Lost Connection

Got to Whitby and the charging port on my Google Pixel died on me, so it was a case of slowly watching the woer drain until it died. An new port will be about sixty pounds but of course I was away in Whitby with no other form of connection to so many things. I have my Amazon Kindle but that is reliant on a wifi connection and  while there are numerous connection options it's not a phone and is hardly portable.

The cost of a refurbished Pixel 2 is only a hundred pounds more than the Pixel itself , and the reason I want to stay with the Pixel is that it keeps pace with Operating System Upgrades so my Pixel is on Android 10. I bought an old Samsung Note that could only take up to version 4 so a lot of the apps I need wouldn't work and didn't  do 4G, so went back to CEX and exchanged for a Samsung A3 which was smaller and goes up to V6 and does 4G. It's a bit smaller and slower but does the job and is a decent holding handset until I get a new on or the Pixel fixed, though a second hand Pixel with a 12 month guarantee is around £90 so not much more than getting this one fixed.

If I had been in Newcastle I'd have probably found somewhere to fix it but when you are on holiday it's a little more difficult, although life without a phone is not impossible.

So it's now finding options and finding my way back to work tomorrow.

Ezra Furman's "Lousy Connection" seems fairly appropriate don't you think for this first February post. Oh and I need to install twitter on the A3 to share this.

Length

In yesterdays post I spoke of "Revelation" being the first piece by a rock band (Love on "Da Capo") to take up a side of a vinyl album. That got me thinking of what followed from that.

Classical music seems to have often consisted of lengthy pieces in the form of symphonies , but these were usually split into movements to give orchestras and audiences a rest. Remember permanent functional recordings that could cope with that sort of length of music did not come until the vinyl album which was around the late forties early fifties , and some symphonies outlasted the realistic forty minute vinyl limitation (anything else results in groove cramming and sound degradation).

Pink Floyd took up s side of "Meddle" with "Echoes" and "Atom Heart Mother"'s title track took up the first side. Yes did the same with "Close To The Edge" and "Relayer" opened with the first side being taken up by "Gates of Delirium" .

"Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd and "Sergeant Pepper" by The Beatles were merged song cycles that had defined songs that segued into others.

Yesterday on my walk to work I listened to Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" which is just a single forty minute piece, obviously consisting of movements and it does amage me that artists can remember everything to perform these live. That was followed by "Passion Play" which was split by the silly "Hare Who Lost His Spectacles" by effectively took up a fill vinyl album.

However Tull were outdone by Mountain who on the original vinyl album of "Twin Peaks" stretched "Nantucket Sleighride" over two and a half sides even though it was only thirty minutes long, so we'll go with the studio take of that for this last post in January. It's only six minutes long and amazing song about whaling, a section of it was also used for an ITV news program "Weekend World" , and I always loved the early Mountain album covers, amazing artwork.

Revelation

On my last post I realised I'd posted 21 times this January, last January I posted 17 times and I thought if I keep this up it will be another record year. I'd worked on in my heat that 21 x 12 = 372 !! Obviously my brain wasn't functioning correctly as it often doesn't.

This is probably my last post this month and will probably resume early  next week. I am off the Whitby for the weekend staying at Dillons one of my two preferred stays in Whitby (the other being La Rosa) , Dillon is brilliant , Craig and Matt are great hosts , the rooms are great and their breakfasts are awesome. This time it's Whitby by train, I wonder if the train will make it. Last time the line was blocked at Hartlepool so a taxi was laid on that got us to Whitby 45 minutes early...... you can't do negative delay repay (smiles).

Anyway I am getting through "Follow The Music" and the Elektra label has got it's first rock acts, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Love. Love, led by the unfeasibly talented Arthur Lee, were the first band to fill a side with a single piece, the eighteen minute "Revelation" on "Da Capo", their second album which you can listen to by clicking on the title link. It starts off with cod harpsichord  before reverting to more standard 4/4 pop rock progressing / descending into a jam, though more than listenable , owing a lot to long blues jams.

Love covered "Hey Joe" and the Bacharach / David song "My Little Red Book" book I'm going to share "Alone Again Or" with it's amazing brass arrangement and trumpet solo. It was also well covered by the Damned which you can hear here.

Archimedes' Devil

A quarter of the way through "Follow The Music" and it mentions that Jac Holzman had a desk toy called an Archimedes Devil. I'd never heard of these and couldn't really find anything on the web until I came across the Cartesian Diver or Cartesian Devil a classic science experiment which demonstrates the principle of buoyancy (Archimedes' principle) and the ideal gas law. So now I know what it is and I have seen them in the past, but this is another reason why it is great to read because it either brings back things you've forgotten or lets you discover new things.

I'm still not up to the introduction of rock music to Elektra (though the book's cover has about four Doors albums and The Beatles have been mentioned) but several unexpected names have popped up, one of which was Joshua Rifkin a player with the Even Dozen Jug Band (I really need to look into what a Jug Band is (A group that uses unconventional or improvised instruments, such as jugs, kazoos, and washboards.)  DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia are a great reference library.

But it a semi parallel with Brian Eno's Obscure imprint , Jac Holzman came up with the idea of a budget Classical label selling good quality albums for $2.50 undercutting major labels, and Rifkin was a musicologist who wrote the sleeve notes, The label is Nonesuch ,and I first came across this and Joshua Rifkin when he covered some Scott Joplin ragtime and his version of "The Entertainer" was what brought ragtime to my attention, Marvin Hamlisch covered it for the theme for the film "The Sting" , so that's what we go with today for your enjoyment.

Repetition

I heard some of the new Ed O' Brien (Radiohead) album and remember Thom Yorke saying they were dispensing with melody. Essentially music should contain some sort of recognisable pattern which may or may not be defined as melody.

Then I started thinking (and I have probably written about this before so I am repeating myself) that all songs and musical pieces are generally based on repetition , often starting with a drum beat or a rhythm in one form or another and then built up from there.

Obviously there is music that maybe doesn't have a beat as such (say in acapella) but there is recognisable repetition.

For a piece to not repeat and still be recognisable it needs to be very short, and often you will get bits in songs that do that, but repetition is essential to the actual production of a song or musical piece.

Ironically prose and film has to generally avoid repetition except in cases such as the two excellent Duncan Jones (David Bowie's lad) films "Moon" and "Source Code" where repetition is essential to the excellently executed storylines.

Life is full of repetition we sleep , wake eat , work then repeat. When we eat we have to wash and dry utensils and then repeat, same with clothes , we wear , wash  then wear in a never ending cycle which is not necessarily a bad thing , life is cyclical.

Yes it's a short Saturday morning post , and there is only one song for this , "Repetition" by The Fall.

Missing Targets

I was hoping for the blog to hit half a million visits by the end of January but with eight days to go and 21K short I think it will happen in the first week in February. January's step count is back to normal with 51K to do in eight days so that is fairly easy, and in theory I could do it in one day but that would mean walking over twenty miles and I'm far too lazy to do that.

My Christopher Lee slideshow video has passed 40K visits which is impressive when you consider the a hundred visits is considered a success for me. The Dr Seuss / Nick Cave Red Right Hand one is up to 5.6K (the first one I did hit 16K but new images became available so I extended it). Given "Red Right Hand"'s use in "Peaky Blinders" and the fact that it was the first ever non commissioned piece of music used it the "X Files".

I'm only a tenth of the way through "Follow The Music" but it is enjoyable finding out about recording , distribution and Jac Holzman's unimpressive attitude to women in the fifties, plus dealing with blacklisting during the McCarthyist Witch Hunts  is all very illuminating and interesting and I may have up to ten weeks of this, which is not a bad thing.

I am almost impressed with myself that I have written a decent length blog post with absolutely nothing to to say, just plucking the odd things out of the air to put down and share with you.

So the last thing on this Friday morning is to share the "Red Right Hand" video for you with excellent graphics by the brilliant Dr Faustus. , Oh here's a thing, because I've been writing this I've completely forgotten to take my tablets!!

Cars Hiss By My Window

This is basically my start to the days, around 4:30 - 5 am I start hearing cars on the road, then about 5:30 I hear the Central Heating Boiler (serviced today by my friend Harry Willis) start up , then at 5:45 my alarm goes off, which I turn off immediately then stretch to wake my body up before going to the bathroom to shave and clean my teeth, followed by a shower. That's my normal start to the day except today I heard a car and then the alarm went off, meaning I sort of had to get up immediately, with Harry coming to service the boiler at eight.

The "Follow The Music" book is very similar to "On Some Faraway Beach" , a lot of text, but very interesting and is going to be a long and interesting ride, about the history of Elektra records as well as the history of recording media and lots of other things including interviews with the artists involved and Jac Holzman's first record shop "The Record Loft" (it wasn't a loft but he thought it sounded folky.

The title of the post is another song from "LA Woman" one of my eldest daughter's favourite Doors albums so we will use that for this post methinks.