Huerque Mapu (1972/3)

I first arrived in Argentina in early 1975, at a time now crystallised on celluloid by Argentina’s post-Junta cinema but then very real; a time of the AAA, the ERP, the Montoneros. A country led indeterminately either by a nightclub dancer President or her warlock, de facto prime minister: a man who determined national policy through astrological divination. The nightclub dancer shared her Rasputin’s interest in the occult.

I have memories of green Ford Falcons driven manically on and off pavements, both cars and drivers quite bereft of identification, front seat passengers leaning out of the windows with Ithakas, spraying pavements, shopfronts and the occasional passer-by with bullets. I have memories of people I met at parties that I never met again. Couldn’t meet again. Memories of a honeymoon in the Cordoba Hills punctuated by the sound of not-so-distant gunfire. I remember we never exchanged phone numbers, because they could so easily bring an Ithaca to the front door. I could go on – you get the picture.

I was living in Palermo, in a small bedsit with a girl I had met in Barcelona. I had arrived with a backpack and had no music of my own, but she had a small collection. I remember some of the albums: Cat Stevens, Caetano Veloso, that sort of stuff. And this album: the eponymous Huerque Mapu, their first, released in 1972 or 73. Neither I nor the girl I lived with have a copy any longer, and they are probably like gold dust but the tracks are still available (see below).

‘Huerque Mapu’ was the name of the band and the album. The words are from Mapungdun, a language of the Mapuche peoples, and mean ‘messengers of the earth’. The album is political, and its artists had wisely fled the country by the time I arrived in Buenos Aires. One track has stayed with me and is still a recurring earworm that pops up in the strangest places. That track is the hauntingly sad Vamos Mujer. Outside the album it is the closing piece of the Santa María de Iquique, cantata popular, a classical/folk fusion performance that tells of a 1907 industrial dispute that ended with the massacre of hundreds of nitrate miners in the northern Chilean city of Iquique.

As massacres go, and Latin America has had its fair (or unfair) share, it was a bad one. The miners had a more than just cause, one still unanswered in the 1950s when Ernesto (Che) Guevara and Alberto Granado passed through the region. I was not so conscious politically in those hazy, smoke-filled days but this one song had a pathos, a sadness,  a resignedness that would bring on tears. This is not to denigrate the other tracks on the album; they are all good, but this one song really did (and does) affect me.

So, for me this album is another powerful blast from the past; a memory of my first arrival in  Buenos Aires. It was a different time, I was a different person, but the album brings it all back together.

The track ‘Vamos Mujer’ and in fact the whole album can be downloaded from https://archive.org/details/perrerachmhm1972.

Track listing

El cuento
La Fiesta de San Benito
Sacha Shulko
Vamos mujer
Carta del soldado
Trelew
El Canelazo
Ojito de agua
Coplas del Valle Calchaqui
Run-Run se fue pa’l norte

Anyone who studied Spanish in Europe in the late 60s or early 1970s will have heard this album, and a great many, like me, will have bought it. It is a simply a collection of twelve poems by the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado, sung by the inimitable Catalan cantautor Joan Manuel Serrat. On the back of this work Serrat was awarded First Prize in a 2000 competition organised by the Fundación Española Antonio Machado for the promotion of Machado’s work.

Not that Machado’s poetry needs much promotion. I was never quite sure, and the doubt remains to this day, which I prefer here: Machado’s words, or Serrat’s arrangements and performance. It’s probably the case that the result is greater than the sum of its parts, and for me the effect has always been mesmerising. I do have to say that Serrat went on to make a similar album based on the work of Góngora that did nothing at all for me, but then I was never much of a Góngora fan.

I did my first degree in English and Spanish Literature, so this was in a sense both work and play, and if I had not spoken Spanish at this stage it is unlikely that I would have engaged with it. But engage I did, and it is an album that has never strayed far away from me. Just one example, and `I could have pulled out many: whenever I have heard Machado’s predictive words in Cantares: Murió el poeta lejos del hogar / Le cubre el polvo de un país vecino I have wondered which country’s dust will one day cover me. Now, I suppose, it is increasingly likely that it will be Patagonian dust for me rather than the dust that was to cover the exiled Machado in Collioure.

The album, Serrat’s second, was made immediately after his conflict with Eurovision 1968, in which he withdrew and was replaced at the last moment because he was prevented from singing in Catalan. Ironic, perhaps, that this, together with Mediterráneo,  his two best selling albums, should have been recorded in Spanish but he did achieve fantastic coverage with it, not just for himself but also for Machado.

NB The cover art I have included is that put out in the UK – there are several others out there.

Track listing

Cantares
Retrato
Guitarra del meson
Las moscas
Llanto y coplas
La saeta
Del pasado efímero
Españolito
A un olmo seco
He andado muchos caminos
En Colliure
Parábola

All lyrics by Antonio Machado, guitar and voice by Joan Manuel Serrat

Giant Step/De Ole Folks at Home 1969

Today’s album (or albums) for reflection: ‘Giant Step/De Ole Folks at Home’, a 1968 studio double album by American blues artist Taj Mahal. The first disc (Giant Step) is electric, while the second (De Ole Folks at Home) is acoustic. Available on Spotify.

I was into the blues at an early age, but I was quick to learn that there is blues and blues. Many, many kinds, and some I learned to love more than others. My early foraging was with old black American musicians, some of whom regularly ventured over to the UK where their music was more popular than in their native land: Howling Wolf, Champion Jack Dupree, Lightning Hopkins, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, that ilk. And some British R&B bands in the 60s were covering their kind of music, in a tentative sort of way. The old-timers had the soul but were often pedestrian in their musical artistry; the young white Brits had on the whole better technical skills but failed to get under the skin of the genre.

In 1969 I was living in México D.F. studying at UNAM. I had a record player of sorts and half a dozen records; this was one of them. I heard it at a friend’s house and went straight out to Hip70 in the Zona Rosa and bought my own copy. I loved it then, and I love it now. The first album is ‘De Ole Folks At Home’, an acoustic solo set incorporating old-time steel-body slide fingerpicking, clawhammer banjo, raw harmonica, moans and body slapping. The set includes classic numbers as well as several originals. ‘Giant Step’ is electrified, with driving rhythms, downhome grooves and an occasional Cajun feel; funky and fun.

Taj Mahal was a stage name; his real name was Henry Saint Clair Fredericks. I saw him play in Buenos Aires In the 1990s as a warmup for ‘Master of the Telecaster’ Albert Collins. I wasn’t that impressed with Collins: loud and noisy, but not very subtle. The head-banging crowd loved him, but turned against Taj Mahal, who suffered a lot of unkind barracking. That Taj Mahal set was for me superb; first half acoustic guitar, second set on piano, as he took the audience through a whole range of blues genres. But they didn’t listen – they did not know how. Pearls before swine, I fear.

I have listened to this double album regularly over the years, and some tracks are still on my current playlists. He’s an accomplished musician, music scholar and musicologist and has recorded a wide variety of styles. And he’s won two Grammy Awards, so I can’t be his only admirer.

Track listing – ‘Giant Step’
Ain’t Gwine Whistle Dixie No More (Taj Mahal, Jesse Ed Davis, Gary Gilmore, Chuck Blackwell)
Take a Giant Step (Carole King, Gerry Goffin)
Give Your Woman What She Wants (Taj Mahal, Joel Hirschhorn)
Good Morning Little Schoolgirl (Don Level, Bob Love)
You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
Six Days on the Road (Carl Montgomery, Earl Green)
Farther on Down the Road (You Will Accompany Me) (Taj Mahal, Jesse Ed Davis, Gary Gilmore, Chuck Blackwell)
Keep Your Hands Off Her (Huddie Ledbetter)
Bacon Fat (Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson)

Track listing – ‘De Ole Folks at Home’
Linin’ Track (Huddie Ledbetter)
Country Blues No. 1 (Traditional; arranged by Taj Mahal)
Wild Ox Moan (Vera Hall, Ruby Pickens Tartt)
Light Rain Blues (Taj Mahal)
Little Soulful Tune (Taj Mahal)
Candy Man (Rev. Gary Davis)
Cluck Old Hen (Traditional; arranged by Taj Mahal)
Colored Aristocracy (Traditional; arranged by Taj Mahal)
Blind Boy Rag (Taj Mahal)
Stagger Lee (Harold Logan, Lloyd Price)
Cajun Tune (Taj Mahal)
Fishin’ Blues (Henry Thomas, Taj Mahal)
Annie’s Lover (Traditional; arranged by Taj Mahal)

Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton (aka The Beano Album): featuring John Mayall, Eric Clapton, John McVie & Hughie Flint

In the early 1960s I was still at school, somewhat obsessed by folk, burgeoning folk-rock and blues music. I was attending folk and blues all-nighters at the Cousins, getting into early Dylan and buying cheap sampler albums of old blues artists like Lightning Hopkins, Sonny and Brownie, etc. And then came Clapton.

In 1963 the 18 year old Eric Clapton was a teenage guitar prodigy with the Yardbirds. This was about the time he became God overnight, although the truth was rather more prosaic – he was, in fact, a drunkard known for racist outbursts, a drug addict, a car destroyer and a serious philanderer who stole a Beatle’s wife.

And a brilliant guitarist, in a brilliant band. The Yardbirds put out ‘For Your Love’ in March 1965, at which point young Eric left and Jeff Beck (another prodigy) moved in. Jimmy Page was in the band too … sounds like a joke today. Sadly, there is no recording of the three of them together at that time, but they did record a session together in the 80s.

Anyway, back to Clapton. As Beck joined the Yardbirds lineup he left to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the best rolling blues band of the time and one that every competent musician seems to have done a stint with. A band with probably more line-ups than any other in the history of modern music. In Mayall he met a fellow blues purist, like him more into music than fame and fortune. They bonded. Clapton dropped his Fender for a Gibson Les Paul and ran it through a Marshall amp; the result is there on vinyl for all time.

The album was the breakthrough that Mayall was looking for, and made #6 on the UK album charts. Today it is recognised as one of the most influential blues albums of all time. But by the time it was released in July 1966 Clapton already had left the band with Cream in mind, to be replaced by Peter Green (did I say everyone who was anyone played with Mayall?). And as for the Beano album, well if you just listen to one track, ‘Steppin Out’, you’ll see why one morning all over London Clapton was hailed as God.

Track list
All Your Love (Otis Rush)
Hideaway (Freddie King, Sonny Thompson)
Little Girl (Mayall)
Another Man (Mayall)
Double Crossing Time (Clapton, Mayall)
What’d I Say (Ray Charles)
Key to Love (Mayall)
Parchman Farm (Mose Allison)
Have You Heard (Mayall)
Ramblin’ on My Mind (Robert Johnson)
Steppin’ Out (L. C. Frazier)
It Ain’t Right (Little Walter)

When thinking of albums that have had an important impact on me, this album has to be right up there. I think it may have been the first rock sampler album ever, I don’t know, but it was certainly the first I saw or heard. I think it might also have been the first time I saw the word ‘rock’ that didn’t refer to the Hayleyesque ‘rock ‘n roll’ of my childhood.

Apparently in 1968 (three years before decimalisation)  I paid 14/6 (that’s 73p in new money) for this album. A ‘proper’ album would have put me back £1 17s 6d (£1.63p), so it was definitely the bargain offer I remember. But given the quality and variety of the album it was definitely worth it. Tracks carefully sampled from CBS albums of the time introduced me to artists I would otherwise never have known (or at least not for a fair time). As a collection the diversity is eclectic, comprising folk-rock, blues-rock, jazz-rock, country-rock, psychedelia and stuff that was just plain weird. Yet it somehow held together.

Two artists that I was especially turned on to were the short-lived United States of America and Taj Mahal. The United States of America was special for two reasons: they eschewed guitars and enjoyed the participation of the eerily, ethereally voiced Dorothy Moskowitz. Short-lived, yes, but an album still very much worth digging up today for curiosity and/or nostalgia– it’s on Spotify. The other track was by Taj Mahal, later to become a favourite of mine. He was an excellent pianist and guitarist and I had the good luck to see him on stage in Buenos Aires in the 1990s.

Other tracks were by names soon to become favourites too. Dylan was on CBS so he was represented, along with the Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen. These I already knew. Lesser names I was introduced to and that have stayed with me include the Zombies, Tim Rose, the Electric Flag (Mike Bloomfield AND Buddy Miles), Blood Sweat & Tears and Roy Harper, the last of whom I saw regularly on the 60s university folk circuit.

A blast from the past, as they say. The album is available on Spotify, with certain omissions – presumably for reasons of copyright.

Tracklist

I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight – Bob Dylan – from the LP John Wesley Harding
Can’t Be So Bad – Moby Grape – from the LP Wow
Fresh Garbage – Spirit – from the LP Spirit
I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar – The United States of America – from the LP The United States of America
Time of the Season – The Zombies – from the LP Odessey and Oracle
Turn on a Friend – The Peanut Butter Conspiracy – from the LP The Great Conspiracy
Sisters of Mercy – Leonard Cohen – from the LP The Songs of Leonard Cohen
My Days Are Numbered – Blood, Sweat and Tears – from the LP Child Is Father to the Man
Dolphins Smile – The Byrds – from the LP The Notorious Byrd Brothers
Scarborough Fair / Canticle – Simon and Garfunkel – from the LP Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
Statesboro Blues – Taj Mahal – from the LP Taj Mahal
Killing Floor – The Electric Flag – from the LP A Long Time Comin’
Nobody’s Got Any Money In The Summer – Roy Harper – from the LP Come Out Fighting Ghengis Smith
Come Away Melinda – Tim Rose – from the LP Tim Rose
Flames – Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera – from the LP Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera