Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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76 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My most amazing concert!, November 13, 2002
I had third-row tickets to see Jimi Hendrix at the Virginia Beach Dome. But of course we had to suffer through some unknown opening act first, a trio called "The Soft Machine".After the Soft Machine got through with us, Hendrix was an anti-climax! There was Kevin Ayers on bass guitar and vocals, Mike Ratledge on organ (with some extra sounds built in-first time I'd ever heard fuzz organ before), and up front was drummer and lead singer Robert Wyatt. The organ and bass were on a higher level behind Robert, who actually led the band. They began their set, and played without a break for something like an hour and fifteen minutes, doing smooth transitions from one song to the other so that it came off like a suite of songs. Their musicianship was astonishing! And their music was so unlike anything I'd heard before (or since), that I was absolutely blown away! They quit, and the lights came back up, and as I looked around, I saw others with their mouths hanging open and their eyes wide, just as mine were. There was a moment or two of complete silence as people gathered their wits and came back down to earth. Then a standing ovation! We were completely wrung out. I didn't know how much of what they did was planned and how much was improvised, but when I bought their first album, I was amazed to hear that the record was a short version of the concert that I had been lucky enough to see. A true psychadelic journey! Hendrix did the smart thing when he came on. He left the lights on, and started slow, doing an intimate version of "Red House Blues" while smoking a cigarette, giving us time to recover, and slide into his vision of reality bit by bit. Volume two is a logical extension of volume one. A bit jazzier, a bit more refined sound-wise than volume one, which was a bit on the raw side from time to time. But it's a further look at the same musical vision, and a unique one at that. The two albums work together well as a musical unit. This is not background music, it is not dance music. It is not music that you listen to casually. It's music that will take you on an emotional journey if you give it a chance. It's somewhat free-form, not adhering to conventional song structures or chord progressions, but they used a lot of jazz and rock elements to make a music vision that was theirs and theirs alone. If you have time and a reasonable attention span, give the Soft Machine a chance to show it to you. But please don't do as one clueless reviewer did, and judge a body of music from just listening to a few brief clips. That's ridiculous! After their third album this group lost me. As much as I loved their music, they moved into personal avenues of expression that I was no longer able to share. Some songs sounded to me as if they inadvertantly recorded the time they spent tuning and doing sound checks and put that on the record instead of the songs. But the first two Soft Machine albums, and much of the Third, still shine as gems, as unique today as they were in the late sixties. Nothing like it before or since.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Greatest Group of the late 1960's--maybe the best ever, July 23, 2002
Soft Machine were actually friends of Pink Floyd and played with them on double bills many times. Admired by Hendrix when Hendrix came to England, he had them open for him on his first headlining U.S. tour. Friends of mine who saw them reported that Hendrix was OK, but Soft Machine was amazing.
I actually heard these two albums back about 1971, after I heard Third--Third was (and is) a phenomenal lp, holding a place in the Soft Machine catalogue close to that of Ummagumma by Pink Floyd. It was the summation of both bands' early heavily experimentational periods, and the point at which both began to formularize their sound; both groups put out two more interesting albums but eventually succumbed to repetition/commercialism in 1974. (In the case of Soft Machine, they never pulled off a "Dark Side of the Moon").Even from their early releases, the Soft Machine were virtuosic musicians in the world of rock. Ratledge's keyboard chops were as good as -- or better than -- his most accomplished contemporaries, Keith Emerson and Brian Auger, and he is the ONLY rock keyboard player who pulled off bringing the most advanced free jazz concepts (Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman) to rock, particularly on the first album. As a keyboard player, some of the things on both albums, such as "Hope for Happiness", "So Boot if At All", "Lullabye Letter", "Hibou, Anemone and Bear", "As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still" are incredibly complicated and innovative keyboard pieces and among the reasons I still admire Ratledge thirty years later. (Ratledge's organ sound changes quite radically from the first album to the second, probably because of the amplification they were using. On the first U.S. tour, Soft Machine used Fender Dual Showman amplifiers--pretty hefty power output, but very clean sounding. Later they switched to Marshall amps, which had more power but also more distortion; they were favorites of everone f Wyatt's drumming is as good as Keith Moon's, but he knows what he is doing. Although Kevin Ayers' bass playing on the first is not quite as proficient as Hugh Hopper's on the second, Hopper was one of the finest bass players in rock; totally unique and lightning fast, so Ayers did a creditable job (especially on "Joy of a Toy" on the first lp). This was a staggeringly good group...great but very odd. But, as one of my friends had said once, both albums are like one "great long song." You should really hear this, if only to hear what really great musicians can do when the fetters are untied. This was such a brief and shining moment in rock history...I am delighted that it was at least captured on vinyl. Get it...this is a piece of magic captured in a jewel box. Gary Gomes
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If, June 11, 1999
If you want to hear how psychedelic rock and jazz will forever be tied by improvisation, if you've been looking at old Family Dog posters and want to know why why why these guys opened for Jimi Hendrix, if you like Syd Barrett but sometimes think his acid nuttiness distances you rather than brings you into the music, if you don't want to listen to Pharaoh Sanders' Karma but want the same challenge and elation, if you want to hear some of the best drumming ever laid down anywhere at anytime, if you need a warm-up before you put on that old Gong record, if all the jazz fusion you've ever heard seems either too brainy or belongs in an elevator, if you just want something really different to listen to but that rocks and you've never heard of these guys or any of the comparisons I've just thrown out...well then, have a listen.
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