Thursday, January 20, 2005

Better watch your close friends

Download: BLIND WILLIE DAVIS "Your Enemy Cannot Harm You"
Download: THE GREAT UNWASHED "I Can't Find Water"
Download: ROBERT WYATT "Strangers In The Night"
Download: DAVY GRAHAM "Afta"

The Blind Willie Davis tune is taken from the 1970 Yazoo LP Ten Years of Black Country Religion 1926-1936. It's available in much better sound quality on the box set Goodbye, Babylon, but this LP just rules and it's where I first heard Charley Patton's "Prayer of Death" (a song so moving you have to try to think of a word that means the same thing as "moving," only magnified a thousand times.) Speaking of comps, maybe you've heard Davis' "I Believe I'll Go Back Home" on American Primitive vol. 1 (goddamn it I want Fahey to return from the grave to gimme vol. 2!) I was pleasantly surprised this morning to see a (new?) long-ish entry by our old friend Dr. Eugene Chadbourne on AMG for Davis -- a guy who cut three or four 78s, total, about whom very little is known.

Lyrically, "Your Enemy Cannot Harm You" concerns Christ's betrayal by Judas, of course. I upload the song today, on Inauguration Day, because we all have a bit of Judas within ourselves -- we all have our price; we all have our breaking points too. And if this administration knows anything, it's to use money/ influence as a weapon (of course they know how to use weapons as weapons too), and how to torture folks, right? You probably think I'm nuts and/or paranoid, but I honestly think that "things" are about to get very interesting and incredibly, incredibly fucked -- worse than soup line a mile long fucked -- and so we'll all fight the power in our ways, whether it be to umm write a blog about it all or to you know, wear t-shirts with the President with devil horns... Just be very careful, is all I'm saying (in all earnestness.)

The Great Unwashed was a short-lived supergroup in New Zealand ca. 1982-'84: The brilliant brothers Kilgour minus pop guy Robert Scott (busy with the fab Bats), plus junkie psych. guru Peter Gutteridge. Needless to say, the Great Unwashed was an amazing band. This song is among my favorite ever dystopic post-apocalyptic type numbers, and since the inauguration has my leetle brain all conjuring a landscape that's very Mad Max meets Bosch painting, here 'tis...

The Robert Wyatt song is from the nifty Miniatures LP, an album of one-minute-long songs that's almost as good as the Resident's Commercial Album. It's the soundtrack to me trying to calm myself down but uhhh, it's not working, really, is it? The project was compiled by Morgan Fisher "who played keyboards with Love Affair, Mott the Hoople and Queen."

The Davy (or is it Davey???) Graham composition -- one of my favorite things he ever did -- is from the 1970 LP Godington Boundry, which Mark Ibold told me I must buy six years ago, so I did (thanks Mark!) This is the only kind of music that can calm me down when I get all freaked-out about our current state of affairs. The album's mostly covers (including Monk, the Beatles and Incredible String Band) but this tune's an original. The tabla player's name is Kesh Sathe, FYI.

PS: Don't forget about Joe Frank, OK? Okay.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Watch your close friends is right. Thanks for the tip!

9:31 AM  

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