Great God Pan

Last Fall while tooling around the alleys of old town Stockholm, I stopped in to a tiny record store to see about relieving myself of my per diem. After witnessing me stock up on Algarnas Tradgard reissues and Frida from Abba’s solo record (featuring the definitive version of “Life on Mars”), the store’s owner suggested a CD collection by an obscure Swedish duo called Charlie and Esdor that they’d recently released. Checking out the attractive cover photo, I thought, what the hell, what’s a few Kronor more for some shirtless hippies laying it down for the people? Anyway, I’m glad I did and here’s why.

Half-Swede Edmund “Charlie” Franzén and Norwegian Esdor Jensen emerged from a confusing mishmash of Scandinavian beat groups like The Brew and the DeCoys in the mid ‘60s. Due to a common interest in Indian music and the fact that Charlie had a sitar, the two began jamming together, mostly on Beatles and Hendrix numbers. By 1970 they had their shit together enough to perform as Charlie’s Elektric Band at a big festival in Stockholm where they’d relocated, along with counterculture faves Träd, Gräs, och Stenar. Soon afterwards the pair entered the studio, recording a single for the emerging MNW label that kicks off this CD. Both sides are grooving compositions, featuring acoustic guitar, sitar, drums, and bass. The a-side, “Dä klagar mina grannar” (“That’s When My Neighbors Complain”) sorta borrows jazzy chords from “Spooky” but piles on top of it some great electric geetar-style sitar pickin,’ as well as some somewhat unmelodic Swedish vocals, almost Damo Suzuki-like in their delivery. After blowing minds for standard pop song length, the whole things phases out into a staticky mess at 3:15. The flip is in a similar vein, with the jazziness dumped for straight up nouveau-Indian bliss, West Coast style. When selected from the jukebox at the local head-attended café, these incredible euro-garage ragas impressed the city’s freaky cognoscenti to no end, but unfortunately made little splash outside the city walls.

Continue reading "Green is Good!" »

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At The Smell last night, Will Oldham introduced the song "Lion Liar" by joking, "This song reminds me of North Korea."

The show was just super. Will was bleeding from the mouth all over his western shirt. I thought at first it was food stains, like he set out his costume for the evening, and purposefully applied taco sauce on the front as some sort of fashion gesture. But later, Tracy showed me pictures she took of him on her camera-phone, pointing out the blood dripping from his mouth. Was it a Halloween gag or did he hit his face with the microphone? He had on even more eyeliner than the last time I saw him, which combined with the taco sauce/blood and the hiking boots made for a very understated trans-gender experience. The melancholy tone of the set was smoothed out by the ghost of Jerry Garcia brought forth by the solo guitarist. Quite amusing! The best experience was the very young red-headed drummer. He just filled out every song completely, with his eyes closed, making faces. I could only see glimpses of him because the tallest person in the room was standing right in front of me (no, not Jens), but I could still appreciate his nuanced accents on the finer points of guitar and vocals. After the tallest person in the room left, I had a clear view of the drummer: he removed his red gingham shirt, button by button, to reveal that not only was he incredibly skilled, but that he was also completely hairless. Brilliant.

—submitted by Gabie Strong

While on the subject, watch Neil Hamburger get pissed at BPB.

Posted by Erik at 04:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Way back in the mid-'80s you could find me most Saturday nights prancing around on a tiny stage doing the two things I was then best at, screaming really loud and shaking a tambourine. The audience was full of pimply guys with bowl cuts and pointy boots who left the dancing to a few girls in their mini-dresses bouncing up and down in futile attempts to locate some kind of beat in our inept bashing. Those of you Southern Californians who weren’t hanging with the New-Ros down on Beverly might remember that scene. Groups like The Gravedigger 5, Telltale Hearts, and Untold Fables were thrown together by suburban ex-punkers and mods who fell hard for the sounds they heard on compilation albums like Back From the Grave, Pebbles, and Ugly Things. By growing out our hair and slipping on our dads’ turtlenecks we gave up on any chance of ever scoring with anybody in High School, but hey, it was worth it. We were gonna be just like the Count V!

Thanks to our Stooges-meets-Zakary Thaks aspirations and a thematically raucous live show (our drummer worked at Ralph's so there were always plenty of bananas on hand), my band landed a "record deal" with Greg Shaw and Voxx Records. In order to insure his interest, we claimed we were from a backwoods town in Ohio (in reality we were So Cal kids, raised on the Descendents, Black Flag, and Red Cross)—so that it was all the more amazing that we were so well versed in punk rock legendry. It all worked according to plan and a few months later we were cooped up in a studio off of La Cienega with Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion at the controls. Seems that Gurewitz and Shaw had become “partners” in the expansion of Epitaph Records and we were to be the first to make them both lots of money. Unfortunately, we didn’t even know enough songs to fill up a record so we halfway figured out a couple Sonics covers and stole a few more from the Morlocks set. Things were looking good.

A regular guest at the sessions was none other than Sky "Sunlight" Saxon. Having recently returned from an extended dog-honoring sesh in Hawaii, Sky would stop by wearing a long beard and white robe or sometimes just sweatpants and maybe an amulet of some significance known only to him. Gurewitz liked to go pick Sky up at a Hollywood Motel, where he was living with some girls, mostly because the ex-Seed was holding some pretty stony weed. We'd get baked and try and record some

inane three-chorder, a task that got harder and harder the longer Sky hung around. While Greg Shaw usually looked on in silence, reading a book, Sky would go off about saving animals and stuff like that. He began calling Gurewitz "Starbolt," so we put that on the record. I think we wanted Sky to write the record's liner notes but we couldn't really understand what he was talking about so Greg Shaw wrote them and credited them to "Marcus Tybalt," just like on the Seeds’ first record. A couple times at the Cavern Club (a short-lived '60s hangout in an alley off Hollywood Blvd.) Sky would ask if he could sing with us and we'd do "No Escape" or "Out of the Question." Mostly we thought he was kind of annoying.

Continue reading "Father Sky" »

Posted by Erik at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Neon Pearl
1967 Recordings
(Acme Gramophone/Lion Productions)

The discovery of these early recordings from Please/T2-member Peter Dunton was one of the most memorable moments of the reissue world last year. Neon Pearl were a mixed-bag of British and German heads prone to extended jams, vaguely jazzy arrangements, and baddish vibes who gigged around West Germany in the mid-60s. Captured on tape in late 1967, these stripped-down recordings retain the punch of their reportedly “lengthy” live shows the shaggy exiles developed in Siegen teen clubs. With their bass-heavy and sparse sound that fortold future dark ‘n heavies like Sand, Flying-era UFO, or Burzum, Neon Pearl took Germany (or at least the “tiny medieval village outside Kassel” where they were crashing) by electrical storm, mututaing the day’s hits like Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)” into extended melancholy mysto-jams. Kicking off with “What You See,” an incredible, plodding kick drum/ride cymbal groove that kinda sounds like Section 25 covering Syd Barret, this collection keeps on in interesting directions, seguing from one memorable melody and ominously toned gem to the next. Some songs, like “Going With The Flow” and “Forever,” bely a West Coast influence, jangly and fey, yet tripped-out in all the right ways—think David Crosby when he’s trying to bend minds instead of bed maidens. Mostly though, the kids are alright with heavy anthemic guitar licks, subtly fuzzed out euphoria passages, and plenty of stoned Be Here Nowness.

Posted by Erik at 06:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Re-issued on CD by Locust Music

Best known for his candlelight radio ramblings and Eastern mysticisms, Alan Watts also brought the world what can arguably be called the first on purpose psychedelic record. This Is It—Alan Watts and Friends in a Spontaneous Musical Happening—was recorded on a houseboat in Sausalitio, California in 1962 with the help of Vortex-er Henry Jacobs, Chet Baker/Harry Partch-collaborator William Loughborough, and a few other "with-it" types from around the Bay Area. Possessing an aural intensity that makes the Summer of Love hit parade sound like the Chipmunks, Watts' predilection for "the expression of completely spontaneous movement" through dancing, singing, howling, babbling, jumping, groaning, and wailing often leads him into a metal mouth maelstrom that prefigures late-60s tribalists like the Nihilist Spasm Band, Cro Magnon, and Intersystems—lots of primal screaming, aum chanting, bongo beating, and tape effects. No doubt a direct result of Watts' recent dabbling with LSD—he had visited Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard and written a book called The Joyous Cosmology about the experience—the recording, in the words of Watts himself, "makes no claim to be Art, Music, or even Therapy." "We are listening-in," he tells us, "To a group of friends, who had no thought at the time of performing for an audience." Which is a good thing, as it is doubtful that there was much demand in 1962 for a recording of a half dozen lit-up, bearded intellectuals banging on drums and chanting nonsensical syllables. Which, as Watts would likely explain, is exactly the point. Acceptance would only rationalize "the art of pure nonsense." Or as he so succinctly put it, "It can only be done for ITs own sake."

Originally published in Ugly Things

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