Can’t see the obnoxious self-serving pillock is going to enhance the farmers’ case! If anything he makes the case for more stringent taxation. It’s about time the wealthiest get to pay more. Clarkson epitomizes the profiteering wealthy who are using farms as a means to avoid paying tax.
Ordinary farmers do need protecting. I can see that they are asset-rich and income poor – but that is more the fault of the supermarkets paying too little. But when it comes to the really wealthy opportunists and landowners I think they should be paying just like everybody else.
The Tories destroyed our public services. We have to rebuild them somehow. The wealthy need to pay!
I was writing an article on my Phil Ochs book for the RNR magazine which made me get my Phil Ochs albums out and listen once more to the great Phil Ochs.
I chose All The News That’s Fit To Sing – his debut album. It contains a number of my favourite numbers – songs of anger like Too Many Martyrs, One More Parade and Power And The Glory as well as songs of great emotional impact and beauty such as Cecelia. An album doused in the heady fumes of civil rights, injustice and antiwar. An album of great passion and optimism.
It would be great if we were to share our best albums. So if everyone put forward a view of what they love. I’ll put them up here for everyone to share. I’ll have a page of recommended albums (with connections to You Tube where possible).
Now it just so happens that I’ve already done this with my book 537 Essential albums. It was also a bit of synchronicity that Andrew suggested Stormcock as Stormcock is also my number one album of all time.
So that is a good place to start (This is an extract from my book 537 Essential Albums). This is my number one recommended album.
Roy Harper – Stormcock
Roy Harper is the greatest British song-writer and poet. There is no one who even gets close. His acerbic lyrics and social commentary are unsurpassed. He rivals Bob Dylan as the greatest songwriter of all time and is greatly undervalued. This is not surprising as he has constantly shot himself in the foot and sabotaged his own career. He remains the foremost British dissident and commentator on the human condition. His epic songs are legendary and the music sublime.
Stormcock is arguably his best album but is strongly pushed by both HQ and Lifemask. I would place at least ten of Roy’s albums in my top 400 albums. He’s that important to me.
The Stormcock album features only four tracks but the album is one of his masterpieces. It consists of brilliant songs with poetic imagery and wide canvasses that challenge your imagination. The music and musicianship was innovative and of an excellence that puts this album top of my top ten thousand. It is one of four Harper albums that would make it into my top ten albums of all time. I have a penchant for great meaningful lyrics put to brilliant music and this hits the spot. I never tire of hearing these songs and simply cannot understand why Roy has not been lauded from on high. I love the depth and insight he brings to bear and the risks he takes in developing his ideas through epic songs. Few people can match it. Roy’s shorter songs are also great but these four songs show how Roy has matured and taken his art to another level. ‘Me and my woman’ is one of the very best tracks ever recorded. The scope is immense and Roy was at the top of his game. I am fully aware that not everybody shares my opinion. I can see that it is never going to be commercial. Roy’s work is thought-provoking, intelligent and musically intricate. You have to concentrate. It’s not your catchy pop song – fortunately! But it is well worth the effort. For me Roy is the James Joyce of music as opposed to Simon Cowell’s Barbara Cartland.
OK – Now it’s your turn. I’ll put out some more of these. But I want to hear from you with your favourite albums, a reason why and if possible a You Tube connection.
That will be fun and interesting – Looking forward to hearing from you!
‘Circle’ is the first of Roy’s epic songs and certainly not one that Shel could turn into a commercial success. It lasts over ten minutes and has five sections to it, including a spoken part – absolutely unique for its time. The song is the central point of the whole album.
Each of the sections involves different tempos and instrumentation.
The piece starts with Roy strumming on acoustic guitar to a subdued drumbeat. Then follows a spoken word section of a strained conversation between Roy and his dad over the sound of traffic. This leads to a faster sequence featuring drums and bass, and then subsides into a slower but more intense part augmented by strings with drums in the background. The mood builds in intensity with fast plucking of guitar, drums and strings coming in strongly, followed by a return to a softer section in which Roy’s voice rises at the end of each line to a falsetto. The strings appear again as the finale is reached.
A very ambitious and exacting piece of work that must have tested both Shel and Roy in the creating of the final successful recording, I can only imagine the conversations.
The lyrics deal with the constant pressure in Roy’s childhood to succeed, and success being measured in wealth. Roy’s father is addressing Roy about his accomplishments and Roy is responding. The topics move through Roy’s rejection of religion to his adolescent striving for importance and acceptance towards his realisation that the only thing he can be is himself. The song covers betrayal of relationships along with the inability to find answers. Roy’s final assertion is that all we can do is to live our lives.
The last spoken word is his Dad’s, who ironically, not understanding a word of the long introspection, says ‘Aye Lad – but I always knew you had it in you.’
Neil later bought a hearse that he called Mortimer Hearsebug, Mort for short. It was big enough to get the band in and transport all their equipment – the rolling tray made it easier to get heavy equipment in and out. More importantly, it helped them stand out from the other bands; not many bands drove around in a hearse – though I’m reminded of the British band Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. That hearse – Mort, or its successor Mort 2 – would later play a prominent part.
The Squires had a local hit with a single they put out featuring two instrumentals written by Neil – ‘The Sultan’ b/w ‘Aurora’. It was while with the Squires that he bumped into and befriended Stephen Stills, who was playing with a band called The Company. That was a crucial component in the serendipity that led to so much more. That encounter formed the basis of a friendship and musical adventure that persists up until today. It formed the nucleus of three incredible bands: Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and the Stills-Young Band.
But the Squires only lasted two years – 1963-1965 – and soon split up. Its other members were not as committed as Neil and life and careers soon got in the way. The band eventually ended up skint and destitute in Fort Worth. Mort dropped its transmission on the road and Neil just split for Toronto, leaving everyone in his wake.
We have to go back a little further to see what else induced this full-throttle burst into rock, back to where The Beatles burst onto the scene, revitalising rock, reawakening it and bringing it back from the dead.
The Beatles had taken the UK by storm in 1963. ‘Love Me Do’ was released on 5 October 1962 and reached a modest number 17. However, ‘Please Please Me’, released on 11 January 1963, then ‘From Me To You’, followed by ‘She Loves You’, all raced to the top of the charts. A sold-out tour sent the young girls screaming hysterically, and by October 1963, Beatlemania had been born in the UK, a phenomenon that was unlike anything witnessed before.
The United States was a little slower to catch on. Those early Beatles singles were not released in the States. The Americans were blasé. The US was the seat of all genres of popular music. Hardly anything of worth had come from outside the States. The hysteria of Beatlemania was viewed with amusement from afar.
Then, the dry tinder caught. The vacuum in rock music created by the payola scandal of the late fifties, with its subsequent clampdown on rock ‘n’ roll, had left an empty gap. Rock had become soft. It was all soft rock and pop with clean-cut pop idols. It had lost its rebellious edge. With the release of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ on 26December 1963, The Beatles shot to number one and that gap was filled. Their subsequent tour started on 7February 1964. It featured an incendiary slot on the highly influential Ed Sullivan Show, which helped to shoot them to the very top. All across the country, families tuned in to see what the fuss was all about. The kids were instantly smitten. Beatlemania took off in the States with a vengeance, with radio stations playing non-stop Beatles tracks and The Beatles dominating the American charts. The British invasion had begun.
Just before they were due to perform at their first professional gig they split up. Jim left for New York with his mind set on becoming a professional folk singer. Phil stayed on and continued playing and writing songs. In 1961, just three months before graduating, in a fit of pique at being passed over as the editor of the college magazine (not really surprising given the radical nature of his writing), Phil left the course. He returned to stay with his parents in Columbus, Cleveland but continued singing solo in the folk clubs. He’d basically sing anywhere that would have him. Pam Raver, a performer in Columbus has an amusing anecdote from this period: it centers on one of Phil’s early solo shows.
‘One of his first public performances as a solo artist was at the First Unitarian Universalist Church on Weisheimer Road, where he performed for a ladies luncheon,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I found that astounding because you think of him doing more radical, anti-establishment songs. God only knows the songs he performed there.’
While singing in Farragher’s Backroom folk club in Ohio as an opener for established acts he met the folk singer Bob Gibson. Bob had an impact on his songwriting.
The gestation period was over. In 1962 Phil followed his mentor Jim Glover to New York City and, like Bob Dylan the year before, inserted himself into the burgeoning Greenwich Village folk scene.
A more unusual radical left-wing, anti-war folk singer would be hard to imagine. Phil’s background as a middle-class, Jewish, country and western loving, rock ‘n’ roll loving, devotee of Elvis, Jonny Cash and the all-American hero John Wayne was hardly the stuff of rebellious, intellectual folk music. But then converts are often the biggest zealots.
This new Phil Ochs had a thorough grounding in socialism and was now an evangelical radical. He had absorbed sufficient Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, honed his songwriting and would scour Newsweek for sources of content for what was shortly to become an impressive catalogue of hard-hitting topical songs. Ironically, given Dylan’s later put-down jibe, he called himself ‘A singing journalist’. The scene was set.
We headed into San Francisco at the end of December 2012. It was chilly with quite a breeze blowing off the bay. We clung on to the streetcars and hit the Coit Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge & Park and City Lights bookshop. There was ice cream to be eaten at Ghirardelli’s and a stroll round Haight Ashbury. It was all a bit of nostalgia for the old folks.
Furthur – San Francisco 2013
We’d rented this cosy little room in a rundown but friendly hotel. I was sorting out a cup of coffee and talking to the nice lady who was packing up Christmas things and putting them away. It seemed a bit early to be putting the Christmas things away and I asked why the rush.
‘I have to pack them away,’ she explained. ‘Because all the weirdoes are gonna come out of the woodwork for that concert tomorrow.’
‘Oh,’ I replied, all innocently. ‘And who is playing?’
‘It’s that band Furthur,’ she replied peevishly. She obviously did not approve. ‘They’re the Grateful Dead. They play every New Year. Every Pot-head in the universe descends on us!’ The lady thought that the owner should deny access to all those damn Pot-head Dead-Heads.
Without more ado we headed off to the Bill Graham Auditorium to investigate. Sure enough Furthur were on and they had tickets. It was only two minutes’ walk from the hotel!
As soon as we walked in to the huge auditorium the heady aroma of pot hit you. You didn’t need to smoke any you just had to breathe. That lady had been right! Every Pot-head in the country had congregated here. All around there were pipes and spliffs. It was like being back in 1967 all over again.
The band was awesome. They did a three hour set with incredible lightshow and it was all vintage Grateful Dead. Wow!!!
