Written By: Tom Murphy
In March of 1991, I was a junior in college while attending Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and Spring Break was coming up and I was originally planning on staying on campus and surviving off of soup, sandwiches and little extras I could get at the Aldi grocery store. The latter was kind of a discount grocery store that was within walking distance of the small campus in a town of just over thirty thousand people. But my friend John Carroll, nicknamed “Ripper” by friends, offered a ride to his home town of Tulsa, Oklahoma to spend several days there and helping him put new spark plugs in his car. It sure beat the prospect of hanging out on campus with no one around and being bored to death.
So, naturally, we went and that’s how I learned about this great record store in Saint Louis (well, University City but it’s close enough) called Recycle Records. We may have stopped by Vintage Vinyl, another fine establishment, as well. At any rate, we made it to Tulsa safely and I got asked by Ripper’s brother if I was a Yank. He was kidding. I didn’t know how to answer because Colorado, where I was born, wasn’t even a state for more than another eleven years after the American Civil War was over and my father is from Hannibal, Missouri and my mother is from rural Okinawa. Being a Yank or not a Yank didn’t really figure into that equation.
Between working on the car and checking out the scenery and playing video games at the arcade, we went to this kind of strip-mall-used-CD-store and I picked up Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ “Mother’s Milk,” a CD single of “From Out of Nowhere” by Faith No More and this curious item I bought because it just looked interesting: Hawkwind‘s 1988 album “The Xenon Codex.” I had been an avid player of AD&D at the time so I knew a “codex” was a book and my background in science made me immediately associate xenon as one of the noble gases. Song titles as suggestive as “Wastelands of Sleep” made me think of H. P. Lovecraft, “Neon Skyline” resonated with the cyberpunk literature I had discovered a couple of years beforehand, and “Sword of the East” sounded like something out of fantasy literature. Naturally, I was fascinated.
The album did not disappoint either. It was like not much else I had ever heard except for maybe Blue Öyster Cult. It covered a lot of sonic territory from heavy rock, weird noises and atmospheres and strange voices in a song or two, and there were, to my ears, shades of Billy Thorpe’s Children of the Sun. I went on to explore more of the band’s material when I got home for the summer in Colorado and discovered the group had multiple albums. Not being blessed with an abundance of money, I picked up the 1990 album Space Bandits. It, too, had unusual offerings and it is from that album that I discovered the book Black Elk Speaks from the song “Black Elk Speaks,” featuring a recording of the voice of John G. Neihardt reading the words of Black Elk Speaks, because of whom we have this classic piece of Native American spiritual literature today.
What I did not know upon initially listening to and exploring the work of Hawkwind was that that band was one of the very first space rock and psychedelic, progressive rock bands. Nor did I immediately realize that Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead had played bass with the band for several years before forming Motorhead. Or that Michael Moorcock had collaborated with the band and that their 1985 album, “Chronicles of The Black Sword,” which I acquired toward the mid-90’s, was an obvious example of that.
Moorcock was the first writer I had read who had been referred to as “psychedelic” that wasn’t Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey. His Elric of Melniboné series, specifically, because of its rich world-building and willingness to treat magic and world-building in a way that didn’t seem hokey or too terribly tied up with notions of high fantasy as established earlier by J.R.R. Tolkien. I got into Blue Öyster Cult around the mid-80’s and noticed that the song “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” was co-written by Michael Moorcock and that so was an earlier song, “The Great Sun Jester” from the 1979 album Mirrors. Naturally, “Black Blade” from Cultosaurus Erectus was a Moorcock collaboration as well. So, that there was a resonance in my mind, perhaps not thought of in those terms at the time because I simply did not have the vocabulary for such notions, only then abstractly understood, between the music of Blue Öyster Cult and Hawkwind made sense partly because of the Moorcock connection.
More so than Blue Öyster Cult, though, the music of Hawkwind was clearly aimed at exploring human consciousness and its alteration through exploring inner space and the possibilities of the imagination. Even the band’s eponymous 1970 debut album went beyond the organic psychedelia of some of the garage rock of the era and drew clear inspiration from bands like Pink Floyd and The Jimi Hendrix Experience in creating what would end up being called “space rock”– really an off-shoot of psychedelic rock but using a broader palette of sounds and instrumentation and subject matter.
It was Hawkwind‘s 1971 album, “In Search of Space,” and the recordings affiliated with that period (like the epochal and influential “Silver Machine” with Lemmy on vocals) has had an enduring impact on later psychedelic rock bands and even on punk. Hawkwind was the one progressive rock band guys in The Damned, The Clash, and The Sex Pistols could like because its music was so raw, primal and coming from a direction that seemed to embrace the subconscious source of creativity. There is something elemental of that era for the band that disappeared once it became more involved in writing otherworldly, space rock experiments, fairly removed from its rock and roll roots.
The more traditionally psychedelic rock era of the band is perhaps best embodied by the landmark live album, 1973’s “Space Ritual.” As a document of the band at its peak during that time, even without the disorienting visuals (including Stacia who often danced topless, but seemed to be in an intense hypnotic trance and not to be fucked with) “Space Ritual” is a masterpiece of a time where the band’s straight-ahead psychedelic phase and its space rock came together. You listen to that record and you can hear where Acid Mothers Temple, Chrome, and Ghost picked up a great deal of their sonic DNA.
After the 1974 album “Hall of the Mountain Grill,” Lemmy stopped being as direct a contributor to the songwriting as perhaps he had been and for 1975’s “Warrior on the Edge of Time,” Michael Moorcock, already a good friend of the band, began his longtime collaboration in songwriting. The following twenty-two albums, including the 2012 release “Onward,” showed a band stretching out and not being defined by only by rock and roll and its strangest songs; some containing sweeping, whispering atmospheres and sound experiments that push the limits of what the band is, even while capitalizing on what its already done with members coming in and out of the project over the years. Hawkwind deserves a whole book written by an expert and I never saw the band live, though still hope to. But I will say that Hawkwind‘s music got me to be more open to strange sounds and new ideas, which is the very essence of the psychedelic experience.
Tom Murphy grew up in NW Aurora, Colorado three blocks from an airport runway in the 1970s and 80s. He was a DJ at Knox College in the first half of 1992 when the wave of “alternative” music was eroding the business models of the music industry. During most of the 90s, he worked in call centers and chipped away at his second BA in Political Science and History. In 1999 he wrote his first show review for publication. In 2004 he released his first ‘zine, All Need Is Music, dedicated entirely to local music. This lead to his 2006 start with alternative weekly paper Westword in Denver. Since then he has written articles about a broad spectrum of music and he has done numerous interviews with musicians, high profile and not. Some of his hundreds of interviewees include Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, Annie Clark of St. Vincent, Tex Kerschen of Indian Jewelry, Peter Hook of Joy Division and Henry Rollins. Currently he has expanded his interviews to comedians and he is still working on a history of Colorado underground music covering the years 1975 to the present for which he hopes to finally fulfill a childhood dream of getting a PhD. As part of that goal he has taught a class on the subject through Denver Free School. He primarily plays guitar in the experimental band Pythian Whispers with dabbling in side projects and session performances.
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