Endless Summer Solstice

Brian Wilson - Surf's Up

The changing of the seasons brings us the end of a life extraordinary.

It makes perfect sense that his 83rd birthday -- which he missed by just a few days -- falls this year upon the summer solstice, as there will never be another musical figure, even if Delius himself were to resurrect from the tomb and sing his rendition of Good Vibrations, more associated with summertime than the unquantifiably visionary Brian Wilson.

There have been a zillion tributes, as there should be when a person of this magnitude departs the plane, so here goes one more.

Few people can lay claim to having such a multidimensional impact upon their chosen field that when the histories are written, it becomes undeniably obvious that there's their craft before them and their craft after them. The latter makes everyone ask what the heck they all thought was so great about the former, usually.

The initial, genre-defining Surfin'-era hits aside, his reputation rests primarily on two albums... one of which, technically, doesn't exist, but is considered by many to be what the YouTube documentary I just watched about it was titled: The Greatest Record Of All Time.

That's not even wrong or inaccurate to say that. It's even plausible to say that had it been issued when it was made and not abandoned in its assembly stages, it'd have fucked up the music industry so badly, all of subsequent cultural history would have been different.

It's said that when Paul McCartney received an acetate of the preceding LP, his consciousness was so altered he started to wonder what the heck he and his Moptop mates were up to... and whether or not they were any good at it. All of England agreed that it was the most revolutionary album to come from Pop music up to then, and Pet Sounds -- which was initially a commercial failure in the US -- is still one of the most beloved albums ever in Britain.

That said, Sir Paul's lucky the next one got shelved. Had he got an early pressing of SMiLE, The Beatles might have quit music altogether and gone into the actual submarine business, just to submerge and escape being outclassed by today's late, great birthday boy.

It's really one of the first and best concept albums, if you dig into it. I'm imagining it was the first one in the Pop realm to attempt the Classical pretense of different, distinct and defined movements, justifying its subtitle, A Teenage Symphony to God.

By using a journey across the USA's physical landscape to fashion a sort of Americana homage to the land, and unifying the song arc accordingly, he was able to completely recalibrate what was then considered possible not just in Pop music, but across all musics... and the thing existed only as a fleeting, shadily-bootlegged myth for a substantial period.

The thing I just watched postulated that Pet Sounds and SMiLE represent the beginnings of what would become Progressive Rock, and it wasn't lying. The daring orchestrations, the ridiculous harmonies, the zigzag chord progressions, the repeating of motifs through multiple tracks, and especially the mind-frying editing techniques on display ushered in the modern era of now as much as anything ever waxed, and nobody even heard SMiLE as it was truly intended for decades after it was made.

Mythologized forever, it was egged along by an appearance in a huge TV special of the time -- hosted by Leonard Bernstein and detailing the progression of Pop into more "serious" terrain -- of our hero playing the album's central song at the piano. This whetted the Pet Sounds-piqued public's appetite for what wouldn't fully surface until the next century, well after the dissolution of his masterwork led our hero to spiral on a well-documented, near-total psychic collapse into borderline catatonia.

Of course, pieces of it surfaced on subsequent Beach Boys albums, and the mythological proportions of SMiLE exponentially expanded. And beginning 50 years ago, bootlegs of the aborted sessions began to make the rounds, and over time fans began to construct their own versions of the unsurfaced masterpiece, exacerbating its rep as the single greatest lost album ever recorded.

It wasn't until the early 2000s that Brian Wilson -- born this day in 1942 -- finally got convinced to take a stab at completing it, on the heels of him resurrecting Pet Sounds and touring, for the first time in a long while, to near-universal adulation from audiences and critics alike.

The result was even greater and more positive than those reviews, and the tour that followed -- with a huge band capable of presenting music of such complexity in a live setting -- set the world on fire as the finished thing was brought out... and turned out to be even better than the intervening four decades of anticipatory hype might have suggested.

Here it is from that tour -- performed at Carnegie Hall and broadcast by NPR -- performed to perfection to close the show after a set of equally as historic hits he had with the Beach Boys and on his own.

 Brian Wilson

Carnegie Hall

New York City, New York USA

10.12+13.2004

01 And Your Dream Comes True

02 Surfer Girl

03 Row, Row, Row Your Boat

04 Hawaii

05 Add Some Music to Your Day

06 Good to My Baby

07 Please Let Me Wonder

08 Drive-In

09 You’re Welcome

10 Sloop John B

11 God Only Knows

12 Soul Searchin’ (incl. NPR voice-over intro)

13 California Girls

14 Our Prayer/Gee

15 Heroes and Villains

16 Do You Like Worms? (Roll Plymouth Rock)

17 Barnyard

18 Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine

19 Cabinessence

20 Wonderful

21 Look (Song for Children)

22 Child Is Father of the Man

23 Surf’s Up

24 I’m In Great Shape/Workshop

25 Vega-tables

26 On a Holiday

27 Wind Chimes

28 Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow

29 In Blue Hawaii

30 Good Vibrations

31 introduction of Van Dyke Parks & Brian Wilson/Do It Again

32 Fun, Fun, Fun

33 Love and Mercy/NPR outro

34 NPR "SMiLE" feature by Bob Boilen

Total time: 1:41:01

disc break goes after Track 19

Brian Wilson – vocals & keyboards

Scott Bennett – vocals, keyboards, mallets & guitar

Nelson Bragg – vocals, percussion, whistles & celery

Jeffrey Foskett – vocals, guitar & hammer

Probyn Gregory – vocals, guitar, brass, Tannerin & whistles

Jim Hines – drums, mallets, saw & sound effects

Bob Lizik – bass guitar, guitar & beret

Paul Mertens – woodwinds, saxophones, harmonica & semi-conductor

Taylor Mills – vocals, power drill & leg-slap

Darian Sahanaja – vocals, keyboards, mallets & drill

Nick Walusko – vocals & guitar

with

Stockholm Strings 'n' Horns:

Staffan Findin – bass trombone

Andreas Forsman – violin

Erik Holm – viola

Anna Landberg – cello

Malin-My Nilsson – violin

Björn Samuelsson – trombone

Victor Sand – saxophone, flute & clarinet

Markus Sandlund – cello

224/48k audio streamed from the NPR website @ npr.org

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, tracked -- with NPR announcer mostly removed/occasionally attenuated -- and remastered by EN, June 2025
578 MB FLAC/direct link

This show circulates in ROIOland and on YouTube from a vastly inferior, off-air FM tape -- one iteration is on a boot CD that eliminates two songs! heresy! -- that only went to a paltry 9 kHz in the spectral analysis. Fortunately, NPR hoisted a whole bunch of Brian Wilson- and Beach Boys-related stuff onto the web when dude passed away 9 days ago, and this complete performance -- maxing at about 16 kHz like an FM broadcast should -- was among them.

I took the liberty of placing the NPR feature included in the broadcast, all about the story of SMiLE, at the end, in case anyone wants to give it a spin.

So one of our ultimate Maestros -- and it's well-documented how hard a time he had, battling mental illness and the music business that guarantees it, for over 60 years -- is no more.

There's no reason to be sad, though. A long life, with all the peaks and valleys longevity ensures, that made a global impact that will resonate as long as people have ears to hear. The lifetime of Brian Wilson can never, ever die, and the melodic material he masterfully metastasized into some of the most mesmeric and lasting beauty that shall ever be will still be here, ages after all of us are long and forever gone.

And God Only Knows, in times such as these, that's enough of a reason to SMiLE.
--J.

6.20.1942 - 6.11.2025
I heard the word
wonderful thing
a children's song

Praise Behemoth!

Pere Ubu - Prison of the Senses

I'm back after my Oops I Posted It Before I Knew WTF I Was Doing mess from the other day with yet another, completely different visionary artiste of our epoch. This time I may not even alter it six times after I put it up!

Today we have the birthday of a truly singular figure -- no, not that fascist, self-worshiping, illiterate asswipe -- who sadly passed a little bit ago and whose 72nd birthday would have been today.

This guy, though. Of all the music to have come from Northeast Ohio in the 1970s, is there anything as viscerally weird and unique as Pere Ubu? I almost hope not.

The whole Cleveland scene back then was of Biblical proportions... and Rocket from the Tombs did beget Pere Ubu, and The Numbers Band did declare "We're all DEVO!". And all rejoiced Tin Huey-ly.

When Ubu first Ubu'd in the second half of the 1970s, there was nothing on the planet like them. If they were to approach a record company today, they would likely be escorted out by security, if they were lucky.

Lucky for us, back then it was almost the stranger the better, so true and unalloyed visionaries such as David Thomas -- born this day in 1953 -- were able to break through and drop their tonnage of truth upon us all.

When he was in Rocket from the Tombs he was called Crocus Behemoth, but when he started Pere Ubu he reverted to his real name, which made it seem all the more different and unusual in a way.

As charismatic and uncompromising as any figure ever produced by Rock music, there is no way to describe what he was up to, other than to say his mind was like an antenna that picked up the post-industrial realities of America, and he spent many decades in full-on broadcast mode.

Like some sort of unleashed and obese shaman of Urban Angst, he pattered and preached his grand gospel of the glorious American Dystopia across decades of seminal, galvanizing performances both in and out of Ubu.

He must have appeared possessed by demons to the Ubu-uninitiated, but to people who love Art and Music he was like a Power Spot on legs, oozing a completely individual presence all his own.

Like I said, if he tried to get over these days he'd likely be escorted out and you'd catch him performing in one of those YouTube bodycam footage clips -- face down on the concrete somewhere -- but thankfully for us, he came up at a time where almost anything went artistically. So he wasn't even that uncommercial in the context of 1978 or whatever.

He participated in and even helmed a gazillion other projects since back then, but he always maintained at least one foot in Pere Ubu his entire performing career, which lasted until the very end of his life.

The vast majority of Ubootlegs are legitimately issued and are gathered here on their Bandcamp page. Their performances for National Public Radio have never been issued as far as I know, so I have dressed these up in nice clothing for your 390 degree dose of stimulated stereo today, to honor DT's life and passing.

Taken together, these offer as great an introduction into the oeuvre of this one-of-a-kind band as any concert I can think of.

Pere Ubu

Mountain Stage

Culture Center Theater

Charleston, West Virginia USA

10.6.1991 & 12.21.2017

01 introduction

02 Street Waves

03 Goodnight Irene

04 Caligari's Mirror

05 Nevada

06 Over the Moon

07 Life of Riley

08 Busman's Honeymoon

09 Oh Catherine

10 Cry, Cry, Cry

11 introduction

12 Slow Walkin' Daddy

13 Breathe

14 Monkey Bizness

15 Carnival

16 Howl

17 Prison of the Senses

Total time: 1:00:16

Tracks 01-10: 10.6.1991

David Thomas - vocals

Jim Jones - guitar

Eric Drew Feldman - keyboards

Tony Maimone - bass

Scott Krauss - drums

Tracks 11-17: 12.21.2017

David Thomas - vocals

Robert Wheeler - synthesizers & theremin

Kristof Han - lap steel guitar

Michele Temple - bass & vocals

Gary Siperko - guitar

Steve Mehlman - drums & vocals

the MC for both segments is Larry Croce

320/48k audio streamed from the NPR website @ npr.org

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, denoised, tracked & slightly remastered by EN, June 2025
366 MB FLAC/link is below with other show

Pere Ubu

Anthem

National Public Radio studios

Washington, DC USA

March 1999

originally aired 3.13.1999

01 Anthem introduction

02 David Thomas introduction

03 SAD.TXT

04 talk 1

05 Highwaterville

06 talk 2

07 Urban Landscape

08 explanation of "Ubu Roi" & talk 3

09 Mirror Man excerpt

10 talk 4 incl. Mr. Wheeler excerpt

11 Worlds In Collision

12 talk 5

13 Fly's Eye

14 talk 6

15 Wasteland

Total time: 47:43

David Thomas - vocals

Tom Herman - guitar & vocals

Steve Mehlman - drums

Robert Wheeler - theremin, keyboards & vocals

Michele Temple - bass & vocals

combination of 2 low gen (possibly master) off-air FM captures -- likely to cassette -- of the original 1999 NPR broadcast

retracked, edited and very slightly remastered by EN, June 2025

283 MB FLAC/direct link to both shows

I shall return next weekend with some sustenance to start off the Endless Summer in the proper tropical perspective -- this, in honor of a recently departed summertime icon -- so you'll want to get your 'boards all waxed and ready for that, because I saw the forecast and Surf's Up.

All in good time. For now we'll let the good times roll through like the clock atop Cleveland's Terminal Tower, giving due thanks and praises to David Thomas and his pet project Pere Ubu for 50 years of telling it -- and speaksinging, screeching, babbling, and often wordlessly vocalizing it in ways that might terrify your grandmother -- like it was and is for us all.--J.

6.14.1953 - 4.23.2025

that's the prison of the senses

Pretty Things: The Beats of Bernard Purdie

Pretty Purdie - Heavy Soul Slinger

Sorry to be flogging the mixtape compilation compendia angle twice in a row, but I got on another of my little manic binges, and you, fair reader, are the beneficiary. I try to make commonly social-life-destroying traits -- like my obvious predilection towards compulsive, obsessive mania -- work for some reasonably arguable iteration of the common good. It sure beats contemptuously harassing strangers with moonhead conspiracies only the person saying them and the people they're trying to feel accepted by believe on social media all day anyway.

It's astonishing that no one ever got obsessed or manically motivated enough to attempt what I'm about to drop here, but then to get the rights to all these different songs, by all these different artists, on who knows how many labels owned by who knows who would take every lawyer on Earth working 16 hour days for who knows how long to crack.

You also have to take into account that today's birthday battery brahmin -- and it's no lie whatsoever to name him the most recorded drummer in history -- has, at some point or another in the last 60 years, taken credit for approximately 93% of the drum tracks on all the recorded music of those long and fruitful decades.

What takes it to an even more surreal level is that he may, in fact, have played on 93% of the recorded music of the last 60 years. Some people, rare as they are, distinguish themselves by their ability to live up to their own hype. Few, but some.

Bernard Purdie -- nickname: "Pretty" -- is most firmly in this pantheon of people that exist beyond the heavyweight class of their art, in a realm only a handful of humans get to claim.

The most sampled drummer in Hip-Hop history -- and likely the most recorded in the annals of all music, since recording technology was invented -- his records will never be approached, much less broken. They will, however, be danced to by people whose great-grandparents aren't even born yet.

I've wanted to cover him on here since I started, back when wild beasts roamed an Earth covered in red plankton, but I could identify no ROIO or show or whatnot that I felt really did justice to his essence, galactically broad and integral to the arc of the history of this stuff as it is.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, he has formed the engine that has driven so many tracks on so many radios, and ushered folks onto so many dancefloors that, were I to try to list every session and single and album on which he's appeared, I would literally be here typing until time ended.

The timekeeper of more timeless tunes than anyone ever to grip sticks, I was vexed for years on how to make a thing that might capture what stands him as a central figure in all of modern music. That is until I found this other (yes it's tremendous) blog, and the double CD, deep-cut Pretty Purdie put-together its proprietor has up on his page.

As I sometimes get into doing, once I saw what he had assembled -- I exaggerate not when I say that he made, really, as good and as thoughtful a mixtape as someone can make -- my first instinct was to reassemble its all-mp3 playlist, track for track, in a lossless audio format immediately.

That proved sticky with a couple of his more obscure-yet-essential selections, but I got it together for both volumes of his creation.

That's where the legendary mania kicked in.

And then, I wake up days later and I'm sitting there, having to make 93 of the cornerstone tracks of modern music the same damn volume level. By hand. Gosh, my arm hurts... but not as much of a hurt as Bernard "Pretty" Purdie -- in the conversation for Single Greatest Drummer in all species history -- puts on the skins in this merely 6 1/2 hours of badass backbeating, Purdie Shuffling mayhem. Which really could be a physical boxset some day, were all the attorneys in this Milky Way Sector gathered to the purpose.

Bernard "Pretty" Purdie

Pretty Things: The Beats of Bernard Purdie

1966-1980

CD1: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 1

01 Bernard Purdie – Soul Drums (1968)

02 The Five Stairsteps – O-o-h Child (1970)

03 Tim Rose – Hey Joe (1967)

04 King Curtis – Whole Lotta Love (1971)

05 Shirley Scott & The Soul Saxes – You (1968)

06 Aretha Franklin – Rock Steady (1972)

07 Nina Simone – Real Real (1967)

08 John Lee Hooker – I Don’t Wanna Go to Vietnam (1968)

09 Bama The Village Poet – I Got Soul (1972)

10 Gil Scott-Heron – The Needle’s Eye (1971)

11 Esther Phillips – Sweet Touch of Love (1972)

12 David Newman – Captain Buckles (1971)

13 Margie Joseph – Touch Your Woman (1973)

14 Roberta Flack – Sunday and Sister Jones (1971)

15 Wayne Davis – I Like the Things About Me that I Once Despised (1973)

16 Donal Leace - Country Road (1972)

17 Gabor Szabó  – Paint It Black (1966)

18 Leon Thomas – Let’s Go Down to Lucy's (1972)

19 Ralfi Pagan – La Vida (1975)

20 Brother Jack McDuff – A Change Is Gonna Come (1966)

CD2: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 2

01 Cornell Dupree – Teasin’ (1974)

02 Joe Cocker – I Get Mad (1974)

03 Robert Palmer – How Much Fun (1974)

04 Steely Dan – Deacon Blues (1977)

05 Cat Stevens – 100 I Dream (1973)

06 Grady Tate – Sack Full of Dreams (1969)

07 Dusty Springfield – In the Winter (1974)

08 Cheryl Lynn – You’re the One (1978)

09 Roy Ayers – Melody Maker (1978)

10 Herbie Mann – What’s Going On (1971)

11 Quincy Jones – Oh Happy Day (1969)

12 Letta Mbulu – Music Man (1976)

13 Joe Bataan – I’m No Stranger (1972)

14 Freddie McCoy – Funk Drops (1966)

15 Marion Williams – Wicked Messenger (1971)

16 Ronnie Foster – Sweet Revival (1973)

17 Hummingbird – Fire and Brimstone (1976)

18 Hall & Oates – I’m Just a Kid (Don’t Make Me Feel Like a Man) (1973)

19 Gene Ammons – Feeling Good (1969)

20 Mongo Santamaria – Baby What You Want Me to Do (1968)

CD3: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 3

01 introduction of BP

02 Bernard Purdie - Hap'nin' (1973)

03 Steely Dan - Babylon Sisters (1980)

04 Gary Burton - Vibrafinger (1970)

05 King Curtis - Soul Serenade (1971)

06 Albert Ayler - Sun Watcher (1969)

07 Boogaloo Joe Jones - Right On (1970)

08 Daryl Hall & John Oates - She’s Gone (1973)

09 Felix Pappalardi - Sunshine of Your Love (1979)

10 Larry Coryell - Morning Sickness (1969)

11 Charles Kynard - Odds On (1970)

12 Richie Havens - Headkeeper (1974)

13 Garland Jeffreys - Harlem Bound (1973)

14 Les McCann & Eddie Harris - Shorty Rides Again (edit) (1971)

15 Aretha Franklin - Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do) (1974)

16 Miles Davis - Red China Blues (1974)

CD4: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 4

01 Buddy Terry - Lean On Me (Lean On Him) (1972)

02 The Soul Finders - Respect (1967)

03 Richard "Groove" Holmes - Flyjack (1975)

04 The Last Poets - Ho Chi Minh (1977)

05 Arif Mardin - Street Scene: Strollin' (1974)

06 Rusty Bryant - Ga Gang Gang Goong (1973)

07 Carla Thomas - Where Do I Go? (1969)

08 Al Kooper - Magic In My Socks (1969)

09 Sonny Phillips - Sure 'Nuff, Sure 'Nuff (1969)

10 Gary McFarland - 80 Miles an Hour Through Beer-Can Country (excerpt) (1969)

11 The Insect Trust - Hoboken Saturday Night (1970)

12 Houston Person - The Houston Express (1971)

13 Harlem River Drive - Idle Hands (1971)

14 Dakota Staton - Let It Be Me (1972)

15 Dizzy Gillespie - Soul Kiss (1970)

16 Hank Crawford - Baby, I Love You (1969)

17 Phil Upchurch - Muscle Soul (1968)

18 King Curtis - Memphis Soul Stew (1969)

CD5: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 5

01 Herbie Hancock - Wiggle-Waggle (1969)

02 Pee Wee Ellis - Fort Apache (1977)

03 Jackie Lomax - Lost (1972)

04 Johnny "Hammond" Smith - Purdie Dirty (1969)

05 Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway - Where Is the Love (1972)

06 Randy Brecker - The Vamp (1970)

07 Melvin Bliss - Synthetic Substitution (1973)

08 Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1971)

09 The Five Stairsteps - Dear Prudence (1970)

10 Ben E. King - What Is Soul? (1967)

11 Jimmy McGriff - The Bird Wave (1970)

12 Roy Ayers' Ubiquity - The Boogie Back (1974)

13 Solomon Burke - When She Touches Me (Nothing Else Matters) (1968)

14 Tim Moore - I Can Almost See the Light (1974)

15 Wilson Pickett - Deborah (1968)

16 Yusef Lateef - Livingston Playground (1969)

17 Louis Armstrong - Give Peace a Chance (1970)

18 James Brown - It's a Man's Man's Man's World (1966)

19 Steely Dan - Home At Last (1977)

20 Pretty Purdie - Heavy Soul Slinger (1972)

Total time: 6:36:15

imaginary box set containing 93 iconic grooves of The Maestro, Bernard "Pretty" Purdie

volumes 1 & 2 originally conceived, selected and sequenced 

by Any Major Dude with Half a Heart, whose excellent page can be found right here

reconstructed losslessly and remastered by EN, June 2025

volumes 3-5 selected, sequenced, edited and remastered by EN, June 2025
2.36 GB FLAC/direct link

So we see that the sonic revolution of our musical epoch may not have been televised, but it certainly was recorded pretty substantially... and for a whole lot of the time that the tape was rolling, "Pretty" Purdie was perched upon the drum throne like a potentate of propulsion. I just hope he's truly on all of these myriad tracks, but AMD and I researched it all as thoroughly as boys with a high-speed internet box and the will to know the truth can, so we should be good here. (((EDIT: I had to change four of the songs -- after I chiseled it out through further research that BP probably doesn't play on them -- so I switched them for ones that were certainly him!)))

Born this day in 1939, Bernard Purdie is 86 today, and he is still alive and sticking, thank Providence and his continuing good health. I will return in a few days with another unquantifiably influential figure, but today is all about looking -- and sounding -- as "Pretty" as can be, and I hope my (and Any Major Dude's, major kudos and thanx to him) compendium of crunch will assist everyone in cele-vibrating at their very best!--J.