News

Today over dinner Olivia and I watched Episode 5 of the original Star Trek, she’s never seen it. Can you imagine experiencing Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Scotty, Sulu, Dr. McCoy, Lieutenant Uhura, Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Janice Rand (Chekov isn’t in it yet) for the first time? Revisiting the series is interesting because I remember story lines and some of the creatures, but of course I can’t remember every scene and because it’s a sixties show every scene is an experience in itself. Just the colours alone are striking, the models they used for the Starship Enterprise, the sets with the painted backgrounds, the hairdos, all this along with the imaginative story lines and Olivia is hooked (me too). I’m wondering is there an episode I haven’t seen? There’s three seasons and seventy nine episodes, we’ll see. In the meantime the other day before all the shops closed I got the ‘I Am Spock’ book, Leonard Nimoy’s autobiography, for 33 pence, I couldn’t resist it. You may remember Mr. Spock in the very silly Bangles video (that reminds me of all the silly videos I was in during the same era) for the great Kimberly Rew (from The Soft Boys) song, Going Down To Liverpool, sung by drummer Debbi Peterson.

 
I remember how much I used to read, it’s so hard these days to find the time. I guess that’s an excuse, you have to make time, prioritize. It’s all this mobile phone and internet business that’s filled life up. It’s not just being in a band that stops you. I remember reading Lord Of The Rings and Don Quixote in the eighties and nineties, I mention these two books because they are both so long and there wasn’t the distraction of digital devices to interrupt the flow. I read so many books in between and it wasn’t only records I bought on tour, I was always in bookshops, especially in America, looking for English translations of August Strindberg, Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet and others. I still love going to The Strand book store in New York, I always find some amazing book in there or a different translation of a Camus book or Bulgakov and probably in a different cover. I’m always buying Camus books I have and have already read because the cover art is different, I do the same with albums, but I suppose an album might not be released in a different cover as often as say, The Stranger by Camus.

Both Olivia and I were in the studio today with Dare, playing on a Space Summit song, this one’s a real cracker! Ha ha! I keep on telling you how great it is, I hope you agree. I feel like I should be giving you titles, but for some reason I want to wait for it to be all done and then present it as a finished thing. Nicklas from Anekdoten called me from Stockholm today and I asked him if he could play some ‘real’ mellotron on it? So we’ll be looking forward to hearing that. You may want to read up on what’s happening in Sweden with their approach to the virus, they are taking a different route. Although gatherings of over 50 are not allowed, the schools are open, bars and restaurants are open and life goes on despite the rising death toll. The theory is that when we undo the lockdown the virus is still coming in anyway, so destroying the economy is worse for the world and the consequences of unemployment, lack of support for the developing countries and general recession is only bad. Dying is not good, hospitals that can’t cope is also not good and England seems to be a hotspot along with New York, Spain, Italy and Iran, but Simeon from the Citroen coffee truck tells me (with graphs) that deaths are no higher than previous years, so can someone tell me what the hell is going on?

I had two sessions today, one with Daniel in Arkansas and another with Mark in Tucson. They are both working on releasing their own interesting albums. That’s what we all want to do, make something we are proud of and share it. It’s both easier and harder these days. It’s like there’s more opportunity to do it and a bigger audience to access, but the money is short and the competition is huge! Then there’s the free music, what can you do about that? If you don’t play live it’s hard. Traditionally it’s not always the dead certs that make it, how could Another Girl Another Planet not have been a hit for The Only Ones when they were signed to a major label in that era with a song as good as that? How could Big Star have been missed? All musicians and artists have to remember it’s not just about the quality of the work. I always wonder if Hip Hop will ever end its reign, it’s been around for 40 years now, it must be time for a new generation of hipsters to condemn it as music that the parents like.

Today’s music listening was quite diverse (or not, there was no Hip Hop). I was telling Daniel about Wire and afterwards decided to play 154 (1979) as my first album of the night. Then I thought what could I possibly play next as it’s an album I particularly like and have had since the seventies, so hard to follow. So I went completely the other way and went backwards ten years and played the first Allman Brothers album from 1969. When in doubt change eras. After that it was Ancient Grease’ Women And Children First from 1970, a mostly unknown Welsh band produced by John Weathers who would later find himself as the drummer in Gentle Giant. The singer Morty would find fame in Racing Cars with the hit They Shoot Horses Don’t They. Next was another band I mentioned to Daniel, the band from the Gothic fields of Worcestershire, And Also The Trees, and the first album I ever bought by them, The Millpond Years, from 1988. Apparently they always did well in France, but perhaps not that well-known otherwise despite fourteen studio albums. Next was Quiet Sun (1975), a project that starred Phil Manzanera, guitarist from Roxy Music, a jazzy progtastic sensation. A record I haven’t played for years came next, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow and the debut album, also 1975 with Ronnie James Dio singing. I never tire of Blackmore’s guitar playing.

Song Of The Day is Melancholy God from Rhyme because today in the universe even the alien creators are confused:

 

Melancholy God

So confused
It’s going ’round again
The world’s abused
But is it just by men
If I even try to imagine
I see a melancholy god

Who believes today
Whoever is to blame
I’m really not quite sure anymore
I see a melancholy god

(Willson-Piper)
Rhyme (1989)

The sky was so blue today, the sun was warm on my back, I came out with my coat on and walked a few yards then turned back and left it in the hallway. I saw a goldfinch in a garden, exploding with colour, red and yellow flashes. The world might have been perfect, but what are we to do even beyond the present situation, because when it’s all over all those other problems we were living with, angry about, disillusioned with, will return with a whole lot of new issues to navigate. There are many injustices to be fought for and there are many imminent situations that need our attention, but it all seems so hopeless. Do we take action or do we concentrate on our personal improvement? Not all of us are warriors despite our concern. There was a time when I was sending a small amount of money every month from my bank to Amnesty International. I guess a lot of us pick a cause we believe in and try to contribute something. At some point I was disturbed to find that they had just simply stopped taking the money and I thought if they can’t get it together to take free money, how good can they be at fairly distributing it?

Today I was wondering if my contribution to the world was enough. Making music is certainly a privilege, especially if you are getting paid to do it. Writing and having someone out there read your words or teaching which in my case is simply sharing ideas collected from experience. Others aren’t so lucky, I could say I’ve made sacrifices, but most people don’t even get the opportunity to make the sacrifices and then there’s the world outside our little world of affluence and freedom that we have here in the West. I was thinking that for us privileged Europeans that maybe travel should be compulsory. Three months in a country that speaks a different language, three months in America, three months in China, three months in a developing country somewhere in Africa, three months in a different political system to our own, three months in the desert, three months by the sea, three months in the mountains. Two years of worldly experience. It couldn’t hurt and Americans, Australians, the Japanese, all peoples could have their equivalent so that everyone in the world was aware of everyone else and how it was. But even this is elitist and privileged, because the developing countries could never see the West and then go home to an uncertain future with little opportunity. So when all this lockdown is over, all the other troubles, ignorance and prejudices will still be there. What happened to the news of Syria, Israel and Palestine, the Catalan separatists, the new Labour leader, Greta Thunberg’s rallying cry to save the planet, Iran, Iraq, peace in Afghanistan, terrorist threats, Putin and Russia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, all these things are still there, you’d never know it. Racism will continue, the nutty far right will be continuing their message of hate, gay people will be persecuted, women will still be fighting for equal pay – maybe now nurses might get that pay rise that austerity wouldn’t allow.

In my lucky life I played guitar and six string bass on another Space Summit song today and I will be continuing to do this tomorrow. Dare and I were commenting that the acoustic guitar we recorded today (my Fender El Rio) we can’t remember ever actually recording before. It’s been more of a ‘lying around’ guitar. It’s the guitar I wrote Spark on and today we thought its rather special sound was perfect for the song we were working on. I also used the Fender 6 string bass, I guess that was the bass instrument used on Priest=Aura. I can’t quite remember when that was first introduced and then retired. If you would like to look at the guitar collection or these guitars in particular you can check out the gear page here.

If you’re going to collect something you’d better be prepared to get it organized and tonight after the studio I decided to sort out all the records that needed filing away. So I put the records that were out of the shelves in alphabetical order so I could see how much space I needed for each letter. Then out of the main shelf I moved all the Hendrix, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree, Genesis and Kate Bush albums into another place to free up space for bands I have fewer albums by. I have also done this with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, CAN, The Moody Blues, Miles Davis, The Who, The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, Elton John, and Scott Walker. I need that warehouse.

Tonight’s music has been thrilling to say the least. Two far out CAN albums, Ege Bamyasi (1972) and Landed (1975), two amazing Dylan albums, Highway 61 and Bringing It All Back Home, both released in 1965, and then a record you might not know but have to hear, Talk To The People by the soulful jazzy pianist and singer Les McCann (1972). I think it was Barton Price from The Models that turned me on to this fantastic record. The last record of the night is the outstanding Struttin’ (1970) by those Funk kings, The Meters.

Today’s Song Of The Day is Questions Without Answers and it needs little explanation. There’s even a video:

 

Questions Without Answers

Is it true
I can’t believe this hatred
What do you do
The world is so ill fated
But when you’re sitting
On a quiet afternoon
With the sunlight
Pouring like gold into your room
You can’t believe that the world will end soon
The world will end soon

You sometimes feel
You’re not doing enough
But what is real
You never know who to trust
It seems that people
Sit in jail without a crime
And ruthless leaders
Seem to lead us all the time
There’s too much crying, people dying
Who can see the light
Who can see the light

Questions without answers
Questions without answers

So I sing
It doesn’t seem to make a difference
Should I give in
That’s not a point of reference
But the passive masses
Being eaten by TV
Ignoring cruelty
And saying it’s not me
When will they realize
Soon it’s going to be
Soon it’s going to be

Questions without answers
Questions without answers

Questions (yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah) without answers (soon it’s going to be)
Questions (look out, look out) without answers (here it comes)

(Willson-Piper)
Rhyme (1989)

When you get out of the centre of Penzance and away from the harbour and the sea, when you find the back streets of Penzance in certain parts of the town there are rows and rows of what used to be workers’ cottages. They are all pressed together in typical English style with no front gardens. There are also the bigger houses where the rich lived and the houses in between where those half way up the ladder lived. All very nice. Cornwall is in fact one of the poorest counties in England, despite its beauty. The VIP Lounge studio and the In Deep Music Archive are housed in what was apparently an old sea captain’s home, plus there’s two accountants and a Pilates studio. The reason I’m talking about houses is because I don’t want to live in one. Whether it be big or small. I want to live on the floor of a warehouse, a place with no traditional doors. A place where you partition off your own areas as you decide where you sleep, where the library is, where the records are, where the kitchen is. Big windows, wooden floorboards, industrial lift, high ceilings, lots of light. I want to live in an old factory with no neighbours and so does Olivia.

Travelling has traditionally taken my mind off the fact that I don’t live like that, just a dream, to live between the aisles of audio and written history, to return from exotic lands with piles of books and records, artefacts and experiences, beautiful guitars and brightly painted plates. To make an intriguing museum of all these things to leave to future aesthetes. If one were very rich one might have a Picasso or two, a Kandinsky or three and a Max Ernst, a Miro and a…oh the list goes on…darrrling. Is it that we dream in times of despair? Or in the present circumstances, do we just want our old normal lives back?

I read once that The Face, a very popular style magazine in the eighties, was at its peak when Britain was in its most troubled economic state. It was escapism, a fantasy to aspire to, style, good looks, credibility, the respect reserved for the better off and the famous. And what about celebrity admiration? It comes not just from respecting the skill, the acting, the musicianship, but there seems to be something about admiring the fame itself. But surely one would be embarrassed to be famous without any real skills, but then what are skills? Is manipulation of the media a skill? Is a massive personality a skill? Some people can dance beautifully, some people can talk beautifully. Sadly there seems to be little desire or any sexiness in being a writer. I suppose there used to be. Ernest Hemingway was pretty glamorous, as was Aldous Huxley. Oscar Wilde was infamous, but don’t people think that Stephen King is just a weird guy despite his success, do people aspire to be him, skills aside, I don’t think so. I think they’re happy to let him be him.

Who is a glamorous modern or contemporary writer? I love Ian McEwan but he’s hardly glamorous. He’s not very weird although there’s been some troubling stories. (I’ve read eleven of his books, I think.) Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac might tickle the fancy of the well read, the explorers of modern literature, but do the masses really care? Dorothy Parker, Daphne Du Maurier, Jean Cocteau, James Joyce? What about Agatha Christie? What about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Colette or Henry Miller, Truman Capote? Will Self or Michel Houellebecq? My point is that in the end fame is attractive and an aspiration to many and desired without a skill set rather than the acquisition of a skill set as a way to make you famous. In the good old days you had to be able to dance, sing AND act to even stand a chance, nowadays fame seems cheaper.

I went to the grocery store today. They’ve changed how you get into the shop for some reason, I can’t see that it’s safer. Inside there’s tape all over the floor separating everyone. When you get to the counter there’s screens and signs saying “place vegetable on the counter and then take a step back behind the line”. When I approach the counter to pay, the lady behind the counter steps back, too. People will never shake hands or hug each other again and what about the cultures like France where they kinda or actually kiss when they greet? The world has already changed.

Todd Rundgren is back tonight, a man that can do just about anything in his field. I’m hearing that despite his reputation for being difficult with musicians he is nice to his fans – and Liv Tyler.

His productions that I have played tonight and will continue into the morrow are Patti Smith’s Wave (1979), XTC’s Skylarking (1986), Psychedelic Furs’ Forever Now (1982), Halfnelson’s debut, later Sparks (1971), Grand Funk Railroad’s Shinin’ On (1974) and We’re An American Band (1973), The Tubes’ Remote Control (1979) and Love Bomb (1985), and Cheap Trick’s Next Position Please (1983).

We finalized a mix for Space Summit and started listening to the next track and tomorrow I will be in the studio all day playing guitar and bass. Talking of playing guitar and bass and in celebration of seeing the last episode of Better Than Us (Russian Netflix series) and as people are having no meaningful friendly contact with anyone, the Song Of The Day is A Girl With No Love. It must be hard for people these days who live alone, no personal contact with friends, no physical contact with a partner. I hope they have pets.

 

A Girl With No Love

I wanna know you
I wanna show you
I wanna mistletoe you
While you just stare

I don’t wanna switch you
I don’t wanna flick you
I don’t wanna stick to
How the book depicts you

So I turn another page
To see what to expect from you
Your skin feels like a real girl
As I love you again

Having you’s expensive
The benefits extensive
You don’t get defensive
And I don’t lose

I can choose your clothing
There’s no more self-loathing
I can do my own thing
Without you opposing

It says here that you were made for me
In a town somewhere outside Tokyo
You saved me from emotional despair
In a world with no love
With a girl with no love

I don’t wanna bait you
It’s difficult to hate you
It’s so easy to date you
So easy to make you

All my fears are washed away
As I lie right here beside you
In the darkness, with the heavy curtains drawn
The difference is so small

And I know should anything go wrong
I can call and simply just replace you
You will always be the same
‘Cause I have, I have your model number

(Willson-Piper / Mason)
Noctorum – The Afterlife (2019)

Is it that the cheaper the shop is, the more people are allowed in it? Poundland has a sign on the door that says “No more than 75 people at once” and that seems like a lot to me, it’s a pretty big space, but it would be hard to keep 75 people 6 feet apart from each other if they were all in there at once. A few doors up the High St is Holland & Barrett, health food chain, quite a big space too, not as big as Poundland, but on their door it says “Only two people allowed at a time”. Really? In between is the Co-op where you just have to be aware of Social Distancing and follow the tape on the floor and if you go to the independent health food store Archie Browns (granted it’s smaller) no one is allowed in, you stand in a queue outside. I’m not quite sure what my point is here except to say that there’s not really a system that suits everybody and how can 75 people in a shop be practicing Social Distancing?

Having said this, it’s nicely quiet out there, fewer cars, fewer people, it’s going to be a major shock if and when we go back to normal. The pollution is seriously down, in India they are seeing blue skies over cities that they forgot even had skies. I’m sure this is true in China too and other major industrial polluters. I suppose that the virus would have an easier time attacking someone with damaged lungs from exposure to pollution. Perhaps just cleaning up the air might save people’s lives? Isn’t that what Greta Thunberg has been saying all along? So the irony is that the virus is saving the lives of people who would have died because of the pollution. Would that be more or less?

On our trip to the sea, the supermarket and the recycling today we walked past an old Morris Minor 1000 Traveller, hard to know the year from the old style reg. I have a vague memory of my parents having one after the Ford Consul and before the Humber Sceptre. It’s all about the wood and I presume despite this being a cheaper vehicle, the leather seats? Were they leather? When I stood by the car the back sliding windows were slightly open and there was a distinctive smell. I remember the smell of car interiors from the sixties, a mixture of leather and oil. I wondered if that’s why they left those windows slightly open because even after 60 years, the smell is strong, not that I’m saying it’s bad, it’s just strong. You had to look after the wood otherwise it would rot and when you see one in the street where the wood is still solid you know someone cared. I guess they had a small engine, simple and weren’t that fast, but look, here it is on the street still going strong. Something to learn from that. It would be like travelling around in a tin, whereas ‘average’ cars these days are like travelling around in a toy, one that easily breaks. Like the shops, the more expensive they are, the longer the lifespan.

There’s a lot to say about Todd Rundgren, or Turd Runtgreen as Lennon called him when they got into a spat about something or other. The impression you get of him is, impossible genius, but please don’t make me meet him, work with him, listen to what he says or be in his presence in any way, but let me have the records he’s made as either an artist or a producer.

As a producer there’s Patti Smith’s Wave (1979), XTC’s Skylarking (1986), Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell (1977), New York Dolls’ debut (1973), Hall & Oates’ War Babies (1974), Badfinger’s Straight Up (1971), Psychedelic Furs’ Forever Now (1982), Halfnelson’s debut, later Sparks (1971), Grand Funk Railroad’s Shinin’ On (1974) and We’re An American Band (1973), The Tubes’ Remote Control (1979) and Love Bomb (1985), Cheap Trick’s Next Position Please (1983) and Bad Religion’s last album, The New America (2000). So many artists talk about how difficult he is to work with. He was allegedly supposed to produce Janis Joplin’s Pearl, but they simply couldn’t get along.

So tonight I’m going to be playing Todd Rundgren records that he produced rather than the ones he made as himself or with Utopia. All this because I bought a very cheap sale CD in Sister Ray Records in Berwick St, Soho, of his 2004 album Liars. There’s something really good about it and it makes you realize that he may be something of an ass, but he really can do anything and everything.

Song Of The Day is Lullaby For The Lonely from Nightjar as I played the guitar, the bass and the drums (apart from the rolls, ha ha), sang it, wrote it, co-produced it. Todd isn’t scared.

 

Lullaby For The Lonely

Lullaby for the lonely

Luck is a myth
You reach the abyss
And you somersault to your death
You die in style
Deep in denial
Broken at the foot of the cliff

Wishing that you’d hid yourself away
Expectations rise and fall away

You’re driving blind
The road is mined
How many times can you lose
You can’t see the sun
You can’t get things done
So you bury yourself in the blues

Suddenly you find you’re standing still
You shiver but you can’t shrug off the chill

Lullaby for the lonely

There’s blood in your tears
A buzz in your ears
And all your faith is scattered over the floor
You pick up the pieces
And your golden fleeces
They don’t seem to exist anymore

You thought that you could manifest your dreams
And then you find you’re on the losing team

Lullaby for the lonely (Can’t you feel yourself falling apart)

(Willson-Piper)
Nightjar (2008)

Every day I drink copious cups of Celestial Seasonings Tension Tamer tea with a spoonful of honey. I know, Tension Tamer, bit of a silly name, but that blend of herbs and that sweet spoonful is the day’s repeating treat. Sundays are generally mega session days for me and the kettle is constantly boiling. I guess there’s a lot of boiling kettles at the moment with everyone at home and consequently I’ve been getting a lot of enquiries about the sessions as people now have more time. (The boxes of tea have been emptying fast.) It’s probably hard to imagine how it works unless you’ve done so if you want to try it out, remember the first preliminary chat is free as we discuss how I may be able to help. It doesn’t matter if you play guitar well or are a beginner and it’s not just about playing guitar, it’s also about writing songs, the creative process and as much as my experience covers. I don’t do theory, scales, Van Halen covers or stick to the hour. At some point you will be hearing the album we are making with the original sessioneer Jed from Minneapolis. The results will speak for themselves, I single Jed out because it is a musical project that started with a Skype call and will soon (world survival notwithstanding) become a record. I’m sure that other releases will follow and for those that are just trying to improve their guitar playing, it’s baby steps. You don’t need to be a hot guitarist to write great songs. There’s a lot to all this creative stuff but a virtuoso skill set is not necessary. You need what every single person has, your uniqueness and direction, that’s it.

 
Today I was in Sydney, NSW with Tony, Orlando, Florida with Brian, Minneapolis, Minnesota with the other Brian and Wappinger Falls, New York with Doug. I’m getting around and I’ve been thinking about the travel bug and being locked in all the time and how people must be suffering acute cabin fever, Netflix overload and guilty overstocked toilet paper anxiety. What must prison be like? Before all this went down, I was talking to a stranger at Simeon’s Citroen. I didn’t catch his name but he had never left England. He’s not the first person I have met who’s never left their own country. I simply can’t imagine it. (A friend in Australia has never seen snow fall.) When I was living and working in and around Liverpool, my biggest ambition was to travel outside England. I admit living up North with working parents it took me 19 years to do it, but I did see a lot of Wales as a kid.

My first trip outside England’s borders was with my friend Lesley to the grape picking region in Perpignan (a whole story in itself). I was fascinated by the feeling of being in another land, it was an absolute fantasy world. Words coming out of people’s mouths that I couldn’t understand, cars with steering wheels on the wrong side and driving on the wrong side of the road, different food, different clothes, different demeanour and in the South of France a different climate. I won’t be going into too much detail about all these years of travelling I was just thinking about where I got the desire. My theory is that I got it from my childhood stamp album. Decades ago I inherited my grandfather’s and my father’s family’s stamp collections and as a kid continued collecting. There were these companies that sent you little oblong books of stamps from all over the world, they were called ‘approvals’. You could pick the stamps you wanted out, send them a postal order for the ones you wanted to keep and return the ones you didn’t want. There were beautiful big colourful stamps from exotic places like Malawi and stamps that were different shapes, triangular or long. I remember China had some huge colourful red stamps depicting a happy life with Mao Tse Tung. But it wasn’t just the look of the stamps from different countries or the fun of collecting them. I inherited a stamp album (long since lost) that above every page stated the country, the capital city and the square miles (it might have also stated the population but I can’t quite remember that). My imagination would run wild thinking about all these fascinating cities in all these magical countries. What could be better than going there and meeting the inhabitants? All the excitement those stamps have caused in my life.

Music today took me to some great guitarists and singers. I didn’t really know where to start, but Florida Brian had mentioned Richard Thompson today during the sesh, so that’s who I went for. I picked out his last album, 13 Rivers from 2018. When we talk about unique, we just listen to Richard Thompson play the guitar. There’s no one like him and I love his approach, his tone and the chances he takes. He bends strings in patterns and shapes that are from another place. I’ve met him a couple of times or more and he’s always really nice. I played with him as support in San Francisco one night and he asked me for my autograph! Ha ha! I nearly fell off my 12 string, it was for his daughter Muna. He’s made so many great albums and his voice is unmistakable. I’ve seen him live many times and will always take the opportunity to see him live. Sometimes he has a band, sometimes he’s solo, but he’s always happening.

After that as there’s no traffic out there, I listened to John Barleycorn Must Die from 1970. At this point Traffic had become a three piece with Dave Mason gone and the band seemingly over. Steve Winwood joined short-lived supergroup Blind Faith. So the session was originally intended to be a Steve Winwood solo album but joined by Chris Wood on flute and sax and Jim Capaldi on drums and vocals with Winwood on lead vocals, keys, piano and guitars, it was decided to call it Traffic. It was their highest charting album till then and was probably the impetus to continue for four more years. I saw them once at Universal amphitheatre in LA when they released one more album, Far From Home, in 1994 (they had split in 1974). It was dedicated to Chris Wood, who had died in 1983 at the age of 39.

Next came For Earth Below (1975) by Robin Trower, his third album featuring ex Stone The Crow’s James Dewar on bass and vocal and ex Gypsy drummer Bill Lordan. I saw Trower live around this time at Liverpool Stadium, I remember it was sold out. I still buy his albums and his last one Coming Closer To The Day (2019) was great, especially sonically.

This led me to the second Gypsy album, In The Garden (1971), inspired by the appearance of ‘Sweet William’ Lordan as he is credited. After Gypsy and before Robin Trower, Lordan went on to play for a short time with Sly And The Family Stone and appears on Small Talk (1974) and on one track on High On You (1975). But who were Gypsy? Gypsy were from Minneapolis and made four albums and I only have this one, if anyone spots their other three out there, let me know. Sweet William gets an upbeat drum solo on the record, but they have an organ-heavy sound and a good singer, with songs that typify the era. Whatever happened to singer guitarists Enrico Rosenblum and James C. Johnson? Keyboard player James Owl Walsh had his own version of the band. Bass player Wille Weeks and percussionist Joe Lala became well-known session players, Weeks with David Bowie (on Young Americans but not on Fame or Across The Universe, that was Emir Ksasan), George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, and a million more. Lala played with Stephen Stills, Dan Fogelberg, Joe Walsh, Jackson Browne, Barbra Streisand on Guilty, Dionne Warwick on Heartbreaker, Rod Stewart, and more. He was also a voice actor, he died in 2014.

Records and stamps led me here and in celebration of the Chinese stamps I mentioned earlier, here’s Mao Tse Tung Kiss from Honey Mink Forever:

 

Mao Tse Tung Kiss

In the West they’ve got religion
Blood and fear, distorted vision
They can’t see whe’re all the same
And all extremes mean

Pain across the Peking sunset baby
A sight you don’t wanna miss
I didn’t see it in your eyes
A complete surprise
When you threw me your
Mao Tse Tung kiss

In the East there’s population
But they’re not waiting for salvation
Integration or one nation
Another situation for a corporation

It’s all a theory
You can’t carve it in stone
Punching in the dark
Scared to be alone
Scattered in the dust
Of the great unknown

Was it on the Great Wall of China baby
That you came up with this
I didn’t see it in your eyes
A complete surprise
When you hit me with your
Mao Tse Tung kiss

If it’s China or Carolina baby
Just remember this
You can’t convince
2000 years of sins
With one Mao Tse Tung kiss

(Willson-Piper / Mason)
Noctorum – Honey Mink Forever (2011)