Steel Mill's Green Eyed God

 

I'm not so crazy about the music, which is too basic in the rock genre with some inventive ideas, blues passages, but very little original melodic or chordal progressiveness, but boy that cover painting is beautiful!  I remember reading it was commissioned from a legit German painter, which makes complete sense, you can make out the influence of S. Dali obviously. 

In most reviews online this music will be described as 'crazy psych' and I suppose that is definitely the most accurate description, though to me psych means absolutely nothing other than that perhaps there is guitar in it, since it has been applied to the most diverse albums from the Byrds' Turn Turn Turn all the way to Comus, which to me seems bona fide psychedelic, in the sense of LSD-influenced.  On that dial of utterly ordinary to utterly incomprehensibly demented music this album is squarely on the leftwards axis.

The song called Black Jewel of the Forest employs the Black Sabbath technique of minor second chord change (on top of E minor, of all tonics, the easiest one on the guitar! -- my kids could play this song btw) to give a doomy atmosphere, yawn; I mean, when Tony Iommi first discovered on his electric that playing E minor to F sounds really hellish and demon-like when played really loud, it must have been so (or soooo, as those millenials would text) exciting, until it was copied over and over again by lesser bands and guitarists:

If you're patient however (not my forte at all as my wife always loves to remind me) you'll find that 4 minutes through there is a great riff and a change to a more exciting passage, very much like B.S., but it quickly reverts to the annoying minor second change.

(Dust in the air suspended marks the place where) A Story Ended, by Dick Heckstall-Smith (1972)

 

Like, wow.  First of all with a title like that you know you're in for a wonderful treat.  And the artwork on the cover, as I always point out!!  Gorgeous!

I'm sure he was happy with the photograph on the inside too-- good thing they kept it out of view of the record-purchasing customers.  Not too many units would have sold, I suspect.  Might have been some kids in that record store too...

You can see he collected together an all-star crew for this recording, I daresay, this masterpiece, which looks to be a one-off where everything came together perfectly for this most progressive of times.  Information here.

Since he worked with Jack Bruce, the unknown progressive genius that is, not the super-famous Cream bassist (yes I know it's the same guy), and his lyricist Pete Brown, obviously the prog/creative spirit lay strong in him.  This was the time when Jack Bruce was hitting it out of the ballpark in album after album, from the first solo Tailor to Harmony Row, his masterpiece (questionable?).

He played with The New Jazz Orchestra, who was just recently featured here in connection with Neil Ardley.  Wonderfully, you might notice that Dave Greenslade plays keys here.  Boy what a string of progressive gems Greenslade put out with his band!! Always worth relistening for that gorgeous mellotron mastery.

Musically, this is like Marsupilami, Gnidrolig toned down (less prog), may be the Sandoz posted on these pages before.  So it's quite electric / rocky, despite the jazz credentials behind him.  Oddly there is singing on all tracks and with 4 different vocalists, none of them Jack Bruce.

A Pirare's Dream is the prog masterpiece here, as you will recognize instantly, despite the 11 plus minutes, I sampled it in toto:

Album closes out with a blues song with Caleb Quaye playing gorgeous blues guitar licks.

Wonderful masterpiece.

Heaven - Brass Rock 1 from 1971 + single Hangin' On 1972

 

WOW-- look at that album art!!  You can see it was shaped into a crucifix.   On the inside the band is posing in front of what looks to be a totem pole.  Like, wow, as my kids say.

From discogs:

Heaven originated from Portsmouth, UK circa 1970. Their major live debut was at the famous Isle Of Wight Festival. They were then soon snapped-up by CBS Records, who had a penchant for brass-rock and spared no expense allowing them to issue a double album housed in a lavish cross shaped fold-out sleeve.

Oh boy, another day, another gem.  There are still gold nuggest in this stream.  Who thought the gold rush was over?  It's just moved on to another place... From Alaska, to outer space asteroids maybe.

I really really enjoyed this album, having grown up on Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears, etc., who didn't?  And I still love Chicago, the older albums are full of not just inimitable hit songs but creative compositions.  All the way up to number nine there are interesting songs to discover if you only know their radio-friendly AM hit tunes, the full albums are well worth exploring.

Compared to the above too though this is harder stuff, more akin to the wonderful little-known American (Indian) band Redbone, but with horns.  Great stuff.  Sample (and exemplary) track:

I have the CD and LP versions, I used the former because it includes their single as a bonus track...

Brecker Bros in Steps and Steps Ahead, 7 albums.

 

The Brecker Bros were a band I diligently avoided due to their horrific connection with the toxic David Sanborn, the musical equivalent of a fresh napalm facewash in a slop bucket, but actually the Bros. turned out to be pretty good when I had a listen to their discography-- at least, the first ST album (1975) was good, quite progressive music along the lines of the Auracle Glider material and their related artists. Michael Brecker and Mike Mainieri, who was also on these pages on a couple of occasions, appear in these closely related cousin-like bands Steps and Steps Ahead.  I guess the former evolved into the latter after a couple of years.  Not to be confused with the far more brilliant Canterburian prog-fusion one-off band also called Steps. which hopefully everyone knows and possesses.  (A good example of what I was talking about when I said Euro-fusion surpassed US fusion.)  

Although the music (of US Steps) doesn't quite cut it like the first Brecker album there is a lot of enjoyable fusion spread out between these 7 albums, 8 LPs actually since one is the obligatory double-live where the overextended improvisations take over more than 95% of the playtimes like the so-called non-coding "junk DNA" that makes up most of our chromosomes.  

As expected, by the time of 1989's NYC the quality of the composition has drastically declined (LPDP), from a not so high basis admittedly, and the only surprise I had was that there wasn't some rapper yelling in the background about "them Brooklyn projects" on top of the over-loud slapped bass, screeching Sanboring saxes, and digital drums.  I think in particular the compositions of Mainieri really stand out in the whole, for example, he made Red Neon, Go or Give, which appeared (shockingly) on the NYC album, it reminds not a little of the French band Noco Music I ripped long ago:

Although a more typical song for this band is the title track to Modern Times (1984):

Italian Ping Pong, 1971 and 1973

I remembered this band from 20 years ago when I first got into this genre (progressive rock) and that was mostly thanks to the brilliant innovation that was Napster-- which allowed the sampling of music we had no idea was good or not, without spending a penny.  Amazingly Italian Ping Pong has a wiki page.  Then I promptly forgot about it in the frantic and unseemly haste at discovering new gems that this addiction/hobby engenders in its victims.  I listen to it now as if I never heard it before.  There must be so many albums that got trampled underfoot like that by my desperate accumulation of lost works that so amuses my wife (are you sure it's not just the same album you keep collecting?)...  I wish I could erase my memory of Led Zep (like in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!) and The Beatles too for that matter and listen to them as if for the first time like my kids are able to do (actually they dislike them both, especially the former).  Imagine that!! Enjoyimg Stairway to heaven again!!  Discovering Black Dog, Four Sticks, Out on the Tiles, the Presence album!!  Wanting to learn to play it on the guitar, too!  Man that's cool the way the song starts with acoustic guitar and recorder and gets harder and more electric until that crazy breathless loud loud finale, and as I walk on down the road, a lady I used to know...  Speaking of which, I was amused to read a news story from Brazil-- not fake news at all-- about an uncontacted indigenous tribe deep in Manaus, Amazon, who had never heard of electricity, radio, guns, cellphones, tv, millenials, selfies (!), etc.,  who sat down with an anthropologist for the 1st time and started singing as a greeting, theres a lady who's sure, all that glitters is gold, and she's buying a stairway to heaven.  Boy, was he surprised.  Well, not that surprised, having grown up in North America.  Luckily he had brought along a double-necked guitar which, at the end of the night, the tribal leader after drinking an excessive amount of palm wine, smashed and set afire. Really happened, Jimmy Page should be proud.  When's the reunion tour, Jimmy?

Anyways, it's lovely and humble Italian pop-folk like my old favourite Maxophone, but with slight touches of progressive-- more so in the 1973 than the initial, very hesitant and amateurish 1971 album.  Really enjoyable from beginning to end, consider the Miracle of Il Miracolo:

Like, wow. As those millenials say.

Speaking of millenials, again, I'm old enough to remember a time when the old virtues were still talked about-- you remember those things like selflessness, humility, generosity (vs. avarice) and vanity especially, was looked down on.  The idea of taking a picture of yourself in front of a mirror-- like, wow.  What's wrong with you?  Back then I mean.

Nowadays imagine the reaction if I said selfies are vanity.  Even the most conservative politicians wouldn't dare say it.  And in the same breath they tell us abortion is a sin!  People have made their whole careers and lives out of vanity today, like Kardashians.  No, go ahead, post thousands of pictures of yourself in underwear or less for billions of human to see, that's great!  Don't let me stop you.  Don't let your embarassed father stop you.  Don't let your boyfriend get mad.  Don't worry that hordes of young teenage boys are masturbating daily, hourly, to your image and sharing it between themselves.  Post some more!  Why not take that thong off!  Read every single intelligent comment about 'wanna suck your tits'!  Be proud of it!  Make some money off those pix, too!  Yeah-- monetize 'em! It's better than working at the local Jack Astors right?

And I want someone who believes in humanity's future to tell me why they think this is a positive signal for our society.... because I regretfully would have to disagree.

Review of the phenomenal British composer Neil Ardley

 

Neil Ardley made the three masterpieces: Symphony of Amaranths, Kaleidoscope of Rainbows, and Harmony of the Spheres in the seventies as a sort of trilogy, but in the earlier days the library records: Greek Variations, which I found quite disappointing, Mediterranean Intrigue (KPM), which I found very disappointing (partly because it recycled most of the ideas of the former), and Will Power the tribute to Shakespeare which I found profoundly depressing (because I love Shakespeare and hold him as the greatest writer ever), and with the New Jazz Orchestra/Mike Gibbs, the brilliant Dejeuner sur l'herbe and the 1971 Radio Live recent CD release.

So Symphony of Amaranths (1972) is the most hesitant, which makes sense since it followed closely on the heels of the 'Third Stream' jazz movement (melding classical with jazz, but not rock) with a first part that forms a kind of 20-minute long composition ending in a long and rather unnecessary set of improvisations, the second side consisting of some really odd songs and a spoken poem over composed instrumental music (The Dong with the Luminous Nose).  I don't feel much of this is entirely successful, if at all.  And I could easily understand if the average listener, the average human, laughed in disgust if I were to be brave enough to play it for their enjoyment with a straight face stating it's a masterpiece.  We could be quite amused too by the choice of emoticons the 'millenial' person would come up with, especially since with my bad eyesight and lack of understanding of this mystifying new hieroglyphic I would be completely left in the dark with regards to the meaning-- especially if one of those neologistic acronyms like WAKSKIG was added in.  Like, to the Ardley music.  Wait-- whaaaat???

Anyways, by the Kaleidoscope of Rainbows (1976) the maturation of his composition is obvious and we have a really beautiful and total all-encompassing suite of symphonic melded with jazz, actually fusion since the 'rock basis' is now in place, just about perfectly, that flows very beautifully without dropping in interest and based on a wonderful octave-reaching melodic theme that is repeated throughout in different variations.  (That theme had appeared before in an earlier album btw I subsequently noticed.)

On Rainbow 5, you get a good taste of his style which usually but not always involves rapid percussion at an almost max heartrate overlaid with funky guitar chords, piano, and a long drawn-out melody in the horns for contrast, usually with many sustained chords or notes, giving that feeling of rushing through and observing slowly both at the same time:

In the same way the last album again forged a gorgeous symphony of classical jazz-rock with all the excitement of drums, guitars, electric piano, added to a full-on orchestra.  Here like in the style of easy listening the orchestra and particularly the strings never get dumb in the usual 'normal' classical manner, partly due to the way the orchestra (the individual instruments) was recorded.  On Fair Mirage, the composition is just other-worldly, although notice how similar the style is to the previous work (strong driving percussion, sustained melodies with long notes):

The commenter asked me about some of my favourite fusion albums, this trilogy would be one of the top ten, well, maybe too generous, top twenty.  Or fifty.  At least, from Britain.  Just kidding.

Now imagine my shock when I read his bio:

English jazz pianist and composer, and author, born 26 May 1937 in Wallington, Surrey, England, UK, died 23 February 2004 in London, England, UK (aged 66).

As well as being an influential jazz musician and composer, he also made a name as the author of more than 100 popular books on science and technology, and on music. When he retired in 2000 Ardley had written 101 books, with total sales of about 10 million.

Madura 1 and 2, 1971 & 1973

Like, wow.  It amazes me there's still gems like this I never heard of.  Maybe some of you knew it already, but I didn't.  After so many years of collecting this stuff, hard for me to believe.

When do I run out finally?

Here's a spot-on review on discogs, for once:

I bought this album when it first appeared on the shelves at local record stores way back when. Unlike today, you couldn't preview albums to see if it was a dud, or if your newspaper route earnings would truly be spent wisely. Sometimes, I would just look at the cover, read the personnel notes, associate members with other bands I'd heard of, etc.. and just take a chance - sometimes extremely disappointed - sometimes inspired beyond words. This gem was one of the latter, to put it in simple terms. I played the plastic right of this generously pressed double - album ear candy. All I could ask is "Why isn't there a HUGE cult following?" I really don't know, but I've turned so many people with discriminating tastes (both listeners and musicians) on to this goldmine and all agree - it is one diversely played out and produced LPs of my generation. The musicianship is superb - the vocals exceptional (the lead vocalist reminds me a lot of the late Terry Kath of "Chicago") and the entire project wreaks of energy and soulfulness - This is the REAL DEAL. You have every genre of music under the sun in this compilation, from Jazz to Funk - from Rock to Blues - I just cannot say enough good about it. Do yourself a favor and chase down a copy. I wore out 2 copies and it was extremely difficult to find another, but I managed. It looks like they are a little more common to find lately. Thanks for the great music guys!! Enough jawing. Go listen!!

So there's a lot to agree with in there.  Remember spending your 5 or 7 dollars allowance or chore money without having any idea of the contents of a record other than that it had a good reputation, or an intriguing cover?  Remember reading a rave review in the old Rolling Stone by some moronic coke-addled critic who adored I-IV-V and called the sequence brilliant, or in the encyclopedia of rock, and then being bitterly, bitterly disappointed at how terrible the songs were?  That's why it was so wonderful when those used record stores with dollar-bins showed up... or when you had friend collectors whose dads already had huge collections you could just 'illegally' copy on cassettes...

This album is sometimes all over the place as he said, but mostly stays in the funky or bluesy horn-rock electric guitar mode with a lot of different ideas-- in that respect, reminds me a lot of the little known US band I presented a year ago called The Screaming Gypsy Bandits-- that Doghead collection, I'm referring to, perhaps because it was a collaboration with multiple songwriters, or a hippie commune, where the women were shared as freely as the dirty bedsheets (Yech.)  Or maybe you could say it's like Backdoor, my recent post with horns tuned down and guitars turned up.  What really matters is that the songs are quite inventive and the riffs original, with a base of 'psychedelic rock' which usually implies simple 60's chord changes, but here, not at all.  And they had so many ideas that the first album is a double LP, like I think Chicago did, didn't they?  Or may be that was Chicago 2.

The other thing is look at those album images-- wow, wow.... they don't make covers like that anymore, do they.  The prosaic ordinariness of the farm image-- it says so much.  So American too.

Consider the track Doctor Honoris Causa (i.e., Honorary Doctorate for a [good] reason, like Jeffrey Epstein's degree from Harvard which had numerous-- counting in the teen numbers-- good reasons behind it).  This is from the second album. It's not just the high energy fusion rhythm section, the excitement of the percussive motor, the swirling synths, the interesting chord drops up and down keeping the flow going strong, the addition of interesting instrumentation with the unexpected appearance of horns, the light touch of strings, the never-ending movement of the piece that sounds like an exciting vision-packed train trip through a dense slum like Calcutta, but fast forward to the 4:06 mark, the keyboard chord that ke knocks out on top of the driving C tonic, which is so totally abruptly different-- it's chords like that, to me, differentiate this particular 70s style of progressive rock from anything which is done today (cf. the recent recommendations in these pages like Zopp)--  a chord like that has never been heard before and likely will never be heard again in the history of human music:

Incredible, just incredible.  How did they come up with these ideas, back then?  The giants lived in the past, as the Greeks well knew...

From the first album, with its all-crazy themes of dreams, death, rebirth, reincarnation, redemption and damnation, remember my wife's usual comment they where all stoned back then, My Love is Free:

Absolutely insane?  So you're sitting in a university class on songwriting or pop composition, the prof presents this song to be analyzed by the students as the perfect example of Everything Wrong, What Not To Do when composing melody, chords, ideas, lyrics.  Please people, please avoid these mistakes if you wish to have that number one hit.  You have broken multiple rules of harmony here.  

And that's exactly what makes me happy.  

Thank you to the men who created these gems.

Thank you to the folks who share them.

Richard Kruza - Oui [feat. Zbigniew Namyslowski] (1988)

From discogs:

Music composer, vocalist; lecturer of Bartók Béla College of Musicart.
Plays vibraphone, keys instruments, synthesizer, piano & percussions.
Born in Chojnice, Poland on July 16, 1939.
Died March 19, 2020

Note that our previously featured Namyslowski is credited as producer on this record.
The music was written by Kruza, except one track by Csaba Deseo, remember him?
In keeping with the later year of 1988 the music is a bit more unnecessarily accessible than one would have wanted.
There are the usual loud echoey chords that were so typical of the 80s casio keyboard sound and needless to articulate, the dreaded digital drum machine.  The whole is entirely quite libraryish, with all instrumental descriptive tracks.

A very throwback track, Between you and me, note that it's Kruza who is playing the vibes here:

Last of the Retour to Haiti with Gerald Merceron in Haiti Insolite, Kako 1915 (Unusual Aspects of Haitian Music)

Here is what I assume to be the last of this series of Haitian jazz/fusion albums related to the brilliant and unknown Gerald Merceron.  Of course, there may always be more albums not entered yet in the database that will turn up later, it always surprises me when that happens--though it shouldn't by now.  In terms of this blog, a search function just might work for you here, though it has been problematic for me for the oldest posts from probably more than 5 years back.

It all started about that far back when I discovered the Kote Ou album from Mushi Widmaier-- posted here, an album which remains for me one of the most underrated unknown masterpieces in the world.  I bought an original LP from 1982 for less than 100 USD and couldn't believe it when I saw it selling in the hundreds about 2-3 years later.  Subesequently of course you can see a rerelease came out in 2017, so anyone can hear the beauty of the music.  Nonetheless, I'm sure the original release will remain a collector's item and thus appropriately priced.  Mushi produced some more music that can be found and sampled on amazon, here, or here on youtube. Anyways, that LP led to the Energie Mysterieuse one from 1979 with involvement and most compositions from Merceron, and that one was unquestionably brilliant too, especially in the melding together of classical and fusion, and the really oddball and original melodic lines Merceron was able to come up with, like magic, as I always say, compared to the average songwriter facing a piano or guitar and coming up with a circle of fifths progression or even worse, a mixture of I, IV, V, maybe the II minor.

As a result of the strength of that one I resolved to collect all the remaining albums, there was an original Jazz Compositions from Haiti which proved generically disappointing, and was posted the most recent, 2 years ago, then the brilliant Tet San Ko in which the nutty imaginative songwriting technique just went through the roof, out of the ballpark, and the follow up one called Bokassa Grotraka that made fun of the cannabilistic dictator or Napoleonic 'emperor' of Central African Republic-- a story so crazy that you have to read it on wikipedia to believe it.  Mention should also be made of the solo album of Lionel Benjamin, who sang on almost all the releases, including this one.

This is the rarest by far of the 5 related albums from Merceron, and quite indisputably the worst, being mostly regular jazz.  Information here.  Sigh-- a recurring problem when I try to complete these discographies, necessary as it is.  The first track is one of the wonderful crazy melodies typical of Merceron, but the second half of side a is a purely improvised solo piece that seems to me a little self-indulgent.  The second side as I said is given over to the generic jazz in quartet format.

Here is the first track, the title track:




The blurb on the front:

Modern classical music art songs and jazz themes composed by Gerald Merceron, played by Brazilian, American, Haitian and French musicians
This record includes "Criar" with lyrics by Agostinho Netto, late president of Angola, music composed played and sung by Gerald Merceron

Polish sax player Namyslowski, again in the ST, 1978, and Air Condition, 1981

I posted his Jasmine Lady album, back here, hopefully there are those who remember the name.
His discography can be found here.  Note that he played in the Klaus Lenz grouping, which I posted too a few times (most recently here, the amazing Sleepless Nights).  He was also in the superb hard-fusion Swedish band Pop Workshop which created two masterpieces of fusioneering space travel in the early 70s.  Get those if you don't already have.  Their Song of the Pterodactyl is absolutely priceless.

His 1981 Air Condition album was a bit too fuzackyish, though it led to 2 other albums from the same grouping (the LP title led to the artist name), and those are both really good and well worth seeking out for the fusion fan.
But the ST Namylovski (with a v) from 1978 is just amazing.   Some songs were recycled from the 'with strings' predecessor 1977 with 'w' album, which was reissued and is easy to find, with arrangements by Zbigniew.

The astonishing Time Passing track, or Passage of Time, just throws me off the earth with its chromatic and intriguing, utterly unique chord changes that seem to flow from one planet to another, but with such beauty, never mind the utterly priceless electric piano intro section that to me blows away the majority of what Chick and Herbie ever wrote (pianist is Slawomir Kulpowicz, not familiar with the name at all, others for sure can enlighten us).  It's difficult for me to even identify or discern most of the specific chords in there. The sax melody flows so smoothly over the shifting chords underneath, it just amazes me:

Anthony Davis with his missing piece, Return from Space, 1985

Some very very beautiful artwork, and amazingly varied to boot, in his oeuvre.   You have two mosaic-like images, an abstract expressionist monochrome, the gorgeous sky-perspective photo of lying humans (Buddhist monks?) from his masterpiece Episteme 2, a surreal or fantasy cliff painting, a watercolour abstract, and then the second from bottom, a mix of cubism and more modern realist expressionism.  Really lovely stuff.  Note that after the mid-80s (link for discography below), in keeping with the zeitgeist, the gorgeous cover art disappears, and pretty quickly too.  Maybe coincidentally with the start of the CD era.

These are all the albums he made from the first Past Lives in 1978 to this rip, 1985's Return From Space, missing sadly so far from the digitalese cybersphere.  Until today that is.

From discogs:

Anthony Davis (born February 20, 1951 in Paterson, New Jersey) is an American composer, jazz pianist, and student of gamelan music.  Davis composed an opera entitled X (about Malcolm X), taught at Yale University, and has played with Anthony Braxton and Leo Smith. In 1981, he formed an octet called Episteme. He also wrote the incidental music for the Broadway version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. He incorporates several styles including jazz, rhythm 'n' blues, gospel, non-Western, African, European classical, Indonesian, and experimental music.  Davis is with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and has received acclaim as a free-jazz pianist, a co-leader or sideman with various ensembles. Such ensembles include those which featured Smith as bandleader from 1974 to 1977.  Davis is professor of music at the University of California San Diego. His opera, Wakonda's Dream, is a tale of a contemporary Native American family and the history that affects them.  His latest opera, "Lilith" (libretto by Allan Havis) will have its world premiere at the Conrad Prebys Music Center in UCSD on December 4, 2009. The story is about Adam's first wife and will be set in a modern era.

From the blurb:

From The Original Soundtrack Recordings and The Original Compositions for Return From Space (Wonder Nonfiction)
Towa Production and Fuji Television Network Inc. Presents A Filmlink International Picture in association with Theodore Thomas Productions
Special Thanks To: NASA
℗ & © Gramavision Records

I don't see a lot of google for the show, whatever it was, possibly because it was Japanese, and made for TV (?).  Doesn't matter.  The lovely third track, Into The Outer Space [sic], sounds a lot like the best of ECM's Art Lande (E.g. Rubisa Patrol).  Flautist is Marty Ehrlich.





The often-mentioned Sea of Tranquillity is oddly hyperactive on this record, usually being represented by a droney one-chord synth a la early TD, and the composition with the sea of jostling horns reminds me a lot of my old favourite Berklee alumnus Paul Nash:





Everything was written by Anthony Davis, of course.  Some lovely arrangements here and there recalling his masterpiece Episteme.

I should of course dispense with the usual political comments about how the last landing on the moon was just under 50 years ago, how no one could ever have imagined that it would already be the end of non-earth exploration for humans, how this provides a very simple example to resolve (in an Occam's razor sense) 'Fermi's Paradox,' and how I don't expect any travel beyond the earth in the near or distant future with conditions as they are especially after the big Nov. election in the US and the looming world-changing tragedy of climate change that will soon irrevocably change all our lives for the remainder of humanity's time on the planet, may it at least be long. 
Really have to leave all that stuff out...
As James Vincent said, We're Space Travellers, on our way home...
Let us at least make our home last.