Word: organism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rock is immediately gripping and this immediacy is what makes the greatest rock music as widely popular as it is. Jimi Hendrix was named the most important star of the year by, of all publications, Billboard, that infamous organ of AM radio rock. This would all be fine, and all the various forms of music would coexist happily, if it were not for the fact that American rock today is in some danger of being subverted by pernicious influences. This is a message I bring back from the Miami festival: The music of groups like the Grateful Dead, Iron Butterfly...
From Chuck Berry, again appropriately, to Terry Reid, the latest staggering import from England. At 19 Reid runs one of the most well-honed combos around: drums, organ and himself singer-guitarist. His group's polished, gleaming-hard sound has all the taut excitement that one associates with the best rock. In a sense Terry Reid, with his towering individual talent for arranging and composing and leading, is very much a Chuck Berry figure. He has the same inventive rock 'n' roll ear, the ability to make original driving music out of the simplest basic elements, all presented...
...musical structure that he favors is basically one of tight bursts of packaged melody--made up of a stinging organ sound, precise drumming and his own jabbing giutar, between intervals of his own singing which is acute and stormy. He also seems to have a nice sense of balance and discretion, rarely overstepping into excess. "Tinker Taylor," for example, has a pleasant original riff and this is milked in the song just about as far as it will go and no more--not pounded to death as some American groups are prone to do with their own minor creations. Within...
...Iron Butterfly discover a pleasant riff and instinctively they begin to give it the full treatment--toying with it pretentiously for about thirteen minutes, padding it with irrelevant organ solos and guitar solos and the mandatory drum solo (with extensive use of the bass drum yet!). This music is very different from, and inferior to, the concentrated, strictly organized, but striking sound of early black rock and roll of the Chuck Berry-Fats Domino-Little Richard variety--a sound which had its greatest impact among the swaggering, brash young British proletariat. When the white working classes in America finally shake...
...maedow. I remember them illuminated by the silvery-pink lights of the light show in the dark heat of the night crashing out their rapturous blend of music. Gary Brooker's expansively soulful singing, Robin Trower's eerie guitar, B. J. Wilson's deftly brilliant drumming, Fisher's streaking organ, and above it all the presence of Keith Reid who writes all the words, an enigmatic intricate personality, quite possible a troubled genius. Procul Harum are sobering and transcendental, allying glittering jewels of musicianship with their message of melancholia and self-doubt, one of the Sticking Greats...