Peter Walker, “Camel Ride,” Long Lost Tapes 1970 (Tomkins Square 2009)
So many good things seem to happen at Levon Helm’s house in Woodstock. And apparently these things can occur even when Helm is not home. This exceptional discovery is one such event, a recording of six songs performed by Peter Walker and friends:
“One cold late fall weekend I put a session together. I found housing for the out of town musicians and invited my friend Maruga Booker who came all the way from Detroit, Badal Roy and I had played together and he was available so he came up from New Jersey, the rest of the guys were already in Woodstock that week. It all come together at Levon Helm’s house while Levon was away, Paul Butterfield heard about it and came by but didn’t play, it wasn’t blues so it wasn’t his thing. The police chief heard about it, showed up drunk, sneered his contempt for the “Hippies”, and went away. I traded with Eddy Offord for the equipment rental and engineering, so in so many ways it was a classic “Woodstock Production”. It was my last major effort before years of obscurity and remained in storage all these years. Josh Rosenthal (Tompkins Square) encouraged me to dig it out and release it.”
Walker had developed in the folk scenes in Cambridge and Greenwich and Greenwich Village in the 60s and recorded two albums for Vanguard in the “folk-raga” style he worked in, having studied with Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. He was Timothy Leary’s musical director, organizing music for Leary’s LSD celebrations. Many of today’s best guitarists, across modern traditions, cite Walker as a major influence: Steffen Basho-Junghans, James Blackshaw, Greg Davis, Shawn, David McMillen, Thurston Moore, Jack Rose and Ben Chasny. Walker later settled in upstate New York, cultivated his interest in Spanish flamenco guitar and became so skilled in it that he has been accepted within the inner circle of flamenco guitarists.
Long Lost Tapes 1970 reveals a looseness of form that points always towards experimentation. Nowhere, perhaps, is the exploration of variation more evident that in this style of music: each instrument proposing a theme, and then slowly moving it one way or another, together within the group, a harmonious discovery of how the phrases lock and unlock, blend and mutate. So good and so exciting is the tone of Walker’s guitar on these tapes, a slightly distorted tone that breaks up more or less depending on the strength of Walker’s attack. The saturation of his guitar sound is spellbinding when combined with the modality of the musical form Walker works in. The assembled group includes Maruga Booker on trap and frame drums, renowned clarinet player Perry Robinson, tabla player Badal Roy (who was working with Miles Davis and would appear on that master’s ‘70s electric jazz classics as On the Corner and Big Fun), bassist Rishi, and free jazz practitioner Mark Whitecage on flute and alto sax. Eddy Offord recorded the session, somewhat odd given his work on more monolithic productions of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes.
Tompkins Square
