what a long strange trip it's been

Lo and behold. I was only posting about Mick Hicknall the other day when he appeared staring out at me over breakfast. I nearly brought my cereal up all over him. He features in this weeks 'Observer Music Monthly' in the 'Soundtrack of my Life' bit. By golly he might not be the best looking fella in the world but apparently he has a reputation as a bit of a ladies man. I'm not really sure what the attraction might be in his case but he must have the obligatory 'great personality'. Fair play to ya Mick.

There's also a great article on the Haight Ashbury scene in San Francisco during the late sixties. It follows up some of the participants in the scene and there are some very interesting words from Bob Weir, the guitarist in The Grateful Dead. Peculiarly enough I bumped into Gerry Garcia in a petrol station in Co Donegal a couple of years before he died in 1995. When I say bumped into, that's exactly what I did. The only words I exchanged were 'Excuse Me'. Shit, maybe it wasn't Gerry Garcia at all. Anyhow this is what Bob Weir had to say about those crazy days in San Fran.

'We were folk musicians unable to resist the array of electric guitars in the front of the music store where we were working, and the possibilities, tonally. There was also classical music and jazz, Stravinsky and Coltrane. Let's say the ultimate goal was to find something like the first movement of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, but free-form. What we would do is take LSD and work around, say, a two-step programme; find a key, open up a room of possibilities and explore them. There was a thread to it all, and the idea was to find the thread.'

Well Bob, I have to say that yourself and the lads got it right on 'Workingman's Dead' and 'American Beauty' but the rest was fairly hit and miss.

One of my all time football heroes was also sent for a check up with the Record Doctor. Ian Wright Wright Wright was prescribed some tunes that he was heretofore unfamiliar with. Shuggie Otis, The Aliens, Rufus Wainwright and Jamie T amongst them. He seemed to like most of them.

One final thing I noted was the link to this short video of a flooded Glastonbury in 2005. I had a load of mates at it and I couldn't stop laughing when I saw it on the news in my comfy armchair. Let's relive the good times.



Don't bother reading the Music Monthly next month. I'll just do a review of it here instead.