Grey and Pink

Can’t Be Long Now/Francoise/For Richard/Warlock
From: If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You [Decca, 1970]

Nine Feet Underground
From: In the Land of Grey and Pink [Decca, 1971]

Feeling kind of random lately during this warm spell in NYC; so, here is a random selection from the progressive rock vaults – Caravan. For those uninitiated in prog lore, Caravan was part of the Canterbury scene and they made some pretty kinda fairly decently good albums (~4) in their prime (‘70-’74). I haven’t thought about this band for quite a while; and then, last week I was sitting in a bar and I swear I heard a hip hop track sampling some of the synth lines from Caravan’s 23 minute “opus” 9 Feet Underground. I assumed I had heard wrong until the next track came on and it worked around the main riff from Cross-Eyed Mary by Jethro Tull (didn’t see that coming). Long story short, I’m still not sure if it actually was a Caravan sample, but regardless… apparently progressive rock is fair game for beat mining now. With that said, I guess it’s acceptable to dork out on this music again. I mean, I did hear a Diplo mix with snippets of Amon Duul’s Yeti.

Can’t Be Long… is a suite of smaller tunes that showcases the full gamut of the Caravan sound: psychedelic pop->some lite rocking->smooth jazzy jamming->psychedelic pop. Some say they perfected that formula in Nine Feet Underground. They’re both here so you can be the judge. Hope you enjoy.

Note: The links above will take you to the Gibraltar Encyclopedia or Progressive Rock. It’s definitely a super-fan site so take all the reviews with a grain of salt. It has all sorts of info about obscure albums so it might prove to be a useful research tool from time to time.