Pink Floyd: Pompeii, The Wall, and Syd

For my birthday, my brother got me multiple items, including a tribute album devoted to Pink Floyd The Wall, done by various stoner rock bands, The Wall (Redux).   For the most part the bands did a fairly decent job of reminding me about this album.  The lyrics came back to me despite not having listened to the album or watched the movie in a long time.

I had an earlier blog, “Which One Is Pink?”, but over the years I’ve had occasion to rethink some of what I said and I’d like to revisit this topic. 

Pink Floyd is a band which can be divided into three phases.  Working backwards, the least substantial is the third – New Shit Without Roger - with David Gilmour (guitar & vocals), Rick Wright (keyboards) and Nick Mason (drums) continuing on without Roger Waters (bass & vocals) for three albums, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), The Division Bell (1994), and The Endless River (11/14).  They have much of the musical style of the prior phase without any of the pretension or strong themes which the Waters-era material had.  Fans tend to prefer The Division Bell and often consider A Momentary Lapse of Reason to be a David Gilmour solo album which happens to have Mason and Wright contributing.  I like them both.  I wouldn’t consider them any better than Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, or Animals, but as far as I’m concerned they do beat Waters’ self-indulgent critique of the Falklands War, The Final Cut, the last Floyd album with him.  The Endless River, released in November 2014, is half-finished fragments cleaned up a bit and apparently intended as “this is it, this is what we’ve got.”  It belongs with the other two by default rather than quality. 

Before that, you have the Weird Shit and the Classic Shit.  Each is capped off with a movie.

Weird Shit:  Piper at the Gates of Dawn (8/67), A Saucerful of Secrets (6/68), More (6/69), Ummagumma (11/69), Atom Heart Mother (10/70), Meddle (11/71), and Obscured by Clouds (6/72).  Movie:  Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii.  Rather than separate out Piper as I did before, I’d say that, notwithstanding Syd Barrett’s departure almost immediately after, it still belongs together with the subsequent albums of this period.  We’re talking about psychedelic music: long and complex, material which is best enjoyed under the influence of marijuana, if not LSD or mushrooms, although by now I’ve learned to enjoy it in straight edge format.  My favorite would be the album with the cow on the cover, Atom Heart Mother, which also has the killer duo on the B-side, “Summer ‘68” (Rick Wright) and “Fat Old Sun” (David Gilmour).   Gilmour himself described this period as “weird shit”, and Mason laughed that “the record company had no idea what we were doing.” 

These songs can be seen performed by the band in Pompeii, Italy (right outside Naples and next to the famous Mount Vesuvius) along with clips of the band at Abbey Road Studios working on Dark Side of the Moon.  Starting with a VHS copy in August 1990, I got it on DVD as soon as it came out in that format and watched it several times with my Brazilian ex-GF Leila, with whom I also saw Roger Waters in concert in summer 2000.  The interviews with the band members are also fun to watch, Waters of course being the most arrogant and Gilmour smiling as he denies that the band is still “drug-oriented” (“You can trust us.”)

Classic Shit:  Dark Side of the Moon (3/73), Wish You Were Here (9/75), Animals (1/77), The Wall (11/79), and The Final Cut (3/83).  Movie:  The Wall.    This is the material you’ll hear on the radio.  Arguably much more enjoyable to listen to while high, it’s still well within the tolerance of the straight edge crowd.  Gilmour’s guitar gives it a strong bite and keeps it from drifting too far into a mellow, prog zone.  In fact, relative to the rest of their material I’d say The Wall is pretty much a classic rock album rather than a prog album.

I started watching The Wall in college, including a few movie theater appearances (don’t think I ever saw “Pompeii” in a movie theater).  Oddly, unlike Pompeii, the band itself makes no on-camera appearance, the persona of “Pink” being played by Bob Geldof.  There’s some excellent animation by Gerald Scarfe, who – by the way – ended up marrying Jane Asher, the long-time girlfriend of Paul McCartney.  The other funny thing is that lately Waters has been quite vocal in his condemnation and denunciation of Israel, leading to the obvious suspicion of latent anti-Semitism, so it makes the crossed hammers and Pink-as-Dictator sequences much more intriguing….

Gilmour on Guitar.  I recently picked up a live DVD of the Moody Blues playing Days of Future Passed in its entirety, along with more of their popular songs.  Justin Hayward plays his familiar red Gibson ES-335, but behind him is a classic Marshall stack.   Lo and behold, he has it set on crunch, and has some heavy soloing going on – not what you would expect with a prog band like them.

Likewise, it’s easy to forget that Pink Floyd has some stunning guitar soloing.  The solo in “Atom Heart Mother” and “Fat Old Sun” from Atom Heart Mother, the solos in “Time” and “Money” from Dark Side of the Moon, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, both sections, from Wish You Were Here, “Dogs” from Animals, and of course “Comfortably Numb” from The Wall.   His solos are blues-based and highly memorable.  Tune in on this: “of course Mother’s gonna help build the Wall…”

Syd Barrett.   Having pulled Piper back into the fold, I don’t want to devote an entire blog to Syd, so I’d rather do justice to him here.  Before his LSD-fueled meltdown in 1968, Syd was the creative focus of the band – long before Waters stepped up to the plate.  While the Grateful Dead were doing their Acid Tests in California, a similar scene was developing in London, with Syd’s Floyd acting as the house band for the London version of the Acid Tests.  Piper at the Gates of Dawn has two major psychedelic songs, “Astronomy Domine” and “Interstellar Overdrive” and the rest are fairly whimsical, e.g. “Lucifer Sam”, “The Gnome”, and “Bike”. 

In between his own consumption, and “friends” doing him a favor by dosing him with LSD without his knowledge or consent, Syd wound up frying his brain on LSD.  He didn’t go to rehab like Roky Erikson of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, but he did wind up in seclusion living with his mom.  By that point he was semi-comatose or repeating the same word over and over again, making live performances almost impossible.  Gilmour did help him put out his solo albums, The Madcap Laughs (1/70) and Barrett (11/70) – Opel (10/88) collects all the unreleased material as a compilation - and he made an unannounced studio visit while the band were in the studio recording Wish You Were Here (1975), including their tribute to him, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.  Nick Mason, asked in an interview if fans ask about Waters’ absence at their Momentary Lapse of Reason shows (1987-89), replied that they get far more questions about Syd. 

Live.   I saw the Momentary Lapse of Reason Tour at RFK (6/88), followed by Paris (Bercy) (7/89).  Years later I saw Roger Waters solo tour at Nissan Pavilion (7/00) and more recently, Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets at DAR Constitution Hall (4/19).   All shows were highly enjoyable, and Syd’s picture was up on the screen for “Shine On”.   Now I have a nosebleed seat ticket, the cheapest available, for Waters’ upcoming summer tour.  I always say, if you like a band’s music, see them live, and Pink Floyd/David Gilmour/Roger Waters are no exception.   If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor while they’re still around….

MetALiCCa

I saw Metallica’s second orchestral collaboration, S&M 2, on Wednesday night at the movie theater, and enjoyed about half of it:  the half corresponding to their material from 1983 to 1991, which was the beginning and the end of the show.  It occurred to me that Metallica has indulged in a few affectations over the years.   These are represented by the A, L, C and C uppercase.

Acoustic.   I got their Helping Hands album recorded earlier this year.  Of 12 songs, a full third, 4, were covers:  “When A Blind Man Cries” (Deep Purple), “Please Don’t Judas Me” (Nazareth), “Turn the Page” (Bob Seger), and “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” (Blue Oyster Cult).  The remaining songs were “Disposable Heroes”, “The Unforgiven III”, “Bleeding Me”, “Nothing Else Matters”, “All Within My Hands”, “Enter Sandman”, “The Four Horsemen”, and “Hardwired”.

I’m getting really fed up with acoustic albums, and I think we can blame Tesla, a band I’d otherwise be praising, for this thanks to their Five Man Acoustical Jam. 

My assessment is that if a song was originally electric it will not sound any better as an acoustic song. 

I suppose I should distinguish songs which were acoustic from the beginning, and metal bands are surprisingly competent at doing so.   That being the case, their electric songs still work better in their original format than pretentiously reduced to acoustic parameters.   When it comes to bands’ ability to write original material in the acoustic format, I give Alice in Chains & Jerry Cantrell the top honors, with SAP and Jar of Flies being superlative.  Everyone else should stick to electric.

Here’s an idea: instead of this acoustic crap, how about taking songs which were originally acoustic and make electric, heavy versions of those?   Go for it! 

Live.  Actually, I can’t really call live albums an affectation.   For that reason I’ll give them a pass on that.  In fact, I’ll give them credit:  they’re releasing all of their shows from the most recent tour as live albums, not just a single live album per tour.  They haven’t matched their San Francisco comrades the Grateful Dead policy of playing a different set each night; their sets are about 80% identical night by night with 2-3 slots as wildcards.  [Dead & Company, the current incarnation of Jerry Garcia’s classic band, are also releasing all shows on MP3 and CD, as Metallica are.]  I picked up the May 2017 show at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, which is the show my brother and I saw for the Hardwired tour.  Of course I already had Live Shit: Binge & Purge, recorded on the Black Album tour. 

More recently, they have Live at Grimey’s, which is setlist heavy on older tunes – “Fuel” being the only one from later than Metallica.  In fact, it’s excellent enough to warrant sharing:  “No Remorse”, “Fuel”, “Harvester of Sorrow”, “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, “Master of Puppets”, “Sad But True”, “Motorbreath”, and “Seek and Destroy”.  THREE songs from Kill ‘Em All!  This show was the night before their Bonnaroo show in 2008, which itself was a remarkable set:  

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/metallica/2008/great-stage-park-manchester-tn-53d6dfc9.html.  Sadly, only one track from that show (“Sad But True”) made it to recording.  We’ll have to enjoy the Grimey’s set instead…

Covers.  Yet again, comrades Tesla did this with Real To Reel, but they did this clever thing of releasing the first disc normally with the second disc picked up on the tour, which of course I attended (fall 2007).  I actually got Frank Hannon, who had been running the concession stand at the Ram’s Head Live at that show (aside from actually performing) to sign my CD insert – after he gave me disc 2.

Anyhow.   Metallica has been doing covers for awhile, and its Garage Inc did a remarkable job of a full new disc (#1) and compiling previous covers on Disc 2.  That’s in addition to the Garage Days Re-Revisited EP, the first endeavor with bassist Jason Newsted.   

Classical.  It’s now been twenty years since Metallica’s first classical collaboration, S&M, which gave us “No Leaf Clover”.  I have it on CD and have listened to it a few times.  At that time ReLoad was the most recent album, so of 21 songs, 7 were from Load and ReLoad, or one third. 

Now there’s S&M 2, twenty years after the first S&M show, a live show with an orchestra backing them up.  They’ll be adding another night, 10/30, on which you can see them in a local movie theater.  I would imagine when the run is over, the soundtrack (DVD/CD/MP3) will be available.  

Here’s what prompted me to do this blog, because I came to two conclusions based on this, one specific to Metallica and the other more general.

Metallica.   I liked Hardwired when it came out, considering it a change from the prior albums, which is to say Load, ReLoad, St Anger, and Death Magnetic, a series I’ll refer to as the Loadwired albums.  However, when it came to the middle of this set of S&M 2, I realized something.  After “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, the band plays nine Loadwired songs, including three (“Confusion”, “Moth into Flame”, and “Halo on Fire”) from Hardwired, before returning to “Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth)” in set 2.  All nine sounded equally “meh” to me.  Now, “meh” for Metallica isn’t crap, manure, commercial, or unendurable, but with so many other awesome songs on Kill ‘Em All through Metallica, I could do without any of the Loadwired songs taking up place in the set. 

And I could not aesthetically distinguish the three from Hardwired from the other six of that era.  That being the case, Metallica (aka the Black Album), is the cutoff point for the material I’m going to listen to on a regular basis and enjoy.  The Loadwired stuff is to be endured periodically and far less often, and I do have all of it on CD. 

On the other hand, some people arbitrarily stick with the Cliff Burton material, meaning you have only three albums to choose from – Kill ‘Em All, Ride the Lightning, and Master of Puppets.  It also means you’re going to miss the 9 excellent songs from …And Justice For All and twelve of Metallica.  This includes “One”.  Because you’re too pissy about “The Unforgiven” and “Nothing Else Matters”, you’ll also miss out on “Harvester of Sorrow” and “Sad But True”. 

Hey, it’s your loss.

General.  The more I hear these live albums where a band performs its material with an orchestra, the more I consider these to be an affectation. 

For songs I already liked, the orchestra really doesn’t add much more.  And for songs – like those Loadwired songs – which I never cared for to begin with, the orchestra doesn’t turn it into a song I now like. 

Let’s go a step further and briefly address bands releasing original classical music of their own (which disqualifies ELP’s Pictures at an Exhibition, by Modest Mussorgsky).

Atom Heart Mother.  I love this Pink Floyd album, although the band itself doesn’t.  Gilmour has been playing “Fat Old Sun” in his solo sets these days, and Waters has been playing “If”, but that’s side two, isn’t it?  And we all love Wright’s contribution, “Summer ‘68”.   I suppose we should say it’s the “Atom Heart Mother Suite” which takes up all of side A that the band really detests as overindulgent and pretentious, but I listen to the album in its entirety on a regular basis.  Hell, the album cover alone, with the cow, is distinctive and noteworthy. 

Deep Purple can claim the distinction of Concerto for Group and Orchestra, from September 1969, not only the first musical operation of Deep Purple Mark II which had finally formed that summer – Rod Evans and Nick Simper shown the door, and Ian Gillan and Roger Glover finally abandoning Episode Six and joining up – but also one of the first rock & orchestra collaborations.  Mind you, this wasn’t Deep Purple’s regular material – which at that point would have been exclusively Mark I material anyway – but original classical music written by keyboardist Jon Lord expressly for this project.  I have it on DVD and watched it once.  Blackmore plays his red ES335.  It’s done at the Royal Albert Hall.  It was interesting but hardly had me compelled to watch it again.

Days of Future Passed.  The Moody Blues album deserves credit as well, and predates Concerto by two years (1967).  In this case the orchestra was real – the London Festival Orchestra – but the material was expressly written and recorded with the orchestra ab initio.  And this is an album I’ll listen to far more often than Concerto.  The Blues themselves have played the album live in its entirety fairly recently (2017) with the full orchestra.  I can venture to say that Concerto didn’t get a repeat performance, and with Jon Lord resting in peace and the rest of the band close to packing it in, isn’t likely to in the near future.

How did we get to Atom Heart Mother and Days of Future Passed from Metallica???  Classical music, two S&M performances.  Given that we know Metallica has no objection to playing covers, perhaps S&M 3 should add in Floyd and the Moody Blues.  Think about it, guys….

*****

People seem to love hating on Metallica, and I find about 50% of the crap to be justified.  But for all my dozing off during the Loadwired material, I certainly came back when “Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth)” resumed a set section I knew would be exclusively older material.  Now let me sit back and enjoy the Grimey’s show….

Sell Out!

One beef I hear quite often is that bands “sell out”.  That is, they betray their fans and their heritage by changing their sound to sell more albums and make more money.  I’d like to address this issue.

As professional musicians their job is to write and record music, then perform it, to a sufficient level of competence that a critical mass of people are willing to purchase the music and pay to see them perform it.  It would be odd to suggest that a band deliberately write music to minimize their audience and income.   “We need to write music good enough that people actually buy it, but not so good that too many people like it.”

Having said that, I rarely watch the Grammy award shows and almost never listen to the bands and artists who win the most.  My own tastes center around AC/DC and Black Sabbath, plus stoner rock, the Beatles & Beach Boys, and progressive rock like Pink Floyd (who played stadiums in the late 70s, including Montreal!) and King Crimson (not the same level of popularity).   Some bands I like only play clubs and very likely will never play any larger venues:  Clutch and many stoner rock bands.  But if by some miracle Clutch had a top 10 album and were thrust into a spotlight headlining hockey arenas or music festivals, I’d be just as happy to see them there as I am to see them at the current places they play, mainly small local clubs.

Here are some examples.

Aerosmith.  Originally a classic rock band in the 1970s with an excellent album, Toys in the Attic, years later they hit it big with Permanent Vacation and other similar albums.   These are clearly more commercially oriented than Toys in the Attic, though you can be sure they continue to play the older material live.  Did they sell out?  Probably.  Are they worth seeing?  Sure.   Is the new material worth listening to?  Maybe on Spotify, but I wouldn’t spend my money on it.

Metallica.   Three thrash-defining albums with Cliff Burton on bass:  Kill ‘Em All, Ride the Lightning, and Master of Puppets.  Cliff died touring the last album, replaced by Jason Newsted, and the band blew everyone away with …And Justice For All.  Here’s an example of an album which achieves commercial success based on its merits rather than any deliberate attempt to sell for the sake of selling.  I’d argue the following album, self-titled Metallica, aka the Black Album, is more of the same, roughly the same running time of music divided into 12 songs instead of 9.   Because if you really thought the Black Album was the sellout, you’re wrong: it was the next album, Load.   Subsequent albums Re-Load and St. Anger gave us more of the same, Death Magnetic as well, and Hardwired…to Self-Destruct sounds like a return to the more traditional Metallica sound.

We saw the band tour recently in 2017, but the last show we saw was 1997, on the Load tour – our first show was (yes, I’ll mention it yet again) Donington 1985, on the Ride the Lightning tour.  We were not impressed with Re-Load through Death Man-getic and only Hardwired persuaded us to return to the camp.    

Def Leppard.   Did they sell out?  Yes.  Did they get away with it?  Remarkably, yes.  Initially yet another New Wave of British Heavy Metal band like Iron Maiden, Saxon, and Metallica-inspirers Diamond Head, Def Leppard had a forgettable debut album, On Through the Night, a killer second album, High’n’Dry (my favorite) produced by John “Mutt” Lange – the man responsible for AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, Back in Black, and For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) – and an excellent, if somewhat more commercial third album Pyromania which blew the doors open for them.   The next album, Hysteria, really threw off the pretense of metal and said, “ladies, line up here.”   However, it did eventually catch up with them after subsequent albums simply gave us more of the same and fans lost interest.  They still tour, but none of the albums have come close to matching Hysteria’s sales. 

Pink Floyd.  Here’s a weird case.  Obviously Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall sold far more than Piper At the Gates of Dawn through Obscured By Clouds, the prior albums.  But arguably they should have – they are much stronger albums.  How often does anyone listen to “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” or “Sisyphus” (Mason and Wright’s studio contributions to Ummagumma)?  I certainly watch “Live at Pompeii” and enjoy Atom Heart Mother, but I’d say the later material is still better.  

  

Some bands actually go backwards, starting out trying to sell millions of albums and then switching to simply writing whatever material they feel like, without any concern for sales.

Deep Purple.  Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, bassist Nick Simper, and keyboardist Jon Lord were frustrated with the lack of success of their respective bands in the late 60s and recruited singer Rod Evans and drummer Ian Paice to form Roundabout, quickly retitled Deep Purple.  From spring 1968 to summer 1969 they had three albums, Shades of Deep Purple, Book of Taliesyn, and (self-titled) Deep Purple, but despite touring the US opening for Cream and Vanilla Fudge, couldn’t get anyone much interested in them.  Their material was 50% covers and generally calculated to sell – and didn’t.   By July 1969 they’d persuaded singer Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover to quit their now-stagnant prior band Episode Six and by early 1970 had In Rock out in the record stores.  This was followed by Fireball and Machine Head.   Note, of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and this band, only Deep Purple released a live album, Made in Japan, at the same time as the tour it was recorded on.  The band only became successful AFTER it stopped trying to be successful.  So much for that.

The Beatles.   Same deal here.   The earlier material was intended to move units, by Sgt. Pepper they decided to stop touring and record whatever they wanted to.  Of course, by then they had established themselves as a band people wanted to hear, so John-Paul-George-Ringo aren’t quite the same as Ian G-Roger-Ritchie-Jon-Ian P (aka Deep Purple Mark II).  Be that as it may, they also quit touring, foregoing what could have been lucrative tour income – if only they could get all those screaming girls to shut up.   

Note:  Frank Zappa is famous for hating the Beatles, and my understanding is that he disagreed with the prior analysis of Sgt. Pepper representing a break with their prior commercial tendencies, cynically concluding that the band simply changed its tactics but not its strategy.  In fact, he titled his third Mothers of Invention album We're Only In It For The Money and designed the cover as a deliberate parody of Sgt. Pepper's famous cover.  It's hard to miss the point Zappa was trying to make.

Oddly, he liked the Monkees, who if anything were far more egregious than the Beatles.  Zappa’s distinction was that the Monkees themselves were trying to break out of the commercial prison they’d agreed to play in, insisting on playing their own instruments on the albums and writing their own material.  Fair enough, except that the Beatles had been doing so since Please Please Me.  I can scarcely imagine that the Monkees themselves, or their biggest fans, would compare Headquarters to Sgt. Pepper.   Mind you, the bands themselves got along with each other, and the Beatles encouraged the Monkees to expand beyond their original commercial constraints.  In terms of 60s psychedelic idiocy, Magical Mystery Tour and Head are probably about equal.  Getting back to Zappa’s assessment of the Beatles, though, even Rubber Soul and Revolver are far different than Please Please Me, “Tomorrow Never Knows” lights years apart from “Love Me Do”.   I’m a big fan of Zappa, but I’m also a fan of the Beatles, and on this issue I’ll side with the Liverpool guys over Frank.

In general I find this tendency to scream “sell out” whenever a band begins to achieve more commercial success to be the rock equivalent of “snowflake” status.   It’s really convenient that this seem to happen AFTER the person has already been seeing the band in concert.   Anyhow.   Sometimes the material sells more because it’s better, sometimes not, not necessarily one or the other.  As noted, there’s Def Leppard and there’s Pink Floyd.  Decide after listening to the music itself, NOT because the band wound up at the Grammys.   

The Sword and Witchcraft

I’ve been trying to get my brother – who mostly shares my taste in music and is my most consistent concert companion - into stoner rock, but he’s been reluctant and indifferent.  Recently he articulated his major beef:  “all the bands sound like they’re ripping off Black Sabbath.  If I wanted to listen to Black Sabbath, I’d listen to Black Sabbath.”  Fair enough dispute, though after having listened to Pentagram and sHeavy, plus Witchcraft & The Sword, adding in some Obsessed, I’d say the more accurate critique would not be that they all sound like Black Sabbath, rather that they all sound like each other.

http://thehardtimes.net/news/innovative-stoner-metal-album-blends-influences-black-sabbath-black-sabbath/

Funny enough, let’s talk about Witchcraft.  They’re from Sweden, of all places, so add them to ABBA and Ace of Base, then add in Opeth and Ghost BC.   Supposedly they started as a de facto Pentagram tribute band, which are for their part Washington DC’s answer to – drum roll, please  - Black Sabbath.   I can hear that.  But I hear enough other stuff thrown in that it becomes a bit different.  Still heavy, still droning, still riffing, but different.   Why?  Because vocalist Magnus Pelander, instead of copying Ozzy Osbourne, as sHeavy vocalist Steve Hennessy does (while looking like early-era Whitesnake David Coverdale) – mind you, Hennessy is the only one who comes close to getting Ozzy’s voice down - or even copying Pentagram vocalist Bobby Liebling – who looks more like a long-haired Marty Friedman than Ozzy Osbourne – he’s actually copying The Sword vocalist John Cronise.   See?  Mixing it up by copying each other instead of Ozzy, Tony, Geezer or Bill.  

For that matter, I’ve yet to hear a stoner rock vocalist who sounds anything like Ronnie James Dio.  Then again, Hennessy is the only stoner rock vocalist I’ve heard who sounds like Ozzy.  But sHeavy sounds so much like Ozzy-era Sabbath that many of us thought their early track “Electric Sleep” was a long-lost Sabbath song.  Listen to it yourself and decide.

 

Incidentally, Pentagram won’t be touring much anymore these days, as Liebling is going to prison for beating up his mom.  Yeah.  Liebling has been a heroin addict for a while, but like most addicts swerves from periods of relatively clean stability where he has his s**t together, to other times when he’s more of a colossal screwup.  It’s sad because musically the albums, including the most recent, Curious Volume, are actually pretty good.  In fact, you’d never know what a colossal screwup Liebling was by his music.  They’ve been around since the early 70s, but attempts during that decade to get a record deal went south on two major occasions:  he turned off Gene Simmons & Paul Stanley (KISS, you know), and then Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman (Blue Oyster Cult, you know).  It wasn’t until the 1980s that Pentagram finally released an album.   I managed to catch them live at American University and then the Baltimore Soundstage, both times headlining.  Anyhow.

Back to Witchcraft.  They have five albums, Witchcraft, Firewood, The Alchemist, Legend, and Nucleus.   All of them are pretty much the same, of equal quality as well as sound, with no major departures.  There’s some softer interludes and change-ups which break the monotony, so you can listen to an entire album without getting bored – though a five album marathon might be pushing it.  I haven’t been able to see them live yet.  They’re from Sweden.  They need to ask Papa or Mikael Akerfeldt who does their visas, as neither Ghost nor Opeth seem to have any trouble getting into the US to tour. 

Having absorbed their repertoire with much appreciation and satisfaction, I’m now swerving back to The Sword, who are from Austin, Texas.  Although I’ve yet to catch Witchcraft in concert, I’ve been lucky enough to see The Sword a few times:  the (new) 9:30 Club in DC in 2010, opening for Kyuss Lives at the Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore (2011), headlining the R’N’Roll Hotel in DC in 2015, then opening for Opeth at the Fillmore Silver Spring in 2016.  Not particularly energetic or exciting live, though: more of a band that just comes out and plays their music.  Now they have six albums, plus a live album:  Age of Winters (2006), Gods of the Earth (2008), Warp Riders (2010), Apocryphon (2012), High Country (2015), and an acoustic version of that album, Low Country (2016).  The Sword are somewhat faster than Witchcraft, but share this deal where every album sounds pretty much the same, making a multiple disc marathon somewhat dull. 

Song Length.  Black Sabbath songs are relatively short, with “The Warning” from the first album being the longest studio track and the extended “Wicked World” from Live At Last being the longest live track.  Witchcraft have several 10-15 minute songs.  The Sword songs are about 5-7 minutes long.  And The Obsessed scarcely tax your patience, with songs which are 3-5 minutes long, fairly brief and intense.   Though if Wino’s on it, be it The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, or Spirit Caravan, we’re talking some measure of doom involved.

Then you have Earthless.  They’re coming around on tour next spring, so I decided to listen to them again to determine if I wanted to see them for the first time in concert.  I only have two of their albums, the split with Harsh Toke and Rhythms From a Cosmic Sky.  Here we’re talking 15 minute instrumental jams.  But it’s not mellow and laid back like the Grateful Dead or the Allman Brothers, rather it’s intense soloing like Deep Purple’s “Child In Time” or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”.  You kind of have to be in the mood for that kind of thing.  But it’s clearly different than Black Sabbath.

Even bands which sound like each other, like Fu Manchu and Nebula (thanks to Eddie Glass, a common member), there’s subtle distinctions.  FM are more straight ahead and even somewhat punk oriented, with shorter songs and subject matter about skateboarding or vans, whereas Nebula have longer songs and are space-oriented.  Bottom line is that you have to have the patience and inclination to really listen to the music before you can begin to distinguish them from each other – and from Black Sabbath – but the differences are there.  Black Sabbath obviously serves as the starting point, but each of these bands take slightly different directions.   For some, Pink Floyd is the opposite end they’re going for; for others it’s the Misfits or Ramones.

As for the overall resemblance to Black Sabbath?  As it is, they have 9 studio albums with Ozzy Osbourne, three with Dio + the Heaven & Hell album (The Devil You Know), 5 with Tony Martin, and one each from Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes.  Is that really enough?  

Please Stand Up

In three monumental instances, an anonymous fan has dramatically impacted a band’s direction, yet to this date has never come forward, and thus remains unknown – even after the story has been told countless times, and will be told again here by me.

Moody Blues.   By now the ‘Blues are best known for pretentious prog-rock masterpieces like December 1967’s Days of Future Passed.  Before that, though, they had one album, The Magnificent Moodies, full of R&B tunes which sound nothing like their later material; Justin Hayward and John Lodge weren’t even in the band.  Hayward, the guitarist/vocalist, replaced Denny Laine (later to wind up in the Wings with Paul McCartney) and bassist/vocalist Lodge replaced Clint Warwick.  Instead of obvious MB favorites like “Tuesday Afternoon” or “Nights in White Satin”, Ozzy Osbourne covered “Go Now”, which dates from MB Mark I, so to speak.

What pushed them into prog territory was a chance encounter with a disgruntled fan after a show in Stockton, wherever that is.  Despite a new lineup, they were still doing their R&B set.  The fan bitched at them for a terrible show and a waste of 12 pounds and a ruined evening with his wife.  Drummer Graeme Edge concurred with the fan’s assessment: a change was needed.  After the record label had asked them to do a cover of Dvorak’s Symphony #9 in stereo, they simply decided to make their own concept album, about the passage of a day from dawn to midnight:  Days of Future Passed.

I read the account in the most recent PROG magazine article (cover story) on the Moody Blues.  But to date, that mysterious couple appears lost to history.

Deep Purple.    In December 1971, Deep Purple were due to record the album which would be Machine Head at the Casino in Montreux, Switzerland.  Before that, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention played a concert there, which was interrupted by “some stupid with a flare gun…burned the place to the ground.”  They had to record at the Grand Hotel next door, using the “Rolling Truck Stones thing” (mobile unit).  One song which came out of the recording sessions was the story of the whole debacle, better known as “Smoke on the Water”, with its classic riff.  Without the flare gun incident, the album would have been recorded at the Casino, without “Smoke on the Water”.   Who knows how it would have sounded, but it would have been without the band’s ultimate anthem.

But the gun nut?  Somehow this person has never come forward to take the blame – or the credit – after over 40 years.  

Pink Floyd.   On the 1977 In the Flesh tour for the Animals album, Pink Floyd were now playing stadiums, far larger venues than the UFO club in London where they started out as the house band for the London equivalent of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in California – for which the house band was the Grateful Dead.   Instead of tight, intimate venues, the band faced a vast multitude of faceless fans.  Some of these fans were rather rude and boisterous.  Something in Roger Waters snapped, and at the show in Montreal, he spit on a fan.   Afterwards, shocked at his own behavior, Waters realized that an invisible wall had somehow erected – either by circumstances or by Waters himself – between the band and its fans.  Waters explored the concept further, into what we now know of as The Wall album.

   To date, I am not aware that the Spit Victim has ever come forward, perhaps (in French Canadian accent) “ees me, ‘e spit on!  I am zee inspiration for ze Wall!  Ou sont mes royalties??”

** IN fact, since none of these persons have come to light, perhaps they are all… the same person!  A mysterious muse who remains anonymous, yet spurs the great and mighty minds of music to greater heights.   Someone had to tell the Moody Blues they sucked, so they would write Days of Future Passed instead of repeating The Magnificent Moodies yet again.  Someone had to shoot off a flare gun in the Casino, to inspire “Smoke on the Water.”  Someone had to incite Roger Waters to spit on him, so we could enjoy The Wall. 

So, Mr. Mysterious Musical Muse, a Real Man of Genius, Bud Light salutes you.

Psychedelisch

When we think of Germans, we think of highly organized, efficient, crew cut people who follow orders and obey authority.  Since WWII, however, such ideas have fallen into disfavor, especially in Germany.  The Nazi Party and the swastika are banned.  Even the Swiss chemist himself, Albert Hoffman, invented LSD.  In the 1960s, the world peace, aka hippie, movement found as much fertile soil in West Germany as anywhere else; the West Germans even produced their own left wing extremist groups, the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhof gang. 

 Recently I came across a pair of newer German psychedelic bands, Electric Moon and Vibravoid.  Both go off into the ozone with 20-30 minute songs with no lyrics (similar to Sleep’s Dopesmoker album, a single 60 minute instrumental track).  For each band I have a studio album and a live album, Lunatics and Live at Epplehaus (Electric Moon; the latter is two discs each with only one humungous song on it), and Minddrugs and Herzberg Festival for Vibravoid.  I’ve yet to see either band tour outside Germany, though – just as Hawkwind never seems to leave the UK anymore.

 But Germans have been doing this for some time:  Can and Amon Düül II were at it in the late 60s and early 70s, and are as crazy and off the wall as the Grateful Dead, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, or Gong.  There’s not much more I can say about any of these bands besides recommending them to anyone who loves the tried and true psychedelic bands we’ve known about for years. 

 Piper Angle.  Pink Floyd is rightfully labeled a psychedelic band, and its first album, with Syd Barrett, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is Exhibit A for that case.  But I’ve found that Piper has two very different types of songs: the heavy duty, mindf**k psychedelic songs, of which “Astronomy Domine” and “Interstellar Overdrive”  are the most obvious; and the simpler, whimsical, sing-song, nursery rhyme songs, almost children’s songs, of which “Bike”, “The Gnome”, “Scarecrow” and “Chapter 24” are the best examples.  These German bands are all in the first category and have no songs which pay homage to Syd in the second fashion.

Jam Bands

I’ve been listening to Man alot lately, especially the expanded edition of the studio album Back Into The Future, which includes the full 1973 show at the Roundhouse, not to be confused with the 1972 show, included in the Greasy Truckers album (with Brinzley Schwartz and Hawkwind), or the 1975 show which was immortalized on Maximum Darkness with John Cippolina of Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Greasy Truckers set was fantastic, practically nonstop jamming – which led me to decide on this entry.


What is a “jam band”? To me, a jam is an extended improvisation involving the entire band. From this I have to disqualify various guitar-oriented bands which set aside a portion of the live set for the guitarist to go off on his own, alone on stage, e.g. Black Sabbath, AC/DC, or Blue Oyster Cult. Oddly, BOC could have been considered a jam band back when they were Stalk-Forrest Group, because “St. Cecilia” and “A Fact About Sneakers” have extended jams, whereas “Buck’s Boogie” and “Then Came The Last Days of May” simply feature Buck Dharma soloing on his own. Similar to Van Halen, their current live setup gives the drummer a drum solo and the bassist a bass solo – even Cliff Burton did that. Sorry, “jam” involves the whole band, not this “taking turns in the spotlight” deal. And “Freebird” does not make Lynyrd Skynyrd a jam band.


Grateful Dead. Probably the top jam band in reputation alone. Oddly, their top album American Beauty has no jamming on it. Having two drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman, truly complicates things, but the overall effect is mesmerizing. Every set, on every tour, was a complete surprise, even if certain songs tended to follow one another. The vast volume of bootlegs, openly recorded and traded among fans, greatly expands the variety of songs in their repertoire, well beyond the studio albums. Moreover, the same song could be dramatically extended or played in various different “moods”. To the Dead themselves I’ll tack on the derivative bands Ratdog (Bobby Weir), Phil Lesh & Friends, and even Phish and Widespread Panic.


Allman Brothers. Sounding similar to the Dead but with a more rock attitude. Warren Haynes played with the Dead on the 2004 tour. To be honest, though, I’ve only heard At The Fillmore East, and can’t comment on their live performances without Duane Allman.


King Crimson. After listening to the studio albums to get the bare minimum basis, listen to the live material, and prepare to be amazed. The live stuff takes off to a completely different dimension, including lots of material, e.g. Holst’s “Mars” and “All That Glitters Is Not Gold”, which don’t appear on any studio albums. Even more so than the Dead, Crimson truly expand in the live context, like a caterpillar blossoming into a butterfly (“WHO-ARE-YOU??”). Hell, some of the live tracks are simply called “Improv”.


Pink Floyd. With Floyd, it’s less of a vast distance between the albums and the live material the way it is with the Dead and Crimson, but they do jam.


Hawkwind. They add a heavy dose of electronica and psychedelia into the mix. Stiff competition with the Dead for this type of noise, but Hawkwind are much heavier and have less of a country angle. A Hawkwind crowd has a nastier, biker type of element to it than the harmless hippie stock at a Dead show. Both bands cater to LSD and marijuana, but Hawkwind is more skewed towards the raging aggressive psychosis of LSD than the Dead, who are much more mellow and less intense. Hawkwind tends to pull you into the psychosis as a participant, whereas the Dead are content to leave you as a mere spectator.


Deep Purple. They qualify based on the 20 minute “Space Truckin’” on Made in Japan alone (which took up an entire side on the original vinyl), but I find that Purple don’t do very well at maintaining momentum throughout the jam the way many others of these bands do. Moreover, Purple do tend to stratify the jams into guitar (Blackmore), keyboards (Lord) and drums (Paice) rather than a true jam, a chemical “suspension” rather than a “solution”. I also noticed that the extended jams which you could expect from Marks II-IV no longer occur with the post-1984 lineups.


Man. Easily the most heavily guitar-oriented of the jam bands, without being heavy metal. True distortion and not the annoying bright distortion-less treble sound of Jerry Garcia’s guitar, but also without the “wayyyyyyyyy off into space” electronica of Hawkwind. The Greasy Truckers’ set was practically a nonstop guitar solo, yet it never got dull or lost its momentum. The more I hear, the more I like. Plus they have a refreshingly irreverent talent for odd song names (shared with Budgie, BOC, and Frank Zappa), my favorite being “Many Are Called, But Few Get Up”.


Particle. By far the newest of these, injecting a heavy dose of funk and techno into the equation. But the guitarist, wailing on a Les Paul with thick distortion, gives it the balls that the Dead often lack. This was another band I listened to nonstop – thanks Diane!

Frank Zappa.  Usually known for his humor, Zappa was all over the place musically.  On Hot Rats, he's well into jam band territory.

The Atomic Bitchwax -"Astronomy Domine" 2007

Atomic Bitchwax, a spinoff of Monster Magnet who now have a career of their own, performs the Pink Floyd classic "Astronomy Domine" at the Brighton Bar in N.J.

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD)

Despite what happened with Marge in the kitchen, Shelbyville cannot lace Springfield’s (or anyone else’s) water supply with LSD: the drug is too unstable and complicated, and gets broken down immediately by the chlorine and other chemicals in the water treatment plants.  This is the same reason the water supplies are essentially immune to potential biological terrorist attack, as these chemicals attack bacteria as well.  In any case, the effects would take an hour or two to really get going, not instantaneous as happened to Marge.  

 In the Beginning, there was Sandoz.  Working on ergot alkaloids for Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, Albert Hofmann (one f, two n’s) invented lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938.  They marketed it as Delysid.  Can you imagine the ads today?  “Delysid is not for everyone…consult your doctor about Delysid.  Side effects may include…”.   Having successfully developed several other (non-hallucinogenic) ergot compounds which became commercially successful for Sandoz, he put LSD aside for the time being.  In 1943, he dusted off the LSD and began working on it again, and accidentally ingested it through his skin, becoming the first person to trip on it.  Soon after he took another trip, resulting in a horrifying bicycle ride (wartime restrictions limiting gasoline engine vehicles).  The rest is history.  His book, LSD: My Problem Child is remarkable, although only half of it is really about LSD itself.  The drug definitely changed him, although he remained the efficient, normal-looking Swiss chemist with the analytical mind we expect from Germans/Swiss.   

 Eventually Sandoz was embarrassed by the publicity surrounding LSD and stopped making it.  The premier LSD source of the 60’s, Augustus Owsley Stanley, III, better known as "Bear", claimed to be able to make purer LSD than Sandoz itself; his variety “Blue Cheer” became the name of a SF metal band, and his poetry graces the inside covers of their albums, but he is usually associated with the Grateful Dead and claims he was never very impressed by Blue Cheer.

 Effects. LSD is the most powerful drug known to man, as noted in the Guinness Book of World Records.   Doses are measured in micrograms, not milligrams.  Although it’s been produced in tablet and liquid form, blotter paper (as shown second left) is probably the most popular and well known, and certainly uniquely open to artistic interpretation, something that can't be said about a drug which is injected, snorted or smoked….LSD doesn’t have to be injected, snorted, or smoked.

Low doses.  The spaced out feeling like a mild fever, or Darvocet/Percocet.  Something isn’t quite right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Still able to have something close to a normal conversation.

            Medium doses.  The visuals show up – trails, colors are brighter, glow, and begin to melt into each other.  Patterns, like wallpaper and oriental carpets, begin to shift, swerve, or scroll; lines on a flannel shirt will dance, woodgrain breathes.  Grass grows before your very eyes.  Album covers breathe and begin to act up, like the living portraits in Harry Potter.  Speech becomes more difficult as the brainwaves no longer directly connect thoughts to spoken words – someone inside (who?) has to translate from the brain to the mouth. 

            Higher doses.  Totally out to lunch, on another planet.  More intense visuals, and the mindf**k goes into overdrive.  The self dissolves into the universe at the molecular level, the ego disappears and nothing has any true meaning anymore.   You’ve shifted into a completely different dimension.  Welcome to “where the hell am I now???”

There is no “cure” for a trip, but thorazine will calm down a bad trip somewhat. Theoretically, a bad trip can happen to even the most experienced tripper, but it's most likely when LSD is taken carelessly  in the wrong set or setting - or if it's given to someone without their knowledge ("Somebody Put Something In My Drink", as the Ramones might  say); the Dead were notorious for doing so, so much so that it was common knowledge to avoid eating or drinking anything in their presence.  Syd Barrett's friends would constantly dose him, thinking they were doing him a favor by keeping him tripping 24/7, ultimately not helping him. 

 The CIA.  It experimented with the drug in the 1950s in the MK-Ultra program, as fully described in Acid Dreams, by Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain.  It turned out to be a lousy truth drug: the subject was as likely to spout complete nonsense as the “truth” (however that could possibly be defined under the influence of the drug), with the interrogator scarcely able to tell one from the other.  It was also useless as a mind control drug, because its effects were so unpredictable and (as noted above) it breaks down in the water supply.  The CIA finally gave up on it altogether, about the same time certain anti-establishment elements discovered it.  This is the twisted part about LSD: it started out within the darkest depths of the establishment, the CIA, and then went to the counterculture.  Before Leary (mentioned below) there was Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, one of the CIA’s biggest fans of LSD.

 Merry Pranksters.  Yes, these are the anti-establishment elements, led by Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) – they ran out of the Beatles’ 1964 tour screaming as they couldn’t handle “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” on acid.  Kesey & crew, with a plentiful supply of still-legal LSD, painted a school bus (“Furthur”) dayglow colors and toured the country in summer 1964, freaking out unsuspecting locals who had yet to experience LSD or hippies.  Eventually the Acid Tests evolved, group parties in California where a warehouse would be rented, a vat of electric Kool-Aid (laced with LSD) was there for communal drinking, and a house band, the Grateful Dead, would play – all in safe, nonthreatening environment where you were surrounded by like-minded (?) people and not thrust out into a hostile outside world of squares and pigs.  In London the same experience was imitated, the house band being Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.  Kesey’s antics are best described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

 Timothy Leary. The all-time ultimate LSD guru.  After a mushroom trip in 1960, he discovered LSD and proceeded to lose his job at Harvard.  From then he preached the LSD gospel to everyone, convinced that LSD could solve all the world’s problems.  Hofmann met him a few times in Switzerland but felt that Leary was responsible for attracting too much unwelcome attention to LSD and encouraging its use among people who really should NOT be tripping.  Eventually Leary got off his acid trip (after a vacation in exile in Algeria, Switzerland, and finally picked up by the FBI in Afghanistan) and turned his attention to space travel and the ultimate final trip, death itself.  Before he died he engaged in a series of public debates with G. Gordon Liddy, his erstwhile nemesis as a NY prosecutor in the late 60s.

 Change the world?  The hippies, including Leary, felt that if LBJ or Nixon could just be dosed, they would wise up and stop the war in Vietnam.  Highly unlilkely. The effects are unpredictable even for the same person tripping more than once – each trip is completely different, like a snowflake – much less predicting how it would affect the President.  For all we know, Nixon might have decided to nuke North Vietnam.  Not good. 

 Acid Casualties.  Charles Manson & Syd Barrett, who I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs, are the most notorious.  Hofmann, though, notes that no one has ever died of an LSD overdose, which can’t be said for heroin.  Much of the anecdotes about people flying off rooftops because of an LSD trip gone wrong usually turn out to be urban legends (remember Pop Rocks?).  The rumors that LSD damaged chromosomes turned out to be complete nonsense, as Generation X has ably demonstrated (these kids are normal, right?).  And the top ranks of corporate America are full of baby boomers who consumed vast quantities of acid in the 60s and eventually rejoined the mainstream rat race like everyone else, none the worse for the whole “experience.”

 It’s the music, man.  Of course, far beyond Timothy Leary or Charles Manson, the ultimate legacy of LSD is in the music we listen to today.  Although much of the LSD-influenced music was psychedelic with little appeal to those not already disposed to take LSD, marijuana, mushrooms, etc. – notably Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and Hawkwind – a substantial amount was, and is, accessible to those of us who would never dream of tasting the temporary madness of LSD, but who can nonetheless enjoy the music made by those who did dare to “turn off their minds, relax and float downstream”, the biggest example being the Beatles and their masterpiece, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Very little of Sgt Pepper is psychedelic in the sense of “Interstellar Overdrive” (Pink Floyd), “Dark Star” (Grateful Dead) or anything by Hawkwind or King Crimson.  The LSD effect is more subtle than that: it’s the whole concept of the album and how it all fits together; “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is just the ambassador of LSD within the album itself, to those not in tune enough to recognize it in the whole, the big picture.

            But that’s not all.  To the extent a second wave, an “equal and opposite reaction” in the Newtonian sense, of 70s rock developed, mainly Black Sabbath and punk rock (remember that “Pink Floyd Sucks!” t-shirt?), in defiance of the hippies and California sound, we have a secondary ripple from LSD.  From there, you get the bands Black Sabbath influenced, i.e. Metallica and the whole dark heavy metal genre, and its offshoots such as grunge, meaning that LSD’s impact on music is far beyond the Beatles, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead.  Again, even if some metalheads wouldn’t dream of doing LSD, they still listen to, bang their heads to, and enjoy, music which was indirectly caused by the very drug they shun.  There's also a whole newer genre of heavy metal, which developed in the mid 1990s and continues today, called stoner rock, a genre which deserves its own blog entry in its own right.

             Finally, that brings us to Blue Cheer – not only named after LSD, not only having Owsley’s poetry on their albums, but merging both the San Francisco sound with the darker noise of Black Sabbath and proto-metal...arguably the first stoner rock band.