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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
America's First SpaceRock Festival Features British Headliners Hawkwind & Nik Turner,
By
This review is from: Fulfilling Ancient Visions - Strange Daze Festival '97 - America's Space Rock Festival 2 Cd SET (Audio CD)
Strange Daze '97 is an aural record of the first outdoor "SpaceRock" festival to be held in the United States. The headliners Saturday are Hawkwind, 25-year veterans of the outdoor music festival scene in the UK (who began their career by playing numerous free outdoor gigs- at times as a protest outside the fence of concerts where outrageous prices were being charge. Hendrix dropped by and watched the band at one of these). On Friday night former Hawkwinder Nik Turner headlined fronting Far Flung. He arrived on stage with crutches, the victim of a broken leg rumored to be from a motorcycle accident. The balance of the acts are primarily American with the exception of "Born To Go's" lead singer.
Strange Daze is a two disc set uniquely arranged. The first disc is pretty straightforward- one song from each of the bands arranged chronologically in the order they took the stage... with the exception that the headliners are saved until disc 2. Disc 2 is a bit crazy. It includes 4 complete Hawkwind songs (at 23+ minutes) and 3 complete Far Flung with Nik Turner songs (at 10+ minutes). There are 5 complete songs by some of the other bands. Then there are excerpts from 6 of the songs on the first CD (totaling less than 12 minutes in length) and there is even 1 song (Bionaut's "Re-Laminate My Organ Donor Card") from the first CD that is repeated (almost) completely in a reedited form. What do I mean by reedited? Well, the track begins on the second CD about 5 seconds later than on the original CD (mostly cutting off the unnecessary beginning of one long sustained synthesizer note) but adds about 15 seconds to the end! This makes it longer than the 'full' version on disc 1. And all of the tracks on disc 2 are arranged in a superficially random fashion. So what is going on here? The package does not tell us this but Dave Brock, founder and main force behind Hawkwind, helped produce Space Daze '97. As he is a bit of a self-proclaimed anarchist, that would be a simple explanation for us. A little too simple, as it turns out. Listening to this disc several times I realized that what we have here is a 'stream of consciousness' recording. Hawkwind did not arrive until Saturday, but when they did Dave made it a point to walk around the Brushwood New York campsite and visit every group of campers. He wanted to know his audience. He recorded some of his encounters and in between songs, or snippets thereof, a few of these (and other recorded festival noises) have been spliced in. "Hello there," you here Dave say. "I love you" cries a female fan. "I say, jolly nice!" Dave replies, before "Burning Inside" fades in over the conversation. The disc is roughly chronological, but not exactly, the way one would remember a 2 day festival with lots of bands. The song repeated in its entirety twice, but edited in a slightly different fashion (and arguably edited to sound 'better' in Brock's memory on disc 2 than what it 'really' was on disc 1) samples Hawkwind's "Countdown" from a live concert aired over the BBC on October 14, 1972. Obviously one remembers things better if they relate to you personally, thus the song gets more emphasis. Excerpts of songs seem to very from seconds to almost 4 minutes in way that seems to me to emphasize (via length) the songs that made the most impact on Dave. For the most part, the songs blend into each other or into snippets of conversation and festival noise with 2 exceptions. Following the Bionaut's song sampling Hawkwind is a retrospective silence and just before the Hawkwind 4-song set at the end of the disc is a long break I relate to, as it represents the time you blank out your surroundings and gear up for the stage. And then Hawkwind's set begins. Obviously over a third of this disc is Hawkwind- that's where the emphasis is in Dave's mind and without Hawkwind there would have been no SpaceRock festival! Nik Turner's set comes second, with 3 songs allotted to him, as Nik and Dave were bandmates off and on for years. And Turner actually did join Hawkwind on stage for a number of songs that August night, although on none presented here. For the record, Drumplay did not have a stage set, but played for the bonfire on both Friday and Saturday nights following the headliners and members of Hawkwind did attend the bonfire. There is one thing I regret this set not including, and that is one of the numbers Nik Turner performed solo onstage after the final concert on his saxophone. As the lights went up fans were disappointed that Hawkwind only did one encore. As roadies began carrying equipment off the stage Turner came on with his sax, cast and all, and began to play- first without even a mike, but finally, after ten minutes, a roadie brought one up and he went through a few of the little tunes he does and at least one Hawkwind song ("Master of the Universe"?). He played a total of 30 minutes following the 90 minute Hawkwind set. The concerts were taped on a 24 track machine by a mobile recording unit. Naturally, at least a few of the bands have bootlegs of their full concert floating around out there... The set does not list the track order for disc 2 and the order given in the item description is wrong, so I have listed all the tracks on disc 2 and their times for you here: CD 2 1. (?) intro 0:20 2. (Gaia Avatara) Sunrise 1:22 3. (Nucleon) Green acid 2:15 4. (ST37) Translunar injection 3:47 5. (F/i) Evan Walker P.I.M. 1:09 6. (Red Giant) Rooms of shord 0:43 7. (Far Flung with Nik Turner) 25,000 Feet Per Second 5:16 8. (Far Flung with Nik Turner) /Soul Herder 1:05 9. (Far Flung with Nik Turner) /Opa Loka 3:33 10. (Bionaut) Re-Laminate my organ donor card (incl Hawkwind's Countdown) (longer reedit) 4:05 11. (Nick Riff's Freak Element) Vagabond unknown 5:58 12. (Born To Go) Burning inside 0:39 13. (Quarkspace) Faerienot Space 3:49 14. (Drumplay) The stream 1:42 15. (Architectural Metaphor) Kairds 1:50 16. (Alien Planetscapes)Radiation King 3:44 17. (Melting Euphoria) Celestial Hysteria 1:07 18. (Hawkwind) Kauai 1:30 19. (Hawkwind) /Assassins Of Allah 9:14 20. (Hawkwind) Brainstorm / In Your Area 12:39
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