Can’t believe you cunts don’t dig Zoviet France. A sublime act to return to, I know where you all live too btw.
Thinking back. Some of what follows owes its provenance to the 20th anniversary of Paris and Prague being recalled in the news and media in ‘88, just before the Berlin Wall came down. A stack of late 60’s music got an airing by J Peel et al, which fed into this. Nostalgia finding fresh ears. Others were right place right time synchronicities. I love those chance encounters of discovering new worlds of music that stay with you for life from pure luck. A benevolent universe, contradictory considering all the sin.
Records and tapes came from multiple influences in a short blast. My Dad had a good few, but I never really got artists like Dr John initially. Too young? Immaturity? You turn away never to return in the teenage universe, but you haven’t really listened. One afternoon mutching off school at home with my mate *Trigger (*long story involving inebriation and getting people’s names wrong), he navigated through these sounds and it ‘clicked‘ into focus. “Your Dad’s got a bunch of Dr John here, duck, give em some volume” (or words to that effect).
Dr John, the original swamp thing. First impressions - what’s going on with the album art, Dr John? You look like Sun Ra meets a public safety campaign gone wrong. Masses of rhythm like a junkie wants to score more. Slick female vocal accompaniments that never over power in the mix, perfect soul counterpoints to all the strangeness. Of which there is plenty. A stack to distill and with inevitable memory fails in mind, highlights include
I Walk on Guilded Splinters
Danse Fambeux
Loop Garoo
Black John the Conqueror
Babylon
Like bayou swamp vapours bubbling out of your speakers. One bonus to temporal distance is you hear things out of their original cultural context. 2 stoned lads in the late 80’s aren’t going to adjust to the more precise nuances of American regions and their distinct flavours or revolutionary politics from the late 60’s, but they can still get on the bus. With the internet, nearly every listener can curate playlists today. The satanic lilies of ungodly YT recommendations aside, chance has a higher order of magnitude when you can hunt for music via your isp/dongle/wifi bill (or piggybacking on someone else’s). People can listen at work - if you‘d polled that question in 1988 as a future possibility, your answers would’ve been near zero, add digital downloads. But chance has a multitude of platforms.
The 2nd was Trigger looking at an albino keyboardist and asking “who’s this white cunt?”. One was an audio tape and another an early VHS from the Montreux Festival with the suspicion it may have contained a porno (highest shelf, hard to reach). That’s when I discovered the magic of Hermeto Pascoal. Think want you want about the Fender Rhodes as played out, exhausted, contrived, HP is a ride and a half
Lastly. Scoring draw. If there’s a worse routine of awfulness etiquette, it can be found within. The bloke who served up locally was a registered league football ref, 80’s centre-parting layered over his ears, had a few records but a fucking yeti too. Every inch of his home’s ground floor, including the bog, was dedicated to Nottingham Forest. His poor wife. Photo in their front room of him and his wife in mock western period cowboy gear and poses from a Skegness seaside visit. Best draw anywhere. Sandy kief press to sticky textured north African hash, to leb, temple ball, charas, Thai-stick and the radiantly stamped slabs of Afghan. The type of draw dealer who got washed away by pressed flower coming from the Netherlands and then extinction by hydroponics. In among the madness of the obligatory ten pipes, this psycho turned me onto Moondog
Saying ta on his doorstep with this in your head