late night thoughts

The question of what distinguishes an EP from an LP really bugs me severely. I noticed when I was tinkering with Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons’ Wikipedia entry that someone had listed So Young an album when really – it has 7 tracks and goes for 21 minutes – it’s an EP. The group were making that point when they tried to get their record company (Oz/EMI) to sell it cheap, but this wasn’t done, so they switched to Mushroom and then released a bonus ‘album’ with the initial copies of their next album, it was a live record longer than So Young. But when I decided some years ago to separate my LPs from my 12”s (this was originally a decision based on the fact that I had too many records to fit in the allocated shelves, and I figured one solution would be to store the 12”s elsewhere) I knew that it would take me forever to figure out how to separate them, because I just don’t have that kind of brain to go through methodically and spot them all. Today I was putting back a bunch of albums I had out and I kept weeding out these various 12” EPs, and then there are these anomalies. Not So Young, but for instance the Moodists’ Engine Shudder and Double Life (six tracks each). I chickened out with these two actually – they’re still in with the LPs. I have at least three other Moodists 12” records, however, with four or three tracks on them, that I have decided are 12” EPs. 

Of course many are confused about whether the definition of an album is about length (somewhere around half an hour, maybe less) or about number of tracks (roughly ten three-or-so minute tracks, as a general measure). Famously (to me) the Numbers’ first album was criticised for its shortness (under half an hour) and the follow-up was named 39.51, named after its length in minutes. I wonder what the shortest album is? I gather in 2013 there was a vinyl compilation called the World’s Shortest Album but it was a 5” disc in a 12” sleeve. I also found a long list of the shortest albums ever, but they are all records specifically contrived to be short for the sake of being short. I was more interested in a commercial offering, standard record. I imagine they go lower than 25 minutes but few would go lower than that, apart of course from So Young. I wonder. 

cats are possibly getting to grips with each other

What does 'getting to grips' literally mean? They are both annoyed with me apparently, or at least keep approaching me separately with problems they can't articulate. Nancy got up on the shelf and knocked some things off, including a candlestick which broke, but might be fixable. I looked at some pictures of her from four or five years ago and I have to say, she is probably overweight. She and Helmi have had negative interactions at least twice tonight (it takes the form of Helmi running at Nancy and the two of them scratching the air between them with one paw for a few seconds of 'bring it bitch'.

I'm tired

goodnight

de da de dum all over again

Half a Cow are reissuing the pure original De Da De Dum. Nic Dalton kindly sent me a copy of the test pressing and I'm listening to it now. Just one more time I am extraordinarily and uncategorisably staggered by the brilliance of 20-year-old Pip in I guess 1967, an absolute exceptional original, stream of consciousness, funny, awkward, irresistible. This is absolutely the Pip I knew thirty years later, except this young man had every reason to believe he was going to tackle the world, too, whereas the Pip I knew was happy to have cigarettes and alcohol.*

1967 Pip was a more complex person than anyone knew and I also know, because I got bits and pieces of real reminiscence occasionally revealed in his late period drunken ramblings, had a truly horrendous childhood. For example, he told me he was sexually abused by a family friend for much of his childhood (one of the songs on this album is in part about that) and that when he told his mother about it she said 'I thought that's what was happening' (and did nothing to stop it).

I honestly don't know it's even possible to say that this album and the others that followed were from the heart. I think there's an element of Pip where he was very ambitious and just hoped to get famous from his quirky wordplay and delivery. I think he was also genuinely grappling with some ideas here, too, and pushing the envelope. There is also a chance that (as people around him have told me) in his head he sounded like Buddy Holly. He was competing with his brother and others in their social circle to be relevant and interesting - it's not easy, and indeed it must have been virtually impossible in late 60s Sydney if you weren't, I don't know, the fuckin' Executives or Russell Morris.

Anyway. A truly brilliant original album and as for Pip - you were such a manipulative person** Pip but at the same time so easy to keep happy and such a lovely, lively mind, I do really miss you.

* Although he also wouldn't have minded regular sex and the chance to keep making music. And the respect and love of his children - some of them totally got him, some of them were alienated by, he would say, their mothers but I am absolutely not going to speculate on the truth of that, probably not even really calculable. 

** I feel very bad saying this but my complex feelings come from the difficulties of dealing with an alcoholic. It's a disease so it seems wrong to say Pip was manipulative. 

but also...

The other thing I wanted to say though was I suspect the Carr and Tyler book had a deeper impact on me, in that it gave me ideas about what was core and non-core, and what was interestingly non-core, and how artists did things sequentially but not necessarily with everything in the canon or in the A-list. So, to pick one example, George Harrison made two 'solo albums' before he made All Things Must Pass, but the two which came before that huge triple album with hit singles on it and so on, were kind of minor works no-one needed to pay attention to (and one of them was substantially swiped from Bernard Krause anyway, though that’s irrelevant right now). The fact was, Artist A could be spending his or her time on drawing a picture in nail polish on toilet paper on Monday, composing masterwork Tuesday and Wednesday, writing her or his novel on Thursday, and propounding a famously mad conspiracy theory on some chat show on Friday. If you want to understand those component parts – the development of the artist’s work – don’t you have to know them all in context with each other? 

Truth is, I don’t know if you really do, but I do want to know if it’s necessary. 

leavening

I guess that in reality once there was no Lennon being cajoled into producing 50%, and no Harrison begging/sulking about his quota, McCartney had to leaven his own records. So with the arguable exception of Wild Life (though, 'Some People Never Know', for crying out loud) the 70s post-Beatles records McCartney was involved in each had at least one amazing candidate for no. 1 hit single (I'll exempt London Town because I find that record hard to listen to - I didn't mention this before - but I just assume it's great, it's only that I haven't quite got on top of it yet). So you sequence an album not by going 'argh, here are the shit tracks we already paid to record so we got to have them on the record somehow' but by going 'this is an album track, fewer bells and whistles but it winds the listener down after hearing 'Let 'Em In' or 'Silly Love Songs' and builds them up for the next epic (eg 'Must Do Something About It', my favourite Wings song and not even sung by PMcC).