jamesg1213
They were always the kind of band I liked when I heard them, but couldn't get the enthusiasm up to buy an album. Very creative guys though.
I have over 500 hours of recordings from an import show in Santa Barbara in the late 70's. They cover about 5 years worth.
There is a lot of stuff in there that is far out, different and sometimes silly. I mean hearing the Clams do Bapu's favorite song by the Carpenters, is not something that you want to go home to mom and talk about, but it is funny, and even Bapu can't do it, or dance to it! Hearing Ogden's Nut Gone Flakes, is STILL not old to me, and far more advanced and defined/designed than half the music out there anywhere in the top 100 of anything. It's still one of my all time favorite albums!
Some of the side stuff in those days, that appeared in that show, was different, strange and sometimes crazy. I mean listening to Ralph Lundsten's robot trying to pick out a date with another robot in a dance, is a bit ... what??? ... and then you hear Germany's Cherubin do "Choo Choo Train" (massively awesome song!!!!), and then something from Sparks and then something from Edgar Broughton Band (like Roccococooler!), and right after some Family, and then some David Watts (oops ... early Kinks), followed by Curved Air, Rare Bird, Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, and then Unicorn, and then String Driven Thing, and then Wolf, and then Grobbschnitt, and then Pink Floyd and then Le Orme, and then Horslips, and then Steeleye Span, and then Mike Oldfield, and then ... you got the idea? ... there are a lot of great things and a lot of not so great things, but the difference in all of them is magnificent.
The big problem in most radio is WHERE/HOW these are given to you, because if you place a known something right in the middle of all these instead of the whole sequence non-stop, you do not learn to catch the subtleties in other music, because you are too well attuned to the things that you know, and the things that you DON'T, do not click as much.
The context of where/how the music is shown, and heard, is the single most important part of it all. If you hear 2 minutes of ENO next to your band when you are playing or next to your hour of Black Sabbath, you're not going to like it ... and in fact, it will sound a bit weird and disrupting to your mood and feel, and this is an issue when it comes to these things that are so damn different!
The only way you can learn to appreciate the difference is making time for some of them, but 5 minutes of it, is not going to teach you a whole lot. It might, but not likely, because right after you went back to the same thing! If it were an injury, it would not be able to heal properly because it got infected again!