See Angel Trumpets! Come one and come all. You are one of the people to discover Toronto's most notorious and legendary bands from the 1980's ... and you are INVITED!
The all new free Great Nature Theatre of Oklahoma was founded in 1979 by Gary Lawrence Murphy and, during it's 21 year history, recorded hundreds of miles of 2-track tape. Taking its name from Franz Kafka's Amerika, the popularity of the band can only be attributed to its one simple concert rule:
Everyone is welcome to join the band
In one legendary Kew-Beach (Toronto) session, the band numbered 56 on stage with so many more dancing and percussing about inside and on the street that one of the neighbours called the police. This was guerilla folk music at its finest.
Core band members held the sessions together and those who thought themselves to be non-musicians were coached with simple verbal rhythmic phrases to help them follow the beat and maybe a 10 second tutorial on the mechanics of their instrument. It was common to have a drummer, guitarist or bassist who had never before held an instrument in their hands. Many of the instruments did not exist, assembled from bits of furniture and kitchen ware or squeezed out of a guitar using electro-accoustic techniques, and recorded on a veritable zoo of old discarded cassette and reel-to-real equipment. A polished, 'professional' sound was irrelevant --- we made this music to have fun.
"Each Nature Theatre event was a tribal jamboree, an awakening of the inner rock musician trapped within us all and aching to rail on a screaming guitar."
The Great Nature Theatre recorded many original tunes as well as covers --- no cow was considered too sacred to be covered. For those with RealAudio players, here are some samples from our vaults. As you listen, keep in mind this was 1980, when Public Image was still underground, U2 (another Nature Theatre) had one album, and disco had just been buried (Sid Vicious too, if I remember correctly).
Also, yes, some of these songs are owned by other people and distributed without proper license, but the performances recorded are not presented for any fee, only as a historical record. Besides, considering the recording quality of the old stuff, you need some imagination to recognize many of the covers from the originals.
1979 Rain, Rain, Rain -- the Leuty
Sessions
Undeniably our greatest hit --- more copies of
this recording were distributed than all other combined, we even
got a few seconds airplay on Q102. In the tradition of 'Midnight
Rambler' or 'Louis Louis', the lyrics were learnt phonetically
from an extremely bad nth-generation dub of an old scratchy Roxy Music
disc ... and we got most of them wrong ... including the
title.
1980 I'm Not Your Steppin'
Stone -- the Leuty Sessions
Excerpt from the
extended (25 minute) dance mix that once again made the Monkees
an acceptable topic for polite conversation.
1982 Subterranean Homesick Blues --
Queen Street Sessions
A very vintage 'mash-up' remix using many FM-radio 'Palm
Sunday' cut-ups and mixins of various LP samplings such as
the stradivarius violin solo taken from Ann Southam's
violin concerto. Although this is the complete Dylan
song, to appease any copyright police I have intentionally
reduced this to telephone-quality RA 14.4k encoding; I
think the gist of it is still audible and trust me, the
master tape likely isn't much better.
2000 It
Could Happen to Me, It Could Happen to
You -- the Sauble Sessions
Yes, the GNT lives on! This original track was released under the pre-CreativeCommons 'Open Content License' allowing anyone to mix, mash, rework or reword the song for any purpose they like. This take
was recorded in Sauble Beach, Ontario in April 2000 and used for Earthday 2000 celebrations in Hongkong.
Note: These RealAudio clips will not play in the new community Helix player from Real.com -- the open community editions lack the number one most common RealPlayer codec (which makes them kinda useless) so you will need realplayer version 8 or older if you prefer running free community software.
Given the rise of the MP3 bloggers and common sampling in modern popular music, I've decided to throw caution to the wind, take my chances and release the original GNT tracks in MP3, just for the record. You can find MP3-format editions of many of the above tracks in the Great Nature Theatre Archives.