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Rating: In 1966, Aspen Magazine included a Flexi disc with two tracks composed by emerging composers.
On side B, there was an instrumental piece by the Velvet Underground, “Loop”: a beautiful guitar feedback performed by John Cale, still captivated by La Monte Young and the eternal music or perhaps by Robert Ashley’s The Wolfman, an artist somewhat forgotten even by those who don't forget much. To explore Ashley further, I recommend a wonderful documentary by Greenaway: “Four American Composers.”
Probably, Loop was one of those creations that didn’t find space on the banana album; one of those spur-of-the-moment creations, born between a session and a borderline evening at the Factory. The last groove of the flexi is deliberately tampered with, to repeat the final groove of Loop ad infinitum. All we needed was Velvet Underground & Nico to end like that, with “Loop” telling us about eternity, and we could have closed it there.
On side A, instead, an instrumental guitar piece by Peter Walker, “White Wind.”
Walker loved to play guitar like a sitar: a deeper sound acting as a drone, followed by a psychedelic cross between Raga and Flamenco.
It’s '66, baby. Or rather: it’s '66, brother: tune in. Ça va sans dire: we are in the cosmic mood, peyote, trip, let go, the States deeply involved in the Vietnam conflict, so let's strip naked and return to the earth. “You’re in the cold land. You’re in the black land.” If only Morrison had written that sentence. But instead, it was Carducci who wrote it, without the slightly subject allure of English stylistic appeal.
And after imprinting in minds the image of an English-speaking, psychedelic Carducci, already leader of the Green Pomegranate, here’s Paul Walker again, a student of Ravi Shankar, so much a student of Shankar that he was nearly stunned when, a year earlier, George Harrison, also a student of Shankar, inserted a sitar in Rubber Soul.
Walker couldn’t find the right words: the band of thirteen-year-old howler monkeys had put a sitar in the new album. He paid homage to Norwegian Wood, with a cover found in the album “Rainy Day Raga.” I like to think that this cover, unknown to most, could be the first clear official recognition in those years: the confirmation that the Beatles weren’t just a quartet of chart charmers but a group formed by four gentlemen of music, well-listed among the resounding names (some rightly, others less so) in Music History manuals.
To close the circle (after all, between drones and feedback, what else could I close?), I have uploaded a file that I promptly attach, composed as follows:
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White Wind
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Loop
(and this is the Flexi)
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Norwegian Wood (Peter Walker cover)
And two tributes mixed by me:
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White Wind Loop (overlapping the flexi tracks)
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Norwegian Loop (final tail).
And enjoy listening, here. (Don’t ask me why that family portrait with a background of washing machines: I might even give an explanation).
Curious note: Fifty long years have passed since the publication of this flexi. There used to be publishing realities capable of offering their audience such masterpieces.
I imagine the dialogues:
- What are you doing today, John?
- I'm envisioning the publication of a flexi that has the drone, the feedback as its common thread; a new, old way of understanding contemporary horizontality.
After doing this, life must be so fulfilling that you can just go screw off in the cold land, baby John.
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