#vinylbibyl

[vinylbibyl]

Fleetwood Mac  Mystery To Me  1974    Warner Bros.

That fellow on the left of the gatefold cover sure looks familiar…. There's quite a bit of symbolism in the front/back cover art, I suppose.  After a little bit of digging, seems it was crafted by a pair of grads from the University of Liverpool (Pete Fulwell and Jim Masson), who were collectively known as “Modula” during the 70′s.  In addition to Mystery to Me, they were also responsible for covers by Camel and Curved Air.  Needless to say, this cover is a favorite of mine.

This would be a coming out party of sorts for Bob Welch (guitar, vocals).  This would not be his first nor last album with the Mac, but it would spawn his definitive Mac track, the otherworldly “Hypnotize”.  What starts out with a bruising drum beat done in triplets ascends with a mystical configuration of jazzy guitar chords.  The lyrical plot revolves around encounters with ghosts in haunted lands.   The album opener “Emerald Eyes” is another above-average Welch offering, and the rest of the disc would be rounded out by a few ho-hum Christine McVie tunes and a Yardbirds cover.  This incarnation would release another album (Heroes Are Hard To Find) the following year, though soon after Welch would venture out into the pastures of a solo career. The Mac were forced to hit the rest button once again, though a fresh start with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks proved to be a godsend.

[vinylbibyl]

Roland Kirk  The Inflated Tear  1973?  Atlantic

“Rahsaan” Roland (nee Ronald) Kirk’s inventive approach to wind instruments inspired an army of impostors, and of those, probably none reaped a reward as bountiful as Ian Anderson.  As Anderson was stumbling around the British blues scene in the mid to late 60′s, searching for a niche to carve, he came upon the flute and honed a style eerily reminiscent of Kirk’s half-hum/half-blow approach.  It would be a Kirk composition, “Serenade to a Cuckoo”, that Anderson would include on Jethro Tull’s debut release This Was, and away Anderson/Tull went towards international arena stardom while Kirk toiled away in jazz clubs until his premature death from stroke in 1977.  It bears noting that Anderson certainly evolved his craft and became a highly unique songwriter and showman that veered drastically from the early Kirk influence, however it was those eccentricities and creative fearlessness that endeared him to the rock legions. I surely mustn’t be the only Tull fan that came to Kirk largely due to Tull, and for that I owe a debt of gratitude to each artist for enriching my world through symbiosis. 

Kirk’s fingerprints, though not as readily visible, are elsewhere on the 20th century pop culture landscape.  In addition to his influence on Anderson, he’d  made sizable impressions on other musical luminaries including Jimmy Hendrix and Frank Zappa due to his unorthodox approaches to performance and composition.   His flute leads on the Quincy Jones piece “Soul Bossa Nova” helped define the retro-groove ambience in the Austin Powers franchise that was omnipresent in the 90′s.  More recently, he’s been hailed by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood as an iconic figure and inspiration.  

The somber title track to this record shows Kirk confronting his blindness: “When I was one or two a nurse came into work drunk or high or mad at somebody and she slipped and put too much medicine in my eyes.  I think that’s when the TEAR began because I went through years where my eyes used to run and hurt and be nothing but TEARS.” (from the jacket back).  The rest of the tracks show Kirk moving through a variety of instruments (sax, clarinet, flute, whistles) and styles (swing, bop, blues), and collectively this would become one of his definitive works.  

[vinylbibyl]

Woody Allen  Standup Comic  1978  United Artists

This one is filed under Soundtracks alongside fare such as this, this, and inexplicably this and even this.  Suffice to say its a fairly jumbled lot, but I don’t quite have enough of neither comedy records, film scores, or other niche soundtracks to entitle each to their own sub-category. 

Born in the Bronx as Allan Stewart Konigsberg, the neurotic more commonly known as Woody Allen got his start in entertainment by serving as a comedy writer for 1950′s television institutions The Tonight Show and Candid Camera, among others.  In the 60′s, he had begun performing his own material on stage, and it’s where he began cutting his teeth on the self-effacing persona that endured in a film career some 60+ titles deep.  This collection stems from separate gigs in Chicago, Washington D.C. and San Francisco, and spans the years 1964-1968.   While Woody was never quite so topical or incendiary as contemporary Lenny Bruce, he made a mark by shucking aside show-biz trappings and stage camp (”Try the veal...”) in favor of unassuming stage attire and deadpan wit.