(This was planned as the 2nd music review for CCCP Review, but Kevin didn't seem enthusiastic after a certain point. A raft of free jazz CDs were supposed to turn up to get reviewed, but the years went by and they didn't. So this remains a heroic torso.)
Jumpin' slick was my ruin; or, Twilight Whisperings from Arkham Asylum
(Saturday Night Forever; The space between the notes; Garage Inc; The Acid Gallery; Bucketfull of Citadel; Simon H. Fell)
(rest of plan)
free jazz (jenkins and Fell)
loungecore
more on cover versions
Dale hawkins album. history of rockabilly.
This Mortal Coil
(end of plan)
Now that it seems that rock music is over or obsolete, and since we don't have any budget for review copies, it is time for a retrospective in which we analyse the cultural field of rock; starting with the division into genres. Saturday Night Forever: the story of disco, by Allen Jones and Jussi Kantonen, is one of the worst books I have ever read. If you imagine two mice painted pink, in an excited state, running around the cage in circles squeaking, that is about how lucid and intelligent these two are. I started with a lot of questions I wanted answers to, which is why I plonked my £9.99 down; but answer came there none. I wanted to know if disco was a gay invention, because the sequence of Glam Rock and disco, within a couple of years of each other, seemed auspicious; along with certain unresolved questions about the start of punk rock. Theory A is that disco was a gay invention; theory B, that it was a European invention, which the gay world clung on to years after it was fashionable, because many of their members wanted to deny that time was passing, because external pressure brings about cataclysmic loyalty to treasured symbols, because the pressure prevents the normal succession of fashion and youth rebellion from happening. The book cites Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa" (1973) as the first disco record, but doesn't tell us whether it was made for the French, American, or even African (Dibango is a francophone African) market. Was disco associated with gay scenes in Germany? was Moroder aiming at a gay market? when was disco music first favoured by gay clubs? These questions aren't even posed. Theory B fits because European pop producers have a perennial problem (a) with a lack of live bands (b) with a lack of rhythm sections who can swing (c) with a linguistically fragmented market which prefers American lyrics but can't follow them. The correct solution was a style with programmed beats, which dispensed with live musicians, reduced lyrics to warcry level, and never undercut crude showbiz gestures of Sex and Glamour which had no nuances and could cross borders. Disco as a European invention makes sense. The archaic showbiz aspects also fit Europe, where sequin-splashed glamour had never gone out of style: the lower-class roughness adopted by Anglo-American rockists, imitating the blues lifestyle, had never affected the world of European pop.
Looking back, disco music was a perfectly wonderful idea: a vision of joy. There is a strong resemblance in vocal timbre and favoured pitch between George McCrae and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a Sufic singer of ecstatic qawwalas (on records which Ulli lent me). The situation is that the West takes the sounds of joy and the circling boundless and reduces it to sex, (and even sex in a toilet, in Allen Jones' memoirs). Just about the finest music around in 1974 was George McCrae's album "Rock Your Baby", forever floating around the same self-sustaining point of ecstasy, yet constantly varied, with faultlessly fluid alternation of rhythmic and melodic foci, a polycentric surging drive. Disco imitated the soul-dance sound of 1974 (the TK sound but also the sweet, Italianate airs of Philadelphia), but minus the swing, minus the soul. Minus everything, really. Disco was a virus: not really alive but not quite dead enough. 'Rock Your Baby' makes almost everything since 1974 sound neurotic and hyperbolic. Great records by the Sunshine Band, Chic, or David Bowie ("Young Americans") aren't derived from "disco" but from mainstream Black dance music, post-Philadelphia.
The other area of concern is the "end" of disco music. The emotional riff here is: the world is homophobic; they attacked disco for being too gay; so it had to stop; and went underground to become our exclusive property. But did disco stop? (in 1979 or any other time); it shifted out of fashion with the metropolitan elites, but I really can't believe that thousands of suburban provincial venues weren't still having disco dances on a Friday night. Dance records changed, but in the bow wave of improving technology for programming; the name "disco" went out of fashion. In 1985, raves became the fashionable thing; demonstrating, to anyone except a rock journalist, that dance music had never gone away. One of the emotional high points of the book is a scene in 1979 where people in Chicago demonstrate in Kaminskey Park and attack disco for "gay orientation"; Jones and Kantonen present this as the reason for the 'death of disco" without telling us why Chicago suddenly became the leader of world fashion, why such an event would make a world of non-gay people abandon the style (when in fact it suggests they already had), why they can't point to any other such incidents. The closing of Studio 54 is also presented as an attack on gays, ignoring the well documented tax scams for which its owners went to jail. Thought is abandoned for lush fantasies of martyrdom; the idea that A can only cause B if B follows A is ignored, sequence and causality are jettisoned in outright pusillanimous self-dramatisation and projected guilt. Possessive projection onto the music prevents you from finding out what it really meant. I checked out the theory that disco just changed its name for marketing reasons by looking at a few copies (from the Duncan Trash Archives) of Morgan Khan's Street Sounds series (Don't Miss These Monsters!); the product changes its name to house, techno, electro, etc., but the same names keep on cropping up on every volume.
The mice do reveal that TK evolved out of Alston records, of 'Clean-up Woman' fame. This figures; that stunning guitar sound, very melodic, very clean, rhythmically exact as a drum part, is there on McCrae's records. Jumpin' slick was my ruin, Betty Wright reminisces; I found out, all I was doin', was makin' it easy for a clean-up woman, to steal my baby's love. The posters up now for a Disco revival tour include The Stylistics ("Stop, Look, Listen to Your Heart") and George McCrae: acts who weren't really disco, but who can be fitted into it by a retroactive slur. McCrae did a big fade around 1976 while, oddly, his wife Gwen was becoming huge in the disco market; meanwhile his songwriters, Harry Casey and Richard Finch, owners of TK, switched to KC and the Sunshine Band (so named because it was all happening in Florida, I suppose) (KC=casey).
Oasis (Moroder's record label) wasn't named after Casablanca (their American outlet), this was just a coincidence. Neil Bogart of Casablanca had "Love to love you, baby" re-recorded from 3 minutes up to 25 minutes so that it would be played in the bedroom. Another issue not covered is the corruption of the time sense induced by disco music; the main thing pop music had in the 60s was the 3 minute song, and this perfection was thrown away in the 1970s merely out of sloth and greed. Jones and Kantonen have no notion of this; the death of soul music, since by 1976 no soul singers were being recorded unless they switched to the disco style, is something else they don't consider. But maybe this is the single most significant event in popular music?
The cover picture of 'On Your Radio' (1979) has Mrs Summer perched on top of a 1930s style cabinet radio made in wood to imitate older and more solid pieces of furniture, ambitiously framed against a background of the New York skyline, seen by night with a pink glow which matches the dominant flower motif on her rather enviable cotton print dress covered with tropical blossoms. After deep thought, we feel that the conceit is that she is "on the radio" and her songs are broadcast "on the radio", causing the visible pink glow of excitement to spread out over the city. The composition of the picture clearly focusses on the Summer derriere; first because the pose on top of the radio stresses how svelte she is and makes you wonder exactly how svelte; but mainly because all the gravitational thrust of her body is going down through the named body part, and the lines of thrust are focussed at it. You can't see it, of course. So the pose is quite saucy but also perfectly respectable: there she is, knees raised but together, legs crossed at the ankle, dress demurely pulled down. The proverb is that, the richer you get, the more clothes you are allowed to wear on your album sleeves. Both front and back pictures are (vaguely) in period clothes, as an allusion to the track 'I remember yesterday', which is a pastiche of early 30s pop orchestration with Donna prattling scat. Summer could in fact remind you of an art deco mascot, which you might find on a car bonnet, or as a light fitting, although not on a radio; she looks very pretty, very streamlined, slightly glazed. The dress pattern reminds me slightly of designs for silk prints which Patrick Heron did, possibly in the 1940s; I am wondering if it is silk, and some reviewers would probably be wondering at the same time just what Summer's skin feels like. The pose makes her look nimble and weightless, because of course it is dance music. The story we seem to have is, not dull Summer and mad techno (Swiss-Italian) genius Moroder, but very intelligent Summer and averagely stupid Moroder. I mean, listen to his other records. Summer is an academic singer; almost unnecessarily good at pastiche (the scat part she sings is extraordinary) and acrobatic, but she doesn't have the close attention to words that we associate with soul singing. She could sing jazz, scat, showtunes, sultry disco, heavy metal, etc., and wrote most of her own material. "I Feel Love" is something Summer improvised in the studio. Admittedly, the production is a huge breakthrough; but it is probably true that Moroder had been listening to Kraftwerk (who were big that year) and applied their techniques to a dance number as a one-off. As Jones and Kantonen hint, the track quotes 'Autobahn' even if it doesn't sample it.
The Roxy (the classic punk club) happened at a venue being used by a fetishists' club called Skin Two, which is still going. At the Stock Exchange, I used to sit next to a musician whose band used to play there occasionally. They were called Death Bang Party and did a number called "Get yer cock out", which seemed to encapsulate the rock song: small on an absolute scale, old-fashioned in function, and yet red on a thermal scale. There was certainly an overlap between the punk nights and the fetishist nights; and one asks if the point of punk was not to get a whole lot of young people to dress in specialist gear for the benefit of much older perverts. Because if a fashion has an obvious result, you do wonder who it was obvious to beforehand. I don't think Skin Two was predominantly gay. Punk was launched to publicise a pervy King's Road clothes shop (SEX, owned by Vivienne Westwood). Nils Stevenson says, interviewed in the new issue of "Open up and Bleed" (punk neo-fanzine named after that great, weary, track on "Metallic KO"), "Most of the first people to wear the clothes from SEX were into disco music, from Alan Jones (who was the first person brave enough to wear SEX clothes from head to toe) [i.e. Allen Jones, pink mouse etc.] to Siouxsie and Steve Severin. We loved George McCrae and Hues Corporation as well as Dr Alimantado etc." All cultural waves favour self-expression and release from rigid codes up to the point where they don't. I can reliably tell you that all you have to do is be yourself, unless of course you say the wrong thing or wear the wrong trousers, then your friends won't talk to you. The catchphrase at Skin Two, I'm told, was "Are you allowed to do that?", which spread a visible pink glow over everyone. Imagine.
I am forced to open out with a grovelling apology for mistaking the name of the eminent rock historian Sheila Whiteley in my last review. Truly, I am not worthy. Whiteley's book The space between the notes: Rock music and counter-culture is a great work, shedding a great deal of light (Blue daylight in your hair) also on the poetic culture of the period. All I can say in my defence is (a) I didn't want to go to Hendon to check the book (b) it was filed in my memory under "research into the sixties", not under "rock music" (c) I am not worthy. Whiteley stresses the link of philosophical and behavioural choices with an agreed musical code, which she analyses as "Stylistic complexity, the elements of surprise, contradiction and uncertainty" ... "personalised intuitional breaks, inflections, and the breakdown of structure". She identifies discontinuity, montage, as features of psychedelic music; but aren't they also features by which we classify a poem as "modern style" or 'mainstream"? Can we interpret the history of counter-cultural poetry in terms of psychedelic coding? For example, the psychedelic stress on ambiguity of interpretation parallels the poetic concern with the critique of immediate consciousness, via epistemology and phenomenology; an obsession with the ambiguity of experience emerged as a constructivist approach to writing. The link between abstruse linguistic patterns and a political intent exists as an intent, which for want of an agreed coding is invisible to 90% of the poetry audience. Quite transparently the distribution of cultural codes is more critical than the (mere) availability of the texts which are to be read through them. If this philosophical poetry is to have any social impact, it is by reprising psychedelic stylemes. Was the response of poets to the demise of the counter-culture a stampede for academic legitimation? an attempt to enter the State and its chambers of authority via a paternity suit? What exactly is the gap between popular culture and unconventional poetry?
If the hedonistic strand of the Sixties decayed into disco music, and the search for new sonances produced progressive music, another bundle of features became heavy metal. Heavy metal is extreme music, on a limit of emotional tension which blunts the sensibility of those gifted at it, and where mechanical bluster covers up absence of heart; it permanently lets itself down, and this is why it has such low prestige- it wasn't a decree from the Style Police Marshals. HM was pioneered by Hendrix; he adapted jazz to the modern guitar, with endless effects pedals, and HM guitarists copied his overall sound, with endless guitar ornament over Coltrane-derived monotony in the rhythm section. I would be quite happy to say that it stopped in 1973, with the end of The Stooges and of the MC5, but sometimes records, like "diamonds from the mouth of a corpse", make me realise that this isn't so. There was a moment, around 1973, when Creem, the great Detroit rock magazine, would only review free jazz and heavy metal. I have, ever since, admired this kind of suicidal purism, and I have decided that from now on CCCP Review will only cover free jazz and German techno. And, of course, heavy metal. Metallica recently did an album (2 CDs) of cover versions, called Garage Inc, a tribute to greatness- thirty years of "metal, thrash, punk, and post punk". They came, as a band, straight out of Lars Ulrich's huge collection of underground English heavy metal albums. I thought Angel Exhaust would be like this, a kind of personal tribute tape. I was wrong. I haven't made my mind up about the Metallicats; the single Enter Sandman was great, but the album "And Justice for All" was leaden, without entrain, let down by a series of weary march beats. Garage Inc shows off their intelligence; with digital depth of field, their approach to the material is far more musically precise, and free of hyperbole and carelessness, than most of the originals. As 'Astronomy' leads on to 'Whisky in the Jar", the true mantle of heavydom descends, graceful, frightening, and exultant at the same time; the preceding medley of Black Sabbath knockoffs after the Danish HM band Merciful Fayre is also perfectly spiffing. HM is a masculine sound, where the ornamentation eludes a social rule about trills being effeminate, and an atmosphere of fear and menace evades a given rule about anxiety being un-masculine. The obsessive externalisation of anxiety could shed light on the popularity of adornoism, where people cling together fantasizing about badness and how powerful it is; Inauthenticity is ten feet tall and it's coming up the stairs. Such projections of monsterism create a wonderful sense of cosiness, and of group solidarity; they knock up an enticing scenario of struggle, heroism, and triumph out of an ordinary suburban landscape (cf. also gay paranoia ut supra). Early borrowings from horror films taught how the "panic signs" of hard rock, mimicking the physiological experience of flight (over-speeded drums like a heartbeat, musical "shrieks", verbal alarm calls) could be used to aestheticise anxiety. The hyperbole can never be relaxed. We can compare the demons of classical HM cover art to the "angelus novus" of Benjamin's panicky fantasy. The liner notes are quite specific about where the 'Tallics started, in 1982: 50% Motorhead and 50% Diamond Head, and the affection shown for the New Wave of British heavy metal (dated to 1979-81) raises the possibility that it was the successor to the punk movement; stripped of the art school-Situationist verbal aura (which never went far beyond Central London), punk was a celebration of energy and youth over money and culture, and many of the wide audience probably weren't aware that (revived) heavy metal, celebrating ditto and ditto, was "different". Is it realistic to segregate the "punk covers" from the "metal covers" here, when they sound so similar? I suppose HM musos have long hair, but that is not a musical criterion.
The poet-physicist Rob MacKenzie observed to me that people who had grown up on a diet of exclusively Scottish country music were programmed to become fans of Saxon. I don't understand why, but I expect he's right. Given that HM is not light entertainment and so ignored by the radio, unhip and so ignored by the media, including the rock press, it reaches a large enthusiastic audience by a rigid code in sleeve designs, attire of the performers, and musical style. It is liked by a "subculture" of those unconscious of fashion, one which exists in every industrialised country (Russia, Brazil, etc.), is itself rigid, rejects change, but which lacks an account of history because it dislikes reading and talking about feelings: male adolescents with low cultural capital. HM signals, crudely and explicitly, that it has no truck with irony, post-modernism, feminism, experiment, psychotherapy, fine distinctions, conscious mixing of styles: it promises in this way the absence of the glib capuccino-swilling media tarts whom the target audience dread and shun. HM does not tolerate a stratum of HM cognoscenti, but yet carries the mantle of rock classicism; of white trash virility, solidarity, inarticulacy. Nip yer heid, Senorito Culturato.
Acne cream. Spunk. Leather jackets. Angst. And, of course, getting out of it. The bad acid trip was the mother of all anxiety imagery, the ripe seedhead of most of heavy metal's conceits. One of the songs they revive here is 'Astronomy', by the Blue Oyster Cult: 'The clock strikes twelve and moondrops burst/ out of dew from their hiding place/ Like acid and oil on a madman's face/ Their reasons tend to fly away/ Like lesser birds on four winds, yeah/ Like silver scrapes in May/ And now the sand's become a crust, /And most of you have gone away.' The ambience is akin to that of stories by MP Shiel: "Once more I threaded the mazy sphere-harmony of the minuet, reeled in the waltz, long pomps of candelabra, the moonday of the bacchanal, about me. Cosmo was the very tsar and maharajah of the Sybarites! The Priap of the détraqués! (...) he did not refuse the revel, the dance, the darkened chamber. It was black, that chamber, rayless; approached by a secret passage; in shape circular; the air hot, haunted by odours of balms, bdellium, hints of dulcimer, flute, and all around it ottomans of Morocco. Here Lucy Hill stabbed to the heart Caccafogo, mistaking the scar on his back for the scar of Soriac." (One of the contributors to this horror anthology from Wisconsin's dreaded Arkham House imprint says "Since 1956 he has been engaged on a history of the Chesapeake Bay oyster wars." Look, I don't make this kind of thing up. The only way in which sessile oysters could make war is by releasing seed [froth of their kind, as an old phrase has it] which had a chemical affinity for rival oysters and poisoned them on arrival. A typical subject for a heavy metal song, indeed.) BOC were always eery, erudite, melancholic, perverse, and Gothic; the Mario Praz of the psychedelic agony. Ah, Pearlman, c'était un lapin. The musical menu of visions of impossible geometries, ornate symmetry, paranoia, delusion, obsession, and transient insights into the fundamental forces of the universe, points us straight at the glowing heritage of lysergic non-sobriety. Is there an album composed entirely of Bad Trip songs? for long I thought this was a mere legend of the chemically concerned community, and in fact the object (Pebbles, volume 3: 'The Acid Gallery', from BFD Records of Kookaburra, Australia) is about acid trips in general. Much of it is parodic. It hasn't got the best acid-paranoia song ever ("I'm a Living Sickness", by The Calico Wall) but has got the B-side. A track by The Driving Stupid gives us "Tiny green lobsters throw spiders' eggs", further insight into the sexual tensions of invertebrates.
Floundering in Flanderses of mud and thud or not, any true account of rock classics would have to include Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Stooges, Mott the Hoople, the first six Blue Oyster Cult albums, Radio Birdman, Killing Joke, the New Christs, Thin White Rope, and indeed Metallica. The greatest HM album, so far as I know, is 'The First and the Last' (1983), by The New Race, basically 3 of Radio Birdman plus members of The Stooges and the MC5. 'Bucketfull of Citadel', a CD from the Citadel label of Darlinghurst, Australia (I think this is the gay suburb of Sydney? contains the formatives darling and her) given away free with Bucketful of Brains magazine no.53, reminds us just how great was the explosion of Australian music around Radio Birdman, the Saints, the New Christs, the Birthday Party, Hunters and Collectors. Finer bands have never recorded anywhere. Planetary geology will never be the same. Bucket seems now to be largely written by ex-members of deep fab expat Oz/Canadian London 80s sixties-ist band The Barracudas (Baba! rara! cucu! dada!), notable for covering both Ed Cobb ("I'm a Barracuda, baby") and Gerard Winstanley; their contrabassista Jim Dickson went on to be a key member of The New Christs. The CD of this Birdman-oriented label which peaked circa 1984 bestows a track by the legendary Hard-Ons (one Korean, one Yugoslav, and one Sri Lankan, as I recall), although sadly not one by the even more legendary Spunk Bubbles. Also included are a Norwegian Hard-Ons tributes band called The Wonderfools. Well done, drenger. Someone had to do it! Australian studio sensibilities never accepted the conventions of heavy metal production so cynically swallowed by English producers, retaining a much more melodic and natural quality which was less numbing and less predictable. As with poetry, British styles tend to be super-professional: totalised and paralysed. Repeatable, recognizable, reliable switch-settings which sound like themselves. A divergence which converges on congealment. This tuneful CD, leaning back towards the early 80s and even the mid-70s (a recycled track by Radio Birdman, Sydney's peerless dual-guitar Detroit-line surf-metal band named for a line on the second Stooges album) allows us to ponder just how much Deniz Tek, Birdman's co-chief composer, (the other one is the lead New Christ) owes to the Blue Oyster Cult; signalled by the Four Winds Bar, which appears in 'Astronomy' ('it's the nexus of the crisis and the origin of storms') and also in Tek songs like 'Last Chance' and 'Life Spill'. The Tek solo number is 'Billy was a Cathar', a 12th C Gnostic survivalist agit-pop number, with the chorus line "Who knew Innocent could be so cruel", dissing the Pope. Tek namechecked The Masters' Apprentices and The Loved Ones as Australian influences on R.Birdman. Bucketful (named after a Flamin' Groovies album that was planned circa 1975 but never released, slang for "a motorcycle helmet") started in 1979 largely devoted to post-Nuggets psychedelic punk, but now seems to be wholly tuned into a huge worldwide network of bands writing perfect 3-minute songs, where Jason Falkner (ex-The Grays, ex-Jellyfish) seems to be the new god. 'Walk away Renee' friendly zone. Did we actually need progressive rock, heavy metal, and disco music?