With Christmas parties in full swing and blizzards, freezing fog and ice descending on all parts of the UK, missions home are becoming ever more sketchy for the seasonal reveller. If you're unlucky enough to be stranded in a car, airport or wheelie bin, take comfort in the knowledge that even rock deities aren't immune to the odd wayward, drunken loss of navigation.
Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band (they of 'Express Yourself' fame), released their third album 'In the Jungle, Babe' during 1969, including a handful of covers and some loose instrumental jams. This one is a breezy brass and ivory number suitable for those times when an air guitar won't quite satisfy and what's really needed is an air trumpet.
Alternative Christmas sound alert, with West Coast stoner rock outfit Wooden Shjips turning the whimsy of 'O, Tannenbaum' into a lilting psych instrumental. This tune along with a crazy cover of Auld Land Syne were released last Christmas on tape to friends and family of the band and have just recently been redistributed for wider yuletide moshing. One to wrap the presents to with the aid of mulled cider and a fatty.
Lewd, grinding funk-rock from the original, slug-tached Sheik Yerbouti off the 1973 album 'Overnite Sensation'. It's testament to Zappa's subversive brilliance during his lifetime that there should be so many honors bestowed upon his memory. There's a monumental bust of his head erected in Vilnius, Lithuania and a fossil discovery named after him - Spygori zappania - by American paleontologists who stated his: " mission paralleled that of the earliest paleontologists: to challenge conventional and traditional beliefs when such beliefs lacked roots in logic and reason". Annual get togethers such as the 'Zappanale' in the German city of Bad Doberan and a Zappa Day held in his birthplace Baltimore ensure some of the younger generations get exposed to the bizarre genius.
Funkadelic's first album made a frayed and wide-eyed entrance into the world in 1970, melding deep, rhythmical patterns into lengthy funk jams. 'I Bet You' is a remake of an earlier version of the song by The Parliaments, also covered by the Jackson 5 and sampled by the Beastie Boys.
Given the perishingly cold and snowy conditions in the UK at present, a bit of ambient German electronica seems in order. Krautrock adventurists Roedelius and Moebius ditched the urban sprawl in '76 to go and make expansive analogue soundscapes in a cottage in the forest. The whole album is a masterpiece in restrained layering, and offers an ideal soundtrack to driving in blizzard conditions. There's something in the fabric of this tune that might actually be constructed out of melting icicles.
