What Are You Listening To Right Now (Part IV)

[Vyn]

Fever Tree had several superb musicians, and I think if they hadn't been sucked into the vacuous hole of psychedelia they might have eventually gained some traction. They made it, "big," with their first album, which hits all of the (then) current hip topics: San Fransisco, getting high, females with mystical auras, flowers, etc.

Rather than pivot away from the psych stuff - which I get why they didn't to a degree, it's what made them known beyond their locale, they doubled down on it. And not in a great way. The tunes are "OK", but the Blues Magoos they were not. And, lol, their singer could read the telephone book and make it sound like he was giving a sermon. The guy had a striking and readily identifiable delivery. Which, combined with their insistence on cranking out weirder and weirder shit, relegated them to footnote status in the book of rock.

I've always had a tinge of regret about them - I think they could have been a lot more popular, and delivered some envelope-pushing music. Instead, their "producers" (Keith and Donna Godchaux they were not) led them down the path of delivering music that lacked that one critical component: authenticity. And that killed their chances for greatness. I really believe they could have dismantled King Crimson if they had done things a little differently.

Anyway, cool that you checked them out. For as negative as my commentary about them seems, I enjoy their tunes every so often, and the negativity stems from my disappointment with what could have been, more than anything else.

[Zzzptm]

Ultimately, they're like the 13th Floor Elevators - an Austin-based psych band from around the same time that did some amazing stuff on like a third of their tracks and the rest was like, OK, where's the rest of the revolution?

[Charger]

Bit of a workout going on and music for that this time comes from DELAIN:

[Zzzptm]

Drove a lot today, road music included Deep Purple, Billy Squier, Fastway, and Dio. Also Van Halen.

[Vyn]

Scary John Bonham for a grey Monday

[Zzzptm]

Whoa, your house has gone grayscale negative! Have you called a repairman?

[Vyn]

That always happens when I pull out the Bonham record. Weird voodoo shit.

[Charger]

Working out to some EXCELLENT DOOM METAL from Portland!

[Vyn]

Going to have to check that out, never heard of Witch Mountain.

MOR with the poster I never wanted to put tack holes in so have unfolded it maybe three times.

[Charger]

This one came out of nowhere!!

Some new TONY IOMMI music featuring Serj Tankian!!

[Zzzptm]

I will need to get to it once I've done finished with a spin I'm giving to Delerious Nomad...

[Zzzptm]

This one came out of nowhere!!

Some new TONY IOMMI music featuring Serj Tankian!!

Iommi sounds great on this. And Gibson is doing a great job of advertising its relevance to a continuous audience, something Fender failed to do.

[Vyn]

That Iommi tune was a great find!

I'm hitting the Youtube this evening, and it's currently playing a randomly selected tune called, "Atomic Cocktail". I'd never heard of it - mid-40's pop tunes not being my thing and all, but from what I looked up it was something of a hit back in the day...not too long after the US served a couple of those things up for Japan:

P.S. - I can't help but think that the record label was created expressly to release this song on, heh.

[Zzzptm]

^ One of my faves, and actually, no, Atomic Cocktail was a tune that came along a few months after the label was formed. Lots of swing jazz, jump blues, and cool roots of rock and roll on that label. The flipside of Atomic Cocktail is Yep Roc Heresay, which is Slim Gaillard reading an Arabic restaurant's menu. The cat knew like 6 languages fluently and invented his own language, Vout, for his vocal lines.

The song got banned on two LA radio stations because program managers had no idea what Slim was singing and panicked that it could be some rather rude or blue language or that he was doing crimes in his music or SOMETHING that would get him on Santa's Naughty List. Of course, a mild ban like that helped to boost sales a tad.

[Vyn]

Awesome info, thanks! Nothing scares broadcasters more than possibly losing ad revenue - I mean, if the guy is singing "Mwabalaka" it might actually mean "the owner of this radio station takes it in the ass while smoking the devil's cabbage and reading The Communist manifesto." Seems like a reasonable assumption to me!