All that led up to you being my ideal reader! Thank you so much. My first trip abroad, with my bar mitzvah money, was to dreary London, and I hadn't been out and about much beyond provincial Dallas, and while I was not prepared for the climate, my romance for all that amazing music still made the experience magical. I would be on the Tube at Hammersmith and I could hear Elvis Costello singing of "the hell or to Hammersmith blues." I had to recreate the Abbey Road cover. The Oxford campus! Can you imagine the beauty after Texas? And the theatre, my God. Through a comedy of errors, I got someone else's ticket for Tom Stoppard's Hapgood. I would later discover that it's not Paris or Rome, but it's a very handsome city, connected to so many things that were exotic for a boy from Dallas.
I am definitely writing something about Pink Moon, and I love all three albums. He knew how good he was and it made the commercial failure unbearable. He had an arrangement with Island that he had some form of tenure, which must have been highly unusual. He hand delivered the Pink Moon tapes to Island and no one knew who he was. Heath Ledger was planning on playing him when he died. And I thought of you because of Richard Thompson on Five Leaves Left and the Joe Boyd connection. If he could have lived it out, he could have been appreciated more. He was just wonderful and I can't think of a weak track among the whole corpus. And I love his covers--Tomorrow is a Long Time, Cocaine Blues...
1972 I had two more years before graduation from medical school and the Brooklyn circa 450 Clarkson avenue was violent and grubby. I broke my studies with a track or two: Paul Simon, Dylan, Cohen, Joni, The Who, Iron Butterfly In a Gadda Da Vida and then back to the books. Unlike today when no one fails - unless they are imprisoned for a crime - people failed. The amount of information to learn approached infinity. Impossible. Took me a while to learn that what appeared on tests - in those days both oral and written - was what the professor included in his lectures. An amount of information that was possible to learn. Those who didn’t learn this and tried to learn 3,000 pages of medical text had the most problems. Some of the information was both interesting and useful. Much of it was useless to be memorized before a test, regurgitated on request, and forgotten forever. An initiation ritual? An expression of creative sadism by faculty? A mandatory discipline of concentration? Useful knowledge that I recall a half century later. All of these are true, but the joy of respite with great musicians and poets ring as true today as they did then. Medicine changes, art is eternal.
I was going into my trouble teens in 1972, not having time to appreciate most of what was around me, but Stevie, Marvin, Paul Simon and Ziggy certainly made my days bearable.In dreary London , with the drizzle beating down , strolling down the street with the miasma of my unwashed hair like a halo, I would be singing “ I believe when I fall in love… ,luxuriating in those rich chords,segueing into a life of my imagination…. Nick Moon, unfortunately, I didn’t get into until decades later, due teen intransigence. But Marvin, Stevie awoke the black experience for me, and from Trouble Man I deep dived into Al Green, and whatever else I could listen to in the UK. It set my template , Stevie and Marvin: 50 years ago, I walked into that road I’m on now. Thanks for bringing it back …,
Oh, yes..... wonderful evocation of musical memories and all the associated emotions that went with them. By the way, PINK MOON was Nick Drake's third album, and I (along with some others) was already familiar with him from the first one, FIVE LEAVES LEFT, discovering him through the producer of some of my favorite groups (Fairport Convention and Incredible String Band), Joe Boyd. I also zeroed in on that album because of Richard Thompson's participation as well as that of the great Danny Thompson from another favorite group, Pentangle.
Clube da Esquina - Milton NAscimento; Sui Generis, Vida; Transa, Caetano Veloso; Acabou chorare, Novos Baianos; Close to the Edge, Yes. Vol.4 Sabbath; Zappa, Grand Wazoo; PFM, Storia di un minuto; Santana – “Caravanserai” etc
It may pacify your sense of calendar to know or perhaps remember that The Bear Comes Home was published in July 1997, a month short of my 51st birthday; a book that was begun in July 1979, in another country, and no mention of who or what is or was then dead or nearly. And it worked out kind of okay for the author, whose name I can't remember at the moment. Kind of an odd name. Must be some kind of exotic foreigner, who wishes Trouble Man all the best, and the music of time and timelessness both.
All that led up to you being my ideal reader! Thank you so much. My first trip abroad, with my bar mitzvah money, was to dreary London, and I hadn't been out and about much beyond provincial Dallas, and while I was not prepared for the climate, my romance for all that amazing music still made the experience magical. I would be on the Tube at Hammersmith and I could hear Elvis Costello singing of "the hell or to Hammersmith blues." I had to recreate the Abbey Road cover. The Oxford campus! Can you imagine the beauty after Texas? And the theatre, my God. Through a comedy of errors, I got someone else's ticket for Tom Stoppard's Hapgood. I would later discover that it's not Paris or Rome, but it's a very handsome city, connected to so many things that were exotic for a boy from Dallas.
I am definitely writing something about Pink Moon, and I love all three albums. He knew how good he was and it made the commercial failure unbearable. He had an arrangement with Island that he had some form of tenure, which must have been highly unusual. He hand delivered the Pink Moon tapes to Island and no one knew who he was. Heath Ledger was planning on playing him when he died. And I thought of you because of Richard Thompson on Five Leaves Left and the Joe Boyd connection. If he could have lived it out, he could have been appreciated more. He was just wonderful and I can't think of a weak track among the whole corpus. And I love his covers--Tomorrow is a Long Time, Cocaine Blues...
1972 I had two more years before graduation from medical school and the Brooklyn circa 450 Clarkson avenue was violent and grubby. I broke my studies with a track or two: Paul Simon, Dylan, Cohen, Joni, The Who, Iron Butterfly In a Gadda Da Vida and then back to the books. Unlike today when no one fails - unless they are imprisoned for a crime - people failed. The amount of information to learn approached infinity. Impossible. Took me a while to learn that what appeared on tests - in those days both oral and written - was what the professor included in his lectures. An amount of information that was possible to learn. Those who didn’t learn this and tried to learn 3,000 pages of medical text had the most problems. Some of the information was both interesting and useful. Much of it was useless to be memorized before a test, regurgitated on request, and forgotten forever. An initiation ritual? An expression of creative sadism by faculty? A mandatory discipline of concentration? Useful knowledge that I recall a half century later. All of these are true, but the joy of respite with great musicians and poets ring as true today as they did then. Medicine changes, art is eternal.
I was going into my trouble teens in 1972, not having time to appreciate most of what was around me, but Stevie, Marvin, Paul Simon and Ziggy certainly made my days bearable.In dreary London , with the drizzle beating down , strolling down the street with the miasma of my unwashed hair like a halo, I would be singing “ I believe when I fall in love… ,luxuriating in those rich chords,segueing into a life of my imagination…. Nick Moon, unfortunately, I didn’t get into until decades later, due teen intransigence. But Marvin, Stevie awoke the black experience for me, and from Trouble Man I deep dived into Al Green, and whatever else I could listen to in the UK. It set my template , Stevie and Marvin: 50 years ago, I walked into that road I’m on now. Thanks for bringing it back …,
Oh, yes..... wonderful evocation of musical memories and all the associated emotions that went with them. By the way, PINK MOON was Nick Drake's third album, and I (along with some others) was already familiar with him from the first one, FIVE LEAVES LEFT, discovering him through the producer of some of my favorite groups (Fairport Convention and Incredible String Band), Joe Boyd. I also zeroed in on that album because of Richard Thompson's participation as well as that of the great Danny Thompson from another favorite group, Pentangle.
It’s a great book. There’s nothing like it.
Clube da Esquina - Milton NAscimento; Sui Generis, Vida; Transa, Caetano Veloso; Acabou chorare, Novos Baianos; Close to the Edge, Yes. Vol.4 Sabbath; Zappa, Grand Wazoo; PFM, Storia di un minuto; Santana – “Caravanserai” etc
It may pacify your sense of calendar to know or perhaps remember that The Bear Comes Home was published in July 1997, a month short of my 51st birthday; a book that was begun in July 1979, in another country, and no mention of who or what is or was then dead or nearly. And it worked out kind of okay for the author, whose name I can't remember at the moment. Kind of an odd name. Must be some kind of exotic foreigner, who wishes Trouble Man all the best, and the music of time and timelessness both.