I take it all back. Had a chat with 'er downstairs the other day, and apologized if I'd woken her at the weekend. She bemusedly answered that she hadn't heard a thing.

End of the week. A "recovery Friday"- the party pumps will stay on the mat til tomorrow night. In the meantime-

Tom's Desert Island Discs no. 4- "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man", by The Flying Burrito Brothers

The who ? No, honestly missus, that was their name.

History is all written in retrospect of course, seemingly more so in art than anything else. In the rare event of a tag or category being invented at the time of what it describes, it's often an insult at first, like "punk" or "impressionist". Music writers love tags more than most, to the extent that they often seem to invent them because they sound neat, and then run around looking for acts to squeeze into them.

"Cosmic American Music" is one of the few cases I can think of where an actual musician undertook this process. In the late 60s (as you might guess from the word "cosmic"), a cosetted Rolling Stones hanger-on called Gram Parsons produced said moniker and set about trying to make a kind of music that encompassed rock'n'roll, country, soul, blues, gospel and other uniquely American genres. Amazingly, he succeeded.

You may know the original version of "Do Right..", by Aretha Franklin. If you don't, imagine her signature song "Respect" slowed right down, with the same rock-solid rhythm and defiant vocal. For all that she demands respect and equal terms from her lover, her vocal often sounds on the edge of breaking. These demands are based on experience, not a workshop.

The Flying Burritos were California hippie rockers, by contrast to Aretha's southern R&B band. They take the song as a country waltz, a piano loping along on the exact beat of the drums, unlike the church organ that seeps throught the groove of Aretha's version like Delta humidity. Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman sing in close harmony, the like of which you might hear at a family singalong in the Appalachians. Parsons' voice is often knocked as high and reedy, needing the support of his later singing partner Emmylou Harris, but he sings divinely here. Throughout, the vocals are beautifully punctuated by the pedal-steel guitar of Sneaky Pete Kleinou, who also turns in the most graceful, swooning, minimal solo I've ever heard on that instrument. At the conclusion, David Crosby (one of the greatest ever harmony singers) adds an aching high part to the vocal. They don't alter the lyrics at all, which unfortunately transforms the middle eight from feminist to male supremacist, but the whole thing is so beautiful you can forgive them. I doubt it was intentional (at least I hope not, given the relatively neanderthal attitudes most hippie blokes still had towards da sistahs).

A rock line-up performing a soul song country style. Cosmic, maaaaaaaaaaan.