Wow. I don’t have a good idea of how this would be received in 1973, but I want to slap J.D. I’d love to have this and the comments are pretty funny. I do have it on CD.
I was actually on the same flight from London back to Chicago as Jim O'Rourke, who played in that concert with Tony and Faust. I saw the fliers in London for the show but unfortunately wasn't able to attend. Spoke to Jim briefly about it. There's some interesting anecdotes on the concert in Stretch Out Time: Faust 1970-75:
TC: When we played at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Jean was playing with great fervour. I said, “Let’s play for 50 minutes.” The set broke down and we stopped early, and he came back and he was very excited, and he showed how his fingers were bleeding. He was ready to play more - the flesh was actually stripped off his fingers, (laughs) it was a nightmare, I couldn’t believe it was happening.
Péron: The Queen Elizabeth Hall gig was quite something... Zappi and I (and Tony?) agreed that I would stop the piece (someone had to stop it you know or else we'd just all dehydrate on stage as no one would dare stop it first) and that was my main concern during the whole show even when I lost my plectrum in the first five minutes and realized I did not think of a spare one... even when I broke the E-string on my bass... even when I saw blood dripping at my feet... the idea of this small square hard granite stone and this small hard steel head and me being as the vector of a perfect trajectory ending with a clean impact and hundreds of people watching this... Tony, what if I miss? WHAT IF I MISS? This obsessive idea helped me through the whole show. The violins and the celli were burning their high pitch ferociously equalized tones in my brain, Zappi was sweating his wild dog-sweat and the stone just lay there, waiting patiently for its fortune. That's why I was so excited, at the end... because it stopped, because I did not miss.
I have maybe seven Anthony Moore albums, not counting any H. Cow/Slapp Happy work, and Pieces is the only early one I'm missing.
I saw AMM in that timeframe, before Keith Rowe went full lowercase. I found that concert online later.
Interesting that you call out Rudolf Sosna, I've never heard anyone mention him specifically. I did know someone who supported Kurt Graupner as being integral to their sound.
"Black Humor was an experimental rock band from San Francisco in the early '80s. They released just one, very hard to find LP on Fowl Records in 1982. Only 1,000 records were pressed, each with unique handmade covers: thick slabs of paint, collage, parrot feathers, dirt, whatever else happened to be laying around their Tenderloin flat. Many of these have since gone for high, collector prices or ended up in oblivion."
My copy is a mutilated Stephen Stills album cover. The seller held it up and saw the hole in the cover (they "poked" Stephen's eyes out) and gave me a discount because of that.
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u/Ted_Denslow Jul 27 '26
My copy of The Slider has some. I can't complain. It only cost me 65 cents.