Vevey - Day Off

Above: Our modest tour-van, from outside my Vevey Hotel Window
Ahh the rare 'day off' . Kinda sorta.
I woke up "late" haha, and since it was a hotel with a LAME internet pricing, i grabbed a 30 min slice for 4.00 CHF (swiss francs, 1 CHF = about $1.15USB right now..)

On tour -- there is a continual barrage of stuff to do - contact wise. There's the lame promoter who JUST WOULD NOT get back to you, even after 50 calls and emails. Usually it's the REAL owner's son..usually heroin is involved. These guys somehow keep staying in this biz..
Then there's just the continual number crunching, payouts for various bills, per diems, fuel money deposits perhaps, etc. The sound guy who NEVER got the several emails with inputs you sent him or his boss. The sound guy in 2008 with NO EMAIL (rare, but it happens). The booking agent who keeps sending out 3 year old info. Grrrrrr!!

Finally i said "screw this, dude take a break!!" and headed down to the lake...on the way there I dialed up:

DEEP PURPLE - MACHINE HEAD (1972) (25th Anniv. Re-master 1997)

I mean c'mon. How can you be at "the Lake geneva shoreline" and not go sing that while cranking THE GUITAR RIFF THAT KILLED THE 60s....??? It's just so great, still. So silly, so spinal tap -inspiring..

So, yeah, I'm that lame, I listened to "Smoke On the Water", right at that fabled lake. But I mean-- when one travels THIS far to sacred places in the rock pantheon, one must participate in ritual. I firmly believe that.


The shoreline was clean, pristine and the ducks were loving the day. This LP is one of my earliest encounters with hard rock -- I remember my cousin Christine bought this LP, and Alice Cooper 'Muscle Of Love". They also had Black Sabbath "Paranoid", and I remember learning the riff for "Electric Funeral" on some horrible out of tune guitar. In all cases the insane cover art is what blew us away...




"..Frank Zappa and the Mothers..were at the best place in town.... some stupid with a flare gun, burnt the place to the ground"

So then I had to hear, of course


FRANK ZAPPA and the MOTHERS OF INVENTION
KING KONG (fr. AHEAD OF THEIR TIME live 1968)

I have the distinct pleasure and good fortune to have been able to tour a few times with a few of the ex Mothers Of Invention, very often DON PRESTON, the original synth player for Zappa's groundbreaking band.


Above, THE GRANDMOTHERS fall 2001
Left To Right: Yours Truly/Andre' Cholmondeley (Tour Manager/Driver), Ken Rosser (Guitar), Don Preston (Keys, synths, vocals), Bunk Gardner (saxes, madness) , Billy Mundi , drums - I'm gonna guess Roy Estrada was taking the piccture..

What the hell does that have to do with anything -- well of course Don Preston - was actually JUST launching into his Moog solo on KING KONG...literally on the first note -- when the alarm went down -- FIRE!! FIRE!!! the bootleg is great and you can literally hear people clamoring to get offstage. The best part is ..Don is sometimes...um, well, let's say caught up in the music. You can be onstage trying to tell him to go to the bridge , or to turn off a sample, and he seems to be off somewhere in a state of bliss. Listening to the boot - I like to imagine they were trying to get his attention for several seconds before he realized what was up!

The 1968 version I head today is from an LP that came out aout 30 yrs later -- from the infamous Royal Albert Hall show--- turns out Frank had a 4 track live version sitting around that actually sounds incredible. A very key document of the Mothers -- some of this show can be seen on film in various spots. this is a great record too 'cos it has the Mothers doing "Progress" a crazy play/dramatic piece Zappa was working on at that point, a little piece of bizarre theatre that asked the questions about modern music vs. the classics...about tonality vs. dissonance and experimentation...

ANDRE' CHOLMONDELEY
Fire and Air (fr. ENIGMA WITH ATTITUDE 2006)

I did this wacky album a couple years ago -- and Don Preston was kind enough to let me use a sample of THE VERY FIRST AND ONLY NOTE of that famous Moog solo.... I sampled it and looped it , and used it as the basis for a piece I used the Alesis Airsynth for. Hence the name. A strange little instrumental weirdness. Don's part is the weird, rising dirty synth sound. So it was cool to hear it again after quite a while...near where a piece of the track got it's birth. You can check out my album on iTunes, or here

But, wow..back to hearing the rest of the Purple album after all that.....Lazy"...."Space Truckin"..the classic "Highway star"..."Maybe I'm A Leo".."Pictures Of home"...all complete blues-proto-metal classics. Ritchie Blackmore just digging into the pentatonic blues box, with his scalloped strat....so good!!

Now, the bonus tracks ---some quad mixes,who is gonna use THAT I have NO idea, and a B-side "When a Blind Man cries" a cool blues number.

I ran into the great Roger Glover - bassist for Deep Purple and also Rainbow... He was coming upstairs to leave BB King's in NYC...after a Steve Morse show. He was really cool, and I got to thank him for not only helping to basically INVENT HEAVY METAL but also for producing Judas Priest's "Sin After Sin", a great , dark kickass slice of their history. very diverse album actually, with some great ballads...but again I digress..

Fans of the band and rock-fans in general don't often realize it , but Morse is the longest running Deep Purple guitarist (!) having joined the band in 1994, and is still in the band, very busy. He has a great road-diary on his site. What a special human being that guy is.

I love the stuff Purple has done with him -- it really sounds quite different than his stuff.... or previous Purple. It's really rockin', sometime just basic sounding like AC/DC, but with the awesome Jon Lord distorted organ sounds. They have remained HUGE in all markets ..except the USA! So weird. They tour stadiums in south america, australia, europe, russia, all thru asia...but can;t get arrested in the USA. In fact-- the most successful tour they have done in the last decade was when they played...the entire Machine Head.


(Photo: Looking back at our hotel fomr across the street..)

I walked over to Lake Geneva, I mean Lake Léman... apparently the locals insist on that - the 'real name' .."Snobs call it Lake Geneva" I was told by a local musician !

Whatever you call it --it's amazingly beautiful.... a huge glacial lake ringed by mountain. On the side I walked near there were houses going up the side. A great sunny, crisply cool fall afternoon, people of all races walking their kids, dogs, lovers along the super clean lake's edge. I was blown away by how clean the water looked... really amazing. Couldn't find any garbage along the rocky shore either -- i had to SEARCH until I found ONE cigarette butt over by the grassy park, and I finally found a plastic coke bottle and threw it away. It's great -- like most places I visit here, it seems a higher % of people just... take pride in their country, they are VERY nationalistic...they just seem to channel it into..taking care of the place instead of feeling like they need to invade someone.

Deep Purple. Go crank some - Ian Gillan is simply one of the greatest rock vocalists....hard to quantify how many others rip his style off.