@slaw, I’m doing some catching up, and here’s some responses to a couple of your posts on this thread:
- The Zeta arm. I think of it as the hi-fi equivalent of the Chevy big block V8 engine ;-). Available for under a grand (the last one I got---NM condition---for only $500); spend a couple hundred on a rewire (uninterrupted run from cartridge tags to KLEI RCA plugs), and you have a very nice medium mass arm. For some reason great with Deccas and Londons, which dump a lot of mechanical energy into an arm.
- Fleetwood Mac’s Kiln House album. This came out when I worked at my first record store: Discount Records (owned by CBS), the best in San Jose. A full catalog record store in 1970 was a rare thing (Tower had just opened it’s second store, in North Beach in San Francisco), and working there I got exposed to Jazz and Classical for the first time (other than in my Humanities class my Senior year in High School. When Reagan was elected Governor of California, he initiated the elimination of such classes from the curriculum, and the defunding of school orchestras and bands).
Anyway, in 1970 I had a bad attitude towards Blues performed by English white guys. Thanks to Bill Graham and my own research, I had become aware of the genre’s creators. Bill started booking the old Blues guys at The Fillmore (I started going to shows there in ’67), and seeing Albert King and others live changed my perspective.
I immediately loved Kiln House, probably because it was a rarity at that time (for some reason, I remained unaware of Dave Edmunds and his wonderful Rockpile---the album title, not the group he later formed with Nick Lowe): an English group playing 1950’s-style Rock ’n’ Roll. I love, Love, LOVED Danny Kirwin's phrasing and tone, the best I've ever heard out of a Les Paul. I then heard Kiln Houses predecessor Then Play On, and dismissed it as just another English white boy imitation of the real thing. So I never bothered to listen to their first album. I did listen to the follow up to Kiln House---Future Games, and didn’t like it at all. Jeremy Spencer had left the group, replaced by American Bob Welch, whom I didn’t and don’t care for. Bare Trees I liked even less, so I wrote off Fleetwood Mac.
(I and everyone else in San Jose was surprised when Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham---members of local garage band Fritz in the late 60’s---turned up in Fleetwood Mac. I had last seen Fritz in the Summer of ’68, opening the Santa Clara Folk/Rock Festival, headlined by The Electric Flag and the doors---the lower case their idea, not mine ;-) . Just another local garage band.)
That assessment remained unchanged until very recently. I have watched a couple documentaries on Peter Green and early Fleetwood Mac, and found myself wanting to give the first two albums a thorough listening. Those albums should be easy to find, as soon as my LRS reopen! In the intervening years, I did read that B.B. King said Peter Green was the only white guitarist who made him sweat. Sorry Clapton and Beck ;-) . Speaking of them, I saw Clapton with Cream twice, and Beck on his first U.S.A. tour (with Ron Wood on bass and Rod Stewart singing). Loved them both at the time, '67 and '68. As it did for Clapton, The Band changed everything. Kiln House fits well with their brown album.
