AMM 2021 Feature Album Day 4

 

Kahvas Jute were a heavy and loud blues based rock band, who made this one incredible album and then kinda went nowhere. The album is now highly collectable, and I wish I owned it. It was released in early 1971 on Infinity Records through Festival, and never scored a repress, so originals are scarce. It sounds incredible and the remaster on Aztec circa 2006 sounds brilliant. Bassist Bobby Daisley has a field day here, and so does teenage guitarist Tim Gaze. Gaze went on to re-join Tamam Shud after this album (he was in the Shud before he split to form Kahvas Jute) and Daisley went to England and played in Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne in the 80s, among many others since. 

The Hoax is Over...

In 1967, Billy Thorpe had an epiphany. He'd worked out his audience was starting to change. No longer were teenage girls screaming themselves hoarse at his gigs. A new breed of music fan was starting to appear at his inner-Sydney residencies. A tougher, hard-drinking, self-medicating type of bloke, brutalized by experiences in an (ultimately) unwinable war in Asia. These guys didn't want to hear Thorpie chirp his way through "Over The Rainbow". These guys were fans of a new, harder sort of music, by performers with strange names like Jimi Hendrix and Cream, with loud guitars, even louder clothes, and wild haircuts.

After declaring bankruptcy in 1968, he decided to try and start again in England, thanks to a lifeline from ex-pat Aussie and former Epstein-protege Robert Stigwood, who was managing Cream and The Bee Gees at the time. He had six weeks of shows booked in Melbourne to complete before he left, but ended up staying for 6 years.

Forming a new band of Aztecs with Paul Wheeler, Warren Morgan, and Lobby Loyde, the band became an extremely loud jamming blues band. He grew his hair long, wore dirty jeans and T-shirts and turned up the amps to deafening levels. Initially, audiences and promoters alike reacted violently, but soon after, the cult of the "Sharpie" was born and the band were embraced by them.

After an initial single issued by Festival in 1969, the band reconvened in September 1970 to cut an album. Rumour has it that the band got completely out of their collective gourds on psychedelics and told the engineer just to keep tapes rolling until they were done. "The Hoax is Over" is the result.

Issued late in 1970, the album sold respectably but didn't set the charts alight.

The original album had four songs over a running time of just over 51 minutes. 3 originals, one cover. The opening track is a cover of the Johnny "Guitar" Watson track "Gangster of Love". In its original form, its duration was around 2 minutes 45 seconds (2:45). When Steve Miller covered it on his LP "Sailor", 1 minute 23. In the hands of the Aztecs on acid, it rolls on for an epic 24 minutes and 30 seconds. Drum solos and manic Lobby Loyde soloing are part and parcel of this, and they completely go to town on this. It's all kinds of awesome. The two short tracks are "Goodbye Baby" and "Truth", clocking out at just over 4 minutes each and break up the tedium. Especially after "Born In Mississippi", a slow blues jam which drags on for a lethargic 19+ minutes.

The album has been out of print since the 1970s and vinyl copies these days are rarer than rocking horse do-do. Most copies that still exist are thrashed to the point of unplayable. If they are in good nick, they sell for well over $100. There was talk of a reissue by Aztec Music but nothing has eventuated as of yet. Here's hoping...

For the time being, take a listen to the album below via YouTube. Enjoy!

April 2014 Playlist

Welcome to the start of a new month. The air is getting cooler here on the east coast of NSW, and so we bring you a new playlist to warm up your heart and raise your blood pressure.

Taking in tracks from artists as diverse as Miles Davis, Do Re Mi, Swoop, Osibisa, Babaganouj, Nirvana, Killing Joke, Charlie Hunter and heaps more.

There's over 250 songs within to heat the home with. Set the playlist to shuffle, crank it up, pour out some of your favourite vino and ENJOY!

Philip Sayce

I like my blues rock.

No really, I do. I've grown up listening to Gary Moore, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Healey, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Stevie Ray Vaughan at the like. I just find that pretty much everything calling itself "blues rock" since Stevie sounds like...well, a pale imitation of Stevie.

Although recently I discovered Philip Sayce. I don't know a whole lot about him, aside form the fact he is a Canadian who has done a lot of session work for the likes of Jimmy Barnes and Melissa Etheridge, as well as had a solo career of some note for a while. But I do know that he has somehow managed to breathe some new life into this form that has been so uninteresting to me lately.

What you see below is a live performance of his track "Morning Star", and to be honest, superlatives are hard to come by after watching this. You could say it's "amazing" or "blistering" but that only scrapes the surface of just how awesome this is.

See for yourself below.

Cue the jaws hitting the floor...NOW!

February 2014 Playlist

Welcome to the latest Sound and the Fury Playlist, loving curated by hand and ear during February 2014.

This month, you get:

Aussie gems from: Australian Crawl, The Butterfly Effect, Custard, Chad Morgan, The Cruel Sea, Delta Riggs, Even, INXS, James Reyne and more
Punk bashers from Bracket, Asteroid B-612, Green Day, Slapshot, Six Ft Hick and more
Awesome jazz from Dave Brubeck, Larry Carlton, LA Express, Ahmad Jamal,

and a whole mountain of other great songs.

Crank it up and ENJOY!!!

100 LPs Shortlist #37: Gary Moore - "Still Got The Blues"

It's been a while since I've added to my list of 100 albums that I grew up listening to. But this is one that has dropped off my radar until just recently.

Gary Moore got his start as a rock guitarist after leaving his native Belfast in the late 1960s. He moved to Dublin and then onto England where he based himself for the rest of his career. His rather unusual career trajectory involved him joining Thin Lizzy no less than three times, and performing a rapid switch from rock to heavy metal to blues as the mood strikes.

His guitar style is not dissimilar to many other rock shredders of the day, including Zakk Wylde, Jake E. Lee or Joe Satriani, and on this record, an album of straight blues tracks, his soloing isn't much different to the aforementioned guitarists.

Upon re-listening to this album recently, it struck me, moreso now than it did then, how much Gary's soulful vocals clash with his Les Paul-through-Marshall-stack-turned-up-to-11 guitar sound, and then put that against the tone of the music and you have a rather odd mix that doesn't blend too well.



Probably the best example of this is when Gary duets with Albert King on one of Albert's own tracks "Oh Pretty Woman". Albert's own guitar sound is timid, meek and mild compared to the heavily overdriven slashing style of Gary. I loved it at the time, delighting in the fact that the elder bluesman was almost eaten alive by the Irish shredder. Now I just think it's a bad example of a rather painful culture clash.

Gary Moore tears through these songs, with abrasive sounding guitar in hand, with all the subtlety of a North Queensland sugarcane cutter. His guitar sound rips them to pieces, throwing in lead guitar techniques and flashy tricks that date the record to its era, when it seemed every guitarist who wanted to be taken seriously had to throw in a bit of tow-handed fretting.

At the time this came out, I was a beginning guitarist with high ideals, playing the blues and taking my first steps into lead guitar, looking up to people like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix for inspiration. This was a staple part of my musical diet of the time, however in retrospect, I just think it has worn well. My tastes have changed to the point where the subtlety and restraint of Moore's mentor Peter Green wouldn't have gone astray on this record. However, the record was a product of its time and reflected the values shared by likeminded musicians and record buyers alike, and so it is what it is.

Moore-y never had another sizeable hit record like this again. He died of heart failure on 6th February 2011.

Check out the album for yourselves below. Enjoy.