Category Particular platters
BLURRED VISION
Back in May of this year I was immersed in a project that occupied my waking hours (plus a few more besides) and left little room for other activities. The best I could manage at Vinyl Connection was a pictorial post that hinted at the topic. It was called, with coy indirectness, “What’s Going On […]
1971 COUNTDOWN: #65 — #61
65 LEAF HOUND — Growers Of Mushroom Inside half a minute you know exactly where you stand with Leaf Hound’s only LP, Growers Of Mushroom. “Freelance Fiend” opens with a guitar squall, powerful vocals and a blues-rock fusillade that would have made Hendrix grin. If the sound evokes Atomic Rooster, that’s not surprising as Peter […]
1971 COUNTDOWN: #71 — #66
After some time becalmed in lockdown waters, word has come from the poop deck of the good ship Vinyl Connection that it is well and truly time venture once more into the ocean that is “1971”. Although voyages on this varied and exciting sea have been a tad irregular, a few nautical miles have accumulated. […]
A YEAR OF GOOD VIBES — PART 1
I was asked to recommend some good vibes albums. I swallowed the bait, though it has taken a while to haul in the net. So here is a year’s worth of music featuring that unusual member of the percussion family, the vibraphone. For those unfamiliar with the instrument that Australian jazz legend John Sangster called […]
MASTERS OF UNREALITY
Black Sabbath’s third LP, released in July 1971, is not exactly a long-player. Clocking in at thirty-four minutes, the follow-up to 1970’s breakthrough Paranoid does not wear out its welcome. Overlooking the two brief instrumental pieces you are left with a six song record that opens with a love song to grass and closes with […]
1971, SINGER SONGWRITERS #1
The early 1970s saw the emergence of the singer-songwriter as an acoustic force in popular music. If you played something—commonly piano or guitar—and wrote your own material, why bother with a band? All that negotiating and compromise, pah! Do your own thing, (wo)man. Do it yourself. So albums boasting a single person’s name on the […]
AUTUMN 1971, MELBOURNE
Typing the title, a southern hemisphere companion to the previous post, I found myself wondering what was going on for me during autumn of that year. Not much, really. I was doing more-or-less exactly what my son is doing fifty years later: plodding through Year 10 in a suburban Melbourne secondary school. He’s sitting behind […]
CHILLED BUT WARM
Thunder rumbled around the pre-dawn purple, but burrowing under the doona I got another hour’s sleep. Maybe more a doze. When I crawled out it was light; brighter than expected given the vague sleep-penetrating sounds of heavy rain earlier. The morning blind raising ritual let in more light and more weather. The rain wasn’t rain, […]
FEBRUARY 1971 — PART ONE
We’re running late, by about two months, so let’s get into it. * FEBRUARY 1971 ALBUM RELEASES Simply the most infectious collection of straight-ahead electric boogie that you’ll ever hear. John Lee was a savvy veteran by the early 1970s, he’d witnessed the surge in interest following the British blues boom of the early 1960s […]
JANUARY 1971 — THREE LATE ARRIVALS
It is tempting to believe that the internet knows everything about everything. When it came to finding release dates for Vinyl Connections bushel of 1971 albums, it became clear that the www is not as all-knowing as you think. Sure, I discovered a number of errors in the VC spreadsheet, mostly albums where I had […]
SPLIT DECISION
Veteran British blues-rockers Groundhogs deserve respect. They were there, in one form or another, from the early days of the UK blues explosion, taking their name from a John Lee Hooker song (‘Ground Hog Blues’) and backing the legend on his mid-60s visit to old Londinium. After a debut album in 1968 showed them in […]
HAVE SPACESUIT—WILL TRAVEL
Ordering a book from the dreaded ‘Big River’ company, I was lured by the ‘on your list’ bait and, of course, bit. The item was a CD I’d removed from an order months ago, something that had caught my attention but not fully hooked me in. On a whim, I added it to the cart; […]
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