I really want to share this excellent cover by the incredible and prolific Lite Gauge of a song from my misspent youth.
Well to be more exact, half a song from those long lost days because the song itself is split at least in half (actually kaleidoscopically fragmented) in the original Incredible String Band performance of the wonderful Job's Tears.
This movement of the song, performed here by YouTube musician extroadinaire who goes by the name Lite Gauge is to me an anthem from those psychedelic days of magical discovery in the late 1960s. It reminds me of the very taste of existence, the nectar of youth, the ecstacy of the world I entered into adulthood in. All that is history now of course. I heard someone on a BBC programme I recently watched on my computer say that the era of my childhood - i.e. post-war England is now as remote from the modern world as Ancient Rome.
Half my life is officially consigned to 'history' even 'ancient history' seems a bit harsh to me...maybe every genereration gets to this place if it survives long enough to become history in its own lifetime, but then again... my generation have seen a total and complete transformation of the society in which we live... from my childhood, when our milk was still delivered daily by horse drawn carts, even in a big industrial city like Birmingham... to this age of particle accelerators, digital information superhighways and man-made interstellar space objects leaving our solar system. Sci-fi is now the norm.
Half my life is officially consigned to 'history' even 'ancient history' seems a bit harsh to me...maybe every genereration gets to this place if it survives long enough to become history in its own lifetime, but then again... my generation have seen a total and complete transformation of the society in which we live... from my childhood, when our milk was still delivered daily by horse drawn carts, even in a big industrial city like Birmingham... to this age of particle accelerators, digital information superhighways and man-made interstellar space objects leaving our solar system. Sci-fi is now the norm.
All in all I think humanity is clearly incredibly adaptable and I'm very glad about that, but not as glad as I was to play 'Rounders with an old chair leg and with fallen apples for a ball in the grounds of the derelict Victorian asylum after a long wakeful night, my friends, my lovers and this song still echoing in my ears......ah it takes me back to a time now long since gone! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounders
Lite Gauge is the face of the folk scene as I remember it, now reaching out to us from the internet and transporting us to the folk clubs of the 1960s and 1970s. For the full psychedelic impact of these acid anthems here is the original song by the Incredible String Band which for me will always be situated between the Aztec Temples and the dining table of some bedsit with incence and an unmade bed. I'm sure you get the picture, so anyway here is the original from the archives of my life, hope you enjoy it too.
In a final bit of enchantment here is a film of ISB playing Irish jigs which was made for tv in Germany in 1970 but apparently never shown. Fortunately the film has been posted on YouTube and given a new lease of life as a captured moment in time. This video is a celebration of the Celtic traditions which gave rise to the band in Edinburgh in the first place. It says it all really.......
From the archives
First off, best wishes to you and your fellows and ladies in West of England as this hurricane-style storm comes inland. I hear it is going to be a "doozy" and public transport is limited, so may Birmingham folk and their environs weather this one and come out home and dry in the end.
ReplyDeleteThanks Doug, so far no storm here... its calm here right now and my local weather forecasters are predicting rain...this is what they are saying about weather in my locality.....
Delete"Rain showers, becoming steadier around 10pm. Mostly cloudy with temperatures slowly falling to near 53F. SSW winds shifting to SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 95%. Rainfall around a quarter of an inch."
Nothing very dramatic there Doug.
Its quite odd really we have this disaster dialogue going on in the media with so far nothing but typical autumn weather here ...and no prediction of anything else from our local weather watchers.
Of course they can get it wrong and I have battened down the hatches just in case but it is strange that the current wind speed is a leisurely 16 kph (9mph) from the south. I await events with interest, thanks for your concern Doug if I listened to the BBC to decide what action to take, I'd be in the cellar with a tin hat on by now .
As it happens I just went outside it is still, the wind has dropped, there is very light drizzle in the air and it is abnormally mild for late October at a balmy 13C or 55F.
We await events with fascinated trepidations Doug I'll keep you posted if there are any major developments assuming I maintain my power supply of course..
Cheers
Great music indeed, AA, and thanks for sharing songs from those heady times. I know I get a similar feeling looking back at the "Vietnam War-Watergate Scandal" era I grew up in. It seems to me that the society I and other friends experience in the USA has changed faster in forty- odd years than you'd think possible with regular chronology. It could be the enormous changes in home technology and advances in particle psychics and public and private spyware have altered the way we interact with one another.
ReplyDeleteThank goodness for You Tube that we all can share bits and pieces of our youth like this--the Incredible String Band sounds a lot like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and John Sebastian and other folk-and-string bands I would catch on the AM/FM radio or television variety shows. One could catch a Sunday Night show called "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" which used to feature a lot of folk performers like Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie and The Lovin' Spoonful. Even George Harrison showed up one week. The anti-war and satiric tone of Tom and Dick Smothers rubbed too many local affiliates in the heartland of America the wrong way so the CBS network took it off the air despite respectable ratings. The so-called "liberal media" of the Nixon Era danced to the tune of "Don't Make Waves".
Things have changed a lot here. I didn't see horse-drawn milk delivery but I remember life in Northern California being far more accessible to more people. Adults could get jobs and those jobs got them adequate medical care and decent housing. Now in many places almost half the people who are homeless in places like San Jose work for a living and can't get into an abode except under a bridge.
You also very rarely just see kids playing the way I did after school when my pals would fill up a red wagon with baseballs and bats and gloves and head for a grab-grass laden patch of public (state) school playing field and just choose sides and play a game of baseball (the American version of Rounders as I understand) or kick a football around. It's all about grabbing an "X-box" and playing indoors. Kids do seem to get out and play sports but now the emphasis is more and more on adult-organized leagues which frankly I never found as much fun as the impromptu games we had from the lot we could organize in our own neighborhoods. Organized kids sports are, to me, more about adults reliving their pasts through the kids than letting the kids just play the game for the sake of competition and plain fun.
What that all has to so with great folk music I am not sure about, but thanks for sharing this music here. It's a sad day with the news of the death of Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground and later solo efforts and I'm happy to hear some of the music--albeit different from Mr. Reed's more urban sound--- from that era again.
Thabnks for your comments Doug. It is indeed a sad loss that Lou Reed has died, I saw him at Birmingham's National Indoor Arena in what was quite an intimate show where the aiudience including myself were up close to Lou and the band. I remember first hearing What Goes On by the Velvet Underground in a booth in a record shop in Birmingham and being completely amazed by the proto-Punk energy of it. Lou Reed was an innovator and one of the most important performers of the last 50 years. He carried the NYC musical torch from the Beat Generation on McDougal Street through the Pop Art revolution before handing it over to the Ramones while he settled into the grown up pop market, but always with an edge. He'll be sorely missed, another music legend disappears from our world. The 60s were indeed a remarkable musical and cultural era ...the full blossoming of globalisation began there.
DeleteI agree with all the above about the synthesis of The Beats with Pop Art , AA,and the legacy that these special artists brought and still inspire others when the torch inevitably passes.
DeleteYour tribute to Lou Red on your other Blogger site was just right. I'm glad you shared "What Goes On" because I rather left it our of the YU canon in my mind and it's good to have it back there :-) The Ramones were also a favorite band of mine and you can't go wrong with songs like "Britzkrieg Bop" and "The KKK Took My Baby Away", of that I'm certain.
Sheena Is A Punk Rocker ia an all time classic in my view Doug, if Lou Reed was New York on heroin then the Ramones were New York on speed. It is interesting to me that commercialised global punk rock began more or less simultaneously in New York and London in the mid 70s I think. One influential forerunner of both streams of punk rock was the Velvet Underground who also pioneered 'indy' music too of course. The punk movement were the marching band of anarchism whatever that is, its symbols became the icons of punk, just as the safety pin became the symbol of alienation and anticapitalism. The irony is of course the only reason we know of the Ramones, a garage band from Queens is the corporate global distribution octopus and the investment that went into publicising socially constructed trends like punk rock. The only way the world will ever know that punk rockers from lets say Bolton have rejected capitalism is when multinational corporate capitalism tells them so via the inhouse media, the product and the ever burgeoning merch. As you say Doug Blitzkrieg Bop is a great
Deletesong, you can hear different musical traditions with the throttle fully open in those songs.
The indebtedness of American punk to various musical traditions is of course expressed in the whole repertoire of Me First And The Gimme Gimmes the breakneck cover group as a statement of fact. No less so if perhaps less explicitly most of the time with Rancid and Bad Religion and the whole punk/ska synthesis that makes the genre more than a white male preoccupation, now a new global cross cultural roots music variant. No wonder the KKK targeted his baby Doug, it all makes sense when you look at from that angle I think.
Thank god for YouTube..............there are songs and bands and concerts that are burned deep in my memory and can be recalled in an instant. But there were other bands and other concerts that need a little prompt before they float to the surface. What an incredible era we lived through, musically and culturally we were the lucky ones, I'm so glad the core of who I am was formed then, surrounded by good music in a pre-consumerism and pre-thatcherism world.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very happy post in the wake of such sad news. :-)
Indeed Loretta we were children of the revolurtion as Marc Bolan put it and it is true. I do think we were lucky to be in on the beginnings of this movement that has given us the green movement and a cultural history to be proud of for all of mankind really. It was a time of great discovery and it was like being launched at adolescence into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities and the uncharted regions of both inner and outer space. It was a rainbow revolution that happened as Bob Dylan pointed out how hard the rain was falling and was going to fall. He was right. Pre-consumerism, pre-Thatcherism and good music, who could have asked for more, but alas it was too good to last, the revolution has to be much more focused and resilient this time, I think it is actually. So yeah....the prayer flags of the patchouli oiled libertines flap in the winds of time as the sun sets on more ravaged and parched lands than they had been back in those days. Here's to Lou Reed and the Wild Side may it continue to gain ground.
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