The Incredible String Band
Wee Tam & The Big Huge

New York, 1968...

Let's start with Simon...

Who is Simon?

Well, Simon is the nobody of the small band scene, someone who dresses like a bum and always keeps his eyes down.

When you ask about him, everyone shrugs.

He likes pseudonyms, just to say (nicknames like Bruno Wolfe, Hugh Bialy, Rex Rakish, Wolfgang Whatshisname) and he was with those guys, the ones about the eggplant for a while...

“You'd better watch out for that eggplant that ate Chicago because if it were hungry, it might eat your city too”...

But, above all, our Simon is someone who sings and plays superbly. The blow of his harmonica is like a scratch. The voice floats “shrill and bleeding” and the soul, the soul “crawls out from inside him.”

Then, of course, he's a weirdo. And if there's one thing weirdos should never do, it's stop being weird. And I say this because Simon has long since stopped practicing.

Believe it or not, he is now a maître d' at a fancy restaurant, and, man, you should see him; he doesn't seem like himself.

He's so sure of himself, so efficient.

And then that kind of mask, that salesman smile. But that's not the point.

The point is that outside Simon's restaurant are those of the Incredible String Band. And there's Joe Boyd too. And it was Joe Boyd who chose to go to that place. Well, he'll regret it...

He'll regret it for the rest of his life.

Anyway, now we need to step back.

...

Scotland, the '60s...

Edinburgh is a city full of poets. “Eight of them live on a canal barge, ten in the basement under the pet shop.” And all the others? Who knows where the others are...

Edinburgh is also a city full of folk, and folk is not a revival. Folk is a wildflower that insists on sprouting over and over. Excellent.

After all, youth too is a wildflower. All those people dressed in velvet, all that energy. Take the club, for example; you enter, and you are enveloped in a cloud of smoke, amidst the smell of coffee, bacon, beans.

Then there's sawdust on the floor, empty bottles, hookahs. The lunar girls who accompany you upstairs, disappear for a moment, then return completely nude with two pints in hand.

And what about those two oddballs? Clive, a stern beatnik with a sharp mind and a nomadic soul, and Robin, a kind of wizard with a heavy Scottish accent.

The first one started playing on the streets of Paris and now lives in a tent, the second draws songs directly from dreams.

Their music, according to Joe Boyd’s definition, is a round trip from Scotland to the Appalachians via Morocco and Bulgaria.

One fine day, “dragged by a sled wind,” Mike arrives at the club. He's a guy full of laughter and backslaps, and his role, at least initially, is that of an esoteric apprentice. Think Arthur and Merlin.

Then, once enlisted by the alien beatniks, it comes to the recording of the first album, the self-titled “The Incredible String Band.”

Produced by Joe Boyd, the album alternates moments of vivid folk and hypnotic epiphanies à la Davy Graham. Here comes the gypsy fiddle, the shimmering banjo, the concentric circles, the serpentine touch.

“We met a magic blackbird and have since left pieces of ourselves behind that, if you don't look too closely, might even seem like songs,” says Mike in the liner notes.

Anyway, Clive is elusive, distracted. There are signs, maybe a shuffle of tarot cards, maybe a phrase overheard by chance. Thus, as an eternal nomadic soul, he leaves the group and heads to Afghanistan.

Robin also sets off, destination Morocco. He stays away for six months and nearly starves. On his return, he brings with him some beautiful exotic instruments. When Mike, the eternal Arthur, hears their sound, he realizes that after having been a fish, it's now time to become a squirrel. The apprenticeship is not yet finished.

Then, when the time finally arrives, “the fool ventures where even angels fear to tread.” A place that's a sort of middle ground between tradition, naive sentiment, and Kerouac-style beat flow.

Not only that, but acid also plays a part. And “the lute becomes a cat”, the cat a maiden, and the maiden a cloud.

The final result, the album “The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion”, takes your breath away. Our guys have found a “Painting Box”, full of colors. And these are bright, loud colors, a puff of sparks in the air. And beyond the colors, the flavors. Beyond the flavors, the aroma.

Everything moves between rustic grace and wild beauty. And on music that darts like a fish and escapes like a lizard, the voices recite an unreal dissonant rosary.

The ghost of Dylan can be glimpsed, a disturbing bumblebee on a flowered meadow. And alongside the bumblebee, there can't be a lack of butterflies.

Psych butterfies? Yes, psych butterflies...

For the next one, “The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter,” the “Painting Box” chooses different colors, some nocturnal greens, certain earthy shades. With the meadow becoming forest, the nursery rhyme becoming ritual, and the sunbeams becoming stars.

The witch's hat flies away, transforms into a bat, then a raven. In what other way to describe the succession of enchantments and flying as needed?

Fairy/awkward voices, mysterious alien choruses, enchanted sounds in the grip of a very drugged vibration. It's no longer folk, it's no longer psychedelia, it's no longer world music, and who knows what it is.

“Spirits” and “Hangman” are two enormous masterpieces.

Opposite, yet united by an indefinable quid, together they are a kind of squaring the circle. And “if the peacocks talk gray,” the puddles reflect the colors.

After all, when the strange is more real than reality, the eccentric shows its natural spontaneity.

...

We left Simon busy with his maître d' duties. Well, he's still there.

Outside, the band is still signing autographs. So Joe Boyd is the first to enter and he knows them all, even Simon. But he scarcely recognizes him...

“Is it really him?”

After a while, Mick and Robin come in with their girlfriends, Rose and Licorice. The two girls, one sunny and the other elusive, have recently become stable members of the group. They play with amateur grace and have voices almost like Yoko. Fans adore them.

They sit down to eat, and Joe tells them about Simon: the pseudonyms thing, his appearance back in the day, the incredible change. The story is so curious that the four of them want to meet him.

So he approaches and, after putting on his best salesman smile, launches into a classic, the convert's speech...

“I was nothing, and now I am everything.”

The fact is, good Simon has become an adherent of the Church of Scientology, a horrible mix of bad science fiction, success cult, fake positivity, Rotary Club mysticism.

Every good Scientologist's task is to make converts. And Simon is quite good at this. Only, come on, it doesn't seem possible to go from William Blake to Ron Hubbard. Yet that's exactly what happens.

By the end of the convert's speech, Mike, Robin, Rose, and Licorice are essentially screwed.

It might be a coincidence, but it is from that precise moment that the music of the Incredible String Band ceases to be magical. Our guys will stop drinking and doing drugs, become super nice, super smiling, but goodbye wild beauty, goodbye enchantment, goodbye spontaneity.

...

“Wee Tam & The Big Huge”, the swan song a moment before Scientology.

In reality, these are two different albums recorded just a few months apart. At the time, they were released both separately and together.

The first is relaxed and dreamy, the second more visionary and dark. Both stand out for an unexpected simplicity and for renouncing most of the esoteric instrumentation. Now only the sitar crosses the Celtic mystery.

“Wee Tam” would be the boy, “Big Huge” the mystery of the cosmos. A hippie whimsy not to be laughed at, one of those that trigger the chuckles of the bad guys. But who cares about the bad guys, we are good...

For “Wee Tam,” the “Painting Box” offers softer colors. White softens an infantile yellow. A sleepy dust dissolves the ancient energy. After all, when you hear all things, you hear silence. “Teach me the flow,” says the song of the water.

All that was odd is now even, don't worry, eight is as magical as seven.

Here then are the “Songs of Innocence” by William Blake, here’s a pianissimo of dreams by the river, tune your ear, they might slip away.

Few references to the old “Incredible” quid, a Cajun fiddle, some sparkle from Mike. For the rest, a little Donovan, a bit of timeless folk, a touch of invigorating naivete.

On the other hand, “Big Huge” wanders through deep blues, nocturnal tarot cards. transcendent hypnosis.

Long ballads that step by step head toward the stars, dowsing voices, the sitar and the acoustic dynamic quality of each other.

The bard is here, and “walks on the sand not yet trodden.” Again and forever, the squaring of the circle. Or maybe just Arthur and Merlin together.

To hell with Scientology and all Scientologists...

...