Cold Blood

I was watching Fillmore: The Last Days, the documentary about the last concerts at the Fillmore auditorium, and one of the acts on sage, a soul rock review, featured a female vocalist that for all the world sounded like Janis Joplin who had been dead for about 2 years by then and, with the few flashes of her face appeared to be more attractive than Joplin ever was. The eerie things was, when this woman shrieked her passion, she sounded uncannily like the gravel-voiced Joplin of legend and if I closed my eyes I could swear it was Janis giving it her all fronting the Kozmic Blues Band of soul and jazz guys. I had to google the line up of these shows to find that the band in question was Cold Blood and that the vocalist was Lydia Pense, who is still very much alive.

Apparently Joplin knew the band wand had been so impressed with Pense’s vocal style en intensity of soul that she recommended her to Bill Graham the impresario of the Fillmore auditoriums.

I had to buy Cold Blood’s eponymous debut album from 1968.  The music is probably derived from the Kozmic Blues of Joplin’s first solo album when she ditched the blues-psych rock sound of Big Brother and the Holding Company for big band soul music and R & B to showcase her roots in Black American music rather than the San Francisco style rock of her first band. Cold Blood gives it some; it is a powerhouse of soul power and Pense has a formidable set of pipes on her.  She does not sound like Joplin and is in fact more restrained yet also more soulful at the same time. The tunes are a mixture of covers and more original songs and each of them is performed at a height of sustained intensity that is quite awesome.

Joplin’s version of “Work Me, Lord” is by far the best thing on I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again, Mama and this entire Cold Blood album is on par with that Joplin performance.

I guess Cold Blood is pretty much a rock album based on soul and jazz rather than an authentic soul record of the time, as the musicians play much harder and with much more of a rock edge than the typical soul of the period or even the new funk of the Isley Brothers, James Brown or Funkadelic. Even so it is a refreshing change from the heavy blues or nascent heavy metal of the time, with proper songs, strong vocals and passion that is often lacking in rock music whether the contemporaries of Cold Blood or even now. The band did not conquer the world or become known much outside of the San Francisco Bay area and I guess Lydia Pense was too sensible and not much of an outlaw, hence her survival where the legendary Joplin burnt out.  I would not make much of an effort to buy more of Cold Blood’s albums. My guess is that the debut pretty much sets out the stall and that the next bunch or records more or less repeated the strengths of the debut without adding much of interest or progressive development.

This record, though, is a delight. I love soul, I love funk and I love a gritty, gutsy soul powered blow-out by a vocalist who can sing as strongly as Lydia Pense, especially If backed by a band as powerful as this one is.  

Aguaturbia

From Wikipedia:

Aguaturbia Is a Chilean rock band formed in 1969, featuring Carlos Corales on guitar and his wife Denise on vocals. The band is known for pioneering heavy psychedelic rock in Chile, eventually enjoying international acclaim. In addition to psychedelic sounds, wah-wah guitar effects and heavy blues rock chord patterns, Aguaturbia also incorporated elements of Latin American folk music into their work. The band is noted for causing controversy in the Chilean press at the time for stepping outside of prevailing social norms.

Discography

Albums]

·       Aguaturbia (1969, Arena)

·       Aguaturbia Vol. 2 (1970, Arena)

·       Aguaturbia acoustic version (2010, Milodon)

·       Aguaturbia Vol. 2 (2010, Lion records USA)

Compilations

·       1996 - Psychedelic Drugstore

·       Aguaturbia Complete Tracks (2000, Runner Records)

·       2010 - Aguaturbia acoustic version

·       2010 - Aguaturbia vol 1 y 2 Vinil Lion Records

Members

·       Denise Corales - vocals

·       Carlos Corales - electric guitar

·       Willy Cavada - drums

·       Ricardo Briones - bass

Original drummer Willy Cavada died on October 1, 2013.

YouTube is a wonderful, magical repository of all kinds of music (videos and audio albums) from the most contemporary releases to the most obscure old music. I often randomly stumble across amazing music hitherto unknown to me while I was looking for something else. It is astonishing how much music from, say, the late Sixties and early Seventies one can find from acts that by no means set the world alight at the time yet managed to release one or more records.  Some citizens continuously find the time and the enthusiasm to download these albums to YouTube.

So far the richest treasure trove has been psychedelic and hard rock bands from the late Sixties or very early Seventies, whether from the UK, the USA or other corners of the world.

Probably my best, most entrancing discovery has been the 1996 compilation album Psychedelic Drugstore showcasing the Chilean band Aguaturbia. It is one of a slew of similar albums from the era (roughly 1968 to 1971) that I was idly looking at. My attention was drawn to the album cover and name. When I saw the track listing, with “Somebody to Love” and “Crimson and Clover” in particular, I decided to listen to the record. There was no indication, on the YouTube site, of the release date of the record or of the band’s origin, but I thought, what the hell, if it did not move me within a song or two, I could always look for something else. I go through a lot of YouTube music by  listeingin to only the opening two or three cuts of a record;  if my attention is not being engaged and held, I change albums.

With Aguatrubia I was hooked from the first notes. I listened to the entire album with a sense of rising delight and euphoria in making the acquaintance of a hitherto unknown psychedelic gem.  The band may not be of the same calibre as I am used to in Sixties psychedelia, such as Jefferson Airplane, for example, but  the basic three piece of guitar, bass and drums could play and brought a completely original, slightly off-kilter perspective to the  table that the more established an accomplished bands on the big labels cojuld never do. At first, given the oddness of the female vocalist’s inflections and accent, I thought that Aguaturbia, despite the Spanish name, must be Japanese  and it was only because I googled the band that I found out where the originated from. Who even knew that Chile had a rock scene much less a psychehdelic one! My ignorance I guess.

A somewhat rinky-dink, amateurish-sounding version of “Somebody to Love” is the opening cut. I love Jefferson Airplane and this is one of their signature tunes. Aguaturbia do not do a note for note copy of the Airplane tune and to a degree it is not a very successful version either.  On this evidence Aguaturbia would have been  no  more than a mediocre bar band covering the big US or UK hits of the time. The shrill female vocalist sounds as if she is phonetically repeating the lyrics she learnt from listening to the Airplane record without ever seeing the lyrics in print and without  understanding what she is singing.  This imporession is true of every cover song on the album.

This primitive interpretation of “Somebody To Love” song is rescued by the thunderous drumming and powerful, agile bass guitarist who is definitely a co-lead instrument along with the fuzzfreak guitar fireworks. The band is a classic power trio with vocalist but even in Cream Jack Bruce’s bass is not always as prominent as on Aguaturbia.

 The second track is “Erotica;” basically a psychedelic freakout with the vocalist moaning orgasmically. It was probably intended to be risqué and daring at the time of free love in the Haight,  which must have pretty much only rumours in the much more conservative Chile. Today the faux orgasmic vocalisation simply comes across as quaintly naive. The psych rock backdrop rescues the track from utter ridiculousness. One can visualise a youth movie scene from the era, featuring a crowd of hippies frugging in a nightclub while this music is the soundtrack.

This period odditiy is followed by a storming version of “Rollin and Tumblin,” which sounds like the Cream arrangement played by Blue Cheer fronted by a thirteen year old female singer with a small voice. Blue Cheer was kind of part of the San Francisco psychedelic scene, though at the heavier end of the spectrum. The Aguaturbia guitarist turns up the fuzztone on his guitar and rocks out plenty.

“Ah Ah Ah Ay,” which follows, is an instrumental jam that fades out much too soon and before a truly tance-like state can be achieved.

“Crimson and Clover,” at over 10 minutes, is the awesome and  masterful centrepiece of the album In its original form, by Tommy James and The Shondells, the sound and performance suggested that it could be a druggy, psychedelic trip if played live. In Aguaturbia’s hands we are entertained by the absolute highlight of the album with a long, grooving guitar rave up that keeps on building and building and delights all the way. The instrumentalists are not amateurs but there is a refreshingly different attitude to the music, as one would not expect from an American band doing the same thing, yet also with enough familiarity to suggest that the musicians were aware of what was going on in the USA but possibly only from the records they were listening to and not from personal experience.

“Heartbreaker,” the surprisingly melodic song by Grand Funk Railroad, is made over into a pop anthem with less of the stodgy heaviness of the American band’s version and more of a soulful ambience where the female vocals aid the melody and feel of the tune.  Possibly one of the best Grand Funk covers one is likely to hear. The unintelligible phonetic vocals are disarmingly cute.

The psychedelic bands often had a strong blues background and influence and Aguaturbia seems to be no exception. It’s nod to the blues is the long blues workout of “Blues from the Westside” with a solo section where one realises that the guitarist is a truly original visionary who sounds like some of his Northern American peers but always finds a new way to express blues tropes in exceptional and unexpected ways that turns the tune into an enthralling blues rather than the clichéd rehash as would have been the case with so many other bands. The freaky vocal style is the only aspect that makes this tune not so much a blues as a novelty.

“Waterfall” follows, another psychpop experience where the lyrics are little more than another sound in the mix because they are so unintelligible. Even the chorus sounds like “wider fall.”

Third last track is yet another, mostly instrumental, erotic freakout called “Evol” and this is a fraction louder and more frenetic than “Erotica,” which makes one wonder about the type of sex South Americans like. On this evidence it is fast, furious and with shrieking.

“I Wonder Who” is the penultimate number, a sweet pop song with the psychedelic heaviness that underpins the album. The last track is “Aguaturbia,” sung in Spanish, which  gives it another dimension altogether, as straightrforward a piece of Hispanic pop fluff as one could hope to find.

This collection, then, is presumably the best of Aguaturbia and if some of it is quaint, most of it is loud, pounding psychedelic rock with some of the most agile, inventive freak bass playing I’ve heard and with accomplished fuzztone guitar and the busy drumming that charaterizes so much of that style of music; all is movement and flux, like the light shows behind the bands on stage. Perhaps the band members were deadly serious; perhaps they were imitating music that semed impossibly far away in space and time and could not quite get right even if they gave it a damn good thrashing.

Whatever. I love this album.

Golden Earring

“Radar Love” is one of those hits that are both a blessing and a curse for any band with progressive ambitions. It is right up there with the best American and British classic rock songs of the Seventies and probably the best known song of Golden Earring; probably also the best known, most famous Dutch rock band ever.   

“Radar Love” broke the band in the USA, and internationally, in a big way and, on radio airplay alone, must be a good little earner for the songwriters. On the other hand it is probably the only Golden Earring tune most casual fans know and expect to hear at every gig.  It is also not even very typical of their general style of progressive hard rock. In the latter vein “Ce Soir (Kill Me),” for example, ranks as every bit as powerful and memorable.

The “best of” collection Earring’s Believing (1976) was my introduction to a representative selection of songs from the albums Eight Miles High (1969) to To The Hilt (1976.) The tunes are mostly progressive hard rock songs that, to my mind, would put Golden Earing in the same kind of category as Blue Oyster Cult of being a heavy band that was not just dumb heavy metal at all but put a premium on writing good, intelligent songs.

I wanted Earring’s Believing primarily because it had “Radar Love” but that was not the only Earring tune I knew at the time. In the early Seventies I had heard a couple of Earring tracks on the Saturday late night progressive rock show presented on the English Service of the SABC. The particular Golden Earring song that had caught my ear was “The Road Swallowed Her Name” with the opening line ‘Sitting down here and feeling annoyed…’ the song title and opening line were both equally off-kilter brilliant and strange, just what one would expect of a European rock band.  I also think I’d heard “She Flies On Strange Things” or perhaps “I’m Gonna Send My Pigeons To The Sky.”  All of these songs fall into the category of what counted as progressive rock in those days, or sounded like it, and this must have been why the SABC radio host, who was well into Genesis, Yes, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Airto Moreira, and others of that ilk, was allowed to play rock. It was not simply mindless pop but music of serious artistic intent and integrity with a premium placed on musicianship of the highest standard. I was just a kid at the time and listened to the radio show because it was real, and interesting, alternative, to the typical contemporary pop music I heard on Springbok Radio  or Radio Good Hope.

Earring’s Believing did not have “The Road Swallowed Her Name” but it did have plenty of other good songs I had not heard before, like “Landing,”  “All Day Watcher,” “Candy’s Going Bad,” “Sleepwalking” and “Tons of Time.” There was also the oddity of a pop narrative called “Buddy Joe” that (retrospectively) very much sounds like the inspiration for the Cape Town band McCully Workshop’s hit “The Buccaneer.”

The collection of songs emphasized that the Dutch had a quirky sense of what big rock should sound like, slightly odd English-as-second-language but overall rocked pretty hard.

Matters rested there. I never bought another Golden Earring record for many years. The two albums I knew well, at least from seeing the album covers in my local record store, were Eight Miles High and Moontan, from which “Radar Love” was pulled as hit single. I never bought the records because it seemed like a risky venture on a band I did not know relay well and also because the semi-naked figure of an exotic dancer on the Moontan cover would not have been welcome in my household, if I could have plucked up the courage to buy the thing.

It was probably only in the mid-Eighties, after 1983, that I found the 1970 album Golden Earring (apparently also known as Wall of Dolls from the cover photograph of the otherwise untitled album where the band members posed against a background of a wall full of dolls) in some discount bin.  I bought it for that reason, and because “I’m Gonna Send My Pigeons To The Sky” was on it. Golden Earring shows off the band in its early progressive phase with deeply philosophical lyrics commenting on the human condition.

From the late Seventies and into the Eighties Golden Earring shifted gear to become a typical, or so I was led to believe by record reviews, big rock act of the era, far removed from the quirky progressive style of the Seventies and I was under the impression that Golden Earing had decided, perhaps influenced by the prospects of continuing career in the USA, to cast their lot with the likes of Def Leppard, Foreigner, Asia, Europe, and other such MOR acts. Since I was not at all interested in the other bands this also suggested that I would not want to spend money on contemporary Golden Earring albums and I can say for the record that I have almost no idea of what any of these later records sound like and I pretty much still have no compelling reason to investigate them.

In the early years of the 21st century I found, shortly after each other, CDs of the USA version of Moontan, with a slightly different track listing and with a completely different, sanitized, cover than the original, UK and European version I was familiar with, and a compilation of well-known, early Earring tracks.  This compilation did not replicate Earring’s Believing and did not have “The Road Swallowed Her Name” either.

Fast track about 10 years to April 2015 when I found some video clips of Golden Earring shows from 1975 (Winterland, San Francisco), 1982 (RockPalast) and 2007, that piqued my interest in the band’s back catalogue from the era the tracks on Earring’s Believing were culled. Pretty much the entire Golden Earring catalogue is available on iTunes and one of the things I did was simply to look for the songs I remembered from Earring’s Believing and eventually buying them individually for a playlist I called “Earing’s Believing.”

My playlist did not follow the set list of the record I was trying to replicate and included “The Road Swallowed Her Name,” which was not on the record.  I then also googled the actual Earring’s Believing album, that I had thought was not available as a CD, and was not on iTunes, and found a reference to it as well as a track listing.  My memory had served me well, though this official track listing refers to a song *”God Bless The Day”), by the earlier version of the band, called the Golden Earrings, that I did not buy and do not really recollect from the record either though I suppose it was on it. Perhaps I should see if I can find it, and buy it too for inclusion on the playlist, for reasons of absolute authenticity.

 Moontan, the parent album of “Radar Love,”” also has “Candy’s Going Bad” but is otherwise firmly fixed in that progressive hard rock pattern with two tracks exceeding 9 minutes, two tracks exceeding 6 minutes and the remaining 2 tracks each longer than 4 minutes. The mixture of instrumental inventiveness and dexterity, solid tunes and masterful vocals serve to make the album seem shorter than it is. The songs are hook driven and rocking. Moontan deserves a reputation as a classic rock album of the mid-Seventies.

I’ve now also watched a documentary made by a Dutch filmmaker, probably in 1969 and during the time the band was recording the tracks for Eight Miles High, that shows off Golden Earring as a bunch of hippie rockers with ambitions to be successful beyond their homeland. George Kooymans seems to be forever playing guitar and singing songs at every opportunity and is the most articulate member of the band, albeit in Dutch. There is a long section showing the band setting up for a gig in a tent somewhere, with Barry Hay (vocalist and flautist) and Kooymans jamming on flute and acoustic guitar respectively on the banks of a narrow canal and then the band performing to an enthusiastic audience with plenty of freeform jamming. None of the tunes, except for the title track of the album, are familiar to me.  I suppose much of the type of footage would have been typical of any band of the era but the live footage in particular gives one an insight on how rock music was approached back then when the rigid divide between pop; and rock was still of recent invention and the role of tock musician as artist deserving of serous attention and special treatment was still quite novel. Rock was a young man’s game and, as the cliché had it, none of them expected to make thirty or forty years’ worth of career out of it.

Apparently Golden Earring, still with the four guys who made Moontan, is very active and plays about 200 gigs a year, mostly in Europe and possibly on the very lucrative classic rock circuit in the USA.  And each night the audience wants to he4ar “Radar Love.”