Hi. If you haven’t already started following Yeeshkul Mk. 2 (yeeshkulmk2.tumblr.com), please do so. I won’t be posting here anymore, for reasons explained here.
All content that’s on this blog has been ported over to that one. There’s also a new post up about “Candy And A Currant Bun,” to be followed by related posts this week.
Thanks.
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Hi.
I’ve rebooted Yeeshkul, my Pink Floyd blog, at a new location, yeeshkulmk2.tumblr.com.
There’s a very simple reason for this: my main Tumblr, Every Great Song Ever, is a music Tumblr, and I use my daily audio upload there almost every day, leaving nothing for Yeeshkul, unless I can find a video, and I don’t want to rely on YouTube links for everything.
So, in the name of actually getting onto a decent update schedule at Yeeshkul, I’ve created Mk II on a separate account, meaning that I’ll be able to upload audio to both blogs on the same day now. I’ve also reblogged all the original Yeeshkul content, so it’s all in one place.
If you’ve been following Yeeshkul, please re-follow Yeeshkul Mk II. I will try to make it worth your while with plenty of audio, video and bootleg downloads, in addition to my ramblings.
I’ll likely re-post this a few times for people who miss it.
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San Francisco, by Anthony Stern, featuring a 1966 recording of “Interstellar Overdrive”
Up front warning: the video contains some very 60s, very hippie nudity just after the 10-minute mark. Best not to watch it at work.
This is Anthony Stern’s San Francisco, a 1968 short film and video experiment that features as its soundtrack one of the best versions of “Interstellar Overdrive” available to us. Though the film was completed in 1968, the Floyd recording was made in 1966. This is not the same version of the song that appears in Peter Whitehead’s 1967 film Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London, though the band’s association with Whitehead, and Whitehead’s use of the version of the song the band recorded at Sound Techniques Studio, did lead to the use of the song in the Stern film.
The most noticeably different thing about this version from other Barrett versions is that Barrett doesn’t play the main riff, instead working a weird, surfy rhythm part while Wright plays the melodic sequence on his organ. I think the midsection jam on this version is especially good and unusually vicious. The dissonance in Wright’s organ part around the eight-minute mark is blood-curdling.
Stern’s film is an interesting (and potentially motion sickness-inducing) document of the city of San Francisco—odd that he chose a British psych band to soundtrack it, but I suppose he was working the connections he had. He seems to have tried to capture a panorama of what the city was like at the time, visiting different neighborhoods, taking a trip across the bridge into Marin County, and dropping in on different groups of people as they socialized. The Jimi Hendrix Experience has a cameo as the Floyd roars back into the riff near the end, and I think the first band that appears is the Grateful Dead, though I may be wrong about that.
By taking the disparate images of the city he captured and swirling them into a frenetic, psychedelic smear, Stern neatly conveys the spirit of the age, though he obviously favors the city’s underside and sub-communities over its bankers and lawyers.
And about that underside: I am not sure what the performance between the ten and twelve-minute marks is supposed to be. Some sort of mini-play? Straight performance art? I think the frenzied eating of the fruit is probably supposed to be some sort of comment on consumerism—I don’t know what else to make of it. The rest is less easy to read. First, I’m unsure why the girl lighting the candles and presenting the fruit is naked, nor what the symbolism of dressing her in tin foil is supposed to be, if indeed it’s meant to be symbolic.
Seeing that girl makes me wonder: what is she thinking during that scene? There’s a particular moment when she removes the tin foil, and is there in a pile of people on the floor, eating a piece of fruit, the only naked person in the room. Surely that must be strange. Perhaps she had an exhibitionist streak. At any rate, I think Stern is as much an outsider in that scene as a modern viewer, and if he had any insight into what those hippies were trying to accomplish, he probably helped his film by leaving it out. It’s a visitor’s portrait, after all.
This version of “Interstellar Overdrive” has appeared on a few bootlegs, but the sound on this video is unusually good, so I ripped an mp3 from it, which you can have here.
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“Interstellar Overdrive” at UFO, February, 1967
Unlike yesterday’s video featuring the mid-section of a performance of “Interstellar Overdrive” from 1967, this black-and-white footage of the Floyd performing the song is actually synced and gives us a few good glimpses of the band. Here, some of the chaotic mid-section seems to have been snipped out (you can hear at least one edit if you look for it), but the overall thrust of it is intact, and we get a nice, roaring intro and a stomping ending.
And then, when it’s over, there’s Paul McCartney, sitting in a chair all by himself, babbling about “psychedelic,” “drugs” and “freakout music” and telling people not to be afraid (the sync gets off here, at least when I watch it). I don’t know the full context of this—seems to be a BBC program about “the kids these days,” with McCartney employed as a trusted cultural arbiter, complete with Sgt. Pepper mustache.
One thing I’d like to point out here is how few people there are dancing to the music, and how hard they are trying to dance to it, especially once the rhythms become less regular—spastic frugging is really the only plausible response. They’re wearing everything from sun skirts and sweaters to full suit-and-tie, and Nick Mason looks like the kind of guy a girl could take home to mom.
The rather lazy editing doesn’t do much to tie all the intercut images together with the band’s performance. What does toilet paper dispenser man have to do with these overall pretty wholesome looking kids freaking out in the club? To an oldster without a clue what the UFO Club was, the answer apparently was everything. This is an instance where being too young to remember any of this first hand creates a big disconnect from the mindset that went into making a documentary like this.
What’s more amazing: how unthreatening this all seems today, or how threatening it seemed then?
By the way, if you’d like to have the audio from this video, sans McCartney, uh, monologue, here it is, on me.
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A partial performance of “Interstellar Overdrive” at UFO, March 1967, with announcements
The camera focuses more on the obviously non-contiguous shots of the audience than on the band, I have no idea what the German announcer is talking about, and it’s not a complete performance, but this gives a decent idea of what “Interstellar Overdrive” could sound like on any given night.
For clarification, the German announcer is Edmund Wolf, a documentary filmmaker, and this is a clip from his documentary about the London underground, Die Jungen Nachtwandler (The Young Nightcrawler). It’s hard to say for sure that this is actually “Interestellar Overdrive,” but the overall thrust of this improvisation seems to be in the same vein as what they usually did with that song.
It always gets me to think about what “Interstellar Overdrive” must have seemed like back in 1966 or 1967. I consider what the average fan of pop music must have been familiar with, and how far out of most listeners’ frame of reference something like that must have been. It fits more with the avant garde jazz of its day than with mid-60s rock, but reading the thoughts of the band members about what they were doing makes me wonder how much any of that mattered to the band. They don’t seem to have done a great deal of conceptual thinking about the “freak out” direction they took their music in. They seem to have just done it, mostly as a means of having to learn fewer songs to fill out a night’s worth of sets.
I think by the time footage like this was being shot at UFO, they must have realized that they were on to something really new and potentially challenging—I can’t help wondering what was going through their heads when they convened in the studio with Joe Boyd to record “Arnold Layne.” Were they feeling pulled between pop and the avant garde? Or did the spirit of the times convinced them they could be both, that they could make the avant garde into the new pop if they damn well felt like it?
Either way, that’s what they did. They weren’t the only band that helped make it happen, of course, but even in the context of psychedelic Britain, they were strange—you can see how as they moved forward in the late 60s and early 70s they were separating from the British prog rock pack, and they never really wound up running with it. To my ears, right up through 1972, they fit more easily with the German kosmiche rock scene they helped inspire than they did in their own country, at least from a purely musical standpoint. And I think that divergence begins with “Interstellar Overdrive.”
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BBC: Tomorrow’s World, featuring Mike Leonard’s lighting contraptions and a bit of jamming from Pink Floyd.
This is one of the final video documents of Pink Floyd’s Barrett era. It was filmed in December, 1967 at Mike Leonard’s house (the band rented from Leonard, and he was their first lighting engineer), and aired in January, 1968. They do a bit of Booker T & the MGs’ “Green Onions,” and there’s a cool, spooky jam at the end—that’s also them in the beginning, playing as Leonard demonstrates and the cats jump in through the mail slot. The cats’ names were Tunji and McGhee, and according to Nick Mason, Roger Waters admired them for their arrogant aggression (McGhee gets a close-up later on).
I love that the announcer looks beyond the musical and television applications of such lighting effects, seeing a future where these arrays are used to decorate buildings and rooms. It’s one of those futures that never came true, but there are places where I wish it did.
I think that’s the Tremeloes doing “Silence Is Golden.”
daualset asked: is this psychedelic enough? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8N18diRMVE
Ah, yeah, Dumbo Gets Mad. Great psych band from Italy—this song, “Plumy Tale,” actually made my top 50 last year when I was list-making for Pitchfork.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]“Nick’s Boogie” (1966)
I remember finding this song. I was in high school, it was the mid-90s, and I’d listened to Pink Floyd every day for a good couple of years. They were the biggest thing in my musical world by far, the first band I ever bought a bootleg of (a 2xCD set called Loose Connection: the Best Live in Concert 1968-1969 that’s quite poorly mastered, at College Music in Mansfield/Storrs, CT, across the street from the high school my father attended), a band whose every officially released note was firmly committed to memory. The rest of my musical world was essentially defined by the playlist at WAQY, a classic rock station based just over the Massachusetts line in East Longmeadow.
Because that playlist only included music from part of Pink Floyd’s album-making career—Meddle through A Momentary Lapse of Reason or very occasionally the Division Bell—there was a degree to which I felt like I was in on something. Here was this very popular band whose music people all over the world knew very well, but even they had a bunch of albums full of songs that never got played on the radio. Those people who only heard them on the radio didn’t know what this band really was. I knew. I had the albums, and I knew how good they were. I knew what people were missing.
It’s an easy attitude to have when you’re young and have no idea about the real amount of music that’s out there, the sheer staggering variety of it all, and the immense number of ways people interact with it and care to interact with it. It was also something of a trick of perspective: I was listening to records that had sold millions of copies around the world, but they still felt like they were mine, a private thing.
I used to go to the music section at the local Borders almost every week, usually just to look, but sometimes to buy. Even though I had every Pink Floyd album, I’d check behind their card every time out of habit. And once, I saw something new. It was called Tonight Let’s All Make Love In London, and the tracklisting on the back was a very long version of “Interstellar Overdrive” and something called “Nick’s Boogie,” plus interviews with Lee Marvin and David Hockney, neither of whom were familiar to me. You know what I bought that day.
The record label was something called See For Miles, which I thought was odd because I was used to seeing Capitol and Columbia labels on Pink Floyd’s music. And the music was very weird, much further out there than most of the band’s other work. “Interstellar Overdrive” on Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is a monster—the opening guitar riff is fat and nasty, and for a free-form jam, the wild midsection is pretty tightly controlled. Here, it was still a monster, but not the kind that jumps out from around a corner and kills you with claws. It was less tangible, more of a leviathan you never saw coming until it had you. The middle jam was full of shivering echo and odd sounds that were hard to trace to specific instruments.
And “Nick’s Boogie” didn’t even have the common rock and roll courtesy to start off with a badass riff. It just started with some rolling tom toms and immediately drifted off into interstellar space.
I don’t know if it was the psychology of listening to a piece of difficult music by a band I loved that made me love this too or something else. I was still at a point where I wasn’t really willing to admit that Pink Floyd might have on occasion done something below the level of total genius—my self-identity as a music fan was too wrapped up in them for them to be fallible. Connecting with “Nick’s Boogie” also strengthened the sense that this band had a secret history that simply wasn’t told to you unless you asked to hear it.
I still test this piece of music from time to time, seeing what I think of it as my tastes change and expand as I age, and I think it’s neat, even groundbreaking for a rock band in 1966, but not a work of staggering genius either. I do think it’s illustrative of how Pink Floyd shaped the way my taste expanded and changed over the years, though. Certainly when I first heard it, I was prepared for this side of the band by years of obsessively listening to Ummagumma, but I think spending a great deal of time not only listening to “Nick’s Boogie,” but trying very hard to like it more than I really did, prepared me to be open to other free-form music, and, years later, to keeping giving records by Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon and Pharoah Sanders chances if they didn’t immediately click with me.
Who knows, maybe I would have made my way to free jazz and other music of that sort anyway, but I very much doubt it when I think about all the listening I did to get there, and where my curiosity about intermediate steps like King Crimson came from. Every listener has to start somewhere. The great thing about it, though, is that as long as you’re alive you don’t have to finish anywhere.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Tuning
I’m working on the next wave of Yeeshkul content (and probably also abandoning any sense of a chronology here). Things kind of hit the brakes around here when the end of the year got a little crazy.
This fragment of Pink Floyd tuning was recorded on June 28, 1975 at Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario, in case you were wondering. Roger Waters can be heard introducing “Echoes” at the end. That was the encore. That whole show will be shared and talked about sometime soon here.
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