Intervention Records is thrilled to announce The Flying Burrito Bros. classic 1970 sophomore effort Burrito Deluxe on 180-gram vinyl.
Burrito Deluxe is the second and final hot Burrito made while the band was still led by former Byrds member Gram Parsons. The Flying Burrito Bros. are widely viewed as the inventors of country rock and are one of the most influential bands of all time. “Burrito Deluxe” is another classic full of great tunes written and sung by Parsons and Chris Hillman.
The original LP art is restored by IR’s Tom Vadakan and the old-style, “tip-on, brown-in” LP jacket is printed by Stoughton and features super deluxe red foil accents on the front cover. For years now, we’ve touted Intervention Records’ superlative work in the vinyl reissue front. The team’s attention to detail, impeccable artwork, and stellar sonics across genres have given them a reputation in the reissue world as one of the best. Their established quality in the LP world happily extends to the digital realm, as well.
Is this the album that made country cool? Former Byrds Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman picked up where they left off with Sweetheart of the Rodeo with this stunning masterpiece of a debut album by The Flying Burrito Bros. While Parsons had already pushed rock in a country direction during his brief stint with The Byrds and The International Submarine Band, The Gilded Palace of Sin is why the Burritos are widely viewed as the inventors of country rock. Indeed with this album, Hillman and Parsons carved a substantial place in music history as one of the most influential albums and bands of all time.
The Gilded Palace of Sin was 100% Analog Mastered by Kevin Gray at CoHEARent Audio from the best source available- a phenomenal sounding 1/2″ safety copy of the original stereo master tapes. All of the top-end energy and “snap” of the original A&M LP is preserved, while the bass foundation is fully restored to make this new Intervention reissue the definitive listening experience for this classic LP! , For their sophomore album, the band’s original songs were joined by a country classic (“Image of Me,” popularized by Conway Twitty), a gospel standard (“Farther Along”), and tunes by Dylan (“If You Gotta Go”) and the Stones (the first recording of “Wild Horses”). “Burrito Deluxe” featured Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman, “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, Bernie Leadon, and Michael Clarke plus guests including Leon Russell (tickling the ivories on Leadon and Parsons’ “Man in the Fog” and the Glimmer Twins’ “Wild Horses”). It would prove Parsons’ final album with the group.
Indie rock band Grand Am with the rebellious and catchy soundscape of “Five days a week and twice on Sunday”. With this exquisite and intoxicating blend of melodies and lyrics they pull us in an instant and remind us that there are things out there that we are sure to want more than anything. The track is perfection and in an instant became one of my favourites and during this time at home, it has become one that I can jam to every afternoon. The track is infectious and there’s something about it that catches you with lush and rebellious hooks that will surely connect with you. The soundscape is a sweet blend of classic and contemporary melodies that make it a one of a kind addition to the rock genre. So come with me and let us remember that there are things still pending that we want more than anything out there. When things get well, let’s go out there and pursue our dreams.
“The story behind the hook u“Five Days A Week And Twice On Sundays” goes back to when I lived in New Orleans. There was an old guy in the neighbourhood who used to come around, and he would show up (uninvited) at a barbeque or house party would stay a little while and tell some stories. I only met him a handful of times, but the thing that stuck with me is that when he was talking about something he really wanted or liked he’d say “five days a week and twice on Sundays.” And he said it a lot. It was such an expressive way of saying yes and showing how badly he wanted something, and it stuck with me. When we wrote the retro rock riff that’s the foundation of this song it brought me back to my time in New Orleans with it’s groove and attitude, and that old saying that’s been stuck in my head all these years felt like a perfect fit.” – Grand Am
As a composer, producer and engineer at The Music Playground in Manhattan, James Panepinto has been the engine behind the soundtracks heard on shows on MTV, A&E and CBS and in films at Sundance, Tribeca and Cannes. But his work on big and small screens represents a small fraction of his creative energy. Panepinto has been even busier outside his career in the music industry, quietly building a massive catalogue of riffs, melodies and beats.
I have a new song coming out in two days. It’s called Calico and it’s about the graceful and incredibly grounded women of my childhood. While we’re all at home feeling gratitude for the technological advances that have allowed us to stay in close contact with friends and family during social isolation, it’s easy to forget how much we’ve grown to rely on phones and computers for so much of our personal experiences and memories. Sometimes it takes a busted laptop or lost phone to have this realization—as was the case with Woodson Black, the songwriter set to release his debut record as Haux.
Thinking back on a voicemail from his late aunt—one of the last messages he ever received from her before she passed away—Black was inspired to write his latest single from Violence in a Quiet Mind, an impressively gentle acoustic ballad matching the cabin fever of early Bon Iver and the baroque acoustics of Fleet Foxes.
“I wrote ‘Calico’ in a kind of daze one day last March,” he shares of the new track. “I lost my phone when I was writing the album and had forgotten to back up my voicemails, including one from my aunt calling to say happy birthday. It was one of the last times I heard from her before she died from an overdose. Losing it felt like I somehow lost my last connection to her, which triggered a very strange and confused grieving process for me. From this I wrote ‘Calico,’ and I couldn’t help but feel like this song was maybe my last time with her—like the song itself was my aunt’s final resting place in my mind.”
After A five year period that brought dizzying success with 14 US Top 40 singles and eight US Top Ten studio albums. British song-writing partnership of pianist/vocalist Elton John and lyricist Bernie Taupin had seen their last five consecutive LPs all hit the top spot. By early 1975, it was hard to imagine the dynamic duo blowing up any bigger. But they did. And 45 years ago this week (May 19, 1975), they released what would become arguably their most celebrated album to date Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.
Captain Fantastic is a personal retrospective a musical diary and one that reflects John and Taupin’s humble beginnings working together in the late ’60s. There’s a scene in director Cameron Crowe’s iconic film, Almost Famous, in which 11-year-old William Miller gazes wide-eyed as he peruses his older sister’s vinyl album collection in 1969. There is the classic LPs from The Who, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell and others. That scene is particularly spot-on, as in those wondrous days, record releases were beautiful works of art from the songs to the album covers to the liner notes to the photography. Captain Fantastic delivered that spectacular cover art created by Alan Aldridge, two booklets and a “fantastic” poster of the entire opened gatefold jacket .
Music consumption always has been a very personal experience for us all. As it’s been said, our music chooses us not the other way around. At age 12, many of my closest friends had older siblings whose “personal” albums included classics from the Beatles, the Stones and Zeppelin. I had my best friend Johnny Hawker, we would sit in his room and he would play the most amazing albums.
The songs bathed in Elton’s warm Fender Rhodes piano and glossed with his honey-soaked vocals, the song is accented by Davey Johnstone’s crisp acoustic guitar work throughout, Along with John’s long-time producer, Gus Dudgeon who once stated, “There’s not one song on it Captain Fantastic that’s less than incredible.” Even EltonJohn himself has said, “I’ve always thought that Captain Fantastic was probably my finest album.” Hence, to dissect the record properly, could fill an entire book.
There is are an array of stand-out bullet points. On “Tower of Babel,” John’s vocals are soulful, while Johnstone’s solo is gloriously gritty. “Bitter Fingers” packs playful verses and crunchy choruses I’m sick of tra la las and la de das. “Tell Me When the Whistle Blows” remains a delicate, bluesy treasure, while the record’s sole single, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” has become one John’s most endearing songs that John has referred to as, “one of the best songs that Bernie and I have ever written together.”
There is the heart-racing, guitar-driven urgency of “(Gotta Get A) Meal Ticket,”. Conversely, “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” is a beautiful, heartfelt masterpiece. Although the song is about John and Taupin’s early creative relationship, as a naive 12-year old, it sounded like a sweet, romantic love song. Heck, even as a little old man navigating through a young girl’s world in 2020, that one still makes me cry.
In addition to Johnstone’s brilliant guitar playing, the record also benefits equally from Dee Murray’s rock-ribbed basslines. Nigel Olsson’s dry, yet fat-sounding, signature-style meat and potatoes drumming is superb. He knows when to bash the shit out of a note, and he knows when to simply let it breathe. Sometimes less IS more. For mad looking Ray Cooper, his percussion work dances from left speaker to right — making these songs pop with masterful precision.
There are very few who have not been touched profoundly over the years by Captain Fantastic Elton John and Bernie Taupin who intended the Captain Fantastic record to tell their story.
Melbourne four-piece Jade Imagine have returned with their brand new single, “Coastal Pines”. The track is their follow-up to their debut album Basic Love and last year’s tour that included support slots with Pond across the U.K.
“Coastal Pines” is perfectly timed to release during the emerging summer months, with a groovy psych-infused jam that just radiates a cool sun-soaked warmth and free-spirited imagery.
Talking about the single, frontwoman Jade McInally describes Coastal Pines to be:
A song about the head verses the heart. For me, it’s the never ending struggle between the city and the ocean pulling in two different directions.”
Jack Bruce was asked “What do you think these days, about the Cream songs you wrote?” the reply: I don’t call them Cream songs. I call them songs that I wrote at that time. OK, tell me about “White Room,” for example. I’m really happy with that song, because it’s paid the rent for a while. It’s quite a daring song in that it starts in 5/4 and was a huge hit. There aren’t many of those—Blondie’s “Heart Of Glass” has bars of 7/8 in it, that was a good song.
I think it’s important that writers take chances and risks. Record companies and a lot of people underestimate the public tremendously, so you end up with a public that doesn’t know. But if you reckon that the people you’re playing for are fairly hip, then they’ll really get into it. “White Room” has some of Ginger’s best drumming—when he brings in that extra bass drum at the end, it’s a whole new dimension.
How about some of the Cream gigs? Or should I say the gigs you played at that time. I think your debut was at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester in 1966. You were still playing your Fender VI, before you got the Gibson EB-3. I don’t know who suggested the Twisted Wheel. It might well have been Ginger. But why not? One of the better clubs in Britain, without any doubt. I think it was a pretty good gig. We had a big American estate car, which blew up on the way to the Twisted Wheel. I don’t remember how we got there in the end.
So then we got our Austin Westminster band car. There’d be the driver and roadie, Ben Palmer, and three in the band, two Marshall stacks, and the drums. That’s what we’d get in with any relative comfort and spliff-rolling capabilities. We’d drive there and come back the same day.
What do you recall about playing the Flamingo in London?:
I did the all-nighters there a lot, that was one of my very early gigs. I played the Flamingo with Alexis, too, a bit, but mainly the all-nighters with pickup bands, usually Ginger on drums, Dick Heckstall-Smith on tenor sax, and Johnny Burch on piano. The band room of the Flamingo in the early ’60s was the centre of the universe, really. It had a pet rat that used to run in the rafters above. Just a fabulous place to hang out. The Marquee was good, the 100 Club was good, but the Flamingo was the hip place. A guy called Ronnie Chambers used to look after the Flamingo. He’d get excited sometimes and rush on stage waving his gun about if the music was particularly good. His line was, “Hey, you want a watch?” And he’d pull up the sleeve of his suit and he’d have all these watches up his arm. Those were really great days, quite innocent really.
I’ve got a copy of a contract here for a 1966 Cream gig in Stockton [northern England] for £75.
Seventy-five quid? Well, that’s pretty good bread for then. I remember the first big-money gig we got with the Graham Bond Organisation, a bit earlier, I think Newcastle or Durham University or something, we got £40. We thought, Wow! We’ve hit the big time! A few of those and we can retire. Bearing in mind that people were probably earning a quarter of that as a decent weekly wage. So I don’t think Cream was making very good money at first from gigs—I think that came much later. I’m afraid I’m very vague about anything financial.
How about the early American gigs, maybe the Fillmore? . The Fillmore was great in San Francisco, and obviously 1967 was the year to be there, really. It would take off some nights, and this was when we first started doing the extended improvisations in Cream. It was new to the band. Up to this series of gigs, we just played little songs live, very short: three, four, five minute versions of the songs. And since there were only three of us, it wasn’t like: “You do a solo, then I’ll do a solo, then you.” It was: “Eric, do a solo.”
“Our albatross was having to do very long solos when you maybe didn’t feel like it. Mixed blessings, really.” We would sometimes strip it down to where Eric would play completely unaccompanied, for quite a long time [laughs]. And I remember him doing some quite incredible stuff, quite amazing. But they weren’t recorded.
The change was, quite simply, that we were fed up with doing that, and the audience was so great at the Fillmore, they were all so out of it, all sort of laidback, and would say, “Just play!” They wouldn’t let us go. So we just started playing, jamming as it were, and that turned into what we became known for. We didn’t sit down and have a big discussion: “Oh, let’s do this.” I think it was the same way that The Who became known for smashing up their equipment and all of that, and that became their albatross.
Is your academic musical background of use to you?
Yes, because if I’m sitting on a plane, say, and I have an idea, I can always write it down. I can write all my own horn parts, as on my new album, I can write my own arrangements. In fact, thinking back to “I Feel Free” and “White Room,” I was much closer to the academic days—which in fact were very shortlived. I did A-level music and then I went to The Royal Scottish Academy of Music, studying composition and cello, part-time and then full-time. And then we sort of threw each other out. They didn’t like me because I was improvising.
When I left the Academy, I was playing acoustic stand-up bass, and I heard about this band in Coventry, guy called Murray Campbell, it was a Mecca dance band. I was playing bass with Andy Park and some local people in Glasgow—he turned me on to Thelonious Monk. I just wanted to go out there, I wanted to be the next Scott LaFaro. Not much hope of that, but when you’re young you’re very ambitious. Ambitious, certainly, and also with some strong jazz roots, it seems.
The roots thing is very important to me. I think the difference between my roots and someone else’s is that I didn’t come from rock ‘n’ roll, I came from jazz, basically. I was playing with Ginger and Graham Bond, we were an alto–acoustic bass–drums trio, very much in the style of what Ornette Coleman was doing in the late ’50s, Charlie Haden and so on. That was my roots.
Anyway, I left home at 17 and went down to audition for this band I’d heard about, because they were playing Maynard Ferguson, Dizzy Gillespie big-band arrangements. The audition piece was Dizzy’s “One Bass Hit.” It’s a very difficult piece, so it was sorting out the men from the boys. And even though I was 17, I got the gig. A very good band.
I travelled around the country playing with jazz bands—I played with Chet Baker, and then with a fairly good cocktail-jazz band on the American Air Force bases, which was great because it introduced me to Mingus. They had these great record collections, and I steeped myself in Mingus records. It completely changed my life, because that introduced me, though I didn’t know it at the time, to the blues. Because really, what Mingus did was to bring country blues to jazz. Then I came to London and joined Alexis Korner.
Well, there was a place in London called “the street,” Archer Street, round the back of Piccadilly Circus. One day a week at lunchtime, all the musicians would go down there and you’d get work. Hundreds of musicians hanging out with their little books, getting their weddings and bar mitzvahs, this whole street would be thronged of musicians. That’s how I got the cocktail-jazz job, and Chet Baker. Then I tried to make it as a jazz bass player in London and had some tough times. I was playing with this band called Jim McHargs & His Scotsville Jazz Band. And Jimmy McHargs was the bass player, so how I got that job I still haven’t worked out.
This was 1961, ’62, and we got a gig at a Cambridge May Ball. And then I hear this amazing sound emanating from a cellar they had there. I went down, and it was Dick Heckstall-Smith on sax, Kathy Stobart singing, forget who was on piano, a guy called Morris on bass, and the guy on drums was called Ginger Baker. I went and asked to sit in, and they said they didn’t encourage that. I think they may have thought I was a student, though how they could have thought I was a student at Cambridge I don’t know. But anyway, I persuaded them, and they did the old trick of what jazzers do when someone sits in, which is to make them look stupid. So first they played something with very difficult changes at an incredible tempo.
So then they played a ballad and said: “You play the tune.” So OK, did that. And then I put the bass down and left. And Dick Heckstall-Smith spent two or three weeks trying to find me, and somehow he managed, and he asked me to join Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. It was a good job he managed to find you.
Yeah. I might still be living in that terrible room in Willesden [north-west London]. You never know. So I joined, and Charlie Watts was on drums. I became good mates with him, often slept on his couch. And Dick Heckstall-Smith I regard as a musical father in many ways. He turned me on to a lot of things. The legendary Cyril Davies was on harmonica. It was very much a rhythm and blues band.
Cyril was a panel beater by trade. He and Alexis used to play interval spots with Chris Barber, playing Lead Belly things. I haven’t heard a harp player like Cyril. OK, Little Walter is obviously the man of all time, James Cotton is good, but Cyril had something. He was so good that when Muddy Waters heard him over here, he asked him to join his band and go back and live in Chicago. Unfortunately, poor old Cyril had leukemia and didn’t have very long to live. But I don’t think he would have given up his panel-beating business anyway. Muddy doesn’t, er, pay well.
I was a terrible musical snob. I thought progressive jazz was all there was—Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, post-bebop but still with the roots. Very much what you would call modern jazz. Talking ’62, so a lot of interesting stuff was about, Blue Note was happening, Riverside was happening. I remember hearing Tony Williams for the first time around then, he made a record with Eric Dolphy called Out To Lunch which is still something I play once a week. It was Dick that explained to me that it was possible to keep your musical ideals, but apply other things to it. Fusion, in other words. You could have a great country-blues harmonica player playing with a modern jazz tenor sax player, and that it didn’t demean anything, and in fact that it was much more modern than playing an imitation Ornette Coleman. At this time there were some great fusion bands, specially the Miles Davis band, the original Return To Forever, Weather Report in its heyday. Lifetime was the fusion band. Lifetime I consider to be definitely the best musical experience of my life. [Jack played on the 1970 Tony Williams Lifetime album Turn It Over.] Anyone who was lucky enough to hear that band would tend to agree with me. Played some great gigs over here, played the Speakeasy which people still go “wow!” about. That was a great band. We all knew it was very, very special. For me, it was great playing with people up to my standard—and that’s going to sound terribly big-headed.
Lifetime was a three-piece band at that time, Tony Williams [drums], Larry Young [organ], and John McLaughlin [guitar]. John brought Tony along to this gig—Jimi Hendrix was there, we had a great time—and Tony said, “Hey, I’m recording tomorrow, would you like to come down and play on a track or two?” So I went down, and he presented me with this very complicated written part, thinking probably this guy is a rocker. So I sight-read it, because I’m trained in that way. But the thing was, we clicked rhythmically.
Oh, Miles! Miles likes Cyndi Lauper. Miles is a completely open individual, as every musician should be. There’s a lot of people in rock music that I know—I won’t mention their names—who are snobs as well. They think that if it’s not two guitars, bass, and drums, and maybe a keyboard, well, forget it. There’s a sort of inverted snobbery there that I find and that I have suffered from. And there’s a problem with guitar players in the States who all want to play like Yngwie Malmsteen. They all want to play scales very fast up and down the neck of the guitar, and they aren’t interested in finding the roots of the music. They probably go as far back as Van Halen, and think that’s the beginning, instead of where Eric went back to: Robert Johnson, Albert King, and so on.
I’m roughly the same age as Mick Jagger, John Lennon—we were all little boys who were really influenced by the very beginnings of the commercial success of early rock ‘n’ roll music. It was there in our consciousness. So we can now look back as an overview, a lot of people of our generation, and a lot of younger people, too. It’s there. You can get the entire output of Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, or somebody. In the ’60s when Cream was happening—let’s say in 1967, when we had our first real success in America—we played the Fillmore in the hippie summer and it felt like the whole world was being reborn, and musically I was so excited.
Ginger Baker and myself were really a hot jazz rhythm section, and even when Eric was playing, Cream was basically a jazz band. We never told Eric that, but that’s another story. Well, I don’t mean we were playing jazz. We certainly weren’t. We were playing improvised music, and some of the improvisations were damn good, even the recordings that were released. Which were not the best. You never get the best live stuff recorded, I’m glad to say.
Because it’s almost a pity when it’s recorded. Because live music should be something that happens and disappears, and you go home from the concert going, “Wow, that was great!” And you know you’ll never hear it again. The musicians love that magic that happens every so often. Also, I think if you stick up a microphone and you know it’s being recorded, it’s going to stop the real magic happening anyway. And I think there’s got to be something wrong with the people who go to the trouble of recording every gig. When I listen to live Cream records now, I’m struck by the sound you got. I think if we were to play now, it would be a lot better. That side of it would be a lot better. Two of the bands that I’ve played with, at least, the great pity was that we were ahead of the technology—they were Cream and Lifetime. They hadn’t invented the real PA system yet. We used to play baseball stadiums with little 200-watt PAs. The problem that Cream had was that none of us were technically minded, in the sense that we knew what to do about it..”
You only have to look at old films of Ginger playing. I saw something recently of him playing with Blind Faith, and he was using two mics for the drums. In Hyde Park! Jimi suffered very badly from equipment, too. In Lifetime, we were playing light-years-ahead music—very fast, very loud—and that was the loudest band I’ve ever played in. Cream wasn’t that loud. Volume is a very relative thing. I think even symphony orchestras are playing louder now. People are going deaf! In those days, if you had 100 watts for the guitar and 100 watts for the bass and 200 watts for the vocals, that was damned loud. In Alexis Korner’s band, we all went through one little amplifier and two speakers either side of the stage—and people thought that was loud! People have got used to louder things. And, of course, we now have more sophisticated sound equipment, which in those days just did not exist. The first time I played electric bass was for Island Records with a guy called Ernest Ranglin, a Jamaican jazz guitar player. We recorded an EP called Ernest Ranglin And The ‘G.Bs’. It was Ernest, Graham Bond on Hammond, Ginger on drums, and me on a bass guitar that I borrowed from some music shop.
I’m a very stolid person. It takes me a long time to change, so I was against bass guitars. But that session was all it took. God, I thought, it’s loud, and I can play so easily. I can play louder than Ginger! He didn’t like it. I was totally convinced, so I went out and bought my first electric bass, which was a Top Ten [he means the Teisco-made Top Twenty brand], a Japanese bass—and “Japanese” didn’t mean very much in those days. It was all I could afford. Sounded pretty good to me. Kept giving me terrible electric shocks, though.
Marvin Gaye came over here. He’d just had his first few hits, must have been ’65. Graham Bond got the job of putting the band together to do a TV show with Marvin, we were playing things like “How Sweet It Is,” and I was going so he asked me to join, but unfortunately—unfortunately? Fortunately, I was getting married and I couldn’t go.
But that did encourage me that I was on the right track, because I was having a lot of problems, specially from Ginger who thought my bass playing was becoming too busy. It was just that he could hear me now. Suddenly there was a bass, and I was playing melody.
I’ve always thought that good music is not a melody and a block and boom-boom. To me good music is all melody—the drums should be playing tunes, the bass should be playing tunes, it should be counterpoint. I like to be able to listen to a lot of things going on, as opposed to one block—unless that’s what you want. I like moving parts, and that’s what a lot of the great Stax and Tamla things are. A lot of great soul music is very contrapuntal. So James Jamerson to me was Tamla Motown, as much as any of the great singers. He’s what made it great, this bass player.
What’s your feeling these days on the way Cream ended? I mean, why did the band break up? The kind of theoretical reason given is that we all wanted to go our separate ways and do different things. The real reason was the greed of the management. They never gave us a minute’s rest, because they drove us into the ground. We were all exhausted, and we hated each other. We were selling more records than The Beatles; the first platinum album; all that stuff. So they thought, let’s get these guys happening, you know?
And so we used to make records, we’d do the recording but wouldn’t be at the mixes. We wouldn’t know what was going to be on the records sometimes. We’d drive past some record shop, go in and buy our record to see what was on it. That’s the way it was in those days. I think most of the Cream songs are alright, there’s just not enough of them, for those reasons.
That final Cream tour in 1968 must have been a weird one. I suppose vaguely I thought it wasn’t our final tour. Mixed feelings. The height of success that we’d had, and we were splitting. Very strange feeling. Some of it was fun, because a lot of the pressure had gone. The Madison Square Garden gig was done in a very joke way, using the house PA, the same one that comes down from the ceiling where they say, “And in the blue corner—” And on a revolving stage. People who saw that gig couldn’t believe it. You’d get a big loud bit of Eric, then a big loud bit of Ginger, then Eric would disappear and I’d arrive, you know.
I remember getting the platinum discs at Madison Square Garden. Robert Stigwood and Ahmet Ertegun got on stage to present us with these in the middle of the set, and the audience just went “Booooo!” Very embarrassing. Very nice to get those, though. I wonder where mine is? I remember bringing it back to England, proudly, and they wanted me to pay duty on it.
The success is nice. But then the feeling is that it’s going to end. I had other things going on in my life. I wanted to have a kid, I wanted to have a house, the different things that people do, as opposed to living out of a suitcase. So there was that to look forward to. It was a good time, really, and I think some of the gigs on that last tour were really, really good, considering. I think we had something slightly better organized sound-wise. I remember one of the first big gigs on that tour, maybe it was Oakland, I remember going with Eric right up to the very furthest-away seats you could go to, and these tiny little dots where we would be, and going, “Fucking hell! We’ve come a long way from the Twisted Wheel.”
Hello, and welcome to Sunday Series No. 5!
I’ve been reading a lot of Wallace Stevens in the past few days, and I keep coming back to a poem called The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm (opposite to current experience) and this bit in particular: “The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom,The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be.”
I love this image of leaning into something that you know will lead to growth, something true. I won’t wax on about Bob Dylan’s impact on my love for lyrics — endless others have expressed what he’s given to us far more eloquently than I ever could — but the leaning reader in this poem pretty well describes how I have always listened to him. Like reading a great book — that rush of receiving a perfect string of words. I always lean in.
On the surface, this isn’t as essential a release as other BBC John Peelsessions LPs. Because the Cocteau Twins used drum machines, the backing tracks and the rhythms replicate the known versions much more than other bands forced to record live in the studio. Yet these BBC John Peel Sessions is still a whopper of a treat for fans and the uninitiated, A sound that builds and builds until one is overcome with unspeakable, barely understood emotions as Elizabeth Fraser starts to blossom into one of the most riveting voices to ever blow air into a mic.
The original members were Elizabeth Fraser (vocals), Robin Guthrie (guitar, drum machine) and Will Heggie (bass guitar), who was replaced by Simon Raymonde (also bass guitar) early in the band’s career.
These BBC Sessions were released as an an album of BBC studio recordings by the band The Cocteau Twins released in 1999 by Bella Union in the UK and Rykodisc in the US. The album spanned the band’s career from the early 1980s through the 1990s. Taken from a series of early 1980s Peel sessions. Throughout most of the Eighties, Peel made favourable comments on the band in interviews.
The band were discovered by Peel when they sent demo tapes to him and the 4AD label. After hearing the demo, Peel invited the group to do a session for his show in 1982. The 4AD label heard the track and signed them. Peel would play their songs throughout most of the Eighties, although by the time the band released their 1988 ‘Blue Bell Knoll’ album, his interest appeared to have waned. At the end of 1988, Peel’s listeners voted their track ‘Carolyn Fingers’ in the 1988 Festive Fifty, despite the DJ not playing any tracks from the album throughout the year.
John Peel Session, 15th July 1982
“Alas Dies Laughing” – 3:29
“Feathers-Oar-Blades” – 2:19
“Garlands” – 4:19
“Wax and Wane” – 3:50
“Strange Fruit” (Billie Holiday cover written by Abel Meeropol) – 1:52
“From the Flagstones” – 3:
“The Tinderbox (Of A Heart)” – 4:46
“Hitherto” – 3:57
In 1984 Peel included ‘From The Flagstones’ by the Cocteaus in his selections for “My Top Ten” and discussed the band with Andy Peebles. Cocteau Twins – From the Flagstones .Well, this is my favourite record of last year. And they were one of those bands again, like when I first heard them I thought, “Great, I’m glad I lived long enough to hear this.” My favourite record of last year, The Cocteau Twins and From The Flagstones. It’s a very, very pleasant voice actually. I like listening to that. Well, I like the extreme voices. I was just thinking that. Over the years it has always been people who have got the really idiosyncratic voices that I like Beefheart, Marc Bolan, Rod Stewart, Elizabeth Frazer of the Cocteaus, Mark Smith of The Fall people like them.
Happy birthday to the great Taj Mahal who turns 78 today. Taj is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who has been performing and recording for 50 years. Primarily a Blues singer, he has incorporated elements of world music into his works, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, and South Pacific. He formed a group called the Rising Sons in 1964 with Ry Cooder and Jesse Lee Kincaid. A record deal with Columbia Records was unfruitful, perhaps because the group was one of the first interracial bands. Mahal worked with other musicians like Muddy Waters,Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, before beginning his solo career with the eponymous Taj Mahal long-player in 1968. His follow-up “Natch’l Blues,” became a part of my collection in 1969 – loved the playing on “Corrina,” and “The Cuckoo,”, and wore it out. Taj also performed with The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus at the end of 1968.
Taj Mahal’s second album, recorded in the spring and fall of 1968, opens with more stripped-down Delta-style blues in the manner of his debut, but adds a little more amplification (partly courtesy of Al Kooper on organ) before moving into wholly bigger sound on numbers like “She Caught the Katy and Left Me a Mule to Ride” and “The Cuckoo” — the latter, in particular, features crunchy electric and acoustic guitars and Gary Gilmore playing his bass almost like a lead instrument, like a bluesman’s answer to John Entwistle most notable, however, may be “You Don’t Miss Your Water (‘Til Your Well Runs Dry)” and “Ain’t That a Lot of Love,” which offer Taj Mahal working in the realm of soul and treading onto This is particularly notable on “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” which achieves the intensity of a gospel performance and comes complete with a Stax/Volt-style horn arrangement Jesse Ed Davis that sounds more like the real thing than the real thing. “Ain’t That a Lot of Love,” by contrast, is driven by a hard electric guitar sound and a relentless bass part that sounds like a more urgent version of the bassline from the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’.”
He recorded 12 albums in all for Columbia during the 70s and 80s, and also recorded three albums for Warner Brothers. His career stalled afterward, and he moved to Hawaii, where he worked throughout the 80s. He released more albums in the 90s. collaborating with both Eric Clapton and Etta James.
In 1997, he won Best Contemporary Blues album for “Senor Blues” at the Grammy Awards, followed by another Grammy in 2000 for “Shoutin’ in Key.” Mahal has continued to record and perform with the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Joe Walsh, and Sheila E. In 2017, he worked with Keb Mo’ on a joint album TajMo.
Taj Mahal is a major artist who has travelled somewhat under the radar all these years. but make no mistake, he is a gifted musician whose albums are well worth searching out.
“The Cuckoo,” From his first Columbia album “The Natch’l Blues,” comes this laid back gem from our Taj Mahal.
“You know the cuckoo is pretty bird/But she warble as she fly/But baby you never heard a cuckoo/Until the Fourth of July.”
“Good Morning Miss Brown” – Taj is all the way live as he rolls through the streets of the Big Easy. This guy has to be one of the coolest cats alive with a resume that could stretch down Bourbon Street. Originally from his second album on Columbia, “The Natch’l Blues,” in 1969 it was the beginning of a 50+ year career that is still going strong.
Produced by the band members themselves and engineered by the legendary Martin Rushent, “Future Games” was recorded at London’s Advision Studios between June and August 1971, and the fact that it was released on September 3rd of the same year shows just how quick the turnaround was. In addition to Kirwan, the album also stands out as being the first Fleetwood Mac album to include Christine McVie as a full member as well as the first to feature Bob Welch, but it’s also notable for being the band’s first album without Jeremy Spencer.
When Fleetwood Mac turned in Future Games, Reprise Records said that they wouldn’t release it with only seven songs, so the band popped back into the studio and laid down “What a Shame,” doing so as a jam, hence the song writing credits including every member of the band. The album’s lone single, “Sands of Time,” failed to chart in either the U.S. or the U.K., but one tune has managed to find a tremendous audience over the years: the title track, penned by Welch, which is by far the most streamed song on the album.
Future Games was poorly received by the critics of the time. Future Games is a thoroughly unsatisfactory album. It is thin and anemic-sounding and I get the impression that no one involved really put very much into it. If Fleetwood Mac have tried to make the transition from an energetic rocking British blues band to a softer more “contemporary” rock group, they have failed. If they have simply lost interest.
Critic Robert Christgau’s commentary shows how much the man admires what he perceives as his superior ability with wordplay as well as the usual pomposity and factual errors:
These white blues (and hippie rockabilly) veterans shouldn’t have to depend on new recruit Bob Welch’s deftly metallized r&b extrapolation for rock and roll, but unless you count the studio jam, they do. And if the best song on the album isn’t the slowest, that’s only because Welch also has mystagogic tendencies. It’s the simplest in any case: Christine Perfect’s ‘Show Me a Smile.’ Christine was no longer calling herself Perfect but was still good enough to qualify as McVie. Bob Welch actually contributed relatively little to Future Games: he wrote two of the songs (including the title track) and “played mostly rhythm guitar.” And to apply the term “mystagogic” to Bob Welch is completely absurd, for “A mystagogue is a person who initiates others into mystic beliefs, and an educator or person who has knowledge of the sacred mysteries of a belief system.” Neither of Welch’s songs come close to qualifying as a trip into the mystic (though Danny Kirwan’s do).
The expansion of the band’s range is established immediately in the pair of sus2 acoustic guitar chords that form the intro to Kirwan’s “Woman of 1000 Years.” Patterns of sustained and major seventh chords have an elusive, indefinite feel, calling up adjectives like “ethereal,” “dreamy” and “melancholy.” Most songwriters fail to develop chord structures to support them, leading to a vague, uncertain musical statement that lacks a sense of forward movement—songwriter and song remain suspended in a musical vacuum.
Danny Kirwan was not one of those songwriters. “Woman of 1000 Years” has one of the most beautiful and satisfying chord structures I’ve ever heard. When I reproduced the chords on my acoustic guitar, I felt myself moving into a still, reflective space where I was at one with the sheer beauty of the musical progression. I switched to piano and the progression had the same entrancing effect. The sense of movement and wonder is enhanced by subtle changes and additions along the way that keep things challenging and intensely interesting—but not once does a chord feel out-of-place. Chord charts on the Internet are often hit-or-miss (half the contributors couldn’t tell a minor chord from a major to save their lives), but I found one on Ultimate Guitar that gets it right. If you are a musician, I encourage you to head over there and explore the pattern—the improvisational opportunities are limitless.
Back to our story, the “resolution” chord is Asus2, which effectively means there is no resolution at all—the woman of a thousand years remains an indefinable mystery. Although not specifically identified as such in the lyrics, the woman is certainly a manifestation of the muse, but Kirwan doesn’t limit her role to sparking creativity in the artist. Danny Kirwan’s vocal is beautifully restrained and blends marvelously with Christine McVie’s harmonies. The first guitar solo is a gorgeous display of simplicity, completely consistent with the nature of the composition as it seems to end a bar before its time, avoiding definitive resolution; the complementary guitar fade supplies an appropriately gentle exit. While “Woman of 1000 Years” is hardly your typical album opener, it is a compelling experience nonetheless, establishing a mood for the album that asks the listener to shift gears, slow down and take some time to enjoy the magic of music.
Let us correct the record. Future Games balances the impressive song writing talents of Kirwan, Welch and Christine McVie. Each of those artists put a great deal of effort into crafting those songs, a glaring truth that is obvious to anyone who actually takes the time to listen to the record. Danny Kirwan is clearly the dominant presence, contributing the three songs most crucial to establishing the reflective mood of the album. If anything, Future Games increased Fleetwood Mac’s “promise” by extending their playing field beyond straight blues-based rock ‘n’ roll.
Future Games may not have been a gargantuan hit in America, but it did kick off a trend for a few albums where each album did better than one that preceded it, with 1972’s Bare Trees hitting and Penguin so it still furthered Fleetwood Mac’s fanbase in the States.
Even nice albums need some kick, and Future Games certainly delivers on that score. Christine McVie’s “Morning Rain” gives her a chance to warm up her piano fingers in a percussive role dedicated to reinforcing the solid rhythm established by the ever-grounded pair of Fleetwood and McVie. I love the way this song opens, lulling the listener into believing the root chord is F# before making a move to establish F# as the tension chord demanding resolution to B major. The sweet bluesy guitar licks that highlight that transition make me smile at the cleverness of the ruse as they settle into the solid groove. For a rock song, Christine’s vocal in the verses (supported by harmony) is comparatively subdued, but soon we learn that she’s been saving her vocal chords for the more enthusiastic performance in the bridge . The contrast between the two vocal styles adds to the appeal of the song, and even more excitement awaits us in the instrumental passages where the guitarists let loose. I also love the way the piece ends, with Christine and the boys reminding us of the song’s essential melodic nature with a nice round of wordless singing. “Morning Rain” is a tasty little piece promising that Future Games will cover a lot of musical ground.
“What a Shame” was added at the last minute because the album submitted by the band contained only seven tracks and the record company wanted eight. The band responded with a single key jam with heavy bass featuring Christine’s brother John on saxophone. I’m glad John picked up a few bucks in the process, but other than executing the piece with due professionalism, the band doesn’t sound particularly interested. If they had to include it on the album, it might have been better to move it back into the fourth slot to serve as a brief intermission between “Future Games” and “Sands of Time.” It’s sufficiently low-key so as not to disturb the nice album vibes.
Moving onto Bob Welch’s Fleetwood Mac début, “Future Games” makes use of the sustained and major seventh chords we heard in “Woman of a 1000 Years,” in this case producing a slight drone effect with the unifying B-note (Em, Cmaj7, Asus2, B7). However, Welch’s piece features clearer resolution to E minor in the verses and G major in the chorus, hinting at a more definitive theme in the lyrics. Despite the unknowable nature of the future, Welch pulls it off by universalizing the message: playing out future possibilities is something everyone does, whether it’s speculating on the afterlife, the possibility of a relationship with this person or that person, or worrying about disasters that may come our way. “I know I’m not the only one to ever spend my life sitting playing “Future Games”. Musically, “Future Games” complements Kirwan’s contributions to the album with its pensive mood and restraint. The band passes up the opportunity to go big in the instrumental passage featuring the guitar solo, using that passage to reinforce the melody before easing into the third verse. Though I think they could have shortened the fade a bit, “FutureGames” works on multiple levels, and demonstrates Bob Welch’s gift for melody that would later result in “Sentimental Lady.”
The flow of Danny Kirwan’s “Sands of Time” is as gentle and mesmerizing as the flow of a mountain stream. The music here alternates between G major and its E minor complement, spiced with a delightful variety of guitar fills, cascading arpeggios and some nifty cymbal work from Mick Fleetwood. The lyrics involve the interplay of darkness and light, as expressed in the verse that opens and closes the song.
In a stunning turn of events, Danny seems to go full country in the introduction to “Sometimes,” with Christine McVie’s down-home piano and sweetly picked guitar leading the way. Danny inserts a minor chord into the mix and John McVie fills the empty spaces with deep, penetrating bass. Danny then steps into the role of jilted lover, remembering the good times while throwing his aching back into his work to help push the emotional pain to the sidelines. The song straddles the line between classic sad song and defiance of sadness, expressed both in the lyrics and in the surprisingly muscular guitar fills. Although not as deep or complex as his other two contributions, don’t let its subtlety fool you: “Sometimes” is first-rate song writing by a very talented songwriter.
The one contribution on the album I could have done without is Bob Welch’s “Lay It All Down,” a rather pedestrian attempt at blues-influenced gospel with the usual “just like the good book said” crapola. Thematically it’s a weak fit; I suppose one could argue that it maintains the connection with the earlier model of Fleetwood Mac, but that was then, this was now, and this song flat-out sucks.
Fortunately, Future Games ends on a high note with Christine McVie’s “Show Me a Smile.” Songs written by parents for their children generally don’t grab me because of the latent sentimentality, but there’s one verse that lifts this song out of the maudlin and into the reality that a child’s future is likely to result in disappointment. Christine captured that dynamic beautifully, carefully balancing her vocal so that she never goes too soft or over the top. The music is equally supportive of that balance, with luscious arpeggiated guitar, lead guitar fills and splashes of piano guiding us gently through the verses, and John McVie delivering serious punch with his bass during the louder passages. “Show Me a Smile” ends Future Games by underscoring the album’s essential beauty.
The only constant members are drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. That’s where the band’s name comes from, and they won a lawsuit to prove it.
Fleetwood Mac began life as a blues band during the peak years of the British blues movement. Their first album is officially titled Fleetwood Mac, but nearly everyone refers to it as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, referring to the band’s lead guitarist and singer. This début album was a smashing success, and remains one of the most enjoyable blues records of the era. Jeremy Spencer contributed slide guitar and some vocals. As was true for so many British musicians of the era, Peter Green developed his chops in John Mayall’s band.
Peter Green stayed with the band through the third studio album, Then Play On, the first album with Danny Kirwan. Kirwan would emerge as sort of co-leader with Jeremy Spencer on the fourth album Kiln House. Spencer left the band shortly thereafter. Christine Perfect, aka Christine McVie, who had appeared occasionally on earlier albums, became a full-time member after Kiln House, the name change reflecting her marriage to John McVie.
Prior to Future Games, an American musician by the name of Bob Welch joined the band, sharing guitar duties with Kirwan. This relationship ended after the follow-up album Bare Trees when Kirwan’s drinking and temper led to some serious altercations with Welch, which in turn led to Kirwan’s dismissal. Welch contributed to five studio albums, and the period from Future Games to Heroes Are Hard to Find are colloquially referred to as the Bob Welch Era or similar designation.
In 1975, Christine McVie pushed hard for a more radio-friendly music to pad her bank account. Welch thought he’d be better off going solo and left the band. Fleetwood Mac replaced him with Americans Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
