Music today took some interesting turns. I felt like listening to something Motown and discovered I had the Marvin Gaye ecological classic What’s Going On (1971) on my iPod but I felt it was a bit smooth and scrolled to Isaac Hayes and Hot Buttered Soul (1969), a double album, four tracks including the opening track, a version of the Bacharach/David classic Walk On By (Bacharach, by the way, is 92, David died at the age of 91 in 2012) and the closing track, Jimmy Webb’s By The Time I Get To Phoenix, originally recorded by Johnny Rivers in 1965 and famously covered by Glen Campbell, Frank Sinatra and why do I keep on thinking about Max Bygraves? (Deck Of Cards.) Hayes’ version runs for over 18 minutes. Two other tracks: One Woman and Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic (believe it or not). His version of Walk On By is over 12 minutes, it really is an album you have to own. Great music if you like this kind of thing.

How I got from here to Grateful Dead’s Live Dead (1969), well, that came from a conversation I was having with Jerome today. It was their first of many live albums and they were the first band to record a live 16 track album and you can probably thank their legendary soundman Owsley Stanley for that. This from Wikipedia:

The band’s soundman, Owsley “Bear” Stanley, asked electronics designer Ron Wickersham to invent a microphone splitter that fed both into the PA and the record inputs, with no loss in quality. The songs were recorded with an Ampex 16-track machine.

This led to high-quality live multi-track recording (Ron Wickersham was also part of the Alembic bass company). Stanley was arrested in 1967 after being found in possession of 350,000 hits of acid in his LSD lab. He said it was for personal use and was imprisoned for three years. Stanley died in a car accident in Queensland in 2011. An interesting fellow, should you choose to read his Wikipedia page.

Music Of The Daze

The musical musings in this post are an excerpt from my daily blog, TO WHERE I AM NOW, featured on my main website. See more pictures and read the full post here.