Sunday, February 28, 2016

Roxy Music "Full House" 25 November 1972/"I hope things will turn out right Old Man"

Unfortunately, the entire Roxy Music "Full House" performance from 25 November 1972 has not appeared in one piece. October 1972 has the group wait out while Ferry has a tonsillectomy, and December 1972 has Roxy in the US opening for the J. Geils Band, Humble Pie, Ten Years After, the Steve Miller Band, Edgar Winter, Jo Jo Gunne, the Allman Brothers and Dr. John the Night Tripper. I actually think in retrospect some of these pairings make a lot of sense, not sure how the crowd at the Miami Speedway would have treated Eno though. In between, we get Full House at the BBC studios in London. The clip below of "For Your Pleasure" with the unsynced sound comes from the 2007 collection The Thrill of It All: A Visual History 1972-1982 where it is synched (enjoy the screen grab). The review of For Your Pleasure in Rolling Stone amusingly noted: "The title tune ends the album, but is it a tune? It sounds like dogs barking repetitively for minutes on end. Maybe it is Eno's genius at work, but if so you've gotta be Mensa level to understand him or be so stoned you still think the drum solo on "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" is a tour de force." Uh, I kinda take offense as I like Ron Bushy's solo on the lp version. "For Your Pleasure" is a concise statement of where the band was at - can you name another Krautrock-inspired art pop track that clocks in at around three minutes. There is a time coded clip from Full House in circulation as well but is incomplete. The BBC will likely unearth the whole session for one of its extra channels in the near future but until then . . .

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

The First European (Proto) Velvets Cover?

Thinking about Bowie and his early championing of Reed/Cale, I have always liked the Downliners Sect crusher "Why Don't You Smile Now" but forgot that of course, it is in part a Reed-Cale composition. From the same year, 1967, as Bowie's VU covers. Bowie acknowledged the Downliners Sect as a big influence on David Jones and the King Bees, so do we thank Don Craine for the Velvets intro to the UK (along with Bowie). The Sect 45 was a Sweden-only release and Pärson Sound were already onto their VU/Cale drone sound via Terry Riley among others, but this may have been Cale-Reed's intro to Swedish am radio: