
For me speedrunning isn't a matter of "winning" or "beating the clock". There's certainly a John Henry aspect to it, of beating a machine, but a large part of the goal of leisure for me is to bring about the irrelevance of time. So I tend to gravitate towards very long speedruns. The media experiences I seek out are either short or hyperextended, either a hall of mirrors or an endless corridor. Preferably with as few events in them as possible. Events are something for my rational mind to grab onto, ruminate on, forcibly pulling me out of the flow state. Work which defies meaning, which defies rational analysis, is invaluable to me because it gives me permission to just exist, to just enjoy something as it is, without staying up at 3 AM wondering if that man is right in the head, if he knows something I don't.
Well that went nowhere I expected. Hell with it, I'm posting it anyway.
Tuesday, 19 May 2020
Lapti Nek
I don't remember when I first heard about Star Wars. Probably when I was seven, when Return of the Jedi came out. That was just the big thing that summer, by which I mean the big toy line. Everything back then was just one long advertisement for toys - Transformers, He-Man, GI Joe, Star Wars. You had your sugary breakfast cereals that I ate way too many of, like C3POs. I don't remember what C3POs tasted like. Usually the cereals were just a knockoff of an existing cereal with the processed grains formed into some shape that was supposed to be vaguely evocative of the branding. For Mr. T Cereal it was Cap'n Crunch formed roughly into the shape of serif Ts. Sometimes tiny hard marshmallows would be thrown in, the shapes even more abstract than the grains.
Anyway, I remember the toys, mostly, because I spent more time with them than I did with the film. I saw it once, in the theater, and then I guess not for years and years and years when it showed up on cable. In '83 hardly anybody had cable, mind, so you had to wait for the network broadcast, about eight years or so after the original theatrical run. I think that's what strikes me most about those times, how easily things were forgotten, how much relied on just memories.
My memories of Return of the Jedi are overlaid with all the crap that has happened since, though. It's different from a film I saw once and nobody else remembers - I guess a good example would be something like Unico, which exerted a powerful hold on the memories of everyone who saw it even when they couldn't remember its name. All of the things I "know" but learned since intrude on my memories, so retrieving that time is particularly difficult and uncertain.
I remember I liked the first bit better than the second. Even though I was the market Lucas was going for with the Ewoks, they seemed a little babyish for me. That was my big fear as a child, of anything that seemed "babyish". I desperately wanted to be grown up.
So I liked the first half a lot better. In retrospect it's hard for me to view it as sympathetically. Why Lucas decided to cap off his trilogy with an alien retelling of "Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks" isn't something I much understand. And then there was the sandworm (it wasn't called a sandworm, again, later events superimpose and I find myself struck by just how much Lucas was ripping off Dune with Tattooine) which yes I did at the time think of as a giant man-eating vagina with teeth, I'm sorry if that's a cliche Freudian reading of it but I was seven. I was fascinated by it, the torture and slow death. I was fascinated by all the weird and strange creatures, Jabba, huge and slimy, the Rancor...
I didn't give a shit about Boba Fett. Didn't see what was supposed to be the big deal with him, what was supposed to be "cool" about him. Was interested in the knockoff Cantina band playing disco. I don't know if I knew about the original Cantina band at this point or not. Certainly it was one of the more memorable bits of the original movie. Certainly the film didn't stand on its character development.
I did research the other day the history of the Star Wars disco song, Lapti Nek. It's an interesting history. It was written by John Williams' son, who went on to join Toto. Blatant nepotism. I don't remember disco, wasn't really around for disco, so the fact that disco was deader than... well, disco was as dead as disco, but that didn't mean anything to me because I didn't remember any of it. So there was this cool alien lady singing in a cool alien language. And when I come back to it, it sounds kind of crap, but I remember it being cool.
So here's the thing about that song - there was an old article in Crawdaddy, well, not that old, Facebook was involved, but it's only shared on Star Wars forums now. What it looks like happened is that a studio singer by the name of Michele Gruska came in to sing the song, and that was the song that was released as, flopped as, a single. That's not the version that was used in the movie, though. The version in the movie was sung by the lady who wrote the lyrics, a lady by the name of Annie Arbogast, who is... like, I guess the polite euphemism is that she's less "polished", but I like shit that's less polished in general. She's not a great singer. I'll just say that, Gruska was a really good singer and Annie Arbogast wasn't. Gruska's personal theory, as expressed to Crawdaddy, about why Arbogast's recording was used... well, she suggested that Arbogast and George Lucas may possibly have had an intimate relationship at the time. Fuck if I know how to evaluate that statement. I probably shouldn't even repeat what she said, but you know, nobody's going to be reading this anyway, right?
Later Joseph Williams recorded a version with himself on vocals, and it's by far the worst. For some reason he decided that the best way to sell the song was to do it in a medley with the Ewok "Yub-Nub" song. It is absolute bottom-scraping cheese, and that's the last anyone heard of it, because when Lucas got a chance to revisit his work out went Lapti Nek and in went, predicably, an even fucking worse song.
Anyway, I'll stop there and just say that I think Lapti Nek is a jam, particularly the version with Michele Gruska on vocals. I have a 12" of it I picked up at a completely unrelated convention where someone was selling it presumably on the grounds that Star Wars fans will buy any old crap. Joke's on them, though - I'm not a Star Wars fan, and I only buy very specific crap.
Anyway, I remember the toys, mostly, because I spent more time with them than I did with the film. I saw it once, in the theater, and then I guess not for years and years and years when it showed up on cable. In '83 hardly anybody had cable, mind, so you had to wait for the network broadcast, about eight years or so after the original theatrical run. I think that's what strikes me most about those times, how easily things were forgotten, how much relied on just memories.
My memories of Return of the Jedi are overlaid with all the crap that has happened since, though. It's different from a film I saw once and nobody else remembers - I guess a good example would be something like Unico, which exerted a powerful hold on the memories of everyone who saw it even when they couldn't remember its name. All of the things I "know" but learned since intrude on my memories, so retrieving that time is particularly difficult and uncertain.
I remember I liked the first bit better than the second. Even though I was the market Lucas was going for with the Ewoks, they seemed a little babyish for me. That was my big fear as a child, of anything that seemed "babyish". I desperately wanted to be grown up.
So I liked the first half a lot better. In retrospect it's hard for me to view it as sympathetically. Why Lucas decided to cap off his trilogy with an alien retelling of "Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks" isn't something I much understand. And then there was the sandworm (it wasn't called a sandworm, again, later events superimpose and I find myself struck by just how much Lucas was ripping off Dune with Tattooine) which yes I did at the time think of as a giant man-eating vagina with teeth, I'm sorry if that's a cliche Freudian reading of it but I was seven. I was fascinated by it, the torture and slow death. I was fascinated by all the weird and strange creatures, Jabba, huge and slimy, the Rancor...
I didn't give a shit about Boba Fett. Didn't see what was supposed to be the big deal with him, what was supposed to be "cool" about him. Was interested in the knockoff Cantina band playing disco. I don't know if I knew about the original Cantina band at this point or not. Certainly it was one of the more memorable bits of the original movie. Certainly the film didn't stand on its character development.
I did research the other day the history of the Star Wars disco song, Lapti Nek. It's an interesting history. It was written by John Williams' son, who went on to join Toto. Blatant nepotism. I don't remember disco, wasn't really around for disco, so the fact that disco was deader than... well, disco was as dead as disco, but that didn't mean anything to me because I didn't remember any of it. So there was this cool alien lady singing in a cool alien language. And when I come back to it, it sounds kind of crap, but I remember it being cool.
So here's the thing about that song - there was an old article in Crawdaddy, well, not that old, Facebook was involved, but it's only shared on Star Wars forums now. What it looks like happened is that a studio singer by the name of Michele Gruska came in to sing the song, and that was the song that was released as, flopped as, a single. That's not the version that was used in the movie, though. The version in the movie was sung by the lady who wrote the lyrics, a lady by the name of Annie Arbogast, who is... like, I guess the polite euphemism is that she's less "polished", but I like shit that's less polished in general. She's not a great singer. I'll just say that, Gruska was a really good singer and Annie Arbogast wasn't. Gruska's personal theory, as expressed to Crawdaddy, about why Arbogast's recording was used... well, she suggested that Arbogast and George Lucas may possibly have had an intimate relationship at the time. Fuck if I know how to evaluate that statement. I probably shouldn't even repeat what she said, but you know, nobody's going to be reading this anyway, right?
Later Joseph Williams recorded a version with himself on vocals, and it's by far the worst. For some reason he decided that the best way to sell the song was to do it in a medley with the Ewok "Yub-Nub" song. It is absolute bottom-scraping cheese, and that's the last anyone heard of it, because when Lucas got a chance to revisit his work out went Lapti Nek and in went, predicably, an even fucking worse song.
Anyway, I'll stop there and just say that I think Lapti Nek is a jam, particularly the version with Michele Gruska on vocals. I have a 12" of it I picked up at a completely unrelated convention where someone was selling it presumably on the grounds that Star Wars fans will buy any old crap. Joke's on them, though - I'm not a Star Wars fan, and I only buy very specific crap.
Saturday, 16 May 2020
A Strange Idea of Fun: Cherry-Picking Led Zeppelin Bootlegs
So for some reason yesterday I did a deep dive on old Led Zeppelin bootlegs.
Led Zeppelin were my first "favorite band". From the time I first heard a record of theirs when I was in seventh or eighth grade - a story I've told countless times before and will probably tell again, but won't retell today - up through my senior year of high school, they were the only band I listened to. More than that my entire wardrobe was, for all of high school, made up entirely of Led Zeppelin T-shirts.
I've never quit being a Zep fan. Never stopped listening to their records, in fact. At the same time, though, my love for them has never deepened, has never grown, which has happened with a lot of the music I listen to. I listen to Led Zeppelin precisely because it evokes the same feelings in me at age 44 that it did at age 13. It's timelessly adolescent.
I was never really into Zep boots, though. I dabbled in them when I first started getting into bootlegs, in my senior year of high school, but they were all disappointing. For all of their reputation as a mighty live band, most of the boots I had of theirs were unremittingly dull. I remember most vividly a long, long three-cassette show I had of a show in Seattle in 1975. They played "Dazed and Confused" for 45 minutes! At this time I was fully convinced that longer equalled better, and it took probably several times listening to that fucking thing to persuade myself otherwise. There were better boot tapes - I remember fondly one from the Texas International Pop Festival in '69 - but compared to nearly any other bootleg tape I could think of Zep tapes sounded interminable and lethargic.
It's only recently - in fact, as a conscious realization only just now - that it has occurred to me that live Zep can't possibly get any worse than live Dead, that it might be amenable to the same cherry-picking approach that has paid off so well with the Dead. What started as a random tangent in my mind turned into a day-long trawl through their corpus of dodgy audience tapes. One thing led to another. I found a guy who, in 2008, blogged his impressions of every extant Zep boot take. He's not the world's best writer, and our tastes don't overlap entirely, but if someone's listened to them all, I can take some time to check out the things he names as exceptional, particularly when they overlap with my personal taste.
So here's a rundown of some of the stuff I've found. I mostly focused on the first couple of years of their existence; after that my knowledge is mostly cherry-picking.
1969-01-26 Boston - The Train Kept A Rollin'/I Can't Quit You Baby: This show looms large in Zep mythology. The story goes that they played for four and a half hours, and the tape here is only the first third of a much longer tape. I'm not sure how plausible I find this story - while the tape does cut off, it does so after encompassing nearly every song in their repertoire at the time. Maybe they did spend another three hours playing rock and roll standards - it's not out of character for them, frankly - but on a tour where they were mostly playing 50 minute sets opening for the Vanilla Fudge? Regardless, what is on this audience tape is suitably incendiary; the sound is not polished and, like many tapes of the era, is a bit overdriven. I like the overdriven sound - it sounds authentically "live" to me. The instruments are also clear and well-mixed, with Jones's bass sounding really good. It is very likely the finest document of Zep on their first US tour as a young band lighting the world on fire.
1969-04-27 San Francisco - As Long As I Have You: This is one of the more famous tapes on the list, one of the many Zep tapes that circulate as an excellent quality soundboard. Which is fortunate because this is also the consensus finest performance of their never-studio-recorded cover of the Northern Soul classic "As Long As I Have You", which served as a vehicle for one of their early medleys. This medley has latterly been most notorious for including Spirit's "Fresh Garbage", which became germane Randy California's estate sued Zep for plagiarizing "Stairway" from one of Spirit's songs. (The openings of the songs are similar in sound, but in terms of composition there's not much to hang a plagiarism charge on... once Zep's lawyers succeeded in the motion to exclude actual recordings from the trial, the suit was dead in the water.)
Anyway, had I came around to this famous boot tape earlier I might have been more bullish on Zep's live work. This medley is a fantastic performance of material that's nowhere to be found in their "official" catalogue. It's not "original" material, but then again neither is most of their first LP...
1969-08-08 San Bernardino - entire tape! This is probably the most exciting tape I came across during the whole trawl, and justifies all the time I spend digging through stuff that is labelled as "fanatics only". Zeppelin fans tend to lament the "poor quality" of this tape - it is clearly a fantastic performance, and Jimmy Page in particular is absolutely on fire, but the tape was apparently made from inside of Jimmy's guitar amp, and you can't hear anybody else in the band!
Well once I read that description I had to hear it, and it didn't disappoint. You see, for anyone who is unfamiliar, there is a famous Velvet Underground bootleg called "The Legendary Guitar Amp Tape" that was recorded in precisely that fashion. This tape is absolute peak bootleg ethos. It is, in fact, more or less all Jimmy's guitar, blazing, noisy, blown out. Me personally? I am a noise rock FIEND. Jimmy Page on a good night in '69 is absolutely the equal of Lou Reed on an average night in '69, the equal of any Les Rallizes Denudes recording you can think of. Maybe there's something going on in "Flames of Ice" that isn't resent in the "Dazed and Confused" here but I don't know what it is.
The best part? The best part has to be when Jimmy breaks a string at the end of "I Can't Quit You Baby". The rest of the band goes into an impromptu blues jam while he changes it. The tape isn't hi-fi, but the instruments are, again, well-balanced and clearly comprehensible. At the very end Jimmy, string repaired, jumps in and because of the way he's mixed it is utterly apocalyptic and amazing, even though he's literally just throwing in some stray notes at the end of an impromptu blues jam. And then they do "Dazed and Confused".
This tape deserves to be legendary.
1970-04-09 Tampa - White Summer/Black Mountain Side: Jimmy Page gets a lot of shit from folkies, mostly I suspect because of his habit of blatantly stealing credit for songs and arrangements he had nothing to do with. Black Mountain Side, for instance, in its studio recording, is a complete cop of Bert Jansch's arrangement of "Blackwaterside", and most Zep fans don't know this, haven't ever heard "Blackwaterside", don't know that the song has lyrics, haven't heard Sandy Denny's stunning rendition. This seems absurd to me, I feel like these people are missing out something fierce, but ahh, you know, one only knows what one knows?
Page as a folkstyle player... he was more than a Jansch/Graham copyist, and I think this comes through live. Hell, one can hear this on the BBC "White Summer/Black Mountain Side" released as part of the '90 box set. It's a great performance. I love it. He went on to do better. For a long time my go-to performance was Montreux 1970-03-07, a fine quality audience tape patched with a poor-quality soundboard (poor-quality enough that it was used as a patch to an audience tape and not the other way around!). It's a renowned, well-known gig, and one of the things I wanted to do is hear if the less-renowned gigs had anything going for them. Which is how I came across this tape. White Summer/Black Mountain Side expands to 13 minutes here. We did establish here that length is no indicator of quality, particularly with Zep. The recordings I'm talking about here aren't just long - they earn their length. This performance is very creative. Page is still searching, experimenting, incorporating new riffs, new approaches. Bonham's drumming - Bonham did provide sporadic drumming for live versions - is propulsive. It sounds on paper like Bonham would have the wrong approach for a "folk" number like this, that his lack of subtlety would overwhelm it, but Page had moved well beyond "folk" at this point. He was, indeed, playing electric, and while this was one more reason for folk purists to scoff at him I find his adaptation of folk music techniques to electric guitar to be super fucking exciting. I'm told Jansch experimented with playing electric in one phase of Pentangle's career. There are no tapes. That's really unfortunate IMO.
1970-04-17 Memphis - How Many More Times: I never much rated Zep's lengthy blues medleys, of which How Many More Times was the first and, on record, one of the longest. The only two Led Zeppelin studio songs that top eight minutes, pre-1975, are How Many More Times and Stairway to Heaven.
Live, Zeppelin were much less succinct. My MP3 of this performance runs to 33:33, and yes there is a tape cut in the middle. If you were to tell me that I would listen to like 35 minutes of "How Many More Times" I'd be... skeptical. And does it entirely earn it? No. As medleys go, there's a certain stop-start nature to it, and at their best Zeppelin was a little more organic than that.
The circumstances here were perhaps a bit exceptional, though. You know it's gonna be a good "How Many More Times" when Peter Grant has been arrested by the end of it.
This performance is, like many rock concerts of the era, many Zeppelin concerts of the era, a scene of high tension, and this tension comes through on the tape. It was Memphis, and the Southern police were, well, acting like Southern police. I don't want to go into detail, not out of decorum, but because you either know what I'm talking about, it's enough for me to say that this was a couple weeks before Kent State, or you're gonna get really mad at me if I go into more detail. So I'm going to try and be polite about this.
I wasn't there, but it was clearly an intense fucking scene, and Plant, Plant the inveterate hippie, is just trying to keep the peace. He can't. It's beyond him. He pleads with the crowd some, and he sings, because that's what he's there for, that's what he knows how to do, but his otherworldly screams don't seem to do much to calm down the crowd, the band launching into a full rendition of "Memphis Tennessee" doesn't calm down the crowd, Page going into an impromptu run-through of Ravel's Bolero (Jeff Beck? Who's he?) doesn't help, Plant launching into "Ramble On" doesn't help, none of it helps but it all sounds fucking fantastic.
So yeah. It's great music _and_ it's an invaluable historical document. Can't fucking go wrong there.
1980-08-21 Tulsa - Communication Breakdown: That's audience tapes, right? Zep don't have the reputation the Dead does for blowing major gigs, but they kind of did? They headlined Knebworth in '79 and it's widely agreed that the Danish "warm-up" gigs were way better. The whole clusterfuck of the concert movie, the lackluster New York gigs, the botched Earls Court gigs that didn't even get used tor the film... yeah, Zep had a talent for blowing it, for doing their best work when nobody was looking. So here's Zep fucking killing it at a show in goddamn Tulsa Oklahoma. This is the final encore and they stretch it out a little bit - in the breakdown section we get a fuckin' bass solo! And it's a good one. I do love Jones's bass, and Page dropping the odd theremin whoop on top doesn't hurt things. I haven't heard a lot of versions of Communication Breakdown but this is a good one.
1971-09-23 Tokyo - Whole Lotta Love: I'm pretty sure I started with the '71 Japan gigs. I had fragments of the stage tape of the 09-29 Osaka gig as filler on an old tape, and it did immediately did jump out to my ears as exceptional. It's not just that it's the only ever live version of "Friends", one of my favorite Zep songs - the whole vibe is that of a band at their absolute peak, firing on all cylinders. I don't particularly _like_ the "tight but loose" descriptor that gets applied to them often. I think "inconsistent" is frequently a better descriptor. Here I'm tempted to actually accept it. Zep go through Whole Lotta Love for fucking forever, and it's glorious for a change. The crowd here is considerably more animated than they were in Osaka, and Zep are clearly feeding off the energy here.
1973-01-22 Southampton - Thank You: '72 was a good year for Zep, but honestly, the best shit they did that year was released on "How The West Was Won". Possibly someone could at some point convince me there's live stuff worth listening to that's _not_ on their release, but I'm not there yet. So we're on to early '73. This is a long gig that was professionally recorded and was considered for release, but whoever made the decisions decided (correctly) that the '72 gigs were just a better performance. This performance is a long one, but it doesn't have the raucous energy of those mid '72 gigs. What it does have, the reason I jumped on this, is the Mellotron. Starting with their Japan tour in October of '72, Zep started incorporating the Mellotron into their set - primarily for their new number "The Rain Song". However, Jones also started playing it in lieu of the traditional organ solo on the now increasingly-rare number "Thank You". I am so fucking there for this. There may perhaps be better performances of "Thank You" - I'm not an expert - but there aren't any with Jones killing it on the Mellotron in pristine soundboard quality, jamming on MacArthur Park and shit.
1973-03-24 Offenburg - Dazed & Confused: Over time this show has become legendary. The tape I have is the Eddie Edwards version. For this Eddie used the stereo source tape. A lot of releases reduce it to mono because the stereo tape has some weird stereo imaging, but for Eddie the stereo image gives it a depth that the mono can't give, and for me weird? Weird is good. Look, if Jimmy is going to do a bow solo and there _isn't_ psychedelic phasing I'm gonna be a little disappointed. This show wasn't legendary when I was younger, it wasn't known. This was a small gig in an obscure suburb of Strasbourg across the Rhine in Germany, and Zep being Zep, they killed it. A growing consensus has it that this is, in fact, the best Dazed and Confused ever. I'm struck by how _different_ it is from the "How the West Was Won" version. Here there's no "Walter's Walk" or "The Crunge" riffs. Instead we get Jimmy doing an early version of the "Achilles Last Stand" riff, we get Jones and Bonham in unison going into Hendrix's "Machine Gun", we get... well, I don't need do a blow-by-blow, because it's Internet Famous now. It's the equivalent of the Veneta Dark Star.
I also took the guitar solo from "Stairway". Uploads of gigs to Youtube appear to be unmolested unless, for some reason, they contain "Stairway", so uploads tend to cut it to only the guitar solo. Me, I do have the whole tape of Stairway, but I'm rather unimpressed with the audience member loudly yelling crude epithets at a woman at the start of the tape, and Plant's voice has rather started to slip by this point in Zep's career. I do find Page's solo exceptional, though, so kept it.
1973-04-02 Paris - The Song Remains The Same: Now, one would think that Paris '73 would be a fairly big gig, at least compared to Offenburg. And the perfomance, the performance is quite fine. it's a good one. But the tape? The tape is not as good as Offenburg. It's distant, a bit echoey, got that "through a glass darkly" feel a lot of '70s audience tapes in big venues have. Still, I have to say I'm sold by this "Song Remains the Same" - and it's not a song that usually sells me live. Here's the thing, Page wrote these blazing lightning riffs and he couldn't play them consistently. Most of the time he's just fucking sloppy, and I'm sorry, I'm not impressed by hearing Jimmy Page fuck up a riff, even if it is a really cool and fast riff. This version? Yeah, it's sloppy, because Page is always fucking sloppy, but it's not a disgrace like some versions of it. Oh, God, I was listening to the first live performance of it in Tokyo '72, and Page just makes a complete fucking hash of the intro riff. I guess if he had any self-respect he couldn't have played a lot of the amazing shit he did, I'm not saying I want him to be fuckin' Joe Pass or anything, but oh God his fucked up ass can be so painful to listen to sometimes. Not here, though. This version is good.
1975-01-25 Indianapolis - Rock and Roll: OK yes, this is a troll version. Zep are playing at the good old Market Square Arena in Indy, where Elvis played his last concert. It's a parking lot with a plaque now. This was fairly early in Zep's 75 tour, when they were still doing numbers they'd drop later on like "The Wanton Song", and...
Look, Plant didn't always take care of his voice. Zep had a decently strong commitment to not cancelling concerts, at least early on, but he'd do a concert even if he blatantly couldn't fucking sing at all. One can hear this on multiple occasions. In this case Plant decided that even though Zeppelin were touring through Midwestern America in January he wasn't going to compromise his sense of style, which consisted, for those of you who have seen "The Song Remains the Same", of loose, flowing, open shirts, and he caught the fucking flu. So we have here "Rock And Roll" as sung by guest vocalist Tom Fucking Waits. Zep could frequently be embarrassing, I've heard tapes of any one of them individually playing while profoundly ill or fucked up, and most of them are just sad. This one is kind of funny. When he hoarsely croaks "It's been a long time since I rock and roll", you fuckin' believe it!
1975-03-12 Long Beach - Whole Lotta Love -> The Crunge -> Black Dog, Heartbreaker: The neglected companion recording to one of the most famous Zep audience tapes, made by the renowned Mike Millard. The complete tape of the show the day before is widely circulated and renowned. This performance is better, but Millard's tape didn't completely turn out. All that survives in his recording is the ending.
Well, except it's a great ending. I know a lot of people give Zep's attempts at whiteboy funk shit, but hearing Zep do some fake James Brown shit in 9/8 is my jam, particularly like here when they go into "Licking Stick".
The whole show is out there from another source, but fortunately it does seem like Millard got the best part of it.
Well, fuck. I just wrote 3,000 words on Led Zeppelin bootlegs. I guess I have a strange idea of fun. :(
Led Zeppelin were my first "favorite band". From the time I first heard a record of theirs when I was in seventh or eighth grade - a story I've told countless times before and will probably tell again, but won't retell today - up through my senior year of high school, they were the only band I listened to. More than that my entire wardrobe was, for all of high school, made up entirely of Led Zeppelin T-shirts.
I've never quit being a Zep fan. Never stopped listening to their records, in fact. At the same time, though, my love for them has never deepened, has never grown, which has happened with a lot of the music I listen to. I listen to Led Zeppelin precisely because it evokes the same feelings in me at age 44 that it did at age 13. It's timelessly adolescent.
I was never really into Zep boots, though. I dabbled in them when I first started getting into bootlegs, in my senior year of high school, but they were all disappointing. For all of their reputation as a mighty live band, most of the boots I had of theirs were unremittingly dull. I remember most vividly a long, long three-cassette show I had of a show in Seattle in 1975. They played "Dazed and Confused" for 45 minutes! At this time I was fully convinced that longer equalled better, and it took probably several times listening to that fucking thing to persuade myself otherwise. There were better boot tapes - I remember fondly one from the Texas International Pop Festival in '69 - but compared to nearly any other bootleg tape I could think of Zep tapes sounded interminable and lethargic.
It's only recently - in fact, as a conscious realization only just now - that it has occurred to me that live Zep can't possibly get any worse than live Dead, that it might be amenable to the same cherry-picking approach that has paid off so well with the Dead. What started as a random tangent in my mind turned into a day-long trawl through their corpus of dodgy audience tapes. One thing led to another. I found a guy who, in 2008, blogged his impressions of every extant Zep boot take. He's not the world's best writer, and our tastes don't overlap entirely, but if someone's listened to them all, I can take some time to check out the things he names as exceptional, particularly when they overlap with my personal taste.
So here's a rundown of some of the stuff I've found. I mostly focused on the first couple of years of their existence; after that my knowledge is mostly cherry-picking.
1969-01-26 Boston - The Train Kept A Rollin'/I Can't Quit You Baby: This show looms large in Zep mythology. The story goes that they played for four and a half hours, and the tape here is only the first third of a much longer tape. I'm not sure how plausible I find this story - while the tape does cut off, it does so after encompassing nearly every song in their repertoire at the time. Maybe they did spend another three hours playing rock and roll standards - it's not out of character for them, frankly - but on a tour where they were mostly playing 50 minute sets opening for the Vanilla Fudge? Regardless, what is on this audience tape is suitably incendiary; the sound is not polished and, like many tapes of the era, is a bit overdriven. I like the overdriven sound - it sounds authentically "live" to me. The instruments are also clear and well-mixed, with Jones's bass sounding really good. It is very likely the finest document of Zep on their first US tour as a young band lighting the world on fire.
1969-04-27 San Francisco - As Long As I Have You: This is one of the more famous tapes on the list, one of the many Zep tapes that circulate as an excellent quality soundboard. Which is fortunate because this is also the consensus finest performance of their never-studio-recorded cover of the Northern Soul classic "As Long As I Have You", which served as a vehicle for one of their early medleys. This medley has latterly been most notorious for including Spirit's "Fresh Garbage", which became germane Randy California's estate sued Zep for plagiarizing "Stairway" from one of Spirit's songs. (The openings of the songs are similar in sound, but in terms of composition there's not much to hang a plagiarism charge on... once Zep's lawyers succeeded in the motion to exclude actual recordings from the trial, the suit was dead in the water.)
Anyway, had I came around to this famous boot tape earlier I might have been more bullish on Zep's live work. This medley is a fantastic performance of material that's nowhere to be found in their "official" catalogue. It's not "original" material, but then again neither is most of their first LP...
1969-08-08 San Bernardino - entire tape! This is probably the most exciting tape I came across during the whole trawl, and justifies all the time I spend digging through stuff that is labelled as "fanatics only". Zeppelin fans tend to lament the "poor quality" of this tape - it is clearly a fantastic performance, and Jimmy Page in particular is absolutely on fire, but the tape was apparently made from inside of Jimmy's guitar amp, and you can't hear anybody else in the band!
Well once I read that description I had to hear it, and it didn't disappoint. You see, for anyone who is unfamiliar, there is a famous Velvet Underground bootleg called "The Legendary Guitar Amp Tape" that was recorded in precisely that fashion. This tape is absolute peak bootleg ethos. It is, in fact, more or less all Jimmy's guitar, blazing, noisy, blown out. Me personally? I am a noise rock FIEND. Jimmy Page on a good night in '69 is absolutely the equal of Lou Reed on an average night in '69, the equal of any Les Rallizes Denudes recording you can think of. Maybe there's something going on in "Flames of Ice" that isn't resent in the "Dazed and Confused" here but I don't know what it is.
The best part? The best part has to be when Jimmy breaks a string at the end of "I Can't Quit You Baby". The rest of the band goes into an impromptu blues jam while he changes it. The tape isn't hi-fi, but the instruments are, again, well-balanced and clearly comprehensible. At the very end Jimmy, string repaired, jumps in and because of the way he's mixed it is utterly apocalyptic and amazing, even though he's literally just throwing in some stray notes at the end of an impromptu blues jam. And then they do "Dazed and Confused".
This tape deserves to be legendary.
1970-04-09 Tampa - White Summer/Black Mountain Side: Jimmy Page gets a lot of shit from folkies, mostly I suspect because of his habit of blatantly stealing credit for songs and arrangements he had nothing to do with. Black Mountain Side, for instance, in its studio recording, is a complete cop of Bert Jansch's arrangement of "Blackwaterside", and most Zep fans don't know this, haven't ever heard "Blackwaterside", don't know that the song has lyrics, haven't heard Sandy Denny's stunning rendition. This seems absurd to me, I feel like these people are missing out something fierce, but ahh, you know, one only knows what one knows?
Page as a folkstyle player... he was more than a Jansch/Graham copyist, and I think this comes through live. Hell, one can hear this on the BBC "White Summer/Black Mountain Side" released as part of the '90 box set. It's a great performance. I love it. He went on to do better. For a long time my go-to performance was Montreux 1970-03-07, a fine quality audience tape patched with a poor-quality soundboard (poor-quality enough that it was used as a patch to an audience tape and not the other way around!). It's a renowned, well-known gig, and one of the things I wanted to do is hear if the less-renowned gigs had anything going for them. Which is how I came across this tape. White Summer/Black Mountain Side expands to 13 minutes here. We did establish here that length is no indicator of quality, particularly with Zep. The recordings I'm talking about here aren't just long - they earn their length. This performance is very creative. Page is still searching, experimenting, incorporating new riffs, new approaches. Bonham's drumming - Bonham did provide sporadic drumming for live versions - is propulsive. It sounds on paper like Bonham would have the wrong approach for a "folk" number like this, that his lack of subtlety would overwhelm it, but Page had moved well beyond "folk" at this point. He was, indeed, playing electric, and while this was one more reason for folk purists to scoff at him I find his adaptation of folk music techniques to electric guitar to be super fucking exciting. I'm told Jansch experimented with playing electric in one phase of Pentangle's career. There are no tapes. That's really unfortunate IMO.
1970-04-17 Memphis - How Many More Times: I never much rated Zep's lengthy blues medleys, of which How Many More Times was the first and, on record, one of the longest. The only two Led Zeppelin studio songs that top eight minutes, pre-1975, are How Many More Times and Stairway to Heaven.
Live, Zeppelin were much less succinct. My MP3 of this performance runs to 33:33, and yes there is a tape cut in the middle. If you were to tell me that I would listen to like 35 minutes of "How Many More Times" I'd be... skeptical. And does it entirely earn it? No. As medleys go, there's a certain stop-start nature to it, and at their best Zeppelin was a little more organic than that.
The circumstances here were perhaps a bit exceptional, though. You know it's gonna be a good "How Many More Times" when Peter Grant has been arrested by the end of it.
This performance is, like many rock concerts of the era, many Zeppelin concerts of the era, a scene of high tension, and this tension comes through on the tape. It was Memphis, and the Southern police were, well, acting like Southern police. I don't want to go into detail, not out of decorum, but because you either know what I'm talking about, it's enough for me to say that this was a couple weeks before Kent State, or you're gonna get really mad at me if I go into more detail. So I'm going to try and be polite about this.
I wasn't there, but it was clearly an intense fucking scene, and Plant, Plant the inveterate hippie, is just trying to keep the peace. He can't. It's beyond him. He pleads with the crowd some, and he sings, because that's what he's there for, that's what he knows how to do, but his otherworldly screams don't seem to do much to calm down the crowd, the band launching into a full rendition of "Memphis Tennessee" doesn't calm down the crowd, Page going into an impromptu run-through of Ravel's Bolero (Jeff Beck? Who's he?) doesn't help, Plant launching into "Ramble On" doesn't help, none of it helps but it all sounds fucking fantastic.
So yeah. It's great music _and_ it's an invaluable historical document. Can't fucking go wrong there.
1980-08-21 Tulsa - Communication Breakdown: That's audience tapes, right? Zep don't have the reputation the Dead does for blowing major gigs, but they kind of did? They headlined Knebworth in '79 and it's widely agreed that the Danish "warm-up" gigs were way better. The whole clusterfuck of the concert movie, the lackluster New York gigs, the botched Earls Court gigs that didn't even get used tor the film... yeah, Zep had a talent for blowing it, for doing their best work when nobody was looking. So here's Zep fucking killing it at a show in goddamn Tulsa Oklahoma. This is the final encore and they stretch it out a little bit - in the breakdown section we get a fuckin' bass solo! And it's a good one. I do love Jones's bass, and Page dropping the odd theremin whoop on top doesn't hurt things. I haven't heard a lot of versions of Communication Breakdown but this is a good one.
1971-09-23 Tokyo - Whole Lotta Love: I'm pretty sure I started with the '71 Japan gigs. I had fragments of the stage tape of the 09-29 Osaka gig as filler on an old tape, and it did immediately did jump out to my ears as exceptional. It's not just that it's the only ever live version of "Friends", one of my favorite Zep songs - the whole vibe is that of a band at their absolute peak, firing on all cylinders. I don't particularly _like_ the "tight but loose" descriptor that gets applied to them often. I think "inconsistent" is frequently a better descriptor. Here I'm tempted to actually accept it. Zep go through Whole Lotta Love for fucking forever, and it's glorious for a change. The crowd here is considerably more animated than they were in Osaka, and Zep are clearly feeding off the energy here.
1973-01-22 Southampton - Thank You: '72 was a good year for Zep, but honestly, the best shit they did that year was released on "How The West Was Won". Possibly someone could at some point convince me there's live stuff worth listening to that's _not_ on their release, but I'm not there yet. So we're on to early '73. This is a long gig that was professionally recorded and was considered for release, but whoever made the decisions decided (correctly) that the '72 gigs were just a better performance. This performance is a long one, but it doesn't have the raucous energy of those mid '72 gigs. What it does have, the reason I jumped on this, is the Mellotron. Starting with their Japan tour in October of '72, Zep started incorporating the Mellotron into their set - primarily for their new number "The Rain Song". However, Jones also started playing it in lieu of the traditional organ solo on the now increasingly-rare number "Thank You". I am so fucking there for this. There may perhaps be better performances of "Thank You" - I'm not an expert - but there aren't any with Jones killing it on the Mellotron in pristine soundboard quality, jamming on MacArthur Park and shit.
1973-03-24 Offenburg - Dazed & Confused: Over time this show has become legendary. The tape I have is the Eddie Edwards version. For this Eddie used the stereo source tape. A lot of releases reduce it to mono because the stereo tape has some weird stereo imaging, but for Eddie the stereo image gives it a depth that the mono can't give, and for me weird? Weird is good. Look, if Jimmy is going to do a bow solo and there _isn't_ psychedelic phasing I'm gonna be a little disappointed. This show wasn't legendary when I was younger, it wasn't known. This was a small gig in an obscure suburb of Strasbourg across the Rhine in Germany, and Zep being Zep, they killed it. A growing consensus has it that this is, in fact, the best Dazed and Confused ever. I'm struck by how _different_ it is from the "How the West Was Won" version. Here there's no "Walter's Walk" or "The Crunge" riffs. Instead we get Jimmy doing an early version of the "Achilles Last Stand" riff, we get Jones and Bonham in unison going into Hendrix's "Machine Gun", we get... well, I don't need do a blow-by-blow, because it's Internet Famous now. It's the equivalent of the Veneta Dark Star.
I also took the guitar solo from "Stairway". Uploads of gigs to Youtube appear to be unmolested unless, for some reason, they contain "Stairway", so uploads tend to cut it to only the guitar solo. Me, I do have the whole tape of Stairway, but I'm rather unimpressed with the audience member loudly yelling crude epithets at a woman at the start of the tape, and Plant's voice has rather started to slip by this point in Zep's career. I do find Page's solo exceptional, though, so kept it.
1973-04-02 Paris - The Song Remains The Same: Now, one would think that Paris '73 would be a fairly big gig, at least compared to Offenburg. And the perfomance, the performance is quite fine. it's a good one. But the tape? The tape is not as good as Offenburg. It's distant, a bit echoey, got that "through a glass darkly" feel a lot of '70s audience tapes in big venues have. Still, I have to say I'm sold by this "Song Remains the Same" - and it's not a song that usually sells me live. Here's the thing, Page wrote these blazing lightning riffs and he couldn't play them consistently. Most of the time he's just fucking sloppy, and I'm sorry, I'm not impressed by hearing Jimmy Page fuck up a riff, even if it is a really cool and fast riff. This version? Yeah, it's sloppy, because Page is always fucking sloppy, but it's not a disgrace like some versions of it. Oh, God, I was listening to the first live performance of it in Tokyo '72, and Page just makes a complete fucking hash of the intro riff. I guess if he had any self-respect he couldn't have played a lot of the amazing shit he did, I'm not saying I want him to be fuckin' Joe Pass or anything, but oh God his fucked up ass can be so painful to listen to sometimes. Not here, though. This version is good.
1975-01-25 Indianapolis - Rock and Roll: OK yes, this is a troll version. Zep are playing at the good old Market Square Arena in Indy, where Elvis played his last concert. It's a parking lot with a plaque now. This was fairly early in Zep's 75 tour, when they were still doing numbers they'd drop later on like "The Wanton Song", and...
Look, Plant didn't always take care of his voice. Zep had a decently strong commitment to not cancelling concerts, at least early on, but he'd do a concert even if he blatantly couldn't fucking sing at all. One can hear this on multiple occasions. In this case Plant decided that even though Zeppelin were touring through Midwestern America in January he wasn't going to compromise his sense of style, which consisted, for those of you who have seen "The Song Remains the Same", of loose, flowing, open shirts, and he caught the fucking flu. So we have here "Rock And Roll" as sung by guest vocalist Tom Fucking Waits. Zep could frequently be embarrassing, I've heard tapes of any one of them individually playing while profoundly ill or fucked up, and most of them are just sad. This one is kind of funny. When he hoarsely croaks "It's been a long time since I rock and roll", you fuckin' believe it!
1975-03-12 Long Beach - Whole Lotta Love -> The Crunge -> Black Dog, Heartbreaker: The neglected companion recording to one of the most famous Zep audience tapes, made by the renowned Mike Millard. The complete tape of the show the day before is widely circulated and renowned. This performance is better, but Millard's tape didn't completely turn out. All that survives in his recording is the ending.
Well, except it's a great ending. I know a lot of people give Zep's attempts at whiteboy funk shit, but hearing Zep do some fake James Brown shit in 9/8 is my jam, particularly like here when they go into "Licking Stick".
The whole show is out there from another source, but fortunately it does seem like Millard got the best part of it.
Well, fuck. I just wrote 3,000 words on Led Zeppelin bootlegs. I guess I have a strange idea of fun. :(
Friday, 15 May 2020
Etienne Delessert
Been off to a lot of weird places over the past couple of days - it's how I distract myself. Since my last post on chiptunes I've meant to delve into the chiptune scene but it's very diffuse, very underground. There's a stickied message board thread on a quiet board for chiptune makers asking people to list their favorites. It's 21 pages long and filled with dead links and it's a resource I know I will never fully explore. Sometimes I content myself with dipping a finger in and moving on. I found a record by a Japanese chiptune creator called Dong with songs all named after flowers and a record called Another Crack World that is _kind of_ like a chiptune version of those "lo-fi beats" Youtube keeps recommending to me except not really and a PC music disk from 2001 just called "Chipmusicdisk #1".
The chipmusic disks, particular from that era, are hard to get a hold of. Not "hard" as in you can't find them, there's a website that archives them all, but my understanding is you have to emulate the system they were made for. To get it into a more portable format is doable but it's work and a lot of these disks, nobody has done that work.
A lot of art is like that. It has a deep rich history and sometimes it gets shunted off into decaying piles. And shit disappears. Links go dead. That's how things get lost.
The thing I've been sniffing around this week - maybe it was from looking at those Paul Lally videos, but it got me back to old children's television, which in turn brings one back to Sesame Street.
It's weird to me, having grown up with Doctor Who as the nexus of "Missing Television", to adapt to the model of the Lost Media Wiki people. "Lost" doesn't mean the same thing to them. It doesn't mean "no longer available anywhere", it means "not accessible". As far as I know all the old Sesame Street stuff is still around, and since Sesame Workshop are not as protective of their, uh, intellectual property, a lot of the stuff they made is widely available, officially or otherwise.
But by no means all of it. Sesame Street has not been around for as long as Doctor Who, but it's been running continuously and more frequently for most of that time, so there's a lot more of it. It's one hell of a rabbit hole.
There are a lot of things Sesame Street and Doctor Who have in common as obsessions. They're both children's TV shows - I do think it's significant that a lot of this desire to recover the past stems from childhood. The phrase "Proustian madeleines" springs to mind. It's apparently a masterpiece, certainly _sounds_ right up my alley, but I've never read the book, probably won't.
The main difference, I think, is that Sesame Street is a considerably better TV show than Doctor Who generally was. It's not perfect - it's had its share of controversies - but with Sesame Street, one never runs across an instance where they casually drop the N-word into an episode, which Doctor Who absolutely did. Sesame Street was made by people who knew a lot more about what they were doing than most of the people who made Doctor Who did. They had actual research on early childhood development, ideas, theories, and a shitload of brilliant people to put those ideas into practice.
But like Doctor Who, it too reflected its times, in its way, which is to say that a lot of times in the '70s, shit got weird. I come back occasionally to those old episodes, the old clips, to see what people are looking at, what people know about, what people have dug up, and it's mostly accessible on Youtube, even though the locus is a separate fan community. Some of these clips become obsessions. The Lost Media Wiki, for instance, became obsessed with a cartoon shown on Sesame Street that traumatized them as children. This is another thing the Sesame Street and Doctor Who fan communities have in common - this obsession with childhood fear. What they remember most from their childhood are the things that terrify them. Few people remember the professor character whose schtick was so boring that he fell asleep, because he was so boring the kids fell asleep too. The "Cracks" sketch, though... that clearly touched something deep and primal.
I never saw it. I don't remember it. Thinking back on it, I don't think I have any traumatic memories at all of children's television, which seems to me unusual. Perhaps it's totally normal, though. I certainly had my share of irrational fears as a child.
Anyway, my first binge on Youtube quickly brought me to Sesame Street, and I quickly familiarized myself with some of the really strange things they did that I didn't see. "Count to Ten With Nobody", for instance. The early '70s are prime weirdness to me, I suspect because of the heavy use of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog was new and innovative and I think a lot of people didn't recognize how profoundly disturbing the things they were doing with it were to, especially, children.
In the late '70s you have weird stuff too. For instance, there is the Disco Toothbrush song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ4nLTlCkLo
But it's not really that weird, is it? It's just a nice disco song. It's weird because of the place disco occupies in our culture landscape, several years of utter ubiquity, complete confidence that this was The Way, followed by abrupt, well, cancellation, for a host of reasons, some good, some bad. If you were going to do a song about brushing your teeth in 1978, of course it was going to be a disco song. It's not inherently weirder than the "Miami Mice" parody that ran intermittently in the mid-'80s; it's mostly notable to me for being a pretty good disco song.
On the other hand the cartoon titled "Cartoon Face Morph" - present in both male and female versions because the gender binary was a huge fucking thing in the '70s - is genuinely weird and disturbing. There's a picture of a man or woman and it goes through some funhouse mirror changes - the forehead bulges, the nose elongates, the chin juts out - and all of this is accompanied by extremely dissonant analog synth noises. I don't know what the underlying pedagogical purpose was. Maybe there was none. The guy who made it, a guy named Etienne Delessert, look, he worked with Piaget, he illustrated children's books, the assumption is that he knew what he was doing. Maybe he didn't, though, that's the thing about these assumptions. I mean, he also worked with Eugene Ionesco. That was the thing about Sesame Street, the way these influential pedagogues had roots in the avant-garde. Robert Dennis and Peter Schickele came directly to Sesame Street from doing the music to the infamous underground play "Oh! Calcutta". There doesn't... there doesn't seem to be much of a join. Grace Slick counting to ten in song isn't _that_ far removed from her work with the Jefferson Airplane.
Delessert did a couple other things for Sesame Street. The one I came here to post about was a cartoon he did where a hen hatches pterodactyl eggs. This is a conceptually pretty strange film, for sure, but it's not as outright scary as Cartoon Face Morph. It's just weird.
What makes it weirder is... here's something else Who and Sesame Street have in common, their fundamentally international character. Films made for Sesame Street were shown all over the world, dubbed into different languages.
Sesame Street's case, though, is weirder and more complicated. Sesame Street isn't a narratively driven show - it's a patchwork of different films, different ideas, interlocking pieces that, once made, are repeated independent of the episode they were first broadcast in once or many times. Doctor Who is affected by some of this. There are censor clips, clips from old episodes of Blue Peter or Australian computer documentaries, but this variety of footage absolutely pales in comparison to the plethora of sources for the many, many films made for Sesame Street.
One of the clips I remember most fondly from my childhood was a little blue and red typewriter that would roll out, humming tunelessly. It would type out a letter, and then something starting with that letter would show up. There were 26 of these clips made, and thanks to the miracle of the Internet, there's an easily viewable compilation of all of them.
And this, again, is pretty awesome, not just because as a child I did want to see them all. Because the video - which is only in 240p - is extremely revealing of all the various places these videos were collected from. Some of them are official, some of them have old broadcast station chyrons, some of them have file sharing site detritus overlaid on top, VHS lines, films discolored yellow with age and with no effort at color-correcting made... most of them are in pretty good quality but even with that you can readily see all the things that happen to physical and digital media.
The ability to watch all 26 of them at once is, as well, a relatively recent phenomenon, recent enough that you can still see talk on the Internet of the letter "O" being unavailable. People had screen clips, they knew "O" was for owl, but they couldn't watch it. The clip of "O" is really degraded, with a high-pitched whine running through it and discoloration and a Wondershare logo AND a production company logo on top of it, but it's there, it's watchable.
Which, finally, brings us around to the "Hen and Pterodactyl Eggs" clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZHFTxxRRM
You see, some of the Doctor Who episodes were dubbed into other languages - the Arabic soundtrack to "Planet of Giants" is officially available on the DVD - but in all of those cases the English audio track also exists. This is not necessarily the case with Sesame Street. There are a large number of films or sketches that exist only in German or French or, as in this case, Arabic.
I'm cool with that. Some people I'm sure are right now hunting for this in English, but I get what's going on here pretty well I think.
The chipmusic disks, particular from that era, are hard to get a hold of. Not "hard" as in you can't find them, there's a website that archives them all, but my understanding is you have to emulate the system they were made for. To get it into a more portable format is doable but it's work and a lot of these disks, nobody has done that work.
A lot of art is like that. It has a deep rich history and sometimes it gets shunted off into decaying piles. And shit disappears. Links go dead. That's how things get lost.
The thing I've been sniffing around this week - maybe it was from looking at those Paul Lally videos, but it got me back to old children's television, which in turn brings one back to Sesame Street.
It's weird to me, having grown up with Doctor Who as the nexus of "Missing Television", to adapt to the model of the Lost Media Wiki people. "Lost" doesn't mean the same thing to them. It doesn't mean "no longer available anywhere", it means "not accessible". As far as I know all the old Sesame Street stuff is still around, and since Sesame Workshop are not as protective of their, uh, intellectual property, a lot of the stuff they made is widely available, officially or otherwise.
But by no means all of it. Sesame Street has not been around for as long as Doctor Who, but it's been running continuously and more frequently for most of that time, so there's a lot more of it. It's one hell of a rabbit hole.
There are a lot of things Sesame Street and Doctor Who have in common as obsessions. They're both children's TV shows - I do think it's significant that a lot of this desire to recover the past stems from childhood. The phrase "Proustian madeleines" springs to mind. It's apparently a masterpiece, certainly _sounds_ right up my alley, but I've never read the book, probably won't.
The main difference, I think, is that Sesame Street is a considerably better TV show than Doctor Who generally was. It's not perfect - it's had its share of controversies - but with Sesame Street, one never runs across an instance where they casually drop the N-word into an episode, which Doctor Who absolutely did. Sesame Street was made by people who knew a lot more about what they were doing than most of the people who made Doctor Who did. They had actual research on early childhood development, ideas, theories, and a shitload of brilliant people to put those ideas into practice.
But like Doctor Who, it too reflected its times, in its way, which is to say that a lot of times in the '70s, shit got weird. I come back occasionally to those old episodes, the old clips, to see what people are looking at, what people know about, what people have dug up, and it's mostly accessible on Youtube, even though the locus is a separate fan community. Some of these clips become obsessions. The Lost Media Wiki, for instance, became obsessed with a cartoon shown on Sesame Street that traumatized them as children. This is another thing the Sesame Street and Doctor Who fan communities have in common - this obsession with childhood fear. What they remember most from their childhood are the things that terrify them. Few people remember the professor character whose schtick was so boring that he fell asleep, because he was so boring the kids fell asleep too. The "Cracks" sketch, though... that clearly touched something deep and primal.
I never saw it. I don't remember it. Thinking back on it, I don't think I have any traumatic memories at all of children's television, which seems to me unusual. Perhaps it's totally normal, though. I certainly had my share of irrational fears as a child.
Anyway, my first binge on Youtube quickly brought me to Sesame Street, and I quickly familiarized myself with some of the really strange things they did that I didn't see. "Count to Ten With Nobody", for instance. The early '70s are prime weirdness to me, I suspect because of the heavy use of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog was new and innovative and I think a lot of people didn't recognize how profoundly disturbing the things they were doing with it were to, especially, children.
In the late '70s you have weird stuff too. For instance, there is the Disco Toothbrush song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ4nLTlCkLo
But it's not really that weird, is it? It's just a nice disco song. It's weird because of the place disco occupies in our culture landscape, several years of utter ubiquity, complete confidence that this was The Way, followed by abrupt, well, cancellation, for a host of reasons, some good, some bad. If you were going to do a song about brushing your teeth in 1978, of course it was going to be a disco song. It's not inherently weirder than the "Miami Mice" parody that ran intermittently in the mid-'80s; it's mostly notable to me for being a pretty good disco song.
On the other hand the cartoon titled "Cartoon Face Morph" - present in both male and female versions because the gender binary was a huge fucking thing in the '70s - is genuinely weird and disturbing. There's a picture of a man or woman and it goes through some funhouse mirror changes - the forehead bulges, the nose elongates, the chin juts out - and all of this is accompanied by extremely dissonant analog synth noises. I don't know what the underlying pedagogical purpose was. Maybe there was none. The guy who made it, a guy named Etienne Delessert, look, he worked with Piaget, he illustrated children's books, the assumption is that he knew what he was doing. Maybe he didn't, though, that's the thing about these assumptions. I mean, he also worked with Eugene Ionesco. That was the thing about Sesame Street, the way these influential pedagogues had roots in the avant-garde. Robert Dennis and Peter Schickele came directly to Sesame Street from doing the music to the infamous underground play "Oh! Calcutta". There doesn't... there doesn't seem to be much of a join. Grace Slick counting to ten in song isn't _that_ far removed from her work with the Jefferson Airplane.
Delessert did a couple other things for Sesame Street. The one I came here to post about was a cartoon he did where a hen hatches pterodactyl eggs. This is a conceptually pretty strange film, for sure, but it's not as outright scary as Cartoon Face Morph. It's just weird.
What makes it weirder is... here's something else Who and Sesame Street have in common, their fundamentally international character. Films made for Sesame Street were shown all over the world, dubbed into different languages.
Sesame Street's case, though, is weirder and more complicated. Sesame Street isn't a narratively driven show - it's a patchwork of different films, different ideas, interlocking pieces that, once made, are repeated independent of the episode they were first broadcast in once or many times. Doctor Who is affected by some of this. There are censor clips, clips from old episodes of Blue Peter or Australian computer documentaries, but this variety of footage absolutely pales in comparison to the plethora of sources for the many, many films made for Sesame Street.
One of the clips I remember most fondly from my childhood was a little blue and red typewriter that would roll out, humming tunelessly. It would type out a letter, and then something starting with that letter would show up. There were 26 of these clips made, and thanks to the miracle of the Internet, there's an easily viewable compilation of all of them.
And this, again, is pretty awesome, not just because as a child I did want to see them all. Because the video - which is only in 240p - is extremely revealing of all the various places these videos were collected from. Some of them are official, some of them have old broadcast station chyrons, some of them have file sharing site detritus overlaid on top, VHS lines, films discolored yellow with age and with no effort at color-correcting made... most of them are in pretty good quality but even with that you can readily see all the things that happen to physical and digital media.
The ability to watch all 26 of them at once is, as well, a relatively recent phenomenon, recent enough that you can still see talk on the Internet of the letter "O" being unavailable. People had screen clips, they knew "O" was for owl, but they couldn't watch it. The clip of "O" is really degraded, with a high-pitched whine running through it and discoloration and a Wondershare logo AND a production company logo on top of it, but it's there, it's watchable.
Which, finally, brings us around to the "Hen and Pterodactyl Eggs" clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZHFTxxRRM
You see, some of the Doctor Who episodes were dubbed into other languages - the Arabic soundtrack to "Planet of Giants" is officially available on the DVD - but in all of those cases the English audio track also exists. This is not necessarily the case with Sesame Street. There are a large number of films or sketches that exist only in German or French or, as in this case, Arabic.
I'm cool with that. Some people I'm sure are right now hunting for this in English, but I get what's going on here pretty well I think.
Wednesday, 13 May 2020
Answer Poem
CW: Self-Harm
More ruminating this morning. I went from thinking about my post yesterday to thinking about the Police song Roxanne through the typical "flight of ideas", which in my cases for some reason involved Moses. Today my thoughts came out more easily as a poem. I haven't done a lot of poetry and I don't generally think much of myself as a poet, but I guess it has a certain immediacy, and so I'm posting it here, in the hopes that after I do I can get on with my day.
Gordon
What do you mean
I don't have to wear this dress tonight?
I like this dress
It looks good on me
This body
is all I have.
All anyone cares about.
All you care about.
What if I don't?
What then?
I stay home, cook?
Let you earn the money
Pretending to play in a punk rock band?
You beg with me
You plead with me
You threaten to kill yourself
And when I go to work anyway
You get angry at me.
You start yelling about how I scratched your records
Fuck your records
Gordon, I love you
But this body is all I have.
More ruminating this morning. I went from thinking about my post yesterday to thinking about the Police song Roxanne through the typical "flight of ideas", which in my cases for some reason involved Moses. Today my thoughts came out more easily as a poem. I haven't done a lot of poetry and I don't generally think much of myself as a poet, but I guess it has a certain immediacy, and so I'm posting it here, in the hopes that after I do I can get on with my day.
Gordon
What do you mean
I don't have to wear this dress tonight?
I like this dress
It looks good on me
This body
is all I have.
All anyone cares about.
All you care about.
What if I don't?
What then?
I stay home, cook?
Let you earn the money
Pretending to play in a punk rock band?
You beg with me
You plead with me
You threaten to kill yourself
And when I go to work anyway
You get angry at me.
You start yelling about how I scratched your records
Fuck your records
Gordon, I love you
But this body is all I have.
Tuesday, 12 May 2020
The Gentle Giant
Today, out of the blue, a friend of mine posted on Discord a link to the Vimeo channel of Paul Lally.
https://vimeo.com/user368498
Mr. Lally's work is very familiar to me. Me and my brother enjoyed watching it quite a lot when we were younger, particularly a series titled "The Gentle Giant". This show was completely unrelated to the similarly-named progressive rock band, but for decades whenever I would mention them to my brother he would instinctively bring up Paul Lally.
"I'm not talking about Paul Lally!" I would respond, somewhat frustrated. "Nobody else but you even _remembers_ Paul Lally!"
I am glad, at last, to be able to prove my younger self wrong. There are no episodes of "The Gentle Giant" on his Vimeo channel - IMDB does not so much as acknowledge its existence, though Lally's thumbnail Wikipedia page does. However, there are some other shows he worked on featured on the page.
I am watching the show featured at the top of his page, "Teletales: Paka'a". This does bring back memories of 1980s PBS for me, something lost found that I don't get from old tapes of Sesame Street no matter how many I watch. Lally belonged to a different, more sedate branch of children's television, exemplified by Fred Rogers (and he did in fact work on many episodes of Mr. Rogers' neighborhood). I realize that this is making me sound exactly as old as I am, lamenting the loss of slower-paced, gentler days gone by, and I don't mean to do that exclusively. Sesame Street was not a slow-paced show. A lot of the slow-paced shows I did watch, in fact, were garbage, like the sermonizing religious show "Davey and Goliath". I watched a lot of crap because I had nothing better to do. Those days are long gone from me now. I still watch a lot of crap, but now I watch it _because_ I have better things to do.
The first thing that strikes me about Lally, besides the glasses - I had a air rather like them - the visible chest hair under the open collar, the thick sheen of the hair - this was what adult men looked like in those days - no, the first thing that strikes me is his pronunciation of "Hawaii", with the "w" pronounced rather as a German would, a sort of NPR pronunciation. It might be more correct to pronounce it that way. I don't know.
The thing it reminds me of most, though, is an early episode of "Space Ghost: Coast to Coast". In that episode, the creative team got a storyteller to retell the stories of some earlier SGC2C episodes, the way Lally does here, accompanied with drawings very similar to those of Rae Owings. At that time the episode seemed a resurfacing of an impossibly old, archaic lost tradition. Weird to think that this episode was far closer in time to "Teletales", which I do believe was from the 1980s sometime, than it is to our day.
I have a fondness for storytelling, actual storytelling, which I've seen once or twice as part of my brother's high school debate competitions. Because it is different every time, I think. I can say that each time I watch a TV show, each experience is different, and it is true, but that is so much more apparent with a story. Telling stories, I feel today, is my favourite sort of performance.
https://vimeo.com/user368498
Mr. Lally's work is very familiar to me. Me and my brother enjoyed watching it quite a lot when we were younger, particularly a series titled "The Gentle Giant". This show was completely unrelated to the similarly-named progressive rock band, but for decades whenever I would mention them to my brother he would instinctively bring up Paul Lally.
"I'm not talking about Paul Lally!" I would respond, somewhat frustrated. "Nobody else but you even _remembers_ Paul Lally!"
I am glad, at last, to be able to prove my younger self wrong. There are no episodes of "The Gentle Giant" on his Vimeo channel - IMDB does not so much as acknowledge its existence, though Lally's thumbnail Wikipedia page does. However, there are some other shows he worked on featured on the page.
I am watching the show featured at the top of his page, "Teletales: Paka'a". This does bring back memories of 1980s PBS for me, something lost found that I don't get from old tapes of Sesame Street no matter how many I watch. Lally belonged to a different, more sedate branch of children's television, exemplified by Fred Rogers (and he did in fact work on many episodes of Mr. Rogers' neighborhood). I realize that this is making me sound exactly as old as I am, lamenting the loss of slower-paced, gentler days gone by, and I don't mean to do that exclusively. Sesame Street was not a slow-paced show. A lot of the slow-paced shows I did watch, in fact, were garbage, like the sermonizing religious show "Davey and Goliath". I watched a lot of crap because I had nothing better to do. Those days are long gone from me now. I still watch a lot of crap, but now I watch it _because_ I have better things to do.
The first thing that strikes me about Lally, besides the glasses - I had a air rather like them - the visible chest hair under the open collar, the thick sheen of the hair - this was what adult men looked like in those days - no, the first thing that strikes me is his pronunciation of "Hawaii", with the "w" pronounced rather as a German would, a sort of NPR pronunciation. It might be more correct to pronounce it that way. I don't know.
The thing it reminds me of most, though, is an early episode of "Space Ghost: Coast to Coast". In that episode, the creative team got a storyteller to retell the stories of some earlier SGC2C episodes, the way Lally does here, accompanied with drawings very similar to those of Rae Owings. At that time the episode seemed a resurfacing of an impossibly old, archaic lost tradition. Weird to think that this episode was far closer in time to "Teletales", which I do believe was from the 1980s sometime, than it is to our day.
I have a fondness for storytelling, actual storytelling, which I've seen once or twice as part of my brother's high school debate competitions. Because it is different every time, I think. I can say that each time I watch a TV show, each experience is different, and it is true, but that is so much more apparent with a story. Telling stories, I feel today, is my favourite sort of performance.
Monday, 11 May 2020
skink -sonic -c86 -elephant9 -crocodile -prehensile -boilermaker -pyramid -trash -gap -riot
A friend on a message board I read was recently asking for songs about lizards. Me being who I am, my reaction to the question was "What, all lizards? That's _way_ too broad a question!"
As a result I've narrowed it down to one particular sort of lizard - the skink.
Skinks are lizards belonging to the family Scincidae and the infraorder Scincomorpha. With more than 1,500 described species, the Scincidae are one of the most diverse families of lizards.
Yes, that's just copied and pasted from Wikipedia. I do it because I didn't actually know what a skink was when I started this post. I had it confused with a stoat. I don't know what a stoat is, except that it's smaller than a weasel, and if I looked it up I'd never get to the music and just spend all day talking about animals I should've learned about in school.
Skinks, then. Prior to this recent trawl I had only one skink-related record, "On the Wings of a Skink" by the Reptile Palace Orchestra. There's only one skink-related song title - "Four Skinks". However, the song is not honestly skink-related; like most of the songs on the album, what one has here is a Balkan brass-style cover of a "classic rock" song, in this case "Four Sticks" from Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album. I'm assuming it's not literally skink-related, at least. "Four Sticks" famously got its name from Bonham's drumming approach on the song - playing with two sticks in each hand. If the drummer here is playing with two skinks in each hand, I strongly disapprove, because that is plain animal cruelty.
That's what I knew in advance. Here's what I've learned from my research in the last week.
Sonic Youth - Skink: The best-known skink-related song is the simply titled "Skink", track 4 of Sonic Youth's "Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star". I'm not terribly familiar with Sonic Youth's catalog and so hadn't heard this one before. Going by RYM for the general opinion of this album, it seems to be sort of the "black sheep" of what is an overall very highly rated run of records from 1986's EVOL to 1995's Washing Machine.
Speaking as someone who's not, by and large, a Sonic Youth fan, based on this I'm not sure I can get why this is liked less than the other records they recorded in this era. Sounds like a pleasant enough Kim Gordon tune to me.
Skink - Violence: From here we're going to get way, way more obscure. Of the artists named Skink - there are several of them - the one of most interest to me is the hardcore band behind 1992's "Violence" 7". These are two quality tunes with some nice thudding, chugging bass. Skink went on to release a full-length in 1994's "Deaf to Suggestion", but that record is much less interesting to my ears.
Boilermaker - Five Lined Skink: Next, the post-hardcore/Midwest Emo band Boilermaker. I'm a relative newcomer to the midwest emo/post-hardcore genre, and these folks don't seem to have risen above the pack, though they had their fans. Their last album has one review from Simone_Info in 2009:
"Indie Emo in the vein of Ethel Meserve and Garden Variety. A lot of Math Rock influnces, dissonant but always sweet and melodic. It's a shame that only 5 people rated it. The bass player was one of the best in the whole Emo movement, but unfortunately he died."
I've not heard Ethel Meserve or Garden Variety, and looking up the latter, they seem to be _less_ known than Boilermaker. The album this song is from, 1996's "In Wallace's Shadow", is their least known and least reputed record. They went on to do a split 7" with Three Mile Pilot which has a fairly high reputation.
Anyway, I do like this song a fair bit as well, and yes, the work of the dead bassist is impressive. If it's "indie" it is indie in the '90s sense rather than the 2000's landfill sense.
Mule Train - Tails of Skink: Not to be confused with Midrid's '00s-era Muletrain, the Santa Cruz '00s band, or Tom Russell's first band, the Mule Train Band, which released one single, "Take a Whiff On Me / Strung-Out", about which Russell says:
"It owes a little to Commander Cody's style, and to my working six sets a night in a topless bar on skid row. Financed by a well known "porn king" and put on 500 of his jukeboxes. Promptly removed by Mothers Against Drugs and Drunk Driving. So the 500 copies rotted in a Chinese warehouse. Strung out was released on his rarities CD in 2002 - Take A Whiff is not available anywhere else. Both songs were written by Tom."
Right, here's my point. This is the '00s Japanese ska-rocksteady-calypso revival band. This song honestly sounds almost more dixieland than ska. It's not terrible, but not terribly memorable either. Got some sleazy strip club organ along with the horns. I guess that's about all I can say for it.
Fats Navarro - The Skink: There actually is no such song. The song is called "The Skunk". Someone made a typo somewhere along the line, but you know what, I'm going to declare typos officially canon, even if the song does sound more skunky than skinky. In any event, Fats Navarro circa '48: Classic!
A Riot of Colour: Skink (Flexi Version): One of the lesser-known C86 bands. Personally I never much got into C86 except for Stump, who are a C86 band only by virtue of being literally on the C86 comp. Anyway, A Riot of Colour are C86 never-weres, only ever put out the one EP and this isn't even from that EP, it's an alternate flexi version on a later C86 comp. Not sure how they stack up to Lawrence and the Comfortable Society, Benny Profane (as far as I'm concerned a Pynchon reference, not a band), The Noseflutes, or The Enormous Room, but again, one could do worse.
Aydio - Skink: A trip-hop/downtempo group so obscure that this particular release, 2013's "The Second", is not on RYM _or_ Discogs. Is on Spotify and Amazon and Soundcloud tho. If I don't have anything more to say about this than "pleasant, if forgettable, it exists", well, that's all one can really say about most music. I'm hearing lots of interesting music outside my wheelhouse, but one usually doesn't come across hidden gems this way.
Uton - Mauritian Giant Skink Part I and II - Finnish "Free Folk" from an enormous 7 CD box set that apparently has a certain cult reputation. I guess the concept is that all of these underground people perform tributes to extinct species, something between 15 to 20 minutes per artist. The Mauritian Giant Skink is hypothesized to have become extinct sometime around 1600. Wikipedia also says "It may have been somewhat fossorial in nature" and "The Round Island skink is a species capable of caudal autotomy", which are fascinating statements that I don't particularly understand.
Anyway, what we have here are 17 minutes or so of weird Finnish drones. There are a lot of these recordings and it's one of those genres where I can't really tell a good weird Finnish drone from a bad weird Finnish drone. The only other band on this comp I particularly recognize (outside of the heavy hitters like Bardo Pond) is Ashtray Navigations, who I did hear one song that sounded exceptionally good for an alleged "noise" artist. Haven't heard anything else up to that level though.
MC Shy-D - Hit the Skink: Mid '90s Southern hip-hop. Apparently this guy was Afrika Bambaataa's cousin. This is from his last record, a record he released three years _after_ his 1993 record "The Comeback". I guess he gets credit for not calling this record "No, really, comeback for real this time". But then he loses it for having one of the worst '90s hip-hop album covers I've seen. And you know hip-hop album covers in the '90s weren't exactly the epitome of good taste. DJ Smurf's name is as big as his on the cover. Was the presence of DJ Smurf ever actually a selling point? I doubt it somehow. Despite that I don't think this is bad, though again, my familiarity with Miami Bass is approximately zero.
Bivouac- Gecko or Skink: A grunge band apparently nominally related to Dogntank, a '00s piss-taking rock record that nobody but me has heard and which I personally like quite a lot. Anyway this record, 1995's "Full Size Boy" does seem to be quite bad and hated - RYM has an ancient review from a first wave reviewer calling them out as subpar Goo Goo Dolls knockoffs. This track is only 90 seconds and maybe isn't at all representative of their output, but I don't hear that at all in this. It's really nice, actually, a constant rhubarb of voices a la "The Murder Mystery" lending nice tension to a decent grunge instrumental, the only comprehensible words being the words "...gecko or skink" at the end.
Los Tornillos - Skink: Another one of those Bandcamp-only folks, an Edinburgh band what released a couple EPs in 2018. Nominally "surf" but this also has a really nice instrumental post-punk vibe to it. Or, wait, you know what they remind me of? The Cardiacs. Would benefit from some vocals, but nice chords.
Elephant9 - Skink: Oh these folks I know. This is Stale Storlokken's Norwegian jazz-prog trio. He's collaborated extensively with Motorpsycho and Reine Fiske. This is fortunately one of the shorter tracks and so doesn't grate too much.
Quarter Half - Skink and Cherry Blossoms: This is apparently a 2005 Japanese album on the Merry Works label. Some sort of weird underground hip-hop stuff. I don't remotely understand any of it. Weird deconstructed beats.
Charly Steiger / Cornelia Franke - Skink: OK, this looks like it was on a comp CD called Compromize on the Selektion label in 1992. It's straight out noise. Not really very good noise.
Meem - Faeynt Skink: Some Canberra beardo doing funk and disco breaks. Sounds like loading screen music for a vaguely hip 2010 video game.
Caligator - Skink: At last, a song I can give a fairly unequivocal judgement on! This is instrumental rock music. I know rock music alright, and I can say with some degree of confidence that this is not very good. This is some Blueshammer shit right here. I'm sure it makes somebody happy, but I am decidedly not the target audience here.
That's all I got for you! If I hear any other skink-related music in the future, I will make it a priority to let you know.
PS - Fun fact! Blogger's spellchecker appears not to acknowledge the existence of the skink. I smell conspiracy.
As a result I've narrowed it down to one particular sort of lizard - the skink.
Skinks are lizards belonging to the family Scincidae and the infraorder Scincomorpha. With more than 1,500 described species, the Scincidae are one of the most diverse families of lizards.
Yes, that's just copied and pasted from Wikipedia. I do it because I didn't actually know what a skink was when I started this post. I had it confused with a stoat. I don't know what a stoat is, except that it's smaller than a weasel, and if I looked it up I'd never get to the music and just spend all day talking about animals I should've learned about in school.
Skinks, then. Prior to this recent trawl I had only one skink-related record, "On the Wings of a Skink" by the Reptile Palace Orchestra. There's only one skink-related song title - "Four Skinks". However, the song is not honestly skink-related; like most of the songs on the album, what one has here is a Balkan brass-style cover of a "classic rock" song, in this case "Four Sticks" from Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album. I'm assuming it's not literally skink-related, at least. "Four Sticks" famously got its name from Bonham's drumming approach on the song - playing with two sticks in each hand. If the drummer here is playing with two skinks in each hand, I strongly disapprove, because that is plain animal cruelty.
That's what I knew in advance. Here's what I've learned from my research in the last week.
Sonic Youth - Skink: The best-known skink-related song is the simply titled "Skink", track 4 of Sonic Youth's "Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star". I'm not terribly familiar with Sonic Youth's catalog and so hadn't heard this one before. Going by RYM for the general opinion of this album, it seems to be sort of the "black sheep" of what is an overall very highly rated run of records from 1986's EVOL to 1995's Washing Machine.
Speaking as someone who's not, by and large, a Sonic Youth fan, based on this I'm not sure I can get why this is liked less than the other records they recorded in this era. Sounds like a pleasant enough Kim Gordon tune to me.
Skink - Violence: From here we're going to get way, way more obscure. Of the artists named Skink - there are several of them - the one of most interest to me is the hardcore band behind 1992's "Violence" 7". These are two quality tunes with some nice thudding, chugging bass. Skink went on to release a full-length in 1994's "Deaf to Suggestion", but that record is much less interesting to my ears.
Boilermaker - Five Lined Skink: Next, the post-hardcore/Midwest Emo band Boilermaker. I'm a relative newcomer to the midwest emo/post-hardcore genre, and these folks don't seem to have risen above the pack, though they had their fans. Their last album has one review from Simone_Info in 2009:
"Indie Emo in the vein of Ethel Meserve and Garden Variety. A lot of Math Rock influnces, dissonant but always sweet and melodic. It's a shame that only 5 people rated it. The bass player was one of the best in the whole Emo movement, but unfortunately he died."
I've not heard Ethel Meserve or Garden Variety, and looking up the latter, they seem to be _less_ known than Boilermaker. The album this song is from, 1996's "In Wallace's Shadow", is their least known and least reputed record. They went on to do a split 7" with Three Mile Pilot which has a fairly high reputation.
Anyway, I do like this song a fair bit as well, and yes, the work of the dead bassist is impressive. If it's "indie" it is indie in the '90s sense rather than the 2000's landfill sense.
Mule Train - Tails of Skink: Not to be confused with Midrid's '00s-era Muletrain, the Santa Cruz '00s band, or Tom Russell's first band, the Mule Train Band, which released one single, "Take a Whiff On Me / Strung-Out", about which Russell says:
"It owes a little to Commander Cody's style, and to my working six sets a night in a topless bar on skid row. Financed by a well known "porn king" and put on 500 of his jukeboxes. Promptly removed by Mothers Against Drugs and Drunk Driving. So the 500 copies rotted in a Chinese warehouse. Strung out was released on his rarities CD in 2002 - Take A Whiff is not available anywhere else. Both songs were written by Tom."
Right, here's my point. This is the '00s Japanese ska-rocksteady-calypso revival band. This song honestly sounds almost more dixieland than ska. It's not terrible, but not terribly memorable either. Got some sleazy strip club organ along with the horns. I guess that's about all I can say for it.
Fats Navarro - The Skink: There actually is no such song. The song is called "The Skunk". Someone made a typo somewhere along the line, but you know what, I'm going to declare typos officially canon, even if the song does sound more skunky than skinky. In any event, Fats Navarro circa '48: Classic!
A Riot of Colour: Skink (Flexi Version): One of the lesser-known C86 bands. Personally I never much got into C86 except for Stump, who are a C86 band only by virtue of being literally on the C86 comp. Anyway, A Riot of Colour are C86 never-weres, only ever put out the one EP and this isn't even from that EP, it's an alternate flexi version on a later C86 comp. Not sure how they stack up to Lawrence and the Comfortable Society, Benny Profane (as far as I'm concerned a Pynchon reference, not a band), The Noseflutes, or The Enormous Room, but again, one could do worse.
Aydio - Skink: A trip-hop/downtempo group so obscure that this particular release, 2013's "The Second", is not on RYM _or_ Discogs. Is on Spotify and Amazon and Soundcloud tho. If I don't have anything more to say about this than "pleasant, if forgettable, it exists", well, that's all one can really say about most music. I'm hearing lots of interesting music outside my wheelhouse, but one usually doesn't come across hidden gems this way.
Uton - Mauritian Giant Skink Part I and II - Finnish "Free Folk" from an enormous 7 CD box set that apparently has a certain cult reputation. I guess the concept is that all of these underground people perform tributes to extinct species, something between 15 to 20 minutes per artist. The Mauritian Giant Skink is hypothesized to have become extinct sometime around 1600. Wikipedia also says "It may have been somewhat fossorial in nature" and "The Round Island skink is a species capable of caudal autotomy", which are fascinating statements that I don't particularly understand.
Anyway, what we have here are 17 minutes or so of weird Finnish drones. There are a lot of these recordings and it's one of those genres where I can't really tell a good weird Finnish drone from a bad weird Finnish drone. The only other band on this comp I particularly recognize (outside of the heavy hitters like Bardo Pond) is Ashtray Navigations, who I did hear one song that sounded exceptionally good for an alleged "noise" artist. Haven't heard anything else up to that level though.
MC Shy-D - Hit the Skink: Mid '90s Southern hip-hop. Apparently this guy was Afrika Bambaataa's cousin. This is from his last record, a record he released three years _after_ his 1993 record "The Comeback". I guess he gets credit for not calling this record "No, really, comeback for real this time". But then he loses it for having one of the worst '90s hip-hop album covers I've seen. And you know hip-hop album covers in the '90s weren't exactly the epitome of good taste. DJ Smurf's name is as big as his on the cover. Was the presence of DJ Smurf ever actually a selling point? I doubt it somehow. Despite that I don't think this is bad, though again, my familiarity with Miami Bass is approximately zero.
Bivouac- Gecko or Skink: A grunge band apparently nominally related to Dogntank, a '00s piss-taking rock record that nobody but me has heard and which I personally like quite a lot. Anyway this record, 1995's "Full Size Boy" does seem to be quite bad and hated - RYM has an ancient review from a first wave reviewer calling them out as subpar Goo Goo Dolls knockoffs. This track is only 90 seconds and maybe isn't at all representative of their output, but I don't hear that at all in this. It's really nice, actually, a constant rhubarb of voices a la "The Murder Mystery" lending nice tension to a decent grunge instrumental, the only comprehensible words being the words "...gecko or skink" at the end.
Los Tornillos - Skink: Another one of those Bandcamp-only folks, an Edinburgh band what released a couple EPs in 2018. Nominally "surf" but this also has a really nice instrumental post-punk vibe to it. Or, wait, you know what they remind me of? The Cardiacs. Would benefit from some vocals, but nice chords.
Elephant9 - Skink: Oh these folks I know. This is Stale Storlokken's Norwegian jazz-prog trio. He's collaborated extensively with Motorpsycho and Reine Fiske. This is fortunately one of the shorter tracks and so doesn't grate too much.
Quarter Half - Skink and Cherry Blossoms: This is apparently a 2005 Japanese album on the Merry Works label. Some sort of weird underground hip-hop stuff. I don't remotely understand any of it. Weird deconstructed beats.
Charly Steiger / Cornelia Franke - Skink: OK, this looks like it was on a comp CD called Compromize on the Selektion label in 1992. It's straight out noise. Not really very good noise.
Meem - Faeynt Skink: Some Canberra beardo doing funk and disco breaks. Sounds like loading screen music for a vaguely hip 2010 video game.
Caligator - Skink: At last, a song I can give a fairly unequivocal judgement on! This is instrumental rock music. I know rock music alright, and I can say with some degree of confidence that this is not very good. This is some Blueshammer shit right here. I'm sure it makes somebody happy, but I am decidedly not the target audience here.
That's all I got for you! If I hear any other skink-related music in the future, I will make it a priority to let you know.
PS - Fun fact! Blogger's spellchecker appears not to acknowledge the existence of the skink. I smell conspiracy.
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