jon savage's "meridian 1970"

critical revisionism re. the music of the turn of a certain decade from a writer most associated with the punk phenomenon that for many consigned this music to irrelevance. interesting!

From Jon Savage’s sleeve notes…

“This record began as one evening’s free-association with four of my peers, retracing the music that we actually liked as real-time mid-teenagers in the late sixties/ early seventies. To recapture the event, I made a few CDR’s, which I distributed during the next few months. One of the people that I handed them to was Jeff Barrett, who immediately wanted to release it as it stood. Several months later, here is the finished result.

The idea was to celebrate a particularly misunderstood musical moment. Contrary to the received opinion, the cusp of the 60’s/70’s was not a musical wasteland: to be sure, there was a lot of filler and absolute pointlessness as, it seemed, every single member of every single big late 60’s band released a solo album. But, as ever with music – which is a great form of communication – there is always somebody saying something, always somebody making records that help you make sense of the world. Also, there was the law of averages: with so many releases at that point, there were many gems among the dross…”

Meridian 1970 features:

‘Mouthful Of Grass’ Free
‘Nobody’ The Doobie Brothers
‘Industrial Military Complex Hex’ Steve Miller Band
‘Hamburger Midnight ‘ Little Feat
‘Catch The Man On The Rise’ Sir Douglas Quintet
‘3.10 Smokey Thursday’ Danny O’Keefe
‘Message From The Country’ The Move
‘Shouldn’t Have Took More Than You Gave’ Dave Mason
‘Three Hours’ Nick Drake
‘One Night Wonder’ Meic Stevens
‘Man Of Constant Sorrow’ Rod Stewart
‘Cripple Creek’ Skip Spence
‘Tulsa County’ The Byrds
‘Biloxi’ Jesse Winchester
‘Song Of The Wandering Aengus’ Donovan
‘Good Shepherd’ Jefferson Airplane
‘Black Uncle Remus’ Loudon Wainwright III
‘Hear The Wind Howl’ Leo Kottke
‘The Moonstone’ Tommy Flanders
‘Ashes The Rain And I’ The James Gang