I adore Anna Russell. I really need to get my hands on her analysis of the cycle. I heard it on PBS radio years and years ago.
One of my favorite lines,
I didn’t know and had to look it up and will now share just in case there are others that don’t know.
SSoSFAGTiaCaGwaP = Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict
You’ve got mail.
I love Wilco, and their song “Less Than You Think” (off A Ghost Is Born) is an awfully nice 3-minute song. The problem is the track is 15:04 long, and the rest of the song consists of mostly an electronic hum. Jeff Tweedy’s explanation was that the listener can choose how much of it to listen to, and that he “finds it moving and cathartic” when he is in the mood to listen to the whole thing.
Love your work, man, but my choice is to leave it off my iPod as a result.
Have I mentioned that I may love you? 
:o
I don’t think its bad, and have been known to play the whole thing in certain altered states, but come on- there’s like five different solos and a drum duel! Indulgent isn’t always synonomous with bad.
If they just kept it to one side of an LP, I’d have no problem at all, but when you are getting into it and have to get up and flip the record over, well that kind of spoils it.
Well if you’re gonna bring Dream Theater into the equation then you’ve got quite a few choices.
–A Change of Seasons is 23:09.
–Octavarium is 23:59
–A quick check appears to show 16 other songs of at least 10 minutes (not counting any live stuff)
–and the crown jewel of DT’s self indulgence must surely be the entire second disc of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence which runs a whopping 42 minutes or so (while they wisely chose to split it into separate tracks for the CD, it’s all one song).
It does seem a bit odd to talk about long rock music tracks as “self-indulgent” when jazz musicians and classical composers routinely did tracks longer than most.
If “Mountain Jam” is self-indulgent because of its length, why isn’t Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? It’s much longer.
Miles Davis played “Bitches Brew” for 27 minutes. Is that self-indulgent?
However, I do agree the jams in All Things Must Pass are never better than mediocre. But they really weren’t intended to be part of the album. It’s the equivalent of digging up “bonus tracks” from an album to add to a CD – usually there is a good reason they were left off the record in the first place.
I always skip ahead on Mountain Jam to the end of the bass solo. That’s when it really starts to cook. Takes the whole thing down to about 6 minutes, too!