Customer Reviews

Wee Tam / Big Huge

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When Elektra's US division released this recording in America in late spring/early summer of 1968, they were unsure that it would be marketable as a two-record set, so it was issued as two separate lps. Given the unpredictability of the music market, this was probably a prudent decision -- but I'm glad to see that Hannibal has honored the ISB's original intent and made it available as a reasonably-priced double cd. The two albums should definitely be considered as a whole.

This was the first release I bought by the ISB -- and I was hooked immediately on the exotic melodies, the instruments gathered from all corners of the earth...and the lyrics. I was attending college at the time, and I showed some of the lyrics to my English professor -- he instantly recognized them as songs, but he was very impressed with the quality and depth of the poetry. The songs address a wide variety of topics -- life, love, spirituality, mankind's place in the scheme of things -- and do so with intelligence, insight and gentle wit.

The arrangements on this set are decidedly less complex -- but, I think, just as adventurous -- as those on the preceding recording THE HANGMAN'S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER (which came out just 4-5 months earlier). They are perfectly suited to the season of the year -- lighter, less complicated than the darker mood of the prvious album. The lyrics are allowed to dominate.

I think I was a fan from the opening bars of 'Job's tears', the first track. I was mesmerized by the beauty and depth of these songs. Yes, I was at an impressionable age (I was 18) -- but as the years have passed under the bridge, I've found that I can return to these recordings (and, indeed, most of the ISB's work) again and again, still spellbound by the wonder of the music found here. The work has aged well.

Later in their career, the ISB ventured more into electric instruments -- being pushed there, I suspect, by folks at their new label, Island, thinking that perhaps a more electric sound might be more marketable (Island was the home stable to period stalwarts such as Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, John Martyn and Richard Thompson). Some of these later experiments came off well, some less successfully -- but throughout their career, until their demise in the 1970s, the ISB were always interesting.

Williamson and Heron remained individually active after the band split -- Williamson being extremely prolific -- and I was happy to see last year that they're working together again, that the ISB has been reformed. There are tours and new recordings in the works -- I'll look forward to both eagerly. Meanwhile, I know I'll continue to enjoy their catalogue -- especially this set, which is probably my favorite of their many releases.

A short 10 years ago, none of the ISB's catalog was available in the compact disc format. We should be greatful that a number of boutique labels have seen fit to release the music of this talented, but magnificently unsucessful band. There are now about 30 releases including the studio records, the live albums and the anthologies. "Wee Tam" and the "Big Huge" is the beginning of the most enduring and sucessful partnership in the band's history: Robin Williamson, Mike Heron, Licorice McKenzie and Rose Simpson. To say that "Wee Tam/Big Huge" is a personal favorite of mine, goes against the convential wisdom that "Hangman's Beautiful Daugher" or "5000 Spirits" is the ISB's best work. Orginally, a double album was chopped as two separate releases, in the United States: "Wee Tam" was released in 1967 and "Big Huge" was released in 1968. Sandwiched between those release dates, in late 1967 was the release of "Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" which chronologically was released in the UK in 1966.

It's confusing but germaine, because no one in the United States heard the unified "Wee Tam/Big Huge" double disc until nearly 25 years after it's initial release. It is the equivalent of chopping Bob Dylan's "Blonde On Blonde" into two separate albums and releasing the second album one year after the release of "John Wesley Harding." The point I'm trying to make with all of this labored chronology, is a marketing decision took precedence over the ISB's creative vision. In Europe, where the unified release coincided with the so-called "summer of love", ISB were hailed with Hendrix, the Beatles and Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, as innovators in a new music consciouness. In the USA the were regarded as an idosyncratic Scottish group who didn't even have a drummer.

The pastoral feel of "Wee Tam/Big Huge" was a summons to return to Mother Nature, that was tremendously influential in the UK and Europe at the time. In 1968, they were viewed as musical anomalies when the performed at Woodstock, and no one even thought to record their performance for posterity. ISB was regarded, on this side of the Atlantic, as a strange group of musicians from Scotland who wore antique costumes, ate microbiotic food and persued arcane philosophies. In hindsight, the simple well crafted music and the pantheistic mysticism of "Wee Tam/Big Huge" may have been one of the most enduring musical statements from that era.

`The Big Huge' and the `Wee Tam' are nominally two different albums by The Incredible String Band (TISB) when actually; they were released simultaneously in 1968 as if they were a double album where you could buy the two disks independently. The sense with which the two titles can be combined as `The Big Huge Wee Tam' is one small sign of how these two albums were always supposed to be seen as a single work, in much the same way as Dylan's `Blond on Blond' and the Beatles' `white album' are two phonographs in a single album.

It is due to this title combination that I always considered `The Big Huge' as the first of the two recordings. The second reason is because the first cut on this album, Williamson's `Maya' so completely captures the style and spirit of both albums. It also clearly connects TISB with the style of Donovan Leitch as exemplified in his song `Atlantis'. There must be some name for this kind of song in song writing circles, and I wish I knew it, as it is so distinctive in construction. Basically, it enumerates between eight and twelve things, generally people, in a group where each type serves a particular person or fits a role in the whole. The simplest example of such a song might be the `Do-Re-Mi Song' from `The Sound of Music'. Both `Maya' and `Atlantis' are much more complicated, but fit the same basic pattern.

`Maya' is doubly interesting in that it is almost certainly based on the famous illustration on the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes' great work `Leviathan' on political philosophy, where the head of the sovereign sits on a body composed of smaller bodies.

This pair of albums may have been the high point of the TISB recording career. At the very least, together with `The 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion' and `The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter', it created a body of work which at the very least insured the durability of the groups modest popularity well into the 21st century. And, I believe it is the last set of recordings they did in the style of original writing they established in `5000 Spirits...' With their next works, I detect definite changes in style and more independence from Mike Heron, as he released a solo album around this time.

I made the observation in a review of `The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter' that many of the songs can be heard as evening entertainment for children on their way to bed. I can strengthen this analogy with this album with the references to Tolkien's fiction in one or two of these songs. Add to this references to A. A. Milne's `Winnie the Pooh' and songs about caterpillars and I rest my case. Very few of their songs relate to that most favorite song subject, romantic love. Much more time is spent on adventure, discovery, tall tales, and nonsense rhymes.

For those of you who may be coming to TISB from encounters with Fairport Convention and The Pentangle, I suggest that TISB is the gold standard of original writing based on Celtic and other world folk traditions. Fairport Convention, especially Sandy Denny may have written some great songs and Jansch and Renbourn of `The Pentangle' are probably greater instrumentalists, but TISB conveys a folkish charm that is truer to the great 1960's counterculture spirit than any other band.

This is a magical album (and yes, it is one album, as a reviewer below noted). There are songs here which feel simultaneously ancient and totally innovative, achingly beautiful and unfathomably mysterious -- at this moment I am thinking of the songs "The Circle is Unbroken" and "The Iron Stone." But really everything here is amazing. This is one of those albums where you feel that the artists were stretching every nerve and muscle, reaching out beyond themselves to grasp something which they had glimpsed. A masterpiece is made when they succeed, and that's what happened here. And the beauty is not just conceptual. Sure, these guys were picking up a bewildering variety of instruments they had never learned how to play, but they pull it off; it all works. And Williamson's voice... a careless listener will think he's just tunelessly jibbering sometimes, but he's not, he's not... His voice glides and modulates all over the place, always exactly where he wants it to be. This work was really a transcendent, watershed event. For myself, I find it has an intensity unrivalled by any of the Incredibles' other albums, though "U" and "5000 Spirits" and "Hangman's" are all essential listening as well. But this is really something special.

While the remastering is expert and reveals even more of the human warmth of this work, it's difficult to write about the music of Robin Williamson and Mike Heron for the simple reason that they pretty much created their own genre. Who will we compare to the Incredible String Band? The sources and reference points of and in their music are many and widespread. Typically filed under "FOLK", the music of The Incredible String Band was and is much more. A few years after the band broke up, Robin wrote of his interest in creating a "fusion" of different musical cultures, traditions and styles. Seen from this perspective, "Wee Tam / Big Huge" must be one of the first fully-realized examples of that fusion.

In a seemingly simple, quiet framework, ISB delivers a dazzling array of ideas about music and about humankind and our perceptions of the worlds in and around us -- what are we and what we are -- with diverse and complete musical authority. How else could you possibly pull off a song titled "Puppies" without being accused of creating kitsch? This is profoundly ambitious stuff. "Wee Tam / Big Huge" allows us to witness nothing less than the patchwork creation of a being in "Maya" who is comprised of the many archetypes of the human race: "businessmen his nervous system, no-hustle men his stomach" and, my personal favorite, "opinions are his fingernails". Here, as throughout this record, small metaphors create greater metaphors, leading to saturated meanings. Throughout, the lyrical content matches the musical innovation. Always poetic and illuminating, I'd question the typical "psychedelic" conclusion: this stuff is too aware and well worked out. Remember: "At bath time the hippies, in chains, they are crossing the hall..."

As a contrast to the long and almost tone-poem-like pieces such as "Maya" and "Job's Tears" and rollicking fiddle tunes like "Log Cabin Home", there are a pair of very short, haiku-like pieces that are as pure as they are beautiful. "Son of Noah's Brother" and the more remarkable, myth-imbued "Yellow Snake" demonstrate that condensed and concise poetry can be as powerful as the more elaborate and extended work.

There is also a sense of the sacred throughout, from the every day in "Air" and the wonderfully inventive "Duck's on a Pond" to the collage of religious and literary phrases that comprise the lyrics of "The Mountain of God". Through a rich mix of musical and cultural ideas, "Wee Tam / Big Huge" makes the monumental accessible, and the miniature profound without ever resorting to cloying sentimentality, cliche or the dead ends of blind faith. This is music of approachable, constant and everyday beauty. Music as easy to love today as it was when the world was new.

Only the 60's could produce the amazing amalgamation of roots folk and psychedelia. The Holy Modal Rounders were overtly militant, while The Incredible String Band sneaks in gently to induce a more pastoral mirage. After creating their masterwork with The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Heron and Williamson left the familiar haunts of Scotland for an extended tour through America. The music they produced may have lost a slight edge of haunt, but gains in the heady somnambulism drifting through the quietly searching spirit generated by stateside boomers. Hard to explain this youthful enchantment, but this double set is filled to the brim with the stuff. Deceptively compelling. If you are a fan of their earlier efforts, this stuff is requisite.

I had not heard this for thirty years. Many of the songs have stayed with me. The best recordings they ever did - before they got too self conscious. Still a classic - modern bands are just too cautious. They all want to be cool.

The Incredible String Band continue to intrigue and inspire me with their simple but beautiful songs and melodies. Wee Tam & The Big Huge (Typical weird I.S.B album names)is yet another classic set of songs.
The use of Sitar, flutes, acoustic guitars and even kazoo and organ blends the songs brilliantly.

These 2 CDs mean more to me than just music as they also have a huge calming effect and are ideal for anyone who may be in a stressful job or is having a difficult time with their lives.

The Incredible String Band are a special group of very talented musicians who deserved far greater recognition.

I constantly marvel at the simplicity & beauty of their songs.

It's an axiom you are better off not knowing what cannot be done. This might have been a guiding light for the blossoming of the Incredible String Bands thought, words and deeds. And although this album falls short of the work that followed it, it's a worthy of notice for the daring, novelty and prism of musical thought it contains. For young Scots to have traveled so far and drank so deeply of the pool international folk literature is itself worthy of note. The (almost) mystical insight of Hangman's is born of this bumpy ride and is testament to the resilience of an art/culture/genre in decline and dying even at that(1968) late date. Oh, what a great light to cast such a dark shadow!

The other reviews correctly describe the richness and beauty of these albums. Mystical yet fun, fascinating musical concepts, still fresh after so many years. Highest rating...BUT...while wonderful on the ears, terrible on the eyes. Bad job on the lyrics insert, which are truly microscopic to the point of being unreadable. I'm lucky to have the original vinyl for reading. Otherwise, get a high-powered microscope. Still, a gorgeous recording, as are all their early releases.