SPURNED CLASSIC! - Down In L.A. by Brewer & Shipley

Brewer & Shipley

Down In L.A.

(1968)

A young girl sleeps 
and her dreams are laced with silver...

First off, sweet genius that's a magnificent cover isn't it...Mmm green and yellow...I really love this album. This is the sound of the West Coast in that great transitional year of 1968. Things haven't gotten too rural yet (these dudes probably had moustaches not beards), but in the aftermath of psychedelia something irrevocable has happened, the mystical has become implicit in the everyday, so even when you think you're just hearing these kinda traditional, simple harmony-laden folky songs, there's something about them that just feels different. The harmonies are delightful, the songs elegant and organic; acoustic guitars, a tinkle of harpsichord, wind chimes, some subtle orchestration and softly crashing cymbals, close your eyes and you're in Laurel Canyon with the sun in your eyes and the breeze in your fur. This is B&S's debut album, and I wish someone would reissue their 2nd and 3rd albums stat (Weeds and Tarkio?) as I bet they're all kinds of good too. Listen to Green Bamboo, it's great isn't it? You can totally imagine Peter Fonda listening to it by his pool, loving life. Down In L.A. captures that moment in time beautifully, folk-rock turning into roots-rock, kinda Byrdsy, kinda Buffalo Springfield, it is consistently brilliant. Before long things would get heavier, lengthier, or just more deep south, the whiff of the FSM marches and the coffee houses would be well and truly redundant, but you can still hear them a little here. It's a fugitive moment, but this album puts you right there.  

Now we beat on the drum
Aquarian dancers come...

Green Bamboo

Jellyfish Shampoo

And I still hear guitars in the air
as we sat in the sand...
Hollyann - Boston

Sometime in the late 80's, I would've been about 8 or 9, while we were on holiday in Italy visiting family and spending a lot of time at the beach, my dad came up with the idea of Jellyfish Shampoo. He'd be working on his tan in this pair of skintight Moschino shorts with a heart on them and must've had some kind of lightbulb moment. What's the opposite of an epiphany? I remember pop's craze that year was aromatherapy and i think he'd read somewhere that jellyfish had some properties that were good for your hair. My dad's a hairdresser, by the way. If you see pictures of me during that holiday you'd notice that my dad had been practising the Rod Stewart fashion-mullet on his youngest boy with mixed results. My head looked massively out of proportion with my tiny physique, about five times larger than the sun. Anyway, that summer we kept finding jellyfish washed up on the shore, and dad took some back to where we were staying and boiled them up in a saucepan with a bunch of sugar and some other shit. The result was sticky for sure, more like hair glue, but instead of actual glue it was a combination of jellyfish and sugar. Despite his having no knowledge of even basic chemistry he thought 'fuck it' and went with inspired guesswork. Jellyfish Shampoo was too batshit crazy to exist. Sometimes i think about it and have to hand it to him, he had the tenacity to try despite all logic. Other times i think, stupid.

SPURNED CLASSIC! - Apprentice (In A Musical Workshop) by Dave Loggins (1974)

Dave Loggins
Apprentice (In a Musical Workshop)
1974

I recently picked up this Dave Loggins 3-fer on BGO Records, and so far i haven't been able to get past the first album. Apprentice has to be my fave slice of Seventies singer-songwriter-soft-rock splendour since Dan Fogelberg's Souvenirs. It makes me feel warm and good, which is nice as our heater's broken down. This is exactly the kind of tragically overlooked, irredeemably un-hip, true pumpkin-puree sound of the Seventies which i like to imagine piping out of a truck on the L.A freeway or some place with a lovely macrame owl.

A macrame owl

Who is Dave Loggins? I'm not sure. But let me tell you something, he is the shit. Apprentice is sincere and soulful, and there's not even an obligatory rocker so you don't have to skip any tracks, they're all wonderful and they're all soft around the edges. Please Come To Boston was a smash hit, obvs i'd never heard it before. I wish this kind of thing didn't get dismissed so much, where's the respect for Bread, America, Kiki Dee, Clifford T. Ward, Jimmie Spheeris?

Dave Loggins really wants you to go to Boston...

In honour of all these Seventies MOR greats (and because beards are so over) i've shaved my beard and gone full-Glenn Frey with my very own extra-sleazy moustache. There it is.

Honouring the greats

What i read in february...

It's been a slow, non-themed reading month in Bertsville. Looks like every month from here on out is going to be themed. We seem to have formed a small unofficial reading group thing here in Cardiff and we've hijacked the reading year with our vigilante theme-fascism, so hopefully that'll give us all some focus. Themes are good. Once you start with the themes everyone gets excited. Or pissed off, sometimes we get pissed off. Next month is Multicultural March. I'm hoping to finally read some bell hooks, but there's hopes and then there's reality.

So here's what i read in Feb...
(and here's what sian read)

Sister Golden Hair by Darcey Steinke

Really enjoyed this coming-of-age in Seventies L.A (named after an ace America tune!) Tons of period detail, unease, nostalgia and an insight into girlhood. 

Women by Chloe Caldwell

This one has a bit of a buzz going on at the moment, and it deserves it. 

A concise, contemporary-feeling novella about heartbreak and falling hard in love.

The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp

Truly excellent Young Adult novel about a guy going off the rails.  

Funny, unpretentious and subversive.  

Don't Kiss Me by Lindsay Hunter

I've heard good things about Hunter's latest novel Ugly Girls, so i thought i'd give these short stories a go. Trashy, bratty and kinda comic-booky, these didn't feel all that new or original or anything but they did give me a kind of popping-candy high. 

...and i've nearly finished these

Burning The Days by James Salter

Man, Salter can write a sentence. These are his 'recollections' and i'm up to the Sixties right now, pretty thankful to be done with his piloting days...

Nothin' To Lose: The Making Of KISS by Ken Sharp

Deal with it.

What i read in January

January was Manuary in Villa Lile-Pastore. There was really no desperate need for me to participate in a whole month of reading only dudes, but y'know, brotherhood. What happened was this, last year my reading habits strayed dangerously into the weiner camp, too many novels about boys sulking, boozing, taking themselves seriously, and falling for nasty femmes...all that testosterone can seriously increase the risk of being a dick. There are times when you've got to look at yourself and say hey champ, you are not doing your bit for the world as you want it to be. Likewise there are other times when it's equally as important to say screw it, you owe the world jack, but you do owe yourself the wondrous thrill of reading Joyce Carol Oates, or Megan Abbott, or Dorothy B. Hughes, Edith Wharton, Michelle Tea, Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Hempel, Diane Di Prima, Mary Gaitskill etc. So anyway, at the end of last year for 2 months i only read female authors, and it was of course high-rankin'. Anyway, my darling squeeze had the opposite realisation, she was worse actually, her page-to-weiner ratio scored abysmally low, which is why Manuary. 

Goat Mountain by David Vann

Extreme butchosity and bad camping times in the wilderness. This was grim and hypnotic.

Franny And Zooey by J.D. Salinger

Salinger can do no wrong.  Manages to be both frothy and profound, and probably somewhere in it you'll find the meaning of life.

Selected Poems - Kenneth Fearing

Really enjoyed this.  Fearing's poems are almost pop-arty; a collage of modernity, whitmanesque riffs, and the language of hardboiled noir.  

The Riverside Villas Murder by Kingsley Amis

I think if you're going to do Manuary right you ought to read at least one arrogant misogynistic alcoholic prick. *Enter Kingsley Amis* Enjoyed this, not his greatest work, and morally way off, but fun.   

The Primal Urge by Brian Aldiss

My first Aldiss, and an early one. Not great, kinda pointless, like an extended joke with an actual punchline in the last paragraph. Still, the Sixties. Sigh.

Raw Material by Jorg Fauser

Tale of communes, student politics, struggling to be a writer, sex, opium, and booze. An outsider gem from the German 70's counterculture, funny, cynical and probably all true. 

Coffee, Tea, or Murder? by Donald Bain

I've read a few of these and this was by far the crappest yet. Shame on you Donald Bain. Shame. On. You.

(Here's what Sian read...go have a look)

What I've been listening to...

Jessica Pratt

Mystic bedsit baroque folk, I'm loving her more than is appropriate.
Listen to: Half Twain The Jesse

Sturgill Simpson

Hell yeahs. Sounds kinda like Waylon Jennings. Sometimes he sounds like Waylon Jennings having a major cosmic epiphany, but y'know in a cheap motel room or something country.
Listen to: Turtles (All The Way Down)

Mayonnaise by The Woolen Men

This song's been stuck in my head all week, fucker's catchier than syphilis.

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats

Biker-psych heaviosity, they are so great it makes me want to puke.
Listen to: Death's Door

Lana Del Fucking Rey
If her mindblowing Kerouacian intro and accompanying video to Ride doesn't make you weep you're a dick.
Listen to: Ride

Hall of Mirrors by Vum

Loving this song right now. A dark psychedelic L.A soundscape, 

a bit hypnotic and woozy. Don't know anything about this band, derp.

Books i might read in February

I might read these books next month, but who knows for sure.
They're all right here waiting to be picked up, like kittens, or a sandwich.
Have you read any of them? Any good?

Sister Golden Hair by Darcey Steinke

California by Edan Lepucki

A Meeting By The River by Christopher Isherwood

The Catherine Wheel by Elizabeth Harrower

Women by Chloe Caldwell

Signs Preceding The End Of The World by Yuri Herrera

Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky