Raw Power vs. Poor Power.

This is a point of contention among Iggy fans. Firstly, I don't think there will be a definitive version of this album. Too many hands have been fiddling about with it, and, to be honest I think they messed up the original studio tapes - sending everything to two or three tracks instead of the 16(really??) that were available. And it shows. Secondly, it's too far down the line for it to mean quite what it did back in 1973. Punk, Post-Punk and Grunge have all come and gone and the detritus of their passing litters the contemporary landscape. That Raw Power struck a chord with so many people in so many bands over the years shall be its Legacy. And speaking of legacies, I haven't heard the legacy edition save for some of the album tracks, which all still seem a bit thin and wussy rather than the icepick in your earhole guitar stabs that first leapt out of speakers way back when.

So now we've got the internet and stuff like the Raw Power Cassette shows up.

http://theworldsamess.blogspot.com/2008/05/stooges-raw-power-uk-cassette-version.html

Now this is quite a revelation, the opening cut seems somehow lacking the immediacy of the vinyl mix, but stick with it and you'll be ok. There's bass in there and Rock Action tub-thumping is actually very audible.The overall feel of the song seems looser and more rambling but I'm pretty sure its the same take. The mix tends to lose Iggy in reverb but the bass is full and grounds Williamsons wild and screaming guitar solos and licks at the other end of the scale. Other songs I'm not so sure about, Gimme Danger could be a different take, it's certainly a much different mix with guitars and vocals all wide-panned left and right and Iggys vocals on I Need Somebody seem less traumatic. I don't know, I'm going to spend some time with both recordings although I can identify the guitars on Gimme Danger as being more raucous and sounding like they need a bit of a tune up. Also there's so much reverb on some of these that it sounds less like a studio recording than it was done in an empty Gymnasium. In fact it was something called a Universal Audio Time Cube (according to the liner notes of the Iggy Remaster- its a reverb box with a series of plastic hoses inside and a preamp) that made everything sound like it was being dunked in a toilet.

Gadgets aside, the energy of the band is undeniable and there wasn't really much else around at the time to put it up against. Bowie? Marc Bolan? Even the mighty Funhouse of three years previous sounds a lifetime away. Iggy's vocal prowess and Williamsons unhinged guitar playing really shine through the decades of dreck that threatens to swallow these up. Even on the shoddy Rough Power album, his biting guitar intro slashes through the overly reverberated drums and bass - and you can tell they tried to take it down from 11 in the botched Stooges mix, but all this does is make it sound like somebody's pissing about with the volume knob on your stereo.

The differing sound of the UK cassette have a life all of their own and sound more like a work in progress (which is perhaps what they were) rather than the ludicrously loud mash of noise that is the Iggy master, or the weedy junky waiting to knife you in the unmentionables-like sound of Bowies own version. There's considerable tape drop-out in places but overall its a definite improvement over the other mixes even though I'm sure some of these (Especially Search and Destroy) are not too physically dissimilar. I'm not even going near Rough Power(well, alright I've already mentioned it, but that was a later edit). Supposedly they are mixes by the Stooges but their origins are murky and they're not even anywhere close to third generation dupes, perhaps they are the mixes on this tape but its so hard to tell because they were recorded from an off-air Radio Broadcast, and I don't think the signal was very strong that particular evening.

Really there's not much in the way of a point to this - unless it's just to show my devotion to one particular bunch of songs that found their way onto a record at some point. Last April an album was released by the current line-up of the stooges with the recently reinstated Williamson Hacking away at the strings again after the sad loss of Ron Asheton a year or so prior to that. It's a live recording of them playing through the Raw Power set and, I suppose, it's pretty good, its loud and Mike Watt's playing the bass. But I still yearn for the weirdness of the original recordings. There's a strange sense of space within these versions that is entirely missing in the Iggy mix from late in the 90's, the way the guitar cuts in on Search and Destroy, the trailing last chorus of I Need Somebody, Williamson again as he winds up Death Trip with little licks of pain on his Les Paul and you finally take a deep breath and relax. But you know that in the studio Iggy is still bouncing off the walls and shouting at musicians for making funny noises when they're not supposed to.

Iggy Pop, James Williamson, Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton

Side 1 (This is for the cassette)

1, Search & Destroy

2, I Need Somebody

3, Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell

4, Penetration

Side 2

1, Raw Power

2, Gimme Danger

3, Shake Appeal

4, Death Trip

..and it's still good with the songs backwards.

CBS, Embassy, Sony, whatever 1973.

Requiem for the Primitive

I guess when I first heard John Fahey - God,Time & Causality - which was a recommendation from Thurston Moore on the slightly iffy emusic.com, it was one of those moments every music junkie yearns for. Time stops as the music plays and you realise that you've never heard anything quite the same before. New windows opened up to me and I spent the winter of 2005 and the spring & summer of 2006 listening to as much Fahey as i could get my hands on and on re-tuning my crappy little british guitar to try and evince new and interesting song forms from its dusty little body.
God, Time & Causality was a bit of a milestone for me because not only does it showcase Fahey's unrivalled skill as a player, but it also re-imagines some of his older songs (another version of Red Pony yadda yadda) none of which I'd heard before anyway.

It was a few years before I started buying vinyl again, but here we are anyway and I snap up pretty much any Fahey vinyl that I come across. Not found that famous Blind Joe Death album that always seems to make it into people weirdest albums lists- but I do own a copy of The Yellow Princess, Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes and, today I picked up Requia.

The Yellow Princess is really old and crappy and scratched and has been through the ringer more than once, its play is affected a little by this. Requia is not too bad really considering its age, but, to be honest it doesn't matter. This is Fahey at his most playful and annoying, delving into his record collection or playing with tapes. Side two is basically one long piece as Fahey twiddles and mixes in snatches of radio noise, music and other ambient sounds - Ambient being the operative word here, because unlike the dreaded "Ambient" of the early nineties this is actually stuff you want to listen to (well, if you like Fahey you'll probably dig it) that makes your brain utilise bits that usually go to sleep when faced with 40 minutes of guitar instrumental..

Taking drugs to make music for taking drugs to..Pt II

People have always used music for altering their being in one way or another- whether its your Grandads James Last lps or some Aztec chap slaughtering chickens in a ritual accompanied by screeching fiddle and guitar (I have the lp) or a bunch of hippies strung out on brown acid dancing in circles on the same strip of film they use in every single History Channel documentary. There's a part of our brain, that in some people is particularly well developed, that hooks onto and anticipates the beat, that actually synchronizes with the music our brain is hearing through our ears. Fascinating stuff, there's books been written about this stuff that you might want to read.
Zebra Attack - who had some sort of College Radio buzz going about them a few years ago, have produced an album that only a few people's brains will want to synchronize with. It's caught somewhere between Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth and the low brow noise-diving of Funhouse era Stooges. The opening cut - Sonic Blood is a pretty heavy, driving beat with rather large Bass sound that sets you up for whats to come. The production here isn't really the best and it does sound at times as if they just set up in the studio and played. It gets quite loud at times and the quality suffers a little but if you're playing this pretty loud anyway then thats not really a problem. Trans Missions Control, band two, is a bit jammy but then its a comedown from the first- actually the whole album kind of rolls like waves of psychedelic mushrooms with each new sensation getting a bit stronger than the next.
I've been listening to this kind of stuff for quite a while, and comparing bands always seems to me to be a little unfair. The good stuff on here is really quite good, and it stands up. As i mentioned before the production suffers a little at times but thats ok - some of my favourite LP's are soundboard recordings, and the long stretch of Join Compact Heart that fills out side Two, really didn't need to be there- but then maybe I'm just not listening with the right sort of chemical assistance.

The Zebra Attack - Lightweight Into Earblocking Noises

Side One:

1 Sonic Blood
2 Trans Mission Control
3 Secret Wave
4 Capture

Side Two:

1 Situation Sonic
2 Join Compact Heart
3 Organize Powers

2003 Soundexploder Records

Getz your listening head on, Mr Gilberto.

Mrs Doyle, our latest Feline friend, is very small and has taken to using duvets as a makeshift toilet. This isn't funny, although our duvets are now very clean, so anyway, I run an errand to the pet store to pick up some Cat Pee smell and stain remover and find myself listening to Lalo Schifrins totally groovy score to Bullitt, and being cool. Or at least trying to give the appearance of cool- its hard not to with that music. But my car isn't a Mustang although it does make rumbling noises but those, I think, have something to do with it being from the early 90's and decrepit.
It's my wife whom I have to thank for my listening to and appreciating records like this one, namely Stand Getz and Joao Gilberto's Getz/Gilberto - which is not the greatest titled album in the world but Stan Getz makes everything alright. Here's an album that is exactly like sipping a potent but deceivingly fruity Cocktail on a warm summer evening, bathed in the rays of the setting sun, and there are no mosquitoes, its not overly humid and you're wearing suede slippers. Gilbertos music is fairly new to me, that swinging, Bossa Nova groove, and Astrud Gilbertos gently caressing vocals reassure you that all is right with the world. All we need now are some fireflies dancing out across the lawn- oh, there they go.
Easy Listening is something you grow into, and, for chrissakes be careful- before long you could be listening to the Tijuana Brass or even Liberace, without the faintest sense of irony at all!

There are several ways to avoid this happening:

1. Reach for the Gin, consume one or two fingers' of this combined with ice and a little lime.
2. Place Getz/Gilberto on the turntable and set it rolling.
3. Dance to the music. If you can only manage it standing up, fine- but don't spill the drink. Sitting down is better.
4. When your best friend comes over and tries to offload his/her easy listening record collection on you, just say "No thanks baby, I'm cool, you dig?"

You dig, baby?

Where but for Caravan would I be?

Caravan have always been one of those bands that I can come back to again and again without their having left a bad taste in my mouth after far too much time being devoted to them. You know, that album that always seems to be on the turntable and gets played on constant rotation until your neighbours, or your spouse, or somebody from the council tells you to stop it and put on something else?

There's an intensity to their sound but it's all so laid back that I find myself making tea and eating custard creams rather than rolling a spliff and drifting off to some place dreamy in the company of say, hurm, Daevid Allen and Gong's teapot shaped fling Pixies. Granted- there are some extended jammy bits in the music, even on this, their First proper Long Player - but it's the sound that gets me, so far removed but not dissimilar to such ethereal twaddle as the first Procul Harum album, or Syds trippy Floydisms, or anything else from the land of 1968 to be honest.

There are people out there, and I've sat around their grubby bedsits arguing the fact, who place the "Canterbury Scene" in a different sphere to most other late-sixties proggy-psychedelia, and then raise it up onto some collector-scum pedestal and pass on information to you about the bands that they probably made up in the queue at Boots waiting to pay for some Benylin, but which sounds impressive and ever so slightly Arch.. But I'm starting to drift, I think..

Anyway, there's a point to all of this. Namely that I seem to spend so much time in squalid little shops rubbing shoulders with other 25-39 year old men hastily flipping through racks of tatty vinyl, looking for something special, something lost but, unfortunately most of what I'm looking at is absolute cock you couldn't give away (but there are websites devoted to such inane codswallop) but I want to share with you, O unknown browser of internetness - those groovy little platters which make my heart twitter and send me reaching, regretfully for my almost always empty wallet.

So the first album we're looking at is the first album by Caravan. Its got drums and guitars and lots of Organ, and it's some kind of audiophile Japanese import, and I don't think it had ever been played, which is downright shameful!

Boo to you who never touch stylus to swirly black grooves for fear of diminishing a records value! I spurn you with my foot!

Side One:
1 Place of My Own
2 Ride
3 Policeman
4 Love Song with Flute
5 Cecil Rons

Side Two
1 Magic Man
2 Grandma's Lawn
3 Where But for Caravan Would I

Polydor records 1968

Caravan were:

Richard Coughlan - Drums
Pye Hastings - Guitar, Bass Guitar, Singing
David Sinclair - Organ, Singing
Richard Sinclair - Bass Guitar, Guitar, Singing