I wrote some time ago about my musical adventures in 1971, a year which in retrospect was very important for the formation of my musical tastes. In that entry, there was a reference to local (to Bristol) folk artist Dave Evans; Dave recorded for a local record company which has since apparently become legendary, "The Village Thing". They had an office close to my school, and during lunch-hours I often used to go to that office.
The first release that I purchased from TVT was a four track mini-single called "The Great White Dap" (a dap is the primordial ancestor of what is now called a trainer, i.e. a soft shoe which was worn in sporty events). This featured one song each from the first VT releases: Ian A. Anderson, The Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra (somewhat similar to The Temperance Seven or The Bonzos), a Welsh duo called 'The Sun Also Rises' and guitarist Wizz Jones.
Jones' contribution was called "See how the time is flying", which I learnt to play in short order. This was always an intriguing song harmonically, as its verse starts in Dm and ends in Em. Instead of trying to make a harmonically pleasing transaction between these keys, Jones simply starts the next verse with an abrupt change to Dm.
Later on, TVT released a sampler lp with twelve tracks, including Jones' "Beggarman". Again, I enjoyed this song, but apparently not enough in order to buy its parent album, "The legendary me". Obviously my money at the time had more important claimants.
Fast forward maybe thirty five years; money is no longer a problem and anyway my record buying days are virtually over. I began a search for those Village Thing records of my youth, and quickly found Dave Evans' initial record which I wrote about in that blog entry, "The words inbetween". Lately I have found as downloads Hunt and Turner's "Magic Landscape" and Ian A. Anderson's "A vulture is not a bird you can trust". I have yet to find its predecessor, "Royal York Crescent", named after the street where Anderson lived at the time, and where he recorded some of Evans' songs. I used to visit him there.
- digression
I think that Jim Hunter, my English teacher at school, lived there as well, and he told me that another resident at the time was novelist Angela Carter, whose early book "Several perceptions" had become essential reading for me, and even the basis for an exercise in turning prose into poetry. I realised that the district in which Carter's book was set was indeed the arty Clifton district of Bristol, where the above crescent is situated. Hunter wrote a biography of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, which led to the school graffito "Hunter puts the man into Gerard Manley Hopkins".
-end of digression
For several years, I have been on the trail of a cd release of Wizz Jones' "The legendary me", and eventually found it a few weeks ago. I've been listening to it on and off the past week, and reluctantly have come to the conclusion that the two songs which I knew in 1971 were the highlights of the disk, and that had I heard some of the other songs, I wouldn't have bothered tracking down this disk. In certain aspects, Jones might have been a role model for my music - clean acoustic guitar picking, roughish vocals - had my harmonic vocabulary not been irrevocably twisted by Sandy Denny's "North Star Grassman" in the autumn of 1971.
In the early 1970s, the sampler was a legitimate way of allowing impecunious people the chance to hear a wide variety of artists signed to a label and so inform them of the quality of those artists. The Island samplers ("You can all join in", "Nice enough to eat", "Bumpers" and "El pea") immediately come to mind, but there were also successful samplers from CBS ("The rock machine turns you on"), Harvest, Vertigo and others. Versions of these samplers can now be found in the many cd compilations possibly saturating the market (for example, "Refugees: A Charisma Records Anthology 1969-1978 [Box set]".
I have often mused on the selection criteria for those samplers: did the compilers pick the best track on an album for inclusion in the sampler? Did they pick the most accessible song? Did they pick the most representative song? In terms of Wizz Jones, they (presumably the afore mentioned Anderson) definitely picked the best songs, but when I consider "Nice enough to eat", which sufficed as many a young gentleman's introduction to 'underground' music (and to the Island label), then I'm not so sure.
Certainly, Fairport Convention's track on the sampler, "Cajun woman", was neither the best, most accessible nor most representative track from its parent album, "Unhalfbricking". In my opinion, it was the worst track on this ultimate record, not too accessible and certainly not representative (it was more an experiment in applying a Cajun arrangement to what would shortly be called a modern song in the trad idiom).
Another criterion seemed to be that compilers would pick the opening song from an album, presuming that each album's producer knew what he was doing when sequencing. Thus we have "Time has told me", which opened Nick Drake's "Five leaves left", followed by King Crimson's "21st century schizoid man", which similarly held the pole position on their "Court of the crimson king" debut album. On the other hand, neither Jethro Tull's nor Blodwyn Pig's contribution were the opening track.
Another problem which I have with listening to familiar songs from forty years ago along with unfamiliar songs is that the familiar will always sound better. I hope that I am free of this bias regarding "The legendary me", and can explain lucidly why the two songs which have become part of my musical fabric are better than anything else on this album. Incidentally, the cd release has three bonus tracks added at the end; as I didn't know the original, I can't complain that these songs stick out like a sore thumb, but even so.... The first is a recording of Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of mercy"; whilst adding nothing to the original, Jones inexplicably alters the song's chord sequence, making listening to it a jarring experience for someone versed in the original.
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