A Musical Meander based on 1975 and These Days

This morning I read about a group 'The 1975' appearing at Glasto. Was this coincidence with some stuff I wrote last night? I'd never heard of 'The 1975' and my head is currently sufficiently full of music (while writing this update, I've just finished Philip Glass' 'Mad Rush' and now have Max Richter's 'On The Nature of Daylight (Entropy) 2018 version' playing) so I doubt I'll chase 'The 1975', at least for now.

Last night, I had happened upon a programme that led to my fingers whiling away time on the laptop keyboard until late at night. The programme was about about surgery for facelifts, tummy tucks, saggy arm lifts etc. Fascinating, I thought, and if I had the money required ... I would buy a Maserati. So, it was clearly time to switch off the TV and check emails to the backdrop of youtube. This is when my 1975 thoughts sprang up!

It was the opener on youtube - Fripp and Eno with 'Evening Star' from 1975. Can one 'love' electronic music? Back to Eno - I had (and still have) tremendous admiration for Brian Eno, not as much from Roxy Music time, although they were very good at arty rock, but from building what is called ambient music - music for airports etc. I think BBC's Arena arts prog still uses 'Another Green World' which, while pre-ambient, is not dissimilar, and it's from 1975 again! And Robert Fripp ... coming from King Crimson which, although appearing initially, from The Court of The Crimson King, as yet another progressive rock/heavy metal group, sounded a revolt against the plague of metal spreading in the late '60s (although it did suffer some of the pretentiousness of that era). He's done some good stuff. I play Evening Star often - I never tire of it.

1975: that date, meaning little in itself (for now), reminded me of other dates, and reading about somebody who was born only a couple of months before me. So I'm heading away from '75 to '48, the year I was born, as was Brian Eno  and the writer of These Days.

While in '64 I was 16 and a teenager going out with my first girl friend, Jackson Browne, just two months older than me, was writing 'These Days' - a song that retains a timelessness to it. Youtube have an excellent copy of him performing it with the equally excellent David Lindley (a sad loss) at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in '96 . Annoyingly for me (and it will be at least until the end of time), in '06 I was walking about in the Picos de Europa in the Asturias at the very same time that Jackson Browne and David Lindley were appearing in the capital, Oviedo, and I wasn't aware! The prices of air tickets back then were such I could have flown out there from Gatwick just for the concert, but I was just a few miles away! The concert featured a singer, Luz Casal, who went against her usual repetoire to sing 'These Days' - a delicate version which I play quite often. It would be wrong to finish this reprise of JB's song without going back to the Greg Allman original version, although here done later as a duet with  JB (including the backstory). JB has said he thought Greg Allman's version with its slight, but important word change at the very end changed the song for the better. I was a fan of the Allman Bros - I have their first two albums, and petrolheads will remember Jessica . It was a shock when Duane got killed so early on. But, when mentioning the Allman Bros, apart from Duane and Greg, the guitar playing owed much to Dickey Betts.

Now, if only I'd written 'These Days' ... I could afford the Maserati and the surgery, and then some!

Back to this week and 1975. Composer of the week On BBC R3 is Gavin Bryars. His music is very interesting and in the last year I've heard, on several occasions, a piece of something entirely different from anything I've ever heard before in my life. It was originally recorded back in 1975 on Brian Eno's 'Obscure Records' record label. Initially, possibly a difficult listen for several minutes, it becomes a 24 minute mantra. This original version has Michael Nyman on organ and Derek Bailey on guitar - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet but there is also a later version here with an extensive 'sleeve' note by Gavin Bryars about the origin of the music and the words, sung by a homeless man.

This completes the meandering 24 hour loop around my mind of the music associated with 1975. That year also saw the emergence of Talkin' Heads and The Sex Pistols ... that's someone else's story.

Update 30/06:

I've become aware over the last few days that my music posts have changed a little to reflect my listening history. I've never kept a diary and using the musical interludes in my life bring those times alive. I found that immediately I finished this post, I started on another, on Americana! (Neurodiversity and the rest just have to wait). As I said to a friend just yesterday, I don't have anyone to sit and reminisce with, so I reminisce with my blog ...and, heaven forfend, it doesn't contradict me! So, if these reminisces become very introspective, too bad, I'm covering nigh on 70 years of my life!