SydArthur festival

Dag 24: Ash ra temple

Dag 25 gemist

Zabrieski Point (toevallige nog over gelezen dat pink floyd daar mee te maken had)


vanavond maar eens kijken

Dag 26

Death of Abezier Coppe

En

birth of Jerry Garcia

Dag 26 de dood van william s burroughs



Dat zulke zieke boeken achter zo'n uiterlijk schuilgaan

quote:

Today let's practice cut-ups. Make Burroughs proud by tearing first a page from the Bible, second a page from the Koran, third a page of Cosmopolitan and finally a page from any appliance instruction leaflet. Cut strips of text and on your kitchen table sort them out into poetry.

Toffe oprdacht...

quote:

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 11:23 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:

[..]

Ah ja, ik heb al een leuk stuk gevonden dus of ik afwijk of niet, ik ga die toch wel gebruiken.

quote:

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 11:29 schreef Gehenna het volgende:

[..]

Moet nog steeds beginnen in z'n boeken, dacht dat ze vooral heel vreemd waren, maar ook nog eens heel smerig?

Naked lunch is verreweg het extreemste boek dat ik gelezen heb ziek, grappig, smerig, vreemd, absurd, walgelijk, lief, achja bijna elk adjectief is wel toepasselijk op the naked lunch (behalve misschien saai, bedaard etc)

quote:

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 15:38 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

Dit heb ik er uitgepoept

Gaaf

quote:

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 16:04 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:
Enig idee wel cosmopolitan artikel ik heb gebruikt?

Iets over melania trump?

Dag 28 Arthur Lee de afsluiter van dit top festival


Het was een leuke maand

quote:

Op woensdag 3 augustus 2016 10:40 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
Nu alweer afgelopen

Had je het programma-boekje nog op tijd binnen gekregen?

ergens halverwege

twitter:

OnThisDeity twitterde op dinsdag 06-06-2017 om 19:28:30 @TerminaalVrdwld Yes, we are indeed doing SydArthur Festival 2. 😀 reageer retweet

quote:

Op woensdag 7 juni 2017 12:30 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:
Aftrap op zelfde maanstand weer?

Ik gok van wel

twitter:

HeadHeritage twitterde op maandag 03-07-2017 om 18:04:42 The world's first psychic rock'n'roll festival returns! This time with its own free Summer of Love soundtrack CD… https://t.co/3tPV8gi3Yq reageer retweet

Vrijdag is het zo weer zo ver dan gaan de poorten open van het enige echte muziekfestival wat zich gewoon in je hoofd afspeelt

quote:

Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 11:03 schreef Grobbel het volgende:
Heeft de band genaamd Syd Arthur zich al ooit eens uitgelaten over dit festival eigenlijk?

hehe niet dat ik weet

Dag 1:

“I don’t think I’m easy to talk about.
I’ve got a very irregular head.
And I’m not anything that you think I am anyway.”
– Syd Barrett

Syd Barrett is Psychedelic Frontiersman No. 1. For he sums up the Western Experiment: “To be extreme, just to be extreme.” That is to say, that to come back alive is preferred – but not presumed. That sacrifice will be made in order to make progress. As T. S. Eliot declared: “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” Syd was a sonic terrorist, perpetually beating at the boundaries of rock’n’roll. But he was a cautionary tale to us all: he was the one that went out there and never came back.

Syd summed up English Psychedelia even better than the people who influenced him – Ray Davies, the Beatles – because his wayward trajectory provided us with the guide to the post-rabbit-hole ride of Alice in Wonderland once it peters out and is reduced to nothing more than a rarely-used trackway. Syd delivers to us a psychic commentary using a remedial set of symbols, and all over a pillar of revolutionary sound. Mind-manifesting as Humphry Osmond defined the truly psychedelic experience, Syd’s work sizzled with a seemingly effortless sense of melody and lyricism – a heroic childlike Pandora’s Box of magic. When you’re a kid you’re in a world of frogspawn and caterpillars but you grow out of it. But that Syd did not grow out of it was a revolution for all of us. Forever fucking with people’s heads without telling them, Syd was never by rote and unwilling to make a career from his place in the music biz. He was the obstinate child determined to subvert the form at all points.

To be a psychedelic artist you need to know there are neurological problems you might encounter that will shut you down way before your mission is complete. Syd is indispensible because he tells you how far you can’t go. Hug You, Motherfucker! You dared to do all this on our behalf. In bequeathing us your mind map, you lost your mind.

Day 1 of this second SydArthur Festival (Summer of Love edition) opens with the French National Anthem, in tribute to Sgt. Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ – released on July 7th, 1967. Thereafter, comes Pink Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ which contains the essences of both Syd AND Arthur – for Syd was initially inspired to create the song’s main riff by copying Arthur Lee’s own Top 10 hit, Love’s 1966 version of Burt Bacharach’s ‘My Little Red Book’. How visionary of Syd that his fumbling dressing-room attempt to create what his manager Peter Jenner had been humming would lead to such a dramatic power drive.

it has begun

Gisteren was het de beurt aan fain jade

En vandaag zodiacs een moog ensemble

Linkjes volgen als ik niet mobiel zit.

[ Bericht 2% gewijzigd door Bosbeetle op 09-07-2017 21:57:11 ]

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a century-and-a-half too early. Futuristic Shelley, the first modern artist: prolific, prophetic, and torn from us far too soon. Dead at 29, Shelley, more even than Lord Byron himself, was the proto rock star. In life, in work and in death he exuded rebellion, confronted and subverted social mores, and brought forth radical ideas still distant. Ideas of non-violent resistance, vegetarianism and free love are all concepts still unacceptable to many even today: Shelley was far more shocking, challenging God and State, the very foundations of society. Poor Shelley, and poor us. For we need him now. We need him and his atheism now more than ever before… his particular brand of atheism, that is. Shelley’s was a deeply spiritual, heathen atheism – in constant celebration of the natural world, in constant rejection of the God as Overlord. His works teemed with thoughts more easily suited to essays, instead therein taking the form of ecstatic epic lyric poetry. He demanded that his poems be read with the seriousness of political tract. Portentously, Shelley himself declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Shelley hums with discontent. He was the black cloud of objection who foresaw a coming storm of civil unrest still near two centuries away. He’s not just proto-rock star: he was proto-Transcendentalist, proto-Beatnik, proto-Peace Activist. The futuristic mindsets that Percy Shelley played with anticipated by scores of years the duty-bound defiance of Henry David Thoreau, and the martyr-like non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. And yet his unparalleled high idealism ensured that Shelley was never a mere naysayer: he offered an entirely new way, replete with alternatives. For all his criticisms of this unjust world, he wrote in equal measure of its astonishing beauties. Moved to his very core by certain other poets and artists, Shelley celebrated and mythologised them as heroes, proffering them to the wider world, holding them aloft as rich evidence of other exotics whose parallel visions of the earth vindicated the extreme manner in which he viewed life. And so, on this the second day of the SydArthur Festival – wherein we seek to celebrate volcanic minds – let’s honour Shelley in that same exultant spirit that he would honour others.

Percy Shelley

En muzikale invulling:


Few 1967 musical protagonists ventured anywhere near the ‘European Son’ raga-la-ma of the J. Cale-period Velvets – only the tumult grind of this Faine Jade ditty and The Vejtables insane ‘Shadows’ 45 comes immediately to mind. So today let’s celebrate Faine Jade’s masterpiece ‘It Ain’t True’, and do search out the marvellous contemporary accompanying film, in which he is trolled by a Nico lookalike upon her very own DESERTSHORE.

Volle maan

The cosmic structuring of the 28-day SydArthur Festival obliges us to address the very entity that dictates that structure: the Moon itself. That Syd Barrett and Arthur Lee had, ten years ago, the poetic grace to die one full lunar month apart ensures that these great psychedelic artists were righteous motherfuckers even in death. Herein, they become the sacred twins.

Let’s take the cosmic opportunity to take it down an evolutionary notch. Can you see the moon from your home or your place of work? If not, could you search it out? Is there any way in which you could address it with a drink in your hand and stare up at its pulsing, and consider that these impulses dictate our tides, that these impulses dictate menstruation in women? We know how important the Lunar Calendar was to our ancient ancestors. Before egotist Caesars inserted their own months – July for Julius and August for Augustus – our festivals were none of them moveable feasts but fixed in time. The modern industrial world of the 1930s even attempted briefly to ease the lot of workers by returning to the Lunar Calendar. Hidden behind the cityscape, the unseen Moon – whether we heed it or not – still pulses out its influence upon us all. So let us today address that brilliant globe in its fullest phase, and raise our cups to its millennia-long irregular path across the skies of our Solar System.

muziek de zodiacs


Today, under the full moon, let’s go out there with ‘Cancer – the Moon Child’ from The Zodiac’s LP COSMIC SOUNDS. Gaining its Elektra Records release just 4 months after The Doors’ debut LP, The Zodiac was a studio ensemble formed as a vehicle for promoting Moog synthesizers – a project that then got way out of hand! Listen to narrator Cyrus Faryar’s declaimed and grandiose delivery of Jacques Wilson’s portentous poetry. The entire record is drenched in this superlative spew, as sound FX and fuzzy guitar themes conspire to heighten the listening experience. And surely this marvellous paean to the Moon Goddess inspired J. Morrison’s own recorded poetic experiments, his own ‘Horse Latitudes’ then being still a couple of months away.

Vandaag op het festival Bob Seger

Today, let’s listen to a joyous gem that’s sure to make you wanna dance. It’s hard to connect the sheer Detroit dynamism of Bob Seger’s epic extended ‘Heavy Music’ 45 with the blue-collar journeyman of Boring Bob’s decade-later commercial period. No matter, kiddies. That Seger was laying down such heavy sounds in 1967 must suffice for us wildcats. And one listen to this song allows us to forgive his decline into calculated hit mush – at least it brought him mucho moolah, ho hum.


helaas is het filmpje geblokt.

Maar deze is er wel:

Vandaag op het festival the wig

Today we’re listening to The Wig’s ‘Crackin’ Up’, simultaneously frantic and poignant. Such songs used to be misnamed Garage Rock. Wrong!!! The expertise of the rhythm section, the deft tempo changes, the dextrous and moving organ lines, and most of all the sensitivity of the lead guitar as it mirrors the singer’s despair? Garage Rock? Hardly! The Wig herein reveal themselves to have been nothing less than young musical aces at the peak of their young lives.

quote:

Op dinsdag 11 juli 2017 10:19 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
Tof nummer, maar het gaat gewoon als garage rock in mijn boekje

Voor mij ook hoor

Vandaag Henry David Thoreau de proto padvinder

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
– Henry David Thoreau
Gnostic artists interface directly with their information. The materials they bring forth are through their own research and from their own experiences. Hearsay is taboo. The SydArthur Festival cherishes the kind of pioneers who not only dared to embark on bold quests, but who returned from their journeys and made good account of themselves and their experiences. What makes Henry David Thoreau a prophet for the modern age is that he not only went to the woods to live deliberately but, upon his return, he delivered such a remarkable testament that Walden has become a holy text. Essential. Only time has shown us the long-term truth of Thoreau’s words. But one thing is certain: with this accompanying text to support Thoreau’s advocacy of life in the woods, he became Authority. The Authority is the one who creates it and claims it within themselves.
Thoreau was our first hippie. Preaching self-reliance and personal responsibility, here was an intellectual who dared to roll up his sleeves and try it all out: a Nature Boy standing fast against the onslaught of the Industrial Age. He saw the whole world through the microscopic lens of his local pond where he set out to “front only the essential facts of life”. Such a deep journey within, he maintained, was “essentially revolutionary”, a way to change the world. His conclusions were prescriptive and, to the future counterculture, offered a viable alternative to the enslavement of the conveyor belt of life through a new path of self-determination and simplification. As the modern Anti-Capitalist’s fountainhead, Thoreau not only challenged the morality of over-consumption, but further he believed that it was only when we simplify that we begin to reach our higher potential. While his way to personal elevation might not be the only way, it is most certainly a way available to all. What a beautiful gift! Henry David Thoreau has obtained in our minds the status of a folk hero, his words and message having long been appropriated by every righteous-thinking conservationist, anti-capitalist and by every believer in non-violent resistance. To the woods!

En voor de muzikale invulling:

De Electric Prunes


Een keer niet met to much to dream last night maar met een hideaway

Today, check out ‘Hideaway’ by the Electric Prunes. Bad idea of the band’s management to sign them to Reprise Records, stronghold of Frank Sinatra – infamous proscriber of all things rock’n’roll. This well-mannered quintet mostly played the game for their debut LP but had, by this second 1967 release, found both their feet AND their balls. Shades of Keith Relf permeate James Lowe’s raga vocals, whilst drummer Quint foreshadowed the Bunnymen’s legendary Pete De Freitas with his cavernous tom-toms.

Vandaag country joe and the fish

Today we’re ‘Flyin’ High’. Having laid down such a classic debut LP as their ELECTRIC MUSIC FOR THE MIND & BODY, you’d think life woulda been kinder to Country Joe & the Fish. Herein, their genius lead guitarist Barry Melton burns brighter in 200 seconds than most ego axe-wielders manage in an entire career. Unfortunately, their flair and effortless cosmic sensibilities would become tragically overshadowed by Country Joe’s own ‘1,2,3, what are we fighting for’ schtick for the Woodstock Generation. Forget your preconceptions, kiddies. If you dig ‘Flyin’ High’, you’re sure to LOVE that whole LP!

Gisteren werd de bastille bestormd

“Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.”
– Raya Dunayevskaya

If we are in the SydArthur Festival looking for shifts of consciousness, then can there be any greater Forever shift in consciousness than the Storming of the Bastille? The Bastille: that grim and grotesque edifice, that omnipresent symbol of injustice and abuse, whose castellated walls overshadowed Paris since Medieval times. So grim, artists depicted it three times larger than reality. The Storming of the Bastille may have only released six old prisoners and a dog, but it relieved a great strain on the psyche of Parisians. And sometimes revolutions need an incendiary act in order to kick-start proceedings. Power to the People. Just as Ginsberg, Hoffman and cohorts had in 1967 surrounded the Pentagon and chanted “Out Demons Out” in protest against the Vietnam War, the Storming of the Bastille was the great symbolic act that put the fate of the people into their own hands. Power to the People.

The mere fact that we can even think about gobbling psychedelics presupposes that we have full bellies – ingesting the sacred mushroom after you’ve eaten the daily food. These people were starving. Like James Brown, who said himself that he’d been unable to address and sing about black consciousness until he’d guaranteed putting food on the table for his family and his musicians, the French peasants could not advance their own cause without food in their bellies. Their benevolent monarchy cared not: “Let them eat cake.” Until the overthrow of such basic injustices, society could go nowhere.

The Storming of the Bastille was a revolutionary act, a great leap forward in the consciousness of the French peasantry. A Ground Zero moment in French history? No, a Ground Zero moment in Human History. Power to the People. Right On.

met muziek van de troggs

oday we’re listening to ‘Cousin Jane’ by The Troggs. Even taking their name from prehistoric cave dwellers could never have entirely prepared audiences for the inept brutality of this band’s music. However, producer Larry Page reserved the right to single out singer Reg Presley for the occasional orchestral treatment, here showcasing lascivious Reg as an ardent whispering teen getting it on with his visiting cousin. Creepy, so creepy, and yet … their version of ‘Good Vibrations’ was even creepier!

En vandaag happy birthday roky

How moved you are by Roky Erickson depends how far up or down you are on the evolutionary tree. Tears can fall in the most unlikely moments, and for any number of reasons. His caterwauling 4-octave Texan shriek made teen dramas out of the 13th Floor Elevators’ extravagant cosmic notions. Roky was the mouthpiece of those psychedelic pioneers, with all the implications of what a mouthpiece is – as in Tommy Hall’s putting words into his mouth, being fed too much acid, biting off more than you can chew. But Roky was the local teen heartthrob boy wonder, and at 18 already in possession of a successful career. He’d written ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ (“at 13 or sumthin like that”) and taken the vocal style of local hero Buddy Holly, turning it into an even more caffeinated helium mission. What this son of an arty musical family was not to know was that his poetry – later to be shown in print as a veritable cosmic stew of near-religious declarations – would be, throughout the Elevators’ songs, mostly overwritten by a Gurdjieffian hyperventilator almost a decade his senior. That Roky was struggling, by the recording of the first Elevators’ album, even to score a day-pass out of Rusk mental institution is just about the most unrighteous metaphor for a mostly righteous career.

For someone who was mentally fragile in any case, what Roky has endured makes him saintly. Not a martyr, but passion bearer. He did not gorge himself, he was fed – put through these things – a victim of his birthplace, of his family, and of the lofty nature of his band leader. What a role to undertake, what a cross to bear. Who of us upon trying such things would not themselves have turned into a headcase? The story of the Elevators is as on the edge as rock’n’roll stories can get. Up against it in a way no one else was, they virtually erase every other rock’n’roll tale.


There’s an epic calm in the tearful eye of the 13th Floor Elevators’ hurricane that no others have achieved since. Not nearly. For the splendid union of this righteous quintet demanded both utter conviction to the Muse AND total understanding of the reasons behind it all. The mysterious perfection of ‘She Lives In a Time of Her Own’ lies not in the voodoo of Stacey Sutherland’s cyclical post-19th Nervous Breakdown licks, not in the hoodoo of Tommy Hall’s absurdist jug playing, not in the transcendental yelping of Roky’s post-B. Holly vocal delivery, but in the total near-US Marine levels of physical commitment to which these five young Texas heads dedicated themselves. You tell me your religion approaches their truth? Go fuck yourselves!

“Experience really does make you better, man.”
– Alan Vega
It was the immediate aftershock of the Trans-Atlantic depth charges of 1977’s Punk Explosion that blasted Alan Vega out from deep within the substrata of the firmament of the Collective Consciousness. Without that opportunity, this LSD-munching fine artist might never have come to our attention, at best securing a fabulous footnote in the appendices of New York Punk also-rans. Ah, but what Punk has to answer for! When the two sevens clashed, all of hell broke loose and the already middle-aged Vega demanded that his time had come. And how! Even Kim Fowley had recognised that he was by 1977 too old for Punk – instead hanging back in the dugout, preferring to field on his behalf an awry array of off kilter LA teen scenesters in the forms of The Runaways and Venus & The Razorblades. Not so Alan Vega. Despite being a full year older than ’60s veteran Fowley, Vega capitalized on his remarkable demos tapes – made throughout the early ’70s with his keyboardist Martin Rev – to blast forth as the Future/Retro duo Suicide, whose lean, impossibly stripped-back sound united minimalist Terry Rileyisms with the Jaynetts’ ‘Sally Go Round the Roses’, or Takehisa Kosugi’s CATCH-WAVE with the Shirelles ‘Baby It’s You’. Greedy for it all, Vega squirmed and screeched and simpered and sobbed his way into our hearts.
Tinnitus-inducing and sonically reducing, Vega’s songs were radio transmissions from the Heart of Darkness. If you wanted the Ramones, he gave you Paul Anka on a broken radio. If you wanted Debbie Harry, he gave you the Cold War. Too old to be hoodwinked by the gauche tabloid cash-ins that too soon afflicted UK Punk, the defiant Vega even wore red flares to perform in front of a Clash audience – how he paid the price! At various times in his career claiming to be both Jewish, Catholic, AND fifteen years younger, Alan Vega – along with his avant-garde Boy Wonder Martin Rev – demanded such parity with their co-Revolutionists that their maniacal/mystical/diabolical duo Suicide actually became an instant blueprint for D.I.Y. Futurists. Without Suicide? Unimaginable. That Vega died during last year’s SydArthur Festival only confirms that this Great Opportunist knew precisely his place in the Cosmos – today our hearts are full!


Day 10, and we’re checking out ‘I’m A Living Sickness’ by the Calico Wall. Yeah, The Doors have a lot to answer for! But wasn’t it great! And surely Morrison & Co.’s greatest legacy was by inspiring umpteen teenage garage bands to step away from themselves and look deep deep within. Here, the Calico Wall journey through their minds with all the insensitivity of Patrick Starr climbing inside Spongebob’s head – that messy, that brutal, but truly that effective! Was the fuzzbox ever put to more gargantuan use in the history of rock’n’roll? And did the recording engineer ever get another session after people saw his credit on this 7” single?

captain beefheart dag

Today, let’s groove to ‘Zig Zag Wanderer’. Still a full year away from mastering his tremendous vocal union of Howlin’ Wolf and Lord Buckley, the Captain Beefheart of 1967 still shared the same Rolling Stones obsessions as his schoolmate Frank Zappa. And like The Mothers of Invention’s FREAK OUT, the Captain’s debut LP SAFE AS MILK rocks all the more tremendously for it. Who else but The Mothers and the Magic Band were, in those early years, capable of such crushing rhythms? Why, the bass alone would have been enough to propel Beefheart’s near-Ray Charlesian vocal delivery. Add to that Ry Cooder’s monstrous guitar and you gotta stone classic on your hands.

Vandaag een double bill

DEATH OF NICO
“I do not feel connected enough…to throw stones at a policeman. I want to throw stones at the whole world.” – Nico

Nico’s place in this SydArthur Festival was assured when she fired up her newly-purchased harmonium and declared to her gaggle of swooning devoted super-hip songwriters: No More. Jackson Browne, John Cale, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan – all would have been quite content to continue writing material for this beautiful former Fellini Queen and Warhol Superstar. That she dared and demanded to jump off this fabulous conveyer belt, and that the results were of such an extraordinary high quality, obliges us to read her actions as having been nothing less than Total Personal Revolution.

Nico’s was a career of two halves. From having formerly offered in her songs well-organised and charming observations about the Factory scene, suddenly the New Nico presented us with deeply avant-garde art that inhabits Jungian dreamscapes of unspecified times and places. Desertshores. Borderlines. “Where land and water meet.” Across these barren landscapes, Nico’s low-church harmonium drones again and again, offering us clandestine meditations and underworld murmurings. Everything becomes merged and somewhere between the alpha and theta state. Whereas her Warhol vocal contributions are specific, her revolutionary work occupies an entirely different consciousness. She goes from trite to timeless. She becomes shamanic.

As evidenced by the fact that she often drove the Velvet Underground’s tour bus, it is clear that Nico was hands-on whenever she really wanted to be. But it took Jim Morrison’s challenge to goad her into becoming the seeress that so many adore. Once that gauntlet had been thrown down, Nico committed herself utterly to summoning her own magic. To demand to become the magician and not the magician’s assistant: this was her goal, and how highly it was achieved. In this Festival of the Mind, Nico provides for us all a blueprint for total mind transformation. She gave herself permission to become a poet. Her actions show us all that there are secret formulas to fathom and codes to break – but only for those intrepids who dare.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON
“If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get
paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”
– Hunter S. Thompson

The fallout after the failure of the Hippie Experiment? Well, it was never going to be easy. That the voice of hope would came from a paranoid drug-fuelled nihilist with a bottomless love for the promise of America was, however, an apposite blessing. And so it is that Hunter S. Thompson takes his place in the SydArthur Festival as the literary renegade for whom W. Blake’s ‘road of excess’ quite literally led to the palace of wisdom. By drugging to the very edge of human capabilities, Thompson tore away every remaining psychic shield that had defended him from his own Western Culture. Then and only then was Thompson – by now naked, mewling and defenceless – able to confront those ‘difficult truths’ facing post-1960s America. His ruminations were not some self-pitying apologia but funny, brutally satirical, deeply insightful and, ultimately, so very useful to a traumatised generation who – when Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was published in 1971 – had not yet even realised just how badly they would need the death of their dream to be crystallised, let alone by a member of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws AND the National Rifle Association.

For a brief but critical time, Thompson was the voice of the anti-establishment – so iconic that he was even turned into a cartoon character in the seminal comic strip Doonesbury. But more to the point, so iconoclastic was he that he turned himself into a real-life cartoon character – a deliberate move to insert and thrust himself into the centre of the action in order to personally seek and tell the truth. And, as we know from the likes of Charles M. Schulz, have not some of the greatest pearls of wisdom come from cartoons? Thompson’s pioneering Gonzo journalism was self-parodying and self-sacrificing, a visionary artistic innovation that redefined satire and, for Thompson, would result in his becoming an unlikely successor to Mark Twain and a Great American Novelist in his own right.

A freedom-seeking Lone Ranger, Hunter S. Thompson steadfastly refused to tow any party line. And like his 17TH-century Ranter brethren, Thompson was his own Pope, presiding over himself as an autonomous individual, fully prepared to confront the Beast from all sides. A great moralist in spite of himself, he was a rum character with upstanding principles.


Today, let’s marvel at The Craig’s ‘I Must Be Mad’. Replete with the still-teenage Carl Palmer on drums, this must be one of the few British ’60’s singles to have reached the same awesome power-drive velocities as US acts such as The Outcasts and The Wig. Taking ‘I Can See For Miles’ as their blueprint, these Brummies co-opted the turbine engines from Sir Donald Campbell’s Bluebird, oiled up guitarist Richard Pannell’s fretboard with Vaseline, then producer Larry Page set about goading 17-year-old Palmer with fake plans to hire Ginger Baker should the recording not go to plan. The results? Fucking listen!