Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Traffic - Coloured Rain
This album was recorded in late 1967 and came to my attention in early spring, 1968. My friend Flip and I were unemployed at the time, on the dole as it were, and we spent a lot of the daylight hours at his house listening to records, talking about music, and smoking, ah, cigarettes, that's it, were were smoking cigarettes. And drinking wine most of the time, too. Most of our friends were working, and my girlfriend was in school, so we were killing time until the evening when the really serious hanging out could get started.
We played this album a few times a day for a while. It's hard to imagine now how fresh and new it sounded. It's also impossible to really understand how fast popular music was developing at the time. You don't get any sense of it looking at the Billboard charts for 1968, because that was mostly for the squares. Amazing musical things happened on a monthly basis all through those few years.
Flip died in a fire a couple of years later. I got married within a year and joined the corps of adults. 1968 was the worst year in history, politically, but it was a great year musically. I wouldn't want to go through all of that again, but it was kind of fun at the time, as long as you could tune out all of the negativity.
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2 comments:
Oh, I remember the time so well. Speaking of which, not enough credit is given to The Creation's "Making Time" (maybe 1966?). This was the first time I remember hearing a guitar played with a violin bow, a technique later employed by Jimmy Paige with Zeppelin, who got the credit. I remember that basement.
I'm with you about "Making Time." That fellow gets the nod for first with the violin bow. I read a review in Melody Maker and picked up an import copy of Making Time, took it to that basement and played it for the guys. (It sounds like you remember Larry's basement, the "Crypt.") That was a "wow!" moment. We were all giant Who fans at the time, so it was a natural for us to like it. That's a great age. Things like music seem important, and memorable. Now nothing is important, and I forget what I did yesterday.
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