I Don’t Bloody Know What To Call It

If you’ve been following me for a while on Twitter or Facebook, or before that on MySpace and one of my other blogs, you’ll know that I have a number of high horses that I leap on from time to time. So expect more of the same here – rants about stupidity (religion, homeopathy, smoking), moans about bad spelling and grammar, raves about whatever great music happens to have shuffled onto my ipod recently, comments on my choir, and so on. No apologies for that, if you don’t want to read it then why the hell should you. But because I’ve been spilling out over the Internet for several years now, and it’s hardly a novelty to me, posts here may be infrequent and unpredictable – often just me killing time on my commute.
So on we go.
I’m on one of my Grateful Dead jags at the moment, and if you’re not familiar with their music then I’m sorry for you. I’m not going to reccommend any particular album that you should listen to as an introduction but if you think Sergeant Pepper was groundbreaking in 67, just check out Anthem Of The Sun from a year earlier.
One of the things about GD is that – a bit like Pink Floyd – the studio albums are only part of the story. They state the basic song structure and allow you to get familiar with the words or the themes but they really don’t show the potential of what can be done with them in a live environment. For that you need to be at the gigs (never saw GD live but saw Floyd several times in around 70-72) or to immerse yourself in the bootlegs. Not the commercially available ‘live’ albums like Ummagumma,