You will all recognize the title as the famous sci-fi novel by Arthur C. Heinlein in which a moon-sized ion-drive spacecraft filled with 5-year-old kids with IQs over 40,000 points each and mentally retarded computers return to their home planet, Equis, which has been devastated by nuclear war only to decide an intergalactic war might be the best way to 'cleanse the biosphere' of the remnant colonies of de-evolved humans, who now are slaves to advanced worms twenty feet long (advanced in the sense they can now do Euclidean geometry, but not non-Euclidean or Lobachevskian), whereupon the mind of god interferes with itself to decide entropy itself shall be reversed, leading to the collapse of the whole universe into a new rebirth on a hospital bed where Louis Gossett Junior arises as an infant reborn into the space and time of the seventies, the golden age of course of Charlie's Angels and Fantasy Island... But wait-- in the epilogue, it is revealed that the entire preceding 8000-page trilogy of novels was merely the memory of an aging computer about to be dismantled for spare parts in the fabled junkyards of Traxa the iron planet-- was it just a fantasy or truly a memory? bang bang, the computer breaks, we never know, we really don't care, we're just tired from reading such a long book, now we need to eat some chips
What I'm going to do (along with those pesky re-ups) in the next few weeks is feature some of the best progressive music I've heard in the last year that I've kept behind, from all over the world. Almost every day, just like over at Tom's cd reissue wishlist, I will bring out some hidden treasures that will rival your old masterpieces in quality, those albums that everyone considers masterpieces such as classic Genesis or classic PFM. At least in my opinion they rival our old standards-- please keep this proviso in mind, since musical taste is so individual many will disagree. The one thing you can't disagree with me about is the sheer progressiveness of the records I'll be featuring, and I'll make a point of stating the case. All of which will build up to the climactic announcement around mid-October of an album so good it really should be on those stupid Rolling Stones top ten albums of all times lists, or rather nowadays top thousand albums of all time (amplifying the number to placate those self-obsessed baby boomers, which adds an order of magnitude each decade that passes, predictably, so that by 2040 it will be top million albums of all time). And in the process I will tell you a story about a hidden trove of progressive gems found in the Kunstlerhaus of Berlin, Germany, that country I so love to make fun of, those people I so love to satirize (I 'm half German on my mother's side which is from where this tendency derives). When I found out this art museum had a repository (similar to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Spitzbergen, Norway containing seeds of every kind of plant on earth) of progressive albums, one copy each of every one ever made, I literally fainted and had to be woken up with smelling salts held by a little waif from an opera libretto. Now, I said, now I understand what it means to be the man who had everything.... cf.:
http://prognotfrog.blogspot.ca/2010/05/return-of-man-who-had-everything.html
Quickly, I took copies of every album I had not yet seen and ran back to my taxi, Snowden-style, to take it all back home and slowly and gradually I worked my way through this treasure trove to assess what is good and what is forgettable…
I will repeat in the process the mission statement of the blog which is to popularize this most incredibly unknown and maligned style of music that I believe is one of the great apogees of human creativity. I will talk again about how brilliant minds operating from the young and exuberant rock arena of the sixties decided to broaden their horizons by incorporating into popular music and rock the ideas of classical and modern European music and jazz to craft an amalgam more beautiful than any before, more durable, shiny and shimmering than any music or even artform created heretofore, because of its intellectual appeal and emotional approachability and range... We will hear my favourite styles of course of fusion and RIO, the kind that combined the best of modern European music with rock (think ELP's borrowing of Bartok, or Art Zoyd), but also singer-songwriter styles, and the classic prog of Genesis as before said. Then in a few weeks I will show you an utterly unknown record even among the progressive collectors that can rival anything on that aforementioned idiotic Rolling Stones best albums of all time list or anything on any prog fan's top ten list. All this will end, as everything must eventually (including this blog and my life and the whole universe as a result of accelerating expansion), around 6 weeks from now when I have to go on holidays again-- too bad... Ready for it?
Tomorrow to kick things off I will be presenting to you one of the rarest and most sought-after German symphonic rock albums from the seventies, you will not be disappointed, although, it's so rare it might be you've never heard of it. And so to quote now JFK when he stood upon the Berlin Wall long ago as sharpshooting GIs aimed their military assault rifles at the East German guards killing several hundreds that day to protect their president and Marilyn Monroe stood below holding the jelly donuts (stuffed with her vaginal secretions) up for him to eat for a taste of victory: "Ich bin ein Berliner"!! and by this he declared war upon all commies in Hollywood as well as all cubans and cubists and anti-mafia activists, as F-15s strafed the East Berlin streets with RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] ... get ready cowboys, 'cuz it's gonna be one helluva ride...
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