Hot Hot Hot in the Explorers office is this wonderful Belgian Mod-Blog "Jack That Cat Was Clean", with all the info you need about mod style, dances, dance-clubs of the modern age (anno 1960´s that is). What´s revolutionary about this thing is the mass of scans from original 60´s magazines and ads, plus loads of interviews with mod designers, store owners, mod-diaries etc. Enjoy!
Some of our most keen eared listeners may have noticed that one fellow got two songs onto our recent psych-folk mixtape. I´m talking about Bert Janch, one of the most impressive guitarists in my book. His catalogue is comfusingly long now, especially if one includes his 6 records with the superb Pentangle, but hot on my turntable nowadays is his recently reissued 1974 masterpiece L.A. Turnaround, Pentangle´s third LP "Basket of Light", and his self titled one man show from 65. A must hear for those into jaw dropping acoustic jazz-folk playing.
There's no doubt about that! Or is there? Well, not if the year is 1965 at least. The State Library and Archive of Florida gives us some excellent footage from the sixties in these two wonderful clips. The first is about beauty and the second is about... Uhm.. Beauty under water? Check them out for yourself and head over to Floridy Memory for more good stuff!
Skating is the big thing now when winter has come, both musically and fysically. I`ve been skating all weekend on a lake near by, and when I`m at home I´ve listened with great joy to the song Skating by Vince Guaraldi. It´s my favorite song on the «A Charlie Brown Christmas»-album by Guaraldi that is on heavy rotation theese days. I actually like Skating so much that I ordered the notes for piano, and now I´ve been sweating over my fender rhodes for quite some time. The bad thing about learning to play a wonderful song is that it gets less wonderful the more I practice, and if I ever learn to play Skating in a proper way I will probally end up having a tense realtionship with the song. So maybe it´s a good thing that I play it very badly and therefore I also still like it so much.
