It’s difficult to pick a music category that does justice to Nashville four piece All Them Witches, but ‘heavy psychedelic rock’ is probably a good starting point. When they toured the UK last year, they used the entire of Iron Man by Black Sabbath as their intro music and when I saw them at the Bierkeller in Bristol, the keyboard player Allan Van Cleave was wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt – these are both useful historical reference points.
Although they’re now signed to New West Records, they have a history of self-publishing and guerilla releasing, so it was a pleasant, but not completely out of character, surprise when they announced yesterday that they have a new EP, Lost And Found, and it’s available to download for free from their Bandcamp site. It’s produced and mixed by guitarist Ben MacLeod and the striking artwork is by drummer Robby Staebler.
I’ve listened to it a few times over the past two days and I’m really impressed by the quality of the EP. Over the course of three original tracks and one cover, they push their boundaries in diverse directions. They’re going to start recording a new album in April – I’m not sure if this EP is intended to explore possible new directions or just limber up on some tracks that don’t otherwise fit, but either way it’s well worth a listen.
Hares On The Mountain. This starts simply but piles drone instrument upon drone instrument upon hypnotic vocal, before disappearing in a giant wave of echoing guitar.
Before The Beginning. A pretty straightforward cover of a Peter Green song from the 1969 Fleetwood Mac album Then Play On.
Call Me Star. This is a mostly acoustic track which is strongly reminiscent (to me at least) of Nick Drake, especially in the fingerpicked guitar but also to an extent in the vocals.
Dub Passageways. A proper King Tubby style dub treatment of a track which tries to rock out (the drums could be from a Faith No More track) but keeps being pulled back to dubspace. Allan Van Cleave also plays some mean violin.
[You can listen to the music from all the Love Saves The Day posts on this Youtube playlist.]
I read the rather excellent book Love Saves The Day: A History Of American Dance Music Culture 1970-1979 by Tim Lawrence last year. Scattered throughout it are representative playlists of the music particular DJs would have played at a specific club in a specific year. While I was reading it, I bored people with snippets of information about the DJs and clubs and Youtube videos of some of the musical gems. I thought I’d collect these together and expand the text a little in order to bore a wider audience.
The early playlists are pretty eclectic – the core of them is soul and R&B, but the fringes are wild. Francis Grasso was DJ at the Sanctuary, a seminal ‘mixed-crowd-but-essentially-gay’ disco that opened in 1970. He would play rock and funk, James Brown and Motown – whatever got the crowd going. He was also a pioneer in mixing records together rather than just playing them back to back, and would use his headphones to listen to the incoming record to get the perfect blend – which became standard technique. You can’t dance to the orgasmic section of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love so he’d mix the whole of I’m A Man by Chicago over that part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvmeEyVd5w8
Babatunde Olatunji was a Nigerian percussion virtuoso who relocated to the US in 1950 in the hopes of becoming a diplomat, but ended up very successfully supporting himself through his drumming. This track was a pop hit in 1959, as was the album it came from. Eleven years later, Francis Grasso, who’d bought the record when it came out, dug it out of the crate to make it his signature tune at the Sanctuary in 1970.
The club Haven was “a cliquish after hours spot that attracted a mixed crowd of street people, gay men, and high society speed freaks”. It got going at midnight and went through to 7AM. It was eventually closed on the orders of the New York State Supreme Court. Francis Grasso had moved to Haven from the Sanctuary and two of his admirers, Michael Cappello and Steve D’Acquisto, learned his tricks there and waited for their chance. They became three of the key DJs on the early 70s New York club scene. The music stuck closer to soul and R&B, but always looking for the raw or percussive track that would energise the dancefloor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwHAx1i-XPA
Tamburlaine was a Chinese restaurant that metamorphosed into a nightclub at 10pm. By 1971, that nightclub was the gayest discotheque around and also attracted the in crowd – drag queens, fashionistas and celebrities like Jackie Onassis and Keith Moon. Grasso played there, and so did Steve D’Acquisto who was spinning this early Eddy Grant track. But then so was pretty much every other DJ in New York.
Jonathan Wilson is a (non-native) Californian who makes extraordinary music – not just for himself, he also has some very cool producer credits including critically acclaimed albums with Father John Misty and Karen Elson released in 2017 alone. His own music manages to cherry pick sounds and grooves from the last fifty years of popular music without ever feeling derivative or anything other than contemporary.
His last album Fanfare felt rooted in the acoustic guitar and harmony vocals sound of the 1970s Laurel Canyon sound – to the extent that Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and David Crosby contributed harmony vocals. His new album, Rare Birds, has got much more of a 1980s Peter Gabriel/Talk Talk feel, synthesizers and all. There’s still lush orchestration and great guitar playing of course, and there are plenty of outliers like the delicate Loving You or the early Pink Floyd sound of Miriam Montague. The latter is clearly influenced by the fact that his main gig at the moment is guitarist, vocalist and ‘resident hippie’ on Roger Waters’ Us + Them world tour. He also contributed guitar, keyboards and studio skills to Waters’ recent album is this the life we really want?.
I heard a song on the radio this morning, and was so impressed by the guitar solo that starts just before the four minute mark (and is basically the track from then on) that I wanted to know who had played it. It’s linked below, I’ll wait while you listen to it.
That’s John Walker on the video back in 1975 pretending to play the solo on a rather beautiful but unplugged Fender Stratocaster. He was promoting the Walker Brothers comeback album, which did nowhere near as well as the No Regrets single which was taken from it.
The guitarist actually playing the solo is Alan Parker, an English musician who has written or played a huge amount of music I’m sure you’re familiar with, although his face is unfamiliar and he won’t appear on any of these videos barring one grainy still.
After training at the Royal Academy of Music under Julian Bream in the mid Sixties, Parker became an in demand session guitarist on the London circuit. John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin fame was musical director for Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man album sessions and brought Parker in to play electric rhythm and lead guitar on the title track, Hurdy Gurdy Man. It’s often been said that the guitar is played by Jimmy Page – he did play acoustic guitar on some of the other tracks at the sessions but not this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRsrDLkACTs
Around the same time as the Donovan sessions, Parker met Jimi Hendrix when they were both working at Olympic Studios in Barnes, west London. They hit it off and, a couple of years later, Jimi gifted him his 1951 Epiphone FT-79 acoustic guitar. This had been bought for $25 in 1967 with money earned from the Monterey Festival appearance and had been Jimi’s main home guitar while in London, used for practice and composition.
Parker played the guitar on sessions and at some point sold it along with the hard case that he’d found for it (to this day, still stencilled with “A. Parker”). That original sale may have been The Jimi Hendrix Auction at Bonhams in 2001 – it was certainly sold there. It’s been auctioned again a couple of times since then, still with the A Parker case, most recently in 2016 when it sold for £209,000.
Meanwhile, a group of session musicians got together in 1969, at his instigation according to Big Jim Sullivan, with a view to forming a band. Big Jim soon went off to play with Tom Jones for a few years leaving Alan Parker as the sole guitarist – the remaining musicians became Blue Mink. The bass player was Herbie Flowers, later a David Bowie stalwart and member of Sky, but Blue Mink’s pop success was driven by the vocal talents of Madeline Bell and Roger Cook. Cook was also an accomplished songwriter, having writing credits on I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing and Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart amongst many others. Anyway, here’s a Blue Mink instrumental from their first album which shows off Alan Parker’s chops.
All of Blue Mink carried on with their session work and other bands. They formed the nucleus of the musicians on Elton John’s first album in 1970. Parker and Flowers formed a heavy blues band called Rumpelstiltskin, whose twoalbums are well worth checking out.
For strange reasons (it was the early 70s) Rumpelstiltskin adopted pseudonyms, so Alan Parker became Andrew Balmain. That’s how Andrew Balmain came to be credited as guitarist on Ballade de Melody Nelson from Serge Gainsbourg’s landmark 1971 album Histoire de Melody Nelson, the rhythm tracks for which were recorded in London in 1970 with Rumplestiltskin providing the core of the band.
The Herbie Flowers connection was probably responsible for Parker being brought in to play the electric guitar on Rebel Rebel, David Bowie’s farewell to glam rock. Bowie wrote the riff on an acoustic but Parker dirtied it up and added the three notes at the end of each riff (Ab, D, E) that allow it to loop so hypnotically for almost all the song. Parker was also possibly being used as a gentle two finger salute in the direction of the recently departed Mick Ronson, showing that Ronson was by no means the only guitarist with a Les Paul and an overdriven amp. Alan Parker also played the Shaft-style guitar on 1984 which appeared together with Rebel Rebel on Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs.
Parker continued to play on both well-known and obscure tracks. Many of them went uncredited – such is the life of a session guitarist. But some he did get credit for like this track from the first Kate Bush album The Kick Inside, which is one of two tracks on that album (the other being The Man With The Child In His Eyes) which survived from the original 1975 sessions produced by David Gilmour.
But he was also establishing himself as a composer and performer of library music. The distinguishing feature of library music is that the composer assigns all copyright to the publisher, so the publisher can easily license it to film and TV companies for use as soundtrack and incidental music. Library music was also released as albums by labels such as KPM, DeWolfe and Themes. It’s very difficult to trace what use the tracks were put to, However this one is known to have been used on Sesame Street back in the day.
Session contacts led to library music contacts and those in turn led to theme music and soundtrack contacts. By 1977, Parker was scoring the high profile television dramatisation of the “Philby, Burgess and Maclean” spy scandal.
