I never look away, that's no lie (Phoenix Foundation)

I'm a big fan of songs that refer to the mythic nature of a landscape. Great Southern Land by Icehouse (Australia), In A Big Country - Big Country (Scotland), Haunts of Ancient Peace - Van Morrison (England), and Chuck Berry's The Promised Land are some that do the job.

NZ is so small and so young - we don't have a great tradition of this kind of thing. The Night Train Back to Waiuku (by the wonderful Murray Grindley) is a great song but it doesn't do a mythic job - more the ironic. A singer songwriter I loved in the 70s has a couple of songs that head in the right direction. John Hanlon is his name (where is he now? In Aus apparently - running an advertising agency) and he was a big deal there for a while in the mid seventies with his combination of John Denver style concerns for the environment (I Care and Damn The Dam) and Leo Sayer/Cat Stevens style rock.

His two best albums were Higher Trails (1975) and Garden Fresh (1974). The songs I'm thinking of are on the latter - I'd Rather Be A Bird and On A Hillside In The Rain.

How refreshing for an Auckland, NZ kid like me to hear a song that starts - 'Heading out of Auckland/ in the morning rain'. We'd heard songs for years about the rest of the world out there somewhere (I was a teenager growing up in middle class suburbia and had no clue about the world even though I gorged myself on American comics, music and films). The line hooked me and the mention of rain was specific (unlike the Beatles' Rain) and something I knew about.

Same with On A Hillside... I've always associated the song with growing up on the slopes of One Tree Hill in Auckland and the sound effects of the rain are judicious!

Here is his music, the setting is NZ, the adventurers are American.

You gotta go slow below the surface and gaze into the well (Dan Fogelberg)

Been reading Mojo magazine's latest edition. It contains a rhapsodic piece on Van the man's Astral Weeks album by Greil Marcus.

Will write about that in a sec. But first - time for another guilty pleasure. Dan Fogelberg. Yes I know he was sometimes a bit of an egotistical plonker but he made one album that I regard as a stone cold classic - Captured Angel.

No one really rates this album, except me. You can find it an any remainder bin you care to look in. Or you could. Silly me - I forget - no one actually goes to a CD shop anymore do they. No one cares about Dan anymore either (apart from Keegan who asked me for a place to start).

I suggested Captured Angel. It starts with glorious strings (Aspen - clear as a frosty morning)and then glorious acoustic guitars (These Days) and then gorgeous harmonies. All by Dan! He plays and sings most of it. The songs make me smile, strum my air guitar, sing along, feel good, and each song ends when it needs to. The rest of the album slides along effortlessly. Clearly a huge amount of creative effort goes into music but this album is so damned easy to love because it sounds so free and easy. Emancipator's music has the same effect on me.

Of course the associations of happy family travels as the album played over and over in the car certainly help elevate its place in my affections. I'd turn it up as loud as Jacky could bare and sing along on trips to Taupo with Keegan, Adam, Samantha, and Jade, at various times, on board. I'm sure it traumatised them all.

I've just played the album again and I've had a relaxed grin on my face the whole time.

I thought about Dan and my love for Captured Angel as I read the Marcus piece on Astral Weeks. In the piece he makes a lovely point about the synchronicity of all the elements coming together at one point to create a work of genius. He uses Bob Beamon's huge 1968 Olympic leap to illustrate his point (it was an act for which there are no parallels and no metaphors). Unfortunately for Greil, you can make the same point about anything can't you? The bowl of cereal I ate for breakfast this morning frinstance.

Astral Weeks is an album I've never been able to love. I dig it out once and a while and try hard(like right now as I type this) and, every time, it fails to move me the way Moondance and especially St Dominic's Preview move me. I find his voice too harsh on Astral (still in Them mode) and not the softer meditative soul voice he would gain later; the songs are too long and, for me, the music doesn't always suit the song. For me, there is no emotional core as there is on his other major albums like St Dominic's.

Hey it's all subjective. As Paul Simon says - one man's ceiling is another man's floor. At the end of the Marcus article he says as much himself - Astral Weeks became part of his life years ago and 'remains inseparable from it'. Astral Weeks was an album I came to while going back through Van's back catalogue. It's not an album I'm fond of in the way I'm fond of Captured Angel. I remain separate from Astral but Angel is in my soul.

Beneath the ever watchful eye the angels of the temple fly (Dream Theater)

Okay been back a while now and it hasn't taken me long to gnash my teeth at the paucity of CD/DVD outlets in my little corner of the world.

Before I left Taranaki had three places to go to find a CD - The Warehouse's music section (top 40 oriented, okay sales bins, reasonable prices, sometimes an unusual CD), Marbeck's (a pale pale shadow of what it once was - now top 40, poor sales bins, steep prices, sometimes an unusual CD), and Raw Records (niche stuff, no sales bins, steep prices, often an interesting CD).

In my absence Raw Records has closed down leaving only two places. For someone like me who likes to hold a product in his hands (records and CDs) this is a lousy situation.

Now I have to travel vast distances to get to JB HiFi (closest is a two hour drive to Palmerston North) or Real Groovy (closest is a five hour drive to Wellington or Auckland) OR shop online (my least preferred option).

Looks like the age of specialist music stores is over (Marbeck's being the only one within a three hour drive). I'm sad about that. I like to browse and look over the contents before I buy and love the chance of a bargain - a CD I've been hunting elusively. That's now gone.

Sad. Really sad!

Over the mountain watching the watcher, breaking the darkness (Pink Floyd)

It's been a Pink Floyd-a-thon of late thanks to the Rough Guide book I bought at Eye Spy Bookshop in the City Center Mall. Yes - Qatar employs American spellings!

That means an obsessive trawl through the Pink's back catalogue on my p-pod (P for Purdy, not pink yunnerstan).

Ummagumma is a weird one. Fellow non-stoner friend from Nelson is correct when he points out that sixties' university students (he's older than me) opined that it was better heard under a narcotic haze. Having never been in such a state I wouldn't know (I was a square seventies' university student - the closest I got to being stoned was waiting for a rock concert to start at the Old Maid Theatre and drowning in a sea of dope smells).

So when I listen to Careful with that axe, Eugene (what a wonderful title part 1) and Set the controls for the heart of the sun (what a wonderful title part 2) I respond to what is conjured via my full faculties and they are amazingly evocative songs. I have a good imagination.

The cover to Ummagumma has always intrigued me (front and back).


Here's wikipedia on the cover -

The cover shows the members of the band, with a picture hanging on the wall showing the same scene, except the band members have switched positions. The
picture on the wall also includes the picture on the wall, creating a recursion effect, with each recursion showing band members exchanging positions. After 4
variations of the scene, the final picture within picture is the cover of the previous Pink Floyd album, A Saucerful of Secrets. The latter,however, is absent from the CD release; instead, the recursion effect is seemingly ad infinitum.

The back cover has a picture of the band's roadies with the band's equipment laid out on an airport runway.

It's this recursive aspect to the cover that I fell in love with. Here are some others for your enjoyment:

Rip this joint, gonna save your soul (The Rolling Stones)

Every music magazine at present is running a commemorative story on the iconoclastic Rolling Stones (or more hipply - The Stones) album Exile On Main Street.

It is a great double album. Like The White Album, Electric Ladyland, and The River - it's a sprawling document from a time of creative overflowing. Unlike those three other examples, though, it is a lot more inconsistent. There are more clear peaks (Happy, All Down The Line) and troughs (Turd on the Run and Ventilator Blues) than on the Beatles, Hendrix and Springsteen efforts.

My Rolling Stones/Stones collection is, admittedly, quite patchy - I don't have all the early albums (a few collections suffice) but all the ones from Beggars Banquet onwards - through the decadent years into the long slow dissolve towards retirement. I even own a vinyl copy of Dirty Work fer goodness sake!

What with all those magazine covers and all I've been thinking of the Rolling Stones a bit lately. Last week I saw an interview on the BBC with Mick while I was in an electronics store in Doha. No sound - just an image of Mick looking more and more like a Spitting Image puppet. I also bought their last studio album A Bigger Bang on CD.

It's very similar to all of their post Steel Wheels stuff - about three really good tracks and the rest is Stones by numbers (often still better than a lot but compared to say U2 -it's dated/ not relevant/ old and in the way/ the worst type of 'dad' rock). A pity.

The self parody that has long been in evidence is now morphing into irrelevance. Time to call it a day guys - the gang has stuck in there way longer than predicted but John Lennon was right to figure, in his 1970 incarnation, that groups formed in the teenage years had a limited use-by date.

I can easily live without A Bigger Bang but not without Exile.

Dance of spring (Jesse Cook)

I came across Jesse Cook a week or so ago in Virgin Mega Store, Doha, Qatar. Not actually him yunnerstand - his music. But it felt like him. Weird.

I'm not sure how this happens and it's reasonably rare (given how many millions of people play music). A musician's personality comes through the sound so distinctly that you feel like they are in the room with you.

Hendrix, Janis, Mick and Keef, Dylan, Lennon - absolutely have this ability.

Macca? Yes. Lowell George, Anouar Brahem, Frank Zappa - sure. You get the idea.

Okay - maybe it's not that rare. I'm not sure.

With Jesse it was an immediate feeling regarding his presence - his guitar style is not only distinctive but he includes layers of subtlety that make me want to compare him to Miles and Trane. He has a peculiar ability and I'm hooked - just as Brahem conjures up sand and shimmering desert heat so Cook manages an exotic sound all of his own. No mean trick that!

He's exciting to listen to.

Getting crazy on the waltzers but it's the life that I choose (Dire Straits)

Confession is good for the soul I'm told. So here goes. I am a rock snob. I'm not proud of it but there we are.

If you read these posts this will be old news - I've managed other true confessions about my dark side - Peter Frampton, Carpenters, and John Denver, but I've never admitted to rock snobbery before.

My friend Greg is not, nor has he ever been a rock snob which is something I've always liked about him. He happily listens to, collects and has lent me non cool items along with the cool. He never seems to discriminate between - say - Dylan and Denver or Mark Knopfler for instance.

Me - I've had a problem with Mark and his band Dire Straits for years.

I loved the single Sultans of Swing when it came out but I could not really move beyond that (an exception was the Making Movies album which I love and, back in the day, used with students in English classes). I'm not really sure why. The only thing I can point to is rock snobbery. When they became mega with Brothers in Arms I turned away. Too slick, too embarrassing, too commercial, too broad in it's appeal.

That's something we rock snobs hate - when a little known band (or low level one) makes it huge. Don't wanna know anymore. Daft innit?

I bought a live Dire Straits at the BBC CD recently and I'm proud to say it has not left the car stereo system yet.

Speaking of little known bands - I can't see Black Sheep Boy pulling off a Brothers in Arms but you never know do you. My cuz sent me a copy and it's been the soundtrack for a few days now. And is further proof that Tom Waits and the Velvet Underground have forged an alternative career path for musicians. This is fractured deconstructionist-put-together-with-glue-and-scissors -a-la-Swordfishtrombones type of music.

Dr Dog is another of my favourite exponents of this genre where The Beatles sensibility is put through a blender, roughed up and held in front of circus mirrors.

I can tell why Black Sheep Boy appeal so much - there is a Killers vibe at work here but rather than chiming rock anthems we have vignettes and the guitars are replaced by pump organs. Interesting and it definitely burrows under the skin.