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sometimesmylifeissoeerie
Fourth Love
198 Posts |
 Posted - 09/08/2009 : 02:00:21
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I'm well into a great biography of Nick Drake by Patrick Humphries, and on page 68 he goes over ND's favorite LPs in 1968, and listed are:
Love's Forever Changes
Van Morrison's Astral Weeks
Fifth Dimension's Magic Garden
Unfortunately, there's no index for the book so I can't tell if there are any more references to it yet, but ND's use of strings in some of the concerts he played in college at that point show FC's influence on his music.
A good example is the magical "River Man", which wouldn't be as magical without the great string arrangement by Harry Robinson. |
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ThomasGalasso
Old Love
USA
712 Posts |
Posted - 09/08/2009 : 02:15:32
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Joe Morris
Old Love
3491 Posts |
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John9
Old Love
United Kingdom
2154 Posts |
Posted - 09/08/2009 : 15:34:49
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It is good to see Magic Garden in there - it is too often overlooked in music writing - as is the brilliant songwriter responsible for it.......Jim(my) Webb. |
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scully
Fourth Love
United Kingdom
217 Posts |
Posted - 09/08/2009 : 19:15:42
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I thought the Patrick Humphries book on Nick Drake was OK, but the Trevor Dann one was better, bit more depth maybe. I think the best piece of writing 'about' Nick though was the Ian MacDonald (who wrote Revolution in the Head) essay in the Dec 1999 issue of Mojo. It's also in his book 'The People's Music' (which has a good essay on Forever Changes as well). Maybe given recent events on here I'll qualify that -- I think it's good :)
The Nick Drake piece is here as well:
http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/exiled1.html
Jimmy (or Jim or whatever) Webb is great -- I only recently got Magic Garden and it's really good. I also rate Sunshower by Thelma Houston -- another 'song cycle' of Jim Webb beauties. BTW if you ever get the chance to see Jimmy live you should - he's a great performer as well. |
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mikeb
Old Love
United Kingdom
516 Posts |
Posted - 09/08/2009 : 19:43:09
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quote:
Originally posted by scully
Jimmy (or Jim or whatever) Webb is great -- I only recently got Magic Garden and it's really good. I also rate Sunshower by Thelma Houston -- another 'song cycle' of Jim Webb beauties. BTW if you ever get the chance to see Jimmy live you should - he's a great performer as well.
I agree, really enjoyed his solo live show about three years ago in London.
He's touring the UK later this year, not solo this time but with his sons, the Webb Brothers, as well as his father and other musicians. Looks like they've cut back on some dates, the London one has been switched from the Lyceum to Union Chapel, which is a great venue though it's unreserved seating and I'd got some real good seats at the Lyceum, guess I'd better get there early.
Dates on their Myspace page and also a new recording of Highwayman from the forthcoming Jimmy Webb and the Webb Brothers album:
http://www.myspace.com/jimmywebbthewebbbrothers |
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caryne
Old Love
United Kingdom
1520 Posts |
Posted - 09/08/2009 : 20:05:47
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quote:
Originally posted by mikeb
quote:
Originally posted by scully
Jimmy (or Jim or whatever) Webb is great -- I only recently got Magic Garden and it's really good. I also rate Sunshower by Thelma Houston -- another 'song cycle' of Jim Webb beauties. BTW if you ever get the chance to see Jimmy live you should - he's a great performer as well.
I agree, really enjoyed his solo live show about three years ago in London.
He's touring the UK later this year, not solo this time but with his sons, the Webb Brothers, as well as his father and other musicians. Looks like they've cut back on some dates, the London one has been switched from the Lyceum to Union Chapel, which is a great venue though it's unreserved seating and I'd got some real good seats at the Lyceum, guess I'd better get there early.
Dates on their Myspace page and also a new recording of Highwayman from the forthcoming Jimmy Webb and the Webb Brothers album:
http://www.myspace.com/jimmywebbthewebbbrothers
I have to agree with this recomendation, Jimmy Webb is a great live perfomer, as much for his story telling as for his music. I saw him a couple of years back and he had some great Richard Harris stories!! |
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scully
Fourth Love
United Kingdom
217 Posts |
Posted - 09/08/2009 : 20:42:38
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quote:
Originally posted by mikeb
quote:
Originally posted by scully
Jimmy (or Jim or whatever) Webb is great -- I only recently got Magic Garden and it's really good. I also rate Sunshower by Thelma Houston -- another 'song cycle' of Jim Webb beauties. BTW if you ever get the chance to see Jimmy live you should - he's a great performer as well.
I agree, really enjoyed his solo live show about three years ago in London.
He's touring the UK later this year, not solo this time but with his sons, the Webb Brothers, as well as his father and other musicians. Looks like they've cut back on some dates, the London one has been switched from the Lyceum to Union Chapel, which is a great venue though it's unreserved seating and I'd got some real good seats at the Lyceum, guess I'd better get there early.
Dates on their Myspace page and also a new recording of Highwayman from the forthcoming Jimmy Webb and the Webb Brothers album:
http://www.myspace.com/jimmywebbthewebbbrothers
Ah cool -- thanks Mike -- I'll try and get some tickets. I've got the first Webb Brothers album, it was pretty good as I recall. Seen him a couple of time, both in London (both in Hammersmith I think, but different venues) but can't recall exact details. Great shows though. |
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John9
Old Love
United Kingdom
2154 Posts |
Posted - 09/08/2009 : 22:14:08
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I am so very heartened by all the appreciative words here for Jimmy Webb. I saw him deliver a solo concert at the Cafe Royal (a small, intimate venue just off London's Piccadilly) in 1994. But there is also a 1971 performance he did with a full band and orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall........it is available on a 2CD set entitled Archive/Live and is well worth checking out...especially for his cover of the classic Frank Zappa song My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama.
Scully -I'm glad you've mentioned Sunshower by Thelma Houston....the strings on Jumpin Jack Flash and Pocket Full of Keys still give me that tingle factor...to say nothing of the beautiful title song. I forked out an absolute king's ransom several years ago for a Japanese import copy. |
Edited by - John9 on 09/08/2009 22:39:16 |
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The sweet disorder
Fourth Love
United Kingdom
218 Posts |
Posted - 10/08/2009 : 09:43:30
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Hey Scully
Agree that the Ian Macdonald essay on Nick Drake is a fantastic piece of writing although I do have reservations about it when placing in context of what happened afterwards. When reading that piece, to me it says more about Ian Macdonald rather than Nick Drake if you know what I mean??
The record review on Forever Changes is a good read as well. I'm pretty sure it appeared in Uncut after one of the re-releases but of course I may be wrong...... |
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scully
Fourth Love
United Kingdom
217 Posts |
Posted - 10/08/2009 : 15:39:35
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scullyquote:
Originally posted by The sweet disorder
Hey Scully
Agree that the Ian Macdonald essay on Nick Drake is a fantastic piece of writing although I do have reservations about it when placing in context of what happened afterwards. When reading that piece, to me it says more about Ian Macdonald rather than Nick Drake if you know what I mean??
The record review on Forever Changes is a good read as well. I'm pretty sure it appeared in Uncut after one of the re-releases but of course I may be wrong......
Yep -- I know exactly what you mean, it's obviously a very personal piece, and Nick Drake's music (and life) obviously had a major impact on Ian MacDonald. Sometimes the best music wrting can be like that though, written more as a piece of 'art' (if you like) in itself rather than just a factual piece of reporting. I did think Revolution in the Head was great too -- really nothing else you can say about the Fabs after that.
The FC piece may well have been in Uncut -- that book is a collection of MacDonald's magazine articles, so thay all appeared somewhere else first. |
Edited by - scully on 10/08/2009 15:45:48 |
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John9
Old Love
United Kingdom
2154 Posts |
Posted - 10/08/2009 : 17:06:18
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"Safe in your place deep in the earth
That's when they'll know what you were really worth"
...........from Fruit Tree off Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left |
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rocker
Old Love
USA
3606 Posts |
Posted - 10/08/2009 : 21:38:50
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| so scully...any way you could paraphrase that essay on FC?..i'm not familiar with it....I'd be real interested.....what was the point that the writer was making?...... |
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scully
Fourth Love
United Kingdom
217 Posts |
Posted - 10/08/2009 : 22:39:24
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Uncut 2001:
One of the many misleading ways in which writers born since the Sixties view that enigmatic decade stems from the modern habit of judging success on sales. Because Forever Changes failed to woo the mass market in the USA, contemporary pundits conclude that few heard the record until many years later. This anachronism is based on two overlooked factors.
Firstly: tastes, and hence amounts of radio play, vary from place to place. Tickling the palates of deejays on the UK's mid-Sixties pirate radios, Love's arch baroque-rock became familiar enough in Britain for Forever Changes to ascend to Number 24 on the LP chart in February 1968 – quite an achievement for an act that never left Los Angeles, especially up against Sgt Pepper, Axis Bold As Love, John Wesley Harding, The Who Sell Out, the latest by The Monkees and The Bee Gees, and Their Satanic Majesties Request by a group calling itself The Rolling Stones.
Secondly: in those days, there was a very wide distinction between the mass-market pop buyer and those who followed what was then called "underground" or "progressive" music. Every school in the UK had its hip kids who'd hang out at the local jazz-blues clubs and transatlantic import shops, listening to key radio shows and swapping recommendations for records which the mainstream knew nothing about. Many of these fans became the musicians or writers of the next generation; hence the joking axiom that while The Velvet Underground's albums sold only in thousands during their time, everyone who bought them formed a band. Cultural impact isn't measured by quantity of sales but by the quality of those impacted upon.
Why, though, did Forever Changes fail to crack its home market? Superficially, the album is almost ingratiatingly lyrical. Its failure to convince mainstream America probably derives from its ambiguous lyrics and the awkward attitudes they express. In truth, Forever Changes isn't a "nice" album. Remastered with extra tracks and out-takes. Love's showpiece will appeal to modern listeners for its rococo finery, but also for precisely what turned off the average American ear in 1968: its sour reflections on the fateful era of the so-called Sunset Strip riots in Los Angeles during late 1966.
The latter motif bears on another way in which modern pundits misconstrue the creative intentions of the Sixties counterculture. Nowadays, the most upsetting thing in the lives of the average big act will be a promoter's failure to fulfil the demands of their dressing-room requirements. In the mid-to-late Sixties, the new idiom of rock was a revolutionary force and in California things came close to war on the streets. Met by lumbering over-reaction from a badly spooked establishment, the radicalised young of the West Coast graduated rapidly from airy celebration to earnest rebellion.
The Sunset Strip riots were where it first turned nasty. Ben Edmonds, in his notes for this reissue, quotes the closing lines of 'The Red Telephone' ("They're locking them up today/They're throwing away the key/I wonder who it will be tomorrow, you or me?"), commenting that "this may read like standard-issue hippie paranoia" and adding "The voice repeating the Sixties mantra 'freedom' makes the concept sound like the babbling of a fool." In fact, hippie "paranoia" in Los Angeles was for the most part a rational response to the aggression of the LAPD, while the "freedom " chant at the end of 'The Red Telephone', based on Peter Weiss' Marat-Sade, was an ambiguous statement designed by Arthur Lee to express both his pessimistic irony and a genuine (and justified) appeal for tolerance.
Emerging in parallel with the core hippie scene in San Francisco's Haight district, LA's "freaks" and folk-rockers began to "hang" on the Strip in 1965, gathering in the stretch between Clark and Hilldale where, within a few blocks, clustered clubs like Pandora's Box, Gazarri's, London Fog, and The Whisky-A-Go-Go. Nearby off Santa Monica Boulevard was The Troubador, the haunt of The Byrds and The Mamas And The Papas. Also close was The Laurel Canyon Country Store, celebrated by The Doors in 'Love Street' as "the place where the creatures meet". Often glimpsed among the crowds of long-haired kids who, by summer 1966, had turned the Strip into a 24/7 sidewalk party, were local celebrity musicians: Phil Spector, PF Sloane, The Turtles, Barry McGuire, Buffalo Springfield, Tim Buckley, Sonny And Cher, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, The Doors, The Factory (Lowell George and Richie Hayward), Captain Beefheart. The Beau Brummels, The Rising Sons (Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder) and, of course, Arthur Lee and Love. Unlike today's scene in which "artists" queue to insult each other, the Sixties rock pioneers were generally on convivial terms. Love hung out with Buffalo Springfield. Bryan Maclean began his career in The Byrds' retinue. Arthur Lee was friends with Neil Young and Jim Morrison, as well as a scene figure in his own right – until the Strip's freewheeling ethos was crushed in November.
Caught napping in August 1965 by the ultraviolent outburst in LA's 29th district (the open-plan black ghetto of Watts), the authorities were determined not to let the burgeoning counterculture in their city get out of hand. Asked by retailers on Sunset Strip for the round-the-clock babble of hippie buskers and dope-sellers to be curtailed, city hall decreed a curfew. When the kids obliviously declined to conform, the police cleared the sidewalks, none too gently. The resulting anger ensured a rerun of these events, and another after that, and so on. Meanwhile, all the local rock groups were busted and moves were made to close the clubs. When, in November, ageing screen actor Ronald Reagan won the governorship by a landslide, the emboldened forces of conservatism hastened to conclude their clean-up with a minor police riot. Shocked at this fascist piggery, a young white middle-class rock star in the making, Stephen Stills, composed the sternly admonitory 'For What It's Worth', while Sonny Bono, opportunistically roaming the area with a tape-recorder, cobbled together 'Sunset Symphony', a collage of street discussions, crowd disturbances, and groovy music.
Arthur Lee monitored this debacle from his house on Lookout Mountain above Laurel Canyon. Born poor of a mixed-race marriage, he understandably felt somewhat apart from the mostly white and well-off youths mixing it with law-enforcement officers down on the Strip. At any rate, he didn't get involved with these face-offs, instead taking elements of what he observed and turning them into head-game metaphors, producing a sequence of outwardly appealing songs full of harshness, paranoia, and impatience – as it were, making the political personal. Essentially a contumacious spectator, Lee liked his grass and acid, whose sensitizing effects may have allowed him to anticipate the gloomy future in the apocalyptic hocus-pocus of '7 And 7 Is' (recorded in June 1966 when the police clampdown was just beginning).
An apathetic Love, half of them by then on heroin, sleepily gathered to work on Forever Changes in June-September 1967. At first, they were too stoned to cohere and the first track to be recorded – 'The Daily Planet', a tour de force of psychedelic meta-reportage and the most driving performance on the album – was arranged by Neil Young and played mainly by Phil Spector's studio band, The Wrecking Crew. Shaken, the group sat up and focused for the seven remaining sessions. Apart from the single 'Your Mind And We Belong Together' and its capricious B-side 'Laughing Stock' (both of them included here), this was the last time Love played at maximum revs.
Considered as sound and form. Forever Changes is an education in more ways than one. Some moments – such as the low strings rising like storm clouds against the bright keening mariachi trumpet on the wind-winged 'Alone Again Or' – are indelibly beautiful. Several of the songs – such as, again, 'Alone Again Or' with its long pauses for a recurring running soliloquy on flamenco guitar – are fabricated with genuine brilliance; others – like the self-sabotaging 'The Good Humor Man' – with sly deception. The album, which resembles a predesigned song-cycle, has the feeling of a theatre piece; 'Old Man' might be out of a Broadway musical. The use of acoustic finger-picking to generate and characterise melody, harmony, and mood is a lesson in itself. In fact, the only obvious musical blot on Forever Changes is the self-righteous Gibson shriek of the West Coast electric style on 'Live And Let Live', whose last solo persists until you feel like strangling the player (probably Lee himself). As for lyrical slip-ups, "The snot has caked against my pants" is fairly egregious (although some claim to like it), while "Write the rules/In the sky/But ask your leaders why" is wincingly banal.
Though musically still respectable. Forever Changes is less easy to enjoy than it once was. We no longer live in the urgent aura of the Sixties, and the cold-to-scary tone of some of Lee's lyrics requires excusing in this post-confrontation era (as does his presumptuous habit of stressing certain words as if we'd otherwise fail to notice them). While his intelligence is obvious, he can be supercilious and there's a prissy quality to his mind, audible in the effetely contrived design of 'Maybe The People Would Be The Times' and mirrored in the occasional preciousness of David Angel's neo-classical string-charts. There was an edge of sneering arrogance in some countercultural figures – generally the younger ones (Lee was then 22). Older heads like Ken Kesey and the Dead had the "love trip" in their bones and were noticeably mellower.
In fairness, the hectoring mood of menace and vexation in songs like 'The Red Telephone' and 'A House Is Not A Motel' (with its truculent duel of siren-shrill guitars) arose more from Sunset Strip in late 1966 than from any morbidity in Lee's imagination; here, though, his propensity for paranoia becomes oppressive. As for purer stuff, try 'Andmoreagain', allegedly an ode to one of the "creatures" of Laurel Canyon. However skewed his aim, Lee's talent is never in doubt.
Meanwhile, his foil Bryan Maclean plays the lyric innocent – the fool on Lookout Mountain, the Good Humor Man. The key lines in Forever Changes come early – in the second verse of Maclean's 'Alone Again' (to which Lee appended the word "Or"): "You know that I could be in love with almost everyone/I think that people are the greatest fun." If you don't get this, you probably need to hear the album. Others can take it or leave it.
If its lapses in comportment diminish its artistic claims, Forever Changes is at least vindicated by the bold ambition of its tense but ultimately trumpet-triumphant finale, 'You Set The Scene': "This is the time and life that I am living/And I'll face each day with a smile/For the time that I've been given's such a little while/And the things that I must do consist of more than style...lit is time, time, time, time, time..." |
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sometimesmylifeissoeerie
Fourth Love
198 Posts |
Posted - 11/08/2009 : 00:31:55
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Yeah, meanwhile Ian MacDonald went to Cambridge at the same time ND went there and said "I wouldn't say I knew Nick at all, really. Though I was in the same places as him quite a few times...I actually spoke to him on only two or three occasions."
Real prescient, astute judge of musical talent there.
Even though he went to school with him and saw him perform informally, MacDonald was oblivious to ND's talent!
Give me the Ian MacDonald of King Crimson's first LP anyday! |
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caryne
Old Love
United Kingdom
1520 Posts |
Posted - 11/08/2009 : 01:15:48
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quote:
Originally posted by sometimesmylifeissoeerie
Yeah, meanwhile Ian MacDonald went to Cambridge at the same time ND went there and said "I wouldn't say I knew Nick at all, really. Though I was in the same places as him quite a few times...I actually spoke to him on only two or three occasions."
Real prescient, astute judge of musical talent there.
Even though he went to school with him and saw him perform informally, MacDonald was oblivious to ND's talent!
Give me the Ian MacDonald of King Crimson's first LP anyday!
Well, to be fair, most people seemed oblivious to Drake's talent when he was alive, it wasn't until years later that he became widely recognised and then, of course, everyone said they had loved him all along |
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Nick Drake Dug FC!
