Ah, and once more the nights start drawing in again.
In memory of Tim Hart deceased.
The Incredible String Band – “Wee Tam and The Big Huge” (10)
Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.
The Incredible String Band.
Returning now to the music on this album, which is my favourite of all of those that the group released, we come now to Track 3 on Side 3 aka Side 1 of “The Big Huge”. I think it is the shortest track I have in my entire record collection, lasting a mere 16 seconds. It is called “The Son of Noah’s Brother” [someone who could never have existed according to the Bible], and is a Williamson composition. Robin plays guitar and sings the whole thing solo, and Mike plays organ. The lyrics are sung on a descending note progression:
“Many were the lifetimes of the Son of Noah’s brother
See his coat the ragged riches of the soul.”
Track 4 is another Williamson song called “Lordly Nightshade”, coming in at amore normal timing of 5.54 minutes. Robin plays guitar, piano drums and whistle, and sings the verses solo, Mike plays percussion, and the whole band joins in for the single middle 8 one line refrain: “Tell me more, what then”. It is a typical surreal Williamson meander starting with “Captured by Hitler with Oliver Twist in the tower” and ending with “The green wolf with his bunch of red roses is slinking away/ All on a summer’s day”. Great stuff.
Side 3 ends with another short song, but this one lasts a whole 1.51 minutes. It is a Williamson composition called “The Mountain of God”, and the only instrument played is an organ played by him. The whole band sings the whole song in harmony, so the effect is very much that of a church choir as it was in 1968. The song is in the unique form of a sung Psalm. Psalms have not been sung in my church since 1980 with the advent of the Alternative Service Book (“ASB”), but until then they had formed a regular part of the ancient Prayer Book liturgy. The book of Psalms is in the Old Testament, one of the 39 books therein, and contains exactly 150 Psalms, most of which were written by “Great” King David (indeed Israel’s Greatest King of the Old Testament, and an accepted forebear of Jesus, but one who committed murder and adultery during his reign). The style in which they were sung was very distinctive, derived from the chanting patterns of medieval plainsong. Again, this one clearly indicates the strict Edinburgh Presbyterian upbringing the chaps had had, the lyrics containing a most pleasing mix of King James version Old Testament, a Christmas carol, the pre-ASB Prayer Book, and folk literature, ending with the traditional doxological King James cadence. This makes a truly brilliant end to the Side, and it is well worth setting them out in full:
“Behold the mountain of the Lord in latter days shall rise.”
“Hark, the herald angels sing.”
“Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.”
“Do ye not fly as clouds and doves to your windows/ Who serve as the shadow and the example of heavenly things.”
“As Moses was admonished of God as he was making the Tabernacle/ See that ye do all things according to the pattern shown you on the high mountain.”
“Glory be to the Father and to The Son and to the Holy Ghost/ As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be/ World without end/ Amen.”
Pink Floyd in Italy (2)
Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.
Pink Floyd.
We were able to obtain a VHS videotape of the “Live in Pompeii” film, in the late 1980s, and we still have a machine which plays these things. This is just as well, as we have many VHS videotapes. Anyway, this is the Pink Floyd one:
I was fortunate enough to have a brief opportunity to watch this tape a few weeks ago, and it really is splendid. It only lasts an hour, and the songs are recorded partly in bright sunlight and partly at night. The pictures include shots of the backs of the speakers, all of which bear the legend “PINK FLOYD LONDON”. I think I also have this on DVD now, but I’m not sure. The tapes are easier to find because of their size.
“Zabriskie Point” was an Italian film, the album being the soundtrack from it, and features The Kaleidoscope, the Grateful Dead, Patti Page, the Youngbloods, Jerry Garcia, Roscoe Holcomb and John Fahey as well as Pink Floyd. More of this next Pink Floyd time.
The Incredible String Band – “Wee Tam and The Big Huge” (9)
Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.
The Incredible String Band.
It’s good to be back. I have a few minutes to start this post, and I hop[e to finish it over the course of the next day or two. Much remains to be done as a result of my father’s death last year, but at last I can see an end to it in the foreseeable future.
I have to admit that I have now become a bit obsessed with the bizarre nature of this album, the extent of which I had not fully appreciated until starting to write these posts about it.
I mentioned in the last ISB post that I had TWO LPs both claiming to be, on Side 1, to be Side 1 of an album called “Wee Tam & The Big Huge”, even though I only have one copy of the double album; this came as a real shock to me, believe me.
It has come about by my purchase, over the internet, of a two LP package of this release. Each side of the two LPs, apart from Side 1 of the “Wee Tam” record, carries the name of the single LP only. The package was made in England. It came in a cellophane wrapper designed to keep the two LPs together, bearing this label:
The words on it read “Wee Tam/ The Big Huge”. The serial number of the “Wee Tam” record is EKS 74036, and that of “The Big Huge” is EKS 74037, exactly the same as those used in the double album. So, I went back to my “single” copies of the LPs, and sure enough the “Wee Tam” LP is EKS-74036, and bears an American address. My “The Big Huge” LP, however, is numbered K 42022 and bears the English address of EMI Records Ltd, even though the LP is on the “butterfly” Elektra label. The double album, however, was ALSO made in England!
The UK/USA thing becomes VERY distinctive indeed when we get to a later ISB LP in due course, God Willing.
For the time being, though, this album really never knew what it was, except perhaps when it was first released as the straightforward double album “Wee Tam & The Big Huge”; perhaps if they had called it something different it would never have divorced itself.
Sorry to be so boring in tis one, but I had to get this off my chest!
Death in the Family (3)
At last I can see, albeit only dimly, light at the end of the tunnel.
I hope to resume posting on the more frequent basis I did before the death, in about two months.
But who knows? None of us can predict the future!
Pink Floyd in Italy (1)
Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.
Pink Floyd.
One of the oddest things about Pink Floyd is its curious connections with Italy in the period 1970-1971. I did not become aware of this until the late 1970s, when two, at first in my mind, unrelated things happened. Firstly, my wife and I went to the Cinema to see a film called “Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii”. The trailer for this was to me even more extraordinary then, being a film of the 1970 line-up of Fairport Convention performing a live version of “Now Be Thankful”, a phenomenon which I hope to return to at some point.
Secondly, I bought an LP called “Zabriskie Point”:
The Incredible String Band – “Wee Tam and The Big Huge” (8)
Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.
The Incredible String Band.
The last one on this band closed with the astonishing revelation that I had TWO LPs both claiming to be Side 1 of an album called “Wee Tam and The Big Huge”, even though I have only one copy of the double album. I shall elaborate on how I came to know how this happened in due course, but for now here is another startling fact I have only recently discovered. This is that even the double album itself has TWO serial numbers, one for Sides 1 and 2, the other for Sides 3 and 4. On discovering this, I had thought this was a unique feature in the realms of double LPs; but then I remembered that it was possible in the late 1960s to buy Cream’s “Wheels of Fire” as a double LP or as two single LPs. Sure enough, on checking it I find that is has the same dual serial number syndrome. Still, as far as I know, these are the only two double albums to have been treated in this way; and at least with Cream the title stayed the same, qualified only by the words “Live” or “In the Studio” respectively. Conversely, “Wee Tam and the Big Huge” became “Wee Tam” and “The Big Huge” respectively, and in a way which destroyed the wholeness and harmony of the album.
It can be recalled from an earlier post on this album that my first acquisition of any of it was when I bought “The Big Huge”, an LP whose existence made no sense at all to me at the time. Anyway, Track 1 Side 1 was the first thing I heard from it of course, and what an introduction that was! It is a Robin Williamson composition called “Maya”, coming in at an epic 9.24 minutes. It is a truly marvellous song, featuring Robin on guitar and bass, Mike on sitar, and both girls on percussion. Typically it has various sections, but the entirety fits together in the most wonderful fashion. For most of it Robin sings solo, but the whole band joins in with the refrain, which only occurs one and a bit times. This is because the second go at it comes right at the end with a view to attempting to dramatise the next track, which is a bit of a dull, plodding Mike Heron song called “Greatest Friend”. Don’t get me wrong, it is still a pleasant song, but for me it is the weakest on the album.
I now come to the oddity about discovering I had two LPs both having a Side One label titled “Wee Tam & The Big Huge”. This is because in addition to having the double LP and the two separate single LPs, I also have a two LP set, but the two LPs are not the same as the separate single LPs in terms of packaging. This is the “picture side” of “The Big Huge”:
Pink Floyd – “Atom Heart Mother” (3)
Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.
Pink Floyd.
Track 3 on Side 2 is the Dave Gilmour song, called “Fat Old Sun”. This is unique on this record, in that it is the only track therefrom that featured in their live performances for several years thereafter. It is an utterly brilliant piece, and like so many others from these earlier LPs, very much a harbinger of things to come. It starts off with a dreamy and immensely beautiful section which gradually builds up to a rock classic, all of course featuring the wonderful and inimitable electric guitar of Dave Gilmour.
The final track on the LP, Track 4 on Side 2, is the second longest after the title track, which occupies all of Side 1. This is a quirky thing called “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast”, credited to all four members of the group, and for me it is the weakest track on the album. The title is, in fairness, an entirely honest description of the content of the piece, which is essentially a meandering, piano based, and jazz influenced ramble. There are sound effects like that of bacon cooking, but there is no singing as such; rather, there are some mumbled spoken words. Of these, the clearest and most memorable are: “Marmalade, I like marmalade.” It is nevertheless not unpleasant to listen to, in its own odd way.
The title track was originally called “The Amazing Pudding”, recorded for a John Peel session. On 16 July 1970, however, during a break in recording, Peel bought a copy of the Evening Standard, which contained a report about a woman who had had an atom powered pacemaker fitted to her chest. The headline of the story was “Atom Heart Mother”…
Strangely, the band did not rate the LP; Roger Waters said it was “a really awful and embarrassing record.”
This is the middle section of the gatefold cover:
The Incredible String Band – “Wee Tam and The Big Huge” (7)
Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.
The Incredible String Band.
I have only this last fortnight discovered just how schizophrenic this album is; from the outset it seems to have been at the same time a double album and two single albums. More of this in due course, but in the meantime I’ll say a little bit more about the music.
Track 3 on Side 2 is a Heron song called simply “Air”, and lasts 3.12 minutes. It is the most soothing music I have ever heard, and a piece of immense beauty. The girls, Rose and Licorice, do a gentle and magical chant as an intro, which continues throughout. The lyrics are almost spoken rather than sung by Mike, and form a soft counterpoint to the main melody, much in the way of “Sheep May Safely Graze”. It is a song of pure brilliance and God-given inspiration (no pun intended). If I were introducing ISB to someone who had never heard them before, this is the track I would play to him or her to convert him or her. Mike plays guitar and organ, and Robin plays flute.
Side 2 ends with an epic Williamson song called “Ducks On A Pond”, which comes in at a whopping 9.17 minutes. Robin takes the lead vocal and plays guitar, piano, kazoo [yes really!] and bass drum; Mike plays percussion and harmonica. The song has nothing to do with ducks or a pond; the title is taken from its opening words. This piece makes a splendid cadence to the “Wee Tam” half. It does leap and hop among various discrete sections, including towards the end the complete nursery rhyme “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play”. Shortly before this the song also features the line “Lovely Jesus nailed to a tree”, which would not be out of place in any of the Christian songs I love to sing. Again this shows the Scottish Sunday School upbringing the two chaps had. In any event this is a truly magnificent song, one of the very best the band ever did.
On the schizophrenia, for the time being, suffice it to say that I have only recently discovered, to my utter shock and amazement, that I have TWO LPs the labels one Side One of each claim to be Side One of an album called “Wee Tam & The Big Huge”!
;
Death in the family (2)
Dad’s affairs are proving to be vaster and more complex than I had thought. I fear that the disruptions to my posts could continue for a year.
