--- Sez Kenneth Newman to David Marheine ---
 
 DM> Geez, I know you don't like Lee Jackson's voice, but I think 
 DM> _Refugee_ is the best thing Pat Moraz ever recorded. 
 KN> Have you heard _Relayer_ or some of Moraz's duet albums 
 KN> with Bruford? Moraz's playing on _Refugee_ is good, as 
 KN> you say, but in conception and execution the album is 
 KN> hochkaese, high cheese. 
I haven't herd the dewettes, but I did listen to _Relayer_ and
_Close To The Edge_ last week.  I've decided my main beef with
_CTTE_ is the sonics.  Otherwise it's a pretty good album.  If
the CD is better sounding than the LP, I can understand people
being nuts about it.  _Relayer_, on the other hand, *sounds* better,
but I've never warmed up to the material.  Maybe I haven't listened
to it often enough, but large quantities of it just sound like
unrelated riff overdubs.  I mean, nobody seems to be listening
to what anybody else is playing.  In lotsa sections it seems that
any given part could be time-shifted anywhere from a quarter note
to 8 bars and you couldn't tell the difference.  Howe in particular
seems out in left field proudly noodling anti-guitar riffs whilst
ignoring the bass and drums.  This is also my impression of parts
of _CTTE_, BTW.  Too few of the "themes" seem to coalesce into
melodies or statements by the band as a whole.  Perhaps a punchy
remix/remaster would help a lot.  I guess I better haul out
that double disc _Yesstory_ compilation this weekend and do some
comparison listening.  To be honest, the biggest problem here is
that I compare each of these to _Fragile_ and _The Yes Album_,
not to the whole of ProgRock or even music in general.  In a wider
context, there's much to recommend each of these.  In the big world
of both kinds of music, these are certainly one of them.  I think.
 KN> Look, who said cheese was bad? 
 KN> The ultimate cheesiest thing in the universe is the organ 
 KN> sound on "96 Tears" (OFF TOPIC, Newman!) and it's perfect.
Oh man, the cheesy organ on the Cowsills' "The Rain The Park And
Other Things" is absolutely fabulous.  Then the backup vocals take
you to fromage heaven...
 KN> The cover to _In Search of the Lost Chord_ is 
 KN> mightily cheesy, to say nothing of the spoken outro...
 KN> These are all cheese and all wonderful. 
We're certainly in agreement here.
 
 DM> Cheesy definitely has other connotations 
 DM> to me.  Anything produced by Rupert Holmes, for example.  Bands 
 DM> that draw their own album covers with felt tip pens... 
 KN> That's merely tacky, like Wakeman's icecapades. 
For some reason I'm picturing Kraft singles tacked to the walls
of audiophile listening salons as acoustical treatments...
Oxygen-free audiophile cheese slices melting atop monoblock
tube amps, damping inaudible vibrations...
Anyway, I guess there's good cheese and bad cheese, bad taste
and no taste, tacky and wacky terbacky...  Now I'm getting
confused again.
But I'll agree that the idea of reforming the Nice with a
replacement keyboard player could be termed "high cheese".
I still like it lots more than his work replacing Rick
Wakeman or Mike Pinder, however.  Who is he replacing on
the duet albums with Bruford - Dave Stewart?  Vangelis?
 DM> I wonder where Zep Shulman acquired the taste for dairy air? 
 KN> Why London, of course. Have you never sampled the London 
 KN> dairy air?  Or is that an assinine question? 
I drove by London, Ontario last summer, but the closest I've been
to England is Provincetown, MA, which apparently has a large, um,
derrierphile community of its own...
DMM
... Pull any finger to continue ...
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