#thom moore

Lal and Mike Watterson's Bright Phoebus

The most valuable material objects in my home are a copy of The Mountain Goat's Sweden and our blender. My wife informs me, and I believe her, that my socks, underpants and all my Stephen Stills records are worthless.

The blender, a Vitamix, justifies its worth by essentially having the engine of a small aircraft carrier. I use it to make Dollar Bin smoothies out of unidentified objects from our freezer; I figure if you add lots of peanut butter anything is bound to taste good. Some of the time that theory works out.

Meanwhile, although I love Sweden and I owe my initial cooking prowess to John Darnielle, there is no excuse for that record's current value other than simple supply and demand: turns out I'm about the only person who bought a copy at the time.

And so we live a simple life: no locks, no worries.

But, if I owned an original copy of Lal and Mike Watterson's Bright Phoebus my sainted wife and I would need to consider a home security system. Seriously: even reissued-but-instantly-deemed-illegal copies from ten years ago are worth hundreds of dollars. I have no idea why whoever owns the rights is actively interested in making no money on the record; I wish they'd get a life.

And so we'll need to go all digital today on one of the most joyful and reckless records I know. Tumblr, to name another company that seems disinterested in making any money whatsoever, will only let me paste in up to 10 songs per post and I refuse to not share with you a single song, so we'll make consideration of the record a two parter.

Let's dive into Side 1!

The record opens with pure joy. Everyone involved surely swung their arms and waved a baton in triumph while laying this down. I picture Mike Watterson, who at this point was a professional house painter, singing this while mounting a wobbly 40 foot ladder, paint cans swinging in every direction. When the chorus of boinging cosmic Jews harps, or whatever they are, arrive at the two minute mark I dare you to try and keep a straight face.

I'm pretty sure my long ago rock star buddy Thom Moore named his high school band Rubber Band, and I'm pretty sure he insisted no one use a "The" before the band's name. Is that true Thom? If so was the choice a tribute to Lal and Mike or were you just a lucky genius? I'm guessing the former is the case, but I know the later is also true.

Let's take a minute to give some context here. Lal and Mike Watterson were siblings who grew up in a singing family. Trained musicians they were not: neither of them read music or expected to make any real money off the songs they found in the real life around them and ringing forth from their own souls.

But by 1970 they had a ton of famous friends from the Fairport Convention universe (let's call it the FCU) and those friends convinced them to spend a few days recording the songs they'd been keeping to themselves.

What happened next is the stuff of The Velvet Underground and Nico-level legend for the British folk rock movement of that era: Lal and Mike made Bright Pheobus with their famous friends' support and it was bought and appreciated by only a few hundred people (who, to plagiarize Brian Eno, surely then went on make otherwise impossible music themselves). And then, after that, The Watersons never did anything like it again. Thus the preposterous cost of getting your hands on a copy of Bright Phoebus today.

The Scarecrow follows Rubber Band and is presented like a page from Mike's sensitive but drunk journal. I don't know what can be said about this song other than it makes me want to break out sobbing and I have no idea why.

How, he asks, could you lay me down and love me now? Wow.

Fine Horseman follows and you may know it from the cover by the equally legendary lost voice of Anne Briggs. Lal's voice is equally unique to Mike's: both of them turn the word primitive into high praise. And when an odd oboe, then an equally odd cello, accompany her I'm back to fighting off inexplicable tears.

Don't worry, the record isn't all this intense. Richard Thompson, who shares guitar duty throughout with the siblings' new-at-the-time brother-in-law, Martin Carthy, can chord a guitar in a manner that summons up God's restless paces. He taught himself to do so on the record's next track, Winifer Odd.

The track is eventually interrupted by sirens from the street outside the recording studio. The effect is startling on every listen. I always forget that this stuff wasn't recorded in 1742 or something.

Danny Rose is the record's only attempt at something vaguely normal. Happily, it's still totally weird. "Here is the bloodstained jacket he wore... this is his original gun... never been shown to the public before." Apparently we're getting a tour of an impossible museum.

Child Among the Weeds rounds out Side 1. Lal let's us rush through the record's garden; we meet an old man and a young man and demand lullabies of them both. Mike then arrives, the garden's God, and silences us all.

Like an Old Fashioned Waltz

I recently chronicled a fairly formative night in my life which occurred in mid-October 31 years ago; the following, mostly true, story happened a week or two before or after that wild night of knavery and knives. It was far less formative... but still awesome!

Thom Moore and I were really hungry. We needed burritos and neither of us had any cash. I don't know if ATM cards even existed in 1993; if so, neither of us had one and no serious bank would have considered issuing us one, let alone a credit card. After all, neither of us had jobs of any kind and Thom usually sported a thrifted workman's shirt that listed his name as Bobo. Meanwhile, my favorite pair of shorts were about six sizes too big and had been cut to jagged knee length from a pair of what were probably Tom Waits' own corduroy pants in 1972. I tied them around my waist with a piece of rope.

So, there we were, tooling around Pasadena in my parents' armadillo cake (silver on the outside, maroon interior) Ford Tempo and brainstorming how to come up with the necessary $6 for two heavenly, warm and luscious veggie burritos.

We had the taqueria all picked out. The place seemed somewhat famous: they proudly displayed recent press clippings about some obscure airline which was currently serving their burritos at 5,000 feet. I kinda think it's the place in the photo above?

"Maybe we could borrow money from someone?" I suggested. We were hopeless teens: "borrow" of course meant "receive in exchange for nothing and never repay." But Thom was a Pasadena local: maybe he knew of such a generous someone. After all, he seemed to know just about everyone we bumped into. But he turned down the suggestion; most of the people he knew nodded appreciatively when they saw my makeshift shorts. They did not have $6.

"Maybe your parents...?" Thom stopped me before I got to the end of that sentence. His parents were adults with priorities. They would not be buying us burritos.

Thom sighed. "We're gonna have to sell something, dude. Let's go through my CD's."

Thom had a zillion CDs - it was, after all, 1993; and his vinyl collection was the best I'd ever seen. But we were out and about, so we just combed through what he had on him: a dozen or so jewel cases rolling around his backpack.

I, Jonathan was in there; but selling that was out of the question. Thom showed that thing to everyone he met; it was his idea of the world's greatest joke.

He also had Surfer Rosa, Queen Elvis and Henry the Human Fly on him: classics, all, and you can't sell a classic, not even for a burrito. Thom acknowledged that Respect was a largely mediocre record but it was still a Robyn Hitchcock album and therefore it was utterly off limits. Our burrito prospects were dwindling.

But then he found a candidate in the depths of his sack. And that's how I first encountered Sandy Denny's Like an Old Fashioned Waltz.

"Here we go: this album is totally bunk," quoth Thom, waiving it about. "But I don't know... you gotta love Sandy."

At that point I was just discovering Denny: I had the Fairport Convention greatest hits collection that has Stonehenge on the cover, and that was it. And Thom was right, the CD did look bunk: Denny's cover shot looked like she was auditioning for a spot on my grandmother's mantelpiece, and waltzing, whatever that was, was surely the opposite of what we did during Space at Dead shows.

"Yeah, that's the ticket," I said. "But do you think we can get six bucks for it?"

"I hope so; I'm so hungry."

We went, hats in hand, to the same place Thom had bought his copy of Like an Old Fashioned Walz for an easy $12 or more; they offered him just $5, which we took. We were still a dollar short. Curses!

What happened next was desperation lathered in genius. We found - this is all at least relatively true - somewhere around 70 cents in spare change on the floor and under the seats of the Tempo and then a miraculous quarter appeared in the gutter outside the burrito place. We begged our way, at the counter, through the missing nickel.

And, oh boy, those burritos sure tasted good. So good, in fact, that I'm not even sure we made the wrong move selling Denny's ridiculously perfect third solo album. After all, it was a CD copy, and CDs suck.

Plus, Sandy's rich, subtle and utterly magnificent songs were way the hell over our teenage heads:

Recientemente navegando me he topado con thesockcovers, un blog creado por el fotógrafo Thom Moore en el cual publicó las fotografías de su proyecto "Sock Covers". Este proyecto nos muestra portadas de algunos discos famosos, recreadas solamente utilizando medias. 

Una idea muy interesante, creativa y divertida.