No Filler Music Podcast - Sidetrack: Roy Harper - The Same Old Rock

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

​In this week's Sidetrack we take a look at an album that Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold drew inspiration from and had on heavy rotation while writing songs for ​"Helplessness Blues". Roy Harper's four song masterpiece, "Stormcock", is this short and sweet, intensely beautiful & clever album (to borrow sentiments from Johnny Marr), along with other works by Harper, had a major influence on many of rock's most legendary members, including Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Pete Townshend, and Pink Floyd, among others. For more info, check out our show notes: https://www.nofillerpodcast.com/episode/ep-18-fleet-foxes#sidetrack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See, app for details. See, there was a taro, Roy, in the mid-70s, when it looked like you threatened to be enormously successful. For some reason, this success eluded you.

Why do you think that was? My only idiosyncratic behavior precludes me from... from international stardom, as it were, because all of a sudden I take a bend in the road and I go a different way. I know, I'm a sparrow in the gutter, really. I'm always going to be able to earn a living at what I do so that it's not really imperative that I've become a multimillionaire. And welcome to No Filler, the music podcast dedicated to sharing the often overlooked hidden gyms that fill the space between the singles on our favorite records. This is our sidetrack for the week.

My name is Quentin. I've got my brother Travis with me. And today we are covering Roy Harper's album from 1971, Stormcock. Yep, I said Stormcock. Roy Harper is a singer-songwriter from the 70s. He's classified under the folk rock genre on Wikipedia. it says he's under the progressive folk umbrella. I didn't really know much about this guy at all until I found out that he was a major

influence on Robin Pecknold during the helplessness blues years. Travis, had you heard about this guy before this? No, I had never heard of him. I mean, I've never seen the album art. I've never seen a picture of him. Like, I know nothing about this guy going into this episode. Yeah. So we had referenced an interview that Peknell did with Pitchfork back in December of 2009 on our last episode.

And later on in that interview, he talks a lot about Roy Harper, specifically about this record. He says, do you know that Roy Harper record, Stormcock? And he says, quote, it's just super sick. yeah he says jimmy page plays on some of it and it's just this super sick 12 string thing and then he goes on to say so that's the that's the thing about this new record he's talking about helplessness blues it's mostly 12 string guitar he says and that's that's what he feels like is is the primary sonic distancing from the last record so he listened to this album by roy harper and and was immediately just, you know, pulled in by the guitar, you know, the 12-string guitar that

that Roy Harper plays on this album. And so before I talk more about Roy Harper, and before we get into this album a little bit, I kind of want to play the first clip. We've got a couple clips for you for our pick this week. In our little intro clip, that was from an interview that he did. back in the 80s. I don't remember what TV channel it was on. It was, you know, like a music station, kind of like MTV. And he was interviewed with Jimmy Page and it was an interview slash like little recording session. They were out in like the fields out in like the boonies somewhere

in England and they perform a couple songs from from this album, him and Jimmy Page. And I had that clip fade into track one on this album, which is called hors d'oeuvres. Really pretty song, man. Really great opener. The thing about this album, there's only four songs on it, but it feels more like a five or six track album in the way that he pieces together his songs. It's similar to how Peknell does it in Helplessness Blues, where there's one song with,

like a couple ideas in it or, you know, movements or whatever. These songs range from like seven to like over 13 minutes. Really pretty stuff. Let's go ahead and play clip one from our sidetrack for the week. So we're playing track two from the album. It's called The Same Old Rock. So Q, do you hear Bob Dylan in his voice a little bit? Because I sure do.

I do. And, yeah, in that song for sure. But, you know, it's funny, the thing about Roy Harper. And so, again, for us, this is the only thing I've heard of Roy Harper. So I haven't dove any deeper. Have you? No, I haven't listened to anything else. Just this.

Yeah. There's another song, I think it's the next one on this album. album, he's got like this David Bowley vibe in the way that he sings. He's kind of all over the place. And that's what I really, really appreciate about this album. And that goes back to that clip that we played at the beginning, where it seemed like for a little bit that he was just kind of like... Destined for success or whatever set up for success and never found it. Yeah, yeah.

But it never really happened. And, you know, Harper says, well, that's, you know, that's because... You know, I'd release an album that felt and sounded a certain way, and then I'd kind of pivot and do something completely different. So, and you can hear that in this tiny little four-track album, you can hear the many different, you know, sounds and styles and feelings that he's going for in his music. He's really a poet more than a musician, it seems like, when you really dig into his lyrics. Another thing, too, with his guitar stylings, he's self-taught. And, you know, that's something that we've talked about a few times in the past in some of our previous episodes, where self-taught musicians bring, you know, their own uniqueness to how they play,

which, you know, adds to the beauty of their work, you know, like with Brett Daniel and the way that he, you know, plays the piano with Erland Oye and Iric Boe and what they do in Kings of Convenience. You know, it makes sense that self-taught musicians are going to be the ones that you really pay attention to and ones that are going to have kind of a long-lasting effect. Well, I think a self-taughts, too. Yeah, I think a self-taught musician is going to be, is going to go directions that people who were classically trained just might not go. Well, and not only, not even just classically trained musicians.

So when he first learned to play guitar, he was just playing blues guitar. And he kind of references people like Eric Clapton and other blues players from around that time. He said that they would learn from watching, you know, the blues greats like BB King. You know, they would watch and mimic. and Roy Harper admits to just basically just being too lazy to even to do that. He just taught himself

he didn't watch anyone and learned from that you know learned from them he just taught himself and he says it kind of went from like the super simplistic kind of guitar styles and it just kind of built on itself from then and

in that clip that we just played from that little intro guitar part there you know it really keeps your attention and you can really hear the influence that he must have had on Pecknold. It kind of reminded me of the second clip that we played last week for Sim Salabim. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. Just that really heavy guitar strumming. Yeah, so Roy Harper is a huge influence on a lot of pretty heavy hitters in the rock and roll world.

Jimmy Page, of course, Robert Plant, Pete Townsend of the Who, members of Pink Floyd, Ian Anderson from Jethro Toll, the more you listen to this album and like the way he approaches that that fingerpagan for that 12 string, you can see why he was a major influence on Jimmy Page and Townsend. So to quote back to that pitchfork review, or I'm sorry, that pitchfork interview with Pecknold. he says it kind of has this acoustic heavy metal vibe on some of the songs where he's just playing

these intense parts but it's on acoustic guitar um and yeah dude like some in some parts he just is just strumming the shit out of it like yeah really hardcore um and you can hear uh that bluesy metal you know that that zeppelin feel it has that um well that That was kind of what was going on. I mean, we kind of talked about how the early 70s was sort of when rock started to get hard, you know? Yeah, yeah, you had the emergence of Sabbath and Zeppelin. Exactly. Yeah, dude.

So. And then you got people like Roy Harper doing this, man. There was some really great music coming out early 70s. Yeah, man. All right. So that kind of ties into the second clip really well, actually. So, um, I think. I'm fading us into like the seven and a half minute mark or so.

So remember, this is like a 12.5 minute song. So again, here is the second clip from track two from Stormcock, the same old rock. With consternation that you've found a breath. When you tried to warn that there's only one calm. Well, you could certainly hear Jimmy Page all over that. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's, I don't know why we glossed over this, but we just talked about how, I mean, if Robin Pecknell said that this had sort of like kind of the heavy metal, not heavy metal, but like metal hard rock vibes.

It's because Jimmy Page is right there in the studio with him. The guy that, that helps start at all, you know, and here he is laying down, laying down some tracks, you know. So. Right, right. Yeah, we could have just been here in Jimmy, most of that cool stuff. But again, but still, like, it's, it's all acoustic guitar. Yeah. What an awesome track.

Really, really cool stuff. Yeah. And you can also see how Harper continued to stay, you know, on the outskirts of, of superstardom, whatever. Sure. You know, you can't, this is, this is an album with four songs on it, you know. And none of them would fit in that, like, quote unquote, single track, like, minute mark, you know, like, even back, especially back. back then with, you know, 45s, when they released singles, songs couldn't be that long because they had to fit it on one side, you know?

Right. So, you know, you can't box him in here. And another thing, too, he said that he felt too modern for these folk, like, so he played a lot in the folk scene, but he never really felt like he belonged in there. he felt like he was too much of a modernist to play in these folk clubs. He said he was trying to bring meat to the folk music, which he says is a big mistake. I think he's saying it's a big mistake as in like, this is probably one of the reasons why I never got that popular. Does he mean like, I'm sorry, he said meat?

Meat. Bring meat. M-E-A-T. Yeah, okay. So he's like he's saying like, make me-me-a-t. Yeah, make the songs have more depth and more like, yeah, okay. Well, you can start. certainly hear it and that's what makes it awesome you know yeah and and so after hearing that second

clip um i mean you can hear you can also hear pecknold you know it's funny and what he pulled when i was yeah when i was hearing hearing that guitar part in the beginning of the second clip it reminded me of some of the stuff that um that had filled and hamit were doing on the black album oh really or and some of the earlier metallic of stuff too like uh nothing else matters and all that stuff. I mean, if you've got Zeppelin laying down his guitar on this album, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if guys like Hatfield and Hammett listened to this and may have, you know, because I mean, there's a lot of acoustic parts and a lot of Metallica songs. And the acoustic guitar shows itself in metal all the time. So it's interesting to hear something like this. Yeah,

I wonder for it stems from this era. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's interesting to hear. It's interesting to hear this as, you know, another, another possible, like, origin of, like, acoustic influenced metal, like, points back to the same era that Sabbath and Zeppelin were laying down the influence for metal. So it's interesting. Yeah. And we're not going to dive into his lyrics because, I mean, so he considers himself a poet first and a musician second. And, you know, just listen to the album. He's not he's not a Brit Daniel type. Like you can tell you can understand what he's saying. Give this album a listen all the way through. It's it's really pretty. It is very poetic. So yeah, that's the sidetrack for today. Roy Harper's fifth studio album, Stormcock,

came out in 71. Really good stuff dude. Yeah, I might have to go listen to that all the way through for sure. I mean, that song just in it's by itself is incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible. Yeah. Yeah, they're all like that, and they're all pretty unique. Probably my second favorite one on this record. So I don't think there were any singles off this record. So any of these would have been fair game, but track three is called one-man rock and roll band. It's pretty great. So yeah, just a lot of, it's just loaded with, to quote Robin Pecknell, super sick, 12 guitar strings.

Yeah, that's awesome, man. 12-string guitar. Yeah, man, you always get such a like a lush, texture with that 12-string guitar, you know, that's what makes it sound so, so rich, you know. Yeah. So briefly here, I want to just mention where you can hear us. Always hop onto our website, no-feelerpodcast.com. There we have some expanded show notes as far as articles that we've pulled from.

We'll throw up music videos, you know, concert footage and stuff like that. You can stream us directly on our website with our SoundCloud player. You can also hear us on iTunes, pretty much anywhere else that you find podcasts. We should be there. And you know what, dude? So listening to this second clip from Same Old Rock, I was getting some Animal Collective vibes, dude. So I think next week we should cover Animal Collective. I'm down, man.

And I've never really listened to Songtongs. at all. So that's the one I want to cover. Yeah. Yeah. So, oh man, dude, I can't fucking wait. Let's do it. So yeah, let's do it. Next week we'll do animal collective sung tongs. And that's going to do it for us today. I'm just going to, so our outro is just going to be a little bit more of track one from Stormcock or d'urves. So yeah, let's wrap this up. We will see all next week. Anybody see you will hear us. My name is Quentin. is Travis. You may have heard of the sex cult nexium

and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mack. But she's never told her side of the story. Until now. People assume that I'm like this pervert. My name is Natalie Robamed. And in my new podcast, I talked to Allison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member. How do you feel

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