THE HENRY COW LEGEND [AKA: LEGEND OR LEG END]

Challenging and uncompromising, the legendary HENRY COW may go down in history as one of the 1970s most defiantly uncommercial bands whose mission was to create music so complex and daring and so far out of the box that even almost a half century down the road, many will still have a difficult time grasping onto the bizarre nature of the music that this band founded by Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson crafted. The origins of HENRY COW go as far back as 1968 when the two founders joined their avant-garde fetishes while at Cambridge University with a decidedly anti-commercial attitude that would keep them well outside the gatekeepers of the music industry for the band's entire existence however if anything HENRY COW showcased a blueprint as how to find an audience, sell albums and become a LEGEND even while swimming upstream in an industry that was more concerned about cranking out music that appealed to the lowest common denominator.

First of all HENRY COW does not refer to Henry Cowell although it would make perfect sense to assume as such. Cowell was one of the 20th century's most outrageously experimental classical artists and he surely must have been at least an influence in passing but the both Frith and Hodgkinson have denied this and stated that the name is supposed be nonsensical and given some of the Canterbury Scene influences on the band's debut LEGEND which is the first of three albums to feature a sock on the cover and refer to the end of a leg (hardy har har. It only added an extra layer of irreverence and suggests that the Canterbury Scene was one of the primary impetuses in HENRY COW's whimsical avant-garde jazzy-rock with no fucks left to give approach of musical madness. While HENRY COW was opening for Pink Floyd as early as 1968, it took the band many years to actually put together an album but in 1973 the debut LEGEND was finally released and of course found many critics unable to grasp exactly what it was they were hearing since HENRY COW was extremely unorthodox, unapologetically complex and more irreverent than any punk rocker who came after.

While HENRY COW would create one of the most unique sounds in all of progressive rock and even start an entire movement called Rock In Opposition, on this debut album the band was still testing the waters and finding their way through the abstract ethers of the avant-garde. LEGEND was only a quintet at this point but due to the multi-instrumentalist nature of all the members on board still resonated as what many must have perceived as a full orchestra of sort. Hodgkinson himself performed on the Farfisa organ, piano, alto sax, clarinet and bells. Frith handled guitar duties while also adding violins, violas and piano. Geoff Leigh performed on saxophones, flute, clarinet and recorder and John Greaves added bass, piano and whistles. Chris Cutler was the main percussionist but also added sounds from toys, pianos and whistles. While the album was primarily instrumental, there were a few moments where all of the members contributed vocals. While the album seems a little too all over the place for its own good, it's utterly amazing how talented these guys were from the beginning especially considering they basically took a few inverted rock messages from Frank Zappa and turned it into a veritable musical genre.

The opening "Nirvana For Mice" begins the album and sounds like a brass-rock band that has been hitting the pubs a little too much upon first listen. The time signatures are all over the place but then it really kicks into an alien sounding set of pulsating rhythms, psycho-jazz dynamics and an in-yer-face disscontempt for pretty much everything else that was gracing the airwaves during the early 1970s. The beauty of the album is that the members were all talented composiitionalists who offers a very diverse array of mondo-bizarro transitions between straight forward 70s jazz-fusion, Canterbury Scene flavors and completely unhinged avant-garde jazz excursions that would make Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra blush (just check out "Teenbeat Introduction" which basically melds with the following "Teenbeat.") One of the secrets to the stylistic approach on LEGEND was what Frith described as "chance methods" to compose which offered moments of chaos and order to intermingle in wild and unpredictable behaviors!

LEGEND is a tough nut to crack and anyone who thinks they can tackle this one on a single listen or even four or five is delusional. This one takes a great long time to comprehend as it takes all of the advanced methodologies of musical composition to their extremities. Sure this one isn't as streamlined as the band's grand finale "Western Cultures" but all of the HENRY COW elements are presented here albeit in a freeform improv sort of way. While i wouldn't call this my favorite HENRY COW album at all, i have to admit that this one has grown on me after quite a few spins over the years. There is literally nothing else that sounds like HENRY COW even in the modern era some half century later after this debut emerged in 1973. While the album may seem a little too loosy goosy for some, it really does have an underpinning that emerges over time. Canterbury fans go straight to the closing "Nine Funerals Of The Citizen King" which offered glimpses of where Hatfield & The North would go while showcasing a proto-punk irreverence and Canterbury whimsey simultaneously. HENRY COW was one of a kind and although the following albums are more properly constructed, the debut LEGEND stands on its own as one of the primo examples of fuck-it-all prog running amok therefore cannot be discarded in any way.