Log #210 - A Heavy Rock Crossword Puzzle Circa 1983

I recently came across an old photo of my album collection from when I must have been about 18 years old. I had laid the albums out in the garden and taken a photo from an upstairs window:

My LP collection - circa 1983?

It's interesting to track my taste through a photograph like this. Considering I only bought my first proper album around the age of 15 (ELO Out Of The Blue on blue vinyl!) I had amassed a decent collection by the time I took my box of records off to Uni. 

From ELO (Face The Music and Discovery lie prominently above) I moved swiftly into heavy metal (Rainbow, AC/DC, Black Sabbath and The Scorpions), and then more considered rock like Led Zeppelin, Santana and Deep Purple, then more synth and spacey rock like Hawkwind and BOC, prog rock like Jethro Tull, BJH and King Crimson, some first excursions into electronics (Tangerine Dream), first singer songwriters (Neil Young - Van Morrison and John Martyn came later) and then finally Krautrock (I can see my first Can album on the top line). 

Like everyone at that time I also had a lot of cassettes (mostly home recorded) as I know there were bands I had discovered by then that don't appear in this photo.

How many of these albums did I reinvest in as CDs later on? Probably about two thirds of them?

This week I've revisited 6 of these albums from my teenage years:

Saga - Worlds Apart

Camel - The Snow Goose
Sammy Hagar - Danger Zone
Barclay James Harvest - Eyes Of The Universe
Jethro Tull - A

Moody Blues - Seventh Sojourn

SAGA

To be fair it's quite hard to listen to some of these albums now. The Saga (5 down 4 across) is a case in point. It was a struggle to get to the end of the album. I just don't have any interest in this sort of keyboard soft rock music any more (and probably only a very fleeting interest at the time - nice cover though). My reaction to hearing Worlds Apart mirrored my reaction to the Styx album I played a few logs ago ie. not positive. 

I fail to see how this music was ever categorised as prog rock. Great cover though, although more recent versions have different artwork.

CAMEL

Nothing wrong with the great Camel and Snow Goose (4 down 6 along) (their third album from 1975) is one of their best. Save for the odd bit of chanting and humming this is an instrumental concept piece displaying the full range of the band's prog rock tendencies and musical talents - keen guitar, melodic flutes, and bubbling keyboards. 

The concept is loosely based on the wartime novella The Snow Goose: A Story of Dunkirk. Very loosely based really as the album is instrumental, so there were no lyrics, just song titles. Nevertheless the author sued the band for copyright (seems odd really as surely such exposure would only increase his readership). 

Snow Goose has remained in my collection and I know it well, along with their best album in my opinion, Mirage. I see I also had The Single Factor, one of their later albums, at the time of this photo and that might have been a more interesting album for me to revisit - one for next time.

BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST

Eyes Of The Universe (5 down 2 across)- starts of with a gated keyboard rhythm. The best tracks, like this opener, and Capricorn do remind me of Octoberon, personally my favourite BJH album. AOR, or yacht rock if you like, but a good version thereof. 

The Song (They Love To Sing) sounds like Genesis. But then a song like Skin Flicks demonstrates all the schmaltz of the era (a waste of 7 minutes to be fair). The album is redeemed by the final track Play To The World which is classic BJH - an epic moving mellotron drenched ballad.

All in all a pretty good album from BJH, considering they were well passed their best by 1979. Great cover too.

JETHRO TULL

Jethro Tull's A (7 down 9 across) came out just a few months after Eyes Of The Universe. What to think about this? Mmmm, it's almost good. I like the fundamental Tull sound which is still intact - Anderson's voice, the catchy melodies, the harmonies, tinkly piano, guitar breaks, and of course the breathy flute. 

Already having moved on (Songs From The Wood, Heavy Horses) a fair bit from their earlier rock and prog days (Aqualung, Thick As A Brick) the songs on A are not a massive departure from what the band were already doing in the late '70s. Just a little bit more synthesized. 

In fact this album reminds me a lot of the more popular The Broadsword And The Beast album (also in the picture) which followed two years later - possibly their last good album before declining into an '80s mire? I can't comment to be fair having not heard anything post Broadsword apart from Thick As A Brick 2 which I now learn is credited as an Ian Anderson solo record.

My interest waned a bit on side two where there are quite a few throwaway tunes like 4.W.D. and The Pine Marten's Jig.

An odd cover, related (by UFOs?) to the Eyes Of The Universe one come to think of it, and also the recently reviewed Levitation by Hawkwind (also in the photo). Apparently the "A" derives from the fact that the album was originally conceived as an Ian Anderson solo record.

THE MOODY BLUES

 

The Moody Blues never seem to be mentioned in the same breath as other prog rock (and mellotron heavy) bands of the late '60s and early '70s. They were never on my radar like Genesis, King Crimson and Yes. 

There is some nice stuff on Seventh Sojourn (1 down 4 along) and some tracks like When You're A Free Man have elements of Nights In White Satin with some nice acoustic and electric guitar. It's all nicely played and produced but is just a bit too easy listening - and for a 1972 album it even sounds more dated than that when compared to what their rock contemporaries were producing by then.

SAMMY HAGAR

Heavy rocker Sammy Hagar enjoyed a solo career through the late '70s (after leaving rock group Montrose) and early '80s (before joining Van Halen). Danger Zone (5 down 9 along) was released in 1980 becoming his fifth solo album. 

It's exactly what you'd expect - heavy rock guitar in the mould of a Ted Nugent. Nothing too fancy or ambitious - just good old straight forward rock music which hasn't aged as poorly as some of the more progressive music above.

That was a fun trip down memory lane. I'll be returning to this photo for some more listening inspiration in the future.

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Log #21 - The Conceptual Art of Thick as a Brick

1. Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick
2. Barclay James Harvest - The Harvest Years
3. Barclay James Harvest - The Harvest Years
4. Barclay James Harvest - Gone To Earth
5. Eilen Jewell - Sea of Tears
6. Paulo Nutini - Sunny Side Up

Head album this week is the Jethro Tull Thick as a Brick opus. This really was a concept album - deliberately so. Leader Ian Anderson, in response to the critics calling the Tull's previous album, Aqualung, a concept album (wrongly in his view - "it was just a bunch of songs") decided to deliver the mother of all concept albums.

...We were spoofing the idea of the concept album.

Hence we have Thick as a Brick which is essentially one composition spread in two parts of 20 minutes each. The concept as it were wasn't anything grand. It told the story of a schoolboy who was disqualified from a poetry competition. The schoolboy in question, one fictional Gerald Bostock, is pictured on the album cover which doubles as the St. Cleve Chronicle newspaper.

What of the actual Gerald Bostock? He was child model Andre C Le Breton who 45 years on works as a music engineer and record producer whilst dabbling in his own compositions which he describes as weird German underground trance blending light and dark electronic noise. Sounds great!

Apparently the design of the album cover took more time than the actual music. As for the music I can't say I've studied it as a whole much before this weekend. I'm familiar with the opening acoustic riff and Anderson's proclamation:

Really don't mind if you sit this one out. My word's but a whisper - your deafness a shout!

...and other passages are very catchy and like all good concept albums weave in and out at various points. As a whole opus it actually rocks - with loads of excellent Hammond organ and harlequin / renaissance court type one-legged flute.

I would never compare what we did back then to jazz rockers like Weather Report or the Mahavishnu Orchestra - they were really amazing musicians - but we were a little more sophisticated than the usual riff rockers you'd find on the scene.

Ian Anderson

A few years ago I saw Jethro Tull at a festival down in Devon where they were showcasing not only the original Thick as a Brick, but also a new follow up album TAAB 2 - it sounded pretty good although not so holistically well rounded. The live show was excellent too, part drama with a young actor, dressed in overalls holding a broom, taking on most of the singing. Anderson's strum on his miniature guitar of the opening of the original was one of my most exciting gig experiences ever!

The giant Ian Anderson today with tiny guitar

I do love the lengths people can go to on the internet - I'm a bit of a sucker for conspiracy theories for example which are rife. But isn't it great how people find worth and meaning and inspiration in such things. So by way of example someone has gone to town on Thick as a Brick. Check out http://thickasabrick.net for a comprehensive interpretation of the album. The writer of that website Paul Tarvydas makes an interesting point by way of explanation of his (over?) analysis:

"I don't actually think that an artist consciously decides to write with the detail I've expressed. A true artist feels certain emotions and convictions, then writes/paints/composes items which 'go with that flow'. It is up to us, the appreciators of this art, to parse the original intentions of the artist and to express them in more rudimentary terms. To make them more accessible to the masses (including myself). A truly good artist will make his/her expressions interpretable in more than one way." 

Yes and no. I think there is a lot of over interpretation in art. In many cases I think the author is being more random than they are given credit for.  Anderson actually admits this in his Aqualung quote above. Ironically a piece of art that is open ended usually benefits from multiple different interpretations - a hallmark of great art in my opinion.

I have really enjoyed rediscovering Barclay James Harvest this week. That goes for both their old stuff as showcased on the Harvest Years double compilation (covering most of their first three albums) and even the more soft poppy Gone to Earth. As with Afro Celt Sound System earlier in this annual log they were a band I was not expecting to be playing this year. Pleasant surprises.

Eilen Jewell is just great at what she does - which is Americana/Country. I've seen her a few times and the live band - guitar, double bass, and drums, is so tight. The guitarist Jerry Miller is particularly fantastic in that hard to define efficient musicality way - ie. not flashy but with a superb feel for melody. Check them out live if they come to a venue near you.

The Eilen Jewell Band - guitar legend Jerry Miller in customary Stetson

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Log #20 - The Jethro Oyster Harvest - Underachievers in Rock

1. Randy Newman - Lonely at the Top
2. Nitin Sawhney - Beyond Skin
3. Blue Oyster Cult - Spectres
4. Barclay James Harvest - Gone to Earth
5. Jethro Tull - Aqualung
6. Paolo Nutini - Sunny Side Up

A quick word on a super local band who have been doing the rounds for a while - I had the pleasure of seeing The Mountain Firework Company at the Wellington pub in Shoreham the other night. If you get a chance catch them live and enjoy their effortlessly great swamp folk Americana. Lovely harmonies, sensitive brush stick rhythms, and a fiddle sound to die for. Bands like this should be huge but they probably don't want to be.

Barclay James Harvest eh, or BJH for short. That’s a strange one as is their name. Apparently this was decided by drawing random slips of paper from a hat and the word Harvest came before the subsequently named fledgling label they were signed to.

I first heard them at a school friend’s house one evening – I’d just broken up with my girlfriend. A girl named Penny who had decided to go out with my sister’s boyfriend, but that’s off the point! Their music is pretty sad but it was a small consolation to discover them that evening as I’d spent some time looking for other bands that sounded like King Crimson who I adored at the time, and with their prog rock mellotron strings they fitted the bill pretty well.

[They were].. everything that identified progrock then: vaulting themes, orchestra, wailing guitar riding heaving swells of tempestuous music like a doomed ship out of Coleridge, lyrics arising from areas other than the crotch, and a dexterity that would turn most composers and players on their heads.

Marc S. Tucker

Discovering new music and subsequently lending it around school was a constant excitement in those years (something I feel must be lacking in today’s digital world). I had an album called New Morning or something – an early compilation and amongst the odd mix of acoustic Simon and Garfunkel type tunes and rather portentous classical rock there was a tremendous rocker called Taking Some Time On. This tune (albeit not really representative) really turned me on to BJH and plenty of my friends too.

Progressing through the 70s their writing became more expansive and ambitious but their bloated live performances with full orchestra, allied with poor record sales, almost bankrupted the group before they underwent a renaissance with an enforced change of record label and a rebirth as a (relatively) stripped back four piece.

For a short time I bought everything they did. Personally I think they peaked with Octoberon (1976). By then they had mellowed somewhat and were writing largely radio friendly soft rock - songs like Rock N Roll Star should have been massive. After that they began that all too familiar terminal decline into 80s synthesizer irrelevance - an affliction of many 70s rock bands.

Despite playing some massive concerts (famously a 1980 live album was recorded in front of 200,000 in Berlin) they were always on the fringe of success. Bassist and singer Les Holroyd recently theorised that this had something to do with them refusing to join the London scene and remaining a "northern band". Maybe their music was just a little bit too twee – much more Moody Blues than King Crimson in hindsight - there is even a track called Poor Man's Moody Blues on the 1977 album Gone to Earth. It also sounds quite religious – something that I hadn’t really clocked at all before playing this album again this weekend.

The classic line up Wolstenholme, Lees, Pritchard, Holroyd

I saw a Holroyd incarnation of them relatively recently in Hove where they hesitatingly played to only about 300 people – what a fall from grace (albeit a relatively short-lived grace you could say). The persistent downbeat vibes surrounding this underachieving/underrated band were heightened poignantly with the suicide of keyboardist Woolly Wolstenholme in 2010.

While we are on underachievers let's talk about The Blue Oyster Cult. As I mentioned in an earlier post somewhere their early albums like their eponymous debut, Secret Treaties, and Tyranny and Mutation, are tight rock albums with an original twist. They then had their big hit Don't Fear the Reaper and like a lot of rock bands of the time drifted into a slightly more poppy sound on Spectres and Mirrors. Then possibly continuing to chase commercial success they went heavy metal with a sci-fi bent in the early 80s even recruiting sci-fi writer Michael Moorcock to pen some lyrics (as he had done for Hawkwind). Incidentally if you aren't familiar with the writings of Moorcock checkout his brilliant novella Behold the Man about a time traveller who returns to the time of Christ with blasphemous consequences.

BOC - ELO in leathers (plus Saturday Night Fever)

I picked up Spectres on the strength of the literally spooky cover! I don't remember many specific album purchases but I do this one, a single LP purchase one afternoon from an old record shop in Havant. The whole album doesn't particularly gel what with it's mix of rock tunes and ballads (indeed the picture above may suggest some degree of identity crisis although their mysterious mason like symbolism and umlauted "O" were always cool and consistent). Aside from the straight rockers like the catchy Godzilla there are beautiful tunes like Fireworks and I Love The Night, some super tight pop like Searchin for Celine and Goin' Through the Motions, and some epic prog like Golden Age of Leather and Nosferatu (lyrical extract below). 

This ship pulled in without a sound
The faithful captain long since cold
He kept his log till the bloody end
Last entry read "Rats in the hold.
My crew is dead, I fear the plague."

Da da da da daaaa da! In case you didn't recognise it, that's the riff from the title track to Jethro Tull's Aqualung - one of the most famous guitar riffs ever. It's a very strong album and probably the "go to" one for new Tull fans. Apparently there is debate about whether it was meant as a concept album - the first side about a tramp like character called Aqualung, and the second side a commentary on organised religion (actually isn't all religion "organised"?). But Tull leader Ian Anderson dismissed this:

Aqualung was just a bunch of songs.

And a mighty fine bunch of songs it is including heavy rockers like Cross Eyed Mary, Hymn 43, and Locomotive Breath and acoustic gems like Cheap Day Return and Mother Goose.

Anderson was reportedly not best pleased with the similarity between the painted Aqualung figure on the album cover and himself!

The fictitious Aqualung and the real Ian Anderson

Just a quick word this week on slots 1 and 2. Multi instrumentalist and composer Nitin Sawhney shot to fame when his album Beyond Skin was released in 1999. It is a slickly produced affair melding indian influences with electronica and jazz plus some beautiful piano pieces like Tides.

Singer-songwriter-pianist Randy Newman eschewed the Hollywood/Laurel Canyon/Troubadour scene of his native LA in the late 60s and early 70s when contemporaries like Neil Young, James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell were seeking fame and fortune. This didn't stop him producing some critically acclaimed albums like Sail Away and Good Old Boys full of political satire and irony, and well represented on this 1987 compilation album. Now he has fully embraced Hollywood gaining a wealth of grammys and oscars for his film compositions especially the tunes for Toy Story.

Randy Newman - We Talk Real Funny Down Here

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