February 18–25, 1999
disc quicks|rock/pop
Great Minds...
Great Minds…
The Red Crayola
Live 1967
(Drag City)
Moebius/Conny Plank/Mayo Thompson
Ludwig's Law
(Drag City)
Mayo Thompson—The Red Crayola's flame-keeping guitarist—is a creator with, God bless him, not one commercial impulse. At psychedelia's height, 1967, he could've made a mint off Crayola's notoriety for avant-mayhem and Eastern influences (by way of Houston, of course). Instead he put forth (lost until now) recordings of true metal machine music square in the center of California's hippie festival season. At the beginning of the '80s, when he could've cashed in on an Eno-like reputation for avant atmospherics, he hooked up with Moebius and Conny Plank (Eno pals/German Krautrock progenitors) to make this stiff but surrealistically silly synth manifesto. Though neither effort is for the squeamish, both ends of Thompson's red-hot burning candle should appeal to the adventurous and to Drag City's legion o' Crayola freaks. Like Roky Erickson's 13th Floor Elevators, The Red Crayola were considered to be conventionally psychedelic, flowery and melodically divine. Wrong on both counts. So Live '67 is a fabulous blunder in the summer of love, a series of guitar-only squeals, drones and amp-splitting dissonance that must've made mellow hippie freaks quake in their acid-laced Kool-Aid. Thompson's layers of feedback seem to wrap around each other, hinting at structure in his quest for beauty. And, with the addition of like-minded Pollock-esque guitarist/sound-painter John Fahey, it is beautiful. Ludwig's Law, recorded in Cologne in 1983, was Thompson's attempt at synth modernity and linearity. With Moebius and Plank—who planned this Emulator-driven epic as their own—Thompson's socialist/deconstructional poetry glides along wryly. Icy planes, squealed synths, clap-happy basslines and clanging percussives make Ludwig's a squared-off bit of Muzak with Thompson's devolutionary humanist declarations right up front. If you can imagine Thompson impersonating Mike Myers' impersonation of sweat-free German synth pop, you get the uncomfortable picture.
