Hot Tub Time Machine: Morning After World Blues Rock

 "Toxika," Plastic People of Universe (1974): I've been thinkin' maybe it's ab time to pull out those Milan Kundera novels again or take another look at that German film The Lives of Others (2006). But some Plastic People will have to do, for now. This track comes off an album called Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned. So definitely no "Good Day Sunshine," even if that song comes off Revolver. The Plastic People recorded Egon Bondy in 1974 but the record circulated only by cassette until 1978 because it could not be officially released under the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia. Sometimes in my sampling of their work they sound like musicians trained to play orchestral music trying too hard to play rock music. And then there's "Toxika," where they make rock music with the serious, relentless, rigor of chamber music and it all makes sense. Work it, worry it, grind it, and pound away at it until it feels right again, and then get up and do it again tomorrow. Enduring the wasteland. Jamming as a blues thing, with an Eastern European folk music backbone. Job well done. 

"Engel Der Gegenwart," [Angel of The Present], from a soundtrack to a Werner Herzog film, Heart of Glass (1976). The story is set in an 18th century Bavarian village known for producing brilliant ruby glass. When the master glass blower dies, the secret of the production of the ruby glass is lost. The villagers are driven mad trying to recover the lost secret that provided an identity to their home town, and they more or less took for granted only a short time before. Weirdly, maybe even illegal somewhere, all the acting was performed under hypnosis. The people look like harmless zombies, in my dim memory of seeing the film at Cinema 21 in Portland in the early '80s. Popol Vuh's audio accompaniment is warmer, not quite so austere and melodramatic as the narrative, more bucolic, ritualistic, grieving, slow building acoustic and electric guitar grandeur that promises some spiritual release in little evidence in the story. The music is consummate bluesy ambient folk music with historical gravitas, even if entirely imagined by Florian Fricke in a house in the German country side in the 1970s. BTW, check out the Spaghetti western music allusion in the intro. 

"It ain't easy, it ain't easy, it ain't easy to get to heaven when you're going down." "It Ain't Easy," David Bowie (1972). Gives Three Dog Night song more of an epic blues rock My Generation-feel, the way Bowie gives mythic glitter to everything he touches at this point. Turn it up.