3 posts tagged “1967”

Oh. Ma. Gah. The Supro Arlington. No, it's really called that.

WANT WANT WANT.

I waaaant one!!1!

But nine hundred bucks for a fiberglass guitar? Yeah, right. Pfft. (UPDATE: It went for $750. Okay, I've paid that for a guitar, but not for one I've never played, for God's sake. But, yeah, $750 doesn't strike me as necessarily crazy, there, if it really is as cool as it looks (and once in a great while, they really are)).

Man, I hate collectors. They run the prices on cool guitars up into the stratosphere, and then they never play them. I'm cool with supply and demand, but these things aren't Fabergé eggs, OK? They're tools and they're meant to be used. But even collectors aren't as bad as stinking pigs like that creep in Nirvana who bought cool, cheap old guitars (the ones young players could afford) just to destroy them. Brain all the infants you want; there's no shortage. But there will never, ever be any more Univox Hi-Flyers. What an utter pig. I'd've been glad to hand him the gun myself.

It could be much worse, though, if most of the collectors weren't focused on spending five-figure sums on "vintage" Fenders from the '50s and '60s, 80% of which are at least 90% counterfeit. Idiots.

1967. This is the International Submarine Band, Gram Parsons' first band that halfway succeeded. Just as the ISB started to get attention, Parsons was invited to join the Byrds. There was more money in that, so off he went, hence Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Which is grossly overrated, except for "Hickory Wind". But if Parsons hadn't been in the Byrds, he wouldn't've gone on to form the grossly overrated Flying Burrito Brothers with grossly underrated ex-Byrd Chris Hillman. I'm really not sure where I'm going with this, honestly. Parsons did ultimately make a pair of real good records with Elvis Presley's backing band and Emmylou Harris. He "discovered" her, it seems.

The ISB album is called Safe at Home, and it's not half bad. People claim it's the first country-rock record ever made! Awe-inspiring, isn't it? To think that J. D. Souther might not have existed without these guys. Kinda makes you almost wish you had a time machine and a rifle. But then you'd lose Parsons, who did some good work.

Yo La Tengo covered this song. What a tragic waste of tape that was.

Skip Spence played drums in the original Jefferson Airplane lineup. After they fired him, he played guitar and sang in Moby Grape. Things went along not un-swimmingly until the incident in the hotel with the fire axe. That was in New York, when the drugs really got a firm grip. Moby Grape were recording their second album, Wow. "Wow" is one word for it.

They put Spence away for six months in the criminal ward at Bellevue. When they let him out, Moby Grape didn't want him back (it was them he'd been after with the axe), but Columbia gave him an advance to make a solo album. He bought a motorcycle, rode it to Nashville, Tennessee, and wrote and recorded an album called Oar in six days. He played everything himself. Then he got back on the bike and rode off into the sunset. That was December, 1968. His next move was to live on the street for thirty years, and he capped that one by dying indigent.

Oar was a bit iffy in spots. Which spots? All of them. It's very... iffy. It's overrated, but not as overrated as you'd think, for a record a paranoid schizophrenic made by himself in a hurry. Much of it is eerie, compelling, and at times catchy.

I've never had much patience with people who think the world began in 1967, ended in 1969, and never extended much beyond the Bay Area. They're either incurably narcissistic, permanently infantile baby boomers, or the boomers' poor dumb clueless offspring they've browbeaten into worshipping them like they worship themselves. Dirty fucking hippies. We hates them! In truth, most of what happened there and then was just fashionable, self-indulgent crap. Not all, though.

Here's Skip in happier days with Moby Grape, and on one of the sadder but more coherent songs on Oar. It's not all gloomy. In the Moby Grape picture, Skip's the prognathous character on the far left. He was Canadian, by the way. Just as you suspected.

Yada yada, Sister Lovers, The Madcap Laughs, blah blah.

UPDATE

Here are "The Moby Grapes" [sic] on the Mike Douglas show with Spence still in the band. Truly horrendous sound, Spence's voice is nearly inaudible, really not worth watching. I offer it for whatever it's worth.