OFF: Timewind: WTFF?

[Keith Henderson]

 > I did find it amusing that people who bought it also bought Led 
 > Zeppelin.  Random play mode should prove interesting.

Hey, I have the Timewind CD (original version I'm sure, without extended/bonus tracks), also Irrlicht and one or two others (?), and essentially the entire Led Zeppelin discography (not the newest reissues, with fake? bonus tracks), including solo works.  What's so weird about that?  Presumably, a lot of people on lists such as ours would have similar variety in taste, considering that all these artists are from exactly the same era.

FoFP then offered...

> Heh. I seem to be plagued by this lately. Another one I can't find at a sane price:
 
> http://www.musicstack.com/album/ego+on+the+rocks/acid+in+wonderland

Hey, I have this too! 

You can listen to it here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wjEMe8TLzw

I was about to say that this album is absolutely not worth *any* sort of premium price IMHO, but then I was thinking of a different album, that being Klaus-Peter Matziol's solo album, Run For Cover, which I also have on CD.  That one has maybe two really nice tracks in the style of Eloy, and the rest of the album is pretty forgettable.  Ego on the Rocks is, now that I have my mind straightened out, also not up to the level of the parent band IMHO.  Sounds kinda dated in that hokey late 70s/early 80s way, although I still have a weird love affair with certain selected albums/tunes from this era*, even though much of the music of that era has aged really poorly.  (At least gated drums hadn't taken over completely just yet...that happened a few years later.)  I was a teenager during this time, and was just starting to discover my *own* music, as opposed to just listening to whatever albums my older brothers brought home from college.  They all stopped with
 Tull, Rush, Zeppelin, BOC, and in one case, Hawkwind.  Within months, in 1980, HW was my favorite band (listened to Levitation every day for about an entire year), but then I immediately "discovered" Amon Duul II, Nektar, Can, Gong, etc. via the cross-referencing feature of the dead-tree Rock Record discography encyclopedia and Pete Frame's family tree foldout "atlas."  Eloy 

*Late 70s Mythos (Moo-tose) is completely awful and still quite compelling for some inexplicable reason.  Something about that crystal-clear, uplifting/triumphant synth sound that lasted only a few years**, presumably spurred on by the likes of Gary Wright and the fame of Dream Weaver some years before (?).  FM's Black Noise might be spoken of the same way.  (Note that all these bands, including Grobschnitt most notably, recorded some of the most pathetic music in rock history starting about 1982, the beginning of the GREAT BLACK HOLE OF (PROGRESSIVE) ROCK HISTORY, Marillion/iQ notwithstanding.)  Also, Stefan Zauner's Prism & Views is an album I will always love, even though his main contribution to Amon Duul II was to make the band completely uncool and (with a few exceptions) uniformly terrible.

**I remember listening (in "real" time) to Chance, the 1980 (?) Manfred Mann album, full of the cheesiest of cheesy synthesizers, and thinking it was the greatest "new" sound in history.  Same with Aldo Nova's big hit, what was it, "Fantasy"?  "Cars" (Numan) too.  I thought the future had arrived, and the "old" music wouldn't have a chance against this stuff coming out.  How naive I was!  Two years later, I was over all that and said, What the hell happened to guitars?!?!  Human League, Thompson Twins, you gotta be kidding me with this horrific trash!!!  (and Joy Division, perhaps the WORST band that somehow still gets some respect...I cannot tolerate two seconds of them.)  Suddenly, this live album from Hammersmith (Stay Clean! No Class!) was annoying the hell out of my neighbors in my college dorm here at Penn State, trying to drown out "Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now" or whatever the flavor of the day was, none of them any good.  Ugh, what a
 terrible era to go to college, not to mention Saint Ronnie in charge.

But I digress...

Listen to the Eloy live album from last year, recorded 2013.  It's a nice "career retrospective" collection of great tunes, without sounding as dated as some of those post-1980 Eloy albums with the terrible production and all...

Keith

P.S. Didn't know that Klaus Schulze had died...thanks CR for passing that news along.  Better news is that Daevid Allen is getting better...Gong's newest (essentially Allen solo with Aussie friends) is really solid and worthy of being sold under the Gong name...some bits are even a little plagiaristic of old Gong numbers, John Fogerty-style, not that that's a bad thing....

P.P.S.  In 10 years, there will be few classic bands that have enough members to continue in any valid sense, not that that stops them from touring (*cough* Skynyrd/Lizzy/Man *cough*)