Getting To This
I’ve mentioned before that in the early 2000s I sold some of my record collection to fund a decent guitar. Most of the records I sold were the ones that either I rarely listened to or had, for one reason or another, stopped listening to. Amongst them were the two early albums by Blodwyn Pig, Ahead Rings Out and Getting To This. So the 50th anniversary of the release of the latter was a good chance to revisit and decide whether or not I’d made a terrible mistake.
TLDR: no.
It starts quite well but most of the material isn’t very good, largely due to the absence of discernable melody on many of the songs. In itself that might be a problem if there was something else going on to sustain interest, for example lyrically or rhythmically, but there isn’t. Two or three tracks seem to me to be throwaway, including one which I had to listen to twice to work out if it was faux Jamaican patois or a bad Geordie accent (it’s shite either way).
A long track called San Francisco Sketches has its moments but is way too, er, sketchy. It does, however, from around 5.25 to 6.36, have the best part of the album when Jack Lancaster (another admirer of Rahsaan Roland Kirk) plays jazz. By the time the decent final track comes around, Send Your Son To Die, it’s too late.
Anyway, I applaud my younger self for getting rid of this. Your mileage may vary, of course, and you’ll find it on Spotify. It’s also on YouTube, where you will see the vast majority of commenters take a very different view of the album than me. C’est la vie say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.
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