Worst Friend

After listening to the Discord and Rhyme special on Gentle Giant’s Octopus the other week I went back to the album and lived there for a few days. It’s a place where the Earlies spent a lot of time together in 2005 and 2006, joyous times. We thought we were pretty original for caring about these beautifully intricate yet astonishingly accessible sonic masterpieces but it turns out that there’s a significant subculture of the Hip Hop community that has rightly valued this treasure trove of ideas too. I saw a Questlove post about Gentle Giant a few months ago and it was written in an unabashedly reverential tone. I think British people can’t separate the fact that it’s prog, that the people who make it are dressed terribly, that the audience are all awaiting their first miserable sexual experience and the whole journalistic history of disdain for prog from what they’re actually hearing. Meanwhile Hip Hop producers in America just put the record on and think “that’s incredible, I’m nicking it!” They’re the same with Phil Collins records, they don’t have to process that fact that he’s bald and he’s a tax exile who divorced his wife by fax, they just use their ears to make their minds up. There’s something in that.

It’s worth having a trawl through the WhoSampled.com pages on Gentle Giant to see the list of people who’ve had their hand in the till, J Dilla, Madlib, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and many more. Whilst listening to the Advent of Panurge I realised I’d been at it myself on The Extra Weight. The title track is a solid steady groove but I’ve stuck a middle section in to complicate affairs. I think this is because I’d asked Drew (work friend, look him up) to play bass on it and I wanted him to sweat a bit. He’s the kind of lad who could fall down a toilet and swim up clutching a chocolate bar so it felt right to give him a weird section and try and show him who’s boss. Anyway, needless to say he nailed it without difficulty. I’ll have to try again. I am Drew’s worst friend but I credit him when necessary.

You can hear the section in question here, it’s not hard to hear the plagiarism but then it’s music I’m making here not sudoku puzzles. I’m sure you’ve heard the track before when you bought the album. If you haven’t bought the album what’s wrong with you? Get it here.

Sound Man

The other week I read Glyn Johns autobiography Sound Man. I don’t think I’m quite recommending it as a book as it could’ve seriously benefitted from a ghost writer but then good luck to whoever was going to try telling him that as he seems to be quite proudly stubborn. It means that the chapters are three page collections of anecdotes strung together that read like a Brexiteer’s facebook posts, not in content obviously, just style. There’s a lot of sentences like “I told him in no uncertain times I would not be doing that”, or “we ended up making the album together and a nicer gentleman you could not wish to meet”. This isn’t necessarily a problem, it’s just why I’m not recommending it as a piece of literature. The upside of this is that it’s all real, it’s all unfiltered, there’s no filler and he doesn’t overly flesh out the stories about the people he runs into in the studio presuming correctly that you know who they are.

It’s a staggering career to read about and it made me relisten to a few things and check some others out for the first time. In particular this week I’ve been listening to Jamming With Edward, a bunch of loose jams from a Rolling Stones session with Ry Cooder and Nicky Hopkins. It’s in no way polished and it’s pretty throw away for the most part but it’s absolutely worth your time to listen to Nicky Hopkins let loose, he was astounding and I don’t think people know the half of it.

Unstuck In Time

I finally got round to watching the Kurt Vonnegut documentary Unstuck In Time this week. It’s been sat on the hard drive for over a year with me waiting to feel like I had the appropriate two hours to devote to it. On reflection this is ridiculous when I think of some of the turd that’s been allowed to cross the threshold into my brain during that time. I can’t begin to imagine what I was doing instead that seemed so important.

I don’t spoil films anyway, watch it. I’ve always loved him, Robert Weide clearly did too. It’s not afraid of touching on his flaws but its obvious that the director is a friend and admirer. Its fantastic to see so much footage of him being funny and finding things funny, he seems to spend a great deal of his time laughing. Its everything I wanted anyway, I haven’t checked to see whether critical reception matched mine.

In the film you see him being interviewed on Parkinson in the 1970s which left me thinking ‘when did we stop having writers on chat shows?’ I haven’t checked but I’m fairly sure if I look through the last year of Graham Norton guests I won’t find one. I’m not sure if it’s a damning indictment of chat shows, the general public or the status of modern novelists but I can’t think of any writers who’d make it onto a mainstream British chat show in 2024. Don’t come back it my with David Walliams or I’ll deck you. I’m talking about people who are famous because they write, not people who think they might as well put a book out because they’re famous.