The balearic beardo beach hippie album canon

maybe some rick roberts solo stuff? burrito bros probably not. maybe firefall

siah and max's points about the imaginariness of americana are interesting. I guess you could say that americana is like a fascimile of realness where balearica is like a photocopy of a photocopy on an order of infinite regress. Which I imagine is what siah is getting at when he commends the "honesty" of "yacht rock". It's the honesty of faking so real u are beyond fake.

what beardo's listen when it's raining and they can't get to the beach:

http://www.whiskeyexperience.co.nz/music/images/m/Martyn,%20John%20-%20Bless%20The%20Weather.jpg

apostrophe catastrophe

Haven't read this thread all the way through, but would "In The Skies" by Peter Green qualify?

i don't want to come off all mike taylor about this, but let's try to keep one foot firmly rooted in reality. i've lived most of my life within sight of the ocean. in fact right now i live close enough that i can hear the waves on the beach. the "geographical literalist" argument makes no sense to me. practically nobody here listens to this kind of music. surfers listen to jam bands (like dave matthews, jack johnson or tortoise), indie rock (modest mouse, ratatat), rap music (conscious or not), new punk and AOR reggae (marley family offshoots). if they listen to 70s music its likely to be stones, sabbath or bowie rather than freak-folky obscurity.

jokes bruv

lol tho vahid one of my posts above had "i should stop before vahid jumps on me for just making shit up" but i edited it out

i'm not trying to deny that it's interesting to try to sketch out an "imaginary genre" here but i just don't want anybody thinking that this is some sort of california cultural phenomenon or anything like that.

back to suggestions

bobby brown's 'The Enlightening Beam Of Axonda'

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61GH2KN4C9L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

OMG YES

i just bought the reissue on sundazed last week and i was thinking of adding it to this thread before i decided to rant

xxp i think ive made it clear that im not trying to account for anything outside of my head here; that the blog-ass ramblings above are mostly half-hearted attempts to articulate my own, uh, i dont know, like, 'spiritual' or 'psychic' relationship to this music and what it represents in terms of places that ive lived and visited.

that being said i do think that a sense of place, or lack thereof, is at stake in a big way w/r/t much of the music being discussed here--both on the strictly formal level insofar as a lot of it involves the wrangling of quite culturally/geographically specific musics and on the more, like, cultural level where its produced and received as a piece of the tropics, from or for or out of the beach.

xp actually it was on akarma, not sundazed.

though that's not really "beach party" in the sense of dancing around a bonfire ... it's more like the sound of hippies lying in the sand with their heads touching and their feet forming a star, watching for comets while frying.

i dunno max, on one level what you're saying about geography makes perfect sense and i am sympathetic to it, on the other it sounds a bit like arguing that "music for airports" is actually about airports, or best understood in terms of thinking about airports. which it might be, come to think of it ...

yeah i think the geographic thing makes perfect sense and if you are a cerebral music nerd living next to the ocean it makes sense that it informs your listening habits. that's speaking 100% from experience (i live a block away from the pacific next to some beaches that are naturally very intense and wild).

perhaps we can continue both the thought experiment and suggestions?

only because i am curious as to how both max and siah view this music or freedom of location/this sense of placelessness somehow correlates with a particular fantasy of wealth or upper class lifestyle. maybe this is the most truly American attribute to the contextualization of this music because unless i remember incorrectly, the balearic sound derives from the music played on the paradise-like balearic isles in the 1970s when they were inhabited by loads of hippies who did nothing but walk around nude all day and go to dance parties at night listening to this music. in this sense i think the music relates to the island paradise driven concept of escapism which now permeates many americans' fantasies of escaping (or maybe just me, siah, and max). that this music is somehow now contextualized as upper class though is interesting because at first i had trouble fitting the whole "hippie" label into this pseudo-genre which i, given my urban perspective on the music, took to be much more cosmopolitan. now i'm rambling as well...

for a suggestion, the new Woolfy vs. Projections album The Astral Projections Of Starlight is quite beautiful with beachy guitars and dreamy vocals but then again it fits into my more cosmopolitan version of a balearic beardo hippie beach canon

One track has been posted to 20JFG here

http://www.20jazzfunkgreats.co.uk/wordpress/2008/10/15/a-post-so-smooth-it-could-be-made-of-baby-skin/#comments

balearic is kind of like rockism in that I have only seen those two godforsaken words on this webpage

I'm kinda interested in the Scandinavian/Kraut/European side of this spectrum, esp. considering the fact that E2-E4 loosely fits this vibe (Gottsching was sooooo a hippie). There has to be more in this vein...

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/87/258081144_081a7a6cf3.jpg?v=0

Plus, the whole Laurel Canyon-beach vibe you're going for just doesn't make sense to me. Guess I just don't see how the 'beachy' side fits in, especially in "If I Could Only Remember My Name," which has always been about the mountains for me (who cares what the cover looks like). I mean, maybe you're just looking for country-rock made by drug casualties of the '70s, but that starts to veer towards boogie-rock territory or loner-psych, which is way more 'beardo' than 'balearic'.

That being said, what do you think of Jim Ford in this context? Is he on the Americana side of the axis, even though he was notorious for coke-fueled yacht parties and could bust out some seriously funky grooves alongside the honky-tonk?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Yxx2vqHKL._SL500_AA280_.jpg

yacht rockism?

http://images.juno.co.uk/full/CS1360340-02A-BIG.jpg

Jim Ford is certainly hard to pin down...I always saw him as more C & W than R & B...he was a notoriously violent drunk, which I always thought explained his predilection toward honky-tonk...he also always claimed to be the true author of "Ode To Billy Joe"...

re jim ford: hmmm, don't know if he fits, the funkier tunes maybe get close??
some great tunes on that either way
xpost

Some more suggestions, possibly slightly too Dad Rock, maybe not beachy enough.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515BhRBIt%2BL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

http://www.musicdirect.com/shared/images/products/large/crhi78274-2.jpg

And no I'm really not kidding about that Doobie album, its basically Gaucho with Michael McDonald singing.

i love that little feat album

And this is for Tim as He's looking for stuff in the Santana line of thinking.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41VAFDS0RVL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

http://www.zshare.net/audio/501517708612833b/

Gypsy - Gypsy Queen Pt. 1

Max you're totally right about Shawn Phillips BTW. So much of his stuff would fit on this thread.

Let me dig around a bit.

hey what about that mike simonetti "balearic sabbath" mix from earlier this year? all 70s shit i believe.

get it here: http://www.allez-allez.co.uk/2007/08/mike-simonetti.html

i guess that runs a little more toward r&b than it does toward the kind of americana stuff thats popping up here (despite opening w/ buckingham/nicks) but its a spiritual cousin!

And a lot of the stuff that Jaxon mentioned has been included in Kosmiche Kid's Cosmic Dancing Mixes.

http://www.djhistory.com/forum/showthread.php?p=308560

Which I was completely unaware of until this thread, thanks Jaxon for inspiring the google.

the idea is that there definitely seems to be a loose canon emerging which stretches from David Crosby (but perhaps not CS&N per se) through to say Arthur Russell.

wrong. check out Dark Star

as far as santana, some of his beardier releases are Welcome (produced by alice coltrane and leon thomas on vocals)

http://www.mtv.com/shared/media/images/amg_covers/200/dre800/e876/e8769171tkg.jpg

and Love Devotion Surrender with john mclaughlin and is a tribute to john coltrane (so heavy and sooo sooo soo beautiful)

http://www.jazz.com/assets/2008/1/26/albumcoverJohnMcLaughlin-CarlosSantana-LoveDevotionSurrender.jpg

lol at cosmology at 1:00 in dark star video

Just thinking about San Frandisco's question.

I suppose I see Yacht Rock as upper class because that was its image I guess, rock stars sailing out to international waters to have parties. And as poor as I am the Balearic islands might as well be on Mars. I've never been to Europe and unless the factory I work at suddenly gives me a 6 dollar an hour raise I very likely will never go there. Cheap dollar bin records (or very obscure psych ones) are a readily accessible commodity where yachts and international vacations are out of reach.

Rural america on the other hand is something I have a far too intimate a knowledge of to think of as escapist. A couple of years in the country gave me a great Southern rock collection, but it almost drove me out of my mind. I've got no desire to go back to living with ex Meth addicts so that I can round out my Americana collection.

Here's some Shawn Phillips.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/50154308677b8d28/

For a folkie, he sure brought the funk sometimes.

the shawn phillips album Spaced is a bunch of his outtakes that are all jazz funked out. tons of rhodes and breaks. even has a dj shadow sample on it

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7859/o68602dl2.jpg

Sounds tasty.

Someone needs to do a Venn diagram so I know how this all fits in with rare groove, acid jazz, etc.

For example, is the Azymuth album Balearic?

Is it Rare Groove? Is it Cosmic Disco?

I guess its definitely not hippie Beardo, but it fits in a lot of these categories.

Oops misspelled that, I meant the Azimuth album. Not the stuff that they did as Azymuth.

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/B000KB1Y1S.01-A3HKN0V35GPHDY._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_V37305148_.jpg

Is Shuggie Otis a hippie? Balearic?

he's from la so i guess so

Tusk, obv

I'm kinda interested in the Scandinavian/Kraut/European side of this spectrum

mebbe a couple of the less psych-y more rockin' Pekka Streng tracks.

in that regard, what about that alf emil eik guy that's on lindstrom's late night tales?

I'd also be interested in any Australian suggestions coz i got nothing.

I had a great pizza and bottle of wine tonight and the restaurant played tusk and I thought of this thread. so tusk.

Flash and the Pan have already been suggested, wilter.