Before he went off to make a mint singing about the main market street in Brixton, Guyanese-born London resident Eddy Grant put together the Equals, one of England’s most stomping multi-racial soul-rock bands.
Before the Equals scored their first hit in the UK with “Baby Come Back,” it went #1 in Germany, from which the first clip below originates, featuring a rather bossy 19-year-old Grant. It would take Top of the Pops a full year until they booked the Equals to perform the same tune. Oh yeah, they tossed over the song in clip #2 to a bunch of punks a few years after they recorded it in ’69.
Dangerous Minds pal Taylor Jessen, the fabulously meticulous archivist for the Firesign Theatre is in the process of putting together the ULTIMATE collection of rare Firesign Theatre radio shows for a limited edition release via www.firesigntheatre.com. I’ve been raving about these programs (all recorded between 1968-72) on this blog for months and now you can hear them yourself, every Tuesday on WFMU radio at 7:00 pm in the New York area over the airwaves and streaming over the Internet on WFMU.org.
Below Taylor writes of what it was like trying to track down the audio cues used by the FST in an online essay on WFMU’s popular blog, with 30 mp3 files and a contest to win Firesign Theatre photographs signed by all four members:
For ten years or so, the Firesign Theatre has been engaging me in a friendly round of “Stump the Archivist.”
Between 1970-1972, Firesign did about seventy hours of original radio broadcasts. The shows were mostly an excuse for them to riff, but they also played a lot of music breaks, sound effects, incidental music, and total dada noise foofaraw. During those original broadcasts of The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour, Dear Friends, and Let’s Eat, they put the needle on the record about 1000 times, and one of the most fun aspects of restoring all those airchecks (soon to be reissued, yes the whole schmear, in remastered digital audio with an accompanying 108-page comic-book-size color fan guide featuring complete show rundowns, an historical essay, new interviews with the 4or5 guys and their engineer & producer, never-published photos, collages, found objects, scripts, and good God make it stop, it’s just too awesome. Please check regularly here and at www.firesigntheatre.com for an official announcement; we’re only making 500 copies and they’ll never be sold in stores) – one of the most fun aspects, I say, of all this obsessive archival work was identifying those 1000 needle-drops.
To play along and try to identify these music cues—-some are easy: Beatles, Stones, Dylan, but others are pretty darn obscure—visit Firesign Theatre is Playing At My House (WFMU’s Beware of the Blog). You only have to be able to identify ONE of the musical mysteries to win!
Below, my recent interview with the Phil Proctor about the vintage Firesign Theatre radio shows being aired on WFMU:
Stories, with lead singer Ian Lloyd performing Brother Louie on The Midnight Special in 1973. This song came out when I was 7-years-old. I wonder if I had any idea what it was about at that age, or if I just thought that it sounded vaguely scary?
We Americans only know this version, but the song was originally a hit for Hot Chocolate, more famous on these shores more for You Sexy Thing. It was written by Hot Chocolate’s Tony Wilson and Errol Brown. The spoken word bit in their version is done by blues great Alexis Korner.
Since I’m on the subject of bowed gongs and such, Here are a couple of stellar performance clips of Kobe,Japan born now Pennsylvania based percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani. Contrast his furious free-jazz stylings in the duet with flautist Kaoru Watanabe with the gorgeous drone workout in the solo clip. It’s very enjoyable to see the vocabulary of percussion expanded and stretched into ever lengthening washes of rich sound. Dude’s a complete bad-ass.
Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I (1964) is a beautiful meeting of five people, a large gong, a microphone (used as a friction device) and a filter. From that unlikely grouping comes a cosmos of sound, so ripe is the idea of amplfied resonant metal. Need I point out that this is a major root of the later Neubautens and Organums of the world ? The clip below is packed full of interesting info so you can read along whilst having your face melted.
Since we can’t all make it to Stonehenge, here’s Dangerous Minds muse, Marianne Faithfull, to welcome in the longest day of the year! Summer Nights was released two singles after As Tears Go By, and the below performance dates from Faithfull’s September, ‘65 appearance on Shindig. Ahh, such a sweet voice back then coming from the great great niece of Venus In Furs scribe, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch!
Here’s a rare and probably fleeting chance to see what’s routinely called one of the worst films ever made: The Phynx (1970). Essentially a musical comedy vehicle for a cavalcade of stars such as, ahem : Dick Clark, Xavier Cugat, Ed Sullivan, James Brown, Richard Pryor, and (wait for it…) Colonel Sanders ! The synopsis : An athlete, a campus militant, a black model, and an American Indian are picked by a female-shaped computer to form a rock group and go on tour in Albania where American show biz people have been kidnapped by Communists. Natch ! You can watch the whole thing in pieces on the ‘Tube from the same user, but I’ve selected this astonishing early scene in which a Spector-esque record producer guides the band through the recording of their first sure-fire hit: A hilariously clueless attempt at hipster rock written by none other than Lieber and Stoller. A bad trip is guaranteed for all !
A fascinating look at what Jimi Hendrix was listening to at home can be seen at the Record Mecca blog. A collector acquired several of Jimi’s “well loved” (i.e. played to shit) albums in an auction from Kathy Etchingham, Jimi’s longtime girlfriend:
I thought people might enjoy knowing—and seeing—what Jimi was listening to during his London years. The collection I purchased included Jimi’s copies of these albums:
Robert Johnson “King of the Delta Blues Singers”; Muddy Waters “The Real Folk Blues”; John Lee Hooker “Drifting Blues”; Wes Montgomery “A Day In The Life”; The Roland Kirk Quartet “Rip, Rig and Panic”; Ravi Shankar “India’s Master Musician” and “Portrait of a Genius”; The Jimi Hendrix Experience “Electric Ladyland”; The Dream “Get Dreamy”; Howlin Wolf “The Howlin’ Wolf Album” and “Moanin’ In The Moonlight”; Bob Dylan “Greatest Hits” and “Highway 61 Revisited”; Elmore James “Memorial Album”; James Brown “Showtime”; Clara Ward “Gospel Concert”; Acker Bilk “Lansdowne Folio”; The Beatles “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” Various “Chicago The Blues Today”; Various “American Folk Blues Festival ‘66” and Bill Cosby “Revenge.”
The copy of “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” has some psychedelic doodling on the back, clearly by Jimi. Somehow Bonhams didn’t notice this for the auction description—a very happy discovery for me.
The copy of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” has some of Jimi’s blood on the cover—according to Etchingham, the result of a wine glass accident.
Let’s remember jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy, who would have turned 88 today. Over his 30 albums as a bandleader, Dolphy showed an amazing versatility and development, emerging from his be-bop roots into some wonderfully accessible avant garde creations, like his last, Out to Lunch, for Blue Note.
People celebrate that album as a classic of new jazz for good reason. It’s innovative and gritty instead of abstract and simply free for its own sake, as Dolphy seems to transfigure the idea of melody rather than rejecting it out of hand. It’s simply beautiful and compelling, and worth having in your library if you don’t yet.
Dolphy’s death at 36 from diabetes in 1964 in Berlin was especially tragic because it wasn’t from typically regarded circumstances—he was substance-free and didn’t even smoke.
“He was a musical centipede,” notes drummer Han Bennink in the documentary below. “I could hear that he could do everything.”
(1964) is a beautiful meeting of five people, a large gong, a microphone (used as a friction device) and a filter. From that unlikely grouping comes a cosmos of sound, so ripe is the idea of amplfied resonant metal. Need I point out that this is a major root of the later 
and 
of the world ? The clip below is packed full of interesting info so you can read along whilst having your face melted.
