Live 1967

From Red Krayola Wiki
Live 1967
Live album by The Red Crayola
Released 1998
Recorded 1967
Studio


Label Drag City
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Track listing

Angry Arts Festival
No.TitleLength
1."Venice Pavillion Concert" (6/29 afternoon)27:03
2."Venice Motel Piece 1" (6/29 evening)12:35
3."Venice Motel Piece 2" (6/29 evening)4:16
Total length:43:55
Berkeley Folk Music Festival
No.TitleLength
1."Dust" (7/2 evening)27:46
2."Red Crayola with John Fahey" (7/3 afternoon)22:53
3."Jubilee Concert" (7/4 afternoon)14:08
Total length:64:49

Background

Live album

Reviews

Aiding & Abetting

November 23, 1998[1]

Not the Red Krayola that we've heard in recent years. Well, yeah, it sorta is, but the sounds are somewhat different. Lately (in the past five years or so), Mayo Thompson's reformed Red Krayola has trafficked in eclectic pop, but for the most part, stuff that is recognizable as pop. This stuff can only be recognized as slightly controlled chaos.

I can't imagine sitting at a festival and listening to this racket. Now, I dig it in my house, when I'm somewhat prepared for the wild , semi-controlled feedback lines emanating from the guitar, but if I was sitting down at a folk festival in 1967, I might have the same reaction as some of the crowd (who can be heard quite clearly often enough) who wailed or hurled insults in response.

Self-indulgent is one easy way to put it. Particularly the first, 26-minute track on the first disc. The other two pieces on that disc, recorded without an audience, are more crafted (relatively, anyway) and do kinda resemble some of the latter-day Krayola work. Of course, the live (in front of an audience) pieces on the second disc are as chaotic as the first piece. Nothing like a few people to encourage "artistic experimentation". Or something like that.

A real trip. Seriously. Sitting around the casa, I like the more adventurous stuff, the self-indulgent exercises in sonic mayhem. But I sure wouldn't have liked it had I been in the audience. Just a temperament thing. These are jams to end all jams, in both the good and the bad senses. Oh, the humanity!

The Wire

February 1999

Edwin Pouncey

Red Crayola were first formed by guitarist/artist Mayo Thompson in Houston, Texas in 1966. The original trio were soon signed to International Artists, the legendary 60s Texas label that launched acid gobbling garage rockers The 13th Floor Elevators. The Crayola's 1967 debut album of songs and 'Free-Form Freak-Outs' called The Parable of Arable Land (with support from The Familiar Ugly) has become a sought after punk classic. Thompson went on to team up with avant garde art group Art & Language, singer Lora Logic and, more infamously, Pere Ubu at the nadir of their career in the late 70s/early 80s. After returning to America in the 90s, Thompson has since found a sympathetic label in Chicago's Drag City, who are releasing new Red Crayola recordings alongside archive oddities, such as Live 1967.

Though it's seriously flawed by a lack of contextualising sleevenotes, Live 1967 is a confrontational document to set alongside Bob Dylan 1966 and The Stooges' Metallic KO. It was recorded at California's Angry Arts Festival and — on the recommendation of Thompson's art history professor — the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, both of them crawling with hippies and hardcore folkies, who were none too enamoured of the Crayola noise. The primitive recording captures a distinct tension in the air at the Angry Arts Festival, where nobody's ever sure whether the group are tuning up or actually performing. "Is that music?" asks an infant who has innocently got hold of a hidden microphone. He is possibly speaking for his parents, as the Crayola's almost AMM-like improvisation shifts up a gear to shower Frisco's flower power acolytes with feedback and sonic squealing.

At the Tenth Annual Berkeley Folk Festival, the trio shared the bill with such psychedelic stalwarts as Country Joe & The Fish and Kaleidoscope, alongside Reverend Gary Davis and John Fahey, whose Rickenbacker 12 string jam with Red Crayola constitutes the main highlight of the second disc. Listen through the clutter of the amateur recording and you can hear a performance that anticipates Fahey's present direction by some 30 years. Also impressive is the group's medley of "One-Second Pieces": short, astonishing stabs of Cageian chance music that causes the crowd to laugh out loud.

Their serious intent to astonish through sound earned Red Crayola one critic's accolade of being designated "the bummer of the Festival". A badge they undoubtedly wore with pride.

Earpiece

Summer 1999[2]

b.wildered

live 1967 is a great double cd from 2 california festival gigs by the original trio (well, at least the group as heard on their 1st lp, the parable of arable land). and either you think it is shitty noise nonsense indulgence, or you think it is brilliant conceptual anti-rock, proto-you-name-it. i think that it is important to keep a sense of humor engaged whilst listening. of note: the presence of american primitive guitar genius john fahey, who joins in and is pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of the tactical noise [...] another note: i do not believe this comprises the legendary lost fahey/the red crayola project reported by various sources. another legend: that a dog was killed during one of these concerts by the frequencies generated by the group.

References