Mr. Moonshine
I’ve spent all morning downloading albums from a music blog.
I wasn’t even going to comment on the ISP hysteria coming out of the mother country today. All it confirms is the people making these rules, raising their fists against the damn Internet thieves, don’t use the Internet themselves. Because if you use the Internet you know the battle has already been fought, and lost. Music is free online, and as a result, the populace is richer for it.
I’m not saying music SHOULD be free, just that it is. Record label saber-rattling has only resulted in driving music acquisition further underground, to the point where it’s impossible to eradicate the free consumption of tunes. Are you going to eliminate AIM transfers? RapidShare? How about outlawing P2P? Well, now movies are being distributed legitimately via P2P, so that’s no solution… The ONLY hope is to create a solution so enticing that people would rather pay than steal. It’s possible, after all, bottled water is being sold by the truckload even though water is essentially free from the tap and discarded empty bottles are anything but green. But the public has been convinced they need their Fiji. And the purveyor has even managed to mount a PR campaign saying THEY ARE green. Huh? Too busy paying off programmers all these years, record label infrastructure contains no innovative marketers. And the old wavers are so busy protecting their rights that they’d rather have their wares stolen than authorize new methods of distribution. It’s sad, but it’s also laughable.
You can sell music online at the iTunes Store if it’s an impulse item. Like a Coke. A buck for the track, and that’s it. But that was the business model that existed prior to "Sgt. Pepper", and it was only when the album became the standard that profits blew up. But the new acts don’t make albums people want to own, so why should they drop the money for them? Meanwhile, people like me are combing the Net looking for digital copies of albums we owned on vinyl that have never been released in a digital format. Like Fat Mattress.
Turns out you can now buy a compilation on iTunes. But I wasn’t looking for it. I haven’t played my Fat Mattress album for nigh on forty years. But today I saw it listed in this blog and I remembered, I had to download it.
Along with Thunderclap Newman’s "Hollywood Dream", Ry Cooder’s debut, a couple of Spirit albums… Shit I didn’t need, most of which I own on vinyl, but stuff that was worth adding to my digital collection.
And it used to be that you spent all afternoon alphabetizing your albums. Now, it’s aligning your iTunes library. Are the titles correct? I need to eliminate duplicates. Let me check the timings… This is record collector fun.
And after deleting the 56k versions of Al Kooper’s "You Never Know Who Your Friends Are" for their new, shiny 192k replacements, I started working on the Fat Mattress album. There was one track that I absolutely loved… What was it? "Mr. Moonshine"?
Buying albums was so different. They were a precious commodity. You could only afford so many. And it was ABOUT the album. Singles were for the radio. You wanted the full experience. Usually just a bit over forty minutes. You dropped the needle on one side, then flipped it over for the other. You laid on the floor, your bed, and let the music flow over you, in your own private world. You may have lived in your parents’ house, but this was your sanctuary, your escape.
Noel Redding had been in the Jimi Hendrix Experience. But that was not enough for me to buy Fat Mattress. I had to get it at a discount. A premium for joining the Record Club of America. Which appealed to me, because it had no obligation. You bought what you wanted. And, for this low price, I got Fat Mattress. And today, I’ve got Fat Mattress again.
I was listening to the first Spirit album. The one containing "Taurus", which Jimmy Page ripped off for "Stairway To Heaven". I was struck by the sound. Even though it was an MP3, it sounded like nothing on the radio today. It sounded just like 1968.
In 1968, albums were about music, not hits. They were not overly-compressed to sound good over the airwaves. They were made to be played late at night, when stoned, or on lazy afternoons. My mind is brought right back to that era listening now. To an album I never heard. Except for the radio track, "Mechanical World". Which I loved. But I can’t believe I missed out on so much magic. Forty years later, I’m enraptured. Every single track. Listen to "Girl In Your Eye", if you think that sound was only created in San Francisco, you’re wrong. And "Topanga Windows" will let you know why everybody wanted to move to the rugged canyon jutting up from the beach. I’m not sure today’s younger generation will ever discover this music, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valid, that it’s merely fodder for a time capsule. Maybe, in the future, people will study the decade from ’64 to ’74 in music the same way they study the Renaissance. The risks, the influence, the MAGIC!
"Mr. Moonshine" has the same feel as that Spirit album. A certain darkness. This music was not made for adults, it was made for kids, baby boomers. Adults couldn’t get it. You were supposed to work 9-5, buy a house and create a family. But, listening to this music our minds were expanded and we wanted no part of that. We went to Woodstock because of the music, we didn’t know we were part of such a large tribe until we got there!
I’ll hook you up with the BBC live take. But, it doesn’t have the dreamy effect of the studio original.
Music, when done right, cannot be described.
I can just tell you I lived for these records. Their makers were not sold out whores, looking everywhere for bucks, but pioneers, adventurers, discovering not a physical world, but a world of the mind. After hearing Jimi Hendrix, we’d give him all of our money. We weren’t worried about being ripped off, we just wanted to go along for the ride. A ride so great, that we’d even listen to the work of the spinoff groups, just to hear what the supporting players had to say. They were closer to it than we ever were. They were at the center of an expanding universe. We wanted access, we needed access, we’d do anything for access.
