Tuesday 10 May 2011

Power Of Source - The Apollo Stars (1974)


"I played that record a lot back then. I was only 20. I was sharing a house in the Hollywood Hills with four other Scientologists and put the album on the turntable in our living room one night. I sat on the shag carpeted floor and listened. LRH was onto something and I was there to hear it. At the time I believed that if LRH was making music and calling it the sound of the future, he was Source after all, then it must be. At the time I even thought this music was kinda cool. One of my housemates gave me a look and laughed. He was older than me and far more cool and a Scientologist as well yet he didn’t have the Power of Source album in his collection. And when he told me to, “take that shit off !” I questioned his commitment to all things Scientology."

 
Yes, it’s L. Ron Hubbard, with his band...and they’re moving in, so be afraid, be very afraid, especially if they should move into your head. It’s 1974 and Ron is set to seduce the wild youth with his band’s special brand of crazy Jazz. Well, it’s kind of Jazz, and definitely bonkers, but you know what? I like it for that very reason. I’d like to see it released on CD and filed next to Freddie Hubbard. When the band chant ‘We’re moving in’ things get really scary; it’s almost like listening to the anti-Ra. You’ll won’t be surprised to learn that great compositional or arranging skills are not on display here, but you may be taken back by the sheer gusto with which this mob go about their business. All they do is jam over guitar riffs and rollicking ‘tribal’ drumming, basically, but do so in such a fashion that you might find your jaw on the floor, when it’s not working overtime laughing. There used to be (perhaps still is) a branch of scientology on Tottenham Court Road. The frightening thing is that if they had been blasting this out of the shop instead of standing around like idiots I might have gone in. Listen if you dare.




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