Wow. I really don’t know what happened to me on this one. I am usually all over the latest news about Porcupine Tree. I’ve been anticipating this album for most of the year, and yet somehow I completely brain-farted on its Sept. 11 release date. Granted, a lot has been going on to distract me from it but still… I’ve been following new releases. I suspect the album has — most unfortunately — not been given adequate promotion.
The only reason I remembered it tonight, even, was that there is finally some promotion, in the form of this video as a free iTunes download. I got it, and I enjoyed it. Porcupine Tree rarely disappoints me, and Lasse Hoile’s visuals are, as usual, a perfect complement to the music. Well done boys! Now I need to go out tomorrow and track down the album on CD because this is one I am not going to settle for as an MP3 download!
Clearly, this is the most apt song title in the history of progressive rock. Ironically, it was given to one of the shortest tracks in the history of progressive rock, clocking in at just over two minutes.
The development of this track is a rather interesting story, and an excerpt from the “making of” documentary that accompanied the DVD-A version of Snakes and Arrows is also available on YouTube:
Led Zeppelin, as if you were not familiar with them, are generally categorized as hard rock or perhaps (early) heavy metal, but their wide dynamic range, extensive use of traditional instruments and traditional English folk styles, and complex, extended arrangements, all place them well within the parameters of progressive rock.
Led Zeppelin’s catalog features some obvious choices to highlight here, perhaps too obvious: “Stairway to Heaven” maybe, or “Kashmir.” And then there are the slightly more obscure extended tracks like “No Quarter” or “When the Levee Breaks.” But I’m going to bypass those and go with my gut. “Ten Years Gone” has been my favorite Led Zeppelin song for… well, maybe ten years. Quite a while, anyway. What can I say, I’m a sucker for major 7th chords. But I also love the way the band recedes to a delicate interplay between Jimmy Page’s lead guitar and Robert Plant’s voice, and then John Bonham comes crashing in in his inimitable way and the band charges through a heavy section, and then back to the delicate stuff. No one else does this like Led Zeppelin, period.
And let’s not forget the multitalented John Paul Jones. Probably one of the biggest influences on my bass playing style, plus he laid down some awesome electric piano and Mellotron parts for the band over the years, and here he plays a three-necked monstrosity of an acoustic guitar (I believe that’s 6-string, 12-string, and mandolin, but don’t quote me) that has to be seen to be believed.
And finally… I usually try to avoid calling attention to this site itself, especially to design attributes that are likely to change over time (thus making anything I say here absurdly out-of-date), but this is a big thing: as of this post I’m introducing a new WordPress theme, still not complete, but far enough along that it’s not an abomination to roll it out. It’s supremely simple and bare-bones, but it’s loaded full of HTML 5 and Blueprint CSS goodness. The goal is to have my own clean baseline theme to use in creating custom themes. You’re likely to see this evolve into something with a richer design over time, but now you’re seeing the skeleton. The “big” thing I mentioned, though, is the videos themselves: the new layout is much wider, allowing me at last to substantially increase the dimensions of the inline YouTube videos. Enjoy!
“The Analog Kid” by Rush
From the 1982 album Signals
20 years ago, in the summer of 1989, I had just finished my freshman year of high school, and I was deeply immersed in the music of Rush… specifically, the two albums I had bought on cassette at the end of the school year: Signals and A Farewell to Kings.
“The Analog Kid” seems to capture the essence of being a 15-year-old kid idly passing the hours of the seemingly endless days of summer. It helps, too, that the song was literally the soundtrack of my own experience of those days.
This video is from the Counterparts tour, in 1994. The ’90s were sort of Rush’s “lost decade.” The band started the decade a bit adrift stylistically, releasing some albums that were mostly filler and suffered from brittle, over-polished production that would instantly become dated-sounding upon the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in late 1991. The band bounced back with 1993’s grunge-tinged Counterparts, undoubtedly (to my ears) their strongest album of the decade. But they struggled to find their identity and began to run out of steam, and after 1996’s weak effort, Test for Echo, and Neil Peart’s devastating loss of both his daughter and his wife (to a car accident and stress-induced illness, respectively) within a year of each other, it seemed like the band might be done for.
They weren’t, of course, but I’ll save that discussion for another day. Here we see the band carrying on after releasing Counterparts, and they deliver a pretty solid performance, but they seem tired… burned out.
Pardon the poor quality of both the audio and video in this selection, as well as this blog’s increasingly Rush-heavy bias, but seeing as it’s July 14, there was only one possible song to feature today.
This is a really sketchy recording of a blistering (as was characteristic of the band at the time) 1976 performance. Despite both the deteriorated video and the artifacts of digital compression, and the fact that the entire band seems to have been recorded from Geddy’s vocal mic, it’s worth suffering the limitations of this recording to hear this young band on stage with all of its raw exuberance intact.
I’m sure the band would just as soon forget this extremely early material, but for some reason this particular song remains in fairly heavy rotation on KQRS here in Minneapolis. (In fact, I was really annoyed a couple years ago when Snakes and Arrows was released and they still insisted on playing “Fly by Night” instead of giving “Far Cry” some airplay.)
Regardless of the band’s opinion, it’s not a bad song — classic mid-’70s hard rock, not really progressive at all, but with Neil Peart’s arrival on the album, the band’s prog tendencies were beginning to emerge. And it is simply amazing to be able to see the guys this young, and to think about everything they’ve accomplished, but hadn’t yet when this was filmed.
Incidentally, what I really wanted to share here was the hilariously quintessential early-’80s video for “Body Electric,” but I can’t find it on YouTube. It is on the VH1 Classic website though, if you care to check it out.
The sound here is disappointingly bad, but this is nonetheless a rare treat: these days you just don’t see this kind of unkempt mayhem on a network talk show, even Letterman. The band’s blustery intensity and dazzling skill shine through despite the fact that the cymbals drown out just about everything else in the mix. And Cedric’s white microphone is one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in a while — but the way he waves that white cord around looks pretty cool.
If you’d like to hear a better version of the song, the music video is also available on YouTube. (Embedding disabled by request.)
This post is an experiment in trying to fully research and compose an entry solely using the iPhone. It has posed challenges I do not care to describe in detail on a touchscreen keyboard. But I have proven: it can be done… at least with reliable WiFi and abundant patience.
As for the song, what can I say? It’s a great song. The recording is a bootleg, probably from a cell phone. But the performance is great, and I should know: I was at this show at St. Paul’s Xcel Center last year! The band is scorching in the fusion-jam instrumental section, and Geddy can still hit those high notes right after that — even if you can tell he’s keeping a reserve of energy throughout the show just for that moment.
This video also demonstrates both the good and bad of close-up seats: great view, the best sound, and Geddy can watch you illegally recording him on your phone. But you pay a lot more, and your view is always obscured by the towering giant right in front of you who insists on not only standing but bouncing for the duration of the show.
Me? I’m usually 90% of the way back, in the cheap, sitting down, drinking beer, and actually watching the show seats, as was the case at this concert.
I’ve missed the past couple of days here, and I’ll probably miss some more this week, as I’m going on vacation for the next few days. I wanted to find a song with “vacation” or “trip” in the title. No dice, at least not in my library (except the Camper Van Beethoven track “Payed Vacation: Greece”).
This is not exactly the kind of “trip” I’ll be going on, but to some extent, Voyage 34 fits the bill. This album is a bit of an oddity in the oddity-filled Porcupine Tree catalog: originally recorded solo in 1992-1993 by Steven Wilson, before PT was even really a band, these recordings were collected and given a proper mastering for CD release in 2000, and the suite, in whole or in part, is occasionally performed live as well.
This live version from 1999 shows us the band in a fairly early form — Chris Maitland had not yet been replaced on drums by Gavin Harrison, and the visuals are not there like today (in fact compared to what I’m used to seeing this almost looks like a soundcheck, but there’s an audience), but they’re still cool to hear live. I believe this performance was at the same prog rock festival in San Francisco that brought Magma to these shores, and it occurred just a couple of days before I saw Magma live in Chicago, as previously mentioned.
I still think that narrator sounds like Dick Clark.
“Subdivisions” by Rush
From the 1982 album Signals
Rush was my first favorite prog rock band, and “Subdivisions” was my first favorite Rush song (even though now I prefer “Digital Man,” but Signals is still my favorite Rush album).
I heard this song on the XM Radio being piped into the Milio’s where I was eating lunch today, in the subdivision-filled Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie. How appropriate, I thought, and so I decided to make it today’s feature here.
There are a handful of live videos of the band performing this concert staple on YouTube, but I had to go with the classic original music video. This song is, after all, the ultimate high school nerd anthem, and with its video the band made no attempt to pretend it would ever be otherwise: throughout the video we follow a teenage misfit through the small agonies of his daily life, taking refuge the only way a four-eyed, pimple-faced dork could in 1982: by setting the high score on Tempest. Sweet.
