Shub Niggurath - Ris Grangis, France 6/16/85
I’ve seen this Shub Niggurath show a half dozen times since I first acquired a cassette of it and just about everyone had a different spelling, so I’m only hoping I got the title right. Given that the band went off on a totally different tangent after their first LP release, it’s fun to hear a show around the same time, with classics like “Yog Sothoth.” It’s definitely a bit on the hissy side, maybe what I’d call a typical bootleg and some of that murk and hiss tends to cloud up the band’s quite moments, so it’s certainly not a perfect document. If it’s a soundboard I wouldn’t be suprised to see a better version eventually. In the meantime, this is all I’ve seen, I don’t think the band played out all that much.
Yes - Landover, MD 5/15/84 (DVD)
A recent dimeadozen find, I wanted to see this almost entirely based on the fact that I thought I saw Yes during this tour. The quality isn’t too bad, a pro shot video probably 2 or 3 generations off, so things are a bit fuzzy, just enough to know who is who. It’s a standard set from the 90125 tour rather than the Big Generator tour, which might have been the difference between acquiring it or not. It’s funny though, I was fooled all the way through watching the whole show as the live set isn’t all that far from the Big Gen tour, except, of course, for the songs they included from that album. It’s all amazingly familiar, Wurm, And You and I etc. I’m not really the biggest Trevor Rabin detractor really, but it definitely felt like he was playing with a different band here, his timing off in many moments. Anyway it’s about as much twee as I can take for now. I still have that song “Hearts” killing me by earworm, almost a week after the viewing.
Jackie McLean - Action!
Splendid mid-60s McLean album. I’ve been listening to a lot of McLean lately, most of it from the early 60s before he started to break into the avant garde, so this title stands out in particular in comparison to the others. Like most of the jazz world by this point, Coltrane was a looming influence, one so many musicians were starting to incorporate and while this is true with Action, McLean’s take still feels like his own vision, one I’m starting to get a bead on.