Where Worlds Collide

OK, so who’s the joker that game me a remove vote on Blizg?

I notice that so far the only blogs with similar keywords are in my blogroll already, Scott and Julia. Where is everybody else?

If that well-known Seattle corporation were to build locomotives, they might be something like this. (Link from TrainNet)

BBC News are now reporting more than sixty dead in the terrible rock club fire at a Great White show at Warwick, Rhode Island. A lot of safety issues here, from the wisdom of using pyrotechnics in small venues, to the construction of the building itself; which burned to the ground in three minutes

One factor in the deaths is supposed to be the fact that almost everyone tried to get out through the main entrance where they came in, rather than the three other fire exits. Next time I go to a gig (and most of the bands I see nowadays are in that size of venue), I’ll make a mental note of the location of all the fire exits before the show. I suggest those of you that go to gigs do the same; it might just make the difference between life and death.

Update: Damien Penny, a fan of Great White, has some words on his blog, as does Andrew Ian Dodge.

Update 2: JimSpot has a lot more to say on the subject. Had he known about the gig, he would have been there.

“Id of the blogosphere” Lawrence Simon takes the piss out of US government “Don’t panic Mr Mainwaring” graphics.

Can someone who’s familiar with Mozilla tell me what’s going wrong with this display of this weblog on Mozilla? There seems to be something about the Issares/SJG press release that it doesn’t like; other archive posts all seem to look OK.

No, not Ümläüt this time, but A Shoggoth on the Roof: the Cast Album. One for Andrew Ian Dodge, methinks. (Thanks to Silkenray on Dreamlyrics for the link)

Talking of Ümläüt, I’m having great fun in a current game thread making up the early background of the band in-character (during an interview with a journalist) along with another player. Check out this thread for where’s it’s going, including the story of Nigel the Medallion Man.

The Bern Lötchberg Simplon railway have some new locomotives; I can seen some of these running on the N-gauge Wominseebahn as soon as Fleischmann do a version in BLS Livery!

These two photos show the first Re485 in service:

In the company of a BLS Re465 (which the new 485s will be replacing) at Hohtenn on the south ramp with a Rolling Road train

Crossing the Luogelkinn viaduct just east of Hohtenn on a Italy-bound clay train; the second loco is a DB class 185

Carnival of the Vanities #22 now up at The Peoples Republic of Seabrook

Justin Anderson complains about Nirvana making “Alternative” into mainstream in Blogcritics: Death of a Genre

A&R reps scoured Seattle and other alternative hotspots for the next big thing. Bands that would otherwise have become boy bands saw the riches at the end of the alternative tunnel. And what that meant was a diminishment in the quality of music. It also resulted in a sort of cultural imperialism in which hordes of frat boys and teenybopper girls became “alternative” overnight.

Nothing for it, Justin; you’ll have to become a prog rock fan. Prog rock will never get taken over by ‘lemmings’, because it will never be ‘cool’.

Of course, one of the tragedies of “Alternative” becoming mainstream was to kill off a lot of good music and replace it with stuff that was quite frankly inferior, just like what happened in Britain after punk in the late 70s.

I don’t get the ‘elitist’ attitude either; I don’t care how ‘cool’ my CD collection is, I listen to stuff I actually like. I’d rather admit to liking Marillion and Uriah Heep than have to pretend that I like REM for peer approval.

I wasn’t really a fan of the 1971/2 version of King Crimson. The previous incarnation of the band, featuring Greg Lake and Ian McDonald, had produced the Mellotron-drenched classic “In the Court of the Crimson King”, while the later 1973/4 band with Bill Bruford and John Wetton came up a trio of classic albums full of frantic improvisation. In between these two lineups came the two rather directionless studio albums recorded with a revolving cast of musicians, “Lizard” and “Islands”, both of which I find pretty much unlistenable.

With this live release, “Ladies of the Road”, perhaps it’s time to reassess this version of the band. Recorded on the 1971/2 world tour, it sees Robert Fripp joined by saxophonist Mel Collins, Boz Burrell on bass and vocals, and Ian Wallace on drums. With the Mellotron that had earlier defined their sound pushed into the background, the focus here is on Fripp’s guitar and Collin’s sax.

Unlike every other King Crimson live release (of which there have been a great many), this isn’t a record of any single show; instead it’s a compilation of the best takes from a whole tour. Indeed, the lack of any mention as to which songs where recorded where suggests that Fripp has spliced together some numbers from bits recorded on different nights; a technique used a lot by the late Frank Zappa.

Disk One features a set that draws heavily from “Islands” and “Lizard”, but the powerful live version of songs like “The Letters”, “Formentera Lady” and “Cirkus” are vastly superior to their studio counterparts. We still get a couple of songs from the Greg Lake incarnation, “Pictures of a City”, and of course, “21st Century Schizoid Man”. I’m not sure of the blues jam version of “In the Court of the Crimson King”, perhaps it’s just as well it’s but 46 seconds long.

Disk Two is an extended “Up yours!” to all those the music journalists that hate solos. It’s a 45 minute epic version of “21st Century Schizoid man” created by knitting together the middle solo sections from eleven different live takes to form a seamless and relentless sax and guitar solo.

Fripp was to disband this version of King Crimson at the conclusion of the tour; while this album highlights some very energetic playing, the American blues/jazz direction the other three were heading in was at odds with Fripp’s own chosen course. A year later, a new, radically different King Crimson was to appear, but that’s another story entirely.

Oh, and the song “Ladies of the Road” isn’t actually on the album.