You can even sneak into the captain's cabin and read the log while you listen to the record, if you find that helps. You shouldn't need much help though, with songs like "Master of the Universe," which combines the swirling electronic gibberish sound effects of every 1957 science fiction flick from War of the Doom Zombies to Journey to the Center of Uranus with a melodramatic voice intoning "I am Master of the Universe". Go on, don't be ashamed to say it, every cadet does on his first trip out. Being in space does sort of give you that feeling anyway, especially if you've got one of these new modem souped-up jobs that can whisk you from here to Betelgeuse before you can say, "Warp factor eight, Mr. Sulu."
But you should've realized you'd get caught reading the captain's log, and now you must sit still for one, of the old coot's tiresome lectures, this one titled "We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago". Man, you think if only those stupid hippies back in the 20th century hadn't loaded the ancient teachings down with all this moralistic self-righteousness, and if only Captain Kilo hadn't been raised in one of the last psychebiotic communes, I wouldn't have to listen to this dreck today! But then, youth is always impatient with the foibles of the elderly. Just remember, all things must pass.
Luckily for you the sermon is cut short by a red alert - a real outer space rock 'n' roll emergency! Freddie the Friendly Computer is desperately trying to explain his malfunction as circuits overheat into the danger zone and his voice starts going faster and faster until it peaks off the deep end, pleading frantically, "adjust me, adjust me!!" There are tense minutes ahead as the crew work swiftly and bravely to repair the damage and you revel in the excitement of it all, power chords and churning guitars in your head along with the ever-present synthesizer noise.
But the day is saved of course and you spend the rest of the voyage perched before the big screen on the Bridge, daydreaming the light years away with fantasies of bold explorations and heroic achievements in quadrants where no man has gone before. And like every kid, your head is also full of rock 'n' roll, for the most part (since after all you're concentrating on other things) those same repetitive chords and distant muffled drums that have been identified with deep space ever since Pink Floyd first recorded them way back sometime in the last century on a song called "Interstellar Overdrive". Nobody's captured the romantic aspects of space travel any better in all the years since then, and besides the music does go awfully well with that cauldron of synthesizer stuff every starstruck junior cadet likes to pour into his head.
Side two (labeled side one but they mixed 'em up somehow) of the Hawkwind album provides 23 minutes of this, and if that's enough for you (or so the old spacehand's saying goes) you're probably too much of a dreamer to ever make it through the Space Academy.
Final note to the weary record buyer: this album is exactly the same as their first one except that it didn't have as many sound effects. Both provide good energetic background music. The new one is better if you're getting into the Psychedelic Nostalgia movement, however - it even comes with a big beautiful art nouveau poster (copied from one of Mouse's 1967 Avalon jobs, I think) that says - get this - "Love & Peace" These guys don't miss a trick.
-Greg Shaw
It all started with Pink Floyd ... No! It hardly started with Pink Floyd, though it may have started with Jules Verne or Cyrano de Bergerac. Musically, the rock & roll edition of the extraterrestrial impulse probably began somewhere long about Chuck Berry's "Our Little Rendezvous": "We'll build a spaceship / with a heavy payload / and we'll go beep! beep! beep! way out in the wide open blue!"
But that was only the Fifties when the rocket roll was just beginning, fertilized cross-idiomatically by the movies, which were grinding out such certified brain-busts as Forbidden Planet, Destination Moon, The Angry Red Planet, etc. etc. etc.. With the coming of the Sixties the real age of the Starship commenced in rock & roll. Pink Floyd were first to couple it with the new sonic zoom technolorock, of course, but such hardy perennials as the MC5 ("Starship"), Black Sabbath ("Into the Void") and Deep Purple ("Space Truckin") wasted no time in jumping on board. And, lest we forget, Wild Man Fisher himself honoured the genre with an entry called "Rocket Rock," whose singular lyrics ("The sun rocks / The moon rocks / Everybody's doin' the rocket"
There were also the broadsides of Paul Kantner, who tended to come off in his mellower moments like Bing Crosby: "Have you seen the stars tonight? / Would you like to go up on A deck and look at them with me?"
Well, Sun Ra was into this stuff when some of these wimpoids were still wettin' their knickers, but Sun Ra at his best was no match for Pink Floyd at their best, because Sun Ra had too many notes, always too many notes just like a lot of these jazz cats, whereas Pink Floyd only had about three. At their best, that is; later they wandered off down the garden path, with symphony orchestras and such, becoming altogether too prolix and a lot less nifty than in the days when they were writing songs with titles like "Set The Controls For The Heart of the Sun."
And Pink Floyd still take the sweepstakes in the rock race for space, but hold onto yer Buck Rogers beanies, kinder, because Hawkwind are coming up fast. If Pink Floyd were setting the controls for the heart of the sun, Hawkwind have the consummate sense of the present decadent state of astropolitics to stick to their rayguns in maintaining that "We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago."
This is music for the astral apocalypse, and even if it does contain 'Master of the Universe," their sound as well as their message is much closer to Pink Floyd than Black Sabbath, with a little bit of Sun Ra thrown in even, as in "You Shouldn't Do That" with its sonic squiggles that I am not at all sure are alto sax rather than audio generator or synthesizer.
Meaning to say that what this album, friends, is Psychedelic from the cover to the fadeout of the last groove. The music itself mostly sounds pretty much the same: monotone jammings with hypnotic rhythms and solos, unravelling off into... well, space. The synthesizers warble, woof and scream and gurgle like barfing computers, the drums pound, and the singers chant Unknown Tongue rebops reminiscent of such blasts from the past, present and future as the first Mothers album, Hapsash and the Coloured Coat featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids, and Germany's great psyche-overload band Amon Duul II. of Yeti and Dance of the Lemmings fame. As well as the Stones' "Sing This All Together (See What Happens)," which may be at least as much a source point as Pink Floyd.
If you're glad that most of that stuff is part of the past now, you'll probably think this album is a pile of dogshit. If, on the other hand, you remember the absolute glee of filling your skull with all those squawks and shrieks and backwards-tapes and telegraphic open-tuned bridges between indescribable inner worlds conjured best neither by this music nor psyche-deliteful elixirs but rather by a fortuitous combination of the two - if that was one of your favourite eras in the decline of Western Civilization, then you'd better glom onto this album, which features not only the previously described musical treks but the most beautiful packaging I have seen in some time and an elaborate 24 page booklet called "The Hawkwind Log," enclosed to give you something to read while blowing out a few more chromosomes and chock full of prose, poetry, robots, DNA molecules, marijuana, novas, Stonehenge, 2001, gurus, phallic rocketships and tits'n'ass, which may not be rock 'n' roll. but certainly beats "Fire'n'Rain."
- Lester Bangs
Free Hawkwind Downloads <|> Resources <|> Other Features
News <|> Links <|> Search <|> Site Map <|> Home