If you were to head over to AMG and look up their review of Mark Fry’s Dreaming With Alice, you would find the rather iniquitous quote “… reminiscent of Donovan’s forays into that area, though not as interesting.”
How wrong could they be? Dreaming With Alice, released only in Italy in 1972, possesses a certain magic that more than exonerates the cult that has built up around it over the years. As far as obscure acid folk rarities go, this is a stone-cold classic.
In fact, the only fault that can be found in it is the fact it was released in 1972, whereas it sounds as though it were recorded at the tail-end of the 1960s. The fact that music had moved on so much in the intervening years possibly accounts for the fact it could only secure an Italian release. Of course, nearly forty years on, when it was recorded is an irrelevance.
Jethro Tull’s 1969 album Stand Up was the follow up to the inconsistent debut, This Was, and the first to feature Birmingham-born mainstay Martin Lancelot Barre on guitar.
It was also the album that signposted the path down which Jethro Tull (or the mighty Tull, dependant on personal opinion) were headed, largely doing away with the blues influence of the previous release and drifting, via the road of progressive rock, into more folkish pastures.
The change came about following the departure of Mick Abrahams, who’d left following creative differences between him and Tull’s main man Ian Anderson, over musical direction. When replacement and future Black Sabbath axeman Toni Iommi failed to work out it was left to Martin Barre to take up the mantle, which he did, remaining to this day.
Ah, Jefferson Airplane, those fair-weather freedom-fighters who set the American folk-rock/psychedelic scene ablaze between 1967 and 1970, before falling from the perch and metamorphosing into Jefferson Starship. Granted, there were albums released either side of this three year catchment zone, but none that would have the influence or raw power of Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing at Baxter’s, Crown of Creation and this one, Volunteers.
Jefferson Airplane weren’t afraid to play with politics. They were the self-appointed spokespersons of a generation, riding the revolutionary wave of the time and profiting handsomely from it. 1969’s Volunteers is the result of all this fragmented rhetoric, packaged neatly onto a slab of vinyl and sold back to “the kids” for a nice little earner.
Throughout the history of music it’s generally out of the norm for a band to change their name, while remaining the same band. It happens when a band splits, or the creative force buggers off and takes the name with him. Or it happens in the early days when a band’s still finding its musical feet and they’ve yet to hit the big time. The Move falls into the category of “band that changed their name but retained the line-up” when they became the Electric Light Orchestra (for the first album, anyway), as does Fairfield Parlour.
Fairfield Parlour had already released two albums as psychedelic-folk rockers, Kaleidoscope (not to be confused with the American psychedelic folk-rock ?!?!? band of the same name), and it was under this new name, in 1970, that they put out From Home to Home.
During the late sixties and early seventies, each and every rockstar worth their salt considered themselves to be the new Che Guevara. They communicated with the masses via soundbites of revolutionary rhetoric -- more often than not from the comfort of their three storey mansion or tax exile in the South of France -- and once the imminent uprising that had been promised burned itself out, they retired to count their money.
Revolution was, after all, big business.
So in honour of some of these Che charlatons who turned tail and fled as soon as the going got tough, Head Full of Snow brings you 5 songs with which to spark a revolution (or not).
The Rolling Stones -- Street Fighting Man
An absolute stormer of a track and one that was written at a time when the anti-Vietnam war protests had spread as far afield as London, sparking riots and encouraging Mick Jagger himself to take to the streets and… stand on the sidelines taking photos of the ensuing chaos. Jagger was perhaps the biggest pretender to the revolutionary throne, toying with the imagery during the era of Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, but soon getting bored and leaving it all behind to concentrate on becoming the mucky little devil we all know today. ‘Street Fighting Man’ appears on 1968’s Beggars Banquet. Read more…
Fairfield Parlour were once the psychedelic-fairy-tale-folksters Kaleidoscope and this song, ‘Aries’, is bob, and indeed, on. A quiet lament for times gone by and gentle reminiscence, it is a simple thing of beauty.
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