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Any *early* Pink Floyd fans? (67-72 era)


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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

I have no problem not joining in, nor do I want to believe, nor do I not want to sing along. I just want it to stop, especially when it's in a room I can't leave.

I know there's people who feel the same way about music that I feel that way about, but dude, for me, the illusions behind "rock" pretty much ended when Hendrix died, Woodstock devolved into Altamont, and Grand Funk Railroad made it all too clear that going forth, "attitude" was going to be the whole game. Sure, exceptions here and there along the way, a few, but once I got into Coltrane & Ayler & then Bird & Sonny & Ornette, I really, really did not care any longer about "rock".

That was not quite 50 years ago, and I still like me some good pop music. But "Rock" is not about pop, quite often it mocks the notion of "pop". Well, ok, but what do they offer as an alternative? Attitude and lyrics that tell me what I want to hear? What else?

Nothing for me, that's all I can say about that. Nothing for me.

 

I grew up and live in the Philly/NJ/NYC area where Springsteen was a cultural icon even a few years prior to his national breakout.  What can I say, one pleasant myth-enhanced memory for old time's sake.  I'm sure Dallas-Ft. Worth has equivalent myths.  Sometimes I just want to hear what I want to hear.  I understand too many of the realites behind Woodstock, yet was still extremely moved when I visited the site in Bethel Woods a couple years ago.  Moved as much by the loss of the dream as much as anything.  We've had the same discussion in other threads.  Hearing a singer tell you what you want to hear is a lot more soothing for the soul than Albert Ayler when soul-soothing is the desire.  "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now."  I know it can't happen, and I know WAAAY too much about why, but I still really really like hearing it. I had the same arc as you about two years delayed, moved from a steady diet of rock to Coltrane and then Blakey/Mingus/Miles around 72-73, but was not oblivious to the transient pleasure of car radios or to what was happening in FM rock and soul.  Didn't totally tune out until grunge and new jack totally killed the joys of both for me.  "Go Your Own Way" sounds great to me on a car radio.  Ornette Coleman, I need a more focused setting.  To each his own, it's a big tent, we can all fit.

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From maybe 1993 or 1994 through maybe 2002 I listened to maybe 95% jazz never listening to things I thought I was beyond. My close-mindedness really got in my own way.

I still listen to a whole bunch of free jazz/free improvisation but I’m much more open to music I grew up with and I’m also a huge fan these days of the Grateful Dead. The 4 shows I’ve seen over the last 13 months with Phil Lesh leading various bands have been highlights of all my years of seeing shows. Plus the 3 Joe Russo Almost Dead shows have been very good to amazing.

 

The last Phil Lesh show on 3/14/19 (with John Scofield Burning It Up fwiw) was almost as great as Mats Gustafsson’s Fire! Trio on 3/28/19. More exciting than Evan Parker (my favorite saxophonist) with Paul Lytton & Matthew Shipp on 3/25/19 as wonderful as that set was)

As far as musical improvising talent and abilities I’m a fan of many current masters mostly in the more ‘out’ avant-garde areas of jazz and related musics and I’ve been an off & on listener to many of the all-time well known giants of jazz and it’s pretty clear that Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh are on the level or greater in some cases as improvisors/creators as any of them.

I’m not saying anyone here is saying so (hmmm??) but for anyone to even imply that because they are rock musicians that somehow they (and many others) are below that standard of grand master is a bit much. Especially Jerry as a guitarist. Or Phil on electric 4-string bass circa 1972-74). Whatever one thinks they know about the Dead if they havn’t listened to the truly great long form improvised jam based stuff from especially 69-74, they don’t know. 

Dark Star on 4/8/72 or maybe The Other One from 4/26/72 just to choose 2 30+ minute masterpieces from the Europe 72 tour. I’ve found as many surprises and more excitement and sound of surprise in this music than in most jazz than I ever imagined. 

as far as that Fire! show it was probably closer to rock anyway for whatever that is worth it it’s worth anything at all. 

Edited by Steve Reynolds
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6 hours ago, JSngry said:

Nope, no reason. But even now, when you tell people that Rock Band ____ is somebody you've either never heard or heard of, too many times the reaction is, whoa, how could you not have heard THAT?!?!?!?!

Well, it's quite simple actually.

And bad enough as that type of reaction is in real time, it's even more annoying as time passes.

Popular Culture can become too easily devolve into a myopia of the majority. Myopia is not particularly healthy, no matter the affected population.

Apologies if I annoyed you, though I see nothing that is offensive in my post.  

I'm still shocked shrdlu has never heard of Pink Floyd.  I can understand not having heard their music(which wasn't the basis of my post anyway), but to not even have heard the band's name is odd to me.

I'd heard of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, etc., LONG before I'd ever hear  any of their music, or became interested in jazz in general.

And I'd heard of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline long before I ever listened to any country music, or heard any of their music specifically.  

So that concept is just foreign to me, as annoying as it may be to a few amongst us.

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Our beloved jazz music is, sadly, now a niche music. We all know that. House music is not. It is very popular with millions of young people. Eric Prydz is a big star, and deservedly so, as are a lot of other of its composers/producers. That genre is at the cutting edge of music, and has been since the early 90s, or even earlier. There is a lot of shallow junk, but the best of it is superb. It swings like crazy, and incorporates a lot of Latin rhythms, jazz and Weather Report. That is what drew me into it. And its audience, mainly people under 30, consists of people who behave nicely (in clubs and bars), so I can have a good evening if I go to a venue where it is featured. Where I live, most of the few jazz fans are grumpy old farts who want to argue all the time. I do not hang out with them. They have a bad attitude. Who needs that? I listen to jazz at home, where I have a massive collection of superb music.

House stars to check out (as well as Eric): Dana Bergquist, Jimpster (Jamie O'Dell), D. Ramirez (Dean Marriott), Tiesto, Mark Knight, The Freemasons, Sixteen Bit Lolitas, Deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman), and many others. New, good, producers pop up all the time. It is hard to keep track of them all. Jimpster has studied Miles Davis, Bill Evans and Gil Evans and other jazz giants. These guys know their stuff. They even used Tiesto, from the Netherlands, to open the olympic games in China.

Since the 60s, the places where I have lived have had lousy radio, so I don't turn the radio on. The few places I was in that had a jazz radio station were Southwest Ontario, where I could get a Detroit jazz station, and the L.A. area which had (has?) KLON, from U.C.L.A Long Beach, which had Chuck Niles when I was there, and had jazz 24/7. Maybe WNEW is still operating in New York City, but I haven't lived near there, so I don't know.

So, how could I have heard of Pink Floyd (until recently)?

No offense intended to anyone.

Moving on ....

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Am I the only one here who was into Jazz before I was into Rock?  As I said earlier I was a jazz snob when I saw Pink Floyd and The yardbirds in the '60s.  I had liked Elvis when he made hi first Lps and liked Little Richard and Fats Domino but I didn't get Chuck Berry at all. I thought the duck walk was embarassing. As I said I was a teenage jazz snob. I finally got into the Beatles in 1966 or so but never understood my students who liked groups like The Kinks.  

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4 hours ago, felser said:

 I'm sure Dallas-Ft. Worth has equivalent myths. 

Well of course they do. And they're bullshit too. The realities are much more dire, dirty, and depressing.

A myth is a dream your head makes
When you're fast asleep.
In dreams you will dull your headaches
Whatever you wish for, you keep.
 
 
 
 
2 hours ago, Aggie87 said:

I'd heard of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, etc., LONG before I'd ever hear  any of their music, or became interested in jazz in general.

And I'd heard of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline long before I ever listened to any country music, or heard any of their music specifically. 

Yes, credit for having heard of names that were already world-famous, and in some cases, already dead, when you were born, or at least a children.

It is important that we give credit for that. So important. People feel better when they get credit.

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Well...that can get tricky...House music as I've encountered it (I checked it out pretty good for a few years a few years ago, and my daughter is pretty well-informed, much more than I am) is different from traditional mainstream pop product in a lot of ways:

  • The primary listening mode is communal instead of individual. Clubs, not homes, not radio.
  • The primary purpose of listening seems to be participational. Although you can indeed listen to the best of it as music, mostl of it loses it's reason for being if you're not actively dancing to it. But if you are dancing to it, then it delivers THAT meaning.
  • Product sales are now almost entirely digital, and not through iTunes or Amazon. "Labels" in the old sense really don't exist. The old concepts of sales and distribution and promotion never really lived in this world, at least not in any coporate/industial way. Hell, 12"s were often as not bootleg/homemade as they were anything. And now...
  • The emphasis is not on marketing artists, it's on DJs and their mixes
  • Beyond marketing the product, the other marketing emphasis in on DJs spinning, a performance practice that destroys the notion of going to hear a band play their songs, or even going to hear a cover band."Songs" are no longer the main focus, the mix is.
  • The whole thing is very...underground, thus the term "dance underground". It's a very real thing, and it seems to stay that way on purpose, There is an almost total lack of "exposure" to the "mainstream" entertainment industry, of for that matter, to "mainstream society" at large.
  • House and Techno and EDM are all easily lumped together, but as with all easy lumpings,that's lazy thinking, and as such, a faulty premise. so don't trust any conclusions drawn therefrom.

Basically, just saying that the phrase "household name" is very much dependent on whose households you're looking at (and whose households you see are going to be dependent on where you know that households exist). I am very, very, very skeptical that Eric Prydz has the overall international name-recognition that Pink Floyd does, but I'm not at all skeptical that there's a quite sizeable international audience to whom he is indeed a household name. And if that is true, the reason "we" don't see that is because now, as then, there are parallel universes in the world, and they don't always talk to and/or know about the other ones.

Keep in mind that there has been a long-standing institutional industry in place to keep a few of those universes under control, to ensure that its musics is promoted across all platforms to its demographics of choice, for reals sometimes, malevolent, sometime not, but always with finance in mind. And yes, sometimes that industry makes it a point to see to it that "you" don't hear/hear about some of the others.

Setting aside the possibility that 50,000,000 Elvis fans could indeed be wrong, consider that 50,000,000 was at best 1-2% of the global population of 1960, So, what about the other 98% of the world? Were they wrong? Were they simply in need of the Elvis Missionary Force? Were they not really there? Are these 50,000,000 the only real people in the world? If so, they're the only ones who really matter, right? Now, surely that's not Cultural Imperialism in action?!?!?!?!

Popularity of music, and who is going to know about what, and who should know about what, and, especially, who does NOT know about what, you can't look at these things without looking at the commercial forces that propel these exposures, nor can you not consider the very real possibility that a lot of what you know before you develop the capacity and/or inclination to learn different than what you already know has been put there for you by forces that very much benefit from you swallowing it whole and only expelling part of it after you digest it.

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The Beatles, Lady Gaga, Elvis, Eric Prydz, Madonna, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson. 

Which one seems just a wee bit out of place? 

See how easy that was? There is no need to go on a 50,000 word rant to tease out all the known, but easily dismissed, semantic implications of the words household name. 

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Well, I listened to the first disc of Umma Gumma today. Set The Controls... and A Saucerful are mildly interesting at times. But it didn’t sound much better to me this morning than it did three decades ago when I first heard it. I’m glad they quickly abandoned that style because they just weren’t particularly good at it, IMO. 

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16 hours ago, medjuck said:

Am I the only one here who was into Jazz before I was into Rock?  As I said earlier I was a jazz snob when I saw Pink Floyd and The yardbirds in the '60s.  I had liked Elvis when he made hi first Lps and liked Little Richard and Fats Domino but I didn't get Chuck Berry at all. I thought the duck walk was embarassing. As I said I was a teenage jazz snob. I finally got into the Beatles in 1966 or so but never understood my students who liked groups like The Kinks.  

There's age differences at play. . . . I got into rock and jazz about the same time. The first LPs of my own I had were jazz records handed to me by someone who didn't want them, Atlantic titles from the early sixties. I collected jazz and rock side by side until the late-'eighties, when I just sort of stopped buying anything but jazz for a long time. . . .

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10 minutes ago, jazzbo said:

There's age differences at play. . . . I got into rock and jazz about the same time. The first LPs of my own I had were jazz records handed to me by someone who didn't want them, Atlantic titles from the early sixties. I collected jazz and rock side by side until the late-'eighties, when I just sort of stopped buying anything but jazz for a long time. . . .

That’s interesting because I also went for about a decade and a half buying nothing but Jazz. It wasn’t until maybe seven or eight years ago that I started to diversify my collection again. 

I’ve always assumed that’s because Jazz is such a rabbit hole genre. Once you hear your first Coltrane/Monk/Miles/etc. you know you just HAVE to get at least 20 more albums of each. :) 

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25 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

The Grateful Dead, Cream, and The Allman Brothers back then. I suppose you could also throw in Santana, Yes, Genesis...

These days Phish is the king of them all in the live extended jam context, but they weren’t around in the late 60’s. 

Oh! And of course I forgot to mention King Crimson. 

Ah, ok. Other than the Dead (whom I have never connected with, ever, sorry, Steve), and maybe, at times, Crimson, I would not have thought of any of those others as doing the "space jam" thing that PF seems to be doing during the period in question. Maybe I've just missed it, but if so, it'll probably stay missed. No way am I going to go back and listen to all "that" again.

My interest in PF was piqued a little by Guy's mention of Stockhausen as an early influence. Now I'm seeing comparisons to Clapton, Garcia,, Allman, etc. and oooooohhhhh...no thanks, maybe? Nothing to find there that's not already over-known.

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Well, in fairness I just consider Prog and Jam bands under a pretty wide umbrella. Santana put a Hispanic flavor in their music, The Allman Bros had a southern thing happening, Pink Floyd had a space-y psychedelic twist, etc..., but they were all basically playing extended live jams. I hope that clarifies things a little more. It may be oversimplification on my part, but that’s just how I choose to look at it. If you don’t, that’s fine. I don’t believe there is a right or wrong here. 

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Stockhausen was definitely "in the air" around that time. If nothing else, it was a hip name to drop. If Floyd was drawing from that more than American blues, that might be of interest to me (because hey, it's STILL a hip name to drop! :g ). I think maybe the first Tangerine Dream album (the one with the ear) had some of that same type of influence, I don't know, it was a looong time ago since I was checking that stuff out.

Anybody else around then working that vein? Not so much the "jamming" as the electronic textures as a primary content? Please don't say the Dead, either, that's so NOT what I'm looking for.

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16 hours ago, JSngry said:

Yes, credit for having heard of names that were already world-famous, and in some cases, already dead, when you were born, or at least a children.

It is important that we give credit for that. So important. People feel better when they get credit.

Your sarcasm is noted.

It's not about credit.  It's about common experience.  I still cannot imagine someone having come of age in the 60s/70s/80s/90s etc without having at least heard the name "Pink Floyd", a band that has sold over 250 million albums worldwide (one of only 8 artists of all time that has done this).

Apparently there's at least one person out there who hasn't.  

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29 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

Well, in fairness I just consider Prog and Jam bands under a pretty wide umbrella. Santana put a Hispanic flavor in their music, The Allman Bros had a southern thing happening, Pink Floyd had a space-y psychedelic twist, etc..., but they were all basically playing extended live jams. I hope that clarifies things a little more. It may be oversimplification on my part, but that’s just how I choose to look at it. If you don’t, that’s fine. I don’t believe there is a right or wrong here. 

Also Can which were probably “better” than Floyd in that respect.

certainly Cream, The Dead & The Allman’s belong in a somewhat different idiom.

for a very short time Cream was a monster but it was over before 1968 ended. They only played that great improvised stuff because they lacked songs and they had shows booked @ The Fillmore and they had to fill their time. They didn’t plan on I, hence the mostly brilliant results. Too bad most of the Spring 68 tapes are gone. The Allman’s used much more of a set framework to play off as did the Dead originally but the difference is the Dead kept at it and continually adjusted their approach and they *became* truly great improvising musicians - they also became collectively an amazing creator of a great American song book with their collaboration with Robert Hunter & John Perry Barlow.

Jim - point made big have you ever sat down and listened to something like the 4/8/72 Dark Star with no distractions at sufficient concert like volume?

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27 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Stockhausen was definitely "in the air" around that time. If nothing else, it was a hip name to drop. If Floyd was drawing from that more than American blues, that might be of interest to me (because hey, it's STILL a hip name to drop! :g ). I think maybe the first Tangerine Dream album (the one with the ear) had some of that same type of influence, I don't know, it was a looong time ago since I was checking that stuff out.

Anybody else around then working that vein? Not so much the "jamming" as the electronic textures as a primary content? Please don't say the Dead, either, that's so NOT what I'm looking for.

Not that I can think of off of the top of my head. But no worries, I certainly wouldn’t have mentioned The Dead. 

I think Pink Floyd pretty much cornered the market as far as their own little subgenre is concerned. Similar to Santana in that regard. 

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8 minutes ago, Steve Reynolds said:

Also Can which were probably “better” than Floyd in that respect....

Jim - point made big have you ever sat down and listened to something like the 4/8/72 Dark Star with no distractions at sufficient concert like volume?

Ah, Can, there's a name I know, but not the music to go with it.

Was Soft Machine ever in that place, even for a little bit, or were they more outright "jazz-rock"-ish (albeit in their own way) from jump? The two Probe albums...no way for me to ascertain what they were doing live from those...surety not that?

Yes, more than once. I know what it is that I'm not connecting with. No need top press the point, after a while it's like the Wynton guys a while back trying to convince me that the only reason I didn't like Wynton was that I just hadn't heard the right record.

 

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13 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Ah, Can, there's a name I know, but not the music to go with it.

Was Soft Machine ever in that place, even for a little bit, or were they more outright "jazz-rock"-ish (albeit in their own way) from jump? The two Probe albums...no way for me to ascertain what they were doing live from those...surety not that?

Yes, more than once. I know what it is that I'm not connecting with. No need top press the point, after a while it's like the Wynton guys a while back trying to convince me that the only reason I didn't like Wynton was that I just hadn't heard the right record.

 

Can:

Tago Mago 

All of the 68-74 Can is great but the above double LP set is the benchmark for this sort of stuff

Edited by Steve Reynolds
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