SydArthur festival

Today we’re tripping out to ‘Gone & Passes By’. Despite their obvious Rolling Stones fixations, vintage TV footage of the Chocolate Watchband shows glassy-eyed singer Dave Aguilar performing in the kind of heightened state that even Jagger & Co. woulda saved for AFTER their performance! Genuinely psychedelic but manipulated every which way by Machiavellian producer Ed Cobb, the Watchband you hear on disc is often not the Watchband at all, being instead several of Cobb’s associates getting down while the real band was out fulfilling tour commitments. Nevertheless, their three studio LPs all demand proper attention, and their debut LP NO WAY OUT – whence comes this classic – is especially recommended for its robust riffage and musical consistency.

Vandaag herinneren we ons de dood van dieter moebius

DEATH OF DIETER MOEBIUS
The communal aspects of Krautrock have ensured that most of the greatest output of that genre will always be perceived as acts of union, as beautiful collective statements. It is fitting, therefore, that it is upon the slender shoulders of Dieter Moebius that representing all of Krautrock for the SydArthur Festival has fallen. It is righteous indeed, for like so many of his immediate contemporaries, Moebius was a multi-tasking, multi-genre-splitting high achiever of the first order. He always chose his collaborators well: Tangerine Dream’s Conrad Schnitzler, Can’s Holger Czukay, Neu’s Michael Rother, legendary Krautrock producer Conny Plank and of course his Cluster colleague Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Aspirational in everything, Moebius even gave away his own art credits – never laying claim to some of those pop art classics we most adore: Harmonia’s debut and Cluster II included.

It was written by Werner Pieper, former manager of Amon Düül II, that Krautrockers – as the children of “Adolf Hitler’s footfolk” – were musicians who needed to create music so intense and cleansing that it absolved them all of their forefathers’ sins. This demand for freedom within their art was both righteous and deliberate: it should never be forgotten, for it is at the very heart of what constitutes “Krautrock”. And out of this need and demand, Krautrockers created their own medicines and meditations with which to sooth their tortured souls. How this music has endured. Its pop art ingredients being so all-pervasive – industrial sounds, urban traffic noise, western TV, the weather itself – has ensured that however visceral the genre became, it has by this time in the 21st century continued to serve the musical underground through the sheer powerdrive of its execution. Whether soft or hard, Krautrock is always extreme.

The incendiary collective power of Krautrock and those involved was achieved only at the expense of Europe’s sanity. For without Hitler’s World Fuck Up, there would never have been a need for future German youth to create such a vivid musical dance. Unless the world is enduring similar problems, we cannot therefore hope to witness artists of such calibre in the future.

en luisteren we naar pärson sound


Today we’re listening to the still-futuristic ‘Tio Minuter’. Making their music not in the rock’n’roll clubs but from the la-de-da surroundings of Sweden’s Modern Museum, the slow-burning career of Pärson Sound was the result of a mid-60’s collaboration between avant-garde composers Terry Riley and Bo Anders Persson, the latter assembling suitable musicians for the project from Stockholm’s underground scene. When Riley moved on, Andy Warhol moved in … to his 1967 Swedish exhibition, for which he commissioned Persson to provide an appropriate soundtrack. Earlier even than Tokyo’s Taj Mahal Travellers, Pärson Sound cannibalized the tumult of the Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ even more thoroughly than MONSTER MOVIE-period Can. Strung out, burned out, inchoate and stumbling – Pärson Sound was a full three decades ahead of their time. How bothersome for them!

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Op donderdag 20 juli 2017 09:55 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
hehe ik vind dat Pärson Sound juist typisch jaren '60 en daardoor lekker nostalgisch klinken

Denk dat meneer cope niet iets meer krautig klinkends kon vinden uit 1967

Today let’s celebrate the extravagant sound of Circus Maximus, whose debut LP combined the traditional songs of Jerry Jeff ‘Mr Bojangles’ Walker and the mighty guitar of avant-garde artist Bob Bruno. But while the raga-spew avalanche of ‘Travellin’ Around’ ensured that no listener could ever forget, the poor distribution of the band’s label Vanguard Records guaranteed that few even got the chance to hear. Indeed, J. Cope bought his mint unplayed copy for 80p a full 11 years after its release!

Vandaag begint de derde editie van het sydarthur festival. Het enige festival wat je gewoon thuis kunt vieren.

http://www.sydarthurfesti(...)death-of-syd-barrett

Dag 2 de dood van percy shelly tezamen met dit liedje uit 75


http://www.sydarthurfesti(...)percy-bysshe-shelley

dag 3

For Day 3 of the SydArthur Festival, we’re delighted to bring you a song that’s been on our turntable since 1982. ’My Plan’ by Russ Giguere is an astonishingly emotional near-religious account of a psychedelic experience. Taken from his ambitious and only solo LP, HEXAGRAM 16, no one could have expected this deluge from an ex-member of the delightfully breezy Association. But while only HEXAGRAM 16’s ‘Pegasus’ reached similar lofty realms as this song, it’s the Van Dyke Parks-ian/David Ackles-ian lyrics by Nilsson and Mike Nesmith collaborator Bill Martin that so successfully keeps this song anchored to its own time.

helaas een youtube filmpje dat niet werkt

daarom een andere:

Dag vier :


The 2018 SydArthur Moon is something. These past few nights, its crescent glow brands itself into the night sky. What better way, then, to take in the grand display of this next festival song – ‘Yaca’ – by the Italian folk band, Aedi. What an outpouring; its exhortations rending the fabric of the Earth itself. Perhaps Aedi’s singer Celeste Carboni appears more daring to us because, singing for sure in her second language, she dares to let forth with the very un-modern ‘I want your passion’ – and how grand it feels.

En vandaag dag 5


Can you see the crescent moon in the sky today? It’s getting down to nothing more than a sliver. Now’s the perfect time to dance to ‘Hollentanz’ by Günter Schickert.

Oh, this recording veritably crackles with the party strains of Woden’s wild hunt and dry bracken under the bare feet of dancers in a young forest. From Schickert’s only-recently-reissued epic album KINDER IN DER WILDNIS (Child in the Wilderness), ‘Hollentanz’, along with several other standout tracks, is ample evidence of why Krautrock has remained such a sustaining life-force.

How can such a grand artist as Schickert remain unsung, even to many genuine Kraut aficionados? It must be because he spent so much of the 70s in a behind-the-scenes role – routining Far East Family Band’s epic trip-out LP PARALLEL WORLD, keeping the synths of Klaus Schulze happy when the latter was on tour – Shickert’s free-power-trio GAM barely registering, his 1974 album SAMTVOGEL his sole major 70s release.

So do search out KINDER IN DER WILDNIS – but, in the meantime, hang on to your hats with ‘Hollentanz’.

dag 6 (ik ben slordig dit jaar)

Henry David Thoreau's Birthday

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Today on Day 6 of the SydArthur Festival, let us salute the eloquence and robustness of Henry David Thoreau’s still-modern vision with as grand a musical hymn to the frontiersman spirit as the rock’n’roll era, surely, has yet produced: David Ackles’ incredible 1972 epic ‘The Montana Song’.

Telling the tale of a visit to his grandparents’ now-derelict home, Ackles used his big Elektra Records recording budget to hire London’s enormous IBC Studios and a huge orchestra with which to subdue and entrance his listeners. One-time producer of The Teardrop Explodes, Hugh Jones tells of how, as a young IBC tape-operator assisting in the recording of this track, he was entranced by the backwoodsman demeanour of David Ackles himself, who would every day arrive with his handwritten musical charts for the orchestra carefully piled into the back of a knapsack. None of the Elektra executives had a clue where Ackles went at night. A single listen to ‘The Montana Song’ will allow us to imagine him orchestrating by the glow of his Thames embankment campfire.

dag 7

vrijdag de dertiende en volle maan

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It’s Day 7 of the SydArthur Festival, the New Moon, and Friday the 13th – unlucky for some. Ah, but for we rock’n’roll heathens stomping in the summer heat, dowsing our World Cup blues in the idiot dance of the moment, it’s time to summon ‘Fire Spirit’ by the Gun Club. ‘Fire Spirit’ invokes the ignis-fatuus, the foolish fire, the Kundalini-esque thrill-spirit that snaps at us and whips us in the rock’n’roll of our dervish dance. Sung and intoned by the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce, herein his low-key California hillbilly drawl never falls below the buzzsaw ramalama guitar levels of his Gun Club, despite at times barely horse-whispering his lyrics. “I will be cheating, the whole ritual!”

vandaag is dag 10

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Today on the 10th day of the SydArthur Festival, we pay our respects to the LSD-gobbling, avant-punk vocalist Alan Vega – one half of of the seismic duo Suicide. On this, still only the second anniversary of his death, let’s put ourselves in a suitably sombre mood by listening now to Suicide’s requiem ‘Che’, which closed their self-titled 1977 debut LP. Perversely but typically, Vega chose the opposite side of the fence from the general consensus – “they said you were a saint, but I know you ain’t” – yet even more perversely, invited his keyboard cohort Martin Rev to supply the same phased lounge lizard porn-organ music as he had crooned love songs of near-religious devotion perhaps just two or three tracks before this. The result is dark, claustrophobic, crypt-like and utterly the most real embodiment of all the conflicting emotions that we should feel about such a World Prometheus as Che Guevara. Bravo, Alan Vega.

En in retrospect dag 8 en 9

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Happy Birthday, Roky Erickson – how we love you, here at the SydArthur Festival!

Let’s ring in this important lunar day by listening to the remarkable ‘Creature with the Atom Brain’, from Roky’s one-time comeback album THE EVIL ONE. Crack open your own melted plastic brain and mourn and swoon along to Roswell Roky in full Stardust Cowboy mode. “Creature with the atom brain, why is he acting so strange?” Brought up religious and watching too many horror movies as a child, poor Roky fell into a Jungian underworld soup not of his own making. Unlike our own dear Syd Barrett, Roky rose irregularly out of the swamps to bring forth new myths, new fears, new neuroses for this Industrial Age. But hey, when the all-pervasive Christian church destroys your every last temple, divinity and tradition, what’s left but to start all over again? Witchfinder Roky got medieval on our arse…still scared of things we climbed out of long ago. But doesn’t that fear sound good?

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It’s Day 8 here at the SydArthur Festival and we’re celebrating the Storming of the Bastille with something French, freedom-loving, cathartic, meta-synchronised, fetish-like and awesome in the strictest sense of the word. ‘La L´gende du Siecle’ by Magma subjects the music fan to a colossal near-Olympian display of avant-Supremes: soul music from the stars. Who would imagine that there could be such a chasm between the haphazard opportunist actions of those Bastille stormers and the Gurdjieffian precision of their freedom-practicing great-great-great grandchildren? Magma trashed General De Gaulle forever with their blazingly futuristic, ardent, post-nationalist, mixed-race, Sun Ra-attitude to a Next World Music. Watch them here in performance, and be astonished.

Roky en Magma

Dag 12 nico en hunter s thompson

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Today on the 12th day of the SydArthur Festival, we throw our arms up to the cosmos in huge embrace of two colossal outsiders. Dearest Nico, today you sing for Hunter as well. All That Is My Own terminates your marvellous album Desert Shore. Both of you walked at the edges. Nico, you sing where land and water meet. You sing also of the borderline. They who know must pass on…meet me at the desertshore. This blessed SydArthur Festival has thrown the two of you together. What we love so much about you both has probably started some cosmic argument between the pair of you.

En gisteren was het de dood van john coltrane

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If the inspirational heart of this deeply loving SydArthur Festival beats with the psychedelic pulse of the Ur-Ancestors, where then did those psychedelic giants themselves search for their Fountain of Knowledge? For many of those rock’n’rollers, the answer was ‘John Coltrane’. How? No amplifiers, no electric instruments, still lugging about that old wardrobe they call ‘double bass’, and yet by 1961 Coltrane was possessed of an attitude to life that would – within barely half-a-decade – become adopted by every experimental Western musician. Like Percy Shelley, Robert Graves, Henry David Thoreau before him, ‘Trane’, as John Coltrane became known, embodied the high-reaching mysticism that would come to define the ’60s and ’70s. Trane looked to the Hinduism of India, he looked to meditation, he named his son after Ravi Shankar, he looked between the musical notes and w-i-d-e-n-e-d them considerably. His endgame? “I want more of the sense of the expansion of time. I want the time to be more plastic.”

And what Coltrane’s early ’60s band brought forth acoustically, there too traipsed the psychedelic bands of five years hence – the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, etc – but now played on loud electric axes. The antecedents of the Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’? Listen to the groove of McCoy Tyner’s piano and Elvin Jones’ drums on Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favorite Things’. It’s what the Doors aped when club managers insisted they extend their set in the early days. Ah, but even the guitar genius of Robbie Krieger couldn’t hide his devotion to what Coltrane’s sax whips out at 8 minutes, 31 seconds of that track. Doors producer Paul Rothschild, himself so jazz, could not resist its inclusion on the final version of ‘Light My Fire’. Trane’s reputation was rising. So by the time the Byrds recorded ‘Eight Miles High’, it was actually in Roger McGuinn’s interest to confess to his Trane-isms on the song’s unforgettable lead guitar lines. Was it Coltrane’s ‘Africa’? Or was it ‘India’? Performed by McGuinn on a strident and unwieldy electric 12-string no less: his heathen gate-crashing melody channels Coltrane’s off-kilter saxophone magnificently. Free jazz sax permeated performances of the MC5, whose singer named himself after Coltrane’s pianist. Side two of Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia lambasted punks with Coltranean free rock.

When in summer 1982 the Teardrop Explodes passed through San Francisco’s airport, their entourage was approached by members of the Church of John Coltrane, who spoke so lovingly of their divine mentor that three of the band’s five members bought Coltrane t-shirts inscribed ‘Damn The Rules!’ The man himself would surely have approved; interviewed in the early ’60s, Coltrane openly declared his wish to be canonised within 15 years of his death.

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Day 13 here at the SydArthur Festival. Let’s take advantage of that mysterious number to unleash a right old pagan onslaught in the form of ‘Raider’. Never off our turntable since 1981, this slab of supercool West Coast barn-dance was a product of the mighty union of two underground stars. Judy Henske was managed by Zappa manager Herb Cohen and a longtime protege of Mr Elektra, Jac Holzman. Teaming up with arranger/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Jerry Yester, best known for his orchestral work on Tim Buckley’s GOODBYE AND HELLO, the resulting album FAREWELL ALDEBARAN was released on Zappa’s Straight label. Although too eclectic to really showcase the depth of Judy’s amazing voice, the album still reaches several high points – the monolithic gravel blues of ‘Snowblind’ sounds like Sabbath playing the Plastic Ono Band, while ‘Raider’, today’s choice du jour, is the kind of rustic knees-up that would make Neil Young proud.

dag 14

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Today on Day 14 of the SydArthur Festival, we pay homage to Grandmaster Moebius who passed on three years ago, leaving us with a huge trail of evident musical genius. Difficult though it is to pick one tune to represent M, let’s strike an obvious pose by lending an ear now to ‘Watussi’ – the cyclical, emblematic opening of Harmonia’s debut LP. Brimming over an foaming at the gils with inner beats, outer beats, static beats, pedestrian beats, ‘Watussi’ brilliantly sums up its three protagonists but most of all – for our purposes herein – showcases the impish Moebius at his foppish, glorious peak. But then again, who else in 70s Krautland would have dared portray himself as the co-habitee of his cohort, as did Moebius with Roedelius on the cover of ZUCKERZEIT? As Dennis Alcapone would say, “onwards ever, backwards never!” We love you, Moebius.

dieter moebius

This Day 17 of the SydArthur Festival falls on a Monday. Slow, sluggish… we already need a pick-me-up. So what better than ’Me and My Girlfriend’, a curiously-translated drinking song by anonymous heavies Sperrmülll. Jaunty as Syd Barrett, or even Steve Marriott’s chirpy ‘Lazy Sunday Afternoon’ character, ‘Me and My Girlfriend’ is a whale of a drunken tale of a stumbling sunny afternoon in 1973 W. Germany. This will lift your spirits – what a cracker!

Day 16 of the SydArthur Festival celebrates the birth of a Superhero, funk recidivist and culture hero: George Clinton. Today we explore the latter side of his personality, briefly resuscitating the then-floundering Sly Stone who guests on drums and vocals for this uproarious declaration of funk’s unerring righteousness. This 12th album of Funkadelic – 1981’s THE ELECTRIC SPANKING OF WAR BABIES – still saw George Clinton multi-tasking like some musical field marshal; writing the songs, managing his wayward assembly, and still unearthing extraordinary musical talent seemingly out of nowhere. This version of ‘Funk Gets Stronger’ – the second on this album – substitutes the poetic illusion of the first version (funky power, funk can sit and sit and never grow sour), replacing it herein with who for many remains the living embodiment of the successful funk artist: Sly Stone. Rugged, rudely achieved, each Funkadelic member here committed to reviving, however briefly, the once colossal Sly Stone. And what a performance they pull off. George Clinton – here the facilitator, the enabler – we at the SydArthur Festival send to you a cosmic love vibration. No one can repay you for the doors you have opened.

Day 15 of the SydArthur Festival is a quiet Saturday. The heat in the UK is terrific, and everybody is getting exhausted by it. So let’s turn now to Amon Düül’s extraordinary and anthemic ‘Love Is Peace’. Who but the Krautrockers would have dared to out-hippie the hippies with such a title? And yet these renegades dared to take a Hendrix lick and make it into the kind of Krishna chant G. Harrison would have been pleased with (not strident enough for Lennon). They came all the way from the Berlin Kommune 1, from free-form freakout a la Red Crayola, so let’s not expect too much of these Sandoz-gobbling miscreants. For although the main body of the song enjoys a kind of theatre-in-the-round call-and-answer low-church impulse as its main propellant, the second half of the song – unstructured and typical – returns them to more familiar Hapshash and the Coloured Coat territory. Good for a Saturday, though, innit?

Dit jaar niet het hele programma gevolgd Volgende keer beter.

[ Bericht 0% gewijzigd door Bosbeetle op 16-08-2018 13:30:55 ]

https://mobile.twitter.com/JulianHCope/status/1147765105603600384

Het is weer begonnen

Dag 2

Faust met krautrock

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Op dinsdag 9 juli 2019 12:05 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
oh hallo!

Voor vandaag een nummer van 24 min lang

https://soundcloud.com/hh2057/day-4

https://soundcloud.com/hh2057/day-5

Loop wat achter

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HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S BIRTHDAY
“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!

https://soundcloud.com/hh2057/day-7

https://soundcloud.com/hh2057/day-8

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THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE
“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.

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JULY 15TH 1947
ROKY ERICKSON’S BIRTHDAY
How moved you are by the recently departed 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 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.

RIP Roky

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FULL MOON
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.

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DEATH OF JOHN COLTRANE
"All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws." – John Coltrane

If the inspirational heart of this deeply loving SydArthur Festival beats with the psychedelic pulse of the Ur-Ancestors, where then did those psychedelic giants themselves search for their Fountain of Knowledge? For many of those rock’n’rollers, the answer was ‘John Coltrane’. How? No amplifiers, no electric instruments, still lugging about that old wardrobe they call ‘double bass’, and yet by 1961 Coltrane was possessed of an attitude to life that would – within barely half-a-decade – become adopted by every experimental Western musician. Like Percy Shelley, Robert Graves, Henry David Thoreau before him, ‘Trane’, as John Coltrane became known, embodied the high-reaching mysticism that would come to define the ’60s and ’70s. Trane looked to the Hinduism of India, he looked to meditation, he named his son after Ravi Shankar, he looked between the musical notes and w-i-d-e-n-e-d them considerably. His endgame? “I want more of the sense of the expansion of time. I want the time to be more plastic.”

And what Coltrane’s early ’60s band brought forth acoustically, there too traipsed the psychedelic bands of five years hence – the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, etc – but now played on loud electric axes. The antecedents of the Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’? Listen to the groove of McCoy Tyner’s piano and Elvin Jones’ drums on Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favorite Things’. It’s what the Doors aped when club managers insisted they extend their set in the early days. Ah, but even the guitar genius of Robbie Krieger couldn’t hide his devotion to what Coltrane’s sax whips out at 8 minutes, 31 seconds of that track. Doors producer Paul Rothschild, himself so jazz, could not resist its inclusion on the final version of ‘Light My Fire’. Trane’s reputation was rising. So by the time the Byrds recorded ‘Eight Miles High’, it was actually in Roger McGuinn’s interest to confess to his Trane-isms on the song’s unforgettable lead guitar lines. Was it Coltrane’s ‘Africa’? Or was it ‘India’? Performed by McGuinn on a strident and unwieldy electric 12-string no less: his heathen gate-crashing melody channels Coltrane’s off-kilter saxophone magnificently. Free jazz sax permeated performances of the MC5, whose singer named himself after Coltrane’s pianist. Side two of Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia lambasted punks with Coltranean free rock.

When in summer 1982 the Teardrop Explodes passed through San Francisco’s airport, their entourage was approached by members of the Church of John Coltrane, who spoke so lovingly of their divine mentor that three of the band’s five members bought Coltrane t-shirts inscribed ‘Damn The Rules!’ The man himself would surely have approved; interviewed in the early ’60s, Coltrane openly declared his wish to be canonised within 15 years of his death.

Jooohoooon lawman coltrane