So Old It’s New ‘weird shit’ (a shit-show, perhaps?) and a few other things, curios and otherwise, that struck my fancy in assembling this set. Lots of Pink Floyd to start, from a couple albums that Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, according to one of my books on the band, did actually refer to as “our weird shit” period. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list.
1. Pink Floyd, Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast (Rise and Shine/Sunny Side Up/Morning Glory)
2. Pink Floyd, Atom Heart Mother (Father’s Shout/Breasty Milky/Mother Fore/Funky Dung/Mind Your Throats Please/Remergence)
3. Pink Floyd, Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict
4. Pink Floyd, The Grand Vizer’s Garden Party: Entrance/Entertainment/Exit
5. Pink Floyd, A Saucerful Of Secrets (live, from Ummagumma)
6. The Beatles, Revolution 1
7. The Beatles, Revolution 9
8. Plastic Ono Band, John John (Let’s Hope For Peace) (live)
9. The Rolling Stones, Country Honk
10. Frank Zappa, He Used To Cut The Grass
11. Soft Machine, All White
12. King Crimson, Book Of Saturday
13. Genesis, Duke’s Travels/Duke’s End
My track-by-track tales:
1. Pink Floyd, Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast (Rise and Shine/Sunny Side Up/Morning Glory) . . . A 13-minute ‘song’ in three sections during which Floyd roadie Alan Stiles goes about his morning routine, talks about liking marmalade among other things, fries some bacon, pours some cereal into a bowl, etc. all to interspersed musical accompaniment, mostly piano/keyboards and acoustic guitar but the full band does get into it in the concluding Morning Glory segment. This was actually the last track on the 1970 album Atom Heart Mother, the one with the cow – named Lulabelle III, apparently – on the cover but, since this is a morning show logic dictates I serve breakfast first. The ‘Psychedelic’ in the title is rooted in at least one of the many species of morning glory plants whose seeds contain a hallucinogen. Pink Floyd performed the piece a handful of times on stage, during which roadies cooked and fed the band breakfast and the group took time, as is the English way, for tea.
2. Pink Floyd, Atom Heart Mother (Father’s Shout/Breasty Milky/Mother Fore/Funky Dung/Mind Your Throats Please/Remergence) . . . This was the first track on the album, an almost 24-minute instrumental epic in six movements taking up the entire side one of the original vinyl, as Pink Floyd gets to the heart of the matter. Speaking of ‘Breasty Milky’ it could lend itself to the cow on the album cover but, apparently, from my readings the cow cover – and no text whatsoever to indicate the artist behind the album – was deliberately designed to have no meaning or relation to the songs within, hmm . . . as with all art, likely best left open to interpretation.
3. Pink Floyd, Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict . . . Arguably, the best parts of Ummagumma are the live album – which I dip into shortly – and the front and back covers although there are interesting or bizarre, depending on one’s point of view, experimental excursions – like this one – on the studio album portion.
The front cover is a Droste Effect (a repeated picture within a picture within a picture . . . ) of the four band members, although it’s not exactly the same picture as they shift positions in each image. It’s one of the most well-known covers in rock music. Guitarist David Gilmour sits on a chair in a doorway in the foreground of the lead image, with bassist Roger Waters sitting on the floor behind him, drummer Nick Mason standing looking skyward behind Waters and keyboardist Richard Wright doing a shoulder stand on the grass, behind Mason. Gilmour then moves to the grass as the last person in ‘line’ in the second image – although I always noticed he doesn’t do the shoulder stand as well as the others, maybe intentionally, who knows; Gilmour splayed his legs open while everyone else held them tight together – with Waters moving up to sit in the chair, Mason sitting on the floor and Wright standing where Mason was, and back, back, back it goes.
Fascinating stuff when you’re a 10-year-old kid in 1969 and your older brother by eight years brings the album home; one can only imagine the effect of looking at it under the influence. I may have done so later on, when I started experimenting, but I can’t remember. I do remember in college, during a ‘stone’, a buddy of mine swimming, doing the crawl stroke including turning his head to the side to take breaths, on my apartment carpet to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon while another friend begged me not to under any circumstances put on any Emerson, Lake & Palmer when I went to grab another LP, because in his stoned state he figured he couldn’t handle it.
“No, no, no, not that,” is an exact quote. I would have thought Floyd was more ‘damaging’ than ELP, but our minds all work in their individual ways and I suppose the album title and artwork of Brain Salad Surgery, or Tarkus (a giant armadillo tank) could send you for a loop, in a stoned state or otherwise.
Back to Ummagumma. The back cover is Floyd roadies Alan Styles (him again, from Atom Heart Mother’s Psychedelic Breakfast) and Peter Watts standing on an airport runway with the band’s impressive array of equipment arranged in the shape of an arrowhead, set up to create the illusion of a military aircraft about to take off with its payload.
The ‘song’ about furry animals grooving with a Pict (an indigenous people living in what is now Scotland during the Middle Ages) is a Roger Waters soundscape, including some spoken-word passages, as one of five studio creations on the album. Each band member got one track except for Waters with two, his other one the more conventional pastoral ballad Grantchester Meadows, very nice piece actually, complete with bird sounds throughout, along with a buzzing bee that gets swatted at the abrupt end, appropriately enough, for the insect.
4. Pink Floyd, The Grand Vizer’s Garden Party: Entrance/Entertainment/Exit . . . A drum and percussion showcase, with flute passages by Nick Mason’s then wife Lindy, an accomplished flautist, on Mason’s studio track on Ummagumma. The name of the album is an English slang term for sex, although in the book Pink Floyd: All The Songs – The Story Behind Every Track, Mason suggests the title meant nothing, it just “sounded interesting and nice.” It’s also been suggested, according to the same book, that it could be a tribute to the Dune science fiction universe since Umma means prophet in one of the languages spoken in author Frank Herbert’s creation. As for the other individual members’ studio tracks that I’m not playing (perhaps I should do an Ummagumma full album play), Gilmour in some parts of his The Narrow Way gives a hint of the type of playing that was to come on the epic Echoes from 1971’s Meddle album, while keyboardist Wright runs the gamut of classical, symphonic and experimental music on his four-part Sysyphus instrumental piece, named after the character Sisyphus in Greek mythology condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back, endlessly. Wright chose to spell his piece Sysyphus, reasons unclear, perhaps he liked the ‘sysy’ effect.
5. Pink Floyd, A Saucerful Of Secrets (live, from Ummagumma) . . . Terrific version, some have suggested it’s the definitive take and I can see/hear it, of the instrumental title track to Floyd’s 1968 studio album, recorded in the UK in the spring of 1969. The other live tracks on Ummagumma are Astronomy Domine, Careful With That Axe, Eugene and Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun.
6. The Beatles, Revolution 1 . . . If you want fast hard rock, you listen to the best-known version of Revolution, released as the B-side of the No. 1 smash hit Hey Jude but Revolution of course a Beatles’ classic in its own right that topped charts in some countries and made No. 12 on the US Billboard list. If you want a laid-back, bluesy version, you listen to Revolution 1, very cool, I think, from The Beatles (aka likely best known as The White Album). If you want experimental . . .
7. The Beatles, Revolution 9 . . . It’s Number 9, Number 9, Number 9 . . . you know it, you love it or hate it, but there it is, the John Lennon-Yoko Ono soundscape production. You never know what you’ll discover on repeat listens, which I’ll admit don’t happen often, it’s usually a skip for me while listening to the album which is why you discover, or rediscover, new things when you come to it fresh after a long period of avoidance. Originally, Revolution 1 was a shade over 10 minutes long, with the last six minutes of experimental sounds winding up being cut and forming the basis of Revolution 9. George Harrison participated in the production of 9 but Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr didn’t, and McCartney didn’t want it on the album. He wasn’t necessarily opposed to the piece, he just didn’t think such a release should come under The Beatles name.
According to All The Songs – The Story Behind Every Beatles Release, McCartney took Revolution 9’s presence on The White Album, to quote from the book, “very badly, especially since he was very much involved in the avant-garde and had already created a similar sound edit in January 1967 for the Carnival of Light for the London Roundhouse Theatre. He had worked on it with The Beatles, but had never considered it a work that would fit on a Beatles album.” The session, and sounds coming out of it, for the Carnival of Light track is described in Mark Lewisohn’s superbly comprehensive book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions – The Official Story Of The Abbey Road Years.
As for All The Songs, it’s a great series of hefty hardcovers that recently took flight, quite a number of them now and more coming including one on Fleetwood Mac due for publication in 2025. Others in the series I own are on Pink Floyd, as mentioned earlier, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Others on my list, when time and money permit although I’ve flipped the ones I’ve seen in bookstores, are on David Bowie, Queen, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Led Zeppelin and Metallica, among others including Prince, Michael Jackson and Dolly Parton.
8. Plastic Ono Band, John John (Let’s Hope For Peace) . . . Speaking of ‘weird’ . . . It’s a Yoko creation from Plastic Ono Band – Live Peace In Toronto 1969 at the Rock and Roll Revival festival, an event played by John Lennon’s hastily-assembled band that included guitarist Eric Clapton, future Yes drummer Alan White and longtime Beatles’ associate Klaus Voorman on bass. And Yoko, on lead and backing vocals, ‘wind’ and ‘presence’ on such tracks as this one, one of two Ono songs comprising side two of the original vinyl. Side one featured rock and roll standards like Money and Blue Suede Shoes, plus The Beatles’ Yer Blues, written by Lennon, and Lennon/Plastic Ono Band songs Cold Turkey and Give Peace A Chance. That side met with generally positive reviews, the Yoko side, not so much.
Here’s a hilarious take on Yoko’s performance from an archived allmusic site review that’s on the Live Peace In Toronto album’s Wikipedia page and I confirmed by finding the original on a web search, although you won’t see it now on allmusic. It seems to have been edited out and while the review of her part of the album retains parts of the original review, it’s much less harsh. But the original is worthwhile reading and some would no doubt think, bang on:
“Side two, alas, was devoted entirely to Ono’s wailing, pitchless, brainless, banshee vocalizing on “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)” and “John John (Let’s Hope for Peace)” – the former backed with plodding rock rhythms and the latter with feedback. No wonder you see many used copies of the LP with worn A-sides and clean, unplayed B-sides – and Yoko’s “art” is just as irritating today as it was in 1969. But in those days, if you wanted John you had to take the whole package.”
Yet, in listening to the entire 13 minutes of John John in prepping the show . . . call me crazy but it’s actually digestible and not as bad as I remember when, like a lot of people, I probably played side two of the album just once, first listen when I got the record, due to what I used to describe as Yoko’s ‘haiiiyi yi yip yip yipping’, or something like that. And I’m likely not alone in thinking that the applause from the audience after her tracks wasn’t in appreciation but rather more a ‘Thank God it’s over’ response. Iggy Pop, though, said he found the Yoko side more interesting and I can see the musically adventurous Pop thinking that, while Perry Farrell of alternative rock band Jane’s Addiction, according to Wikipedia, said Ono’s sound experimentations were a cornerstone of his musical education.
I will say that I’m still not necessarily a fan of Yoko’s music or however one would term what she does and has done, but she has become let’s say more palatable to me over time. For instance, I – and many others – hated it when I first got Lennon’s 1980 comeback from five years away album Double Fantasy which was sequenced as a Lennon track, then a Yoko track, etc. which meant you, back in the original vinyl days, had to keep lifting the needle off the record just to hear Lennon’s stuff unlike once CDs came into existence you could program around Yoko. One solution at the time was, just make a cassette tape of the album, sans Yoko. Yet in listening to some of that stuff now, not saying she’s great or whatever, parts of me will always think she was just an opportunist, but as mentioned, it’s actually listenable, Talking Heads-ish in spots, etc. Or, you can call me crazy.
9. The Rolling Stones, Country Honk . . . Much more conventional music now but still something of a curio from the Let It Bleed album, this country version of Honky Tonk Women, an homage to artists such as Hank Williams. It was one of the first Stones tracks guitarist Mick Taylor played on, as he also did on the universally-known hit single. Keith Richards, who was friends and sharing musical ideas with country rock artist Gram Parsons at the time, is on record as saying this version is how he originally envisioned Honky Tonk Women. And while reviews seem divided on Country Honk, I can see the merits in it, but obviously to most ears I think Honky Tonky Women is ‘the’ version. It’s perhaps akin to The Beatles’ Revolution 1 and Revolution, the rock single version.
10. Frank Zappa, He Used To Cut The Grass . . . Improvisational excellence featuring Zappa’s typical great guitar, from the 1979 album Joe’s Garage. Is it jazz, is it rock . . . It’s Zappa music.
11. Soft Machine, All White . . . From Fifth, the 1972 album, yes, the fifth by the band, by which time the ever-changing in both members and music Soft Machine had abandoned vocals entirely and gone from progressive and psychedelic experimental rock to working almost entirely within the jazz idiom. Soft Machine was inactive as a group in terms of studio releases between 1981 and 2018, when several former members revived the brand with a new studio album, Hidden Details, following up with Other Doors in 2023.
12. King Crimson, Book Of Saturdays . . . Beautiful acoustic track featuring the nice touch of a violin player, new member at the time David Cross, from the 1973 album Larks’ Tongues In Aspic. It was the fifth studio album by King Crimson which, aside from the one constant in guitarist/leader Robert Fripp was, like Soft Machine, an ever-evolving project that Fripp, by all accounts, put to bed permanently after a 2021 tour.
13. Genesis, Duke’s Travels/Duke’s End . . . Classic closing suite featuring some great drumming by Phil Collins as Genesis seemed to perfectly balance their progressive rock origins with their newfound affinity for pop music on Duke, the band’s 1980 album.