Med til den astrologiske diskografi hører selvfølgelig også musicalen 'Hair' fra 1967, der blev spillet på Broadway i 1968, opført i Cirkusbygningen i Kbh 1972 samt filmatiseret af Milos Forman i 1979. Her er et klip fra begyndelsen af filmen efterfulgt af mega-hittet, den astrologisk inspirerede sang, 'Aquarius' :
- se evt. mere her : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_(film)
.
mandag den 26. juli 2010
søndag den 25. juli 2010
The Zodiac : Cosmic Sounds
LINER NOTES FOR
THE ZODIAC: COSMIC SOUNDS
ON THE WATER LABEL
By Richie Unterberger
At first glance and hearing, The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds might seem like an anomaly in the Elektra catalog. When it appeared in 1967, the label was recognized primarily for its eclectic catalog of folk recordings, and starting around 1965 for its run of extremely important folk-rock records by Love, Judy Collins, Tom Rush, Tim Buckley, and others. Just a couple of catalog numbers in advance of the album was the debut by the Doors, which would advance Elektra to a whole new level.
The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, however, was like none of those records. It was not so much the product of a group or artist as it was a collectively-hatched concept album, matching psychedelic mood music with spoken prose and all manner of exotic and electronic instrumentation. It was, as the subtitle boasted, "celestial counterpoint with words and music." And as the back sleeve instructed, in capital purple letters, it "MUST BE PLAYED IN THE DARK." Should there have been any doubt that it was serious, the astrological sign of each contributor listed on the back sleeve was announced, in parentheses, after each name, even for Elektra owner Jac Holzman. Artist Abe Gurvin and art director William S. Harvey concocted a suitably florid sleeve, with a mosaic of colors so bold and gaudy they nearly glowed in the dark, supplemented by huge wavy title lettering and a nocturnal backdrop.
Divided into 12 separate tracks, one for each astrological sign, it appeared just as both psychedelic rock and astrology itself were coming into vogue in the youthful counterculture. In some respects it was similar to other instrumental psychsploitation albums of the time, with a spacy yet tight groove that could have fit into the soundtrack of 1966 Sunset Strip documentaries, played in large measure by seasoned Los Angeles session musicians. In other respects, it was futuristic, embellished by some of the first Moog synthesizer ever heard on a commercial recording, an assortment of exotic percussive instruments, and sitar. The arrangements were further decorated by haunting harpsichord and organ, along with standard mid-1960s Los Angeles rock guitar licks. For those who took the astrology as seriously as the music, there was the dramatic reading of narrator Cyrus Faryar, musing upon aspects of each astrological sign in a rich, deep voice without a hint of irony.
Only a few of the musicians involved in the album were listed on the back cover, and much mystery has surrounded the conception and realization of the record in the ensuing years. As it happens, though, the album featured some of the creme de la creme of the Los Angeles session musician clique, as well as some notable contributors with strong ties to the early-1960s folk music that had been Elektra's backbone prior to 1965. In addition, there were precedents for albums not tied to a particular artist in the Elektra discography. Only two or three years before, the company had released a 13-volume series of Authentic Sound Effects, as well as records on how to play bass and blues guitar. The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds was not an accidental one-shot aberration from an out-of-control producer, but in fact instigated by Elektra founder and president Jac Holzman himself.
"The idea was mine," Holzman confirms. "It was not my first choice for a concept album. But the person I broached [my first choice] to stopped returning my phone calls and stole the idea for himself. I was pissed, and then decided that the Zodiac was an even better concept, and far more hip for its time. Plus, it neatly divided itself into twelve tracks."
Producing the album was Alex Hassilev, one-third of the Limeliters, the successful pop-folk group of the early 1960s who had recorded their debut LP for Elektra in 1960 (followed by numerous other ones for RCA). Hassilev had recently formed a production company with Mort Garson, who had arranged one of Alex's RCA albums (as well as doing some arranging for fellow Limeliter Glenn Yarborough). "Mort was going to do most of the arranging, I was going to do most of the producing, and we were going to make millions of dollars," says Hassilev today. "But of course, that never happened."
Yet in the meantime, "we had sold a concept to Jac to do a series of concept albums called 'The Sea,' 'The City,' and I think there was another one as well. He went for it." But Rod McKuen did his own album matching words about the sea to arrangements by Anita Kerr on the early '67 Warner Brothers LP called The Sea, which to Hassilev's recollection "kind of torpedoed our project. As I recall, Rod was supposed to be part of that project; that's how we sold it. And Rod jumped ship, and went over to Warners with Anita Kerr. That was definitely a bitter pill, 'cause [Garson] wrote a bunch of music that never saw the light of day."
Something of the original sea concept did survive on the Dusk 'Til Dawn Orchestra's Sea Drift LP, produced by Hassilev with an orchestra conducted by Garson, and released on Elektra just before The Zodiac (in fact, it bears catalog # 74008, just one digit shy of The Zodiac's #74009). In comparison to The Zodiac, according to Hassilev, the wholly instrumental Sea Drift "was a much more conventional album, a symphonic type of album. I went to England to record it with English musicians. The Dusk 'Til Dawn Orchestra was a bunch of English session players, like twelve strings and four celli and that kind of stuff. It was supposed to have had Rod McKuen on it. It was a bad scene.
"In any event, we went ahead with The Zodiac. Mort was of course assigned the task of writing the music for the individual signs." The Juilliard-educated Garson, already in his early forties, was a seasoned veteran of the industry in many capacities, including composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, and pianist. Most famous as the co-author of Ruby & the Romantics' 1963 #1 smash "Our Day Will Come," he'd also done arrangements for discs by Doris Day, Mel Torme, the Lettermen, Esther Phillips, and the Hollyridge Strings (famous for their easy-listening adaptations of Beatles songs). It was not, to say the least, the average resume for an artist engaged in any role on a recording for Elektra Records, the most adventurous independent label of the 1960s. And Hassilev was not the sort of producer one might have been expected to get entrusted with an experimental concept album about astrology. Not only was his background commercial folk, but he had barely produced anything prior to The Zodiac, although he did have one of the first home studios in Los Angeles, where Carole King used to cut demos in her early days in the city.
But Elektra was the type of label to take risks that others might have dismissed as reckless. "Jac, being a very adventurous guy, sonically speaking, really believed in finding new things," enthuses Hassilev. "He bought the idea of doing a kind of electronic score for this project. And Mort assembled this group of musicians, including Paul Beaver." Beaver would play the electronic instruments on The Zodiac, including the Moog synthesizer, a creation at that point known to few, and used by many fewer.
"Paul in those years was primarily known as a film music effects guy," says Hassilev. "I went down to Paul Beaver's warehouse with Mort to check out what we could use in the way of devices Paul had. He had a warehouse in downtown L.A. filled from one end to the other with these arcane instruments, theremins, and strange beasts that he created himself. So we hired him to be on the sessions, and Emil Richards."
Percussionist Richards boasted a staggering array of credits. Over the course of his lengthy career he has worked with everyone from Henry Mancini, Dizzy Gillespie, and George Harrison to Frank Zappa, Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye, Linda Ronstadt, and Herb Alpert, as well as on over 1700 movies. "At that time, I recorded with just about everybody who came through the West Coast," he remembers. "I'm a friend of Mort Garson's; I was his percussionist, usually did a lot of his stuff. I have a collection of over 700 percussion instruments, and he wanted some strange stuff, I guess.
"I turned him onto Paul Beaver, who at that time was one of the only guys into electronics. Paul and I had a group going at that time called AHA, the Aesthetic Harmony Assemblage. Paul was the first guy to use the Moog out here; he introduced the synthesizer to the West Coast." The Zodiac, according to Richards, was not the first album to use the Moog synthesizer: "I think we preceded [it] with an album I did for Uni called Stones. We took everybody's birth stone, and I wrote twelve songs. I was actually, I think, the first one to use the Moog on the West Coast. [The Zodiac] was closely behind this."
Adds Hassilev, "The AES [Audio Engineering Society] convention was taking place as we were getting this album together. It may have even been going on during the recording of it. I do know that I went down to the AES convention to check out this thing called the Moog synthesizer, and to meet Robert Moog. And I was just bowled over by this thing. We decided to hire the Moog, which was the only existing one in town at that time. I mean, nobody had started to work with this instrument yet. We hired it right out of the AES convention and brought it here. But of course, it didn't play in real time. We overdubbed it."
Although the assortment of percussive and electronic instruments was pretty advanced for its time, the sessions for the album were actually pretty straightforward. Hassilev: "Mort wrote the score, and pretty much it was all written out, every note. There was probably some slight improvisation of the percussion. We recorded the album, I believe, probably in four sessions. The narration, of course, was overdubbed, but the tracks were played live. All parts of the tracks, except the Moog."
Recording live presented its own challenges, particularly in "capturing Paul Beaver's sounds and all of Emil Richards's stuff. I mean, Emil ran around that studio like a sprinter. I'm not kidding! Because the score called for him to play five or six different instruments during the course of one song. Some of this stuff was large. He would run from one to the other, and play them on cue. It was something that really hadn't been attempted quite in that way before, at least not to my knowledge.
"Emil had just an incredibly large collection of stuff that arrived in a semi truck. He had the water chimes; they're a chime that has a doppler effect. It goes"--here Hassilev breaks off to mimic a swift high-to-low descension--"'Baaawwmm.' [It's] literally a set of metal plates that are lowered manually into water. He also had a fantastic bamboo instrument that makes the most incredible percussive rattling noise." The water chimes, clarifies Richards, are "four brass discs; I commissioned someone to build this instrument for me. You dropped them into a trough of water, and that microtonally bends the pitch downward. " The bamboo instruments, he adds, were "angklungs, bamboo rattles from Southeast Asia."
It was the Moog that supplied the freakiest swoops and textures on The Zodiac, and the greatest challenge to capture on tape. "The Moog, while a wonderful instrument, had very unstable oscillators," explains Hassilev. "They were good, but you had to warm up the machine. It took time for everything to stabilize. And then it wouldn't necessarily stay in frequency, which meant the tuning would go out. It had problems. It wasn't until later, when they were able to stabilize the output of the oscillators, starting with the ARP synthesizer and others, that they became more accepted."
Filling out the personnel for The Zodiac on more conventional guitars, bass, and drums were top Los Angeles sessionaires, although unfortunately the precise names and details have been lost to memory. Hassilev is fairly certain that bassist Carol Kaye and drummer Hal Blaine--both at the very top of the list for rock, pop, and session calls in Los Angeles in the 1960s--comprised the rhythm section. Holzman thinks Blaine was on the date for sure; Cyrus Faryar remembers Bud Shank playing bass flute, and Mike Melvoin, who played on numerous jazz and pop sessions (including some harpsichord on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds), contributing keyboards. Kaye, who did uncounted sessions in the 1960s (including some others with Garson, and some other dates with Beaver), recently confirmed after listening to the record that it is indeed her on bass: "That's me on the whole thing. [The] double paradiddles, tons of slides, and the octave licks [are] typical of my playing." Garson, she adds, "was an extremely talented arranger. I can see his face now, sort of smiling here and there as if he was up to some mischief."
Once the music was finished, Moog and all, one more component would be needed to put it to bed. This was the spoken astrological narrative, written by Jacques Wilson, and voiced by Cyrus Faryar. Like Hassilev, Faryar was a young veteran of the early-1960s folk boom, having played with Dave Guard and the Whiskeyhill Singers (led by ex-Kingston Trio member Guard, and also including Judy Henske) and the Modern Folk Quartet. Also a session musician who played on some of Fred Neil's finest records, he was well known to Hassilev. "Cyrus has an absolutely gorgeous voice," beams Hassilev. "That's why I suggested him for the role."
"Although I had a chance to review the text, one never knows how it is going to sound," says Jac Holzman. "Because Cyrus was new to this type of recording, as were we all, I didn't listen carefully to his track, since I intended to have him redo it against the finished stereo music track. The musicians' union frowned on overdubs, but with him there in the studio, who was to know. After the sessions, when I listened closely to how Cyrus fitted into the music, plus the quality of his reading, we just kept most of everything he did. It was wonderful."
"I had a great and grand time doing it," says Faryar. "The funny thing about it was that I got paid, like, a couple of hundred bucks. For some reason, years after that, I was thinking, 'You know, I didn't get my whole paycheck.' This is like ten years or eight years or something after it was all over. I went down to Elektra one day and talked to Suzanne Helms, the lioness in charge of everything down here. They looked it up and they'd been holding this $800 check for me for like, about, eight years! The rest of my session money, for doing the job."
Over the years Faryar (who eventually recorded a couple of albums himself on Elektra in the early 1970s) came across admirers of The Zodiac and his narration in some of the most unexpected places. At one party he met the late Graham Bond, the brilliant but erratic British blues-jazz-rock musician noted for dabbling in the occult, who moved to the States in the late 1960s. "When Graham showed up, the scuttlebutt was that he was the illegitimate son of Aleister Crowley, legendary author, necromancer, and mystic," reminisces Faryar. "Graham never denied that, and I think he allowed the rumor to circulate and played upon it. He was sort of introduced into society at this party at some record guy's house. He was an impressive fellow--large and stocky and like a movie kind of guy, flashing eyes and the whole bit. Just checking it out to see if any of these people were real, or if they were going to fuck with his head or something like that.
"We met, and Graham knew it [The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds] by heart! He said, 'Cyrus! Are you the bloke that made that record?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'I love that record, mate, come here!' It was just hysterical. And we just became pals. Right away, his whole facade just evaporated, and he was just this real guy. I will always remember that as a great moment."
There would be no follow-up to The Zodiac on Elektra; there are, after all, only twelve astrological signs, all of which had been used up by a track apiece on the album. Garson, however, would go on to devote more than half a dozen LPs to separate, individual Zodiac signs on A&M, and use the Moog and electronics on obscure albums like Electronic Hair Pieces and Wozard of Id. He's more renowned, however, for scoring National Geographic, as well as doing the theme for that series. Now living in San Francisco and still composing, he declined to be interviewed for these notes, preserving some of the mysterious aura that has surrounded The Zodiac since its release. As the album became harder and harder to find over the years, its price tag followed its lyrics into the heavens, no doubt bolstered by the cover, which was eye-catching even by Elektra's own high standards.
For years afterward, Hassilev had a studio in Los Angeles and continued to produce, working on projects as diverse as albums by Hoyt Axton and Ananda Shankar (Ravi Shankar's nephew, who combined traditional Indian music with modern electronics), a single by Seals & Crofts, and commercials with Van Dyke Parks. He's still playing as part of the Limeliters, and still proud of The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds. "What I chiefly remember is that the recording of the music for me was just a joy," he summarizes. "Working with Cyrus was wonderful, and working with Jac was great too. Jac was there for all the sessions, supervising this whole project. In that period, he was the hands-on for everything." -- Richie Unterberger
THE ZODIAC: COSMIC SOUNDS
ON THE WATER LABEL
By Richie Unterberger
The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, however, was like none of those records. It was not so much the product of a group or artist as it was a collectively-hatched concept album, matching psychedelic mood music with spoken prose and all manner of exotic and electronic instrumentation. It was, as the subtitle boasted, "celestial counterpoint with words and music." And as the back sleeve instructed, in capital purple letters, it "MUST BE PLAYED IN THE DARK." Should there have been any doubt that it was serious, the astrological sign of each contributor listed on the back sleeve was announced, in parentheses, after each name, even for Elektra owner Jac Holzman. Artist Abe Gurvin and art director William S. Harvey concocted a suitably florid sleeve, with a mosaic of colors so bold and gaudy they nearly glowed in the dark, supplemented by huge wavy title lettering and a nocturnal backdrop.
Divided into 12 separate tracks, one for each astrological sign, it appeared just as both psychedelic rock and astrology itself were coming into vogue in the youthful counterculture. In some respects it was similar to other instrumental psychsploitation albums of the time, with a spacy yet tight groove that could have fit into the soundtrack of 1966 Sunset Strip documentaries, played in large measure by seasoned Los Angeles session musicians. In other respects, it was futuristic, embellished by some of the first Moog synthesizer ever heard on a commercial recording, an assortment of exotic percussive instruments, and sitar. The arrangements were further decorated by haunting harpsichord and organ, along with standard mid-1960s Los Angeles rock guitar licks. For those who took the astrology as seriously as the music, there was the dramatic reading of narrator Cyrus Faryar, musing upon aspects of each astrological sign in a rich, deep voice without a hint of irony.
Only a few of the musicians involved in the album were listed on the back cover, and much mystery has surrounded the conception and realization of the record in the ensuing years. As it happens, though, the album featured some of the creme de la creme of the Los Angeles session musician clique, as well as some notable contributors with strong ties to the early-1960s folk music that had been Elektra's backbone prior to 1965. In addition, there were precedents for albums not tied to a particular artist in the Elektra discography. Only two or three years before, the company had released a 13-volume series of Authentic Sound Effects, as well as records on how to play bass and blues guitar. The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds was not an accidental one-shot aberration from an out-of-control producer, but in fact instigated by Elektra founder and president Jac Holzman himself.
"The idea was mine," Holzman confirms. "It was not my first choice for a concept album. But the person I broached [my first choice] to stopped returning my phone calls and stole the idea for himself. I was pissed, and then decided that the Zodiac was an even better concept, and far more hip for its time. Plus, it neatly divided itself into twelve tracks."
Producing the album was Alex Hassilev, one-third of the Limeliters, the successful pop-folk group of the early 1960s who had recorded their debut LP for Elektra in 1960 (followed by numerous other ones for RCA). Hassilev had recently formed a production company with Mort Garson, who had arranged one of Alex's RCA albums (as well as doing some arranging for fellow Limeliter Glenn Yarborough). "Mort was going to do most of the arranging, I was going to do most of the producing, and we were going to make millions of dollars," says Hassilev today. "But of course, that never happened."
Yet in the meantime, "we had sold a concept to Jac to do a series of concept albums called 'The Sea,' 'The City,' and I think there was another one as well. He went for it." But Rod McKuen did his own album matching words about the sea to arrangements by Anita Kerr on the early '67 Warner Brothers LP called The Sea, which to Hassilev's recollection "kind of torpedoed our project. As I recall, Rod was supposed to be part of that project; that's how we sold it. And Rod jumped ship, and went over to Warners with Anita Kerr. That was definitely a bitter pill, 'cause [Garson] wrote a bunch of music that never saw the light of day."
Something of the original sea concept did survive on the Dusk 'Til Dawn Orchestra's Sea Drift LP, produced by Hassilev with an orchestra conducted by Garson, and released on Elektra just before The Zodiac (in fact, it bears catalog # 74008, just one digit shy of The Zodiac's #74009). In comparison to The Zodiac, according to Hassilev, the wholly instrumental Sea Drift "was a much more conventional album, a symphonic type of album. I went to England to record it with English musicians. The Dusk 'Til Dawn Orchestra was a bunch of English session players, like twelve strings and four celli and that kind of stuff. It was supposed to have had Rod McKuen on it. It was a bad scene.
"In any event, we went ahead with The Zodiac. Mort was of course assigned the task of writing the music for the individual signs." The Juilliard-educated Garson, already in his early forties, was a seasoned veteran of the industry in many capacities, including composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, and pianist. Most famous as the co-author of Ruby & the Romantics' 1963 #1 smash "Our Day Will Come," he'd also done arrangements for discs by Doris Day, Mel Torme, the Lettermen, Esther Phillips, and the Hollyridge Strings (famous for their easy-listening adaptations of Beatles songs). It was not, to say the least, the average resume for an artist engaged in any role on a recording for Elektra Records, the most adventurous independent label of the 1960s. And Hassilev was not the sort of producer one might have been expected to get entrusted with an experimental concept album about astrology. Not only was his background commercial folk, but he had barely produced anything prior to The Zodiac, although he did have one of the first home studios in Los Angeles, where Carole King used to cut demos in her early days in the city.
But Elektra was the type of label to take risks that others might have dismissed as reckless. "Jac, being a very adventurous guy, sonically speaking, really believed in finding new things," enthuses Hassilev. "He bought the idea of doing a kind of electronic score for this project. And Mort assembled this group of musicians, including Paul Beaver." Beaver would play the electronic instruments on The Zodiac, including the Moog synthesizer, a creation at that point known to few, and used by many fewer.
"Paul in those years was primarily known as a film music effects guy," says Hassilev. "I went down to Paul Beaver's warehouse with Mort to check out what we could use in the way of devices Paul had. He had a warehouse in downtown L.A. filled from one end to the other with these arcane instruments, theremins, and strange beasts that he created himself. So we hired him to be on the sessions, and Emil Richards."
Percussionist Richards boasted a staggering array of credits. Over the course of his lengthy career he has worked with everyone from Henry Mancini, Dizzy Gillespie, and George Harrison to Frank Zappa, Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye, Linda Ronstadt, and Herb Alpert, as well as on over 1700 movies. "At that time, I recorded with just about everybody who came through the West Coast," he remembers. "I'm a friend of Mort Garson's; I was his percussionist, usually did a lot of his stuff. I have a collection of over 700 percussion instruments, and he wanted some strange stuff, I guess.
"I turned him onto Paul Beaver, who at that time was one of the only guys into electronics. Paul and I had a group going at that time called AHA, the Aesthetic Harmony Assemblage. Paul was the first guy to use the Moog out here; he introduced the synthesizer to the West Coast." The Zodiac, according to Richards, was not the first album to use the Moog synthesizer: "I think we preceded [it] with an album I did for Uni called Stones. We took everybody's birth stone, and I wrote twelve songs. I was actually, I think, the first one to use the Moog on the West Coast. [The Zodiac] was closely behind this."
Adds Hassilev, "The AES [Audio Engineering Society] convention was taking place as we were getting this album together. It may have even been going on during the recording of it. I do know that I went down to the AES convention to check out this thing called the Moog synthesizer, and to meet Robert Moog. And I was just bowled over by this thing. We decided to hire the Moog, which was the only existing one in town at that time. I mean, nobody had started to work with this instrument yet. We hired it right out of the AES convention and brought it here. But of course, it didn't play in real time. We overdubbed it."
Although the assortment of percussive and electronic instruments was pretty advanced for its time, the sessions for the album were actually pretty straightforward. Hassilev: "Mort wrote the score, and pretty much it was all written out, every note. There was probably some slight improvisation of the percussion. We recorded the album, I believe, probably in four sessions. The narration, of course, was overdubbed, but the tracks were played live. All parts of the tracks, except the Moog."
Recording live presented its own challenges, particularly in "capturing Paul Beaver's sounds and all of Emil Richards's stuff. I mean, Emil ran around that studio like a sprinter. I'm not kidding! Because the score called for him to play five or six different instruments during the course of one song. Some of this stuff was large. He would run from one to the other, and play them on cue. It was something that really hadn't been attempted quite in that way before, at least not to my knowledge.
"Emil had just an incredibly large collection of stuff that arrived in a semi truck. He had the water chimes; they're a chime that has a doppler effect. It goes"--here Hassilev breaks off to mimic a swift high-to-low descension--"'Baaawwmm.' [It's] literally a set of metal plates that are lowered manually into water. He also had a fantastic bamboo instrument that makes the most incredible percussive rattling noise." The water chimes, clarifies Richards, are "four brass discs; I commissioned someone to build this instrument for me. You dropped them into a trough of water, and that microtonally bends the pitch downward. " The bamboo instruments, he adds, were "angklungs, bamboo rattles from Southeast Asia."
It was the Moog that supplied the freakiest swoops and textures on The Zodiac, and the greatest challenge to capture on tape. "The Moog, while a wonderful instrument, had very unstable oscillators," explains Hassilev. "They were good, but you had to warm up the machine. It took time for everything to stabilize. And then it wouldn't necessarily stay in frequency, which meant the tuning would go out. It had problems. It wasn't until later, when they were able to stabilize the output of the oscillators, starting with the ARP synthesizer and others, that they became more accepted."
Filling out the personnel for The Zodiac on more conventional guitars, bass, and drums were top Los Angeles sessionaires, although unfortunately the precise names and details have been lost to memory. Hassilev is fairly certain that bassist Carol Kaye and drummer Hal Blaine--both at the very top of the list for rock, pop, and session calls in Los Angeles in the 1960s--comprised the rhythm section. Holzman thinks Blaine was on the date for sure; Cyrus Faryar remembers Bud Shank playing bass flute, and Mike Melvoin, who played on numerous jazz and pop sessions (including some harpsichord on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds), contributing keyboards. Kaye, who did uncounted sessions in the 1960s (including some others with Garson, and some other dates with Beaver), recently confirmed after listening to the record that it is indeed her on bass: "That's me on the whole thing. [The] double paradiddles, tons of slides, and the octave licks [are] typical of my playing." Garson, she adds, "was an extremely talented arranger. I can see his face now, sort of smiling here and there as if he was up to some mischief."
Once the music was finished, Moog and all, one more component would be needed to put it to bed. This was the spoken astrological narrative, written by Jacques Wilson, and voiced by Cyrus Faryar. Like Hassilev, Faryar was a young veteran of the early-1960s folk boom, having played with Dave Guard and the Whiskeyhill Singers (led by ex-Kingston Trio member Guard, and also including Judy Henske) and the Modern Folk Quartet. Also a session musician who played on some of Fred Neil's finest records, he was well known to Hassilev. "Cyrus has an absolutely gorgeous voice," beams Hassilev. "That's why I suggested him for the role."
"Although I had a chance to review the text, one never knows how it is going to sound," says Jac Holzman. "Because Cyrus was new to this type of recording, as were we all, I didn't listen carefully to his track, since I intended to have him redo it against the finished stereo music track. The musicians' union frowned on overdubs, but with him there in the studio, who was to know. After the sessions, when I listened closely to how Cyrus fitted into the music, plus the quality of his reading, we just kept most of everything he did. It was wonderful."
"I had a great and grand time doing it," says Faryar. "The funny thing about it was that I got paid, like, a couple of hundred bucks. For some reason, years after that, I was thinking, 'You know, I didn't get my whole paycheck.' This is like ten years or eight years or something after it was all over. I went down to Elektra one day and talked to Suzanne Helms, the lioness in charge of everything down here. They looked it up and they'd been holding this $800 check for me for like, about, eight years! The rest of my session money, for doing the job."
Over the years Faryar (who eventually recorded a couple of albums himself on Elektra in the early 1970s) came across admirers of The Zodiac and his narration in some of the most unexpected places. At one party he met the late Graham Bond, the brilliant but erratic British blues-jazz-rock musician noted for dabbling in the occult, who moved to the States in the late 1960s. "When Graham showed up, the scuttlebutt was that he was the illegitimate son of Aleister Crowley, legendary author, necromancer, and mystic," reminisces Faryar. "Graham never denied that, and I think he allowed the rumor to circulate and played upon it. He was sort of introduced into society at this party at some record guy's house. He was an impressive fellow--large and stocky and like a movie kind of guy, flashing eyes and the whole bit. Just checking it out to see if any of these people were real, or if they were going to fuck with his head or something like that.
"We met, and Graham knew it [The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds] by heart! He said, 'Cyrus! Are you the bloke that made that record?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'I love that record, mate, come here!' It was just hysterical. And we just became pals. Right away, his whole facade just evaporated, and he was just this real guy. I will always remember that as a great moment."
There would be no follow-up to The Zodiac on Elektra; there are, after all, only twelve astrological signs, all of which had been used up by a track apiece on the album. Garson, however, would go on to devote more than half a dozen LPs to separate, individual Zodiac signs on A&M, and use the Moog and electronics on obscure albums like Electronic Hair Pieces and Wozard of Id. He's more renowned, however, for scoring National Geographic, as well as doing the theme for that series. Now living in San Francisco and still composing, he declined to be interviewed for these notes, preserving some of the mysterious aura that has surrounded The Zodiac since its release. As the album became harder and harder to find over the years, its price tag followed its lyrics into the heavens, no doubt bolstered by the cover, which was eye-catching even by Elektra's own high standards.
For years afterward, Hassilev had a studio in Los Angeles and continued to produce, working on projects as diverse as albums by Hoyt Axton and Ananda Shankar (Ravi Shankar's nephew, who combined traditional Indian music with modern electronics), a single by Seals & Crofts, and commercials with Van Dyke Parks. He's still playing as part of the Limeliters, and still proud of The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds. "What I chiefly remember is that the recording of the music for me was just a joy," he summarizes. "Working with Cyrus was wonderful, and working with Jac was great too. Jac was there for all the sessions, supervising this whole project. In that period, he was the hands-on for everything." -- Richie Unterberger
contents copyright Richie Unterberger , 2000-2010
Se mere om pladen her:
.
lørdag den 24. juli 2010
Max Heindel - første moderne danske astrolog
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia :
Max Heindel (1865-1919)
Max Heindel - born Carl Louis von Grasshoff in Aarhus, Denmark on July 23, 1865 - was a Christian occultist, astrologer, andmystic. He died on January 6, 1919 at Oceanside, California, United States.
[edit] Early infancy
He was born into the noble family Von Grasshoff, which was connected to the German Court during the lifetime of PrinceBismarck. The father of Max Heindel, Francois L. von Grasshoff, migrated to Copenhagen when he was a young man and married a Danish woman of noble birth. They had two sons and one daughter. The oldest of these sons was Carl Louis Von Grasshoff, who later adopted the pen name of Max Heindel. The father died when the eldest son was six years of age, leaving the mother and three small children in straitened circumstances. Max Heindel's infancy was thus lived in genteel poverty. His mother's self-denial was carried to such an extreme that her small income was dedicated to private tutors for her sons and daughter, so that they might eventually take their place in society as members of the noble classes.
[edit] Life experience
Heindel left home at the age of sixteen to learn engineering at the ship-yards of Glasgow, Scotland. As Chief Engineer of a trading steamer, he traveled extensively, and eventually found himself working on one of the large passenger steamers of theCunard Line plying between the America and Europe. From 1895 to 1901, he was a consulting engineer in New York City. During this time he married, the marriage being terminated by the death of his wife in 1905. A son and two daughters were born of this marriage.
In 1903, Max Heindel moved to Los Angeles, California, seeking work. After attending lectures by the theosophist C.W. Leadbeater, he joined the Theosophical Society of Los Angeles, of which he became vice-president in 1904 and 1905. He also became a vegetarian, and began the study of astrology, which gave him the key to unlocking the mysteries of man's inner nature. He met his future wife Augusta Foss around this time. However, overwork and privation brought him severe heart trouble in 1905, and for months he lay at the point of death. Upon his recovery he was more keenly aware of the needs of humanity. It is said that he spent much of the time during this illness out of his body, consciously working and seeking for the truth as he might find it on the invisible planes.
From 1906 to 1907 he started a lecture tour, in order to spread his occult knowledge. He began in San Francisco and then went toSeattle. After a course of lectures in that city he was again forced to spend some time in a hospital with valvular heart trouble. Upon his recovery, still undaunted, he once more took up his work of lecturing in the northwestern part of the United States.
[edit] Rosicrucian Initiate
In the fall of 1907, during a most successful period of lectures in Minnesota, he travelled to Berlin (Germany) with his friend Dr. Alma Von Brandis, who had been for months trying to persuade him, in order to hear a cycle of lectures by a teacher in the occult field called Rudolf Steiner. During his short stay at Germany, he developed a sincere admiration of the personality of this knowledgeable lecturer, as latter shown in the dedication of his magnum opus ("esteemed teacher and value friend"). He sat in on several lectures and had one or two interviews with Steiner and he could learn about occult truth from the founder of laterAnthroposophy, but at the same time he understood that this teacher could not help him to advance along the path of spiritualdevelopment.[1] It was then, with his mind already made up to return, feeling that in vain he had given up a big work in America to take this trip, that Heindel reports to have been visited by a Spiritual being (clothed in his vital body).
The highly evolved entity that visited Heindel eventually identified himself as an Elder Brother of the Rosicrucian Order, an Order in the inner worlds formed in the year 1313 and having no direct connection to physical organizations which call themselves by this name. As he afterwards mentions, the Elder Brother gave him information which was concise and logical and beyond anything he was capable of writing. Later, he found out that during a previous visit of the Elder Brother, he was put to a test to determine his worthiness to be messenger of the Western Wisdom Teachings. He recounts that only then he was given instruction how to reach the etheric Temple of the Rose Cross, near the German/Bohemian border, and how at this Temple he was in direct communication with and under the personal instructions of the Elder Brothers of the Rose Cross. The Rosicrucian Order is described as being composed of twelve Elder Brothers, gathered around a thirteenth who is the invisible Head. These great Adepts, belonging to human evolution but having already advanced far beyond the cycle of rebirth, are reported as being among those exalted Beings who guide mankind's evolution, the Compassionate Ones.
[edit] Heindel-Steiner connection
Current research on the connection between the two seers Max Heindel and Rudolf Steiner describes that "he[Heindel] felt that what Steiner was doing was not appropriate for America where pragmatism and clear linear thinking is predominant" and "that he did not find what he was looking for there (a Western oriented spirituality that was accessible to the general public)".[2] It is also described that Heindel's magnum opus [see following section] having a "more far-reaching body of Teachings" contains "information not otherwise available in the public domain or available without supersensible perception of an advanced degree".[3] This body of Teachings, Western Wisdom Teachings, was further developed in Heindel's subsequent investigations and works and it is not available in Steiner or any other source as it contains material and specific clairvoyant accounts "not be found elsewhere in any occult sources"; thus, it is concluded through the available sources that "The similarities are due to a common source to both men (Rosicrucian influences and teachers)".[4]
[edit] Magnum opus
See article: The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception
Heindel returned to America in the summer of 1908 where he at once started to formulate the Rosicrucian teachings, the Western Wisdom Teachings, which he had received from the Elder Brothers, published as a book entitled The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception in 1909.[5] It is a reference work in the Christian mysticism practice and in the Occult study literature, containing the fundamentals of Esoteric Christianity from a Rosicrucian perspective. The Cosmo contains a comprehensive outline of the evolutionary processes of man and the universe, correlating science with religion.
[edit] Esoteric school
See article: The Rosicrucian Fellowship
From 1909 to 1919, suffering a severe heart condition and with an adverse financial situation, but with an indomitable will and great energy, Max Heindel was able to accomplish the great work for the Brothers of the Rose Cross. With the help, support and inspiration of his wife Augusta Foss, to whom in August 1910 he was joined in marriage, he gave successful teaching lectures; he sent correspondence lessons to the students, who formed groups in many of the larger cities; he wrote volumes which are translated into many languages all over the world; he founded The Rosicrucian Fellowship in 1909/11 at Mount Ecclesia, Oceanside (California); he published the Christian Esoteric magazine Rays from the Rose Cross in 1913 and, above all, he launched the Fellowship's Spiritual Healing service.
It is described that, at his death, his body dropped slowly as if loving hands were holding him and laying him down gently; as he looked up, smiling into Mrs. Heindel's face, he spoke his last words: "I am all right dear".
Last, it is worthy of mention that the work prepared by Max Heindel, has been, since then, continued through students of the Western Wisdom Teachings who, as Invisible Helpers of mankind, assist the Elder Brothers of the Rose Cross to perform the Spiritual Healing around the world. This is the special work in which the Rosicrucian Order is interested[6] and is provided according to the commands of Christ, namely, "Preach the gospel and heal the sick."
[edit] Occult writings
- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, first edition in 1909 (ISBN 0-911274-34-0) www www2 (1911 ed.) www3 (1920 ed.)
- The Rosicrucian Christianity Lectures (ISBN 0-911274-84-7) www
- The Rosicrucian Philosophy in Questions and Answers - Volume I (ISBN 0-911274-89-8) www www2
- The Rosicrucian Philosophy in Questions and Answers - Volume II (ISBN 0-911274-90-1) www www2
- The Rosicrucian Mysteries (ISBN 0-911274-86-3) www a review www2 www3
- Letters to Students (ISBN 0-911274-09-X) www
- Gleanings of a Mystic (ISBN 0-911274-87-1) www www2
- Mysteries of the Great Operas (ISBN 0-911274-88-X) www www2
- Teachings of an Initiate (ISBN 0-911274-19-7) www
- Ancient and Modern Initiation (ISBN 0-911274-82-0) www
- The Web of Destiny (ISBN 0-911274-17-0) www www2
- Freemasonry and Catholicism (ISBN 0-911274-04-9) www www2 www3
- The Vital Body (ISBN 0-911274-16-2) www
- The Desire Body (ISBN 0-911274-03-0) www
- The Rosicrucian Principles of Child Training (ISBN 0-911274-62-6) www
- How Shall We Know Christ at His Coming? (ISBN 0-911274-64-2) www www2
- The Mystical Interpretation of Christmas (ISBN 0-911274-65-0) www www2
- The Mystical Interpretation of Easter (ISBN 0-911274-69-3) www
- Nature Spirits and Nature Forces (ISBN 0-911274-70-7) www
- The Message of the Stars (ISBN 0-911274-18-9) www www2
- Simplified Scientific Astrology (ISBN 0-911274-01-4) www www2
- Astro-Diagnosis - A Guide to Healing (ISBN 0-911274-06-5) www
- Occult Principles of Health and Healing (ISBN 0-911274-81-2) www
- Blavatsky and The Secret Doctrine, from his 1905/6 lectures (edited 1933; Introduction by Manly Palmer Hall) www, an addendum
- New Age Vegetarian Cookbook, 492 pages
[edit] Quotations
An insight into the starting point of the author's writings:
- When a new philosophy is presented to the world it is met in different ways by different people. (...) Both these classes stand in their own light. "Set" ideas render them impervious to rays of truth.
- Buddha, great, grand and sublime, may be the "light of Asia," but Christ will yet be acknowledged the "Light of the World." As the sun outshines the brightest star in the heavens, dispels every vestige of darkness and gives life and light to all beings, so, in a not too distant future, will the true religion of Christ supersede and obliterate all other religions, to the eternal benefit of mankind.
- In our civilization the chasm that stretches between mind and heart yawns deep and wide and, as the mind flies on from discovery to discovery in the realms of science, the gulf becomes ever deeper and wider and the heart is left further and further behind.
- Only when that co-operation is attained and perfected will man attain the higher, truer understanding of himself and of the world of which he is a part; only that can give him a broad mind and a great heart.
- Across every threshold the skeleton form of Death throws his fearsome shadow. Old or young, well or ill, rich or poor, all, all alike must pass out into that shadow and throughout the ages has sounded the piteous cry for a solution of the riddle of life—the riddle of death.
- The man who realizes his ignorance has taken the first step toward knowledge.
- Christ said, "The Truth shall make you free," but Truth is not found once and forever. Truth is eternal, and the quest for Truth must also be eternal.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Ger Westenberg. Max Heindel en The Rosicrucian Fellowship.Chapter 4 Heindel in GermanyPDF (Translation by Elizabeth C. Ray). 2009 STICHTING ZEVEN, The Hague, The Netherlands. ISBN 90-73736-33-1
- ^ David, Alexandre, Heindel-Steiner Connection and ResolutionPDF (1677 KiB). Accessed January 8, 2008
- ^ Weber, Charles, The Heindel-Steiner Connection, 2005
- ^ Auen, Jeff, Heindel-Steiner connection according Jeff Auen, in spiritualscience and rosicruciansophia groups
- ^ Ger Westenberg. Max Heindel en The Rosicrucian Fellowship. Chapter 5 Messenger of the RosicruciansPDF (Translation by Elizabeth C. Ray). 2009 STICHTING ZEVEN, The Hague, The Netherlands. ISBN 90-73736-33-1
- ^ "Their agreement was this: First, That none of them should profess any other thing, then to cure the sick, and that gratis" inFama Fraternitatis, 1614
[edit] See also
- Christian Rosenkreuz
- Afterlife - Life review - Silver cord
- Age of Aquarius - Astrology - Epochs (Anthropogenesis)
- Alchemy - Astrology and alchemy - Rose Cross: Alchemy and Astrology
- Bible
- Clairvoyance - Memory of Nature - Music of the Spheres
- Christ - Second Coming
- Christian mysticism - Esoteric Christianity - Vegetarianism
- Esoteric cosmology - Plane (cosmology) - Subtle bodies
- Esoteric knowledge - Esotericism - Mysticism - Occultism - Theosophy
- Rebirth - Law of Cause and Effect
- The Rosicrucian conception of God and the scheme of evolution
- Rosicrucian Manifestos
[edit] External links
- Works by Max Heindel at Project Gutenberg
- MAX HEINDEL: A Short Biography
- Texts in Spanish and Google Earth resources
- Chronology about Max Heindel and The Rosicrucian Fellowship
- The Mystic and Occult in Max Heindel's Writings
- Description of Heindel's books
- Ancient and Modern Initiation
- Foss-Heindel Residence, where Max Heindel lived for a relatively short period of time
Abonner på:
Opslag (Atom)
