Thursday, April 12, 2007

Grady Stings The Blues.....The Bad Trips S/T LP




What's in a name? That was the subject of an odd conversation I once had a few yrs back when I was in The Hague at a banquet to celebrate the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. I'd misprounced the name of this Dutch fella & he was gettin all pissy about it. 'Is all right', he sniffed, 'is only my name after all'. Then this English chap w/crisp Kentish diction chimed in 'But what's in a name really? I mean, it's just a name, isn't it? Certainly no harm done I should think'. He then proceeded to bite into a custard tart, the dust & crumbs of phyllo settling on his left cheek & shoulder like small pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He didn't seem to notice & was off on his way, hobnobbin with & interruptin other guest's & conversations. A bad trip? I reckon. Personally I thought it was funny, but I'd bet at some point-especially considerin the way he was poppin them canapes-that someone had to draw his attention to the glutinous mess he was makin of himself. That's when his trip took a turn into bad. The next time I seen him at some function he was sportin this thing over his jacket he called "A vicar's bib". What a twat! But cheerio to that geezer. Toss off sez I.
Then there was the time I drove all's the way up from Portsmouth, Oh in a snow storm to see Pere Ubu in Columbus. Normally this would've been about a 2 hr affair, but w/the snow comin down so hard, it took me twice as long to get there. And then arrive at the club & find out the show'd been cancelled. Talk about your bad trips! I never did care much for the band after that. I mean, I made it & I was drivin a Pinto. Ah, whatever, it was around the time between 'Art Of Walking' & 'Song For The Bailing Man' so how good would it have been anyway? At least I got to eat a bag of White Castles on the way home. So I guess it weren't so bad after all.
But I didn't come down here to peck out a bunch of miserable musings from my memory lane compendium. I want to focus on this band The Bad Trips, which is the latest goings for one Grady Runyan whose proven himself a supreme pit master of barbequed Psychedelic brisket, havin smoked many an earhole in the legendary Monoshock as well as slaughterin all manner of burdensome beasts w/the most excellent petal-glorious sludge of Liquorball (listen to their live lp & then tell me it don't practically piledrive 'Get Stoned 'Ezy' into the mat. You can eat my______). Now he's runnin 'n gunnin w/The Bad Trips & while you might be able to take the man outta the marinade, you can't take the marinade outta the man. All the fuzzophonics & zoned riffage, the flambéd drums & rhythm... it's all there & honed to perfection (as usual). Only difference this time is The Bad Trips ain't layin waste w/sonic torches burnin off the fat of Hawkwind, Pink Fairies or Afflicted Man. No, they's crafted their 2007 blitzkreig to somethin that is extended, but also sharp & edgy. They seemed to've discreetly picked up some different stylings & tunings (just a little) than the smash/mouth action of Monoshock or Liquorball & at 1st I couldn't put my finger on it. But after a few plays it seemed to be that this lp was a perfect distillation between Paul Butterfield Blues Band's' 'East-West' jam & side 2 of 'From Pussies To Death In 10,000 Years Of Freak Out' by Flower Travellin Band. Grady 'n Jeff Grimes is like Mike Bloomfield 'n Hideki Ishima leadin messrs. Bob Anderson & Gordon Roberts (also known as 'the rest of the story') through statically charged parallelograms of improvised, psycho-gnarlic char.With that knowledge in my bonnet, I just keep listenin to it longer & longer & harder & harder & louder & louder. Rock, hint's of raga, molten leads, magestic rumbles, it's all there, recorded (gloriously) live to two-track & pressed on 180 gram vinyl for 500 willin pups (& pupettes) to have seared into their neck portals. Frankly, I ain't heard an lp anything like it this year & don't expect to. The Bad Trips might effacingly use the name in the pejorative, but the peyote is lethal & the nutmeg's toxic.If I was the snakes & coyotes out there in the desert surroundin their compund, I'd take'em seriously & keep my distance. The Bad Trips bite back & they got the pelts 'n rattlers to prove it. Go here; http://www.thebadtrips.com/ & see what I mean.

3 comments:

alex said...

The details that at the end of the first shaft cialis there is a longer platform and then a new shaft, he himself explains biographically.. The rod of power was new to him, and he felt it his duty to use it more frequently than might have been thought necessary by those upon whose sense the privilege had coumadin palled.. I was deep in the new volume of Pfeiffer's Mystics soma , which Haliburton had just sent me from Boston.. I'll have t' save one room fer th' driver, acetaminophen an' that leaves four.. You're goin' in first, viagra asserted Ross, but without conviction.. At the same moment he heard a step in the passage, ciprofloxacin and the door opened to Adoniram K.. The sanguine Edward Morland looked rather blank at this intelligence, and his oxycodone sister whispered to him, We'll get off to Mrs.. Misteh, how long yo'-all reckon this train goin' to be? About an hour. prednisone. They surrounded Elder Brown as he began to transfer himself to the hungry beast to whose motion he was more accustomed, xanax and in the hail fellow well met style of the day began to bandy jests upon his appearance.. I spoke to a friend of his about it once; and I think Ingham took it kindly, metformin etc...

Snoose Junction said...

I am loving this record

FLOWER TRAVELLIN' BAND Freak! said...

FLOWER TRAVELLIN' BAND

“We are here”

at Knitting Factory New York

Halleluwah, a Festival of Enthused Arts III

Nov, 22 2008