STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-019)
Rodion G.A., Look Blue Go Purple, Santana, Led Zeppelin, Im & Count Ossie, Johnny Osbourne, Biota, Doug Rauch, Pharoah Sanders, Nathaniel Bettis, Cher Jey, Angel Bat Dawid, Sleater-Kinney, more
THIS WEEK IN CLASSIC ROCK DEPT.: These guys ^, huh? The ca. 1982 Romanian La Düsseldorf, perhaps?

THIS WEEK IN CLASSIC ROCK CONT. DEPT.: God I love Look Blue Go Purple but their song “Hiawatha” kinda sus tbh (previous sentence written in the style of my young adult children, age 20 and 18 respectively). Thank goodness they’ve given us every other one of their songs (nothing else sus that I know of yet), and even just one song as magisterial as “In Your Favour,” to make up for it. This live version made me cry a little bit this week. But hey, when Gregg Rolie wails on the organ for that one turnaround (at 1:33) on “Samba Pa Ti” almost made me cry this week too. And meanwhile, on ‘Robert Plant being even more ridiculous onstage than he is in the studio’ sub-watch, it’s hard to beat the “I live for my dream/and a pocket full of gold/some Acapulco gold, every time” ad-lib that was revealed on the 2007 extended reissue of The Song Remains the Same, but his “Stairway to Heaven” ad-libs that had already been in worldwide public view since the original 2LP was released in 1976 are just as bad, starting with the intro (“I think this is a song of hope,” oh please) and then during the song itself when he goes “sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven/and I think you can see thaaaat” and of course the immortally ridiculous “and the forests will echo with laughter/does anybody remember laughter??” But on the other side of the coin, his non-verbal improvisational “ah-ah, ah-ah” thing after “the voices of those who stand looking” is just good live music-making, man, and I now can’t unhear when I’m playing the studio version, which I’ve been doing a lot lately for the first time in almost literally 40 years. It’s a really good song, man. P.S. The guitar solo section on that same Madison Square Garden weekend’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” is truly great, the upbeat and sunny song descending into extended darkness, Jimmy just ripping and firing off dark and wild shit while the Jones/Bonham rhythm section absolutely grooves out their own distinct funky lope, then that wild transition riff back into the final verse. What a weird funky heavy metal folk rock song it is. Now hours have passed, it’s much later in the evening, I’m barely staying awake, still blasting that classic rock, now swooning in and out of sleep to Mike Cooper’s lovely 11-minute “I’ve Got Mine” from Trout Steel.
CURRENT STUDIO ONE TOP WANT DEPT.: A 45rpm single from 1972 released by Iron Side Disc, a lesser known Studio One sub-label, consisting of “Right Onn Rasta” by Im & Count Ossie b/w “Beat Down Babylon” by Freddie McGregor. (Embedded above is a 1980s reissue on the parent label.) Hard-as-nails early roots reggae from the Studio One empire. The A side is an instrumental version of the B side, with Cedric “Im” Brooks playing the melody on sax over a typically rugged Count Ossie nyabinghi drums and percussion backing. The provenance of the vocal B side “Beat Down Babylon” is a bit of a #songtrail in itself, as it first appeared on a 45 from 1971 on the Tropical label by the Tropical All Stars, called “Righteous Rastaman.” Junior Byles covered it as “Beat Down Babylon” just a few months later, and here’s Im & Ossie and on the flip Freddie McGregor covering it as well, and very well, just a few months after Junior Byles. P.S. My Studio One Top Want Alternate Choice for this article is “Love is Here to Stay” b/w “Love is Here to Stay - Pt. II” by Johnny Osborne, a singer whose tracks always represents a nice early-1980s reggae/soul/disco sweet-spot to me (see also his “Keep That Light” b/w “Keep That Light Pt. 2” 45 from 1981). P.P.S. Digging a little deeper on the Iron Side Disc sub-label, I come across the only song released by the beyond-splendidly named duo Alf & Teep, who are indeed in splendid soulful voice on an A side called “Freedom, Justice & Equality,” backed with “Down at the Bone Yard” by the Three Tops.
RANDOM ALGORITHMIC PULL DEPT.: Almost Never by Biota, released on CD in 1992 on Chris Cutler’s ReR Megacorp label, and it’s very interesting indeed to think of Biota in terms of Cutler’s band Henry Cow. Even if Cow was doing it in Cambridge, England starting in the late 1960s and Biota in Fort Collins, Colorado starting in the late 1970s, both play collectivist music that is very adventurous and at the same time very strict, and both bands continuously resist several possible genre classifications (rock, prog, jazz, avant-garde, contemporary classical) in real time as they play. This CD is basically three side-long jammers, “Burn Daylight,” “Circling These,” and “Old Reason Road,” each broken into shorter tracks on the CD. Twenty tracks in all, but really it’s three, each one the perfect length to fit on 12 inches worth of vinyl grooves cut at 33RPM, and the heady music on this CD is the perfect soundtrack to imagining what the theoretical Side D art etching could look like, over and over again.

PULLING A DISCOGS THREAD TO FIND A STORY DEPT.: It starts on a glum midwinter Tuesday evening and I’m listening to my decades-old secondhand beater copy of Love Devotion Surrender by Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin, a fairly infamous album among rock nerds, guitar nerds, and dollar bin haunters alike, because it’s always cheap and more importantly the cover photograph shows two fusion guitar gurus wearing matching white suits and posing with their literal religious guru Sri Chimnoy, who also writes the liner notes. 1970s cult vibes, ya know. Bill Orcutt has even detourned this infamous artwork for his own nefarious purposes, but we’re here to pull a different thread, because here I am listening, once again tolerating its constantly over-cascading cosmic electric guitar, feeling just a little beat up like I often do when I listen to overt guitar heroism and/or fireworks, and I’m thinking I could write a review about how, for almost 30 years running, I always love the explosive first minute or two of this album, but when it just keeps on exploding the same way for several minutes more, I just tune it out, which is exactly what’s happening all over again right now. The difference today, as my ears continue to completely tune out either Carlos or John rocketing yet another trade-off solo somewhere into the void, is that I’m poring over the album’s credits for what feels like the first time, seeing that yes of course that cosmo-spiritual organ playing is by Larry Young, credited as “Khalil Yasin (Larry Young),” and also seeing that the rhythm section is a Mahavishnu/Santana hybrid with Billy Cobham on drums and, from the Santana band, Doug Rauch on bass and auxiliary percussionists James “Mingo” Lewis and Armando Peraza. On top of that, Don Alias is also on drums, and he played on Bitches Brew for gods’ sake, and Jan Hammer from Mahavishnu is on here too, also oddly credited only with “drums.” I’m guessing his constantly Jan-hammering keyboard style must’ve really just meant too many fireworks, too much competition with the two guitar stars who are already way too much as a duo. Can you imagine three people doing that for a whole LP? Unsurprisingly, when you compare the original Pharoah Sanders version of “Let Us Go Into The House of the Lord” to the Santana/McLaughlin cover version on here, you’ll find a lot more space, quiet surround, and subtle beauty. But, over-plodding early-1970s fusion playing is not the story I pulled out of these credits today. That would be the live-fast-die-young story of bassist Doug Rauch, who I had never really registered before, even though he’s the bassist on this LP, and I’ve had this LP in my collection for a long time. On top of that, my favorite Santana LP has long been their fourth one, Caravanserai from 1972, which I’ve probably had even longer than Love Devotion Surrender, and on which Rauch is also the primary bassist as well as having two co-writing credits. How did an avowed LP credits hound such as myself miss all of this, that Rauch had replaced David Brown, the charismatic bassist on Santana’s first three albums, who can be seen jamming hard in the band’s classic appearance in the Woodstock movie (1970, d. Michael Wadleigh), and by 1971 was becoming increasingly unreliable and problematic due to the use of hard drugs? Rauch was initally brought into that year’s Santana touring group as an understudy for the nights when Brown didn’t show, and by the end of the year had fully replaced him, in time to record the aforementioned Caravanserai (1972) and Love Devotion Surrender (1973) albums, as well as Santana’s fifth studio album Welcome (also from 1973) and their sixth album, the import-only triple-LP live album Lotus (1974). These albums do have pretty dense credits, so I could understand my not fully registering that the bass player on them was a guy named Doug Rauch, but listening now to how absolutely wild, ranging, and grooving his work is on Caravanserai’s side one closer “All the Love of the Universe,” I’m surprised I never did go grab the sleeve to figure out that monster player’s name. At the time, Rauch was making a name for himself on the San Francisco jazz/rock/fusion session scene. He was the bassist on Betty Davis’s cult-classic self-titled 1973 debut, as well as some Santana side projects like the 1974 solo LP by percussionist Jose Chepito Areas, and what eventually became a self-titled 1978 LP by the Bay Area fusion supergroup Giants. He was also a sideman on albums by respected bandleaders Billy Cobham and Lenny White, and even did a one-month stint as David Bowie’s bassist on the Diamond Dogs tour, long enough to appear in the tour film Cracked Actor (1975, d. Alan Yentob). Unfortunately, he had drug and personal problems of his own, and by the 1976 Santana album Borboletta, David Brown was back in the band. Rauch’s career as a musician faltered at that point, and never did resume, as three years later in 1979 he passed away at the age of 28.
A sad story, as these discographical thread-pulls sometimes are, but another glum-Tuesday thread-pull led me to a story that started like it might also become sad, only to end quite happily and perhaps even in a benign nonchalance. Santana and McLaughlin had inspired me to pull the three Pharoah Sanders albums I have Impulse! originals of, which is Tauhid (1967), Karma (1969), and Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) (1970), and for the first time I fully recognized that a xylophonist/percussionist named Nathaniel “Nat” Bettis appears on all three, and how important his playing, particularly on the xylophone, is to the distinctive spiritual jazz rhythms and tonalities of these albums that we all know and love, a certain texture of global percussion lilt and syncopation that I once described in a record review, perhaps one even published somewhere, as “rain-forest tickle.” I don’t know anything else about Bettis, and if you read about these albums on Wikipedia, you’ll see he’s one of the few musicians mentioned who doesn’t have their own Wiki page. In fact, there’s almost nothing about him on the internet at all, other than just a few LP credits: these Pharoah albums, a couple Norman Connors albums, and one album each by Gary Bartz NTU Troop, Donald Byrd, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Pretty high-falutin’ credits, but where is he now? Why is his last credited LP Pharoah’s Izipho Zam (My Gifts) from 1973, followed by absolutely nothing? And here I am thinking the answer is gonna be something sad and depressing, but after less than 30 seconds of slightly more intentional Googling, I find a random Facebook post from just two months ago, one Carol Chappell thanking a Nathaniel Bettis “for the rhythms today,” on the “African Dance Woodstock NY” Facebook Group’s home page. In fact there are many posts by Carol over the last few years thanking Bettis. Gotta be the same guy, chilling in Woodstock laying down rhythms at dance classes. A very happy ending, as far as I’m concerned.

Embedded above we have Cher Jey, Angel Bat Dawid, and Gira Dahee in Chicago discussing the historicity of secondhand original LPs, something I love about my own collection all the time. A brand new reissue of an old LP can still be a very enjoyable thing to own and hold and listen to, and a reissue can’t help but slowly develop a historicity of its own, but you do not get that true year-of-release historicity that I just felt so strongly listening to my original copies of three Pharoah Sanders albums.
And now that we’re back on Pharoah’s Impulse run, we have to highlight another name that isn’t as well known, even though it’s a crucial part of one of Pharoah’s most beloved songs, “The Creator Has A Master Plan” from Karma. We love this epic song because it’s so timelessly great, and we talk about Leon Thomas’s unforgettable vocals, and that the bassist is the great Richard Davis (who passed away last year at the age of 93, one year after Pharoah himself passed away at age 81), or that the great Lonnie Liston Smith is on piano, but I wanted to pause here and give a specific shoutout to a name I had to look up just now, James Spaulding on flute, for the way he patiently repeats that magical hook/ornament lick almost the exact same way each time the chord change vamps from Bbm7 to Abm7 and back again. Recorded on Valentine’s Day, 1969.
Just in case you think I like everything, my god a Mr. Bungle song just came up on the ole shuffle, something from their 1999 album California which is probably supposed to be “their Pet Sounds” for godssake, and Mike Patton’s vocals just represent one terrible idea after another when it comes to all possible post-punk musical impulses, you name it: ironic white-guy scat singing, jazzy tempos, wide-interval vocal melodies, switching vocal registers and personas as crassly as Oliver Stone switched film stock in Natural Born Killers (1994). I didn’t get the name of the song and don’t want to go find it right now, but if I’m not going to share that sonic annoyance, I’ll at least leave you with some visual annoyance via the above photo of Mike Patton performing. You’re welcome!
I remember back in 1996 being at a punk house and someone put on Call the Doctor by Sleater-Kinney. I was going through fairly severe krautrock and the Fall discovery periods at the time and decided I didn’t like Sleater-Kinney or anything “emo” very much and dismissed it with the quip “sounds like Pat Benatar.” Who would’ve thought that 28 years later I’d be listening to the Questlove Supreme podcast and hear Corin Tucker say that one of her earliest influences and first record purchases was the good queen Benatar’s Get Nervous. And that I would have had slowly grown into someone who pretty much loves Sleater-Kinney. Take the song “Let’s Call It Love,” which I first came across as the massive 10-minutes-plus penultimate song on their 2005 album The Woods. It’s over 8 minutes long in the 2015 live version embedded above, where you can hear that the trio has really evolved the closing extendo jam, Tucker locking down the rhythm/bass/low-end role, Carrie Brownstein playing wild guitar that goes from grinding machine blues lead to Japanese shamisen/koto adaptations, and Janet Weiss expanding and contracting the entire organism at will with extended fills and cross-rhythms. Not to mention, back on the first half, the “song” part of the song, Corin’s singing is just so heavy and powerful. “Force of nature” is the common cliche, here coming true.
This post makes me extremely happy. I was bouncing around the Substack here because I was certain that you'd written about Don Cherry's "Summer House Sessions" and "Organic Music Theater" albums, two records that sound fantastic even when nothing else does. (Right now I can't stop singing, "oh Ganessssh/iiiiis/an elephant..." from the latter album.)
That particular Biota record is still my go-to example when I try to explain to people just how otherworldly music can truly sound when you go out of your way to make it that way. I like all the Biotas and all the Mnemonists, but I still love "Almost Never" the very, very tippy-top best. And the Mike Patton/Mr. Bungle mini-post make me actually Laugh Out Lord (er, Loud), especially that photo! I've been listening to the "Who Cares Anyway" podcast from Will York (basically a way to give airing to the many interviews he did that didn't get into the book), and there's a great one with Trey Spruance, who sounds like a very righteous dude. And I was thinking, "Hmmm, maybe I'm remembering Mr. Bungle too harshly..." I got 1.5 songs into Disco Volante, and, well, that's enough for another 10 years!
Anyway, miss you, Fuzz-O! Hope you're well.