Stems, Fire

Rose stems neatly pruned
Trimmed, stacked, fuel for the bonfire
Thorns crackle in flames

Cozy, Full Moon

Red firelight fading
Full moon rising in the sky
A cozy night in

Cheap Thrills by Big Brother & The Holding Company & Janis Joplin

Let’s start with the good. Janis Joplin blazed a trail as one of the very few women in the 60s fronting a band and she brings a very powerful voice to this album, full of raw emotion and cracking in places. As well as a couple of original tracks, her versions of Summertime by George Gershwin and Another Piece of My Heart are genuine classics.

The bad is the bait and switch with this album posing as a live recording. Only one of the tracks was actually live (at least on the original release) with the rest featuring recorded audience noises played in. To be fair, the recording does have a raw, live feel that captures the energy of a top notch rock band, but it feels a little bit of a cheat all the same.

The ugly is the cover art by Robert Crumb, which features crude racist and sexist stereotypes of the worst sort. Apparently Crumb claimed later that he was satirizing those attitudes and that his audience would have understood the context, but it really leaves a sour taste even after all this time.

The final tragedy is that just two years after this record, Joplin joined the pantheon of dead rock stars, dying from a heroin overdose at the age of just 27. What a waste.

Comfort, Sowing

Hot chocolate and cream
Sowing the seeds of sweet dreams
Comfort in a mug

American Beauty by Grateful Dead

I’d often wondered about the music of the Grateful Dead. What was it that inspired legions of Deadheads to follow a band of aging hippies on endless tours across America? They were not the sort of band who got played on the radio in the UK, so it was a long time before I actually listened to an album and then on the insistence of a friend, one of the many carefully curated bootleg concerts.

It wasn’t the cosmic psychedelic space jam that I was expecting. It was … ok. Mellow blues and cosy Americana with a hint of country. It struck me listening to this album this morning that the music is really quite incidental to the experience of tripping out in a field in the California sunshine with a genuine community of like minded friends, before packing up the microbus and driving a couple of hundred miles to the next gig.

This album won’t knock your socks off, but it’s not trying to. It’s the perfect expression of the hippie ethos of tuning in, turning on and dropping out, and I wish there was more of it in the world today.

Vincebus Eruptum by Blue Cheer

There’s a general rule of thumb with this list, that if there’s a sixties band that you haven’t heard of, then there’s generally a good reason for it. In this case, aside from an entertaining hard rock cover of Summertime Blues by Eddie Cochran, the rest of the album manages to be tedious and overblown which is quite a trick when it’s only half an hour long.

File under historical curiosity only.

Groan, Warm Sun

Ancient bones creaking
She stretches in the warm sun
Lets out a small groan