vale pete brown

Pete's teeth were probably not better than Jack's but he knew to cover them up

As usual a range of feelings and opinions wash over me when I hear about the death of someone who impacted on me from an early age but who was very old and had a good life as far as I can tell (albeit one which apparently ended with a patchwork of different varieties of cancer). Pete Brown was an interesting man to me and while his lyrics for Cream weren't so important as far as I was concerned the lyrical content of the first two Jack Bruce albums (or at least the first two with singing on them) was top notch.* Apparently the high opinion of PB's lyrics is one of the probably many opinions I share with Martin Scorsese, or so I gather from PB's obituary. 

I am also just plain appreciative of a man who was happy to be depicted in this manner on the cover of his own record. (He made a few. I have only ever heard this compilation of various releases 1969-1970something. I like a lot of it, but it would have been better with someone who can sing singing on it - this is something I almost never say, so I guess I really don't like PB's singing style). 

And then, I got this off the shelf and flicked through it and wow, it's actually pretty terrible, mostly. Sort of arrogant horny 'chicks eh' tossed off nonsense. And when I say 'sort of', I really say it only as two words that would redundantly start a sentence tempering the reality of the situation. I see that in Washington State there is a bookshop that will sell you this book for almost US$400. If it's signed or has been dipped in gold or something they don't mention that in the description. My recommendation is that if you are walking down the street really bored and you're like me, terribly short attention span, and you see this book lying on the ground, you should pick it up, flick through it for as long as it takes your mind off stuff, then put it somewhere convenient for the next person like us. 

But anyway, I think he was on balance actually pretty good. 

* To save you looking it up I'll tell you that JB recorded an instrumental jazz album, Things We Like, in 1968 but it wasn't released until after his first post-Cream recording, Songs for a Tailor, in 1970. The subsequent LP, Harmony Row, was in the Songs for a Tailor vein. 

1983 i was there

So was Jack Bruce, making his extremely obscure album Automatic. Jack was going through something of a fallow period commercially I suppose, as this record was only issued in Germany, not that I am saying that's a bad thing in itself, if I was releasing a record, I'd like it to happen in Germany probably more than anywhere other than Korea, or Australia. I have listened to two tracks so far and let me tell you it's much better than Jet Set Jewel, the album that was supposedly too magnificent to be released after the dismal performance of the How's Tricks album. GREAT cover too. The song 'The Swarm' - a pretty full on bit of grim electro blues - is definitely going to be part of DJ Getshaneoffthedancefloor's plan of attack at Olivia's 30th. Oh, I see the song 'Encore' is a song off Jet Set Jewel too, but with more electronic booming drums on it, it actually sounds quite good now, a bit Kate Bushy. Now I have turned it over and am playing side one. I guess when it comes down to it, it's one of those records that would have sounded incomprehensively dated five years ago, but now sounds unbelievably contemporary, because it is all drum machines, synths and vocoders.

Jack is one of those people who presumably made all the money he ever needed to make in the late 1960s with various hits Cream had which get played on the radio, or covered, or whatever, all the time, so the fact that he replaced John Entwhistle in Todd Rundgren's Beatles tribute band (I am so glad I know nothing more of that than that it exists, even that knowledge is a little much) was presumably not out of financial necessity but because who wouldn't want to play in a band with Todd Rundgren, even if it was something that weird. I mean, I read on Wikipedia that Jack once owned an island off the coast of Scotland... how does one own an island? I'll have to look into that. Not for myself, but out of interest.

Funnily, the second track on side two sounds like Todd Rundgren, crossed a little with, um, Billy Joel or someone. And there is a cool solo on a keyboard version of something that's probably supposed to sound like a real instrument but sounds so much unlike it that you can't tell what it's a bad imitation of.

By the way DJ Getshaneoffthedancefloor is not going to emerge at Olivia's party, it would be too cruel. A 30th birthday is supposed to be a happy time, and young people aren't that into irony. Although they are probably more into it than me, these days.