Folk-Rock with strong jazz flavors: Saturday Music Club on Thursday

Fairport Convention: Bouton Rouge, Live Broadcast, April 27 1968 (my father's 31st birthday...TM)

01-Morning Glory. 02-Time Will Show The Wiser.. 03-Reno Nevada. Line-Up: Judy Dyble - Vocals/Recorder Iain Matthews - Vocals. Simon Nicol - Rhythm Guitar/Vocals. Ashley "Tyger" Hutchings - Bass Guitar. Richard Thompson - Lead Guitar/Vocals. Martin Lamble - Drums

Pentangle: Live on Norwegian Television 1968

vocal: Jacqui McShee guitars: John Renbourn & Bert Jansch bass: Danny Thompson drums: Terry Cox

Fotheringay: Live at The Beat Club 1970

1 Nothing More 00:00 2 Gypsy Davey 04:52 3 John The Gun 08:42 4 Too Much Of Nothing 13:34

Eclection: "Mark Time"

Eclection: "Please"

Eclection: "St. Georg and the Dragon (Up the Night)"


Joni Mitchell Band: Shadows and Light

Joni Mitchell: 1970 UK television (The Old Grey Whistle Test production unit?)
Chelsea Morning 0:00 (from Clouds, 1969) Cactus Tree 3:15 (from Song to a Seagull, 1968) My Old Man 7:56 (from Blue, 1971) For Free 11:35 (from Ladies of the Canyon, 1970) California intro 16:25 music 18:15 (from Blue, 1971) Big Yellow Taxi 22:21 (from Ladies of the Canyon, 1970) Both Sides Now 25:46 (from Clouds, 1969)

The Byrds: "I See You"

The Byrds: Monterey Pop 1967 set with stage chatter edited out

The Byrds: "Eight Miles High" (1970 at Fillmore East)

Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn: "Eight Miles High" (Capitol Theatre, 4 March 1978)

"Eight Miles High": Saturday Music Club on Monday

The Byrds: "Eight Miles High" (perhaps their single best recording, a wonderful fusion of their folk, jazz, Indian raga, and other influences) 

The Byrds in 1966:
Gene Clark, primary songwriter, vocals, misc. instruments
Roger "Jim" McGuinn, lead guitar, vocals
David Crosby, rhythm guitar,  vocals
Chris Hillman, bass guitar, vocals
Michael Clarke, drums

Gene Clark:


Acoustic Desert Rose Band:


Hüsker Dü:


Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3: (incomplete)


Maura and Pete Kennedy:


The Ventures:


Rufus Harley Band:


The Soulful Strings:


The Bob Thiele New Happy Times Orchestra with Gabor Szabo:


Index:


Roger McGuinn and Crowded House:


The Byrds at the Fillmore East closure concert, 1970: "Jesus is Just Alright" and "8MH":

(music begins at 2:23)

Saturday Music Club: some more folk rock, with some jazz flavors

Pentangle: "Light Flight"


Judy Henske: "High-Flying Bird" (from Hootenanny) (in the studio)


Fairport Convention: "Chelsea Morning; Sun Shade"


The Byrds: "You Ain't Going Nowhere; This Wheel's on Fire" (from Playboy After Dark)

(blurrier video, but fewer disruptions and perhaps slightly better sound)

Love: "You Set the Scene"


Joni Mitchell and The Band: "Coyote" (from The Last Waltz)


The Roches: "Second Family"


Pentangle: "Hunting Song"


The Byrds: "I See You"



Tune detective:
The Big 3: "The Banjo Song" (which puts new music to Stephen Foster lyrics)

Shocking Blue: "Venus"


Longform:
Joni Mitchell and jazz-musician friends: Shadows and Light

Joni Mitchell - electric guitar, vocals
Pat Metheny - lead guitar
Jaco Pastorius - bass
Don Alias - drums
Lyle Mays - keyboards
Michael Brecker - saxophone
The Persuasions - backing vocals on "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" & "Shadows and Light"

FLiP(ping) the Byrds...Hüsker Dü?--May's unForgotten (but unfamiliar?) Music

FLiP
















The Byrds...
Hüsker Dü











(And since Blogger's been such a charmer lately, you might be better off in several ways by double-clicking on the videos below to allow them to open in their own windows...full view of them, and quite probably less stuttering.)

So, the Byrds. Not too forgotten, as probably the most protean and innovative of the sustainedly popular US rock bands of the 1960s...certainly even such rivals as the Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane, the Band (with or without Dylan), and (the initially anti-popular) the Velvet Underground didn't cover as much territory, explore as many ways of making various sorts of rock music, often at the pioneering edge of such forms as folk-rock, jazz-rock, and country-rock (in the latter-day form, anyway, as opposed to rockabilly).

And no song of theirs is more iconic than Gene Clark and Roger/Jim McGuinn's "Eight Miles High"...a song about their first tour of England, the flight over (and Clark's acrophobia, which alas forced him to quit the band, depriving the Byrds of their best songwriter by any measure), and, as every idiot censor at the end of 1966 Just Knew, getting high. Well, as a sort of pun, anyway...as this was also McGuinn's most thorough expression for free jazz (though the album Fifth Dimension would also feature the similar, nearly as good "I See You"), particularly that of John Coltrane, who knew and was consistently further investigating spiritual highs via music as well. Even the British jazz-loving rock bands, the Zombies and Yardbirds and Animals and all, hadn't quite caught up with what was Happening Now in jazz to the same extent, and while the two songs were early steps, they were assured early steps...and also on the way toward realizing McGuinn's desire to make what he metaphorized as "jet" music, as opposed to older forms. Certainly the jazz fusion bands, coming from the other direction, were mostly several years off, as well.
"Eight Miles High" (remastered)

"Eight Miles High" (alternate take/mix)

"I See You":


The syndicated public broadcasting series Growing Bolder offered its viewers an interesting interview and showcase for McGuinn's home movies of that first British experience for the band, and here it is, with an "Eight Miles High" as soundtrack in the middle, along with snatches of other Byrds and Beatles recordings also heard:

Find more inspiring video, audio, and images at Growing Bolder.

And here's a bit of one of the later (1970), more bluegrass/countrified versions of the Byrds (the Clarence White/Skip Battin/Gene Parsons/McGuinn lineup) doing a improvisational jam/vocals-free version of the song:


And a 1969 concert, also featuring Clarence White, doing a medley of the first three hit singles:


I discovered/rediscovered the Byrds for myself about 1981, having been aware of the hits, of course, in the course of getting a bit deeper into rock generally, and particularly folk-rock, '60s rock, punk rock, and all the other things the Byrds and their contemporaries helped create or at least touched on. By 1984, a pretty grim year (hey, Orwell called it), and at one of my lowest points in that year, I heard for the first time a recording, while riding back to the office in the van-full of neighborhood canvassers for SANE/Freeze, the anti-nuclear proliferation merged organization, this relatively new cover of "Eight Miles High" coming from the University of Maryland radio station, which was puzzling everyone else in the van as to what the hell we were listening to...it was Hüsker Dü, of course, the young Minneapolis punk band about to move off SST Records, a major punk indy label, to sign to the adventurous but clueless Warner Bros. Records, who wouldn't market them even as well as they had the LA-based X some years before:


Hüsker Dü (the band-name means "do you remember?" in Norwegian; it was the name of a heavily-advertised board game at the turn of the 1970s), always ready to express a cathartic rage, and as adept as nearly any instrumentalists in hardcore punk (even their contemporaries the Bad Brains, who had turned away from jazz fusion to essentially create hardcore punk), where suffering ever-greater tensions as a band by the mid-'80s, and this performance:


And perhaps the most Byrds-influenced original music Hüsker Dü did was that on their final studio album, Warehouse: Songs and Stories, of which this triptych of songs is a fine core sampling ("Friend, You've Got to Fall"/"Visionary"/"She Floated Away"):





So, pop-punk, punk-pop, melodic punk rock (as well as extremely dissonant punk rock, I must admit) continues to appeal to me, even as proto-punk did in the mid 1970s...and over the last week I've made a little discovery for myself, in the form of the all-woman band from Okinawa, FLiP, and their current single, "Nagai Kiss" (or "long kiss"):


Oddly enough, they didn't just arise in time for me to catch up with them...they played the US as early as 2009, and this earlier (2010?) single, かごめかごめ or "Kagome Kagome" ("Basket Basket" is a no doubt inadequate translation, as is, probably, "Your Eyes or Your Eyes"), I like even better (it is on the ep Dear Girls):


From their first album, I believe, 2008's Haha Kara Umareta Hinekure No Uta:


In LA on the 2009 Japan Nite tour...the Okinawan candy is over there, as noted before going into a slightly ragged but charming reading of (I believe it is) "Yayoi no Nijuku" ("March 29"?):


...and the studio version of that song:


And, finally, apparently at least minor hit single for them in Japan, "It's a Lie":


For more of this month's Forgotten Music, please see Scott Parker's blog for his and the index links to others'.

1965

Aretha Franklin:


The Staple Singers:


Miriam Makeba: 


Doc Watson:


The Kinks:


The Zombies:


The Byrds:


The Rolling Stones:


The Who:


The Sonics:


The Miracles:


Arthur Lee in the American Four:
>

The Animals:


The Beatles:


The Beach Boys:


The Mamas and the Papas:


The Crescendos: Silver Threads and Golden Needles


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