Blog
Top 5: 09.12.19
Written by Jimmy
This is our regular Top 5 feature, where we talk about the top 5 things that strike our fancy this week — this week includes a bit on Donovan and Led Zeppelin, the end of musical classification, a very scary pug, ball girl and bullets and of course — a baby water buffalo having a bad day. Only at Abubilla Music.
1. Donovan links to Led Zeppelin, to Come Together and Jack Johhson. Like all flower power artists of the sixties, Donavan floats between fantastic and naff. Our top 5 is all about Donovan Fantastic and exploring a couple very cool links. So the first is that during summer of 65 there was a big Dylan vs. Donovan controversary and more specifically whether Donovan was just a Dylan wannabe. What folks ignored in all this was that Dylan was a much influenced by Irish and Scottish folk as Woodie Guthrie – and that a lot of the similarities with Dylan and Donovan was simply that both build a lot of their vocal styles off Irish-Scottish music, like the Clancy Brothers. So the next link here is that Hurdy Gurdy Man was backed by all the musicians of what then became Led Zeppilin and the churning guitar in the background is Jimmy Page, the drums John Bonham, the bass John Paul Jones. And Donovan points out in his documentary that Stairway to Heaven in many ways was Page’s attempt to break apart Hurdy Gurdy Man into the two extremes of 60’s flower power acoustic with 60’s heavy metal as defined by Page. I like that. And next link (and by the way read about Donovan hanging out in India with Beatles and a Beach Boy (Mike Love), is between Donovan doing Barbarajaggle and Mellow Yellow and Jack J0hnson doing Banana Pancakes or Better Together. And you’d probably not have had the funk of Come Together. And finally, its cool to know that Season of the Witch is the favourite rehearsal warm up song for Led Zeppelin.
2. The End of Musical Classification. The next little Top 5 point is a celebration of the end of Musical Classification. At beginning of sixties we had a great era, demonstrated by the Donovan-Zeppelin thing above, that artists were inventing and experiementing with all musical styles with little prejudice. Jimmy Page was exploring folk and heavy metal as was Hendrix. Donovan could do the flower power thing but also Season of the Witch. Then at Newport Jazz Festival the war of classification began when Dylan went electric and Pete Seegram rejected it (watch this clip and series if you can). Pete, unfortunately, made a stand and rejected notion that folk and electric could be same. That began a massive desire to classify and endorse a form of music and reject all others as inferior. So I was raised to ‘pick a decade’ and then say all others sucked — you were sixties, or seventies, or eighties or nineties (just look at the images). We had embraced that conservatism of our parents. My kids, with iPods, don’t classify – if they like a song it goes on iPod (where it has a half life, unfortunately, of about a week) but at least they go anywhere there interests take them (See Song Discovery 09.12.19). So for however much is lost by not having the joy of the ‘album open’ there is a lot gained by being able to take the music where it takes you (see Hunter’s blog).
3. Way too heavy — so the next of the Top 5 is about two fantastic ‘screams.’ The first is a very excited pug screaming at TV. Dear Lord help us! The second is violin scream in the shower inPsycho. Yikes. Which, of course, as all of you know, led to the famous end of Violins on Television Speech by Gilda Radner. Can someone help me find the clip?
4. Still too heavy so here’s Ball Jump Girl. Which is just… ugly. In contrasts to the beauty of water balloon being pierced or bullets being fired. Or the orgasmic distortions of slow motion sneezing, not to be confused with the real time orgasim from Harry Met Sally, followed by the best line ever done by Meathead’s (Rob Reiner’s of Spinal Tap fame — see ’11 Scene’) mom (and husband to Dick van Dykes boss (little Christmas clip on Alan Brady Show), who is known forever as having the worst English accent in movies (only to be beaten by the worst American accent in the history of the universe — see Sarah in Spooks, in direct contrast to McNulty in the Wire.
5. And the final, which most of you have scene, but let’s put some classics in our Top 5 is ‘Battle at Kruger’. SMCC commits to writing at least an outtake song for that little Water Buffalo — talk about a bad day. Puts things in perspective. So this leads to a couple great wild life clips including: Lyrebird Imitating Man and Great White Jumping .
So that’s it.
Jimmy