Justice Is Coming To Tombstone, Its Musical Highlights Are Coming To You

When Tombstone made it into theaters in late 1993 it was already a legendarily troubled production, though a lot of the issues- were kept under wraps at the time. Originally scheduled as the directing debut of screenwriter Kevin Jarre, Jarre got canned a couple of weeks into the job after being hopelessly overwhelmed by the job and falling behind schedule. Kurt Russell, if you believe his own account, took over directing incognito, as they hired genre vet George P. Cosmatos as a 'ghost director'. Faced with Kevin Costner's competing production that, due to Costner's clout, blocked most distribution, they had trouble indinging a distributor and finally got the film out at Buena Vista and Tombstone became a surprising box office hit. 

You know what might've helped in that success? Having one of the greatest teaser trailers of all time! In between the quick cutting, the relentless music taken from Peter Gabriel's "The Rhythm Of The Heat", the parade of stars and recognizable faces on display, and the booming voice of trailer voiceover man, this is what puts butts into seats:

Seriously, how do you not want to go and see that movie after watching that teaser? (An amusing sidenote: how the teaser tries to elevate Jason Priestley - then the hottest teen star with Beverly Hills 90210 - to a main character, when he has a grand total of about five minutes screen time and is completely inconsequential to the film's story). 

Every time I do a rewatch of Tombstone and I'm about twenty minutes or so in, I think to myself 'What an underrated classic this is', normally right around the scene where Kurt Russel's Wyatt Earp schools an asshole-ish saloon gambling master, played by a then-unknown Billy Bob Thornton. And then the movie goes on, and the whole romance with an actress thing starts and the movie kind of starts to drag...and then, well, it ends up being the merely pretty good movie we all remember, plus an outstanding performance that some more should remember. 

A merely pretty good Western it might be, but it is one of the most quotable. Seriously, what a number of cool lines Tombstone has:

"We cross?"

"Are you gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?"

"You're an oak, Wyatt!"

"I'm in my prime..."

and of course "I'm your Huckleberry". 

It's fair to say that this is Val Kilmer's best performance, and I'd say Michael Biehn is right when he considers his duel with Kilmer his finest hour. The fear, almost panic in Johnny Ringo's face when he realizes he'll face Doc Holliday, not Earp, the way he tries to talk himself out of the situation, and then how his fearful face turns into a crazy-eyed, murderous grimace, when he realizes he can't: "Alright, lunger, let's do it". Biehn might have never been a master thespian, but here he dances with a great actor, and he holds up his end of the bargain. Just a great movie scne and that is all. 

(Also: Kilmer got fuckin' robbed of an Oscar, hell, he wasn't even nominated! There was a ton of competition, but still. What do you remmeber more? Kilmer in this or Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive?)

You wish Tombstone would have had two or three more of those scenes, but journeyman director George P. Comatos - or Russell, if you believe him - wasn't all of a sudden going to be John Ford or Howard Hawks. There's a classic Hollywood elegance to the film, and some wonderful shots, but at two hours the movie can't quite sustain viewer interest at all times. One of the issues was the overly ambitious script with dozens of parts, that had Kevin Costner attached to Tombstone, before he decided to mount his own Wyatt Earp picture (titled, very imaginatively, Wyatt Earp, natch!) with Lawrence Kasdan. Costner wanted more spotlight on Wyatt's (i.e. his) character, which Jarre refused,but finally Russell had to prune down the script to make the budget and schedule, making his main character what he calls an aura figure, without much interior life or characterisation. The mammoth script and less-than-ideal shooting conditions mean that Tombstone is one of those weird movies, that moves both too fast and not fast enough simultaneously, that does too much and too little at the same time. 

It's also fair to say that the 'pretty good' verdict also applies to the music score by  business veteran Bruce Broughton, probably brought in on the strength of his score for Silverado. When you hear the score, it's like the film: You wish it would be better then 'functional to pretty good'. Now, true to the credo of this blog, this isn't a bad listen, or it wouldn't be on here, but it's interest is limited, as Broughton simply hasn't written that many memorable cues. What's memorable is here, but the strict quality control of the One Buck Guy means that there isn't a ton of the score here. About 25 minutes is all there is, but I figured you'd rather spend a good 25 minutes with this score, then get bored during an hour of it. At least the second half, with its more action-based cues, builds up a nice head of steam, before we get to the "Tombstone Main Theme that runs through the end credits - in which we recap seeing Earp and his group walking to the O.K. Corral, the scene probably most remember from this movie, anyway.  

As for the opening track, it's the only one that isn't strictly speaking a score cue from the movie. "Tombstone Heat" is a (mostly) vocal-less mix of "The Rhythm Of The Heat" that approximates the feel of that film teaser. Oh, by the way: I am known for mercilessly cutting things down, but this version of the Tombstone Motion Picture Soundtrack is not one of those times. I did choose the existing shorter edits of the tracks "Josephine" and "Morgan's Death", but everything else is its original length, the score was and is  originally made up of sometimes really short cues, a couple of which I extracted from longer medleys. 

So, Tombstone, a good movie with a pretty nice score. Go rewatch the movie (this write-up hopefully did its part to inspire you), if you have the opportunity, and then listen to this breezy version of the film's score. 

The Other Side(s) Of Being Born In The USA...And Making Music There

It has become almost apocryphal to say that for every album Bruce Springsteen released, there is at least one he didn't, but since the man has opened the gates to his vault over the last decade (and, ahem, the gates to his other vault), it's becoming more and more evident, how true this is, now that people don't have to exclusively piece things together from bootlegs anymore. In the cas eof the run-up to Born In The USA, Bruce had material for about six albums, that he then pruned down and selected and reselected until coming up with the twelve-song track list - including famous late arrival for hit single purposes "Dancing In The Dark". A ton of the other tracks went back in or stayed in the vaults, though Bruce churned out a handful of possible contenders as b-sides. 

Now, not all of this material is top notch - how could it be? - but overall there are a number of very strong songs that didn't get their due in time, and coud have been hits if Springsteen had issued them with an eye on the charts. I'm mainly thinking of "My Love Will Not Let You Down", finally issued on Tracks fourteen years later, which sounds much more like a hit single than half of the tracks of Born In The USA that did become top ten hits. With Born In The USa you can easily argue that momentum in pop and rock music is real, because at any other time, I don't think a so-so song like "I'm Going Down" would have come anywhere near the top of the charts if it hadn't come from the unstoppabe blockbuster that was Born In The USA.

But back to some of those songs. What if Bruce had kept some of the unused, but high quality stuff that didn't make the cut, and quickly thrown out a follow-up album in late 1985 or early 1986? (In real life he didn't need to, because Born In The USA was still throwing off singles in November 1985, more than a year and a half after the album had been released, following the trailblazing of Michael Jackson's Thriller) That album could've been Rockaway The Days, our One Buck Record of the day, slily presented with a cover that would remind people of its prdecessor - as if here was a need at the time to do so. I have already documented some of Bruce's best demo work with Don't Back Down last year, so this focuses on the finished tracks. I was rather brutal in my selection, dropping two numbers at the last second to make Rockaway The Days a vinyl-appropriate nine-track 40-minute affair. All killer, no filler, or pretty much.  

"Frankie", a lengthy track that oes back to Bruce's love of Van Morrison was a concert classic in 1976, the dropped from the line-up of Darkness On The Edge Of Town for Bruce's harder-edged material. He and the E-streeters gave it another try in 1982, but with the pop-rock sheen of Born In The USA and its eye on concise songs, "Frankie" again got the boot. And in some ways, it is clarly a song from a different era that Bruce that he had left behind, but as a nice throwback to romantic mid-70s Bruce it's a really nice piece that deserves its place in the sun. Another temporarily lost classic, "This Hard Land" figured on early track lists of Born In The USA as its last track, before Bruce inexplicably discarded it, only to resurrect it as a a re-recording for his Greatest Hits album. Fittingly, maybe, it's now the closing track of Rockaway The Days. 

Rockaway The Days collects some of Bruce's finest, if unassuming, pop moments from the era like "Man At The Top" with a very vague country influence, the raucous "Lion's Den" originally recorded during a session for Gary U.S. Bonds (and having its horns anachronistically added in 1998 for Tracks, but we'll turn a blind eye on that, exceptionally). and "Janey Don't You Lose Heart", which like "Man At The Top" was brought out as a b-side. "Janey" also has the first recorded vocals of Nils Lofgren on a Springsteen track, who overdubbed his harmonies on the original 1983 version. 

"Protection", used here as a kick-ass opener for what would have been side b, isn't a finished studio track, but the still very shiny demo Bruce recorded and then gave to Donna Summer. He originally wrote another song for her, which arguably fit her style better, but Jon Landau more or less forbid Bruce to give it away. That song was "Cover Me", a song that I personaly never felt was particularly great, but it bacame a huge hit as Born In The USA's second single, so maybe Landau knows a thing or two more about what the record-buying public likes. 

Rockaway The Days - nine top song from mid-80s Bruce, some of which arguably are better than the weake numbers on Born In The USA. Either way, a very fine companion to the big blockbuster that came before it. 

 

Get Into The Spirit Of Spirit...Once Again

Someone asked, the One Buck Guy delivers. In spades. Indeed, all original Spirit links are dead, as these have been around for a while. Short reminder: You want a re-up, just ask for it, as 'Unknown' did. Now, if he had given himself a nickname to sign his message, in the name of convivility, that would have been even better, but we're off to a good start. So, here's the sprited Spirit Five Pack,

including

- the reimagined one album version of sprawling double whopper Spirit Of '76, one of this blog's first 'classics' which you can find more about here.   

- the Spirit Of The Seventies comp that compiles the rest of the worthwhile 1970s Spirit material post-Sardonicus into much more listenable form, with more info over here. 

- Radio Aqua Blue, the power quartet albumm that Spirit could have brought out in 1979 during a lean period in Spirit land (which, by now you have guessed, you can read about more here).  

- Possible follow-up Rock Of Ages, featuring lots of guitar power from the once again power trio (I don't post a link since the write-up is really short and relatively inconsequential). 

and finally

- the Spirit of The Eighties comp that compiles the band's uneven 1980s material into a very listenable compilation, that I talk about here.

The words, wit and wisdom of the One Buck Guy (ahem...) are over there, the music will be right here. 

Hours of heavy rock'n'roll, beautiful ballads and endearing oddities from Randy California and his ever-changing - except step dad Ed Cassidy of course - line-up of sidemen.

This is your chance, folks, get into the Spirit of Spirit once again...

Let's Have Poco Sing Again...Once More

...and thus we arrive at the end (or almost, more on that later) of our little Poco retrospective/partial reissue campaign, with something that you have already seen on these pages, but only if you've been around for a while. I posted my resequenced version of Poco's Cantamos, their last album for Epic Records, in March 2024, and a lot of the observations and remarks about the music and the sequencing in that write-up still hold true. 

Some, however, can be amended, such as my wondering about the original, still ugly-as-all-hell cover with the small picture of the band not even in the centre of the image. Well, it turn out it was a cutesy gimmick, that nonetheless had pretty harsh consequences. The cardboard cover (with the weird Southwestern art) of the original pressings were indeed having a small cut-out window through which you could see the band on the inner paper sleeve. Whether a band of Poco's rater modest commercial standing needed this kind of artsy gimmick is another question, one that Epic Records also asked themselves, deducting the money for that gimmick from the band's payout, which led almost immediately to a resolution of the marriage between band and label. 

Poco had already arrived at the end of their current contract and were negotiating a new one, but that money issue led the band to sign with ABC Records, prompting Epic Records to swear revenge on the band they had supported throughout a mostly underwhelming commercial run. And they did, issuing a best of and a live album within days of the band's new albums for ABC to cut into the band's sales and confuse buyers as to what was the new Poco product. Ah, petty record companies! European fans of course didn't get the gimmicky cut-out, instead getting the worst of all solutions. A plain cardboard label with the small band image printed on the Western motive and no sign of the inner sleeve with the entire empty cantina image. They could have at least centred the band image, as without cut-out there was no pointin having it off-center. But no one thought that much about it, I guess.

Anyhoo, the music is as good as it ever was. And a little better in this configuration. So, Cantamos, folks...

While this r e-issuemarks the end of albums to post from Poco, we're not quite done yet with the band. They will serve as guinea pigs for a new feature I let you discover very soon...

Two Halves Of Seven Equal ? - Or Poco's Weird Math Problem

Uh-oh. That's no doubt what the remaining members of Poco must've thought when band leader and main songwriter Richie Furay handed in his resignation just before the release of Crazy Eyes. Gone was Furay's recognizable voice, his stage presence, and most importantly, the songs. To be fair, the band had come a long way since Furay had utterly dominated the songwriting on the band's first two bands. Paul Cotton brought a strong songwriting presence immediately, and had three songs apiece on From The Inside and A Good Feelin' To Know and two - the same as Furay - (not counting a coer each) on Crazy Eyes. But Schmit had been content to contribute the occasional ballad, and now had to step up his production, while Rusty Young's real coming out as a songwriter would have to wait for another album.

So while the odds for a quality album seemed slim, the now quartet acquits itself pretty nicely. While Young contributes only one song, his "Rocky Mountain Breakdown" is the best of his country reels, and has a cameo of founder Jim Messina on mandolin. The biggest surprise are Tim Schmit's songs, especially "Skatin'"  and "Just Call My Name", which see Poco experimenting - for the first and only time, really - with a harder edged guitar rock sound. While Paul Cotton had been drafted into the band specifically to beef up the rock guitar in Poco's country rock, Schmit had mainly been known for delicate ballads, but does a pretty good job on these, while Cotton's opener "Driving Wheel" is another of his storytelling epics and quite impressive, while expansive closer "You've Got Your Reasons" also does quite nicely. "Faith In The Families" was a stage favorite and maybe thus chosen to represent the album on their Greatest Hits collection. 

So most of the album's songs were fine, and yet there was something off about Seven, something that made me rarely put the album on and often pull it out of the CD player before the album was done. And yet it took me only a cool 20+ years to figure it out. Sure, having it on CD with no side breaks, and having listened to it about three times in that time span didn't help, but still: For a dude who - since this lil' blog adventure started - spends a lot of time thinking about sequencing, it's kind of tough to realize that Poco did the old 'one rock/quick side, one ballad/slow side' and that's caused such a weird, and not entirely satisfactory, listening experience. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing: Did I not listen a lot to the album because it's running so weirdly, or did I not realize why it's running so weirdly because I barely listened to it. It's the latter, of course, but still: consider the One Buck Guy miffed that he missed this little detail. Then again, since the start of this blog adventure I'm much more sensitive to these things than before, so beforehand I jad just shrugged it off, and the album with it. 

To be fair, this two different sides deal is a weird gambit for a band like Poco, whose music lives between these poles, but is never that rocking, nor that slow, comfortably living in a midtempo world that carries hallmarks of both sides. So it was always a weird idea that Poco would try to attach two identities to two album sides. It's just not a good fit. What happened with the original configuration of the album left me baffled, on numerous levels. On one hand, possibly to fulfill the 'rock side' part of the concept, there were Schmit's heavy rock numbers, So it was not only strange to have two heavy rock tunes from Schmit, but it was even weirder that they ,  each other back to back. But the conception also explains why - after the reasonably promising first half - the album sort of drifts away together with the listener's attention when ballads and midtempo numbers are all cluttered together in the second half. 

This can of course be corrected in a rather simple manner: Resequence the album so that the ill-fitting two side concept is dissolved. Alternate the rock and slower songs, as well as the Cotton and Schmit vocals, and you have a version of Seven that is a much better listen. Which is - you might've guessed - exactly what our One Buck Record of the day is. A sronger version of a pretty good, if not quite top-tier, Poco album. there's a lot of worse ways to spend half an hour. 

Let's Look At Those Crazy Eyes Once More...Yup, It's Still Poco's Masterpiece

Often great art can come out of great uncertainty. Sometimes een out of great distress. And while these terms would be overselling the quagmire that Poco found itself in in 1973, it's still amazing that a group that had several major defections over the years that the group did their hands down best album while their founder and leader with an iron fist was quietly quitting on the band he had held in his grip for so long. When A Good Feelin' To Know the album did way worse than everyone thought and the title song - that everyone, and Furay first - thought would be a hit didn't even chart, Furay was done with Poco, at least in his mind. David Geffen oer at Asylum had bothered him for months now, telling him that Poco was never going to happen, and to come over to his label to team up with Chris Hillman and JD Souther and "do another Crosby, Stills and Nash". (Narrator: They did not). 

There was only one problem: Good old fashioned paperwork. When Furay was sent to Epic Records in the first sports-team style 'trade' in music biz history for Graham Nash going to Atlantic to form the just mentioned Crosby, Stills & Nash, he had signed for a certain number of albums, which was not yet fulfilled. So while Furay was gone spiritually, he still had obligations to fulfill and decided to stick with Poco for one last album before doing the supergroup thing Geffen had sold him on. During recording he didn't tell anyone in the group, only announcing that he was leaving while Crazy Eyes was prepped for release. By the time the record hit stores, Furay was gone. But in his wake he left Poco's masterpiece.

He was of course ably helped by the other members of the group, who no doubt felt Furay slipping away, or at least loosening his grip on the band's songwriting and decision-making that had already sent co-founder Jim Messina on his way. The first thing one realizes when listening to Crazy Eyes is how diminshed Furay's contributions are. He has three lead vocals, but only two credited songs. Common logic would dictate that that's because he was doing minimum service and keeping all his good songs for the future Asylum Records project. But unlike his future group mate Hillman - who admitted to doing all that for the Byrds reunion that brought him to Geffen in the first place - that is not true. For one thing, original closing number "Let's Dance Tonight" is one of his best Poco songs ever. The title song is an astonoshing accomplishment, a mini-symphony whose gradual construction is a joy to behold. And that song, a eulogy for Gram Parsons before the spiralling country rock star actually died probably led him to want to cover Parsons' "Brass Buttons". 

But yeah, the other guys really stepped up. Timothy Schmit had already upped his efforts on the previous album, but his "Here We Go Again" was a new high, and rightfully chosen as the album's lead single, even if once more success inexplicably eluded them. Paul Cotton has strong showings with pure country opener "Blue Water" and "A Right Along", plus a wonderful version of J.J. Cale's "Magnolia" that would become a band standard for the rest of its existence with Cotton in the band. Another thing that is marvelous is Jack Richardson's production work - from the echo on Furay's forlorn vocal on "Brass Buttons" to the way it highlights George Grantham's drum fills to the way "Crazy Eyes" builds from just some distant drums, revealing layer of layer of instruments during its gradual build up. Just marvelous stuff, after the arguably underproduced From The Inside and the overproduced A Good Feelin' To Know. Here Richardson and the band - with a huge assist by Bob Ezrin on the title cut - find just the right balance. 

But back to Furay for a second. While he did hold back a song like "Fallin' In Love" for the debut of the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, he did contribute a new song, "Believe Me" that would finally show up on that album, but could've been on Crazy Eyes. The released SHF Band version is fine, but the looser, more expansive Poco version is fantastic. And he finally went on to record "Nothing's Still The Same", written in late 1969, yet somehow it didn't make either Poco or DeLIVErin', despite being one of his best compositions. One Buck Records vets will remember that Crazy Eyes has been featured here before, and no history will not be erased. I think the original write-up has its moments, but the little chronological Poco alt album series I am currently doing allowed me to take a deeper dive into some aspects of the album I didn't at the time, and both together give you a ton of insight into the original album and its One Buck Record incarnation.

You might have guessed, or, you remember, that the Crazy Eyes on these pages is a reworked alt album that adds four songs that were cut for it but not used, including the above mentioned Furay-tracks, Cotton's superior remake of an Illinois Speed Press song ("Get In The Wind") and a sprightly Rusty Young instrumental. There's lots of nerdy sequencing discussion in the old write-up, if that's your thing, so I'm not going to repeat all of this stuff here. Let me just say it once more. This is the way to listen to that album, as each reinstated number brings something to the table and the album is much more varied and runs way better in this imagined double vinyl album version. Seriously, this is the version of Crazy Eyes to have and hold, and treasure, and listen to repeatedly. It's a really good album in its original form, but I dare say without false modesty that my work pushes it into great album territory. 

It might've been Furay's last dance with the band he founded, and his untimely exit always has overshadowed its musical merits somewhat. But what could have been a lame duck uninspired contract filler album - at least as far as Furay was concerned - turned into something else entirely, especially in this expanded version: a new country rock masterpiece - nothing more, nothing less. 

Breaking News: One Buck Guy Gets Feisty, Listens To Modern Music, For Once...

 

...and I don't really plan to make a habit of it. But stranger things have happened I guess. Still, this obviously isn't music that would bother the charts or the, uh, airwaves (streamwaves?). If you are following this blog for a while, you must've surely heard me mention les soldes, the twice-a-year stock-clearing sales promotion that inevitably has the few stores who still have music sections throw out their unwanted stock. Most of it is crap (well, probably), but the fact that they throw out albums for a couple of bucks gives me the opportunity to take a flyer on something that looks interesting enough. If I were a younger, hipper guy I could of course whip out my smart phone in the store and pull up the artist whose album I have in hand. But that would be spoiling the fun, wouldn't it? Instead I try from scanning the covert art and song titles whether this could be something interesting. And that is how I fell on our One Buck Record of the day, SYML's The Day My Father Died. 

The cover art looked like it might be a folk record of some kind, and I recognized a couple of guest artists mentioned on the back cover (Elbow's Guy Garvey and Nickelcreek's Sara Watkins, whose solo debut I had picked up during the soldes a decade or so ago), so I figured this might be my jam. And it kind of sort of is, otherwise it wouldn't be up here, natch! SYML is Brian Fennell, an indie musician from the Pacific Northwest. 2023's The Day My Father Died is his second album, inspired by the death of his adoptive father. It has grief , heritage and loss as topics, but it never gets too maudlin. Which, given the fact that Fennell sometimes slips into a falsetto, was a real risk, bringing to mind the memory of Bon Iver. 

You guys remember Bon Iver? Justin Iver, one of the most overrated and overpraised projects of the early 2010s? I have excessively used the term young men's earnest sad sack music in the last months and plan to retire that term soon, but if it fits for something, it's Bon Iver's incredibly overhyped For Emma, Forever Ago, that came with its own picture perfect origin story of Vernon, after a romantic breakup, locking himself in an isolated cabin in the woods and coming up with a quote-unquote masterpiece of romantic despair. Except it sucked. No melodies, no memorable songs, and the awful strained falsetto made for an unpleasant listening experience, completely diametral to what the critics and their reviews promised. But I digress.

 So, SYML - Fennel's nom de plume recalls his Welsh heritage, 'siml' being the local varaint of 'simple' - is no Bon Iver, thank god. These songs have melodies, some of them quite memorable, too. They have structure and they are generally well sung, with the falsetto used sparingly. Not awful caterwauling here, no sir. What we do have here is a sort of modern folk-rock, possible close to what someone like Hozier is doing (I'm no expert in the matter, mind). It also turns out he had a bonafide hit somewhat similar to what he is up to on this album. "Where's My Love?" was featured in Teen Wolf, and then numerous teen-oriented TV series from 2018 onwards and is now certified Platinum, whatever that means in the streaming age. Of course, I was cmpletely oblivious to this man and any successes he might've had when I picked this up. 

So, how do we know this truly is modern music, even with its folk-rock twist? Because my then seven year old loved it, demanding I play the song she liked to sing a long all the 'oweo--o-o-o-o-o' of the title song, the lyrics of which she happily doesn't understand, though she's phonetically singing along "...the day my father died" (gulp!). It's a big song with a big hook, yet was never released as a single. It's also not alone on the album as The Day My Father Died has enough 'oweo's' and other stadium-ready singalong elements, and some light electronics. You know, for the young'uns. On the other hand, his music clearly has its origins in DIY folk - thus the Bon Iver comparison - so people who like classic, guitar-based acoustic music should also give a listen. A song like "Sweet Home" reminds recalls the era of Crosby, Stills & Nash, even if one-man band SYML harmonizes with himself. 

If you noticed the little One Buck Records logo on the cover or the tags, you'll see that this is my personal version of the album. I thought the original never really got out of the starting gates, only picking up steamm occasionally, so I resequenced the album from the ground up. I also thought it was a little long and repetitive, so I deleted two tracks, incidentally two of the features (bye bye Lucius, bye bye Sara!). At a now vinyl era-compatible 47 minutes and with a much improved flow, I think SYML's The Day My Father Died is an album well worth listening to, even if - like me - you have given up on modern music trends a hile ago. The Day My Father Died combines modern and retro elements in what I find is a very attractive manner. Check this out to see if you feel the same way...

Let's Look At Poco's Inside...From The Outside

Part two of our Poco alt album project, with the direct follow-up - in terms of studio albums - to Poco's second album, recently reworked as You Better Think Twice. In the meantime, the second big shakeup of Poco - and it would it not be the last one - happened in between. In 1968 Poco (then Pogo) was the brainchild of Richie Furay and Jim Messina, who worked as a producer on the last Buffalo Springfield album Last Time Around. But by 1970 things had changed quite a bit. Richie Furay's worsening jealousy of all the more successful bands that had bypassed Poco and his tightening grip on Poco in terms of dominating the songwriting and decision-making had left Jim Messina really fed up, with the worsening tensions between the co-founders leading to them abandoning a planned follow-up album in the summer of 1970, instead focusing on culling a live album from their concets that would become the classic DeLIVEring. 

But Messina had made up his mind to leave the band, tired of the relentless touring as well as the terse discussions with Furay. He wanted to retire from road life and performing and go back into producing, a plan that was almost immediately scuttled when the work with his first client Kenny Loggins took an unexpected turn. But that's another story. Messina's exit from Poco was an uncommonly graceful one. Messina himself handpicked his successor, Paul Cotton of The Illinois Speed Press, and stayed on for a couple of weeks - with Poco as a six piece - to go on the road and teach Cotton the songs. He also had another graceful surprise for Furay in store, that we will get to later. 

As a newly reconstructed five-piece Poco finally went to work on their third studio album, with Cotton bringing, as planned, a harder-edged rock sound to the band, especially on the charging "Railway Song". Furay still dominated the songwriting, with six of the 11 original tracks rom his pen, including should-have-been classics "You Are The One" and "Just For Me and You". But Poco immediately became more democratic, with new arrival Cotton getting three songs and Timothy Schmit finally landing a song on an album, which even got the honor of becoming the title song. So, everything looked good for From The Inside...and yet, it wouldn't be Poco if it were easy. 

From The Inside was recorded in the Trans Maximus Inc. studios in memphis with Steve Cropper in the producer's chair, and the band was (in)famously unhappy with the recording and production. The control room wasn't immediately reachable from the studio recording space and the studio didn't have enough multitracks for the taste of the band. It's true that the sound of From The Inside is a bit unusual, a drier, more rustic sound than what the band was used to. If you really want to hear, say George Grantham's drumming, From The Inside is the album for you. But it's also true that this slightly swampier sound probably wasn't a good fit for the band, though only the odd rhythm and vocals of "Do You Feel It Too?" stick out as egregious. 

Unusual production or not, From The Inside is indeed a bit of a breakthrough, finally achieving and finessing the country-rock sound they were after on their first two albums, and came close to on DeLIVEring. This album, however, is not From The Inside. Call it an alternate look at the period. From The Outside In. It sort of picks up the (missing) pieces of the period, collecting a bunch of stray tracks from the period: Studio versions of "C'Mon" and "A Man Like Me" that were orphans from the abandoned third studio album, replaced by DeLIVEring, as well as a remix of Schmit's "From The Inside" and the aforementioned parting gift from Jim Messina, who does a lead vocal cameo on From The Outside In. As a surprise for  Furay and his wife for the baby shower of their first daughter, Messina and the band played "Lullaby In September". It's a little maudlin, but a beautiful goodbye gift of the gracious Messina. 

The rest of the tracklist is supplied by Live From Columbia Studios, an intimate record showcase for music executives, where the band played the majority of From The Inside songs. To fit in with the rest of the tracks, I got rid of the audience applause, so that From The Outside In works more or less as an alternate version of From The Inside, not to replace the real thing, but as an 'what if' companion piece. These live versions have a spontaneity and sprightliness that their studio counterparts lack and thus function as a different, more immediate look on these songs. By late 1971 Poco were a well-honed live act, and it shows in their playing here. From 1971 onwards they were launching what was easily the best part of their career. One which we will have a further look at in the next volume of our little Poco series, but for now, dive into From The Outside In, to see what the boys were up to in mid-to-late 1970 and early 1971. 

When Albert Bouchard Launches Bombs Over Germany or What Imaginos Did On His Summer Vacation...

 

When last we checked in with Albert Bouchard, the man had finally realized his dream and putout Imaginos the way he wanted to...or at least as closely aspossible. His version of Imaginos was an interesting lesson in less is more and power through restriction. With the album being a low-budget production that Bouchard started with his music students, then mainly worked on it with David Hershfeld, plus an honest evaluation of the state of his never-that-great-to-begin-with-voice led him to reimagine Imaginos as a more relaxed liste than the hair metal extravaganza his old band ended up turning it into.

But of course, if luck favors the bold, hubris favors the successful. Re-Imaginos was not only a dream project come true, it was also a real success. Given the low front-end investment, it was – according to Bouchard – the first album that made him money, so of course he more or less immediately began work on a sequel. He had planned, or says now that he planned three double albums covering the adventures of Imaginos and incorporating most of Blue Öyster Cult's songs. That sounds like a lot, it also sounds a lot like bullshit.

Just saying : In the mid-to late 80s, no one was giving Albert Bouchard, fuck-up ex-drummer of Blue Öyster Cult - who themselves were swirling down in terms of record sales and critical esteem - that even that band didn't want back, money to record one double album, let alone three, all chronicling an impossible-to-follow storyline about an evil alien-created shapeshifter leading mankind to its doom. These albums only ever existed in Bouchard's mind, or maybe in fever dreams. But a funny thing happened in 2020. Buyoed by the succes of his Imaginos, Bouchard finally found himself in a position to make that crazy dream come true. Because, hey, who was going to stop him this time ? These Imaginos albums are essentially private press releases, all coming out on Bouchard's own Rockheart label. So, even with the most minute of sales, Bouchard will be in the Red And Black.

But here's the thing. Man, is Bouchard overegging the pudding, and that is before he really goes mad in part three. Ostensibly about how Imaginos influences Germany into starting World War One, Imaginos II starts to just put various Blue Öyster Cult songs seemingly at random in its purported storyline, but since that storyline is all but imposible to follow anyway, and the alien-powered title character can just more or less wave everything away with a 'it's magic/Alien/whathavewe' power, it's probably just as well. Except that the One Buck Guy will not stand for all this bloat. A song like “7 Screaming Diz-Busters”, with the diz being a part of the male anatomy (I let you guess which) has no discernible link to Sandy Pearlman's original Imaginos cycle, though since he might've sprinkled a line or two from his poetry epic into it, you can probably construct a very loose, very shaky case if you wanted to.

But I don't. I just look at the remakes of BÖC numbers and decide whether this new version brings something new or interesting to the song or not, and throw it off if the answer is no. And so Imaginos II goes from a slightly overstuffed 14 numbers to a vinyl-era album appropriate ten songs and 46 minute album length, with “OD'd On Life Itself”, “The Red And The Black” and “Cities On Flame (With Rock'n'Roll” being the survivors from the BÖC songs, plus “Quicklime Girl” from the pre-BÖC era. The original songs – like the singalong “Independence Day” or the surging (sub) title song, that Bouchard made sound as much like a lost BÖC tune as possible - are actually pretty neat.

There was also a major piece of surgery I performed. The opener “When War Comes” had some production problems and poorly recorded vocals, belying the modest production budget, and at sevn and a half minutes was not a great start to the program. So I did quite a bit of editing, mainly keeping the (faux) orchestral parts with foreboding military drum march and bits of the song ending, so that it will serve as an overture for the spectacle to come without overstaying its welcome. As is, the streamlined Imaginos II runs much smoother and better than the unwieldy (wait 'til we get to part three...) original. If you really want the whole shebang, you can do so at the usual sources, but as a primer on both the story and sound of this sequel, this should do nicely.

So, if you never bothered to ask what exactly happened to Imaginos once he quit the 19th Century, boy, does Albert Bouchard have some stories to tell you. Here's the slightly abridged second chapter...

Ok, Ok, I Know This Isn't Da Capo...

 

...much to the disappointment of some. I had thought about that album, because it came up in the thread on A-sides and B-sides, and a reader had already asked me to do an alternate, read : better version of Love's Da Capo, to which I can only say: I would if I could but I won't 'cause I can't. Other than a couple of single edits and b-sides, there is simply nothing in the can that can replace “Revelation”, which is exactly what everyone thought it was at the time: a cheap and easy way to fill a record side for a band that only had half an album's worth of songs, while also simultaneously proclaiming hipness Two birds with one stone, though the third bird, a pigeon, was the record buyer in this scenario. But unless someone finds an old cookie jar in Arthur Lee's estate with long-thought lost tapes from the period, Da Capo will probably have to stay as it is.

But there's another, less heralded album that has the exact same problem of Da Capo: A useless and seemingly neverending, tiresome long jam that takes up almost an entire record side. The band, as you have wildly guessed from seeing the above cover art is Poco, and the scene of the original crime was their second, self-titled album. The year before Poco had issued Pickin' Up The Pieces, their debut album that was not without drama, when controm freak Richie Furay pushed Randy Meisner out of the band. Recently relistening to Pickin' Up The Pieces, I can say that that album hasn't held up particularly well, it's very twee-sounding, with some cheesy 60s countrypolitan orchestration , the constant forced 'yee-haw's and laughter are grating and the band had not yet really figured out how to put the rock in country rock. The self-titled follow-up was supposed to change that, showing to the public a more hard-edged sound. And the best way that the band thought up to do so, was to record their own extended jam number.

Poco decided to re-record “Nobody's Fool” from their debut album, which would then lead into a quasi-sidelong jam (they squeezed in one number before it, but at 18 and a half minute that jam could have filled up its own side easily). Here's the thing: It's not even memorably dreadful, just dreadfully dull. Pure boredom for about fifteen minutes straight. They thought they had what it takes to pull that off, but they don't. There's no real musical ideas, no development, no musical themes or motifs that emerge. Just a steady, unchanging rhythm, then Messina noodles a bit on his guitar, then Rusty Young gets to make his pedal steel sound like an organ – which can be impressive for a short spurt, but grows tiresome very quickly, as everything else here – then George Grantham gets a short percussion solo, and then rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, snore, zzzzzzzzz, oh I'm sorry, did I miss something?

As indicated by the Spanish name for the jam section (“El Tonto De Nadie, Regressa”, or Nobody's Fool Revisted) Poco decided to style their jam after Santana. Terrible idea. Not only because they don't have the chops to do it, but why would you want to listen to these guys try that (and, inevitably, fail)? If I want to listen to Santana-style Latin guitar jams, I can just listen to Santana, I don't need a country rock band that has no business doing that kind of music doing a second rate imitation of it. So, “El Tonto De Nadie, regressa” is no bueno, and thus needs to go. Or almost. For this alternate version of Poco's second album I didn't have quite enough material to entirely say Adios to “El Tonto De Nadie, Regressa”. But I cut down that jam drastically, by about three quarters. Out goes almost all of the fake Santana stuff, and everything else is there in very small measures, including the little wordless vocalizing section that should have been the end of the jam, if they didn't had to akwardly go back to the Latin stuff, and then even more akwardly tack the refrain of “Nobody's Fool” onto the end, just to remind people that this was supposed to be the same song. If you think that even at four minutes the jam section drags a bit, imagine this being four times as long with no significant upgrade in interest.

Long-time readers will be familiar with a trope of my alt albums: The newly-minted title song as bookends, made easier by the Poco anthology The Forgotten Trail offering an acoustic version of “You Better Think Twice”. It probably annoyed the deathly jealous Richie Furay to no end that the sole Jim Messina-written number became the signature tune of this album, but there you go. It certainly wouldn't be the end of his frustrations. It also feels appropriate to name a sophomore effort You Better Think Twice, and just to amuse myself, instead of going the song & reprise route, both versions' titles are differentiated by their (Once) and (Twice) tags. Finally, there was an unused Rusty Young instrumental, “Last Call (Cold Enchilada)”, more country and much more sprightly than the “El Tonto” stuff. With that back in, it was all about balancing the longer, instrumental sections (of which the seven minute “Anyway Bye Bye” also has quite a bit) with the shorter and more succinct songs – et voilà, here's a way more listenable version of their second album minus the braindead jam deadweight.

Now, you should really think twice about leaving that album behind. It's not quite top notch Poco, but the pieces are not only picked up, but falling into place. The evolution of Poco will indeed be a topic worth following, as I have been on a bit of a Poco bender recently, so there will be another couple of albums of improved Poco coming your way in the next weeks. So, get on board right now with one of the most underrated bands of the 70s...

That Mr. Ely, He Was One Of A Kind...Here's More Proof

When I posted Easy Street in December to honor the then recently deceased Joe Ely, I mentioned that the outtakes from his MCA sessions in the mid-80s were split into two for more reasonably timed and balanced albums. So here is the promised part two, One Of A Kind. Which he was. As with Easy Street, the sound is indeed very mid-80s, though maybe a touch less so than on the first album. One Of A Kind is a record that puts the rock into roots rock, starting straight off with three uptempo rockers, only slowing down for (imaginary) side closer "They Sing Of Her Beauty". a trademark beautiful country ballad. 

And then it's pedal to the medal again with the newly minted title song and "Back To My Molehill", a Zydeco-styled number that reminds us that Ely was an Americana artist in the truest sense, mixing different music styles into his music that isn't bound by the sometimes rigid style codes of the alt country crowd he influenced.  This is also abundantly clear with expansive album closer "Take Me Down", which has some reasonably avant garde keyboard sequences mixed in (New Wave oblige?). 

Like Easy Street, One Of A Kind's eight tracks show a performer who has a unique take on the genre, and these tracks should have been issued a lot earlier (as in, ever). For some fine music that brings to mind folks like The Mavericks or even Los Lobos (on "Molehill"), switch lanes from Easy Street and listen to the one and only Joe Ely, truly One Of A Kind...

Edit: I wanted to set a link to Easy Street and reup that one, but initially forgot. Both is now done, in case you want the double shot of Mr. Ely...

Of Saints & Sinners - A Kick Ass Movie With A Killer Soundtrack

 

A couple of weeks ago Sinners made history by becoming the first film to ever be nominated for 16 Academy Awards (a.k.a. the Oscars). Even if we discount a new category this year (Best Casting Ensemble), it would still have beaten out former record holders. This alone should give you a good idea what an achievement the movie is on a purely technical level alone. First of: it's an absolute joy to watch. In this ear of shoddily assembled blockbusters with awful CGI, that is not Marvel-ous at all, Sinners clearly stands out. Set Design, Production Design, Costume Design, Photography - everything here is absolutely top notch. 

This movie also literally looks like no other. When I saw the first scene, I scrambled for the blue ray cover, frantically checking for information on the film's aspect ratio that wasn't there. I was sure that the movie was in scope, but the first scenes were not. In fact, director Ryan Coogler elected to film with the loud and unwieldy I-MAX cameras to allow a fluent change between different aspect ratios, sometimes within the same shot (where the black bars on the top and the bottom slowly disappear). Now, all of these technical achievements would be laudable, but for naught, if the movie wouldn't be any good. But it is, great even, if you keep an open mind. If you haven't seen Sinners yet, do so as quickly as possible, and then get back to this write-up. From here on, there be spoilers !

During it's first hour it's not entirely clear where Coogler's film wants to go, taking it's sweet time to set up its story of two twin brothers trying to create a juke joint from nothing in the 1930's Mississippi Delta. Then the movie pulls off the old From Dust Till Down-gambit going from one type of movie to a complete differently one in its second half, and like the former also somewhat surprisingly becoming a vampire movie. This abrupt swerve into genre fare turned out divisive, to say the least. I, as a horror film fan, loved it, but some viewers caught up in the descriptions of the hard life for black folks in the 1930's obviously expected something different. Still, you have to admire the huge and confident swings Coogler takes with this movie.

A movie about a juke joint better have some great music to really sell its premise, and boy, does Sinners deliver.  It features both a fantastic score by Coogler's frequent musical collaborator Ludwig Göransson and an equally brilliant selection of songs on its soundtrack album. However, there is a lot of music to go through, perhaps too much. Both albums taken together run up to almost 150 minutes of music, which is just overkill in one sitting. Enter the One Buck Guy. As with my previous reworked soundtracks for Dick Tracy and Donnie Darko I combined songs and score cues from the film in chronological fashion, to give the Sinners a real sense of how the film develops musically. The word Edit in OBG is to be taken quite seriously: I edited the absolute hell out of this one, shortening almost every score track, throwing off songs which were not featured in the movie, stitching and medley-ing together, and so on and so forth. Now the 150 minutes behemoth is a much more listenable sub-70 minutes compilation.

The music of Sinners is not only great, it also tells its own story, which this added subsequently tries to retrace as well. As the first hour of the film establishes the twins' recruitment of personal for their juke joint, the first half of soundtrack & score is very heavy on blues licks, both from Göransson and special guests like Bobby Rush. Just before the film's big thematic set piece of all timelines and musical eras falling and folding  together, set to Miles Caton's "I Lied To You", there is the first apparition of what I call the vampire theme - you know it when you hear it. 

The appearance of the initial trio of vampires also changes the musical landscape, heavily influenced by lead vampire Remmick's background as an Irish immigrant, trading the predominant blues music for a folk/bluegrass mix of traditional tunes. Their version of the old Irish folk standard "Will Ye Go, Lassie Go ?" (better known as "Wild Mountain Thyme") is not only one of the finest version of this oft-covered tune, but has haunted me for days after seing the movie. A bit (o.k., a lot) earlier I mentioned Ryan Coogler's big swings, and I think none is bigger than the big musical set piece of dozens of vampires, including most of the turned black folks, singing and dancing to classic Irish folk tune "Rocky Road To Dublin", with head vampire Remmick performing Irish stepdancing like a deranged lord of the dance. This was clearly the point of no return for some movie watchers, but again, I absolutely loved the pure chutzpah of it.

In its back third the film's music becomes heavier in support of its action set pieces and show downs (and makes ample use of the aforementioned vampire theme), with Göransson drafting in Alice in Chains' Jerry Cantrell, Metallica's Lars Ulrich and blues power guitar player Eric Gales, before culminating in the double climax of Miles Caton's wordless vocalizing in "Free for a Day" and the film closing song "Last Time (I Seen the Sun)", a duet between Caton and Alice Smith. Like those vampires, it's been a good long while since I've seen the sun in all its splendor, and like for those vamps, music pulls me through.

You might guess from the unusually long write up that this Sinners project is really heartfelt for me. I think this alternate album edit is one of my best editing job and I am very proud of it. I hope you will enjoy this musical journey through the back country of Sinners as much as I've enjoyed making it.Take this write-up as my endorsement of Sinners for tomorrow's Academy Awards, although I don't think it will win the big one. The Academy might have changed quite a bit since the peak Oscar bait years, but 'audacious vampire musical with a mostly Black cast' doesn't necessarily scream Best Film winner, and One Battle After Another seems to have an insurmountable lead. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though. 

In the meantime, enjoy this killer piece of music I have vampired Frankensteined together. It truly has something for everyone: Whether you like Blues, Country, Gospel, Bluegrass, Soul, Folk, Heavy Rock, even Hip Hop...you'll find something to like, or love, here. Or just tick 'all of the above' and  take in that big-ass bad ass musical gumbo that is Sinners - Movie Soundtrack & Score - The OBG Edit, as the gods and ol' OBG intended...

Enter The Crown Prince Of EYMSSM : All Hail Mark Kozelek

I recently talked about earnest young men's sad sack music, somewhat unfairly attaching these thoughts to a peace on Travis, who only partly indulged in EYMSSM. Time to meet one of the stalwarts of this type of music : Mark Kozelek, the figure head behind Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon.

I've encountered Kozelek around the same time as a musician and an actor. I'm not sure whether I picked up the last Red House Painters' album Old Ramon first, or whether I first saw him as idiot bass player Larry in Cameron Crowe's fantastic Almost Famous. I liked Old Ramon well enough, than dipped deeper into their catalogue when I picked up the two-disc Retrospective, a really well done career compilation, that showcased Kozelek's and by proxy Red House Painters' typical music : very slow, very moody, very sad, sometimes with drowning guitares mixed in, sometimes not. There is a real hypnotic draw to Kozelek's songs, which flow into each other weightlessly.

Famously 4AD-founder Ivo Watts-Russell not only gave Red House Painters their first record contract, but also decided to simply release selected highlights from their demo tape, rather than having the band rerecord these songs. Down Colorful Hill was great proof of talent for a band that had already found their signature sound, shortly followed up by two eponymous albums that cemented Red House Painters as an indie band to reckon with. After toiling away for the better part of the decade and losing their last band album - the aforementioned Old Ramon - to a messy label merger, Kozelek decided to retire the Red House Painters name and restart interests in his group as Sun Kil Moon.

Our One Buck Record of the day is a variation of Down Colorful Hill, but if you have very good eyes you'll see a little + behind the title, as I added some additional demos from around the same time (not sure, if they are from the same demo tape), which I feel make the album slightly sprightlier, and also resequenced the entire album for a better flow, as per usual on this blog. As an introduction to Kozelek's brand of earnest young men's sad sack music this version of Down Colorful Hill should do just fine and remind you of what a major talent Kozelek was, before he started to turn his songs into a weird deformed mirror version of his life as a touring musician.

So, take a tumble Down Colorful Hill with this magnificent songs ...

Wish You Were Here To Hear Wish You Were Here Like You've Never Heard It

Ooooh, this might be at least a little controversial. I don't think people minded me too much taking the hatchet to Kansas and their music, because, well, it's Kansas, but what if we touch the untouchables like Pink Floyd? We'll find out together. There were a number of reasons why I wanted to rework this album, the main one being that there are parts of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" which bore me to tears and that I don't want to sit through to get to the parts I like. But other ideas came up: What if, instead of the now mightily thinned out "Shine" the album really concentrates and is built around its title song? 

Now, obviously, this alternate take on Wish You Were Here isn't an attempt to improve the album or 'fix it' or whatever. I may be delusional, but I am not that delusional. No, this is a private project that just may be of interest to a couple of you. It is, if nothing else, a new way to listen to this old warhorse, because - for better or worse- you've never listened to Wish You Were Here like this. This is actually my second take on this album. The first one is, as I've seen when working on this new version, more than five years old, and it shows. It was only my second big mixing project, after a Blade Runner-themed one, but I was just starting out wih Audacity, and it showed. Even more so, I was just starting out with Alternate Albums, and that also showed. Figuring out what works and what not comes with time and experience, and a better trained set of ears, and now - half a decade and a not insignificant number of alt albums later - I am doing a much better job than I would have been able to in 2020. 

I was also greatly helped out by the access to new material. The 50th Anniversary Edition of the album had the band issue a couple of never-before released (or bootlegged) outtakes, including a set of demos for "Welcome To The Machine" and the pedal steel instrumental version of "Wish You Were Here". I can't tell you how much I love the latter - the high lonesome whine and sway of Gimour's pedal steel playing captures the melancholy of the track absolutely perfectly. Unnecessary to say, it is all over this version of the album - literally. It opens and closes proceedings as the thematic and melodic bookends, and makes another surprise appearance elsewhere. "Wish You Were Here" the song is the original version with the clear intro and Stéphane Grappelli's violin all over the second half of the song whereas it was mixed into practical inaudability on the final version, and it somewhat improbably continues the sound aesthetic that that pedal steel version of "Wish" started - this is at least partly Wish You Were Here as imagined by a country (-ish) band, fitting for what Gilmour called "a simple country song". 

Every track on here is different from the original line-up. "Have A Cigar" is the duet between Roger and Roy Harper and given the repetitiveness of its coda, cut down quite a bit. "Welcome To The Machine" exits in two versions, both very different from the album. The first version is the band demo, the second ("Welcome Back To The Machine") a part of Roger's original demo. And then, there's of course the big one: "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". Nowhere is my growth in editing more obvious than here. The differences aren't necessarily just in the quality of the edits and transitions, though those got better and smoother, but in the way I listened to the original while thinking of editing it. When I did that first take on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", I wasn't really thinking about the dynamics of a piece of music, I was pretty single-mindedly occupied with stitching together the parts of those two long suites that I liked. 

Though I ended up with a piece that almost had the same length, my first  unsuccessful stab at "Shine On" was quite different from the one on this album. Back then, I cut a personal highlight reel, this time I thought 'how could this work as a song, rather than a sequence of pieces?'. This led me to make some harsh, and no doubt controversial cuts: Using the first parts essentially as table-setting, a long mood-establishing intro before the song proper kicks in means getting rid of both of David Gilmour's guitar solos, for many a Floyd fan the highlight(s) of the track. On the first version I also kept parts of the last sections that shorn of their long movement-like structure felt stranded on an island, further leading to the feeling that that version was a not particularly well thought-out cut up. For the new version I took Roger Corman's old 'cut to credits when the monster is dead' logic, meaning, as soon as the song part is over, cue the fade. 

So, where does all this leave us? With a very different, and quite breezier version of the album, as this edit of Wish You Were Here is a mere 33 minutes long. I trimmed some of the fat while adding more than a touch of a different, maybe a little earthier version of Pink Floyd. I'd be interested to find out whether all of this works for you, or whether you think it's terrible that I'd massacred a sacred cow. As is, I am finally happy with a project that was in the furthest corners of the back of my mind for five years. I now have an alt version of Wish You Were Here that I'm proud of and happy with. And I hope, one or two of you will soon have that, too. So, friends and neighbors, shall we...dive in?