Oscillate with Silver Apples in Echoes Podcast

Hear the story of the first Electro-pop group, Silver Apples in Echoes Podcast

Silver Apples’ Simeon @ MOEMS Photo: Diliberto

Often when we produce interview features on Echoes, a lot of great material gets left on the floor due time constraints or because they are extraneous to the central story.  That’s the case with our interview with Simeon Coxe of Silver Apples.  You can hear all about this pioneering electronic pop group on Echoes, but in brief,  Silver Apples formed in 1967 and released their eponymous debut in 1968.  They had no synthesizers or electronic keyboards, just Danny Taylor on drums and Simeon on audio oscillators controlled by telegraph switches, buttons and knobs.  They were right in the center of the psychedelic 60s, opening for many of the major acts at the time and jamming with Jimi Hendrix.   Many of Simeon’s stories were too long to make the feature or didn’t fit the narrative.   But I want to share them with you here.  You can hear the tale of Silver Apples in the Echoes Podcast

Their iconic album cover was actually designed by the band:

Simeon Coxe: Yeah, we cut out a silhouette of two apples, me and Danny, and a leaf, just figured, I don’t know, apples have leaves.  And made a stencil out of it and sprayed our entire hallways with it with black ink and a toothbrush.  And the record label came in and photographed that and chose one of them for the record.

Simeon says that the band broke up after they were sued by Pan American Airlines over the cover of their second album, Contact:

Simeon Coxe:  Our second record was called Contact.  I named it Contact just because of the double entendre in the word.  And the fact that old timey airplane pilots used to have someone actually crank their propellers to start the airplanes and they would yell contact, which is to make electric contact.  And we thought this electric contact and the spinning of the propeller and all that was fine.  So we wanted to do it in an airplane cockpit, and the advertising agency that had Kapp Records also had Pan Am, so it was easy for them to get them to park an airplane facing the sunset, and have us sit in the pilot’s seat while they vacuumed out the rest of the airplane and shoot that shot.  So naturally, Danny and I smuggled in some pills and pot, you know, joints to hang out on the dashboard, stuff like that.  And then to take it even further, we found a cover of an airplane crash on the back that we used on the back and super imposed me and Danny just sitting among the wreckage there, just you know, dumb hippies.

And…everybody approved it.  I mean you don’t put an album out internationally and not have it go through all the steps of being approved.  And it was approved by Pan Am, approved by the record label, approved by the advertising agency.  And by the time it got on the shelves, some executive at Pan Am who hadn’t signed on an approval but who had had power, just freaked out and just you know, hit the fan.  They, Pan Am sued us personally, sued the record label, got an injunction from a judge to have all the records pulled off of the shelves nationally.  Got us forbidden to play the music that’s on that record, so we couldn’t promote it.  And as a matter of fact, they went so far as to in the city of New York, get the judge to allow them to confiscate our equipment to make sure we weren’t gonna play that music.  So one time when we were playing at Max’s Kansas City, fire marshals came in and taped the stage so that our stuff would be there when their equipment guy got there, and we managed when they weren’t looking, we managed to sneak my oscillators and stuff out the back door, but by the time we got back, they got Danny’s drums.  So we were out of business.  No record, no record label and no equipment.

They didn’t collect from me.  Danny and I went into hiding.  We both got hotel rooms and just kinda went into hiding.  I worked as a DJ in a nightclub for a while and I think Danny did some session work in recording studios under a different name, and we just kinda laid low.  Then eventually we just said, you know, Silver Apples is never coming back, it’s just not going to be possible, we better just go our own ways for a while and see what happens.

So Pan Am, I guess you could say they successfully shut us down, but actually Silver Apples is still in business.  I don’t think you’ll find a PanAm airplane anyway, so we survived, from my point of view.

Simeon says that Silver Apples jammed with Jimi Hendrix and actually recorded a version of “The Star Spangled Banner” with him.

Simeon Playing in the 1960s

Simeon Coxe: Yeah, well he and Danny were friends.  Danny played drums in his first band.  His first band was something called Jimi James and the Blue Flames.  And they worked as a house band all through the village, just a straight blues band.  And the drummer was apparently very unreliable; he’d get drunk and get lost or something.  He wouldn’t show up for days, sometimes weeks.  One time he went to detox and just stayed there for months.  And Jimi would call Danny and Danny would come drum with him.  And so when Hendrix got the opportunity to go to England and try and make something bigger for himself because he didn’t feel like it was happening in the states, but a bunch of the British musicians were saying we could make it happen, he begged Danny to come with him.  He didn’t wanna go by himself and just be there with, you know, have to pick up musicians.  He ended up with a pretty good group, but fortunately, Danny didn’t wanna go to Britain.  He just didn’t want to go and he said you know, there’s plenty of musicians around here I can work with.  And so I got him.

Silver Apples Oscillatiors Today

And so whenever Hendrix would come back into town, he’d look Danny up and see what he was doing, and so he came around the record plant.  We both were booked in the record plant simultaneously one time for months for doing our third records.  And so he’d come in and jam and we’d find, we’d find out what he was doing in his studio and jam. A lot of times we were using the same studio, his amps would be parked all around my amps.  And so we’d just, you know, when the time came, I’d leave and he’d come in, or many times it would overlap.  He would come in and sit around and drink a beer while Danny and I were working on stuff.   One time Danny and I were working on our version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which we were gonna do at a festival in, on the 4th of July in the park in NY.  We were gonna play “The Star Spangled Banner” with my oscillators.  We thought that would be a howl; if the CIA didn’t put us in jail, it would be great.  And Hendrix came in and he heard us playing it.  And he said damn, I’m working on the same thing…I’m supposed to play an outdoor concert in a couple of months and I’m supposed to play at dawn, and I thought it would be funny to play the national anthem to make those kids all stand up and wake up, you know, before, at the crack of dawn.  [He was actually scheduled to play at night and close the festival, but rain delays pushed him into the morning.]

Simeon Coxe

And so we got to talking about it and he was listening to how we were doing it, and he was playing along with how he  was doing it.  And Ed Kramer, who’s the engineer, had the good sense to roll the tapes.  And so we do have that.  We the version that was given to Danny, a two track mix down that was given to Danny to take home to see how he could add drums to it…all kinds of cymbal crashes for the war sounds and stuff.  And it just never happened, but we did find the tape of me on bass oscillators and Hendrix on guitar playing “The Star Spangled Banner. ” We found it in Danny’s attic when Danny and I hooked up again in the ‘90s.  And so that’s been since released on a disk called Selections, which is like a best of.  It has about 12 cuts from the first two albums and then as a bonus track, as a hidden track it’s the Hendrix session.

This video is ostensibly that recording, however, to my ears it sounds like the studio version from Hendrix’s Rainbow Bridge.

Finally, Simeon claims he never called his instrument The Simeon.

Simeon Coxe: Well, The Simeon, but I would never have done that.  That’s embarrassing to me to this day.  That was one of those record label things to try and promote something that really didn’t exist.  There was nothing that was The Simeon.  It changed every day.  Something broke and had to be replaced every day, or Danny or I would have a new idea, something that we added or subtracted to it.  It never was the same.  There was no way it could ever be manufactured or marketed in any way, but they had to do that as I was just kinda stuck with it.

I told him he should own it.

This is the stuff that was left out.  Hear what was left in with Silver Apples in the Echoes Podcast.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Erik Wøllo’s Timelines is our February CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

Pick Up  TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Silver Apples Plucked Tonight on Echoes

Hear the story of Silver Apples tonight on Echoes

Simeon Playing in the 1960s

Often when we produce interview features on Echoes, a lot of great material gets left on the floor due time constraints or because they are extraneous to the central story.  That’s the case with our interview with Simeon Coxe of Silver Apples.  You can hear all about this pioneering electronic pop group on Echoes, but in brief,  Silver Apples formed in 1967 and released their eponymous debut in 1968.  They had no synthesizers or electronic keyboards, just Danny Taylor on drums and Simeon on audio oscillators controlled by telegraph switches, buttons and knobs.  They were right in the center of the psychedelic 60s, opening for many of the major acts at the time and jamming with Jimi Hendrix.   Many of Simeon’s stories were too long to make the feature or didn’t fit the narrative.   But I want to share them with you here.  You can hear the tale of Silver Apples tonight on Echoes.

Their iconic album cover was actually designed by the band:

Simeon Coxe: Yeah, we cut out a silhouette of two apples, me and Danny, and a leaf, just figured, I don’t know, apples have leaves.  And made a stencil out of it and sprayed our entire hallways with it with black ink and a toothbrush.  And the record label came in and photographed that and chose one of them for the record.

Simeon says that the band broke up after they were sued by Pan American Airlines over the cover of their second album, Contact:

Simeon Coxe:  Our second record was called Contact.  I named it Contact just because of the double entendre in the word.  And the fact that old timey airplane pilots used to have someone actually crank their propellers to start the airplanes and they would yell contact, which is to make electric contact.  And we thought this electric contact and the spinning of the propeller and all that was fine.  So we wanted to do it in an airplane cockpit, and the advertising agency that had Kapp Records also had Pan Am, so it was easy for them to get them to park an airplane facing the sunset, and have us sit in the pilot’s seat while they vacuumed out the rest of the airplane and shoot that shot.  So naturally, Danny and I smuggled in some pills and pot, you know, joints to hang out on the dashboard, stuff like that.  And then to take it even further, we found a cover of an airplane crash on the back that we used on the back and super imposed me and Danny just sitting among the wreckage there, just you know, dumb hippies.

And…everybody approved it.  I mean you don’t put an album out internationally and not have it go through all the steps of being approved.  And it was approved by Pan Am, approved by the record label, approved by the advertising agency.  And by the time it got on the shelves, some executive at Pan Am who hadn’t signed on an approval but who had had power, just freaked out and just you know, hit the fan.  They, Pan Am sued us personally, sued the record label, got an injunction from a judge to have all the records pulled off of the shelves nationally.  Got us forbidden to play the music that’s on that record, so we couldn’t promote it.  And as a matter of fact, they went so far as to in the city of New York, get the judge to allow them to confiscate our equipment to make sure we weren’t gonna play that music.  So one time when we were playing at Max’s Kansas City, fire marshals came in and taped the stage so that our stuff would be there when their equipment guy got there, and we managed when they weren’t looking, we managed to sneak my oscillators and stuff out the back door, but by the time we got back, they got Danny’s drums.  So we were out of business.  No record, no record label and no equipment.

They didn’t collect from me.  Danny and I went into hiding.  We both got hotel rooms and just kinda went into hiding.  I worked as a DJ in a nightclub for a while and I think Danny did some session work in recording studios under a different name, and we just kinda laid low.  Then eventually we just said, you know, Silver Apples is never coming back, it’s just not going to be possible, we better just go our own ways for a while and see what happens.

So Pan Am, I guess you could say they successfully shut us down, but actually Silver Apples is still in business.  I don’t think you’ll find a PanAm airplane anyway, so we survived, from my point of view.

Simeon says that Silver Apples jammed with Jimi Hendrix and actually recorded a version of “The Star Spangled Banner” with him.

Silver Apples’ Simeon @ MOEMS Photo: Diliberto

Simeon Coxe: Yeah, well he and Danny were friends.  Danny played drums in his first band.  His first band was something called Jimi James and the Blue Flames.  And they worked as a house band all through the village, just a straight blues band.  And the drummer was apparently very unreliable; he’d get drunk and get lost or something.  He wouldn’t show up for days, sometimes weeks.  One time he went to detox and just stayed there for months.  And Jimi would call Danny and Danny would come drum with him.  And so when Hendrix got the opportunity to go to England and try and make something bigger for himself because he didn’t feel like it was happening in the states, but a bunch of the British musicians were saying we could make it happen, he begged Danny to come with him.  He didn’t wanna go by himself and just be there with, you know, have to pick up musicians.  He ended up with a pretty good group, but fortunately, Danny didn’t wanna go to Britain.  He just didn’t want to go and he said you know, there’s plenty of musicians around here I can work with.  And so I got him.

Silver Apples Oscillatiors Today

And so whenever Hendrix would come back into town, he’d look Danny up and see what he was doing, and so he came around the record plant.  We both were booked in the record plant simultaneously one time for months for doing our third records.  And so he’d come in and jam and we’d find, we’d find out what he was doing in his studio and jam. A lot of times we were using the same studio, his amps would be parked all around my amps.  And so we’d just, you know, when the time came, I’d leave and he’d come in, or many times it would overlap.  He would come in and sit around and drink a beer while Danny and I were working on stuff.   One time Danny and I were working on our version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which we were gonna do at a festival in, on the 4th of July in the park in NY.  We were gonna play “The Star Spangled Banner” with my oscillators.  We thought that would be a howl; if the CIA didn’t put us in jail, it would be great.  And Hendrix came in and he heard us playing it.  And he said damn, I’m working on the same thing…I’m supposed to play an outdoor concert in a couple of months and I’m supposed to play at dawn, and I thought it would be funny to play the national anthem to make those kids all stand up and wake up, you know, before, at the crack of dawn.  [He was actually scheduled to play at night and close the festival, but rain delays pushed him into the morning.]

Simeon Coxe

And so we got to talking about it and he was listening to how we were doing it, and he was playing along with how he  was doing it.  And Ed Kramer, who’s the engineer, had the good sense to roll the tapes.  And so we do have that.  We the version that was given to Danny, a two track mix down that was given to Danny to take home to see how he could add drums to it…all kinds of cymbal crashes for the war sounds and stuff.  And it just never happened, but we did find the tape of me on bass oscillators and Hendrix on guitar playing “The Star Spangled Banner. ” We found it in Danny’s attic when Danny and I hooked up again in the ‘90s.  And so that’s been since released on a disk called Selections, which is like a best of.  It has about 12 cuts from the first two albums and then as a bonus track, as a hidden track it’s the Hendrix session.

This video is ostensibly that recording, however, to my ears it sounds like the studio version from Hendrix’s Rainbow Bridge.

Finally, Simeon claims he never called his instrument The Simeon.

Simeon Coxe: Well, The Simeon, but I would never have done that.  That’s embarrassing to me to this day.  That was one of those record label things to try and promote something that really didn’t exist.  There was nothing that was The Simeon.  It changed every day.  Something broke and had to be replaced every day, or Danny or I would have a new idea, something that we added or subtracted to it.  It never was the same.  There was no way it could ever be manufactured or marketed in any way, but they had to do that as I was just kinda stuck with it.

I told him he should own it.

This is the stuff that was left out.  Hear what was left in with Silver Apples tonight on Echoes.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Erik Wøllo’s Timelines is our February CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

Pick Up  TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Where’s the Wah-Wah?: PBS Hendrix Documentary Misses the Mark

Jimi Hendrix’s solo on “’Voodoo Child,’ was like a Harley-Davidson screaming out of the sky.” –Conny Plank.

I recently posted on Facebook on the EchoesFans page about the PBS American Masters documentary, Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train a Comin’ because I found myself emotionally affected by the memories it was triggering.  Someone on Facebook wondered why I got so wistful about it and I, perhaps a little too snarkily, replied that “If you listen to the music and have the memories, you know.”  After watching the entire documentary I realized that’s actually truer than I thought.  My memory was filling in all the elements that the film left out.

The main takeaways I got from Hear My Train a Comin’ are Hendrix was a great guy, an amazing guitarist and all he wanted to do was play.  Beyond that, the American Masters documentary sheds little light on this figure who is beyond iconic.  In fact, while note inferior to the original Jimi Hendrix documentary from 1973, it is missing a few of its virtues.

That documentary, released only three years after Hendrix’s death, had compelling interview segments with guitarists who were contemporaries of Hendrix like Eric Clapton, who was extremely touching in his reverence for Hendrix, and The Who’s Pete Townsend who had the most insightful comments on Hendrix’s arrival in London and his Monterey Pop performance.  His recollection about the discussion between him and Hendrix over who would go on last at Monterey reveals just how high Hendrix raised the bar.  But there are few of Hendrix’s guitar hero contemporaries in Hear My Train a Comin’ other Billy Gibbons of  ZZ Top and he wasn’t very illuminating. More importantly, no contemporary musicians testifying to his extraordinary influence outside of Vernon Reid and Dweezil Zappa.  Monster guitarists both,  but they couldn’t get someone with a little more weight?   So many people state that Hendrix changed music and the electric guitar, but how?

Hendrix’s legacy resides in the sound he got from the guitar, yet, except for several vague allusions, there’s almost no talk about how he got that sound, what it entailed, who influenced him, what his technology was.  I don’t think it’s too geeked out to want some analysis of just what Hendrix was doing to get that doomed, ominous fuzz he had on “Purple Haze,” which had never been heard before.  Hendrix didn’t invent the wah-wah pedal, but he invented the language for it and to this day, no one has played it as effectively. I would’ve loved to hear some discussion about the way Hendrix used the studio as an instrument on Axis: Bold as Love and in particular, the “C-side” of Electric Ladyland.  The BBC Classic Albums documentary:  At Last… The Beginning – The Making of Electric Ladyland,  gives vastly more insight into Hendrix’s music making.

Fayne Pridgeon, Hendrix’s New York City girlfriend, is reduced to repeating over and over that Hendrix was a shy and sweet guy who just wanted to play and always had his guitar with him.  But in the 1973 doc, a younger Pridgeon has joyful recollections of Hendrix’s enthusiasm for Bob Dylan, something which isn’t mentioned at all in Hear My Train a Comin’, except for Ellen McIlwaine’s memory that Hendrix adopted Dylan’s 60s hairstyle.  It’s a curious exclusion considering that Hendrix’s version of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” is one of his best known recordings .

And in a fashion all too typical in documentaries on the 60s, they blow right by the psychedelic “experience.”  There are vague references to drugs, but little talk about their impact on his music, which is immense.  It’s like not talking about the influence of Woody Guthrie on Bob Dylan or just ignoring the impact of New York City in Lou Reed’s music.

There are a few nice touches: Paul McCartney’s personal reflections about Hendrix playing “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and getting him the gig at Monterey; the radio ads for Hendrix concerts, including the one calling him the “number one Progressive Rock act in the world.”  Linda Keith had a great handle on many aspects of Hendrix’s life and music and Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke had some contextualizing perspectives.  But many opportunities were missed so that a dozen interview subjects could say Hendrix was a great guy, an amazing guitar player and he was shy.

Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train a Comin’ is an enjoyable documentary, but director Bob Smeaton missed a few too many stops along the way.  And there’s nothing as poetic as the late Conny Plank’s description above.  https://echoesblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/130521_stillcorners.jpg

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB SPECIAL

Join or renew in the Echoes CD of the Month Club in November and you’ll get Bombay Dub Orchestra’s beautiful CD, Tales from the Grand Bazaar as a BONUS CD along with Moby’s Innocents album, our November CD of the Month selection.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.  You can do it all right here.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

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Psychedelic to Serenity: Mike Wall Echoes Interview

We get a lot of music in here with titles like “Music for Massage,” “Music for Yoga,” “Music for Meditation.”  They almost never make it onto the show, but every now and then we get one that has a little bit more going for it, than pretty sounds and contemplative moods.  That’s the case with Mike Wall’s A Time For Healing.  It is indeed, an album for massage but Wall brings in a darkness and textural depth you usually don’t hear, as well as some influences that go back in time.  “I had Hendrix on my mind for sure,” he says.  “On ‘Healing Touch,’ the song ‘Third Stone from the Sun’ was very much on my mind when I did that improvisation and that melody. ” Wall thinks of his compositions as psychedelic music, slowed down.

You can hear more of Mike Wall’s music and interview tonight on Echoes.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.   CD of the Month Club members will be getting Darshan Ambient’s Little Things 10 days before its released.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see what you’ve been missing.

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The Art of the Cover Tune – Echoes Undercover – Weds, May 29th

On the next Echoes we go Undercover.  It’s an entire show of cover tunes from Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin, King Crimson  to New Order and more.   Songs you know by artists who aren’t known for playing them.

The best cover tunes reinvent a song and my standard for that will always be Jimi Hendrix’s take on Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.”  He took Dylan’s understated song with its biblical implications and turned it into a storm from the heavens.  Even Dylan began playing it with Hendrix’s arrangement (sans raging guitar) afterwards.

I don’t know if anything we’ll hear tonight on Echoes reaches those heights, but I think several songs see some serious reinvention, like Pat Metheny’s meditation on Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence,” Geigertek’s luxurious interpretation of John Foxx’s “Underpass” and George Winston’s highly underrated interpretation of The Doors.

One interesting trend is whole album covers.  I think this began in the mid-nineties when Blue Note Records launched their “Cover Series” in which one artist covered an entire album by another artist like Charlie Hunter’s take on Bob Marley’s Natty Dread.   It took a while to grab hold, but the new millennium has seen several albums covered from beginning to end.  Mary Fahl re-imagined  all of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon as did The Flaming Lips.  Japancakes recorded a gorgeous and raging version of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless with cello and pedal steel guitar in the lead rolls and Icebreaker made an album from their live performance of Brian Eno’s Apollo, an album that was a studio creation, never intended for live performance.

We’ll hear selections from some of them and more as we get undercover tonight on Echoes.

~John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club. With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like Rhian Sheehan’s Stories from Elsewhere Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see what you’ve been missing.Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album.

Ten 1967 Pop Songs that Shaped Prog-Rock.

There’s a fun article in Pop Matters called Ten Songs From 1967 That Shaped Prog-Rock.  Writer Sean Murphy knocks out his reasons for songs you might not expect to have any bearing on Progressive Rock,  like The Beach Boys’ “Heroes & Villains,” which he put at number one.  I agree with his choice, although he didn’t give much rational for his decision, instead concentrating on Brian Wilson’s struggles to get it done.   But the Gothic theme, renaissance vocal polyphony, and multiple segments, mixed with Beach Boys surf modes, were brilliant.  Murphy intentionally leaves out the obvious choice of any tunes from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but makes a lot of other great selections like Love, Procol Harum and The Moody Blues.  Their are many other selections he could’ve made.  Here’s a few:

The Bee Gees’ “Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You” from The Bee Gees 1st.  Mellotrons, Gregorian chants, poignant harmonies, what else do you want? A Prog Mini-masterpiece before its time. What went wrong with them?

United States of America “Garden of Earthly Delights” from United States of America.  Lightning rhythm shifts, screaming electric violin, electronics before synths.  The lost link to Prog.

Jimi Hendrix “Third Stone from the Sun” from Are You Experienced? Do I need to say anything?  Jazz changes, multiple sections, Star Trek allusions, tripped out spoken word segments  make this a prog blueprint.  This is the Hendrix song that is also the most quoted in guitar solos.

The Rolling Stones “2000 Light Years from Home” from Their Satanic Majesty’s Request.  The Stones trippiest song that was listenable.  Even this  live performance video from their 1989 tour shows them playing this sci-fi rumination straight, if a bit amped up, from it’s musique concrète open to it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey  imagery.

There’s a few more songs that shaped progressive rock from 1967, a seminal year by any standards.  There’s a lot more out there I suspect.

~John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.  With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like In A Time Lapse   Club members got this album 10 days before release.  Sing up now for next month’s selection, Olafur Arnalds, For Now I Am Winter.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club  and see what you’ve been missing.

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These are the 100 Greatest Guitarists?

M.I.A from The Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Guitarists

100 Best Whatever-lists are designed to engender debate and outrage and 100 Greatest Guitarists is likely to create even more of a firestorm than usual.   Of the millions who followed the Byrds’ dictum to “get an electric guitar and learn how to play,” many are bound to be left off a list of 100.  Rolling Stone got it right picking Jimi Hendrix number one and most of the others are worthy entries.  The problem isn’t so much who is on the list, but who isn’t.

When it comes from Rolling Stone, you might expect the voting to tilt a certain way.  Isn’t it notable that in the top ten, there’s only one artist who isn’t from the 60s or before?  And how else to explain a relative footnote like Mick Taylor being on the list.  He was hot stuff in the 60s when he played with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and then leaped into the vacancy left by Brian Jones’ death in the Rolling Stones, but since then, what has he done?  Not much, but nostalgia-infected voters still remember his mercurial solos during a creative period for the Stones from 1969-1974.

The other slant comes from their tendency towards accepted garage-rock wisdom which would favor guitar primitives like Ron Asheton, Kurt Cobain and Johnny Ramone.   They’re all important musicians in their way, but being important and influential doesn’t necessarily make you the greatest on your instrument.  Take John Lennon and Paul Simon, both of whom appear on the list.  They  are two of the most revered writers and singers of the last half century, but does their serviceable guitar playing have to be acclaimed as iconic as well? Let’s not confuse great artistry with great guitar playing.

If you play acoustic guitar, well, that’s barely a guitar at all to judge by this list.   Only a couple make the vaunted 100, Willie Nelson, John Fahey and Robert Johnson.  I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone acclaim Nelson’s guitar playing over his songwriting and singing.  But John Fahey is acclaimed.  So much so I’m wondering what he’s doing at only #78?  The iconoclastic, idiosyncratic musician single-handedly launched the finger-style guitar renaissance and American Primitive guitar.

But even more ignored than acoustic guitar is jazz guitar.  Only John McLaughlin makes the cut.   How Pat Metheny could be left off any list like this is appalling.  He’s a jazz-fusion god, an avant-garde explorer, and author of one of the most singular instrumental voices of the last 40 years.  He’s stood toe-to-toe with Ornette Coleman and a mechanical orchestra.   But what should you expect when the only person who might be called a jazz guitarist among the voters is Living Color’s Vernon Reid.  (Sorry Andy Summers, you’ll always be the guitarist in Police no matter how many sophisticated jazz records you make.)

Here’s some of the guitarists Rolling Stone missed.

Pat Metheny From Bright Size Life to Orchestrion, American Garage to Song X , pure acoustic guitar to guitar synthesizer, few have stretched the boundaries of his instrument as much as Pat Metheny while at the same time creating symphonically memorable compositions

Bill Frisell: Another jazz guitarist left in the cold despite the fact his unique brand of Americana electric guitar seems so effortless that casual listeners might miss the fact that he’s shredding their heads apart.

Michael Hedges & Leo Kottke: There are three iconic acoustic guitarists, musicians who, like Hendrix change the tilt of the earth for everyone who followed: John Fahey, Leo Kottke and Michael Hedges.  Leo Kottke’s finger-style playing on 6 and 12 string is Transcendental Americana.  Just like Hendrix didn’t invent feedback guitar, Michael Hedges didn’t invent two-handed tapping, but like Hendrix, he defined it for generations to follow.

Those are the most obvious artists who were overlooked.  These others may be a less obvious, but for me they marked heights of guitar artistry.

Terje Rypdal: I’ve seen Hendrix.  I’ve seen Robert Fripp, John McLaughlin and Jeff Beck.  But the best electric guitar show I’ve ever witnessed was Terje Rypdal at Stars in Philadelphia in 1980. In Rypdal’s hands a guitar was a fluid instrument with notes morphing infinitely.  Just listen to “Over Birkenroot” from Odyssey or the air sculpture of “Innseiling” from Descendre to find guitar nirvana.

Steve Hackett: The former guitarist for Genesis is a sultan of sustain and the best reason for listening to post-Peter Gabriel Genesis.  His own solo career has had artistic heights like Voyage of the Acolyte and Spectral Morning.

Ed Wynne & Steve Hillage: Fom Ozric Tentacles and Gong respectively, they are two purveyors of psychedelic guitar, . Every solo they take from Hillage’s wailing sustain and floating glissando guitar  to Wynne’s wah-wah bends is a journey to the center of the mind.

Sonny Sharrock: This is the guy who originated slash and burn guitar with massive chords and sprawling feedback.  He reached his apex shortly before his death with Ask the Ages.  He played so furiously that he’d constantly lose picks but would always pull one from a stash tucked into his cheek.

Steve Tibbetts: One of the most individualistic and dynamic guitarists I’ve ever heard.  He took the sound of Hendrix and made something truly new out of it whether it was the global psychedelic journey of YR, the ambient spaces of Northern Song, the roiling attack of Exploded View or the abstract meditative spaces of Chö .  Playing acoustic or electric, Steve Tibbetts challenges and exhilarates.

I know there are probably dozens of other guitarists who could be on this list.  Derek Bailey; Pat Martino; David Torn, Steve Howe……

John Diliberto ((( echoes ))

 

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