When I was young  

The rooms were so much colder then
My father was a soldier then
And times were very hard
When I was young, when I was young
I smoked my first cigarette at ten
And for girls I had a bad yen
And I had quite a gall
When I was young
When I was young it was more important
They’d more pain but they laughed much louder yeah
When I was young, when I was young

I met my first love at thirteen
She was brown and I was pretty green
And I learned quite a lot
When I was young, when I was young

When I was young it was more important
They’d more pain but they laughed much louder yeah
When I was young, when I was young

My faith was so much stronger then
I believed in fellow man
And I was so much older then
When I was young, when I was young
When I was young, when I was young
When I was young, when I was young

A man with a song, good text and a piano, Randy Newman! 

Political Science
by Randy Newman

No one likes us-I don’t know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let’s drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful
They don’t respect us-so let’s surprise them
We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them

Asia’s crowded and Europe’s too old
Africa is far too hot
And Canada’s too cold
And South America stole our name
Let’s drop the big one
There’ll be no one left to blame us

We’ll save Australia
Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo
We’ll build an All American amusement park there
They got surfin’, too

Boom goes London!…boom Paree!
More room for you and more room for me
And every city the whole world round
Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it will be
We’ll set everybody free
You’ll wear a Japanese kimono babe
There’ll be Italian shoes for me

They all hate us anyhow
So let’s drop the big one now
Let’s drop the big one now

  
End of the sixties the british scene was all about blues. Alexis Korner, John Mayall were the people helping young and talented guitar players start their career, like Peter Green and Eric Clapton. Jimmy Plant, guitar player of the Yardbirds, belongs to this generation of blues gitarists, that changed from traditional blues to the exciting music of the seventies with hard powerful rock music.

The first album of Led Zeppelin, around 1969,  has a blues background, but the guitar, the bass and drums are loud! Combined with the somtimes scary voice of Robert Plant this started a new genre. Dazed and Confuzed is the end of an era and the start of a new. The second album, with Whole Lotta Love,  was a real hard rock album and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had created a new kind of music: hard rock.

The band performed for a long time, made many albums but like many good bands it stopped in the eighties. Jimmy Page continues to play, often with Robert Plant doing the vocals.

For me Jimmy Page is a guitar player who always adds something perfect to his often simple looking playing. See here for a good bio of this band.

People who know me a bit, have learned that I can get very enthousiastic about the band King Crimson. Their debut album in 1969 with the song 21st Schizoid man, came at the moment of discovery of a lot of new musical and other inspiring things in my life.  King Crimson music is hard to describe, it changes over the  years and continues to amaze me.

King Crimson has one constant factor, Robert Fripp,  guitar player, composer and often heard on that melodic instrument called the mellotron.

McDonald and Giles and Greg Lake, and text writer Peter Sinfield were on the first albums, giving it a magical sound. The line up with Bill Bruford and John Wetton was in my opinion the best ever.

Larks Tongues in Aspic, Red, One more Nightmare.

This is the band I saw perform in the Concertgebouw, of which many fragments were on the studio albums. But not so long ago The Nightwatch album was released, containing almost all of that performance of one the most powerfull bands ever
. 
The most obvious of the King Crimson themes is composition by the use of a gradually building rhythmic motif. The Holst Mars that the first King Crimson played is a clear example of this, with its complex pulse in 5/4 time over which strings and winds—or, as played by King Crimson, mellotron—play a skirling melody above. This piece evolved into “The Devil’s Triangle”, a piece composed on variations of the central theme of Mars, split into three parts which were increasingly removed from the original Mars, on the In the Wake of Poseidon album. It was followed by many other forms, from “The Talking Drum” in 1973 (on Larks’ Tongues in Aspic), “Industry” in 1984 (on Three of a Perfect Pair) all the way to “Dangerous Curves” in 2003 (on The Power to Believe).

My musical taste is rather wide, but some musicians and groups made a very strong impression on me and determined what music moves me. I will introduce some of those bands here.

The first one to give honor is the Soft Machine. It is the first group way out of the mainstream of my youth (Beatles, Kinks), and opened a a much wider look at music.
I heard their first album late, Volume 1, at night at a dutch radioprogram (thanks Ad Visser!), at age 16 and was sold. The first line up, Mike Ratledge, Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt, perfomed a strange mix of jazz and pop.
Kevin Ayers left, Hugh Hoper joined on bass and Volume 2 was the best album they ever made as a group. Full of quick changes, unexpected loops, unheard.

With the third album horn blowers joined the band and besides the vocal Robert Wyatt Moon in June it became a jazz band with minimalistic influences. That was the moment also I saw the group playing live in Amsterdam. The sound of the organ played by Mike Ratledge, its amazing! Again it was very influencual for my musical development.
The name of the group is also special. According to Mike Ratledge: “The name came second hand through a book by William Burroughs called ‘The Soft Machine’ and he in turn had taken it from a lecture by a physiologist in America…
Soft machine was a generic term for the whole of humanity, and we were all soft machines… I guess  our basic assumption was that what we liked, everybody else was going to like as well, that we all had things in common,
and therefore we all are soft machines, and we were all going to like Soft Machine music. It might have been a false assumption but I hope it’s true”.