250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 26 True West - Drifters

                                                     

                                                        'Still looking fir the past.'

I don't want to get all 'gather round my knee young 'uns on you.' I'm only 60. But I think it's happening to me. A lot has happened to the world in the time I've been on the planet and I'd say we haven't seen anything yet. 

We have little conception of the impacts of the technological revolution we are experiencing . Yesterday a friend  of mine sent me a link about a man who studied the same subject as me at the same university as me buyt left in 2009 and is now an AI related billionaire who is claiming that they are developing technolgy which will kick start a revolutuin ten tume larger than the industrial revolution in a tenth of the time.

I can't get my head round this idea so I'm listening to True West's debut album Drifters in my living room. I bought it when it came out in 1984. In a record shop in Kingston On Thames. A half hour walk from my home in Teddington. 

I knew the guy who owned the record shop. He was a fair bit older than me. In his thirtues or forties bit we mavens recognuse one another instunctively and we babbled for a while about the Paisley Underground, R.E.M. and ither related matters. I bought Drifters .

I was following Happy Trails in the slow but organic way that you had to dioin these pre Internet and Spotify days. Music papers, friends and evening radui shows. From R.E,M. to Let's Active to True West on one family tree. Antecendents Television, The Doors, Creedence, This process took me most of the eighties and half way through the nineties. Then I took an enforced break before I was reunited with my record collection in my current beloved flat in 2011 and went back to working on the jigsaw puzzle.

True West looked back as R.E.M. did in many ways. But their was somethung inspiring about their traulblazing, their guitar duels. Which harked back to Haught Ashbury and Moby Grape and Quicksilver Messenger Service. This us a flawed record in some ways. It could have greater cohesion and impact. But there are any number of glorious, instigative  moments,