All this writing about the Pig made me dream of them during the night: I woke up at about 1:30am with the riff from "Worry" running through my head. I also found myself playing the riff to "Drive me" (for the first time in my life) not so long ago when I was playing my guitar.
Some additional comments to yesterday's post:
I read about Mick Abrahams' autobiography from his website (natch). The interface on the site is not the most intuitive, which is why I missed the fact that the book could be bought from there for 12GBP (list price) plus postage and packing, which would probably be another 6GBP. Mick signs every copy with whatever dedication one requests. I paid about 11:50GBP, so I have to ask myself whether I would want his signature for an extra 7GBP. Had I known in advance, then I might well have ordered directly from there, but I'm not beating myself about it in retrospect. As I say, the interface is not so good, which is why I can't give a link direct to the book.
Some more observations about "Getting to this" (GTT), mainly personal. Of course, I used to listen to the vinyl record on a record player which had an auto-changer mechanism, allowing one to stack records on top of each other and play them in sequence. I imagine that this was mainly designed for singles, but I used to put albums on the auto-changer ... until I had an accident and ruined the end of "San Francisco Sketches" with a scratch which caused the track to jump. After having ruined several lps this way ("The sea captain" and the eponymous "North Star grassman" by Sandy Denny, along with "Lord and Master" by Heron were other tracks which use to skip), I eventually ceased using the auto-changer. More modern turntables didn't have this 'feature'.
"Worry", especially in the chorus, sounds very much like "Benefit" period Jethro Tull. This and GTT came out at around the same time, so forty years later, I'm not sure who was copying who. There is a definite Jethro Tull joke concealed on GTT, which I learnt about from Mick's book: 'Nainos' (as in "Variations on Nainos") is not a Greek island, but rather Ian (Ander)son spelt backwards. I imagine that the lyrics contain a message to Abrahams' former colleague, but I can't really make them out. And yes, Abrahams did sing the final verse through a bucket of water.
Around 1971-2, my mother had a small catering business in Bristol. Once she catered for some random child's birthday party and somehow I was roped in to provide 'entertainment' for the children (aged maybe eight at the most). Even in those days I was serious about my music and didn't know any party songs. I do recall that I played "Toys", which might have been suitable for a grown man to play and sing, but not for eight year olds.
Island Records had a praise-worthy tradition of releasing samplers: elsewhere, I have written about the first two, "You can all join in" and "Nice enough to eat". Their third sampler was a double album entitled "Bumpers" which came out in 1971 and included a track from GTT, namely "Send your son to die". I suppose that this track could be considered a rarity as the mix is different to that on GTT; I don't really have a way of verifying this now (I suppose that I could dig out my vinyl copy of "Bumpers" from under the bed, connect the turntable which is lying unused on a shelf nearby and play the song), but as I recall, the vocals sounded different from GTT, more unfocused.
I imagine that herein ends the Pig ... but one never knows.....
No comments:
Post a Comment