Valentine's Day was for me long and exhausting but there was still plenty of buzz. Friends buzzed me, SMSs were flying down the wires, and everywhere ladies were dressed in red. Valentine's Day is big here, almost a national celebration--at least it is a fashionable urban one.
Out for a meal after work at the Royal Swazi Sun, I discovered the restaurants busy and couples everywhere: good to see and to be out in all that intimacy and promise of joy.

(The local SPUR steakhouse restaurant has a Tex-Mex night every Tuesday, and their advertising for it trumpets the phrase, Fire up your tastebuds.)
Hey, I wanna taste your firebuds: ladies' rump is on my menu tonight. All right! Outasight! Turn the lights down low; we're jammin', pumping up the jam, letting all the dogs out. Slow jams, fast jams, Lady Marmalade: always sticky and sweet. Tap your dancing feet sugar-sugar, honey, let's eat that meat.

If music be the food of love, play on... this is Valentine week, but R & B, kwaito, rap and reggae (urban Swaziland's favourites) have been muscled aside on my player by a new CD I just bought: the Byrds live at the Fillmore in 1969 (Sony CK 65910; www.legacyrecordings.com). This recording was released for the first time only a couple of years ago, and I had to order it: it's not the kind of music any store here would stock.
The Byrds are one of my all-time favourite bands, and this 69 line-up produced two studio albums: Dr Byrds and Mr Hyde and The Ballad of Easy Rider. The first of these was, and still is, criminally underrated; the second was described by Billy Altman in The Rolling Stone Record Guide as 'a masterpiece'. Anyway, this band played the Fillmore between the recording of these two albums--just a few days after the release of Dr Byrds. The concert reveals even more clearly what we Byrd-watchers already knew: that the late Byrds' glory and might was Clarence White, and that his accidental death in 1973 was a major loss to music. All of White's strengths are on this album: his use of the string-bender, his drive, fluid lines and pertinent distortion, and above all his musicianship. White played many notes but never random or unthought ones.


But that isn't all that I like about this album and about this band. I rather like this bassist too. I have always though that John York was an ideal replacement for Chris Hillman, the Byrds' original bassist. McGuinn didn't think so, firing York after recording Ballad. That this was a mistake has always been clear to me by comparing Dr Byrds and Ballad to the band's next effort, the double-album Untitled. Until now, people have usually disagreed with me, pointing to Untitled's live sides as evidence of what a great band the 1970's Byrds were. Until now, Untitled's were the only live sides we could listen to. Until now. This Fillmore recording champions my cause--York was always more of a Byrd-sounding bassist than Battin, and this album shows it. The songs that York brought to the band were better than Battin's too.