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 … Continue reading Musical roots: Eric Burdon and the Animals

  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 … Continue reading Musical roots: Randy Newman

   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 … Continue reading Musical roots: Led Zeppelin

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 … Continue reading Musical roots: King Crimson

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 … Continue reading Musical roots: the Soft Machine