Nights At The Roundtable - Fat Mattress - 1969
(Noel Redding - life after The Experience was different)
Noel Redding is probably best known these days as the Bass player in the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In 1969, when Hendrix went off in different directions, Redding, and drummer Mitch Mitchell would go off and form other bands. Redding with Fat Matress (which he'd formed a year earlier as a sort of side project), and later The Noel Redding Band. And Mitchell with Ramatam. Neither achieved the astronomic heights during the Experience days, but perhaps it was the pressure and the expectation that made anything less than a Hendrix endeavor a dismal failure.
That just wasn't the case - both musicians were major talents in their own right and in the case of Noel Redding, Fat Mattress was a band that made some great music throughout its brief tenure.
This track, I Don't Mind comes off their first album. Admittedly, the songs are good but the production isn't. I remember when the American version of this album came out via Atlantic, the sound was muddy and the vocals sounded distant and badly mixed. The original version on Polydor in the UK fared a lot better, but it still lacked a dynamic sound, which was badly needed for a band like this.
At any rate, it's all hindsight. Fat Mattress were a good band that didn't get good breaks. But then, the barre was set pretty high.
And sorry for the fundraising intrusion but . . .the archives need shoes.
My biggest recollection of Fat Mattress is from Noel Reading mentioning it about 600 times in his book. That's pretty much all I remember other than him bitching about not getting enough of the spotlight.
sounds like the dead
No, sounds like the Monkees.
The people of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage." J.K. Galbraith
You are calling this a good song? Whatever......
I like it. It had a great 60's feel to it. Groovy man.
Rush Limbaugh is what a smart person thinks a stupid bigot sounds like.
If you ever find yourself in the lovely town of Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland, visit De Barra's bar, which is full of Noel Redding memorabilia. Near the end of his life, he lived in Clon with his mother and took care of her, and donated a mountain of gold records, guitars and other memorabilia to De Barra's. It is a great music spot even now. I got to see Luka Bloom and his brother Christy Moore play there this summer, and it was magical.
Luka Bloom is Christy Moore's brother? I never knew that. I'll bet it was magical...
This tune does reek of late sixties Monkees pop, but it also reeks of nostalgia, of telling my parents I was at a friend's house in DC when in fact I was in a Volkswagen heading for Baltimore to see Jimi Hendrix. It fails in the same way that MacDonald and Giles failed when they left King Crimson...I'm fifteen again, and that's enough for me.
Did he play guitar with Fat Mattress? I never bothered to learn much of them but I am a hardcore lifelong Hendrix idoler. Saw him three times. I'm old.
...Traffic. Not the "crosstown" kind neither.
Liked it though. It was fun to listen to it at least once. RIP, Noel.
I happen to love Fat Mattress, and I love to see them get some attention on this blog. They're very much of the '60s, and I know a lot of people don't like the music of that time. To those people I can only say, take a large dose of LSD, then listen to this.
A hit of LSD is what it would take to make THIS song sound good.
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