Stories

[Walk In My Shadow]

Is BCB dead? Not really, it's been in hibernation for a long time. Thanks to Googs who tries to keep things running and a couple of others.
So here's a story for you. I told it before but, hey!

It was 1968 when I started to buy my own albums, and not only listening to what my dad brought home. So Tyrannosaurus Rex released their debut.
Yes, the one with the long title.
During that period my hometown still had several record shops. Small hippie affairs, big mainstream and even the supermarkets sold vinyl.
It was a small shop I had visited before near the train station. The owner, a stoned hippie, advised me the album in question. What attracted me was certainly the cover art and the long title. I bought it without listening. The day must've been a Wednesday in the afternoon because there was no school.
My cousins lived two streets south of the shop and that's where I headed with my new posession. I knew they had a record player and their mum and dad were at work.
Little did I know the music was made by two musicians on guitar and bongoes.
When the needle hit the groove and Hot Rod Mama started, followed by Scenescof, the silence in the room was complete. Followed by my cousins' gales of laughter. Needles to say we didn't make it to the end of side one.
I biked home, tail between the legs, but was determined to listen to the whole thing in my room. While I could appreciate the music I couldn't get over Marc's bleating vocals.
And then my dad came home. After half a listen he banned Tyrannosaurus Rex's debut platter out of the living room. Forever upstairs in my room. To be played at low volume.
And so it came to be I have never listened to Prophets, Seers, etc., Unicorn or A Beard of Stars.
It was untill Bolan went electric that I started listening again. This time to T.Rex.
But that's another story.

[Six String]

Good story Yves. Here’s mine, short and sweet.
It was early evening back in high school. I was listening to Axis Bold As Love on my little hifi in my bedroom and my dad comes in and sits on the bed and listens for a few minutes. He then tells me that it sounded pretty good, something he had never done before with any of my music. He was drunk of course the next day it was back to yelling “turn that shit down!”

[Charlie O.]

When I was 8 years old and living with my family in Izmir, Turkey, I had an acoustic guitar that I was still years away from even attempting to play properly. But I could play riffs on the low E string, fretting with my thumb - "Sunshine Of Your Love", "Smoke On The Water", like that.

One day I came up with a really cool riff of my own. I think I loosely based it on a rhythm Ry Cooder played on the tedious Jamming With Edward album, which I owned - but Ry stayed on one note, whereas I cleverly incorporated a flat third and a fourth (not that I knew they were called that at the time). I'd play it every day, obsessively, for many minutes at a time.

Maybe a month later, I heard MY riff on a ZZ Top record my brother Jon had just bought (starting at 0:34 here):





I won't say I really believed it, but yes, I was spooked enough to wonder if it was possible that ZZ Top (or someone they knew) had bugged my bedroom. You know how the white man is always trying to steal the elusive "Izmir sound."

[C]

These are all great stories. Thanks!

I don't know how I missed them first time around

Yves - A Beard of Stars is seminally robust album.

Trust me








.