My current favorite song

Can't wait til the new Beanie ... uh... drops? Hits? Comes out? Dec 11th! This narrowly beat out the Jimmy Dean sausage complaint call. If only Randy Taylor had R. Kelly rapping about Scotch girls, alas. UPDATE: Looks like The Solution has been leaked! Dig that "War Pigs" sample! Seriously!

Kevin Dubrow RIP

Holy crap! Quiet Riot's Kevin Dubrow is dead. Wow.

Acid Mothers Sunday Vol 2

These two jams are spaced out overload as only the firing-on-all-cylinders 2002 Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Parisio UFO could deliver. This is still my fave tour, the Magical Ministry tour. Once again Cotton Casino was still a huge part of the band. Her chanting, singing, smoking, drinking, shoes, synth playing, vibe... everything was even more out there than even this bunch of super tall timeless spacemen. And they played the Khyber twice that year! Both shows were a wonderful smoked out haze, but the October show was particularly awesome. These two songs are from the Empty Bottle in Chicago on October 20th, 2002. Not sure who taped it, but it is a good audience recording, but I am not super picky about stuff like that like. Both songs are kinda rare on the live Acid Mothers shows floating around. "Soleil De Cristal et Lune D'argent" was the main piece on their then current album Univers Zen Ou De Zéro A Zéro. The slow bouzouki fractal riff intro features Cotton chanting from another dimension as she rides her space synth in and out of time. The whirling dervish jam that follows is massive; you can hear Kawabata ditch the bouzouki for his electric guitar and take the already spiraling groove to a higher plane. Hard hitting spastic drummer Uki Eiji locks in with Hiroshi, Tsuyama and Cotton and sub-Sabbaths the place up. And this is how they opened the show!




"Loved and Confused" is from the Electric Heavyland album. Absolute riff destruction, the closest Acid Mothers Temple ever got to Mainliner, and this definitely coulda been on a Mainliner La Musica cassette, no doubt. Cotton punks it up while Kawabata grinds the main riff into a spaced out free jazz skronk. Jagged blasts of wah wah'd guitar circling the drain as flying saucers land in the background. And Bill Ward eats Art Blakey. After a slight pause to huff glue, the backwards, been-strangled riff returns to drag its knuckles and cause a fuss before finally flopping over in a pile of beer and limited edition CDrs. So yeah! The whole show can be downloaded here. These pics are from the same tour, the Khyber in Philadelphia, October 18 2002.

Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Parisio UFO- Soleil De Cristal et Lune D'argent (Live Empty Bottle, Chicago Oct 20 2002)

Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Parisio UFO- Loved and Confused (Live Empty Bottle, Chicago Oct 20 2002)

Philly Rules, One Day Only!

Congrats to Jimmy Rollins, the National League's MOST VALUABLE PLAYER! And way to time it on the release date of the new Freeway CD too!

Flower Travellin' Band- Otoko, How Many More Times

While reading Julian Cope's JAPROCKSAMPLER, I was happy to see my favorite Flower Travellin' Band release mentioned, From Pussies Til Death in 10,000 Years of Freakout. I snagged the vinyl LP on Apex Records a few years ago from Eclipse. It seems to be a bootleg and as far as I can tell these pre Satori recordings (recored in 69-70) have never been issued/reissued. The back cover states:

These were crazy sides recorded before the golden dawn of the Flower Travelling Band. Extreme suites of lead-molten guitar, poured with pain and beautiful psychedelic wonder into the mouth of the round eye cow.

Ok, so there you go. The front cover is credited to Flower Traveling Band, while the back is credited to the pre FTB Flowers. There are four tracks on the LP. The first track, "I'm Dead," is divided into two parts, the first taking up the whole first side of the LP. In JAPROCKSAMPLER "I'm Dead" is described as a work commissioned by composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (who had plans to record a rock band with a symphony orchestra but decided to let the Flowers jam out) with his only stipulations being it clocked in at over 20 minutes and was called "I'm Dead" after one of Tadanori Yoko'o's most famoust paintings. "I'm Dead" is free form instrumental freak-out with deep space reverb notes flying from the outer reaches of stonerdom, to heavy duty noise blur scariness. As the jam wound down, the tape machines kept rolling and recorded "Otoko," the second song on From Pussies Til Death.... Another instrumental, this one features a simple, upbeat bass lick being flooded by a spastic drummer and two (I think?) tracks of blazing guitar soloing all over the place. Almost like a distilled and more 'mersh version of "I'm Dead!"

The other tracks on the LP are covers of "Stone Free" and "How Many More Times." The blog Cities on Flame With Rock and Roll devotes a post to the cover of "How Many More Times" here with a substantial Julian Cope quote on the song. Definitely one of the most frenzied cover versions ever, my favorite Led Zeppelin track gets ground up and destroyed in a most perfect fashion. Crazy.

In a recent post on the Acid Mothers Temple mboard about JAPROCKSAMPLER, Kawabata said "...my friend who is Japanese also knows about 60s & 70s Jap Rock very much said there were many mistakes and misunderstanding, when he read this book... but also he said anyway it would be a good guide for beginners of Jap Rocks..." I am curious to hear anything regarding From Pussies Til Death... from anyone with an inside knowledge of the release. According to Cope's book

...for the Flowers, for Yuya Utchida, for Toshi Ichiyanagi, for the entire Japanese rock'n'roll underground, "I'm Dead" was nothing short of R E V E L A T I O N!

I can't tell if "I'm Dead" was ever actually released in Japan, and if so, on what. Anyone with any inside knowledge on this or exactly how far reaching "I'm Dead" was, please post in the comments!

It seems this LP is currently out of print, hopefully someone will reissue it, etc. some day. Insane and youthful, the all out assault on these tracks is fercious, a very different animal from the disciplined cold brutality of Satori.

Flower Travellin' Band- Otoko

Flower Travellin' Band- How Many More Times

UPDATE: Ok, after some more research it seems that "I'm Dead" was released on Toshi Ichiyanagi's Opera from the Works of Tadanori Yoko'o. Also, "Otoko" was released on the fourth volume of the Love, Peace and Poetry series.

Lucy! Well, her dad actually...

I am such a sucker for the few episodes of Lucy, Daughter of the Devil that I have seen, but holy crap, this ups the ante! Ahh!

yearly "MBV R Back, For Reals!" story...

...but with some Svenonius connection this time around! Ok, now lets get those "Loudest band I ever saw..." threads going, right?