The "Retconning" features on the now-defunct Cokemachineglow music zine remain some of my favorite pieces of music writing. I scoured many blogspot sites looking for RARs and ZIPs of these albums. Some I found, many eluded me.
All of these pieces were written by Mark Abraham, between 2007 and 2012.
III: Free Jazz & Improvisation
VI: Prog (Symphonic, Art Rock, Space Rock)
VII: Be-bop, Cool, and Hard Bop
Conrad got some predictable flack for his superb “Bedding the Sellout” article here on the Glow (from readers and colleagues); I enjoyed it without entirely agreeing, but his argument certainly has at least one very powerful historical antecedent. Buoyed by post-WWII wealth, the nuclear obsession of the Eisenhower Cold War years fixated American culture on progressive technology. The money to develop potential aces for the military’s sleeve went everywhere: drug testing, nuclear energy, the space program, and communications and sound, which meant university sound labs across the country suddenly found themselves incredibly well-funded. Meanwhile, the simultaneous growth of advertising and increase of household television sets created a demand for the most cutting edge commercial jingles science could provide to satiate the atomically-aroused culture of the American public. Early sound-smiths like Raymond Scott found their experiments the soundtracks for commercials; these recordings had unprecedented influence upon composers who were themselves getting excited about the possibility electronic mediums afforded. Basically, minimalism and early electronica have their roots in the same culture of cereal box prize atomic decoder rings and appliance fetishism that propelled America to the forefront of global capitalism.
"But hold up,” you say! “Minimalism isn’t just fun to listen to; it’s a P.F.O. to hierarchical notions about the place of “high” art in culture. It’s radical music, right?” This is absolutely true, and yet another indication of how some of the most radical art can simultaneously be influenced by and directed against the reactionary power of a dominant order. Even more ironic, minimalists not only presented an affront to this nuclear culture by compressing notions of space and order; they represented an affront to other radicals from whose ranks they came. In abandoning the more difficult arenas of serialism, minimalist composers were accused of compromising the integrity of formal avant guard composition, and, hey -- what’s better than “serious” composers getting into a pissing contest?
Serialism looked for ways to expand 19th century composition out of the rut of major Western or diatonic scales, assuming that all 12 tones could function (tonally or atonally) within a piece. The game? Start with one tone, and then use the other eleven before returning to your tonic. Instant fun at parties. Minimalists, on the other hand, adapted the paired-down structures of serialism (no “Ode To Joy” ruptures, for example) to more accessible tidbits, preferring to capture often unexpected juxtapositions through the repetitive and cyclic performance of several different phrasings. That “more accessible” is exactly what got them into trouble with their “serious” counterparts; was “more accessible” an embrace of the populism of music or, as hardcore serialists felt, selling out? Either way, minimalism set the groundwork for all sorts of contemporary approaches to composition, and birthed several classic albums.
The open-source code of minimalism, Riley’s masterpiece (first performed in 1964) has been covered so many times its number should be retired. Over the “pulse” (two high C notes banged constantly on the piano, and cheers to Margaret Hassell, because what musician wouldn’t want that fucking job?) the other musicians (on the original recording, ten of them, playing a combination of reeds, brass, a viola, and melodic percussion) play 53 charted modules. The piece allows that each musician can play at their own pace, in order that new dynamics be produced through the varying relationships between modules; the piece only ends when all musicians have cycled through each chart. It’s like a “Row your boat” roundabout realized at its illogical extreme. Intense listening, to say the least, its original performance brought together other prominent minimalists like Steve Reich, Paula Oliveros, and Morton Subotnik.
Dude sits in a room. Dude records himself reading a paragraph that describes exactly what he is doing sitting in that room. Dude plays recording of himself talking about how he is playing a recording of himself back into the room back into the room. Meta-anything strangles itself with despair, decaying under the weight of metaphorical reverberations just as the physical words of the physical recordings decay underneath the physical weight of physical reverberation. Beautiful music is created from the most mundane speech ever set to tape, playing back on top of itself, playing back on top of itself, playing back on top of itself. It doesn’t work when you write it down, but when Lucier actually does it, he manages to create pure tones, noise that compounds itself with a ferocity that has George Martin’s double-track technique in tears. This isn’t exactly the most fun album to listen to, but in using only voice and space Lucier should be credited for creating the simplest powerful D.I.Y. experiment ever.
Better known as the woman who scored A Clockwork Orange, Carlos’ firm pride during the bullshit uproar surrounding her personal life was just as moving as the transcendent music she made. This double-album doubles as a crucial milestone in ambient work, but the relationship between ambient and minimalism should be obvious -- if minimalism hinges on short phrasings and an economy of means to produce sound, ambient minimalism strips those means even further, dwelling on single notes and pulses for excruciating periods of time. Carlos is at her best here, combining sounds of the environment with fractured whiffs of expertly manipulated electronics, fluctuating expertly between the organic and the synthetic, the calm and hair-raising. Some might glibly dismiss this as the first New Age Soothing Sounds of the Environment disc, but Carlos never lets you relax for too long before lobbing another tense moment in your direction. See how she allows a raging thunderstorm to be the most harsh noise in “Spring.” With a cyborgian union of field recordings and moog patches for every season, it’s going to be an excellent year, even if “Summer” does sound like the most excruciating death ever.
Speaking of death, we get the most obvious link between minimalism and the krautrock of Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Faust when the latter band teamed up with Tony Conrad in 1973. Conrad was reportedly never happy with the tone of his cello here, but fuck if it doesn’t sound like it’s going to eat you, all scaly arms and puckered lips; poisonous. Faust’s members do not, apparently, remember much about this session, and if “From the Side of Man and Womankind” was the only piece, I’d understand, given that their work basically amounts to the very occasional fill on a two note bass line and a kick/hat riff while Conrad works out his cello overtop. The piece is nauseatingly intoxicating, but I can’t imagine how mind numbingly boring it would be for a drummer to perform (although, to be fair, I guess the drummer wasn’t asked to bang on two piano keys repetitively for forty minutes straight). But how could they forget “From the Side of the Machine?” Because of course it sounds infinitely more organic than the one with organisms in the title, making Conrad’s union of electronics and humanity clever commentary on society as well as the first full-bodied example of industrial music.
Palestine explores his own pulse here, playing repetitive hypnotic figures on the piano for forty minutes, banging out two notes at different levels of force. He keeps the sustain pedal locked down, and by slowly clustering variations on his patterns together, he allows the growth of harmonic resonance and the natural detuning of the piano contribute to the progression of the piece. For those of you enchanted by the Disintegration Loops, it’s sort of the same principle except analogue and in real time. On the recording there is audible coughing and shuffling; this is barroom art, and the noises of his audience become part and parcel of the ideas of sound Palestine so relentlessly pursues. I mean, seriously, where else are you going to find a piece for which it is suggested that any muscle spasms occurring from the strain on your arms should be employed to modify the intensity and tempo of “Strumming Music.” This is the Yogalates of minimalism, and as far as "rigorous" goes in music, you'd be hard-pressed to find a piece that tops the concentrated musicianship displayed here. Plus it's great for dancing, and I ain't gonna qualify that.
Coming off of his “enossification” of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974), his work with Robert Fripp, and his own Another Green World (1974), what better “what’s next?” for Eno than reducing music to its ones and zeros? The title track here is basically two compatible loops playing through an effects route while Eno occasionally adjusts the timbre through the EQ. Using pre-set delay patches and reverb, Eno creates a sonic environment that changes based on unchanging source material. As a result, his “passive” role achieves a similar affect as Palestine without the concomitant potential upper-body paralysis. The B-sides, variations on Pachelbel’s “Canon,” are themselves worth the effort (and Gavin Bryar's conducting is inspired), but “Discreet Music” is a monolith of concept and form, and the far-reaching effects of the track on all manner of ambient music cannot be overstated. Even the legend leading to its production is fascinating: the piece was originally meant as a backing track for Robert Fripp, but Eno was inspired by a too-soft recording of harp music that a friend had given him to listen too while bedridden after a car accident. To weak to turn the stereo up, Eno observed how the music became simply another element in the room -- the space -- rather than its focus. “Discreet Music” was and remains as interesting an attempt to express space sonically as anything you’ll hear.
After abandoning jazz and soon-to-be out legend Derek Bailey Bryars turned almost immediately to composition. “The Sinking of the Titanic” was composed in 1969 and “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” in 1971, but their release on record would not happen until 1975 when pal Eno (and, if you look closely, both this and Discreet Music have covers overlaid with the same building imagery) would release them on his Obscure label. Bryar’s game always seems to be about evoking (or stirring up) memory through repetition. “Titantic” revolves around a report from survivor Harold Bride that the ship’s musicians stood on deck playing the Episcopal hymn “Autumn” (which sounds more than a little like “Amazing Grace,” enhancing the semiotics) as they sank; according to Bride, it seemed as if they continued to play even as the water enveloped them. For Bryars, then, the piece is about what happens to music played near, in, and under water. The memoirs and other tidbits (a music box, stray melodies) that Bryars ghosts the main string section with collapse boundaries between song and sound, even as the strings become more drawn out and, for lack of a better word, watery as the piece progresses. Like all good minimal pieces, the score is fairly fluid, and requires only that artifacts from the sinking of the Titanic be used, without claiming any specific ones. In a sense, the open-intepretation allows this piece to function as a brilliant union of sonics and oral history -- we are all equal in death and life, and any viewpoint can be related when related to disaster. Flip side “Jesus’ Blood” slowly adds a string ensemble to the hilarious sung musings of a street dweller; the strings get more intense and dramatic while the tramp just keeps vamping away, adding a lovely air of humor to wash away the haunting effects of the other piece.
My personal favorite minimalist album (and I doubt I’m alone there), Reich’s piece is a clinic on how to do just about everything in music. When those reeds first begin to riff phrases out of the chiming pulse you will be fucked; everything that happens afterwards on this engrossing piece is absolutely phenomenal. Essentially, both in orchestration and composition, it functions as a more complex version of In C, hinging on transitional moments where one section calms down enough for another to begin. The interplay between musicians, however, is the real treat, since so many melodies and counter-melodies exist in the piece that it’s hard to keep track. The point isn’t so much to trace those melodies as it is how the interlocking gamut of voices, melodic percussion, and reeds fit together, collapse, and chase each other across time and space. Reich's greatest accomplishment here may well be how it accurately conveys the insane and complicated vitality of life and the slow dismal decay of death at the same time. This is waves eroding cliff walls, insects feasting on crops, smog over a city. This is the sound of modern life; it's rhythm, not melody, because the latter is imposed and ordered, and the former more clearly plays out the deconstructed cacaphony of walking to the market, or attending a block party. This is On the Corner updated as an orchestral piece. And while Reich's intense intense approach to orchestration has obvious influence on Tortoise and all manner of electronica, you indie kids can recognize too: if Sufjan isn’t apeing his arrangements from this shit (“Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt From my Sandals as I Run” is open homage) and Einstein on the Beach, I’ll eat my hat.
First performed in 1976, “Einstein” is a lengthy opera that revolves around vocal pieces combined with narrated sections (normally at the same time). Glass’s composition keeps things more precise than Riley or Reich, but the principle, using voice, is the same. If Reich employed four voices for Music for 18 Musicians, hearing minimalist techniques adapted for a full chorus is thrilling, and Glass works through a whole series of ideas that evolve minimalism from its initial anti-order enthusiasm into vast narrative structures. Whie definitely pretty, endlessly fascinating, and always rewarding, this isn’t easy listening, mostly because there is so much of it; at four CDs, trying to get through Einstein in one sitting is an intimidating project (in fact, I think the only time I’ve actually done it is in preparation for this column). Fortunately, most of the pieces (especially those that riff on his main compositional themes, “Train,” “Trial,” and “Spaceship”) are just as interesting when standing alone, and it's not hard to get into it, even if I'm not sure I could tell you what this is actually about. Um...something about Einstein remembering his toy trains while being on trial and worrying about spaceships which represent the nuclear holocaust? Hey -- I'm sure Robert Wilson is a genius, but I'm only reviewing the music here.
I’m including because it conforms to minimalist techniques, even if I’m sure some would argue it’s the hardest fit. For many musicians, this project could have been absent noodling; for Göttsching, it was an unprecendented success at realizing his ongoing goal to explore electronics through guitar, and indirectly helped stylize the burgeoning house and techno scenes. Essentially a series of looped synthesizers, percussion, and guitar (and eventually one lengthy guitar solo overtop), E2-E4 took minimalist-influenced krautrock micro-funk, severely regulated its patterns, and spread the sound across the space of one album-length track. People argue about the influence of this album on contemporary dance music, but however the arguments about where house was incubated play out just listen to how Göttsching’s adaptations of minimalist riffing sound. He builds conflicting measures into surging tempo-based clusters of music that directly anticipate the growth of techno and house, and does it mostly without making something that sounds dated. I’ve played sections of this while djing, and people have asked me if it’s a new track. It’s that fresh, that innovative, and yeah, it’s basically a rock junkie building towards an overwrought guitar solo. Which was just what everybody was hoping for, right?
These are only some of the great minimalist records, but these best affect me in that shape-shifting sonically-physical way that I think makes minimalism so great. There's a cute story about Music for 18 Musicians; I think it's in the liner notes for the Nonsuch re-record, but I can't quite remember. It's basically a recollection of the album stopping time at a record store, shoppers and staff sort of frozen and staring at the sonically imbued air as it reverberated around them. That contradiction of stasis and movement produced through the shuffling overlap of ensembles or fingers or programming is central to a minimal aesthetic, because "minimalism" doesn't simply mean an economy of means -- it means to disorder your political and personal economies. It's political because it's incredibly complex; it's beautiful because it's simple; it works because at its heart minimalism is always a series of contradictions, which is exactly what our lives are or living is like.
As a note, thanks to a bunch of recent reissues (Glass and Carlos being the most recent), most of these original recordings are readily available on cd. The exception is Lucier, and the definitive 1970 recording of "I Am Sitting in a Room" is only available on With a Minimum of Means on Content Records. There is, however, a version recorded in 1981 that is readily available (and is the cover shown here). Additionally, watch out for original recordings with all of these except Carlos, Eno, and Göttsching; the newer versions aren't bad, necessarily, and generally involve the original composers, but if you want the original, make sure you don't end up with the remake.
Okay, fine: I’m cheating a little here, since that big “experimental” in this column’s subtitle doesn’t account for the fact that roots reggae is, of course, pop music, and while it certainly can be experimental (and many of the albums I’ve listed here are) it’s the “fringe” that’s probably more important this month, since reggae musicians were, in the 1970s, simultaneously responsible for a sustained and coherent critique of the social and racial inequalities of a postcolonial Caribbean and often entirely misunderstood. Let’s face it: the devil-of-the-music-industry’s greatest trick was convincing the west that Bob Marley (at least once he had shed Tosh and Bunny) made feel-good music. And it was feel-good in the sense that it often celebrated the small victories and solidarities within communities still grappling with the oppression of postcolonial empire, and my point here isn’t that those of us in the west -- regardless of ethnicity -- should feel alienated from it, but so many Marleyfied college students of my acquaintance simply see it as fun, groovy music. Just another reason to smoke dope. That it certainly ain’t.
One of the most fascinating things about reggae in the ‘70s, and you can attribute this to Rastafarian quotient or postcolonial anger or just plain social inequality, is just how damn uniform it is in its political intents, whether we’re talking the pop pretense of Susan Cadogan and Jimmy Cliff or the wordless dub play of producers Lee Perry and King Tubby. Certainly, there are problems, and the explicit homophobia and misogyny (not limited to, but especially in dancehall) tends to grate. But prior to the commercial explosion of “materialistic” dancehall reggae pioneered by Trinity and others in the late ‘70s, somehow, in that nexus of geography and genre and generation, you can trace the explosive speeds at which roots reggae (and dub) exploded, fed upon itself, rearticulated itself, and exploded again, as the tireless tricks of dub producers meant to expand the envelope would suddenly find themselves employed in the service of mainstream pop albums.
Which, okay, I’m not going to argue that Jimmy Cliff’s Struggling Man or Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston are, due to that pipeline, somehow shining exemplars of experimental fecundity; they’re pop albums, and damn good ones. But if you’re wondering why none of the artists I’ve mentioned so far (arguably the most popular, along with the influence of Desmond Dekker, in the popular consciousness) are on this particular list, it’s precisely because of the incredible range of roots reggae albums that come from the '70s due to the genres explosive verve for experimentation. That range (which I've hopefully replicated here, even though I'm highlighting my own tastes) helps to dispel a second seemingly unshakable myth about reggae held by stoned casual fans: that it all sounds the same. Sure, the prevalence of the skank makes it obvious that what you are hearing is reggae, and the counter-intuitively propulsive one drop (the kick on the three) makes it function, but the kinds of noise that can collapse around either side of that three are endless, and in the fertile performance laboratory of ‘70s reggae almost anything did, from the stark textures of U-Roy to the Jimi Hendrix riffage of Horace Andy. But even more interesting is the way musicians often played with the absence of a leading tone or beat, a vacuum which pulls you in to every measure, and one that sort of makes the head bobbing sitcoms associate with reggae kind of make sense. You sort of fall in, and with nowhere to start, you can only to follow. And since the musicians did that so effectively, here it might be good time to take a standing “o” for all the session bands that made this music possible, since, excepting the Upsetters, we aren’t really talking about the fabulous musicians involved with these projects, and they rock too.
Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets might get name-dropped more frequently, but Big Youth (who screams, mumbles, and rhymes his way through this album) is just as important an early piece of the hip hop puzzle, and while U-Roy and others were doing it first and Linton Kwesi Johnson would refine this style, Manley Augustus Buchanan has got this shit down. He’s a descendant of the “sound systems” pioneered by Duke Reid and Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, where portable block parties were instigated to build community around the growth of home-recorded reggae and, yes, for profit. The promoters, or djs, began to host the parties by speaking over the records, toasting the audience, that toasting got more elaborate, and artists like Big Youth, who got his experience with Lord Tipperton, picked up the ball and ran. You can hear the dubplates creaking on this album, employing early sans-cross fader techniques of winding between two records, the gaps sometimes showing beneath, snatches of other vocals spreading out behind Youth’s elaborate and charismatic wordplay. If their American contemporaries provided the poetic basis for hip hop mcs, it was artists like Youth who offered a template for the attitude, transferred through Kool DJ Herc to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It works even if Youth’s style takes some getting used to, and I’m not really talking about the accent, but more about how half the time he just wanders off into scat-jazz excursions which, you know, are essentially incomprehensible but also somehow, once you get used to them, sound just as delicious as the concise observations he’s making about society and politics. And “Solomon A Gundy” is the best song ever to get away with a line like “ting a ling a ling dong ding.” Seriously.
I suspect most Hudson fans might go for Pick a Dub (also 1974), but I just can’t get over the opening two-punch of “Hunting” and “Flesh of My Skin,” the former a wild excursion into wiry guitars that must have influenced XTC’s early work and the latter a pleasant romp through the lightest part of dub territory that gets immediately flipped for an even dubbier version on “Blood of My Blood.” Hudson was known as the “Dark Prince of Reggae,” and he already had an impressive resume before his two seminal albums, unleashing a first-recorded U-Roy on the world in 1969, but it was tracks like “Fight Your Revolution” and “Talk Some Sense (Gamma Ray)” that show exactly why Hudson helped shaped the dub movement; the cyclical intonations of the former and the cat’s cradle of instrumentation of the latter are such hot laboratories of noise that it’s difficult to keep up. Of course, by ’74 Lee “Scratch” Perry was already actively involved in dub work, and King Tubby would be making his ascension the following year, but neither, in those early years, managed to sound like they were having as much fun with the format as Hudson. Check “My Nocturne,” which is like the dub version of the entire Jimi Hendrix secret wah-effects arsenal, or his fantastic cover of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” where Hudson actually makes Dylan better by kind of showing how silly Dylan could be, and in doing so making Dylan’s words even more sincere.
Dear every person who thinks the melodica is a silly instrument: Horace Swaby is going to kick your fucking ass. And while East of the River Nile (1978), where he uses it a lot more, is equally seminal, this King Tubby-produced manifesto is often better. Tubby, fresh off his newfound success as a taste-making producer, took Pablo’s dreamy landscapes and engineered them as urban renewal projects, wonking the country right out of them by turning them inside out. It doesn’t matter where you look; Tubby’s stealing stray notes and beats and delaying them over top of the rest of the piece, fluctuating the volume of different parts wildly, and throwing counter measures against the skank like people could dance forwards and backwards at the same time. The band sounds like an army of ghosts. The horn section (the same as on Hudson’s Flesh of My Skin) often gets cut off mid-riff, allowing only echoes of their phrases to flit along with the band. Earl “Chinna” Smith’s guitar sounds like it’s being phased they way he flits in and out of the mix, but it’s all being done with volume and cut-n-paste, and drummer Carleton Barrett is made to sound like he has about sixty arms. On the few tracks where Jacob Miller’s original vocals still actually appear, he gets the exact same treatment. But even with Tubby’s essential production, if it wasn’t for Pablo’s compositional ability (as well as his willingness to have that shit torn to shreds) the trickery wouldn’t mean anything. Pablo’s songs work like travelogues, like you’re out for a walk and everything that happens gets a melody or a beat to react to. Like the weird skit on Sesame Street where the dude with the yo yo explains to the kid with the bike how to get back home? Except, it’s all weird and beautiful just-around-the-corners, and no solid destination in site.
Everytime I listen to this I think I have a new favorite track. Maxwell Livinston Smith's cadence on “my father’s house of worship / has become a den of thieves” on “Stealing in the Name of Jah”; the vocal interplay, squirrely guitars, and sustained hats of “Tan and See”; the brilliant social commentary of “Uptown Babies Don’t Cry”; the ‘Ye sampled Hova-riffic intro from “I Chase the Devil”; the gritty contradictions of the title track. That’s just a boring list, I know, but I really can’t recommend the shear power of the composition alone on this album enough. That Romeo was already notorious for his first single “Wet Dream” (after a British radio ban he claimed it was about leaky roofs, which…silly, but also really kind of cute) only made the sheer political scope of the record more shocking; between the hard-edged religious themes and nuanced portrayal of the effects of poverty and colonialism, War Ina Babylon is a political statement matched only by the serious chops of backing band Upsetters and the production of Lee Perry. Exodus (1977) is a great album, sure, but Romeo doesn’t give you the downtime of pleasantries like “Jammin’” and “Waiting in Vain.” From the opening hypnotic notes of “One Step Forward,” this album is about demanding retribution, and all through writing really delicious pop songs. The most straigtforwardly beautiful album on this list.
It’s a toss-up between Marcus Garvey and this for Winston Rodney’s best album, but I tend to like the restrained sonics here a tad more. Taking its title (and a lot of lyrical content) from the free villages that formed from escaped slaves living in the hills of Jamaica (where the Rastafarian movement was historically born), Burning Spear ties his music very closely to the history of the community, working to reproduce the history and the traditions of Jah. It’s not that his music is more relevant than his peers, but few composers are as able to evoke the lineage of reggae as the culmination of a spiritual and communal movement like he is, and to do so while simultaneously pushing enevelopes. In fact, this album embodies that cusp, glorifying the rural living of those free men while allowing its musicians to add urban tones of rock and dub to the mix (especially Chinna’s lead guitar), tapping into long-term political and social themes by approaching everyday situations, and rearticulating the rage of Garvey as a more nuanced indictment of postcolonial Jamaica while making the overall product more accessible.
Let's start with the cover...did any of you ever watch the show Popular? Remember when fabulous butch teacher Bio Glass (Diana Delano) tells Sam that she got a lower mark than Brooke because of their respective lab report's packaging? Bio, who is licking her lips throughout: "at one point I sat on her leather-encased report and pretended I was driving a Lexus." Of course, this simple joke turns into a morality play about student's inner/outer beauty and Bio's fetishes, but I'm here to tell you: the album art for Super Ape will give you (and your record collection) a similar sense of superiority. It's so good you may never need to actually listen to the album, since it's both aesthetically brilliant, sci-fi/comic campy, and entirely political, rearranging racial propaganda of the early twentieth century into a massive "fuck you" to the establishment. And since the visual statement is so strong, it's sometimes hard to tell how much this album's attraction depends on its politics and how much is musical. I mean, practically it does both, given that the album sounds like humidity. It will melt snow and kill you if it is too hot out. It wants you to sweat inside it; it's cramped, claustrophobic, and damp. It's a fucking nightmare, really, but the covenant of Black Ark dub is a revelation in its expansive experimental scope, Perry's victory over the studio that allowed him to improve on bascially everything he'd been testing out in the years previous, and a band that had reached the height of their powers. I don't even know what else to say about this; it probably won't be your favorite album on this list, but it's by far the most important, since everything you love about house, techno, Bristol, post-Eno ambient, post-punk starting with PIL, post-rock production, postcolonialism, hip hop, reggae, dub, awesome drumming, anti-imperialism, and racial activism is right here. Just stick it on you coffee table or pin it to your sleeve -- instant street cred, I promise, without the embarassment of melting everybody in a ten foot radius of a stereo you might be playing it on. Use with serious caution.
This is my favorite reggae album; this is the album that I’m most likely to pick off the shelf. There’s the obvious attraction of the harmony vocals of Joseph Hill, Andrew Walker, and Kenneth Days. Hill’s lead vocals especially are some of the more nuanced in roots reggae; I’m not knocking the Congos, but they spit the styles of songs between them, whereas Hill fluctuates between charisma, sincerity, anger, and coyness, often in the same song. Then there’s the clarity of the instruments. Even if the mastering of this recording still bears the scars of analogue recording (the thing creaks all over the place) the arrangements are sparse enough to allow pianos, guitars, percussion, and bass to pull off the reggae/dub hybrid many of these songs work upon without sacrificing the trees for the forest. Much of that has to do with Joe Gibbs, his production more polished than Perry or Tubby but still grungy enough that this album basically created the Clash. Or punk. Or something like that. I mean, you can ignore the abject hyperbole if you want, but you can't ignore how good and consistent this album is. And while normally I frown on the whole reggae-and-punk-don't-make-great-albums- because-they're-singles-genres argument, it does carry some weight. Doesn't matter here, though; Two Sevens Clash is brilliant front to back, furrowing into the Rastafarian apocalyptic superstitions implicit in the title and coming out the other side as a heartening statement of hope and celebration. Even if this were a ranked list, this would still be number one.
Like Culture, the Congos focused on vocal harmonies and more regulated and emphasized roots backings, dragging Perry from the dub hole he’d been digging since '74. Which isn’t to say that this album is some traditional masterpiece -- Perry, by this point, could turn anything on its head, and the Upsetters were equally confident by the time they all set to work on Heart. The attraction of this album lies somewhere in that pairing of traditional composition with the experimental leanings of its producer, but just as it wouldn’t be right to think of this as an anti-Super Ape, neither should this simply be viewed as a slighly happier Ape with vocals. Instead, what you get is songs like "Fisherman" and "Congoman," the former of which turns roots reggae inside out and the latter of which must have been the fakebook the Talking Heads worked from for "Born Under Punches." You get brilliant vocal performances on "Open Up the Gate" and "Children Crying." You get the deeply spiritual coos of "Soddom and Gomorrow" and "Ark of the Covenant," the latter of which may have the most awesome vocal arrangement of any song ever. You get the Miracles-ready falsettos of "The Wrong Thing." In short, you get one of the most fantastic reggae albums ever, and while Two Sevens Clash will always have the edge in my estimation because of that unidentifiable punk quality, this is the pop roots reggae landmark for composition, production, and and singing. It's one of those perfect unions of all the right ingredients, and of course (like with basically every other group Perry worked with) it all fell apart over royalties, and this magic would never be captured again.
Entralled with Trinity’s “Three Piece Suit,” teenagers Althea Forrest and Donna Reid wrote “Uptown Top Ranking” as a response. The success of the single (it scored them a number one hit) led to an album, and if a bunch of dreaded men ripping on systems of inequality is awesome, then two teenage middle class women doing it must be even better, right? Predictably, this has been treated like the …Baby One More Time (1999) of roots reggae, for right and wrong reasons. For all the critics who argued that this was two middle class kids acting like they shared in the social inequalities facing other reggae musicians (good point), there are haunting tracks built around repeated phrases like “the west is gonna perish” (“The West”). For all the critics who claimed this was an exploitation, or obvious chart-bait (probably…), the riddims provided by backing group the Revolutionaries seem to synthesize all of the more experimental trends of the decade’s dub. You can hear Perry (those reverbed toms and subterranean bass lobs) and Tubby (the thickets of instrumentation sliding all over the place) throughout, even as the two vocalists stay in thick harmony over the top. For all the (male) critics who said (and say) that Forrest and Reid were just teenage girls…well, they can just shut up. Forever. I mean, yeah: we could get into all sorts of complex textual readings concerning Joe Gibb’s intentions in recording this stuff in the first place, or the reasons why the single was so popular, but whether the promotion and acceptance of “Uptown Top Ranking” hinged on their looks or age (or the exploitation of), but it’s to Althea and Donna's credit that they never sound like a passive product-placement. There is anger here, there is religious conviction, there is postcolonial angst, and whether their social status earned them the right to sing about it or not, that doesn’t make this a novelty item. I mean, one of them got kicked out of high school for it. That's hardcore!
Somewhere, right now, Johnson is writing poems that are better than yours, intoning them in his deep voice over his morning coffee or tea, perhaps slightly disturbed that those intonations basically provided the template for Shaggy, but still content that he could record such enduring pieces of art, and this one in particular, which has a band that seemed ready to accent every important phrase with a cymbal crash or a dub interlude. Dub poetry expanded the concept of the sound system into something more abstract. I mean, Johnson isn't really more political than Big Youth; he just sounds way more into the politics, actually crafting songs out of them instead of free ranging over the top. Johnson works through the everyday lives of African-Jamaicans in England, crafting specific stories with a verve comparable to that of Burning Spear. Meanwhile, Dennis "Blackbeard" Bovell is along for the ride (he produced both Cut and Y [both 1979], thus making him the producer of my two favorite punk albums ever), engineering the dub breaks throughout in a way that allows the dissolution of the music to reflect the social ills Johnson relates. The slightly clearer production here, relative to most of Perry's work, will also make it more obvious how dub influenced British electronica. Those drum breaks and the quicker guitar rhythms that sail over sporadic bass lines are the template for stuff like Tricky and Portishead, and the new intentional silences and instrumental tricks (unlike the format-necessary interuptions of Screaming Target) expanded the template for budding hip hop producers and djs. And that weird marionette-like cover is just creepy, which totally captures the tone of the album.
A few of you requested that I draw comparisons to newer albums (from the past year or so) that have been influenced by whatever genre the column happens to cover. With dub and roots reggae, the list is probably endless, either directly or indirectly, given the amount of historical influences it has had on punk, post-punk, and electronica. Certainly, bands like Menomena, Love is All, and Professor Murder are taking the lessons of thick bass wholesale from dub-influenced punk bands, and you can hear those creaky ricochet drums in their work too. Luomo, Ricardo Villalobos, and the entire Kompakt crew might be taking their cues from minimalism in terms of composition, but in terms of sound those basslines and (in the case of the first two) the scattershot instrumention of dub is key -- listen to Super Ape before you pick up the fantastic Paper Tigers when it comes out and see. Elsewhere, less obvious crews like Belle and Sebastian and Camera Obscura are exploiting the feel of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" (McCartney's take on Desmond Dekker) into their whimsical schemes. In the experimental world, a lot of the stuff on the Touch label is definitely interested in similar explorations of reverber percussion as Lee Perry, and even some of the newer Rune Grammofon albums (Humcrush's Hornswoggle and, to a lesser extent, Svalastog's Woodwork) is playing with sound in the similar ways. And, of course, pretty much everything in hip hop owes some debt to reggae, and Sonic Youth named themselves after Big Youth. I'm deliberately leaving out dancehall here; we (and by "we" I mean Aaron and I) will probably do a separate column in the future, given that most popular reggae today owns its roots there (although the fantastic new Perfect album skirts the lines).
In short, it's incredibly hard to estimate the influence of dub and roots reggae precisely because those influences have so ingrained themselves in newer genres of music that parsing them out becomes too difficult. I would suggest that the key is often in the production, and less in the sound or composition -- anything with thick bass, topplingly scattershot drums, droning vocal harmonies, sparse instrumention, fluctuating sound levels, or a Fugees member is probably influenced by dub. Which sounds like a lot, right?
So, Retconning is late this month, for which I apologize, but I was in Chicago doing research. And since Chicago has such a vibrant free jazz history, maybe delaying it until after the trip was a good thing -- morning walks between Dom’s apartment and the Gerber/Hart GLBT historical archives near Granville station allowed me to listen to the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s work in the spindly concrete environment that inspired it, which got me thinking about what free jazz means. Because, like, every turn in Chicago has a dead end, which means there is no climax -- only brilliant sights along the way. I got into one of my whole internal turn-it-inside-out-athons and ran back at five to tell Dom, but he wasn’t home yet. I tried to talk about it with Edgar, but he just slumped off in a huff. I tried to tell the dog, but my apparently puppy-hating heart scared it off. It was very anticlimactic; I had my own dead-end; that's how this stuff gets you.
But you can’t really just understand what free jazz is purely in terms of how it sounds. It’s political, because even if the more powerful image of the New Left and countercultural zeitgeist in the ‘60s and early ‘70s is that of the youth of America and Europe coming together to rebel against oppression and inequality, we sometimes forget that older activists and fringe artists experienced that sea change too. For jazz, free jazz was the result, and the process is fascinating: attack political and social concepts of order by replacing the structure of the dominant order -- which limited bodies by the imperatives of suburban geographies, workplace and wage, gendered expectations, and familial obligations -- with traditional jazz concepts of ordered musical structure. In other words, every toot and squeal is a lecture on oppression, every swoop and swerve a demand for reform, and every nutso drum fill a cultural cluster of angst fueled by Vietnam, race riots, military response to student activism, Stalinism, and sheer anger.
But it’s schizophrenic too. For African Americans, each victory of Civil Rights post-Brown v. The Board of Education -- the Freedom Rides, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Loving v. Virginia -- was tempered by an obvious increase in urban racial segregation and economic disparity, the consequent race riots, and an increasing number of dead Civil Rights leaders. Early free jazz was as much about Black Power as it was about widespread liberal dissent, because it was about reclaiming the black musicians place in the world -- bebop got popular with white audiences, who weren't really helping with black problems, so fuck bebop. For Europeans, who would join the free jazz experiment in the late ‘60s, the music dealt with the decreased presence of the European community in a bipolar American/Soviet axis, and criticism of that axis, whether it be the mire of Vietnam and global capitalism or the constricted world behind Breznev’s Iron Curtain. Either route resulted in some of the wildest protest music ever, and by the time the genre moved towards free improvisation in the late '60s, jazz in the post-Woodstock world was the most angry music you could find (yes -- angrier than Iggy). And yet beauty always exists in that anger (perhaps unlike Iggy), because this music is all about hope, celebration, and resistance -- in the long sixties, it was looking to a future where capitalism, communism, and racism might not exist, and even if all three still do, these albums stand as powerful reminders of the way art can be incredibly political.
Ornette Coleman may have given a name to free jazz with his 1960 album of that name, but it started here, with this little manifesto that caused a whole lotta strife. How could this cocky kid, who played a plastic alto saxophone, tell people what the new thing was? How could this be the shape of jazz to come? Miles Davis called Coleman “all screwed up inside” after hearing this, as if the music was somehow a natural extension of Coleman’s psyche; of course Davis, along with other giants like John Coltrane, would be rushing to catch up in the next decade, because being “screwed up inside” was starting to make sense -- how could jazz remain complacent when the world it existed in was also screwed up? It’s funny, because the album sounds positively swing compared to free improvisation, but the impact it had at the end of the fifties cannot be overstated. People hated or loved this; people either thought Coleman was an insane genius or a sanctimonious hack -- and both groups thought this was weird and strange music. With no piano, extra emphasis was forced onto Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden; the former’s heavy snare-based percussion forces the music forward while the latter spends his time dodging through the cracks Higgins leaves behind. The rhythmic emphasis wasn’t that large a change, since drummers had been playing freaked-out solos for decades, but extending that approach to encompass the regular time-keeping duties of a stickman threw people off. Coleman and Don Cherry (trumpet), for their part, wonk between straight-ahead solos and complete melodic disruptions. Their continued refusal to complete a phrase or solo in the traditional fashion (blow, snort, nod, next) was what got people the most; jazz itself was under attack by jazz, Coleman was doing things so far ahead of everybody else that the veterans couldn’t deal, and he and his band were a bunch of (relatively) novice players who hadn’t quite done the regular session service required to be taken as a legitimate artist. Implied key changes; a less restrictive emphasis on harmony or progression; an obsession with relative pitch -- it’s all valid, because Coleman was right. Bebop died, and this was the first step towards fusion.
Zappa spent his career lobbing this, Edgar Varése’s “Ionization,” and Johnny “Guitar” Watson around as his influences, but Zappa was always way better at apeing the other two. Especially where his guitar solos from the late seventies and eighties were concerned, Zappa couldn’t seem to get a band that could break down the tempo into enough compartments where everything was improvising without losing the forward momentum. Dolphy and his group -- Freddie Hubbard rocking the trumpet, Bobby Hutcherson playing the vibes like he’s Chick Corea or something, but most importantly bassist Richard Davis and young drummer Tony Williams (who, according to Dolphy, didn’t play time; just played) -- are all over reconstructing the shit they’ve pulled part, and it’s always going somewhere. Watch how Williams and Davis play off one another at the three-and-a-half minute mark in “Out to Lunch.” If we could turn this into a game of Jenga, the two of them would be unbeatable, because they’re removing themselves and each other from the equation, probably blinking Morse code at one another to keep all the changes right. “Gazzeloni” shows more of that goodness, but also Dolphy and Hubbard both knocking shit down on flute and trumpet before Hutcherson plays the most teasing vibe solo possible. And of course there is the reedy “Something Sweet, Something Tender,” with it’s ironic title and bowed bass intro; this is music as thick description, capturing not just a mood, but every thought and tangent that also occurs while in that mood. Dolphy would get critiqued as a “slightly taller Ornette Coleman” -- in other words, he was just as bad to jazz traditionalists, but this album is architecture. Nobody has moved the pieces around and still kept the swing like this since.
Albert Ayler probably wrecked his lips on ultra-thick reeds just to achieve that fantastic, guttural, deep-soul tone on his tenor; he pushed the work of Coleman and Dolphy further off the edge of harmony and rhythm, preferring instead to conceive of music as a set of timbres, and tones (hence the thick reeds) to be paramount to the process. This particular album shares the spastic grind of free improvisation alongside the less-scathing tones of free jazz; you get Ayler himself playing the saxophone like he’s repeatedly telling the rabbit-hole bowline knot story, leading his band in circles and darting excursions with sounds so fat you can still see their tracks on the ground (just like the Oregon trail). This is immigration music; it immigrates us to the next stage of the free jazz assault, where bassists don’t give a crap about rhythm (watch how Gary Peacock is playing chords half the time) and drummers are interested in the long term well-being of their arms (Sunny Murray -- do you have…um…what’s 12th degree carpal tunnel?). Ayler’s music, as suggested by the title, is deeply spiritual, but it isn’t quite about speaking in tongues. When Murray starts lobbing wild snare assaults into the mix about two thirds of the way through “The Wizard,” or “Ghosts (Second Variation)” goes absolutely off its rocker in one of the most impressive free jazz riots ever recorded, it’s clear that for all of our religion (whatever that may be) we’re still pinned to the wall and we need to flail to get unstuck. The music here refuses to stay put, and the bombs and blooms flail around each other like an octopus beating the shit out of itself. Watch for debris, but keep focused on the end-game.
Boring revisionist rock myth #1: all innovation with distorted tone began and ended with guitarists. I mean, Hendrix gets all the credit for “Machine Gun” -- and well-deserved, of course -- but Brötzmann and the other seven members of his octet did it first. Without distortion pedals. I mean, that opening salo is freaky given the technology at the time -- is that contact microphones and tape splicing and Satan on the board? The octet takes the dictionary definition emblazoned on the cover (“automatic gun for fast, continuous firing”) as their only directive, and with two drummers, two bassists, a pianist, and three reed/brass players, the noise certainly sounds like the entirety of Vietnam lodged in the chamber of a nail gun. This is still early free improv though, so we get actual jazz breaks amidst the wails and mutilated bodies. Brötzmann, Evan Parker, and Willem Breuker basically define a European free jazz reed approach -- any track of the bebop past is stripped from the caterwaul, and while most Europeans were still getting over jazz-in-the-firs-place after the mass visit of so many musicians in the early sixties, these three have already loved it, been dissapointed by it, and moved on. Fred Van Hove is wonderful, but with all the business he's kind of left banging keys. Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall flip the bass in so many different directions -- check the high and low bows midway through "Machine Gun (Second Take)" or the beautiful base/percussion solos on both versions of "Responsible" -- while Sven-Ake Johansson and Han Bennink (my pick for greatest drummer ever) sound like they're throwing their kits at one another (or, you know, firing machine guns at them). And it's that dual-drummer assault that ultimately makes this album so claustrophobic -- there are so many different ways the two try to sound like guns, and missiles, and bombs, and your body is the territory they're laying waste to, so wear some protective padding before you enter this fray. Oh, except for the end of both takes of "Machine Gun" where they launch into a Beach Party-like musical bit, where you can do the twist and the only protection you'll need is Zinc on your nose. This album will geek you out.
Oh Evan Parker, what have you done? This gem was recently, finally reissued, but instead of being marketed as a trio (as it was on original issue), Parker has released it under his own name, and, more egregiously, done so only months after the death of Derek Bailey (although, the reissue is dedicated to the well-loved guitarist, but still...). The album, however, speaks for itself -- this is three of the greatest European free jazz musicians just throwing off the reigns and making an album of noise (albeit, noise mitigated by the insanely over-the-map tightness of Han Bennink, free improv drummer to the stars). Bailey is doing what I can only call micro-solos throughout, picking off dampened strings and finger scrapes and throwing his pick all over the fret board; Parker, who flips between squeaky self-esteem issues and horrendous bellows that soar over the mix, has more breath control than an iron lung (like, to the point where you might think he's going to die from circular breathing right there on the album); and Bennink is everything that he was on Machine Gun times 78,657. That this and Kaitaiteki Kokan (the next entry, and assuredly the other most contentious album here) were released close to one another but across the world speaks volumes to the chances jazz musicians were willing to take by this point. I mean, I know I said noise, but this is music; it builds and swarms like music, it's got funk and soul in its crevices, and the three musicians are in total control of the noise. By which I mean that this isn't random; it's improvised yes, but what's going on isn't just random cacophony. Look at this album as a glimpse at three instruments involved in a highly contested debate. And not that lame "conversation" metaphor that Deadheads use either; these are the voices of people screaming, raging, and resisting, and all that kerfuffle is beautiful.
This music, that Clay once described as "unlistenable," will probably eat you...alive. There are two big differences between this and Topography of the Lungs. First, this is somehow more evil, more perverse, and more absolutely insane. Second, it somehow is all of those things while not having a drummer around to keep you strapped to the table. In a way, I think the lack of percussion actually works here; it may well be unlistenable if you try to think about it as an object, but if instead you imagine it as a series of objects smushed together (with no percussion giving you the periods and commas that tell you how to read the text) it's far easier to consume. Takayanagi and Abe have such a good sense of one another on this record that the movements in the music play out like little stories: the guitar makes a statement, the saxophone makes fun, the guitar gets indignant, the saxophone gets snarky, the guitar gets defensive, the saxophone tries to apologize, then the guitar gets the upper hand -- and so on, through the wildest, weirdest tracks that exist in the free improvisation catalogue. And did I mention the hilarious harmonica intro to part two? Before this was reissued, vinyl copies were being traded at 4-digit US prices around Tokyo, but, hey, if this is your dirty little secret, that's awesome!
Sing it with me: "Your head is like a Yo Yo, baby! / Your neck is like a string." And Malachi Favors' funk bass underneath, and this is the loudest, hardest funk ever, and James Brown can go sit in the corner, and Fontella Bass is eating through her own words derisively as she sings them, because this is the angriest funk ever, and then somehow the funk disappears as Roscoe Mitchell and Lester Bowie and Joseph Jarman take turns slapping you in the face, and you're lost in a free jazz funk jungle where there is no rhythm and nothing seems to match up and you realize tha your head is the Yo Yo head and they just snapped your string. "Theme de Yoyo" might be the greatest album intro ever, in part because Don Moye's ability to alternate the time signature while Favors is still playing the lick straight -- check it especially under Bowie's trumpet where they both go off on one another and the beat and refuse to let the funk reset itself -- and this is just about the greatest thing ever. The rest of the album is more typical free jazz, which shouldn't be seen as a backhanded compliment -- the Art Ensemble was brilliant at playing at Ayler's tricks without falling off the deep end while reclaiming some of the Dolphy swing while adding even more hard, spiritual, black politics into the mix. Hardcore enthusiasts might rate Bap-Tizum or Live at Mandel Hall (both 1972) as the group's best albums, and if pushed, I might agree. But "Theme de Yoyo," "Theme de Celine," "Theme Amore Universal," and "Theme Libre" all make pretty good arguments for why this is their most important album. Plus, I could listen to "Yoyo" 87 times a day for the rest my life and still love every off-kilter dusty corner of it, because "dig...dig...dig...DIG IT!"
Swwamini Turiyasangitananda's work started taking free jazz back from the brink of improvisation but never quite abandoned those spastic forms. Having played with John Coltrane for two years before his death during his own free jazz experiments, Coltrane expanded on her husband's ideas on both this and her 1970 masterpiece Journey in Satchidananda -- both exciting attempts to draw world music into the free jazz fold, in the same way Miles Davis had done for fusion. Like Jimmy Smith and Larry Young, Coltrane was also instrumental in making the organ a jazz instrument. Her rolling figures work perfectly with all three drummers on the album: Rashied Ali's pattering hat-heavy style, Jack DeJonette's weird acoustic experimentation (it's like every hit he's considering the sound and volume of the drum), or Clifford Jarvis' light touch. Throughout, Jimmy Garrison's base is more about punctuation than it is the spastic scale riding of other free jazz bassists. But the real gem here are the string arrangements, which show a more rigorous attempt to combine composed sections with free jazz pandemonium. My favorite thing about the album is its sense of space -- you fall off the cliff into the heather and stone of airy, chiming keys and lush organ chords. She works though undulating scales; all the hallways and foyers in the geoography connect, and like Ayler, the point is a unified theory of spirituality, regardless of belief. Coltrane said this music was about the struggles required to reach absolute consciousness and, great, because it's a pretty and brutal voyage.
This isn't quite the CanCon entry; Paul Bley spent most of his life in the States, where he played with Ornette Coleman before moving on to form the Jazz Composers Guild in New York -- a hub of radical jazz activity. Open, To Love is a series of solo piano treatments of his own songs, songs by his wife Carla (responsible for the absolutely fabulous Escalator Over The Hill in 1970), and those of vocalist Annette Peacock. But what is most fascinating about this album is how oldschool Bley makes a new school sound sound. Stripped down to Bley's two hands, free jazz begins to resemble serialism; Bley is a master of space, and his ability to evoke meaning out of the rests between his notes resembles the work of Stravinsky and Varése. You can follow these lines and staircases further than on most free jazz, since Bley has no other musicians fighting back against him, although his two hands do a pretty good job of working at one another like he's playing thumb wars with himself. And maybe that's why this album is so beautiful: stuck on his own, Bley is forced to constantly work against his own intuitive concepts of structure. It's easy to do when you're working against the rhythms and melodies your bandmates have constructed, but when you have to confront those socially-learned qualities in yourself? Bley shows just how wild and deliberate a process that can be.
This has since been billed as a Wadada Leo Smith album, and it is his composition, but the other members of his trio (Anthony Davis on piano and Wes Brown on bass) are essential to the project (one so rare that I couldn't even find a cover image, and had to work from the extremely small inset image in the Tzadik comp reissue of Smith's work). Reflectativity is two tracks, both partially composed (Smith even created his own notation for free improv called "Ankhrasmation"). The title track showcases Smith's brilliant feel for the trumpet, featuring long solo passages that squeak and squabble with themselves. Brown flucatuates between playing weird three or four note runs (check his solo towards he end, where it feels like he's inverting every line previous until he cosmically wrecks the game of Telephone) and making strange noises on his fret boards and strings. And Davis works his classical influences to the group's advantage. You can here it whenever he actually plays a chord, because they aren't incidental slips to bounce beneath a solo -- he's announcing the piano every time they get intoned. "t wmukl - D" fills the other side; it's even more spastic. In fact, the album sounds like Topography and Kaitaiteki Kokan slowed down to some ambient wash. But what I really like about it is that it proves that taking the speed and force away from free jazz doesn't actually cause it to lose any of its grit, and that's the direction free jazz would head in the latter part of the seventies. It's easy to be angry when you're screaming; it's more powerful (but far more difficult) to stay deliberate and calm.
Free jazz lost momentum with jazz in general as prog and other more rock-orientated concepts of fusion began to capture the minds of an audience interested in improv. But the ideas have stayed alive. The Boredoms began as a noise-art punk combo, but they're playing off free improv concepts. John Zorn and many of the original free jazz musicians have had a solid grip on the radical music scene in New York since the eighties (although that hold has lessened). Bailey was releasing fabulous albums right up to his death (check Ballads from 2002, where he attacks and deconstructs standards beautifully). In Europe, labels like Rune Grammofon have been releasing wonderful free jazz experiments in the last few years (including moHa!'s Raus Aus Stavanger and Humcrush's Hornswoggle, both of which will be making my year-end list). So free jazz is alive and well.
But the real effect of free jazz on music in general is the way it allowed musics to see what happened when you opened up structure itself as an idea to toy with. Fundamentally important albums in the sixties that set new directions for rock (like the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out! [1966]) adopted both the style and the concept of space that free jazz artists were so fascinated with. As folk rock erupted into full on psychedelia, the basic tenents of free jazz became part of rock culture. So, yeah, it's important, but mostly I just love free jazz and free improv because nothing is more insanely and conflictedly beautiful than something at odds with itself. And that makes it incredibly real.
It's a joke, 'cept not, 'cause classic rock itself is the punchline to a joke constructed by radio stations for years. What exactly is rock? Like, you don’t really need me to tell you that Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones or Patti Smith are great right? Maybe you don't need me to tell you these albums are great, either, but I picked them either because they're rare, they're overshadowed by other catalogue items, or they're just schlocky enough that you've never really thought about them. But also because they're all really good, and because I think they demonstrate just how vibrant rock could be, and all the different ways you could fall into playing rock. So while Retconning is never a "best of" list, this one really isn't, but beyond that, let's just have some fun with what rock can be. Here are some albums I love -- some sheepishly, some proudly, but all now in public.
This could fit on the glam list I'll do eventually, but let's face it: All the Young Dudes as a title aside, Mott the Hoople is the Rock Hudson of camp. While the wide pastures of glam could contain such disparate figures as Bowie, Roxy, the Dolls, Rundgren, and T. Rex, Mott the Hoople was always staring fitfully from the sidelines, pruning the balls they had to reject Bowie-penned rockers, to break from the sleek sound of the Bowie-produced Dudes, and to allow Ian Hunter to lead the group headlong into this strange concoction of wide-eyed anthems that prove that rock is always either anticipating or living it’s own midlife crisis. Here we have "Ballad of Mott (26th March 1972, Zürich)," a song about the band’s almost-breakup; here we see Hunter’s weirdly creepy desire to become his partner’s parents to watch her as a child ("I Wish I Was Your Mother"); listen where the chorus of "Violence" is slurred just a tad at the precise moment Graham Preskett's violin enters the mix. Bandmates Mick Ralphs, Pete Watts, and Dale Griffin might be the most pristine in rock, but they helped take Mott the Hoople's fifth album to that well of self-analysis. Just take those angles in; what you're hearing is an attempt to bring rock back to personal tragedy after Beggar's Banquet had sent it off on a quest of cosmic importance five years before.
If Mott is a wading pool, here's your route to the ocean, and even if the latter half betrays Reid's folk persuasions (more Perhacs than Page), the river bed he carves draws tributary from Little Feat, the E-Street Shuffle, and a pinch of Shugie Otis. Raise Van Morrison's voice a few octaves to pull this soulful treasure off; it's a little too ready-made for college-dorm-room air-drum antics at times ("Dean"), but generally Reid keeps things from getting too overblown, centering the momentum of the songs on his rhythm section. The wishy blues of "Avenue," with oddly constructed melodies and that beautiful ranging chorus that hiccups the song against itself, are always a treat. "Things to Try," skittish acoustics bubbling over a wild drum pattern that seems way too fast for the track, gives Reid a chance to croon beautifully through another wonderful counter-intuitive melody; when he says "Come on give me the moonlight / Come on give me the stars" you'll want to, because he could probably make them shine differently, because I can't think of another album that sounds so traditional -- nondescript, even -- and yet still every song is a cargo hold of surprises. And, I mean, this isn't going to please everyone: the bongo/clavinet swirls of "Live Life" cinch the fact that this album is either directly or indirectly the inspiration for a whole lot of music you may hate. Don't read it backwards, though. In 1973 this shit wasn't nearly so insipid, and Reid is playing cards with feeling, rather than playing cards that already mean something.
If Hendrix asked "are you experienced," the Maels asked "are you megalomaniacal?" People still have trouble describing this shit: incomprehensible lyrics, given Russell (the guy with the pouty lips) penchant for complex melodies that shift against diction; wild guitar-led self-image anthems that musically are only really comparable (sort of) to some Queen; the camp outfits; the musical theatre fetish. But once you cut past the mirror-gaze sentiments of the song titles you tap into a pretty politically dense album. "This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us" makes fun of soldiers heading out to meet local prostitutes; "Amateur Hour" snarks "She can show you must do / To be more like people better than you" at sexual education; "Falling in Love with Myself Again" is fucking hilarious: "I bring home the bacon and eat it myself / Here's to my health." Those opening three tracks are so phenomenal that I sometimes forget how fabulous the rest of them are: "Here in Heaven" (a love letter demanding "Juliet" will stay faithful till she dies and gets to heaven too); "Thank God it's not Christmas" (template for new waves, Blondies, and Belle and Sebastiens everywhere); "Talent is an Asset" (just the twee part of the last bracketed clause); and "Equator," a song structured like it has Body Intergrity Identity Disorder, all slipping noises that result in a hilarious jazz-scat to end the album. Kimono My House never fails to make me laugh while listening to it, because it has a sense of humor, even if it isn't specifically supposed to be funny. Ron (the guy dressed like a banker) has enchanted keyboards, but his world is freakin' wonderful, because every movement is a vector that leads straight to another insane hook. The first album to really represent our hyperactive world, the Maels (along with Dinky Diamond, Martin Gordon, and the wild carnival guitar antics of Adrian Fisher) figured out how to undercut the solemn with the absolutely silly.
The basic story here: Slapp Happy recorded Casablanca Moon in 1973, backed by Faust. Polydor, pissed at the lack of commercial potential on the album, refused to release it. The band switched to Virgin (home of future collaborators Henry Cow and past collaborators Faust) and re-recorded the album with session musicians (released first as Slapp Happy, and then as Casanblanca Moon). Then, in 1980, Recommended got their hands on the original album and released that as Acnalbasac Noom. Both albums have essentially the same running order; both are gorgeous explorations through the limits of rock and roll music. The original version, Faust creeping on the back end like a gremlin, is more insular, thick, and claustrophobic, Dagmar Krause's vocals the thin thread that ties these raw segments together. The rerecord is far more expansive; the addition of session musicians, a string section, and increased studio time allowed the band to explore all sorts of textures and styles of music (a tendency already implicit in its songwriting). Anthony Moore's compositions are transformed from one to the other, but it isn't always easy to say which is better. Is "A Little Something" better as a short, predominantly acoustic bossa tune, or does the wild string break on the rerecord add something to Krause's thing vocals? The opening two tracks ("Casanblanca Moon" and "Me and Parvarti") always struck me as more powerful on the original; the rerecord tends to indulge in the accompaniment. On the other hand, the more amibitious tracks like "Michelangelo" and "Slow Moon's Rose" tend to benefit from the increased orchestration. Either way, this dual pit stop before the band would leave "naive rock," as guitarist Peter Blegvad called it, for the far more experimental pastures of the Henry Cow collabs In Praise of Learning and Desperate Straights is a beautiful place, the only rock and roll noir I can think of, with villains, heroes, and pop hooks stuffed into every crevice.
Best album's an award normally granted to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1974), which happily seemed to capture both sides of the John split: the bitch queens out on "Benny and the Jets" and throws down the rock messiah gauntlet on "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding"; Bernie Taupin Live Aids Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland into moral parables for the madman's troubled self on "Candle in the Wind" and the gorgeous title track. But that fantastic opening quartet dwarfs the rest of the album, and while I love the bitch, the bitch is responsible for "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," John's descent into the silliest camp ever. One Caribou (1974) later, kill the queen and you get Captain: '75's fantastic chart heart attack, the first album ever to debut at number one, an album purchased on the strength of the bitch persona for which it also stood as grave marker, an album that bore a single heart-wrenchingly invested in suicide and nine other tracks that ranged from dismal to decimating. The bitch, the honky cat who stares at you grinning from the cover is a ruse; inside, John's a shallow husk of his stadium persona, constructing claustrophobic minor-key shelters around lyrics Taupin wrote about John trying to kill himself, drug himself, and negate himself. Whether Taupin just felt enough time had passed to broach these topics or this is some sort of intervention John is forced to perform, it's impossible to separate the emotion here from John's struggles to come out, and the tracks here undulate outwards with the precision of the dull razor blade edge John describes in "Writing" -- they rip your flesh. "Bitter Fingers" squeals like a precocious child about how hard it is to write songs when you're sick of "tra la la and la di das"; "Tower of Babel" presents the music industry as a Babylon of license over complex chord progressions and Davy Johnstone's fascinating guitar work; the title track also features Johnstone riffing out over the chorus, and John's inflection on "Mmm hmm / Couldn’t fool us" is one of the most memorable four part harmonies that lasts less than three seconds ever (the song is also, very possibly, my personal favorite rock track ever); "Curtains" has John trying to out-"Tommorrow Never Knows" the Beatles, exploiting every trick in Ray Cooper's percussive bag; "Tell Me When the Whistle Blows" brews sleezy funk that somehow manages to be sleezy and poignant; "Gotta Get a Meal Ticket" is what the aforementioned "Saturday" hould have been. But the real gem here is that single, the strangled and choked declaration that "Butterflies are free to fly." If "Yellow Brick Road" takes place in the penthouse, "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" takes place in the basement. Taupin is in best form here, with line's like "Prima Donna lord you really should have been there / Sitting like a princess perched in your electric chair" run at odd meters across John's slow half-beat cadences, as Johnstone, Dee Murray, and Nigel Olson (who always arranged their own backup vocals) up the intensity like crazy. It's dreary, but when the band kicks in well over two minutes into the song on the word "strangled," every little thing falls into place. Here was a vocalist at the height of his career, this fantastic captain, telling you that everything about him is a lie. What captures the character of the seventies more than that?
Pigeonholed early on as a Monkees-style put on masterminded by Kim Fowley -- and, let's be the clear: to Fowley, that's exactly what they were -- the Runaways worked hard to shed that image throughout their career. It shouldn't be surprising (although it may be sickening) that so much laugher and criticism met the five young women who formed this band (of which only Joan Jett is still a household name), but the garage/proto-punk/wicked single "Cherry Bomb" (wrapped into lead vocalist Cherie Currie's name or not) managed to put paid to notions that the band was, as Fowley marketed them, jailbait on the run. Lita Ford's guitar squalls on that single are intoxicating, but the real treat is the way she and Jett play off one another throughout, and the way bassist Jackie Fox and co-founding drummer Sandy West grunge up everything from the faux-beat of early Beatles ("You Drive Me Wild") to the pop flirtations of the Velvet Underground (their cover of "Rock and Roll"). "American Nights" hints at the direction former bassist Mickie Steele would take with the Bangles and anticipates the work of the Go Gos, reimagines the Flaming Groovies, and how they do it all at the age of 16 (well, Ford was 17, but still). "Dead End Justice," the curious closer, takes the swagger of David Johansen and the story-telling weirdness of the Volman/Kaylan lineup of the Mothers of Invention and inverts it. Presumably telling the story of how they became "runaways" in the first place, all it really serves to do is scream that these teenagers weren't prepared to be boxed in. That explosion at the end, followed by the baroque piano that closes the album, is the sound of resistance.
Bands like Bad Company and Thin Lizzy have suffered because of two myths. First, they are the boring templates upon which more complicated rock was built (false, because rock had already gone off the Houses of the Holy [1973] deep-end). Second, that they dumbed down rock for mass consumption. There's a certain amount of truth to that -- after all, Phil Lynott's ode to working class boys (the ones who are "back in town") has become the go-to masculinity jock-up for hockey games everywhere (proving that a black man can succeed in hockey) -- but to keep it that simple requires us to ignore how important class identity is. Zeppelin was playing to romantic notions of mythologies and writing championed among the middle class; Deep Purple was playing to Ian Gillian's own obtuse neuroses; Thin Lizzy had been around for the exact same amount of time, forging a union with Irish working class audiences and exploring that style of life in Dublin. That Jailbreak is their best album is tempered by the fact that it's best known for it's choruses ("Oh oh Romeo"; "Tonight there's going to be a jailbreak!"; "The boys are back in town") despite the fact that Lynott's lyrics in between provide excellent depictions of his environment. It’s not quite as overtly political as Springsteen, but you get the same issues -- untethered, "Born in the USA" and "The Boys are Back in Town" get muddied. And, musically, while the net result might be shit like Nickleback, that's Zep's fault too, and we have to keep in mind context: wah pedaled solos, duel harmonic guitar leads, chunked up chords, and suddenly inchoate metal bands had a template to go with the attitude they were purloining from Plant and Gillian. Early Judas Priest and Iron Maiden are just Thin Lizzy sped up with some Alice Cooper attitude. Plus "Fight or Fall" anticipates Elvis Costello like nothing else I've heard. I had to pick at least one straight ahead no-arguments ROCK album, and this is it.
Growing increasingly disillusioned with the Mike Love Beach Boys oldies act, the once fun-loving Wilson brother recorded this introspective masterpiece -- a feat which, given brother Brian's overwhelming influence, is pretty fascinating. Pacific Ocean Blue might be the first reflexive rock album (maybe Lennon has him beat here), because Wilson basically fluked into the Beach Boys, dallied in the Manson family, and then spent the early seventies sad. Other artists have comeback albums or autumn albums after a life of making albums; Wilson released his debut album more than a decade after he had begun his career as a musician. The bulk of Pacific Ocean Blue was recorded in 1976, but parts as early as 1970, including the opening of "River," which owes obvious debts to Brian's failed work on SMiLE, as well as "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Crafting gorgeous vocal harmonies over thick, reverbed blues rock, Wilson was able to tap into all sorts of depressions. "Friday Night" plays with the blues like there is no way to end the format. "Dreamer" juxatoposes thick reeds with wild horn fanfares. "Thoughts of You" sounds like Nilsson being tortured. "Pacific Ocean Blues" greets you with atmospheric steel guitar, deliberates on why the pacific ocean is blue (it's because all the things that live there get killed by humans), and uses its vocal chorus to parody everything we love about the Beach Boys. Dennis doesn't surf here anymore, is the point, and the final trio of songs -- the agonizing "Farewell My Friend"; the navel-gazing mandolin-laced "Rainbows"; the closing "End of the Show," which states "For everything you've ever dreamed of / It's over" -- knock that point home.
So, this is a little punk, yes, and the influence of Wire is hard to ignore, but given where the band would go, this sounds positively Springsteen. This album was never actually released; recorded at singer Adrian Borland's parents' house, the band was already in the studio recording 1980's Jeopardy (Borland's response to Unkown Pleasures) before this could be marketed. It was, however, compiled in 1999 (right before Borland's death), and shows how a rock band could fall into the new wave nexus like anybody else. The riffs here are bright and thick, already sounding better than Wire's 154 -- had this been released, they would have come out at the same time -- and the addition of Bi Marshal's horns and clarinets on various tracks makes this especially interesting given the kinds of textures that were being drawn into more proper postpunk. You can here all the roots of Sonic Youth (especially on "Night vs Day"), but you can also hear the influence of Big Youth ("Physical World"), anticipations of the Replacements ("Statik" and "Words Fail Me"), and the shadow of the Detroit rock scene looming like a lighthouse. It's a lovely (non-)record, easily ranking with the bext of late seventies rock, and one example of how classic sound went underground to build the indie rock of the eighties. Y'know, before they became new wave and all.
The Mekons are blessed, of course, and the way they shifted from their Gang of Four beginnings to whatever this blend of country, rock, drinking tunes, and duets for robots is should be legendary, because this shit is an opiate. Jonny Langford rips the band through all sorts of creation myths (it is hard to be human...again); it's fitting, if this is indeed the place where alt-country was born, but the biggest thing about this album is just how it manages to be unremittingly poppy and experimental at the same time. If "Trouble Down South" isn't the most haunting thing you've ever heard, I'm amazed, but what makes the Mekons great is their refusal to sound like anything, and the shift into "Hard to be Human" is just delicious, as is the decision to graft country aesthetics onto rock riffs to express socialist politics. "Darkness and Doubt" references "Bang a Gong" and John Wayne's ascension while it purports to be a benefit concert for striking miners; "Psycho Cupid" is offered as part 2 of a "social surrealist soap opera"; "Country" fakes a Springsteen riff before opening up into a weird U2-type exploration of exiles at home; "Abernant 1984/85" sounds like a Allman Brothers/Pogues mash-up; the final two songs are the most obviously country, but the net result is the same: this album fucking rocks because it's genius, a fucking Frankenstein of great politics, great music, and whiskey-soaked "renegade Marxist analysis." If that's not rock and roll, I dunno what is.
I don't have a whole lot to say by way of introduction this month, since I think the contextual history is pretty well known. Folk music had already been irrevocably altered in concept and form in the early and mid-sixties, first by Dylan and then by the Byrds and other folk rock groups. What's surprising, I think, is just how far certain folk musicians took experimentation in the early seventies to move away even from folk rock, and how many of these albums, whether because of willful disregard for audience demands or all sorts of horribly handled marketing campaigns, have languished in that wasteland of "critical acclaim" but still seem to have little popular value.
Lately, more than any other genre, it's sometimes it's hard to keep up with new discoveries. A certain Banhart's growing popularity (soundtracking horror films?) has caused a spate of obscure folk albums loosely associated with "freak" to be reissued in the last few years, but most of the ones new to me just don't match the quality of the ones on the list (although, thankfully, the same push has caused most of the more rare ones here to be reissued as well. Except Starsailor. Somebody reissue Starsailor already). Most of the music here only loosely qualifies as "folk" insofar as what it sounds like, but you probably could have guessed that given my other tastes. I mean, Blood on the Tracks is all fine and good, but do we really need Dylan to define folk music in every decade? I say "snore," and while I'm well aware that's a highly unpopular opinion, Comus would eat Bob for breakfast.
If the title makes it sound like a jazz album, I’m happy to say that at times you can read it that way. Exhibit one: the title track of this 1970 gem features ludicrously beautiful harmonizing on lyrics like “Mono-cyclo-cyber-cilia” and “Radio-larial-uni cellular”; the weepy dips spread out like California's Topanga Canyon where Perhacs grew up, words bouncing back at one another, intersecting vowels and consonants soaring towards the horizon. That experimental space is deep, but the rest of the album is about Perhacs playing right at your face. Like the title says, it’s all angles. Exhibits 2-4: “Call of the River” also has a melody built on oblong shapes; the bass and guitar of “Sandy Toes” caress each other like post-coital Tetris blocks; “Delicious” is both the concave banks of a river and the shifting speeds at which its water flows. On the other hand, we get exhibits 5-7: “Moons and Cattails” (template for Califone), “Paper Mountain Man” (template for Heart), and “Porcelain Baked Cast Iron Wedding” (template for awesome). Ignore the dippy cover art with its vaguely “native” iconography (although those heels are totally unsuitable for that terrain); ignore the freak folk titles that make it seem like a Vashti Bunyan album (it bears some relationship, but it’s way better than that); ignore the sketches of leaves on the back. The CD version of the album contains a couple of extra tracks, and therefore Perhac’s complete discography. It’s incredibly beautiful, well-crafted stuff, but what I really like is how it puts all your Banharts to shame. Because “freak folk” or not, Parallelograms dispenses with the vegetable garden metaphors in favor of hooks that satisfy any Pythagorean theorem.
Like father, like son but I’ll always take this version of the father, sweaty and oozing more sexuality than anything his son could ever conjure, because Muddy Waters may have sung about his mojo but this album is what mojo sounds like in the first place. When the opening noise of “Come Here Woman” gives way to Buckley’s fixated caterwauls, his phonetic conjurings that often sound better than they mean are simply vessels for his moans, screeches, and bends, his voice tripping over Lee Underwood’s guitars and synths, Maury Baker’s percussion, John Balkin’s bass, and guest-artist/former Mother of Invention Bunk Gardner’s horns. The result sounds like little earthquakes in perfectly resonant rooms; it’s vocalized free jazz, and everything is genius. Even “Song to the Siren,” which might have been a throwaway to fans pissed at Buckley’s new eclectic direction, sounds like the blueprint for Talk Talk’s later work and Slowdive (and was covered by This Mortal Coil). “Junglefire” and “Monterey” give just enough rock thump to keep the album spinning forward, but it’s the weird, claustrophobic vocal overdubs of “Starsailor”; the spinning, undulating space of “I Woke Up”; and Gardner’s placid sax solo over Buckley’s excruciatingly distended vocals on “The Healing Festival” that make this such a fascinating piece to return to again and again. “Down By the Borderline” is almost respite, Underwood dropping the funk while the horns and the drums play cutely on. Of course, as often happens with a challenging masterpiece, the lackluster reaction to Starsailor would start Buckley on the path that would lead towards his death in 1975. He was financially ill-equipped to produce his own music; Frank Zappa’s Straight Records demanded something more commercial; his next three albums, all produced under drugs and duress, were apathetic stabs at rock and funk. And while the legal battles between Straight and the Rhino subsidiary Bizarre have still prevented this beast from reissue (after a very short run in 1989), iTunes recently made it available online, which is kind of weird, but also kind of awesome. Nothing sounds like this album, and nothing probably could or should, since I doubt we need another giant experimental mess that makes sex sound so endlessly sad.
Wikipedia calls Comus the Greek god of “nocturnal dalliances.” Who wrote that shit? Comus was the god of fucking, but he was the god of, like, inhumanly decadent fucking. You’d die from an orgasm, but he’d still make you want to tap that, whatever “that” was, since the Greeks spent his parties in drag. The name of the British band might therefore hint at why this album is a folk, prog, and metal landmark all at the same time. The lyrics are all about violence, murder, insanity, and rape. Basically, imagine Fairport Convention jamming with King Crimson on some weird Leda and the swan fantasy -- it's sometimes that awkward, reaching hentai levels of icky translated through Tolkien levels of dorky. The seven band members play acoustic prog with the same deftness as Genesis on Foxtrot (1972) without ever exploding into distorted sections; they don’t ever need to, because this stuff is intimidating enough. At the same time we get all sorts of delicious pop moments: the roundabout choruses of “Diana” at the end of the opening track, the absolutely beautiful harmonies that grace the coda of “The Herald,” the weird scattered rhythms and funk of “Drip Drip” that lead into a gorgeous string-and-acoustic metal riff whose eventual breakdown is a huge “fuck you, Dave Matthews Band!” Songs like “The Prisoner,” “The Bite,” and the scorching “Bitten” are all the more impressive for the fact that the band had no drummer (the reissue has a subsequent EP that does feature a drummer, although they don't really get less sparse); their pulsating rhythms and on-a-dime changes are achieved with only hand percussion. But what really makes the band work is the vocals. Say what you want about the lyrics, but the singing of Roger Wootton, Bobbie Watson, and the rest of the band is always clever, engaging, and counterintuitive. And incredibly intimate, as it describes all your catastrophes, which is the scariest part I think.
We can follow the bouncy ball from Harper to Broughton, but only with a couple of pit stops at Springsteen and Jethro Tull. The four tracks show Harper at his best: simple concepts, exquisite executions, and absolutely fabulous writing. Witness “Hors D’Oeurves,” where he takes a descending bass acoustic line (one you’ve heard on approximately 27,893 songs) and cranks it into a chilling 8 minute dissection of a critic who had given him a bad review: “You can lead a horse to water / But you’re never gonna make him drink / And you can lead a man to slaughter / But you’re never gonna make him think.” The song spirals overdubbed vocal ambience, organs, and several acoustics. “The Same Old Rock” explains Ian Anderson’s debt on Harper, while Jimmy Page (credited as S. Flavius Mercurius) plays lead overtop. The two move through some wonderful guitar passages under the vocal passages, but it’s the crisp and thunderous chord riffs that cut into the later sections that make the track soar. “One Man Rock and Roll Band” is all reversed cadences and pianos collapsing over complex guitar fingerings. “Me and My Woman” features lush horn and string arrangements by David Bedford. When I said in our Joanna Newsom review that I was glad she was bringing back the long-song format, this is the kind of thing I was talking about: conceptually erudite but wholly evocative.
I lurve “The Future’s Not What it Used to Be.” It's the best song to mention any of the Decaturs, and that opening piano is just wonderful. And that could be the blurb right there, if Newbury wasn’t so woefully unknown despite all the fabulous writing he’s done. Elvis Presley made “An American Trilogy” a hit a year later, inserting it as a glittery centerpiece to his Vegas act, but Newbury’s original version that opens this album is gorgeously understated, interpolating three Civil War-era songs into a stunning and conflicted deliberation on American idealism. Newbury, with his weeping voice, moves into more personal territory for the rest of the album. “How Many Times (Must the Piper be Paid for His Song)” is slow and deliberate, Newbury turning his voice to “fragile” as he tears all over Charlie McCoy’s placid guitar picking. “‘Frisco Depot” is insanely haunting in its desperation: “When you’re alone you ain’t got much reason for living / But while you’re alive you just have to live with your pain.” Both feature heavily reverbed backing vocals that sound like synths climbing in the background (and, for both this and the wonderful string sounds, producer Dennis Linde deserves credit). And while much of the album follows these two songs in explorations of endless personal angst, the album also features some wonderfully upbeat material. “Mobile Blue” is basic rocking honky tonk, stealing from as much as it inspired Kris Kristofferson. “How I Love Them Old Songs” strips it down further, ending the album on a playful note made all the more resonant by the utter despair that precedes it.
Her self-titled debut is probably a tad easier to get into -- notably, for the Graham Nash-produced “Jesus was a Crossmaker” -- but Sill’s second and last completed album is enchanting precisely for how obtuse it is. The imagery and tone are almost zealously religious (this isn’t Sufjan’s pretty Christianity; this religion is hard) on songs like “Kiss” and “Donor,” and Sill also struggled with heroin and cocaine addictions. While she was critically acclaimed, she refused to open for other acts, which meant she rarely toured, and he slow self-destruction after this album began with her dropping out of sight -- she disappeared so quickly that Nash thought she had overdosed as early as 1974; she actually would in 1979. This album is about blind faith in god or drugs and it sounds like that, and while I’m wary of saying that artists give themselves over in art, Sill always sounds like she’s in direct communion with her higher power. Her incredibly dense vocal and string arrangements for Heart Food are like staircases, and her songs are often languid enough that you can clearly see their structure. “Kiss” is the highlight, an unfolding gospel epic that conflates intimacy and communion; the way she piles on those harmonies is both fascinating and chilling, capturing the sense of rapture she so often exploits. Fortunately, less earnest pieces like “There’s a Rugged Road” and “Soldier of the Heart” keep this somewhat earthbound and approachable. For being one of the more straightforward releases on this list, this might be the hardest album to find a good space with; listening to a singer vomit their desire to marry god on you is both moving and incredibly uncomfortable. But strangely haunting, all the same.
Olivia Records, a label started by radical ex-Furies and Radicalesbians in 1973, was a cultural feminist project as much as it was about music. If women were constantly objectified in music and controlled in production and marketing, the five main members of Olivia thought women needed their own infrastructure to work within, free of men. Meg Christian was the only musician who was also a member of the collective, and this album was both her and the label’s first (most fans of Olivia would point to Cris Williamson’s The Changer and the Changed [1975] as the best album, but I’ve always been fonder of this one). It’s hard to separate the album from the politics sometimes; this is difficult music, inspired by the Olivia members’ belief in radical separatism, in creating worlds without men. This is also lesbian music in the confrontation sense, and when Christian opens with a gorgeous interpretation of Alice Cooper’s “Hello, Hooray” redesigned as a celebration of coming out and coming together, it’s easy for the boys in the audience to get acutely self-conscious. Musically, however, Christian displays a beautiful ability to interpret and compose. Her classical training in guitar certainly helps, as does the coterie of women who were brought in to orchestrate the album. Songs like “Mama” and “The Hive” are angry and confrontational, “Joanna” and “Valentine Song” celebrate love, “Scars” speaks to feminist revolution, and her cover of Linda Lewis’ “Goodbye Joanna” is simply a gorgeous song, however you cut it. It’s hard to underestimate the importance of this album to lesbians and gay men in the seventies; despite the rise of gay lib post-Stonewall, it was albums like this that helped many young women and men to come out in those more repressive times, and while the rise of DC punk culture would fuel different routes for feminist and queer music in the ‘80s, I Know You Know still relevantly wears its politics on its lovely, gorgeously musical sleeve. Plus, “Ode to a Gym Teacher” is awesome.
Okay, so if you have ever wondered what my favorite album ever is, here you go. Why? I’ve never really bought into the importance of Mitchell’s lyrics -- I like them, and they’re great and all, but they often don’t amount to much more than interesting turns of phrase strung together with only loose concepts to bind them. And a lot of contemporary critics said that since this album turned away from the “confessional” style of her more intimate folk it was not as good, but I mean, I don’t really see the difference, beyond the fact that her concerns had matured by this album’s release (although it’s probably not surprising that many of those reviews were vaguely sexist at the thought of their precious Joni making music like this). Which is likely why I like this album more than perennial favorite Blue (1971), since a) like Buckley on Starsailor, Mitchell was always more concerned about sound and tone anyway, which is the real point here, as her voice becomes another instrument in this burgeoning jazz folk fusion experiment, and b) fuck her lyrics when you’ve got this incredibly dense and complex sound. Because even calling it jazz folk doesn’t really explain it, since “Jungle Line” -- with its field recordings of the Warrior drums of Burundi and its harsh Moog synth lines -- anticipates the work of post-punk groups like This Heat, “Shades of Scarlett Conquering” is orchestral in scope, and the closing “Shadows and Light” is one of the most profound vocal experiments ever set to tape. Elsewhere, we have the wonderfully fun “In France They Kiss on Main Street,” the gorgeous mob story of “Edith and the Kingpin,” the stream of consciousness “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” that acts as a prelude to “Coyote” which is my personal favorite Mitchell track, the meditative “Boho Dance” with its gorgeous synth lines, and the solo acoustic “Sweet Bird” which is sort of like a “hey -- remember what you thought I was?” after the deluge. She wasn’t, and this album is a fucking masterpiece in every sense of the word, and a beautiful example of how an artist can decide to produce some fabulously composed songs in a whole variety of ways, influenced by whatever he chooses, and still come out the other end with a wonderfully cohesive piece...
…and besides, folk is supposed to be eclectic, right? In that real, down home “folklore” ideal, where songs are about history and culture? This album is like the opposite of Hissing of Summer Lawns, endlessly traditional and always fun. Kate and Anna, Quebecoise sisters, play most of these songs straight, but it’s the way their compositions seem timeless -- the way they get into the styles they’re performing -- that makes this set essential. We get typical Fairport Convention fare like “Kiss & Say Goodbye,” basic blues like “Blues in D,” and the gorgeous ballad “Heart Like a Wheel” which was later recorded by Linda Rondstadt in much more bombastic form. But we also get reggae like the French “Complainte Pour Ste Catherine,” a banjo-driven recording of Kate’s once-husband Loudon Wainwright’s “The Swimming Song” (yes, she is the mother of Rufus and Martha), and the gospel workout “Travellin’ On for Jesus.” The album also features guest appearances by Tony Levin and Lowell George (in case the thought of Levin playing reggae makes you giggle like me). The is an album of wonderfully oldschool invention that plays with form and subject in ways that seem entirely natural, and which, as an album, is far more coherent than most of its ilk, which is why Fairport Convention And Related Material isn’t on this list.
They weren’t as gruesome as Comus, but British band Renaissance (as the name might suggest) was just as interested in times long gone. After a grueling prog intro, we suddenly launch into an idyllic exploration of the fair, Annie Haslam singing beautifully over chimes and organ pulses. The song, and the material on the album, rotates between heavily composed sections and passages that seem to build through slight improvisation. “Folk” is a concept here; “The Vultures Fly High” follows those footsteps, but would fit comfortably on a straightforward rock album, John Camp’s bass doing its best to sound like dive bombing birds in the creases. “Ocean Gypsy” shows off keyboardist John Tout’s impressive skills and drummer Terrence Sullivan’s ability to switch between restraint and cacophony fluidly. Band leader and guitarist Michael Dunford plays a funny role -- he’s written the songs, but his guitar is rarely the focus of the arrangements. Especially on the closing “Song of Scheherazade,” a reinterpretation of the Rimsky-Korsakov suite based on The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, a Persian folk tale about the way Scheherazade manages to prevent the Sultan from marrying her, fucking her, and killing her the next morning as he had his past 3000 wives. Lovely, I know, but the music hear, accompanied by full orchestra, is astounding; Haslam leads the chorus and musicians beautifully, and Tony Cox’s arrangements play homage to the original piece while displayed modern nuance. Tout’s piano segues are themselves worth the price of admission. This is folk music at its most obese, and thrilling for it.
History (Take One): screw history; prog is a hoax, right?
We could drown in semantics; as a descriptive term “prog” is about as touchy as Caligula’s mood. It’s like the entire history of German philosophy expressed in haiku; it’s a pretty idea, but try to use it too efficiently and you’ll end up with Electric Light Orchestra, the Art Bears, and Cluster in the same frosty breath. And while using subgenre buzz terms may map out the formicinatic detail, they tend to crush the anthill: Canterbury, art rock, symphonic prog, Italian symphonic prog, progressive electronic, krautrock, avant-prog, RIO (rock in opposition), zeuhl -- what are we even talking about anymore? Try to mean too much, or too little, and the exceptions will pull the punch line. And just try saying it, ‘cause you’ll choke: the letters probably spell “Magma.”
If we want to define it, we need to simplify: all “prog” means is rock music that moves out of rock to embrace classical, jazz, or electronic music (whereas, for example, “fusion” denotes the opposite movement of jazz into rock). As a rule, it’s usually either/or, although there are always exceptions that prove that rule (…Magma). For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to follow a very loose framework and divide my deliberations on prog in three: this installment will deal with symphonic, art, and space prog (which, at least in composition, generally embrace orchestral and romantic influences). Forthcoming columns will deal with RIO and avant-prog (the free jazz and free improvisation side) and krautrock (generally, the electronic end). This disclaimer is for anybody who read this list and feels gypped at the lack of Beefheart, Zappa, Art Bears/Henry Cow, Univers Zero, Samla Mammas Manna, or the entirety of Germany: they’re coming. Basically, as long as the real nerds (hi! We should go for coffee!) can deal with zeuhl (or, I guess, just Magma) being present here, everything should work out fine. (Also worth noting, I guess, that Magma is the exception to everything I’m about to say, since, y’know, they’re Magma.)
History (Take Two): my history. Because some of the albums that are in this list routinely get shit on. Sometimes by me. Let me show you my cards:
I started Junior High in 1991; I had like maybe 40 cassette tapes. Among them were the kinds of things you might expect: “Weird Al” Yankovic whatevers, MC Hammer and other notable sock hop jamz, and awesome stuff like Salt-N-Pepa, N.W.A., and Public Enemy that I understood as “awesome” for all the wrong reasons at the time. I would quickly own both Use Your Illusions. Nevermind was released around the same time, but my junior high remained largely immune to grunge (I didn’t; I just didn’t hear it right away from schoolmates). I also believe I had Reebok Pump-Ups. I was totally, disquietingly cool. Then my father bought a stereo system with a CD player, bought the Led Zeppelin box set, played me “Black Dog,” and I proceeded to listen to everything on that set approximately 867 million times; I made my own cassette dubs with handmade covers, and I loved the (quite proggy) shit on Houses of the Holy (1973), Physical Graffiti (1975),and Presence (1976). My father then bought a copy of Dark Side of the Moon (1973). I went out and bought everything by Pink Floyd I could find. Umma Gumma (1969) and Meddle (1971)shocked me. I can’t quite remember how I got into Gabriel-era Genesis; I’ve always had a pop streak, so it’s possible I stayed in the Collins years until 1993, when the early January release of The Longs gave me “Old Melody” and sent me flying backwards through their collection. I bought Phish’s A Live One (1995) on a whim (due to song title “Chalk Dust Torture,” I believe); this was grade ten, and I used the same logic when I read “The Rejected Mexican Pope Leaves the Stage” on the archival Mothers of Invention album Ahead of Their Time (1993) later that year. By the end of high school I had most or all the albums of all of these bands, as well as Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Mr. Bungle, Mike Oldfield, King Crimson, Captain Beefheart (well…the in-print ones I could find at the time), Yes, and Frank Zappa’s solo collection (at 60+ albums, some of my friends actually came with me to celebrate the purchase of the final addition, which…lame, but also: hee!).
Even though Beefheart and Zappa are RIO, these are all prog albums in the most traditional of senses: long song formats, heavily orchestrated or entirely free improv that relied on technical prowess and experimental tendencies. They are also, often, albums that get shat on by experimental enthusiasts. I mean, who actually listens to Yes or Pink Floyd, really? I certainly didn’t, by university. Why? I was fortunate enough to have my definition of “prog” irrevocably altered by friends I met in first year that introduced me to Can and Neu! and Cluster (which sent me off into both electronica and krautrock on my own) and a lovely record store where I could actually buy albums by John Zorn (who had produced Mr. Bungle [1991]) and related RIO work. Consequently, when I heard somebody playlisting “Money” next to “Tripping Billies” on a party list it would only reify my out of the blue and ill-formed suspicion that Dark Side of the Moon was lukewarm compared to Future Days (1973). Or, to use an averted tragedy to explain it differently, Can and Neu! are the reasons I was able to hop off the Phish train before it was too late, and they’re the same reason that the burgeoning New Brunswick jam-scene bored me to fucking tears. I say “out of the blue and ill-formed” -- it’s not that I still don’t think Neu! (1972) is better than Fragile (1971), or that the New Brunswick jam-scene isn’t still tear-fucking boring; it’s just that at the time I based the decision on cache, rather than content.
I think it runs one of two ways: you hear, say, Pink Floyd, and that becomes your inverted glass ceiling, your fringe, that’s what “experimental” comes to mean for you, and you stop your frontier right there. Or you keep going. And, really, the “keep going” factor isn’t just about being more musically conscious, or adventurous, or worst of all better; it relies on all sorts of factors: access, allowance, random chance. If Eric Hill (who writes wonderful out reviews for Exclaim, but who also filled Backstreet Records with wild and crazy shit during my undergrad) hadn’t been stocking certain things and testing them out on me, I wouldn’t have been exposed to so much of the music I had been at such an early age.
Point being, you latch on, and once you move deeper, suddenly Aqualung (1971) doesn’t sound quite so innovative. So you get crotchety and snobby, pissed off at all your buddies simultaneously playing shitty air drums to “Ants Marching” for the sixtieth time in a row at a party. There’s really two points to make here. Because history (Take Three!) matters, and I’ve been deliberately comparing albums released around the same time so far to make a point: comparing Can and Pink Floyd is fine, but it’s really myopic to expect that Aqualung should sound more innovative than, say, Here Comes the Indian (2003); it’s unhistorical, and -- okay, it could be my day job -- but I really think the hardest part about becoming a competent, non-annoying music snob is being able to historicize your tastes.
Second point: the second hardest part is acknowledging relativity. In simplest terms, I probably could never have appreciated Autechre if I hadn’t heard “Achille’s Last Stand” first. And even if that’s a specific historical and cultural situation to me (via my father), Yes and Pink Floyd are critical albums in my own musical history because they taught me how to listen the way I do. Except, experimentation in music runs the same way. “Prog” by default dominated as a descriptive term for so long because it was the easiest way to isolate a constantly advancing fringe still dominated (until the rise of electronic music forms in the late ‘80s) by something still recognizable as a rock band. As a result, what was “progressive” was constantly delineated by what was more “prog” than what had come before. None of which is to even broach the topic of how far ahead of the curve most metal listeners are. Well, semi-broached now.
These issues are especially crucial due to the proliferation of internet music fandom, in part because obscure bands like Can are receiving the kind of press that they couldn’t in their own radio-defined era. The more we rep those bands, the more mystique is pulled away from their popular contemporaries and successors. But should it be? The name of this column is a joke; we can retcon our tastes, as if we always knew about Can, or Neu!, or Magma, or whatever, and then the albums that prepared us for them (the ones we very likely heard and loved first) suddenly aren’t advanced enough. But is it because they aren’t as good? Or because they don’t represent the farthest reaching point of some weird influence + technology + reception + obscurity calculus that doesn’t make any sense anyway because rarely are historicity or relatively considered variables in present-tense taste.
It’s always both, for me, at least. Can is better than Pink Floyd, as far as I’m concerned, and nothing annoys me more than somebody telling me that my opinions are less valid because I only “listen to obscure music that nobody else has heard of.” But what annoys me in the exact same is “you still listen to that?” A rejoinder, then, to both sides, expressed as a spurious claim: even if the Dave Matthews Band deplorably reduces the more variegated ideas of prog into simple consumable feel-good party-ready tid-bits, from another perspective they open up minds to the possibilities of listening habits that reach beyond 4/4 rhythms and simplistic arrangements. In other words, DMB suck, of course, but at least their success wasn’t based on Nicklebackian derivatives. In other words, if you’re a fan and you ask me why I just can’t enjoy them, I’ll tell you all about how their promotion of care-free college fresh-baked stoner romanticism is wracked with boring platitudes that only serve to reinforce the sexism and heterosexism of liberal arts culture, but if you’re paying attention you’ll notice I’m not really critiquing the music. Which is why if you’re not a fan I won’t just write them off -- I don’t like them much, but at least people that do are listening to something with a little more substance than James fucking Blunt.
That is my struggle: I loved Pink Floyd when I was 14; I could hum along with the instrumental portions of “Echoes.” As I got older, the dorky cynicism of Roger Water’s lyrics started to grate; the music seemed less tightly wound and more noodlingly guitar-based; the basic process of overdubbing became something I intimately understood, and therefore I also understood that the way Pink Floyd did it wasn’t that exciting. But those of us who fervently believe that experimental music is the exact point of making music at all -- to push forward, to live in the future -- need to keep in mind those moments when Pink Floyd was that frontier for us. Because if we don’t, we retcon the other way, acting as if the shit that turned us on then isn’t the same shit that turns us on now. The music and bands aren’t the same -- even the quality of the music may not be the same -- but the way you suck breath between your teeth is: we learn and expand through consumption, and my taste is only as good as yours if I recognize the way it grew.
All of which is to say that I think that ignoring the crucial position of the albums made in the more safe quarters of prog is a disservice. Nobody is born into loving Here Comes the Indian or Beaches and Canyons (2002); it’s a process started with “Money” and including “Careful with that Axe Eugene” and “Dogs” and “Roundabout” and “Discipline” and -- yes, for me -- “Harry Hood” and then suddenly Can and the Boredoms and Suicide and This Heat and all of Norway make sense because they aren’t simply luminous parachutes billowing in the wind; they’re attached to your body-as-anchor that can descend back through the history of music into Muddy Waters. Which is a long way of saying that we’ll cover the prog I’m still learning how to hear in the future; here’s a little tribute to albums that helped me get this far.
One reason punks lobbed metaphorical molotovs at progressive rock: they felt it was too geeky and self-involved. That criticism doesn’t quite work with Peter Hamill; his lyrics were always best at his most nihilistic. If previous effort H to He, Who Am the Only One (1970) played things sincere and straight, acting with In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) to create some of the more over-worn clichés of rock history -- dripping electric pianos and keyboards; the clenched fist delivery of soulful nonsense -- it only created them; they weren’t clichés at all at the time. But what’s amazing is that only a year later, on the three tracks that make up this masterpiece, Hamill and crew were already attempting to transcend the progressive, romantic-infused limitations of art rock they had helped to map by subverting them. “Lemmings (Including Cog)” begins with the English band’s patented influenced-by-“A Whiter Shade of Pale” keyboards as Hamill croons; at the five-minute mark, however, the whole band slunches into a wicked riff driven by horn player David Jackson as Hugh Banton drops the organ for some grueling synth work. The band fades low as Hamill whispers “what cause is their left but to die?” which may well seem silly now, but ask that question in the era of the Weather Underground? Chilling. The instrumental section on “Man Erg” is giddy and brilliant: a sweeping synth marks a shift to 11/4 time (the 5 is marked with a staccato repetition of full chords while the 6 is an anvil floating back and forth like a feather) that slows down as the band repeats the phrase. When the song picks up again Guy Evans shows off his skill of being the clangiest quiet drummer ever. Epic closer “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers” is a medley of several different segments; highlight “Kosmos Tours” features Hamill singing in consecutively faster cyclic phrases in shifting time signatures. Robert fucking Fripp guests on the album for some lovely guitar solos, but Jackson, Banton, and Evans are the real stars here, led by Hamill’s wonderfully ranging voice.
This Swedish/German group affixed a sticker to their first album that proclaimed, “after listening to this record, your friends may not know you anymore.” An opus of space rock and one of the most trippy records ever made, the album exists somewhere between formal prog, blues, and “Woolly Bully.” “Black Sand,” with Joel Vandroogenbroeck’s filtered organ and Ron Bryer’s wah guitar, is a laboratory of space rock ideas: repetitive structure, claustrophobic mixing, and a steady but deliberate tempo. Werner Frolich jams on the one-note bass line, Cosimo Lampis and Wolfgang Paap lounge on the percussion, and producer Hellmuth Cole (to my Buffy friends: it doesn’t really sound like Hellmouth music) manipulates filters and electronics. “Places of Light” is similar; the breakdown is more rock-orientated, but the verses over which singer Dawn Muir speaks are direct precedents for electronica. In its purest form, that’s what space rock was: a form of prog that compressed the symphonic ideas of contemporaries into short repeating bursts, emphasizing ambience and tone over form. Space rock bridges the gap between symphonic prog and krautrock, between the psychedelia of the sixties and the progressive ambitions of the seventies, which is why both parts of extended closer “Brainticket” are as much funk (or even afrobeat) as they are prog; the organ play and electronic manipulation over top keeps Brainticket sailing outwards (and Vandroogenbroeck’s work is consistently fascinating, as experimental as it is orchestral) even as the rhythm section anchors them firmly to the ground. Be careful about thinking this is the most straightforward album on this list; it might not have the symphonic ambitions of Yes or King Crimson, but the disaster area is just as wide.
Yes is an easy band to condemn. They are such a geek band: all form, little substance, and -- excepting a couple churners like “Long Distance Runaround” and “Roundabout” (which geeks geek-out to more than anything ever because they know the slight head bob the unconvinced get at the faux-funk guitar heroics is the biggest “I told you so” they are ever going to have with this band) -- absolutely zero personality. Fragile (1971) gets marks for such clean recording given the technology at the time (this band was tight); marks for stretching pop music to its limit; demerits for sounding like robots doing it. I liked them before I understood what I liked about music and then once I figured it out I hated them for a long time. Getting back into them over the last few years hasn’t been an easy process, I’ll readily admit, but this particular album holds charms (real or nostalgic; I’m not entirely sure) that the rest of the catalogue seems to fend off. It’s not that Close to the Edge has more “real” personality, but in expanding their palette to include funk and reggae and other ideas Yes gained a personality by proxy, and even if the delivery is still cold and clinical, sometimes it with catch you off guard with unexpected beauty. Check the vocal breakdown on the title track with all of those evil flitting synths -- it’s enough to make up for Jon Anderson screaming “I get up / I get down” and the “serious” church organs that end the segment. Or watch the juxtaposition of Chris Squire’s bass and Steve Howe’s acoustic guitar underpinning the pitched organs during the intro to “And You and I.” Or the awesome time signature combos in “Siberian Khatru” (parts are in 7/4; parts in 15/4); all of it doled out in Howe’s clever guitar bits and alternatively futuristic and baroque keyboard flourishes courtesy of Rick Wakeman. The obvious religious themes of Anderson’s lyrics don’t grate so much as his hilarious sincerity, but the serious chops of his band mates more than make up for sigh-worthy stanzas like “Hold down the window / Hold out the morning that comes into view / Warm side, the tower / Green leaves reveal the heart spoken Khatru.” Bill Bruford’s drumming throughout the album probably deserves its own blurb, but of course his work in King Crimson seemed to loosen him up a bit, so I always tend to favor his work with Fripp instead. Besides, talking about technique is really old hat for Yes. In those terms, Close to the Edge is just about the perfect symphonic prog album. But it’s also really hard to snuggle up to.
The Hawkwind formula is essentially as follows: add some motorik-synth styles to your pre-Modern Lovers road trip rock, toss in some ludicrous poetry, and excise the hippy dippy fat Brainticket was so fond of in favor of some overlord angst. You’ll either love the shit or hate it, because it’s basically Stooges attitude with krautrock electronics and Doors rock stretched out forever over the course of this double live album. With Robert Calvert basically ranting over top. But for music that often seems so dense and uniform, it sources so many ideas. Nik Turner’s saxophone (especially on the Wilhelm Reich-inspired “Orgone Accumulator”) sounds like post-punk horns a few years early, Lemmy Kilmister and Simon King lock drums and bass together in a fashion where they play rock but mean dub, and all three synthesizer players -- Dave Brock, Dik Mik Davies, and Del Dettmar -- swarm around the mix like insects anticipating the rave scene. Calvert may play the apostle-of-space antics a tad thick, but it’s a wild album where “Master of the Universe” can cop Sabbath’s “Paranoid” at the same time that “Electronic No. 1” can ape Cluster. And it’s songs like “7 by 7, “Brain Storm,” and “Space is Deep” where Hawkwind really move out, adapting symphonic forms to their self-consciously limited palette. It’s in those moments where you can hear all the astute but emotionally chill moments of Yes reformed as punk avengement.
I said last time that The Hissing of Summer Lawns was my favorite album ever, but that’s only in relative mood to this and The Velvet Underground and Nico. The concept of classically trained drummer Christian Vander, this French group veered away from the Anglo-influenced direction of the French underground and pioneered zeuhl, which is Kobaïan for “music” -- Kobaïan being the constructed language in which all of Magma’s material is sung, and to which Sigur Rós’ parents probably procreated. The language is part of a broader story where, fearing the ecological and political destruction of the earth, refugees take flight to a far off planet called Kobaïa. After the utopian planet has been settled, a new group of refugees arrives, and so a delegation is sent back to earth to warn of the impending danger. Soon, these delegates are imprisoned, but eventually they are released, and vow never to return (I suspect Vander was at least in part influenced by early 19th century French philosopher Charles Fourier). Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh is the third part of the Theusz Hamtaahk trilogy, but the first recorded. In it, prophet Nebehr Güdahtt reveals the legend of Kobaïa to an Earth that has long forgotten the delegation; he asks people to march with him. And that marching is beautiful, since the band’s music is a conflation of several ideas: the late period jazz of John Coltrane (Magma was in part the result of the sadness Vander felt upon hearing of Coltrane’s death), the classical influence of Stranvinsky and Orff, and R&B. And while Magma isn’t really much for experimental geeks -- nothing here is technologically shocking for 1973 -- in terms of concept and composition, they are the most adventurous band on this list. Maybe ever. Their work is so complex that it still hasn’t really had much of an influence outside of France and Japan. But “complex” is relative: what you will hear when you turn this on is a chorus singing harmonies over constantly pulsing and shifting time signatures (it’s kind of like macro-minimalism, and bears more than a little resemblance to Steve Reich and Terry Riley’s work). And not chanting either; the vocal arrangements are incredibly daunting, but are always carefully crafted and based on gospel and R&B concepts, even if the vocalists are a little marshal in their delivery. Klaus Dietrich shares lead vocal duties with Vander, and Stella Vander, Muriel Streisfield, Evelyne Razymovski, Micele Saulnier, and Doris Reinhart join them for some of the most impressive (and live, super-impressive) marathon harmonies ever. Meanwhile, the horns and reeds of Rene Garber and Teddy Lasry accent the crests and troughs of the music, while in the quieter bits, Jean Luc Mandelier and Clause Olmos play some intricate duets on piano and guitar, and Vander often leaves the kit to throw some spiraling organ chords at them. Jannick Top’s bass is crucial; his ability to play loose and funky while pushing the music along is always amazing. And the result is…nuts? Amazing? Insane? Beautiful? Epic? What do you call a minimalist jazz/classical/rock gospel soundtrack for an entirely fictional utopian fantasy? You call it “best,” and shut up before it eats you.
Literally, Lamb doesn’t contain Genesis’s best songs. I think it’s quite reasonable to argue, however, that in turfing overly labored symphonic opuses like “Supper’s Ready” and “Cinema Show” -- awesome songs by themselves but ones that seemed to distract attention from the rest of the album they appeared on -- they were able to overcome their Achille’s Heel: god awful filler. Nusery Crime (1971), Foxtrot (1972), and Selling England by the Pound (1973) have always been as notable for their insanely intricate highs as they have been for their incredibly disposable lows. Lamb -- Gabriel’s most brilliant lyrical suite -- manages to spread the attention to detail around while lowering the Phil-sings-lead quotient considerably. Of course, you could also argue that Lamb is, as a whole, Genesis’s best song; that this double album in all of its glory is the logical extension of what “Supper’s Ready” set out to do. Because what’s better than this ostrich-narrated Broadway-fetish gloating West Side Gory tale of castration, schizophrenia, body image, and brotherly love? It’s so incomprehensible it makes sense, just like the name of the title chracter -- “Rael” -- is such a horrifically anvilicious pun that you just sort of accept it. Basically, Rael-who-spraypaints-things-to-prove-he-is-“street” gets caught in a thick goo that also makes him hallucinate about Broadway heroes; he finds himself in a cage; he gets out to find himself in a factory that is packaging human bodies; he reminisces about his life on the streets, in bed, consulting a sex book; he follows a crowd of crawling people in a chamber with thirty-two doors where he delights in anti-modernist images of the working class; he follows a blind woman into a waiting room where he deliberates on death, is anesthesitized, fucks some large-breasted snake women, and eats their moltings that taste like chocolate; he emerges from that cave to find himself in a colony where everybody looks like a mutated Planter’s peanut man, and so does he, and so does his brother John; he finds out the only way to cure the affliction is to get castrated; his recently offed dick is stolen by a giant raven and his brother refuses to help him find it; on his way down into the ravine to follow his brother he spots a window into his home world but then hears his brother drowning in the rapids below; he descends only to find that the person drowning is himself; he knocks and know balls about how everything is everything; the end. But somewhere in there Tony Banks learned how to play keyboards with the band rather than just on top, Steve Hackett (even as his influence within the band declined) was able to add some lovely color on a guitar that finally sounded like it had caught up with technology, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins finally got to get their rocks off, Brian Eno twiddled some knobs, and a band was created from the ashes of a symphonic art collective. In short, Genesis grew up, got with the times, turfed the boring romantics, and the results were astoundingly good -- just in time for Gabriel to ditch the whole affair. The band would return to the industrial revolution, but their queer vision of the seventies is the greatest (and, more importantly, the most honest) rock opera the era has to offer.
Oh, Robert Fripp. You clever soul, opening with a honky tonk tune. Except it isn’t, and of course Starless and Bible Black unfolds like all v2 Crimson albums: unconventionally. Choosing between this, Lark’s Tongues in Aspic (1973), and Red (1974) isn’t easy. Red contains the most punk-laced technical prowess, it’s the most obtuse, and Lark’s Tongues is the most traditionally “art rock,” but I’ve always had a soft spot for the unabashed improv and silliness of this in-between album. Here’s one reason why: Bill Bruford’s decision not to play anything during the live recording of “Trio” was considered a crucial choice by the band, so he received compositional credit. Snerk. The two-and-a-half studio tracks let bassist John Whetton use his assured voice to belt out Supertramp guitarist Richard Palmer’s lyrics about consumerism and society, but the live tracks are the real draw, and improvs “We’ll Let You Know,” “The Mincer,” and the title track are astonishingly polished, while the beautiful Fripp-composed “Fracture” that closes the album proves why King Crimson was the technical prog group to beat. On all of these tracks we hear insanely complex riffage, but also a sense of restraint foreign to groups like Yes and Van der Graaf Generator. There is silence, and space, and most importantly the general momentum is never just a slope; the band moves in peaks and valleys, more concerned with the tension inherent in each moment than pushing towards some glory-note future. This is especially true of the improvised intro to “The Night Watch” and “Trio”; both tracks serve to show off David Cross’ lovely violin work, but they also show Crimson playing at ambience, hinting at modern digital ambience and minimalism in ways that other art rock groups were too busy scrawling Tolkien quotes in their note books to attempt. This is thick, complicated music. And every untouchable inch of it is beautiful.
Italy was and is a hotbed of prog music (so much so that it’s not just “symphonic prog” if it’s Italian; it’s “Italian symphonic prog”). It was also a hotbed of prog fandom, and pretty much all popular symphonic prog and art rock bands found immediate success there. Franco Battiato is an odd addition to prog ranks, however. His music differs from prog because of his cinematic sense; he owes more to avant garde composers like Igor Wakhevitch and electronic musicians. His songs are like brief vignettes of mood, an approach that would be adopted both by post-rock artists and John Zorn in his Filmworks series. And while it’s true that Fetus (1971) or Pollution (1972) might be more suited to a prog column, Clic has always been my personal Battiato fave, especially since its songs are just so varied. The music on Clic unites aleatoric explorations, collage, thick electronic pulses, fleeting vocals, and a healthy sense of space, anticipating all kinds of modern experimental music in ways that very few of his contemporaries did (or, I guess, did well). “Ethika for Ethica,” the lovely radio collage that concludes the album, is one of the best examples of how collage music should be done, so that the point itself isn’t the collage, but in the relationship between events. Battiato’s ear is pretty unequaled in this kind of stuff, and Clic remains the best example. It’s weird, it’s contrary, it’s gorgeous, and it builds symphonic mountains out of fragments of Italian culture.
Also from Italy, Area was a group that bridged the gap between RIO and symphonic prog. Led by the amazingly powerful vocals of organist Demetrio Stratos (now there’s an awesome Roman-hero type name), Area unites strict leftist politics with incredibly complex jazz figures and orchestral bombast on Crac!, loosening the mold a bit from their previous and equally intriguing Caution Radiation Area (1974). Guitarist Paulo Tofani also wields a Moog on several tracks, and on both instruments he tends to throw in some Mediterranean flavored scales that sound wonderful mixed with the rest of the band. Keyboardist Patrizio Fariselli buoys his wilder tendencies in round chords, while Guilio Capiozzo and slap-fanatic Ares Tavolazzi manage to sound spastic and beyond-tight all at the same time. Crac! also sees the band playing around with electronics more, suddenly dropping into weird dissonant textures before the free jazz impulse returns in full. “Nervi Scoperti” shows the group at their exploratory best, opening with a jazz refrain, sailing through some brilliant free jazz, and ending with some incredibly complex prog-derived riffs and vocal/piano duets. At the other end of the spectrum, “Giola e Rivoluzione” is positively pop, separating giddy lyrics and lovely organ runs with thick guitar phrases and a beautiful sense for restraint (and this is another reason I made the crack about the Dave Matthews Band above. This is what that bullshit should sound like). “Implosion” and “La Mela Di Odessa (1920)” are the most free form tracks on the album; both are properly free jazz/fusion tracks, but each has incredibly swift prog sections that build structures into their “free” frameworks. And “Area 5,” the closer, sounds like the band taking lessons from Battiato, creating a collage of themselves that anticipates the early work of the Boredoms. The album is all over the map, basically, but the through line is made from competence and innovation, both of which Area excelled at.
I can barely listen to Dark Side of the Moon (1973) anymore. Wish You Were Here (1975) always kind of bored me. Meddle (1971) is fun for “Echoes” but the rest of it can go away. The Wall (1979) gets the biggest “snerk” I can muster. “Final Cut” is fun once in a while, but it is what it is, which is kind of more funny than tragic. Whether this is because of overexposure or what I don’t know, but I also know that Animals does not, for me, suffer a similar affliction (well…maybe the story about the pig on the cover does). “Dogs” still gives me the same pleasure and despair it did when I was 14 (although I understand it way better now). “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” may have sloppy politics, but who can argue with the sheer rock force? And “Sheep,” even with its heavy-handed psalm slurring, is just as triumphant when those rolling guitars crest at the coda. Because here’s something that little-ol’ space rock progsters Pink Floyd did surprisingly way better than their symphonic counterparts on this album: they transitioned to the instrumental portions in ways that didn’t hit you like an anvil with a card attached reading, “and now it’s time for the fantastic musical skills of the band to be on display.” They constructed complex arrangements that were about mood and emotion more than technique (King Crimson was really the only band that was ever somewhat successful at both). They sounded like they were having fun doing this album, despite it being the most genuinely dreary thing in their catalogue. And even if the Orwell homage sounds silly, Waters mostly managed to pull it off without being mawkish or doing his usual holier-than-thou technique of reducing entire complex concepts to us-and-them distinctions. David Gilmore plays plenty of guitar solos but they don’t ever sound like David Gilmore guitar solos. Nick Mason gets to funk around with all sorts of weird styles he hadn’t touched since “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” Rick Waters cares. In short (because I don’t need to talk about the music, do I? You’ve all heard it) this album withstands pretty much any complaint because it’s actually quite good. I mean, on the relative prog scale it’s sloppy and the experimentation is pretty mundane for 1977, but it’s pretty, and I still get chills as “Dogs” closes, “dragged down by the stone.” In fact, this is the only album that doesn’t get dragged down by the stone; it’s the only one where perennial stoner-gods Floyd managed to make an album that is actually more fucked up than the drugs they supposedly go down easy with. Good job, kids.
As I’m sure readers have noticed, this column plays fast and loose with the “obscure” and “experimental” tags I sort of imposed at inception. In some cases, like here with pre-sixties jazz, that’s because the famous albums we all know about are famous for a reason. With bebop and its variants this is doubly so since a) most of the pre-sixties stuff came out of larger sessions that may or may not have resulted in an album -- or, in many cases, an album was released retroactively -- and jazz heads tend to refer to this stuff in terms of sessions more so than albums, and b) most of the great albums that do exist involve some combination of the same twenty or so famous musicians. And though I consider my knowledge of jazz competent, I’d hardly call it exhaustive. Instead of unveiling obscure curios, then, this month’s installment of Retconning is about situating landmark albums in a history of innovation. Because postwar jazz was created out of circumstance, economy, and Civil Rights, and the way these musicians responded to each is fascinating. Plus, let’s face it: even if you already really like Kind of Blue, you’ve always wished you had a sweet set of bullet points about it to impress people at parties, right? (Retconning takes no fault if anybody thinks you’re a lame-o for doing exactly that. Lame-o.)
Be-bop is the result of two shifts in jazz ideology that resulted from economic, political, and social shifts in postwar American culture. First, the practical shift: even by the fifties, when the Eisenhower administration widened the scope of the Social Security Act and the G.I. Bill to bolster a fluctuating postwar economy the results only really affected the white middle class. In an era where US citizens were beset with new cultural media in the form of television and the vast expansion of Hollywood industry -- as well as white flight from the urban center -- the dance halls and clubs that had facilitated big band jazz became economically unfeasible and the jazz bands themselves found it harder to get work. In response, younger jazz artists began to jam in small groups -- many had already begun practicing that way before the war when their band leaders looked in askance on their less traditional solos -- and as the music conducted within those private and public jam sessions became increasingly free-form and complex the small band format began to captivate jazz enthusiasts.
Second, the cultural and musical shift: playing in small clubs with no space for a dance floor refocused the audience’s place at a jazz concert. If audiences were meant to watch and experience, young musicians brought up on a diet of solo-based swing suddenly found even more reason to stand out for hungry jazz audiences. At the same time, young black musicians reacted favorably to the increasing unrest of African American Civil Rights leaders. Frustrated over continued segregation and, in 1945, still almost two decades away from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these musicians adapted more complex harmonic possibilities into a style that fore grounded substance over gratification. In essence, these young jazz musicians abandoned the celebratory gestures and crossover appeal of swing in favor of a new form of jazz that defied mainstream chart success (which, in 1945, meant success with a white, over-30 audience, and by 1955 meant a white, 15-30 demographic). And though overt identification with the Civil Rights Movement would not really occur until the late fifties (Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” [1949] notwithstanding), the musicians who most closely identified with the movement -- Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins -- were all intimately involved with the evolution of be-bop throughout the fifties. And, of course, it’s also worth noting that the white-owned labels that produced jazz music in the fifties weren’t exactly chomping at the bit to release black-identified politically conscious music.
However you want to drop textual analysis to determine how political this music is, what’s critical is that the black/white coalition of swing and ragtime that had developed in Harlem in the 1920s dissolved as jazz groups became increasingly insular and dynamic, focusing on the performance and personalities of the artists rather than the experience of a jazz hall dance. Be-bop and its variants became more cerebral than swing at the exact same time that the physical playing of be-bop artists became more spastic. In other words, as inchoate rock music was just beginning to grasp the imagination of American youth and challenge the assumptions of their parents, jazz was already forging a mainline directly into the heart and head of its adherents.
By 1945 Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were causing havoc in the jazz community, raising the ire of older jazz legends while captivating the minds of many other young players who would dominate the fifties including Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Coleman Hawkins. Had recording technology kept pace with their energy and racial tension not proved an obstacle for the reception of their work we might well have better documents of the five-year interval between be-bop’s emergence from the shadow of big-band mentality to this document, a curious piece that has been praised and criticized in equal measure. Parker apparently had an epiphany in the midst of a 1939 jam session; his explorative emphasis on 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths -- the extended intervals of a root chord progression -- would define early bebop sound. His compositions here -- and it’s a shame that none of Gillespie’s slightly more eccentric gems were used in these sessions, though the original pressings slated this as a Parker album and not, as the reissue suggests, a co-led piece -- all show off the basic elements of be-bop. Curly Russell’s quarter-note bass plucks rise and fall through the scales, Thelonious Monk’s piano chimes in at awkward angles to add edge or curve and the implied incidental chords that drive be-bop, and the two horn players indulge in rhythmic asymmetry and soaring arpeggios, Parker flitting through his trademark smooth undulating riffs and Gillespie all sharp tacks and jives. Buddy Rich’s drums sound the closest to swing (he receives the most flack from the critics), but he’s full-on swing soloing for the entirety of each track, collapsing rhythmic intervals on top of the solos and throwing them forward. Several innovations here: “An Oscar for Treadwell” redefines the popular Rhythm Change swing vamp on Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” for be-bop, contrasting Monk’s opening atonal piano riff with a furiously happy melody played by Gillespie and Parker in unity; “Mohawk” anchors both horn players at the same time that the rhythm section explores it’s own connectivity, Russell sometimes chasing his own tail and Rich employing the now-familiar but innovative technique of adding the color an absent orchestra couldn’t with incredibly deft cymbal work; “Bloomdido” is basically be-bop’s mission statement, galloping forward and backwards on top of itself but everything is tight as fuck. It's not a perfect mission statement; it's five years late; unearthed live recordings from 1945-1950 have shown Bird and Diz more on point; but this is the album that made be-bop a tenable studio project.
The transition to be-bop was easier and harder on vocalists. Easier, since the music in part had to remain focused on tangible melody. Of course, I mean “melody” in this case, since Vaughan immediately fore grounds her allegiance to be-bop with opener “Lullabye of Birdland,” a scat-infused ode to the New York club that Parker had made famous. Vaughan, backed by Clifford Brown’s muted trumpet, acts as if the difference between scat and words doesn’t exist, switching back forth between the two, ranging over harmonic intervals with aplomb. Her ballads and up-tempo tracks both allow her to switch between clipped arpeggiated runs, harrowing -- although not quite Nina Simone harrowing -- swoops, and her gorgeous sense for delivery. “Embraceable You,” perhaps the best-known track on the album, puts her on the razor’s edge of timbre; the chords follow not-quite-atonal runs but the slow tempo forces her to hold long arched deliveries before sliding ever so slightly up the scale. This is the kind of shit people don’t do anymore thanks to Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera, but arguably this takes far more skill than the over-the-rush dynamics they espouse.
But harder, because Vaughan liked it that way: her vocal skill allowed her to walk a fine line between be-bop and pop, and her voice walked many more, between feminine and masculine tone (she loved to indulge in those low growls), and between the morals of what was expected from and possible for white and black female artists on record. Consider: because Vaughan defied “race music” and defined a be-bop mode of pop jazz, because she sang like a man while she expressed female sexuality, and because she did more to bring be-bop to a wider audience than any of her male contemporaries -- more contentiously, more publicly, and therefore more at risk -- you can’t just think of this as a pretty jazz album. In the segregated fifties this was a fucking atom bomb.
A 1955 compilation of the group’s previous two 10-inch releases hastily re-assembled for the new 12-inch format, this album shows be-bop’s transition to hard bop, bolstered by the bass skills of Doug Watkins and the brilliant drums of Art Blakey. Hard bop tried to be more accessible to jazz audiences who found bop too cerebral and stoic at the same time that it reached out to soul, gospel, and blues and emphasized intense rhythmic dexterity. You can easily hear the difference: Silver’s piano gets its Ray Charles on during “Creepin’ In” and is total blues counterpoint on “To Whom It May Concern”; horn players Kenny Dorham and Hank Mobley have to remain incredibly focused to stay in step given the rhythm section’s penchant for outlandish tangents, best exemplified on “Room 608” and “Hippy”; be-bop tends to employ shifts through harmony but hard bop like this really focuses on dynamic interplay. In other words, new and far more proficient bassists and drummers like the two here and Charles Mingus and Max Roach refused to simply provide a backdrop for the soloists, and so hard bop saw the creation of a rhythmic approach to complement the harmonic advances of be-bop.
While Silver gets billed as bandleader and his piano playing is incredibly vital throughout, it’s no secret that Blakey was a dominant force in the group. It’s interesting, though, to hear Blakey run rough-shod over Silver’s compositions (they’re good, though not so good as when Silver would really come into his own in the sixties); the tension this album exhibits is palpable, and while its influence is undermined by Silver's nominal status in this period, it's probably the most sheer fun of any of the albums on this list.
Wanna know why the heads like Mingus? Just listen to the intro of the opening title track, which anticipates artsy hard rock and metal. And then listen to the rest of the album, which anticipates krautrock, fusion, psychedelic, minimalism, and modern blues. I think most would say Mingus’s best album is Mingus Ah Um (1959); it’s gorgeous, but nothing is so fucking insanely revelatory as his work here, building on the overdubbed work of jazz experimenter Lennie Tristano’s Descent Into the Maelstrom (1953) without the overdubs, exploring jazz tone poetry, and linking the music to Civil Rights through obvious references to evolution and roots. The band is bluesy: Mal Waldron -- who would later become a popular free jazz musician -- switches between bluesy runs and thunderous piano chords; Jackie McLean and J. R. Montrose punctuate the music’s intervals and sound more like incidental soundscapes than soloists; and Willie Jones’s drums are just delicious, switching between bop drumming and Varesé-like scatology. “A Foggy Day” interrupts itself with found noise like whistles and car horns; the music sounds a ruddy glow where people keep bumping into each other because they can’t see. “Profile of Jackie” gives McLean ample opportunity to soar, but his playing is tethered by gorgeous counterpoint thanks to Montrose and Waldron. In the creases, Jones sounds like he’s playing drums on abandoned machinery. “Love Chant” plays on Mingus’s fondness for a melody that consumes the whole band; when the track breaks into the faster section and Mingus starts playing counterintuitive rhythm, it’s obvious that the melody that McLean and Montrose distend is just an umbrella for all sorts of other movement; when the band gets cute by following each other’s riffs “Row Your Boat”-style, Mingus’s genius is incredibly apparent: this is serious music, sure, but everybody is still laughing. “Love Chant” is maybe the only song ever I would actually call “tantalizing”; it perfectly captures a balance between giving and holding out, and even when it does finally surge into more traditional bop, those long passages are still implied and played underneath actual solos, humming in the background like the basic anatomy of music.
For those of you who read my review of Grindstone, thought I was crazy, and have finally just decided to shake your heads and say “that must be a Mark album,” here’s an easier introduction to the thing I find most exciting about musical possibility: Sonny Rollins plays it solemn and cute all over this album, and in doing so articulates a language that is far closer to how we actually think and speak and communicate as humans than music that tries to capture a specific mood. And I want to be careful here: Rollins is one of the primary victims of fifties and pre-Hendrix sixties (Hendrix being the victim) music crit that tied passionate, expressionistic playing directly to race. When I say “Sonny Rollins is the most articulate and expressive saxophone player ever” what I mean is simply that dude knows how to inject attitude into his playing, and when I say “attitude” I mean every attitude a human being could possess. Because Rollins upped the ante on soloing, moving from a simple who-can-play-fastest/hardest/bestest game to a broader question of elocution. The object suddenly had to mean something, and listening to Saxophone Colossus is like listening to somebody tell you awesome stories and not -- as was constantly iterated in the contemporary music press and Beat culture -- like listening to a possessed black man enslaved to communication through his instrument. It’s important to reject that notion, not just because it’s racist but because it tends to disguise the brilliance of what Rollins and his band are doing here. As they transition from a formal, academic style of be-bop into something meant for as broad an audience as possible they avoid the prewar problems of swing -- this ain’t just dance music; it's still highly confrontational. And, ultimately, this is the kind of jazz that we understand as “jazz” today; the culmination of bop as a style manifest through incredibly articulate and technically complex playing that is borrowing from blues, R&B, gospel, and soul, and yet still conforms to the basic tenants of bop: thick descriptive phrases, asymmetric but tonally erudite passages, and complex rhythmic interplay. “St. Thomas” is the most well-known track here, but all of them show just how brilliant Rollins was at coaxing the same performances from veteran pianist Tommy Flanagan and the wicked rhythmic combo of Doug Watkins and Max Roach (check out the opening drum section on “Blue 7”). But it’s the solos that work so well, here: Rollins is telling you shit, and it's shit that hurts, because that's what the fifties were like. Stand up and listen.
The trickster of jazz, Monk opens an album titled to offer just his music with a traditional horn fanfare. Then he crams himself into that cart for the cover photo. To understand Monk, you have to understand his position in the jazz community, and there's only one way I can really describe it. Monk’s eccentricity has only ever really been copied successfully by Tom Waits; neither of them really play music that is that weird but are still seen that way (which isn’t really a critique; it’s just strange how both can be so uncompromising while still being so popular); both seem to be the perfect soundtrack for drinking; and both don’t give a fuck. Monk did it first, though, and right from the inside; he’s the Dennis Rodman of jazz, and Monk’s Music certainly cemented the idea. Employing both Coleman Hawkins and a young John Coltrane (the past and present of tenor saxophone), Gigi Gryce on alto, Art Blakey on drums, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Ray Copeland on trumpet, Monk exploited his expanded horn section to toy with odd harmonies and flesh out a few recycled compositions. Aside from the beautiful “Ruby, My Dear” -- essentially played as a Hawkins vehicle, and the rest of the brass sit out -- this is slinky, septet jazz that exploits a lot of the innovations of all the albums I’ve already discussed. “Well, You Needn’t” fluctuates between straight-forward be-bop and Monk’s fascination with weird tangents; “Off Minor (Take 5)” shows Blakey at his finest, warping the track across transitions between solos, and also some Italian mobster movie-style harmonies from the brass section; “Epistophy” gives Ware space to shine as makes subtle modifications to his tone which seems to place each solo in a different geography; and “Crepuscule with Nellie (Take 6)” is gorgeous slow jazz featuring wide horn harmonies over Monk’s weirdly staccato avant-blues riffs. This album is wickedly sweet and wickedly sour; every time you think you get it, the whole focus shifts. Which is precisely why Monk was so important to be-bop; while everybody else was interested in showing off their skill in the traditional fashion -- "how do I make this solo more complicated and fast?" -- Monk was already seeding the base for free jazz, Ornette Coleman, and Eric Dolphy by asking, "how do I make this sound weirder? No. Weirder than that, even."
Sort of hard bop, but mostly cool, the extent to which Miles Davis may have actually been in charge for this landmark record is highly disputed. What is clear is that this album continues Davis’ approach to jazz started with Birth of the Cool (1957; a compilation of the initial "cool" sides Davis had recorded in 1949 and 1950). It doesn’t really matter who was in charge, though; what matters is that Somethin’ Else is a lot of people’s favorite jazz album precisely because it sounds like an album, or, more correctly, that Somethin' Else is the template for albums as we understand them today. The band creates dynamic and tonal differences between the songs that move beyond the typical up-tempo/ballad distinction; the composition employs lovely hints of Latin and World sounds; but mostly each song is just so obviously different, like be-bop and cool had just finally reached a point where the chord backings for solos could be developed into entirely different geographies. Opener “Autumn Leaves” is all close-miked and intimate; Davis sounds for all the world as if he’s just blowing artsy tobacco rings at the microphone. Blakey’s been put on a leash here, but it doesn’t matter; his style is just as frenetic when he’s playing softly, it’s just embedded in the folds. Adderly is all curves compared to Davis’s chilled-out ‘tude. Sam Jones’s bass crawls beneath them and Hank Jone’s piano floats over top. The band than puts a light samba spin on Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” that completely changes the tone of the song. Davis is quietly coy as if he’s trying to play sexy; Adderly dispenses with the hesitance and he and Blakey wonk out all over the place. “Somethin’ Else” is a Davis tune; it’s played like one, adopting that track-long crescendo quality that Davis is famous for, starting at “intense” and slowly building from there. “One For Daddy-O” is all blues until Adderly injects it with a surf-song solo intro; he slides across the greasy backing like a figure skater; Davis takes another laid back solo, slowly climbing out of the wall of cymbal ambience Blakey airs the track with. “Dancing in the Dark” is all Adderly; he plays his trademark cyclic runs over a stilted backing beautifully. The album isn’t rocket science; take two incredibly distinct soloists and give them five distinct compositions and you get an album that is thoroughly cool and thoroughly accessible. Plus, "Autumn Leaves" is a great go-to track for hip ambience at dinner parties and weddings.
Vibraphones are awesome. I’m pretty sure that’s a statement of fact. And while Milt Jackson would go on to do free jazz-influenced work in the sixties and seventies (as would Coltrane) there’s something endlessly charming about his fifties be-bop work. This album is co-credited; the two young musicians shared leadership duties, and though Jackson composed three of the five songs (the other two being standard “Three Little Words” and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bebop”) Coltrane’s emerging sensibilities can be heard everywhere. This is one of the last pure bop albums before jazz would branch out in several different directions, and like Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers it doesn’t break new ground as well as it synthesizes jazz to this point. “The Late, Late Blues” starts with a piano/drum riff courtesy of Hank Jones and Connie Kay that sounds like it was recorded in 1935 before Paul Jones’s bass and Jackson’s vibraphone lead it into more modern bop territory. When Coltrane takes his solo the rhythm section does this awesome breakdown where they only play the 1s and 3s. “Bags & Trane” is a melancholy, insular piece where the band climbs over one another with bluesy minimalism; the solos are neatly overzealous given the staid backing, creating a neurotic effect that propels the track forward. “Three Little Words” really shows off Jones’s skills; his intro spirals down into a quick up-tempo track that gives Coltrane an excuse to show off his ability to cross octave-intervals really quickly. Jackson plays with the same intensity, and both soloists keep hitting the tonic as if they’re pointing at us and saying, “y’know?” Their take on “Bebop,” though, is what really sells the album. The frantic pace and the orchestral feel the vibraphone gives the track push this be-bop into new territory, and Kay’s drums especially sound pre-ready for free jazz exploration. Using Gillespie’s mission statement to make a new one, these two young musicians set the stage for their ascendancy.
Should I say “poor Miles Davis”? This album is famous, and rightly so, but for none of the reasons Davis really wanted it to be. This was going to be Davis’s calling card; it was going to allow him to change jazz (possibly again). And then stupid Ornette Coleman released The Shape of Jazz to Come like a month later and everybody though that was way cooler.
If jazz had been built on the integration of Western and diatonic scales (for simplicity’s sake, the white and black keys on the piano), modal jazz, as Davis presented it on Kind of Blue, was supposed to abandon those scales and chords altogether. Instead, Davis trained his band to function through modes, creating a much wider palette for collective improvisation. Davis, however, still refused to play atonally (something he would only lightly dabble in even at his most obscure on In a Silent Way [1969] and Bitches Brew [1970]). But even if free jazz (and, not entirely coincidentally, the shift from Civil Rights to Black Power) would mute the impact of Kind of Blue, the album itself is a monster. Opener “So What” is probably one of the best-known jazz tracks ever; revolving around Bill Evan’s chiming piano chords built on perfect fourths mixed with a major third, the stately progression of the track runs over Paul Chamber’s devastating bass ingenuity. John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly are opposing forces, Coltrane always going down, Adderly always going up, both whirlpools to Davis’s blanching, dart-like notes. “Freddie Freeloader” replaces Bill Evans with Wynton Kelly to get more of a bluesy tone, but the piece is still anchored in complex chords from the opening horn harmony. Jimmy Cobb’s understated drumming on the gorgeous “Flamenco Sketches” leaves room for Evans and the horn trio to create waves of soloed ambience. And perhaps that’s why this album is so critically important; every track -- for entirely complex and absolutely boring mathematical reasons that I won’t get too much into, but, basically: this was the most complexly harmonic album that had been released to this point outside of avant-garde composition -- articulates the basic ideas of be-bop in an entirely different way. As a revolutionary album it’s masterful and dwarfs The Shape of Jazz to Come in execution, even if the style of free jazz would ultimately take over. But also, just how listenable is this thing? Davis always managed to temper his experimental impulses with a deep desire for popular consensus; never was he more successful than he was here, crafting a punch in the face with the grace of a dancer. Hee -- now that I think about it, it's just like West Side Story!
I will say “poor Betty Roché.” Once-vocalist for Duke Ellington in the early forties, Roché had to wait until 1956 and then 1960 to record her own material -- three albums, of which this (for me) is the superior document. The reason for her late matriculation into the industry was the fact that Ellington hired her right before the 1942 recording band shut down recording sessions (the record industry was refusing to make music because radio stations were playing it for free. Or something. The record industry is fucking stupid.) Anyway, she was never recorded with Ellington, so she never gained prominence with the industry.
But she has some fucking voice. Like Sarah Vaughan, but with even more range, even more willingness to modify her tone. Listen to “Why Shouldn’t I?” She sounds like two different singers doing a duet. That song is the most strictly bop on the album, but even if the rest of the album is quite bluesy Roché’s voice sounds like a bop instrument, skirting tonality and fluctuating like Nina Simone but keeping that jazz sensibility fore grounded, all kinds of brief voice quivers that completely modify her tone and delivery at her disposal. Roché paved the way for women like Vaughan and Simone, if not prepping the industry for them, at least opening up jazz to this kind of awesome vocal dissidence in direct contrast to more melodic singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. It’s unfortunate that Roché was only finally able to record this stuff when Stax and Motown co-opted the vocal-based R&B market and be-bop vocalists were left behind. This is beautiful stuff, and while the instrumentation is a bit rote at times, Roché makes it worth it, dealing some of the finest vocals ever. So fine that the very first time I heard "Why Shouldn't I?", driving home from Halifax to Fredericton on the foggy, foggy road, but when the CBC launched up that track I swear I almost drove off the road. Lightly and Politely: not safe while driving.
You know what? Metal Box (1979) should probably be here, but it isn’t. So consider that its honorable mention.
Not much more than a year ago the majority of this list was either hard or impossible to purchase. Now only a couple of them are. This speaks as much to the rise of post-punk influence as it does to the fact that several of these bands have reformed more recently. It also speaks to an unusual competence in the record industry to respond to actual audience demand. Reissue Beat Rhythm News!
By way of introduction, I’ll just say that these bands -- mostly British, but three American -- are all pretty political, either identifying as avant or Marxist or situationist or just sort of falling into those rhythms. Generally, they’re coming out of first-wave punk into a late seventies plagued with resource crises, the arms race, the failure of the SALT pact, Margaret Thatcher and (almost) Ronald Reagan, the rise of the New Right in both countries, and a general sense of malaise born from the failure of the sixties combined with a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the nihilism of punk. A lot of the collage work, tape manipulation, and homemade music can be, I think, attributed to an inchoate post-industrial economy, the initial stages of heavy advances in computer technology, and a general fear of the deconstruction represented in a nuclear holocaust (explicitly with This Heat, but implicitly elsewhere). These are angry bands working to make their music advance those politics; these are bands that are all pretty much creating their own sounds as a result. And maybe that’s the greatest legacy of post-punk: there were so many distinct styles of music created in this period -- hell, in 1979 alone -- that the tethers of market demand, fashion, and commodity were displaced enough to allow an independent scene to grow more coherently than it had. Punk laid the groundwork, sure, but post-punk broke down the wall.
“The Modern Dance,” at least as it’s depicted on the cover, means a modernist dance; a million Jungled Jurgises replace their boots with ballet slippers and take off to spread the gospel of the worker. But while the cover might seem anachronistic for 1978, the band is actually updating Eugene Debbs and Theatre of the Absurd at the same time. Father Ubu was a character in Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi, a fat stupid patriarch who murders the king MacBeth-style; Pere Ubu employ the name to contextualize their music in reference to Jarry’s proto-dadaism. The other direct reference to the play is the refrain of “The Modern Dance”; in between deliberations on the plight of “our poor boy” the band shouts “merdre merdre,” the first word of Jarry’s play, which provoked a riot and got the thing shut down during its premiere. For a Cleveland band coping with the post-industrial Midwest rust belt economy, the strange juxtapositions work because the could-be-eye-roll-provoking sentiments of the lyrics (“My baby says / We can live in the empty spaces of this life”) are echoed by the arrangements and compositional style of the group. They’ve been called “expressionist rock”; that’s as good a description as any, I guess, insofar as the band was always more interested in texture than form. Except, of course, the form is still there, which is what makes these songs more fantastic.
Tom Herman’s often-overdubbed guitar switches back and forth between slow, developed deliberation on “Chinese Radiation,” screeching scribbles of feedback on “Sentimental Journey,” and rock-forward bliss on “Street Waves.” Tony Maimone’s bass work isn’t quite as stark on Modern Dance as was generally the case for post-punk; however, his almost-funk drives songs like “Street Waves” and the title track. Scott Krause’s percussion is often based on ambience; “Over My Head” is a gorgeous example of creeping accents, and “Humor Me” is a neat off-time mock march-step. Allen Ravenstine’s synths are critical to the band’s sound; like Brian Eno in Roxy Music, Ravenstine’s position in the band was less “keyboardist” as it was “noise-maker.” Lead singer David Thomas must be a million singers’ idol; insanely contained, his lyrics equate relationships with industry and global politics while his hectic delivery is endlessly entertaining. And, like, find a better melody for “Non-Alightment Pact,” ever.
This is the only album on this list that has never been released on CD. You can get 7 1/2 of the 9 tracks here on Fanfare in the Garden, an Essential Logic/Laura Logic compilation that for some reason doesn’t include “Alkaline Loaf in the area” or the album mix of “World Friction.” Or you can order the original Rough Trade vinyl, which still isn’t too outrageous. Maybe if I just say, “Love is All would not exist without Essential Logic,” the record companies will act?
Anyway: Logic, kicked out of X-Ray Spex because the record company thought the band would market better if Poly Styrene was the only woman in the group, went on to form this brilliant post-punk but also sort of R.I.O. group in 1978. This band just dissolved everything into everything: “The Order Form (I want to order a pelican)” has a melody that sounds like something from the Sparks’ Kimono My House (1974) played out over Logic and Davie Wright’s saxophone duet-driven New York Dolls-play-post-rock crescendos. In fact, Logic pulls the Russell Mael trick all over, infusing his weird sense of melody with a Sarah Vaughan jazz sensibility. “Shabby Abbott” throws Motown horns under Mark Turner’s total punk bass. “World Friction” is rocksteady fun; “Wake Up” is weird vocal treatments and lots of stop/start action between the pulsating choruses where Rich Tea shows off his sense of groove when drumming. “Albert” -- where Logic sings about jelly and disarmament -- gives lots of room for Ashley Buff to play with interesting guitar textures either in or out of unison with Wright and Turner. “Collecting Dust” has Turner rushing up and down the scales as Logic sings about “molesting trust.” When the album finally crashes into the wicked a capella outro of “Popcorn Boy,” it’s clear just how much ground this band has covered. This album is testament that Logic may just have been the most compelling songwriter in post-punk.
It was named after a re-contextualized (or maybe deconstructed) image of the real Maoist Gang; the British group embraced Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan as their Gang, and their lyrics, some of the most overtly political ever recorded, highlight the politics of each through via lyricist Jon King’s Situationist-inspired avant-Marxism.
Heh. Everybody who complained about the Pantha Du Prince review is getting ready to email me right now. Please don’t. Because this is great irony, right? We have all these contemporary dance-punk groups who say Gang of Four influenced them but then they talk about their own music (and get talked about) as if all we really want to do these days is party. Because in our post-9/11 world, we all just want to relax, right? Except, that was kind of Gang of Four’s whole point: they weren’t embracing dance music so much as re-appropriating it from its commoditization because they believed that commercial pleasure (“a market of the senses”) was just as alienating as industrial labor. In other words, for the band it’s impossible to separate pleasure from politics because sanctioned pleasure (including love) was just another way our bodies get controlled by the dominant order. Look: you can’t really ignore those politics without sounding completely irresponsible. I mean, argue against them, sure, and there are lots of ways: “hey, Gang of Four! ‘Authenticity’ means shit all.” “Hey Gang of Four? Aren’t musicians laborers? How is this album I just paid for supposed to represent un-commoditized pleasure?” And the most problematic: “hey Gang of Four? Why do you keep using the female body to represent this evil site of commoditized pleasure?” There.
The album itself is a flurry of tension that musically captures these ideas perfectly. King is just the right amount of angry and agile; Andy Gill’s guitar tone on the album has been talked about so much that I’ll just murmur “influential” and move on; Dave Allen is like the punk Bootsy Collins; Hugo Burnham is incredibly adept at playing those dry, sparse beats while still lobbing fills into the mix. And ultimately the tightly wound punk funk of the album is the reason this is the go-to post-punk album; just don’t forget that Entertainment! doesn’t translate simply as entertainment.
Not the popular choice for top Wire album, I’m sure. Then again, when all three of your classic albums are themselves considered classics, you’re bound to have fans of each, right? And then again, is it any wonder that I like the most experimental Wire album which also happens to most coherently fore ground their Situationist perspective best? Plus, I think you could make a fairly convincing argument that 154 is the album that most directly anticipates the work of the lengthy list of indie bands Wire has influenced.
Wire benefited from having three songwriters in the group; 154 highlights that diversity. We get bassist Graham Lewis’s nocturnal “A Touching Display” that hinges on feedback whose character is changed by the backing chords; we get his “I Should Have Known Better” which ominously pulsates over drummer Robert Gotobed’s stray snares and metronomic high hats. We get Colin Newman’s hilarious “The 15th” with its lyrics that make no sense while simultaneously expressing some unidentifiable core of human truth while simultaneously mapping out the groundwork for pretty much every band that existed in the nineties; we get his “On Returning” which spins on the contrast between heavily reverbed piano and incredibly dry guitar; and we get his “Once is Enough” which returns to the barn-burning of Pink Flag (1977) but only while letting Gotobed play with hilarious percussion. We get B.C. Gilbert’s “40 Versions” which encapsulates all the good parts of grunge at the same time that it eases the pain of the Stooges; we get his “Blessed State” that rocks Eno/Bowie fantasies with a sensibility that’s a little more…uh, twee? Y’know, right before launching off into some King Crimson shit. And we get “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” Wire’s most poppy single which even the band recognizes and makes fun of mid-song by shouting “chorus!” right before the chorus. And, like, find a better melody/harmony for “Interrupting my train of thought / Lines of longitude and latitude / Define and refine my altitude,” ever. Ever.
The CD version starts with “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” which might be the band’s greatest song, but it was originally released as a single before the album. The CD itself is nominally hard to find, made more problematic by the fact the most readily available version (at least in Canada) is a Japanese import which ain’t cheap.
I paid for it. I fucking love this album. Reggae ex-pat Dennis Bovell’s production style makes him my hero (which is why Cut, next on this list, I also love). In fact, you can pretty much shoehorn Y and Cut into my top five albums ever (with only the Boredom’s Super Æ and Deceit jockeying for space). The Pop Group are like the future. This is the type of shit the Liars are still trying to do (they can’t). And sure, a few of the songs -- notably “We Are Time” -- might go into Bovell’s bag of dub tricks a little too often, but the ultimate result of a union between dance-punk sensibility and dub production couldn’t possibly sound better than this.
Mark Stewart’s vocals are critical since he sells the chaos; his strangled delivery allows the band to go essentially as crazy as they wanted. The duel guitars of Gareth Sager and John Waddington flop between angular playing and screeching atmospheric feedback (check the break down on “The Boys from Brazil”). Simon Underwood and Bruce Smith hold the mess together, Underwood’s bass especially centering on stripped down funk while Smith’s drums wonk sparse rhythms and the occasional freak out. This is a band with no real avant pretensions that still manages to out-out most out music; they do it through Bovell but they also do it through conscious and carefully considered self-sabotage.
Every good beat on Y comes at a price; just when you start to nod your head, everything falls apart. Lyrically, the band is quite political, too, though nothing beats Stewart’s tragic caterwhauling at the end: “Please! Don’t sell you dreams!” On an album full of lines like “Teeth beckon you,” “Set yourself on fire on a train,” and “bullets cannot penetrate the sea,” his request is so simple and beautiful at the exact same time that the song is the most dissonant and formless. And that’s kind of what this album is like: watching it disintegrate slowly from “Thief of Fire” to the aleatoric noise that ends “Don’t Sell Your Dreams” amazingly makes all the dissonance at the end more comfortable; we’ve lived through the apocalypse, so we can return home and shut the door.
Cut is a masterpiece of punk/dub hybridity; the band, rollicking over Budgie’s drums and producer Bovell’s odd percussive accents, exploits the far reaches of punk attitude without ever playing a power chord. Viv Albertine’s guitar is a constantly fluctuating sieve of bouncy chords and strange textures. Tessa Pollitt’s bass resounds on the low end; she throws in runs between the head-bobbing pulse that drives the songs forward where the drums don’t. Ari Up sings about various forms of addiction over top, her elastic voice mixing vocal ticks, old-school punkisms, and arching melodies. The album was recorded in the wake of original drummer Palmolive’s departure from the band (to record the next album on this list); any tensions that existed in the band seem to have dissolved if the synergy here is evidence.
Superficially, the album’s songs all work on the same vibes. But check out the variety. Two of Palmolive’s songs are back to back: “FM” presents the radio as “frequent mutilation” through droning harmonies and straightforward drum work; “New Town” employs delicate and strange guitar work, high hats, toms, and percussive accents to create a slowly building crescendo that envelopes itself. “Spend Spend Spend” and “Shoplifting” present different sides of the same consumer-therapy coin. “Instant Hit,” the fantastic opener, sounds like the track has been chopped to shit, self-destructing just like the heroin addict it’s about. “So Tough” mocks a tough boy while Up employs her most interesting melody, giddy and running in and out of harmonies with the rest of the band. The closer, Palmolive’s “Adventures Close to Home,” is a funny little excursion through a labyrinth of riffs and changes that casually -- almost accidentally -- captures some of the most beautiful moments in punk ever -- like, in the spaces between the chords. It’s mind-boggling. “Typical Girl,” a pot shot at marketing directed at young girls, features the most hilarious piano line ever.
And it’s the cocky, snotty, punk attitude that let’s the band get away with this genre centrifuge, which is why when they were dismissed then (and sometimes now) as the girl group of punk, the Slits fucked that shit up. Hell -- nobody else had the balls to release an album like this. They didn’t get naked on the cover for any other reason than because they could, and that’s exactly what Cut plays like. Because all the drugs and other addictions on the album? The “typical girls” who don’t create or rebel? The backhanded dismissal of shopping as a solution to domestic loneliness? The album itself is the answer to every issue it raises; this is the new jonze, and it’s a fucking insane high.
Bla bla bla Kurt Cobain. We can thank him for getting this reissued and we can also write letters to David Geffen asking why it’s out of print again. That’s a travesty, really, because this album, more than anything else here, most directly anticipates the indie rock of the past two decades. Just listen to “The Void,” where the opening pairs Gina Birch’s slow bass riff with Vicky Aspinall’s post-Cale violin riffage. The short section essentially capture everything good about post-rock right before Ana De Silva enters on guitar and vocals and the song hints in an entirely new direction -- and not just because fucking Hole covered it. “No Side to Fall In” is a brilliant vocal piece accompanied by scattered percussion and Birch’s hilarious bass line. Palmolive’s tom-playing in the middle section (a bridge between the Velvet Underground and, say, Broadcast) in brilliant, as is the a capella section that follows. Palmolive’s “Adventures Close to Home” gets another treatment here; the song sounds entirely different from the Slit’s version (in fact, in a weird way this is the version that sounds more Slits-y). “Off Duty Trip” hints at math-rock pretensions; “You’re a Million” creates this collapsing sound scape filled with clomping drums and Aspinall’s countrified violins. Closer “No Looking” is just spastic. The cover of the Kink’s “Lola” takes the nervous sexuality of the original and flips it even further; when De Silva sings “I’m a man and he’s a man” the gender politics of the song dissolve. Essentially, this album is indie rock in the eighties and nineties before the eighties and nineties had happened.
Finally reissued with the Out of Cold Storage box, Deceit is either a fairly straightforward R.I.O. masterpiece or the weirdest post-punk album that exists. It’s a little bit of both, really, sounding as much like Henry Cow as the Sex Pistols and produced with a spate of studio trickery. It’s hard to imagine today with all of our sequencers and sound generators how complicated this album was to make; this band didn’t have that shit. Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward, and Gareth Williams recorded the basic tracks for some of these songs live, yeah, but for the most part we’re talking tape-editing, splicing, manipulation, tape loops, odd recording spaces (like inside toilets and shit), and expansive overdubs.
Check the mid-section of “Paper Hats” that sounds like King Crimson going at it in strict time; you’ll suddenly find that the odd off-time accents in the background are actually a tape loop of a different and much looser and slower performance of the same bit, and you get to hear the tension created between them as the latter gains volume in the mix. Or “S.P.Q.R.,” where an Edge-like guitar sound spirals under deliberations on Roman life. Or “Cenotaph,” all lush guitar textures pinned down by Hayward’s groovy drumming as the band sings “history repeats itself” in harmony right before a brilliant chord change before dissolving in a rush of noise. “Shrink Wrap” and “Sleep” are widely different edits of one another meant to link both sides of the album together; the former is a cute fear-of-nuclear-holocaust lullabye and the latter a collage (like the cover) of dissent directed at world leaders and the arms race. “Radio Prague” is another collage; this time a cutting radio signal, squirrels of feedback, and some heavily filtered percussion. “Makeshift Swahili” is the most overt homage to prog rock on the album; those chord progressions are total krautrock/Crimson moves balled up into little indescribable bombs. Best of all, the song switches into a live version of the outro, and suddenly free from the studio trickery the band sounds like a phantom. “Independence” is all loping guitars and whistles as the Declaration of Independence is read; “A New Kind of Water” continues that ambient sense until exploding into frustrated guitar work. “Hi Baku Shyo” is more collage that ends the album on a suitably eerie note.
This is a band that, more than twenty years later, is still arguing about whether the lyrics of certain songs should have been “we” or “you”; in other words, whether the band should have included themselves in the problem, or simply decried others. And Bullen and Hayward are still arguing about that amiably (Williams unfortunately passed away). Like many of the other groups here, this kind of noise was as inspired by a firm dedication to Marxist ideas as it was avant-art. Deceit, however, is an astonishing piece of work and (especially remastered) shows no signs of its age. Bands, with all of our sequencers and sound generators, still can’t produce this shit today.
It’s difficult to judge how much Burma’s present success has affected the reception of their back catalogue. Vs. has always been the high point, for me; it’s pretty much the ideal indie-rock album, and further, thanks to Martin Swope’s tape and sound manipulation, covers a lot of experimental bases as well. Like Wire, the band benefited from three song writers, with guitarist Roger Miller offering the eclectic songs, bassist Clint Conley penning the more straightforward material, and drummer Peter Prescott contributing a track as well. The album’s lyrics are highly political, certainly, but are delivered with a sense of playfulness absent from some of the earlier bands here; the effect takes some of the burden off approaching the music with those same politics (by which I mean, Mission of Burma don’t act so much like they’re preaching to the converted. They’re trying to convince you, and they’re working hard at it).
The music is vibrant throughout. We get Swope-ified treatments like the thunderous “Fun World” (which doesn’t actually suggest the world is fun), the droning-over-riffage intro “Secrets,” the woozy spirals of “Trem Two,” and the delightfully odd “Weatherbox,” the lyrics of which are delivered like a schoolyard chant. “The Ballad of Johnny Burma” and “New Nails” sound the most traditionally punk; elsewhere we get the guitar solo-explosion of “Einstein’s Day” and the effects chain workout of “Learn How.” “That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate” closes the album out with its most straightforward track (one of Conley’s finest, edged in with some lo-fi punk clipping). I’ve always felt that half the awesomeness of Mission of Burma just lies in how much fun it always seems like they’re having; how effortless it all is. Vs. is a fucking monster that sounds like it was squeezed out as a lark. Which means it’s fantastic.
Name another album that is both a massive sample staple and an important influence on contemporary dance punk; name another album that sits at the intersection of disco, house, hip hop, and punk. This album has been sampled by both the Liars (when they were good) and J Dilla; it’s a phenomenally stark exploration of poly-rhythms and stripped-down funk. The breaks are endless (and fucking prime because they’re so dry); the vocals of sisters Valerie, Renee, and Marie somehow robotic and sensual at the same time, but that’s the attitude they’re kicking, right? This is an album that’s sexy because of the joy of music; it’s not sexy because that’s the only point. The three women blend complex rhythms together; scattered guitar riffs (usually only a couple of notes, surf-like) fade in over the pounding bass lines as the percussion goes nuts. There are even glitchy moments in parts; stuttering tracks that re-orient themselves. Essentially, this album is the root of so many genres and movements in music it’s impossible to talk about. And that’s despite the fact that, since it was originally released on the short-lived 99 Records, the thing has been out of print forever. It was reissued just this past fall; the new release marks the first time ever Come Away with ESG has existed on CD. ‘Bout fucking time, because I only have on other thing to say about this album: listen to “About You.”
Motherfuckin’ Dre, right?
Congratulations to Alfredo Ortega who won the first ever Retconning contest! I hope "I Am Sitting in a Room" is freaking you out right this second! Less congratulations to everybody else who wrote in. Snarky congratulations who anybody who thought I liked Radiohead. Ew! I'll try to do a better planned contest in the coming months.
So, what’s new wave? If post-punk furthered the stripped-down punk aesthetic by making forays into dub, funk, and disco, new wave groups on both sides of the Atlantic dropped the sneers and took the punk ethos as a mandate to produce the kind of music punk was rebelling against in the first place. Pub rock, new romantic, electropop, power pop, goth rock; all exist uncomfortably together under the umbrella of “new wave,” especially since new wave simultaneously birthed some of the most excrutiating pop music that defined the ‘80s at the same time that it laid the groundwork with post-punk for modern indie-rock. This column presents some of my favorite new wave albums with the caveat that I’ll get more in-depth with specific genres in future issues. Especially since parsing the Joy Division/New Order/New Order-as-a-singles-band conundrum probably requires its own column.
When you can gum up Lester Bangs’ “bubblegum apothesis” better than “Weird Al” Yankovic you’ve got a great working formula. But Lili-Marlene Premilovich and her uncredited collaborator/partner Les Chappell don’t really sap “I Think We’re Alone Now” of its potency. They released it a year late to let two sevens clashing mark a hit-every-decade-by-the-year triptych (it was a hit for the Shondells in ’67 and for Tiffany in ’87; though Girls Aloud also fucked up the formula, releasing theirs in 2006), they stuffed a woozy oscillation behind the trademark guitar riff, they turn the Theremin into a poltergeist, and they throw fucking hilarious background vocals behind the chorus. Lovich herself is a great bridge between punk, post-punk, and Cyndi Lauper; she’s odd enough that bullshit like “One in a 1,000,000” sort of works, she’s adept enough that her several wordless hooks on “Lucky Number” are awesome, she’s concrete enough that any quirkiness doesn’t upset pretty songs like “Too Tender (to Touch)” or “Tonight.” This album feeds off of the Sparks’ sense of melodrama as much as it does the burgeoning new wave sensibility. Saying she was the most eclectic member of the Stiff roster isn’t saying much, but where the rest of those artists (Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Richard Hell) were defining New Wave, Lovich was already branching out, employing her art school-background and surrealist fantasies to create a heavily classical performance-based approach to a punk sensibility.
Beginning with a question that doesn't get answered and ending with a punchline concocted from Rolling Stones mockery and a Ross Gellar-fascination with books on evolution (what those dinosaur kids get up to!), Devo began to conquer the world through a series of contradictions. "Jocko Homo" is annoying on principle; they used to play it for upwards of twenty minutes just reciting the refrain: "are we not men?" According to Devo none of us are human; we're "mongoloids"; we wear hats and have jobs to deceive the neighbors who are also probably mongoloids so the whole act of deception is a waste of time. Our "Uncontrollable Urge" is our lineage of brain eating monkeys; our God did create us but he also used the monkeys in the first place; Darwin and Fundmentalists are wrong; we are all Devo's children. Scooping up and pairing down the motorik oscillations of Hawkwind and other mid-'70s synth groups, Devo employed electronics to accent their off-time, silly little songs. In the process they basically paved the way for most of the pop music of the '80s. Their emphasis on devolution (it's all in the name) was sparked by discussions between Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale about the Kent State shootings. After several shifting line-ups they recording this album with both of their brothers named Bob ("Bob 1" and "Bob 2" according to liners) and Alan Myers on drums. I mean, I don't even need to talk about the costumes to point out how weirdly cool these guys were, right?
If Devo laid the groundwork for the alternative pop of the eighties, Prince's work would become the focal point for the huge singles of the decade. Funky and soulful enough to remain associated with the great R&B, funk, and soul of the '60s and '70s while simultaneously embracing the minimal (but not minimalist) edge of punk and post-punk, Prince might be the best example of the what the centrifuge of new wave meant in the aftermath of punk. Dirty Mind might even be the best example of high quality pop music made with a punk aesthetic, given that the album is the original demos Prince recorded to field the album. Let's put it this way: Prince was the Timbaland of the '80s, except that his own material was as good as the huge singles he wrote for others. As an added bonus, Prince exploited the gender ambiguity of glam rock in ways that the New York Dolls would never have dreamed of: purposefully keeping his heritage and sexuality secret, Prince was white and black, straight and gay, masculine and feminine all at once. And uncompromising about it. Dirty Mind delivers what the title promises; other than "When You Were Mine" the tracks are about sex and lots of it. And while Prince was not the first artist to be so upfront about the point, he might have been the first pop artist who wrote pop songs about blow jobs, masturbation, and fucking that didn't exploit dancing as a metaphor. "Do It All Night" isn't a dancefloor song; it's about shimmying in the bedroom. "Head" tells the age old tale of Prince stealing a bride from who groom-to-be by promising her really good oral sex. "Sister" incenses incest, and even the ballad "Gotta Broken Heart Again" stops to point out how good the sex was. Even "Partyup," the anti-war song, offers getting down as the solution. Prince is pure mojo on this album; it's a mojo with nothing to prove except how quickly it will consume us all.
The db's were sort of left stranded, the songs of Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple too involved for popular consumption that demanded power pop in the vein of the Cars and the A's and the rhythmic work of Wil Rigby and Gene Holder not flashy or well-honed enough for fans of XTC. On the other hand, throw this album into a blender with Mission of Burma's Vs. (1983) and Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth (1980) and you basically have the formula (or parts thereof) for Yo La Tengo and every other band that sounds like Yo La Tengo. R.E.M. also cited the album as an influence, although R.E.M. never had the sense of humor this band had. Holsapple and Stamey, the McCartney and Lennon of indie song-writing, balanced each other perfectly; Holsapple's pop work on "Black and White," "Big Brown Eyes," and "Bad Reputation" (dude likes his "B"s) turns the techniques of power pop on their head while the grittier, complex compositions of Stamey (which bear traces of his work with Alex Chilton and Richard Lloyd) give the band some heft. "Espionage" is a mini-rock opera, "She's Not Worried" is gorgeous punk-Beatles faux-classical, and "Tearjerkin'" throws gorgeous vocal harmonies over a ragged off-time attack. The perfect template for an indie-pop album.
It shouldn't be hard to figure out why XTC is the favorite pop group of any out music fan (especially those of us who feel that giving the Beach Boys that honor requires we buy into the personality of Brian Wilson more than we'd like): these guys were fucking insane. Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding wrote songs that tackled class inequality, sexism, working class life, racial prejudice, and the classics with equal acumen while, along with Dave Gregory and Terry Chambers, they performed music that consumed dub, funk, prog, and pop music and regurgitated something that sounded entirely original. English Settlement was the apothesis of this formula, highlighting both the insanely tricky rhythm work of Moulding (bass) and Chambers (drums) that had coallesced on Drums and Wires (1979) and offering a double album of some of the most gorgeous songs Partridge and Moulding have written. Single "Senses Working Overtime" might be the best example of all cylinders working together, but watch how the band takes simple pop tunes like "Ball and Chain," 'Down in the Cockpit," and "Knuckle Down," messes them up, and yet still gets away with having these monstrosities come off like cheery pop tunes. Moulding's "Fly On the Wall" is a barrage of chiming organs and shifting rhythms; Partridge's "Yacht Dance" is a lovely acoustic ballad offset by Chamber's lush high hat work that he punctuates with a soaring snare. The tom fills between verses are hilarious. "Jason and the Argonauts" is like the evil twin of "Senses Working Overtime"; the latter is the sunny side of Partridge's personality while the former is deep, reflective, and edgey. The vocals are particularly stunning; they share the tightrope acrobatics of the instrumentation. The album concludes masterfully: "English Roundabout" is Moulding's most sophisticated track, reducing complex prog riffs and funk bass to an anchored reggae lilt (and check for the Sly/"I Wanna Take You Higher"-like vocal chanting at the end over the riff key changes). Patridge gives us "Snowman," a restained (for him) and gorgeous number where most of the lyrics are unintelligible. An album as gorgeous as it is funky; what other album can you say that about?
Assuming that Nick Lowe would just get impatient with the shit he'd cooked up for the next Attractions album, Costello got ex-Beatles associate Geoff Emerick in the producer's chair for Imperial Bedroom. Combined with the strife that plagued Costello's personal life at the time, the result was simultaneously Costello's lushest and most cynical work, both bravely reaching out to the fringes of pop production while delving inward into personal turmoil. Given that Costello's early work is essentially synonymous with post-punk new wave (as in, the most obvious successor to a punk lineage that includes Buddy Holly, surf music, LA garage, the Rolling Stones, and the Clash) the emotional growth here is astounding, but what's more astounding is how well Costello was able to integrate whatever emotional trip he was on into the coherent pop hookness of This Year's Model (1978) and Armed Forces (1979) and the genre excursions of Get Happy! (1980) and Trust (1981). The orginal recordings apparently sounded very much like Trust but under the guidance of Emerick Costello encouraged the band to experiment with various instrumentations and styles without regard for genre. "...And in Every Home" is the most obvious result: a 40-piece orchestra climbs around the band like kids grappling on a jungle gym. But the approach also bore fruit like the "The Long Honeymoon," a crossbreed of "The Girl from Ipanema" and the stock Hollywood sound cue for "French location," accordians and all. Or "Human Hands," which grafts a Led Zeppelin-via-Flaming Groovies intro onto a ska verse and a Billy Joel chorus. Or "Boy with a Problem," a throwback Pink Flamingos vibe with some wild Charlemagne Palestine piano. Or "Town Crier," a song which starts like Elton John, falls into Bruce Springsteen, and ends up somewhere around Frank Sinatra, a beautifully arranged string section bringing the album to a close, finally dispelling some of the misery so awesomely created with opener "Beyond Belief." Costello will likely never surpass this masterpiece, but it's not like he needs to either. This shit is so far ahead of the game it's unbelievable.
Factory Records' most notorius album cover is likely the all-sandpaper sleeve that graced Return of the Durutti Column (1980); the story about this album's cover is funnier, though. Tony Wilson, head of Factory, phoned the National Heritage Trust which first refused the use of Henri-Fantin LaTour's painting; Wilson asked who it belonged to and once he discovered that it was part of a trust left to the people of Britain replied, "well, the people of Britain now want it." It's hard to say which was more shocking: the album itself, the synths and beats of which deviated so sharply from the dismal concoctions of the ashes from which this pheonix had risen, Joy Division; or the single "Blue Monday" which came out around the same time and threw the dance world on its head. Fortunately, Power, Corruption & Lies doesn't really suffer for the single's non-inclusion. "5-8-6" proper rips just as hard as a dance track, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris knocking heads against canned beats and keeping the low end busy while Bernard Sumner and Gillian Gilbert rock the keys overtop. Opener "Age of Consent" sounds positively cheery compared to Closer (1980) as Sumner sings love song lyrics that don't mean much and the band gets giddy all over the place. If Movement (1981) was the band's eulogy for Ian Curtis, iPower, Corruption & Lies was the mission statement that laid the groundwork for their dominance through the mid-eighties. And even if New Order wasn't the only formerly punk/postpunk band to leave the nihilism of the late seventies behind the dramatic situation that led to their shift only heightened the catharsis their rebirth provided. This stuff is sheer crack.
Aside from the fact that Lauper was a serious mainstream pop artist who connected with a particular generation that believed both in the dismal state of politics in the Reagan/Thatcher era and also believed that it wasn't their job to do anything about it by doing things that most mainstream pop artists would never be able to get away with today; aside from the fact that unlike our current crop of pop ingenues she was over thirty when she noted that "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and it was fun...and political; aside from the fact that one of her biggest hits is about masturbation ("She-Bop"); aside from the fact that Miles Davis once covered the gorgeous "Time After Time"; aside from the fact that, with absolutely no irony, she covers Prince's "When You Were Mine" and she does so without changing any of the pronouns; aside from the fact that her cover of the Brains' "Money Changes Everything" is like Bruce Springsteen jamming with Devo; aside from the fact that "All Through the Night" makes me giddy; aside from all of these things She's So Unusual is so many kinds of awesome precisely because it collapses the boundaries between commercial viability, punk edge, and pop sensibility. Even the album's less well-known second half is fun; the reggae bounce of "Witness" and the synthetic squelches of "I'll Kiss You" work well. Only the excrutiating "He's So Unsual" -- which seems to do nothing more than prove that Lauper was "weird" -- is worth skipping. Whatever. Six pop classics v. a few mediocre songs still makes She's So Unsual leagues above the new Justin Timberlake record, and people seemed to like that a lot.
Either you buy into the dub-lite refractions and the crystal pop here or you don't. Because I'll admit it: I really like this album, but 11 tracks can grate no matter how interesting Green Gartside's collage of dub, sampling, R&B, and Gramsci is. And then there's the lyrics on the thing. Let's take "The Word Girl (Flesh & Blood)" as an example: "A name the girl outgrew / The girl was never real / She stands for your abuse / The girl is no ideal." This is followed by deliberations on how "the girl" became Jesus or something. Gartside isn't necessarily less political here than he was on his earlier post-punk work; he's just more interested in turning phrases and wordplay. Stuffing those words inside a blanket of session musicians and sampled material, Gartside creates some of the most skittish pop imaginable: a shifting array of polemic declarations and expressions of love as varied as the styles of music used to float them. His bright tenor/falsetto soars above the mix, augmented with backup vocalists and effects. My girlfriend Leah describes it as "cheesy" and that's a fine conclusion; what makes the album essential despite that cheesiness is the fact that Gartside is making early stabs at incorporating hip hop culture into mainstream music and even if the overall sound is debatable in process he's fairly successful. In other words, this isn't an artist saying, "how can I make my hip hop song?" It's an artist saying, "how can I make the techniques of hip hop work for me?" Get your AKAI out and let it recognize.
I don't know how to talk about this album. I can tell you it's in my top ten of all time; I can tell you it's beautiful; I can tell you it's exhibit A in my (lengthy and probably boring) argument concerning why Kid A (2000) isn't all that and a bag of chips. I can tell you that it contains my favorite use of harmonica ever. I can tell you that I like it more than Laughing Stock (1991) when I'm listening to it and Laughing Stock more than it when I'm listening to Laughing Stock (I'm using this one here because Laughing Stock really sheds any trace of new waveisms). I can tell you that the shakers and rides that enter five minutes into "The Rainbow" are spacious; I can tell you that the fluctuations between piano, organ, and harmonica immediately after are wonderful; I can tell you that they linger the perfect amount of time before the kick hits again. I can tell you that this album may have provided one part of the post-rock template but it's also the epitomy of a new wave grown and tired by the end of the '80s, still dealing with conservative governments and increasing wealth disparity and a realization that the nihilism of the '70s maybe had a point and that the reckless political disavowels of the '80s had only allowed religious fundamentalism to gain strength. Maybe that's why Mark Hollis went so spiritual on this album, hocking Eden and heaven around like shafts of light through the broiling clouds of music he and bandmates Lee Harris, Paul Webb, and Tim Friese-Greene concoct with a host of guest musicians. The glacial pace of the songs invites people to consider this album pretty and soothing but I don't get that; the dynamics on this album have yet to be captured by any band since because they're built from contrast more than distortion pedals. Throwing the sound work of experimental artists over the guitar riff from "Heroin" and the sonic textures of Genesis allows this album to be the intersection in a Venn diagram of some many at-odds genres. And the restraint of the band is amazing: consider how much less intimidating "Desire" would be if that crunch guitar entered at full volume? If the harmonica was replaced with guitar feedback instead of the wildly vibrant work of Mark Feltham? If the anticipating-Califone acoustics weren't relegated to the edges of the channels? And when the band finally crashes into a beat at 2:39 there's fucking shakers and hockey organs and it lasts for like 20 seconds and then it's back to the silence. I mean, the whole album has shiver-inducing moments like that, and chronicling them would hardly actually explain what experiencing them is like. If Brian Wilson wrote teenage symphonies to God, Talk Talk was asking him for his resignation letter. They had a better way. Plus there are oboes and clarinets and bassoons, which are like my heroin.
The term “rock in opposition” (R.I.O.) was coined in the late seventies. It was the name of a festival held by the band Henry Cow (at that point pretty much on its last legs as Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, and Slapp Happy import Dagmar Krause were about to commit to Art Bears exclusively; also, on a tangent, love that Krause is the first fully accredited band member/artist to make a repeat appearance in this column) in 1978 in London that featured several avant-rock bands who believed the record industry was too interested in profit and not enough interested in fostering musical community and political consciousness. Of course, this wasn’t exactly a new complaint from those on the fringe of progressive rock.
As I mentioned the last time we visited prog, my first real experience with R.I.O. (or the less specific “avant-rock” or “avant-prog”) was the Mothers of Invention album Ahead of Their Time (a 1993 issue of a 1968 concert, also in London). A young music fan in grade ten, having no preconceptions of what I was going to hear, I was pretty surprised by what I did: half-jazz, half-rock instrumentals defined by weird horn work and odd time signatures (at that point, I think “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues,” “Money,” and all those Led Zeppelin songs that Bonham refused to not play 4/4 during were likely the weirdest signatures I was used to), bizarre humor that I sort of got the politics to, all intercut with serial-based chamber music and a developing narrative about the band breaking up. It was a weird way to get into the band; the album’s a bit sloppy, and the release was more for historical purposes than anything else, but I quickly worked on getting all the early Mothers albums. Zappa’s composition and wild production provide a natural point of inception for the genre. His equal love of Edgar Varese, Eric Dolphy, and Johnny “Guitar” Watson define the basic template for R.I.O.: taking free and atonal jazz and classical serialism as inspiration to mix the avant-garde (with varying degrees of seams) into rock music. His band, which couldn’t always perform the music he composed, forced him to use tape manipulation and other studio tricks to achieve the results he wanted.
Later variations tend to place less and less emphasis on the “rock” part of the whole equation. But even if results vary, the clear link between the avant-garde and R.I.O. unites these artists against the more traditional classical tendencies (apeing Brahms instead of Stravinsky, I mean) of their more traditional colleagues in art rock and symphonic prog. Another important link was the emphasis most of these bands placed on technology and the studio. Maybe that’s another influence of Zappa, but especially as the genre mingled with no wave and post-punk in a post-This Heat world, some avant-prog artists became increasingly reliant on technology as well as chops.
This is my bread and butter in a lot of ways. Avant-prog tends to blur the lines of all the other best music I like; it’s “out” music in the best of senses, interested in the way sound can work, experimenting with those boundaries but never letting experimentation get in the way of song craft. If you can get onboard with the rhythmic foolery and the wild instrumentation you’ll find a world of wild music that almost never feels like it’s talking down to you (which is sometimes the case with bands like Yes and King Crimson); these bands don’t want you to be geeked at how brilliant they are so much as they want you to join in and get out with them. Which is why this music is far more nuanced, humorous, and political than art rock or symphonic prog. Like the work of the serialists and free jazz musicians it aspires to, the point is always about employing and parodying a whole range of artistic impulses to create a venue where political and personal impulses can be engaged with. There is (almost) always a message with avant-rock: be yourself in the face of a world of systemic oppression. It’s not always clean, there’s a lot to criticize in the way those politics are presented; however, the basic premise of post-war avant-garde is always present: drag the art out into the streets and make it mean something. Instead of trying to create evidence of the progress of culture, try to create a springboard from which culture can proceed.
Poor Lyndon Johnson, primary victim of three albums from Frank Zappa. Here he starts off the album sick and pissed off that nobody likes his policies (the Tet was still a few months away when the album was released, so once again Zappa proves himself weirdly capable of anticipating public opinion) before being chained to “Louie Louie”-remake “Plastic People,” a song just as critical of the police and government as it is of hippies and beats. Zappa was in the process of extricating himself from the Los Angeles freak scene; he was already in New York as the album was being released; his frustration at the Pandora’s Box riots on Sunset and the hyperbolic-but-apolitical aftermath (by his estimation, anyway) is highly evident throughout the album. As is the fact that MGM gave the band no budget to record the thing after the dismal sales of Freak Out! (1966). The result sounds like a collage, Zappa manipulating the tapes to even greater affect than he had with the band’s debut, band members shouting “wanna buy a pencil?” mid-song, fucked takes (listen to everybody laughing when Ray Collins ad libs the lyrics in “Duke of Prunes”) used regardless, and new band members Don Preston and Bunk Gardner (who, unlike the former members, could read music) running wild all over the place. The message of the album (so awesomely vocalized by Jimmy Carl Black during “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” when he rich-kid drones “TV dinner by the pool / I’m so glad I finished school” is simple: play by the rules, get nowhere unless you already have money. Free yourself (and not with drugs, meditation, or any other hippy ideas; just decide you’re free) and create a whole new set of rules. Collins may have hated singing about vegetables, Roy Estrada’s R&B bass may have already been evidencing cracks when playing on stuff like “Son of Suzie Creamcheese,” and the main theme from Stranvinsky’s “Petruska” may sound absolutely ludicrous paired with a song about high school ostracism, but the drawbacks are far outweighed by the successful turns. Absolutely Free remains the best example of Zappa’s pre-Woodstock politics, and especially his interpretation of the avant-garde. Sure, we can drag the museums into the streets -- we can make everything absolutely free -- but how then are we gonna convince vegetable teenagers that “free” isn’t the same as “worthless”? With muffins, is the answer, although the real answer is: when you melt everything together like this, it all rocks.
When that opening dissonance cuts beneath Don Van Vliet’s gorgeous melody (“My smile is stuck / I can’t go back to your frown land!”) the basic formula for this album is pretty clear: hot hooks obfuscated by tentacles of music. A method compounded by the fact that many of these gorgeous melodies were recorded away from the band in a separate room, live, where Vliet had to rely on the vague sound leakage through the walls. It’s obtuse shit, and consequently Trout Mask Replica has had its proponents slinging around any number of theories about why it’s good over the years: it’s philosophically erudite once you get past the dense imagery of his lyrics; the music sounds like free jazz but it’s actually rehearsed; you just don’t get what a genius Beefheart is! Yes and no. It is a work of genius, and John Peel was pretty close when he said that (at the time he said this anyway) “if there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work.” But it has its drawbacks, too. The album goes on for an eternity, for one, which is only a problem insofar as the difficulty of the music makes this one of those albums that is a strain to sit with. The sheer uniformity of vision (there are no breaks here; it’s all wild) is both breathtaking and maddening, and should you choose to unpack the image-laden lyrics (referencing everything from politics to Steve Reich to in jokes with producer Zappa about jellies) it’s quite the exercise. On the other hand, even as it unfolds deliberately and unstoppably at you it’s also built with a variety of ways into the euphoria: stray garage licks, free jazz, Vliet’s blues vocals, and those pristine, gorgeous melodies. Gorgeous and strange, Trout Mask Replica is still a unique document almost 50 years later. Who could improve on this?
Heh. What to say about this album? It’s a collage of old rock tunes reconstructed and overdubbed with new instrumentation and vocals, packaged in art that features Dick Clark as a Nazi leader holding a carrot, and it’s by a band that…well, almost 50 years later, and we still don’t know who’s in it. So it sounds awesome, it’s about the repression of the music industry, and it’s fun to play at parties (as long as you don’t mind people getting leaving because they’re pissed off). The album ends with what may be the most genius gesture of parody in the history of music, playing the vocal melody of “Sympathy for the Devil” as a guitar solo to the round out chorus of “Hey Jude.” Both classic tunes that stand respectively in our collective consciousness as the most pessimistic and optimistic anthems of the sixties (not saying they are; just assuming what a pole of a Superbowl halftime show might get you), the way the Residents blend them together creates the most cogent eulogy for a dead decade possible: the point is that all music is absolute fluff, even as it moves you.
Belgium’s Aksak Maboul would be a late addition to the R.I.O. collective; however, their masterpiece was recorded before the collective was formed. One of the earliest groups to employ drum machines and samples (the latter technique would be far more developed on their second album), the music here is collage work, a series of short mostly instrumental pieces that bleed into one another. Main members Marc Hollander and Vincent Kenis engage in a deconstuctive dialogue with all sorts of musical styles, throwing African rhythms alongside gypsy interludes and serialist horn fanfares. It’s unlike the other albums on this list because it doesn’t quite have the band feel that makes the other work; on the other hand, hearing the drum machine crank up an early disco beat on “Three Epileptic Folk Dances” makes up for that. The composition here is incredibly tight; the trace of 20th century composition is everywhere, both obviously in the arrangement of the woodwinds and brass and less obviously in the minimal passage of the less ornate pieces. The touch of minimalism is most obvious on “Mastoul Alakefak,” a beautiful track that unwinds peacefully. In fact, much of the album is peaceful, which may be its only drawback. The folded way Hallander composed these pieces could use a bit of upset; as it is, the album stands as one of the first successful attempts to create pop-patterned music based on world and serial forms.
A Swedish group originally part of the R.I.O. collective, Samla Mammas Manna had changed their name to Zamla Mammaz Manna by the time they released the sublime Schlagerns Mystic. The album was a culmination for the band; moving away from the more typical prog modes of albums like Klossa Knapitatet (1974) and fully into their weird would of hinted-at circus soap opera and childhood despair. The title translates to “The Mystery of Modern Music”; the mystery is, apparently, the reason why kids are singing crazy folk tunes like the children of the corn (it’s all tape effects, I think, similar to the stuff Zappa did in the early years). For those of you impressed by the way Beirut employs gypsy ideas to accent his pop songs, here’s an album that takes Swedish folk and carnies as its starting pointing and proceeds to musically capture dark humor with an effortless that is consistently astounding. Like, if I was ever going to soundtrack a movie of Geek Love, here’s the inspiration. It sounds fluffy if you give it a superficial pass, but couched in that performance of circus life are all the tears of all the clowns, the pain of swallowing swords, and the secret masochist existence of the xylophone. This is also an example of what R.I.O. means in conventional terms: Lars Hollmer, Hans Bruniusson, Eino Haapala, and Lars Krantz aren’t really doing anything technically astounding (they could, and the live disc För Äldre Nybegynnare the Silence reissue is paired with certainly makes that clear, as does their early work) so much as mediating their instrumental prowess through concept to create skewed pop tunes. By which I mean, the genius of R.I.O. doesn’t always lie in technical complexity; it’s just as much about uprooting concepts about what rock is. I say: “rock, thy name is ‘Asphaltsong’.”
Evil? Or just trying to be? Critics of these Belgian avant-rockers have argued that the “evil” is concocted to the point of absurdity, that the acoustic nature of the group deprives it of a full spectrum of tonal possibilities, or that the album sacrifices a lot for the attempted tone. I’m (perhaps surprisingly) pretty equivocal about it. There are pretentious moments, but there are also moments of sublime beauty, and while Univers Zero may not have been the very first band to pull shit like this, they’re certainly one of the first to pull it for so long. In a lot of ways, the album resembles the burgeoning work of Nurse With Wound and Coil; it is, especially in it’s opening moments, very sparse and overwhelming, as interested in the things that move in the shadows as it is in shadows themselves. Bandleader and drummer Daniel Denis plays with all sorts of textures throughout, especially once the forward momentum gets going about 9 minutes into the epic opener. Bassist Guy Segers throws in some laughable metal vocals (probably the worst choice on the album, simply because they aren’t very good). Guitarist and keybaordist Roger Trigaux plays a lot of nice accompaniement but never really takes over. The stars, however, are woodwind player Michel Berckmans and string player Patirck Hannapier. The interplay between the two (which sounds like more with all the overdubbing and mixing, courtesy of Etienne Conod) earns the band their relationship to their stated inspirations in Stravinsky and Bartók. Of course, that also raises questions about whether this music is as good as, say, “Rites of Spring” -- or at least as good as a small ensemble can make them. My answer is, I think, that it’s just different. Heresie is not, as some have suggested, the scariest music ever set to tape (hello, Homotopy to Marie!). Instead, it’s a gorgeous album that skirts all sorts of genres in its quest to redefine 20th century classical music in rock in roll clothing. Do they succeed? Not necessarily, but it’s a lot of fun watching them try to get there.
While Hopes and Fears (1978) was a Henry Cow spin-off album (the rest of the band wasn’t interested in playing the new vocal-based music Cutler and Frith were working on with Krause; however, they agreed to help record the first Art Bears album), Winter Songs was the first Art Bears album as an unaccompanied trio. Frith wrote the music and Cutler the lyrics (based on carvings from the Amien Cathedral in France) for each of the fourteen songs on the album. These are short songs; the longest just breach 3 and a half minutes. The recording process ups that intensity; the band would catch the sound of the track and commit it to tape directly, refusing to add any embellishments in post. The result is a series of tightly wound tunes that delve into the myths and memories of human ability and hubris. People note that the album isn’t as overtly political as Hopes and Fears; I’d argue that it’s political in a different way, employing religious allegory and obtuse concepts of divinity to highlight the same truths about the human condition as the band’s other work. But the vocals don’t matter so much as the way Krause delivers them, sneering and stolid as she seems to laugh at the “he”s that are the protagonist of each track. Cutler undercuts her deliberations with the kind of drum work that shows exactly why this band and This Heat are the porous boundary between R.I.O. and post-punk (and why no wave and out music in general were guided by this late-seventies/early-eighties sound for so long. Frith is a monster all over the album, exploiting guitar, bass, violin, viola, xylophone, and all manner of keyboards to color the sound extravagantly. It’s actually a bit awing how this album manages to be so internal and explosive at the same time (much of the credit should go to Conod, here again employing his beautiful editing and mixing); the instruments sound like they’re eating one another and growing fat on the protein. A perfect example of how a band can be experimental and erudite at the same time.
It’s patently ludicrous that this album has yet to see reissue when pretty much every other Boredoms afterthought (with the recent Super Roots collection out) has seen the light of day. And while used copies of Shimmy Discs’ Soul Discharge/Early Boredoms comp are relatively easy to find and generally not too expensive the catch is that the album is featured as one uninterrupted track. Come on Vice, or Birdman, or Very Friendly, or whatever: buy this shit up and get it out. Noise rock and no wave wallow in R.I.O. flavored scatology, where the tautology of the moment is that bathos is serious shit and body (or bawdy) humor is high poetry. Boredoms have always exemplified avant-rock: their push/pull frenetics offset by the glee with which they attack them, their concept of what exact avant means constantly changing, and their long trip toward transcendence mediated by the things they keep with them on the journey. In other words, there’s hella continuity between Soul Discharge and Vision Creation Newsun (2000); if you don’t see it, or if you think the early shit is too infantile you’re missing stuff. Especially since without understanding the boorish tricksterism of their punk-tinged history Super Æ (1998) and Vision Creation Newsun basically amount to high grade jam band routes; the proof of why they’re better than that shit exists solely in the way they inflate the lukewarm humor of such -head groups into something wholly divine and utterly bullshit at the same time. Boredoms, more than perhaps any other band in existence, get that hard core antipathy is performance, and that onstage any other performance gets equal weight. It has to, because in this rush of instrumentation may sound chaotic or spontaneous, but the patterns are all R.I.O., launching Yoshimi’s drums and Eye’s vocals and Hila’s “buzz fuzz mix” and God Mama and No,1 Y and Human Rich Vox and “psychoalphadiscobetaudioaquadoloop sound” at you like the “jam sucker-hucker” you are. And that sense of self-awareness (even at the top of the pyramids they were building in the late nineties) is why Boredoms are such a fantastic group, and trump every psychedelic head-checking community-of-life bullshit hippie that’s ever picked up a guitar. They weren’t offering anything but sound; it’s always your job to interpret what it means.
I picked up Disco Volante used in a hawk shop sometime in 1996. Used because I was hesitant (their self-titled debut was so mindlessly stupid); bought because I was curious (mindless, yes, but also weirdly ambitious). Barring lame duck opener “Everybody I Went to High School with is Dead” (which doesn’t even get good in hindsight) and the awkward instrumental suite “The Bends” the album was a kick in the guts. Still is, in some ways, even if I’ve grown into misgivings about the band as I’ve hinted at in other reviews. In part that’s because it’s a band full of people (or at least two people) who have made no bones of their dislike for one another, which always throws a wrench into Mike Patton/Trey Spruance synergy for me. In part it’s because of the way the band worked: sure, they got how to use the studio, but every time they’re doing something cool it’s like they had to toss six other cool things on top of it just to highlight the coolness. The music on this album is about three parts in-joke (weird, since the lyrics are so ludicrously serious), three parts studio manipulation, three parts conceit, and absolutely no sense of restraint or real interest in writing songs that live for anything other than the moment. That’s fine, of course, except that it makes it hard to root for a band that obviously already knows just how cool they are, which in turn makes it hard to get inside this music. You watch it unfold and it’s brilliant, but don’t expect to feel anything. All of that said, if you’re not in a feely mood you could do way worse. “Chemical Marriage” and “Ma Meeshka Mow Skwoz” are obvious indications of Spruance’s burgeoning Secret Chiefs 3 project, tying Middle Eastern scales to Patton’s weird vocalisms and Spruance’s surf-guitar fetish. His closer, “Merry Go Bye Bye,” is a rollicking tribute to Elvis, Jan and Dean, and Slayer at the same time. Patton’s contributions are mostly co-written; “Desert Search for Techno Allah” again driven by Spruance’s interest in Eastern music while “Violenza Domestica” employs gypsy rhythms to take the sting out of hearing Patton shove the microphone down his throat while intoning “escolta.” Clinton McKinnon shows up with “After School Special”; a needed frivolous break in the middle of the insanity. It’s Trevor Dunn who steals the show, however (somebody get him out of fucking Fantomas and into something awesome): his opener might bite the biscuit but both parts of “Sleep” and the sublime “Platypus” are the album’s secret weapons. They are the only songs that manage to successfully sound heartfelt in ways the rest of the album denies you, even if each represents the most heavy material on the album. Think of this as the ADD version of how R.I.O. ends up post-punk, no wave, and with readily available digital technology.
And, on the other hand, Ruins. Cut from the same cloth as Mr. Bungle (associated with John Zorn, indebted to the Boredoms, Naked City, Painkiller, Samla Mannas Manna, Magma, and the rest of prog); wearing the clothing an entirely different way. This is more like the stuff Patton tries to make with Fantomas; that band isn’t really succeeding, but at least Patton had the sense to sign Ruins for 2002’s wicked Tzomborgha. So, basically: bass and drums duo (Ryuichi Masuda and bandleader Tatsuya Yoshida respectively) attempting (and succeeding) to sound like Magma and Samla Mannas Manna; vocals sung in Yoshida’s variant of kobaia; insane. I mean, it’s not really like Magma in the sense that the jazz is replaced by hardcore, but that sounds awesome too, right? The Ruins had been around for almost a decade by the time they released this album; it marks the culmination of many ideas in their repertoire (they would soon launch off the deep end with their next releases, ending up farther away from rock and closer to free improv. Sort of. I dunno; it’s complicated). Anyway: it is brutal, funky, and proggy at the same time that it exhibits the best ideas of noise rock, zeuhl, and no wave; it has painstakingly composed songs and free improv moments; both musicians are fucking fabulous; and for all those reasons it pretty much defies description. One way to look at it is to again think of the humor. With everything else going on, it’s easy to miss the ludicrous rock giant riffs Masuda throws in by chording the bass. These are rock junkies at the same time that everything they do is anti-rock. Another way to get into it is to hear how clever both band members are in their instrumentation. I was fortunate to see Yoshida on Khoenjihyakkei’s very brief North American tour last month; dude is fucking vicious on the kit at the same time that the sounds he create expand like punch lines through the mix. Every snare hit is clever repartee; every delayed snare hit is a taunt; every fill under the vocals is punctuation. He’s inviting you into the world of Ruins; the scariest hilarity you’ll ever encounter. Bottom line: I don’t get how you could possibly make rock music any more complicated than this. Period.
For people of my generation or thereabouts who listened to this stuff at every sock hop and dance they attended between 1988-1995, new jack (or jill) swing provided our public cultural soundtrack. The grunge revolution, excepting maybe “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” was nowhere to be seen at dances. And while it’s easy to dismiss this shit in favor of the hip hop that came before or after, I’d make arguments.
First, the vast popularity of hip hop in the late 1990s was fueled by the commercial acceptance of new jack swing groups, many of whom were, at least in part, hip hop groups. For many kids, MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice might have been the first hip hop you heard, and even if I had a cassette copy of Straight Outta Compton (1988) hidden in my bedroom I never really understood the difference beyond the general level of cuss words. And, I mean, obviously the Canadian Maritimes weren’t exposed to a lot of underground hip hop in this period, so I’m giving a specific frame of reference here, but new jack swing is what prepared audiences for the hip hop commercial revolution.
Second, just think how weird it was to be 13 and 14 and hearing tracks like “Creep” and “Let’s Talk About Sex” and “Waterfalls” and “None of Your Business.” Though many of the men involved in new jack swing were performing the usual industry-accepted amount of sexism (“never trust a big butt and a smile”) the women were creating incredibly progressive music that we were being exposed to on a regular basis. I’m not saying we got it, necessarily, but I bet there aren’t many people of my generation who couldn’t still drop the lyrics to “Let’s Talk About Sex” if asked, which is pretty fucking impressive given the fear of AIDS at the time. Here’s a little tribute to some of the best/most fun tracks from this period.
“Candy Girl” shunted and King of Stage (1986) forgotten, with this single Brown willfully sought to mature his new jack swagger out of the doldrums by sidelining Don’t Be Cruel (1988) producers L.A. Reid and Babyface in favor of new jack swing godfather Teddy Riley and producer Gene Griffin. Lyrically, the song is all about Brown’s wicked ultra bad-boy image -- the same one that ex-New Edition producer Maurice Starr would attempt to outdo the same year with Donnie “he’s hanging from the train’s ceiling!” Walhberg -- and also, of course, his attempt to jump on the bandwagon of Michael Jackson’s wicked new R&B trope: don’t talk about the money or business of stars. Does it even need to be mentioned that “Gossip Folks” is the only song that has ever made this kind of shit work? Musically, though, it’s hard to deny the pinball pinions of the music, collapsing soul, hip hop, and R&B together in that now-familiar new jack style. Blurping synth lines end in faux-scratching, drum machines are stark and quarter-note pinned (kick/snare/kick/snare), and Brown raps badly over a vocoder. It’s the chorus we come back for, all robot angst and grinding vocals. And fine, I can’t resist: uh…Bobby? I know it was 1988, and I know it was your money, but you really shouldn’t have spent it on all those pairs of severely pleated pants.
Ex-the Time band mates Jimmy Jam (James Harris III) and Terry Lewis pulled a fascinating turn from Control (1986), honing music to match Jackson’s new, stark political image. Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989), whatever its faults, was a pop star bombshell when it came out, even if Jackson realized her audience would only have the patience to sit through three or four tracks about a cosmic 1990s future where everybody dressed like they were in an Air Force funk squad. “Escapade,” cloistered near the back to keep it as far away from the serious business of the front half as possible, is one of the finest exercises in melody that exists, and more discerning listeners will know that pretty much every Jackson single of any worth since has followed the exact same formula: un-grooved intro, drums kick in, frank and conversational lyrics about how Jackson needs somebody to love, semi-related pre-chorus about finding solace in this relationship, semi-related chorus where the title of the song is sung. All the way up the “Ventura Highway.” “Escapade” is the tonic of Jackson’s musical existence: the faux-classical string synths that open with the pre-chorus’s melody (that wonderful, brilliant pop melody) haven’t quite aged well, but the sustained cymbal wash that spirals over the slightly modified kick/snare quarter-note bonanza, the hiccupping bass undercupping the part where a chorus of Janets gate out “Es / Ca / Pade,” and that flourishing hit that punctuates lines like a tricked-out period...all perfect. Cash your paychecks and get down.
To every white college kid who learned the lyrics to this song and sang it at bars when it came on and thought “hey -- I can rap” or, worse, decided they should sing it at karaoke? This song is like the elephant in the room of your life. And, no mistake, it’s a fun song, and a room of kids screaming “yellow” and “hello” at one another before swigging their drinks again? Priceless. Kind of pathetic, but priceless all the same. Anyway, you know the drill: pedestrian rhymes of every salt-of-the-earth sexist-but-not-overtly-malicious assumptions “the fellas” have about “the ladies” are arranged by Marvin Young to map out a basic plan of attack for men (possibly the geeky kind) to get laid: get money, get attention, bust a move. Which begs the question: why is it always guys singing this song to other guys? It’s like a fratboy HoYay! apocalypse whenever it plays. In fact, I heartily suggest you all hit the local college pub and watch two drunk guys scream, “there’s one more girl you won’t be getting!” at one another while grinning like idiots. Could it actually be that this song is entirely responsible for a lot of people not getting laid?
Another too-sincere and therefore hilarious assessment of the evils of women, peppered with hilarious inconsistencies -- the first verse is warning the “girl” against the singer’s strange mind, while the rest is about how the girl is “poison”? Who’s actually bad? “Poison” might just musicially be the best thing new jack swing ever had to offer. I mean, why is this not universally considered the most awesome track of the ‘90s? The only place I’ve heard it (besides my house) is Big Primpin’, the local GLBT hip hop night. It kills there, everybody screaming “never trust a big butt and a smile,” everybody just tweaking on that wicked drum sample. Ex-Brown New Edition associates completely failed to capitulate on their image anywhere but with this, their first single. But even if people remember Turk doing this more than Rickey Bell, Michael Bivins, and Ronnie DeVoe, the song is way better than the cultural novelty it’s been relegated to. Well, maybe not DeVoe’s rap. But Dr. Freeze’s use of Kool G. Rap is delicious, and that bass line under the chorus after the break is better than anything on OK Computer.
Likely intended as the epitome of the “typical” (read: Hollywood inculcated) female fantasy, and almost certainly concocted to fill some bullshit focus group demographic lacuna not currently occupied by the New Kids on the Block juggernaut, Color Me Badd might just be the cheesiest band that has ever existed. They were doggedly promoted throughout the early ‘90s; it’s quite hilarious in hindsight, actually, when you consider that “I Wanna Sex You Up” is the most well known track from the New Jack City soundtrack, or you note the obvious concentration the actors of Beverly Hills 90210 had to employ to act like Color Me Badd was the bestest thing ever. And then there’s the way they united a triptych of romantic manliness with a brilliant marketing plan. Single one: sex us up, even though “I Wanna Sex U Up”’s sex is more chaste than Mischa “Marissa Cooper” Barton’s brief fling with lesbianism, done in secret (“disconnect the phone”), and physically inconceivable (are they asleep or what?). Single two: “I Ador Mi Amor,” but the name doesn’t matter; it’s a ballad and it’s vaguely Latin. Single three, “All 4 Love,” panders to sentiment, but it’s still my favorite of the three, falling neatly into a short list of unintentionally awesome tracks that meld brilliant pop R&B (here chopped into new jack swing) with the silliest lyrics imaginable. Read as camp, this is the best kind of pop single, and is far more comical than Milli Vanilli could ever hope to be. I’ll leave you with the words of Kevin Thorton: “I like a girl that loves romance. Someone I can cherish, hold and who doesn’t mind taking walks with me on the beach, or even gazing into my eyes underneath a starlit night as I read her poetry and express exactly what she means to me.” Hee. That “bad” really does need the extra “d,” what?
If all they get is “better than Kriss Kross” as their legacy, well, what can you do? What’s with the Cleopatra fanfare at the beginning? What’s with the awesome paint covered overalls? Where’d you meet? “At the playground…y’know!” I love it when the newspaper in the video says “second verse” right after Michael Bivins says “second verse” while sitting all casual being interviewed mid-song about how great these kids were. I mean, sure, Diana Ross presents the Jackson 5 (1969) started this trend, but not like this: Bivins says “all you people out there riding in cars”; the video flashes to the group driving go-carts. Chris Sellers, Dave Shelton, Romell "RoRo" Chapman, G.A. Austin, and brothers Marliss and Demetrius Pugh may have been cuter than they were talented, but their story is kind of tragic: they never get the girl. Tears. Seriously, people. When one of the kids tells Dallas Austin to flip the track? The ryh -- the ryh -- the ryh -- the ryh --
Mark C. Rooney and Mark “Prince Markie Dee” Morales transform the wicked drum groove from Audio Two’s “Top Billin’” into something sentimental, but no matter how romantic this song is it won’t erase the way those horn synths encroach the panned channels like the song is being strangled. And that might be the reason this song was so affecting: it’s pretty, but everything that surrounds it gives it a quiet edge, pushing Blige’s vocals upwards above the storm. The piano sample looks patently ludicrous when laid across the stark post-Ryhthm Nation world of the video, produced at the height of baseball jersey etiquette. There isn’t a whole lot to say about this song, really. It warmed the radio waves for hip hop, it gave soul music an edge it hadn’t had since Ann Peebles (who would get her own retconning a couple years later on the Missy/Timbaland joint “The Rain”), and though Blige is only one person, this turfs any En Vogue-ism you can name. Except maybe “Whatta Man.”
Cheryl James, Sandra Denton, and Deidre Roper are the shit when it comes to making politics fun to dance to. The video sort of pretends this is a “My Prerogative” kind of jam, but really it’s much simpler than a lash out at the media: “opinions are like assholes and everybody’s got one.” People hummed and hawed over the mud wrestling or the sex of the video, missing the point: the female body, like any body, interracial relationships, hairstyles, fucking, leopard print underwear, and homosexuality, isn’t up for debate or surveillance. Simultaneously the most confrontational political and engagingly funky of Salt N’ Pepa’s tracks, even Spinderella’s verse is pretty decent. Plus, she’s the funniest to watch in video, completely sincerely licking her fingers and waving them over her nipples while her body moves like she’s been possessed. How could anybody watch this and not get that they’re making fun of this shit? People also argue over whether Very Necessary (1993) sold out the promise of Blacks’ Magic (1990) for commercial success, but “None of Your Business” is a brilliant culmination of the process through which these women, led by James, took hold of the reigns of the group (1986). This ain’t no “Push It.”
The horns that open the track are recognizable anywhere, and the track itself, while shedding the brilliant fun of earlier singles like “Baby Baby Baby” and “What About Your Friends,” displays the vast growth of Dallas Austin’s production style. Austin also wrote the song, which does nothing to explain the cache he wields with Orrin Hatch, but in any case the track tells an eye-for-an-eye story where Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins reveals that she knows her man is cheating on her, so she cheats on him. Watkins’s low voice was a huge boon for the group; doubled with Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas’s soulful croon, the vocal range of TLC was insane. And while Thomas can sing well (see “No Scrubs”) her ability to riff around the melody and raise the song from the murky depths of Watkin’s voice was the hallmark of the classic TLC single. Here, that triple “oh / ah” is punctuated by the horn samples that flutter all over the stereo range, and the absence of a Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes rap keeps the focus on the claustrophobic production. In 1994 this was pretty radical shit (“If he knew the things I did / he couldn’t handle it / and I choose to keep him protected”) wrapped into a new jack swing package that was in the process of molting, hinting at the kind of music that would follow.
And new jack swing matures. By the time “Fantasy” was released hip hop proper was beginning to receive more widespread play on popular radio, and the trappings of R&B were no longer necessary to make hip hop palatable for a commercial audience. Meanwhile, Missy Elliot and Timbaland’s first album was just around the corner, and the Backstreet Boys and others were hot on those heels. The rock insurgence begun by Nevermind (1991) was subsiding, and so the mid-1990s was a strange spot where almost any kind of music could be and was played on the radio and at video dances. “Fantasy” was the first indication of what Color Me Badd promised: that new jack swing was destined to grow old with its audience as commercial hip hop took root in culture, no matter what “No Diggity,” released the same year by Teddy Riley’s new group Blackstreet, would have you believe. The song itself is mindless fun, murder on a dance floor, and full of Carey’s trademark higher-than-heaven vocals. The drums and guitar are pure funk-fueled new jack swing, but check the Dre G-funk (1992) accents in the corners. Too old to rock and roll and too young to die, this is how new jack swing ended up: just another “Escapade” with updated production. If you can lodge this track into a well prepared set at just the right moment? It’s the best dance song ever.
I don’t know anybody who only listens to industrial music unless the only thing they listen to is Nine Inch Nails. And maybe Skinny Puppy and KMFDM. And maybe a lot of people wouldn’t even call those bands industrial. And most people aren’t 15 for their entire lives. So let me start by saying that this column is about the long view, where we examine the routes music took to get to a concept of industrial music and a few of the hurdles it leapt immediately after. Of course, tracing industrial precedents and the genre itself is complex because industrial music is as reliant on a kind of gothic, medium-less tone as it is a normally-but-not-always adoption of electronic techniques. By which I mean, the only real gauge for industrial music is whether or not it sounds industrial, combined with some basic concessions to the kinds of electronic acts that paved the ground upon with industrial, komische, and Psychic TV sprung from. So it’s pretty meaningless at the same time that it’s pretty easy to point out.
Which is why talking about industrial music sort of necessitates a historical view mediated by the use of the term in the first place: “industrial music” was, when it was first lobbed around, a term meant to denote the music of artists rostered at Industrial Records. So it really just meant Throbbing Gristle. And no 15-year-olds listen to Throbbing Gristle.
I tend to think about industrial music more as a mix of several different ideas: it is predicated upon ambient concepts of sound without accepting the limitations ambient imposes upon music. In other words, it goes for the same gut-change tonal shifts that ambient goes for even though it’s pretty clear that Nurse with Wound sounds nothing like Eliane Radigue. They share the same headspace though, I think, and the process of recording industrial music, no matter how loud it might be, is similar to ambient: it’s about repetition and minute changes, and both genres are stealing that headspace from minimalism even as industrial kicks the pulse on the back of industry. Industrial is also, normally, influenced by the metallic sheen of krautrock groups like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk; however, I’d also suggest industrial reflects the work of krautrock groups it is less associated with. Neu!, for example, in the sense that the most basic industrial music is the roboticization of the index groove Neu! employed, rubbing the creases down until any motion is simply 1s and 0s in lock step. Finally, the most typical industrial music tends to employ the same artistic concepts as the gothic new wave of groups like Bauhaus and Joy Division, cheerfully rankling consumer capitalism with celebrations of sadomasochism, torture, and genocide.
The albums on this list are not all industrial; rather, they represent an arc of electronic music that supported the growth of an industrial form. This group is bookended by a whole spate of minimalist/ambient/Varése-based electronic composers on one end and a whole new group of composers and bands on the other that include Radigue, Rylan, and probably Lightning Bolt (simplistic, sure, but the point is more that the firm repetition is again being stamped out). Kraftwerk looms over this arc like a silent moon, grinning at the sounds-of-industry that form the rails that Trans Europa Express could carry weight upon.
Oh…and I should probably refer to it as mechanical or something. So: do you like metal?
The lyrics and vocal melodies are pure Summer of Love but the electronics bloom with circuitry dissonance. Though the Silver Apples were created when Simeon Coxe got so into his electronics that everybody but the drummer left the band, I’m actually surprised it took so long to link oscillators with psychedelic. Then again, maybe not, since most Summer of Love musicians were dudes obsessed with their dicks (read: instruments). In any case, the result was this, a marvel of an album that set erratic jam dissonance on its head by emphasizing drum work and wild symphonic sine play. This doesn’t sound like industrial music at all until you start to play in its creases, loosening the hippy sthick vocals from their moorings to see the grimey surface beneath. Danny Taylor’s percussion is a riot throughout; it anticipates motorik and, paired with low pitched oscillations, often sounds like inchoate notions of the break. “Oscillations” may be a bit obvious for some tastes, the lyrics simply exploiting the medium to mirror the happy harmony glint of 1967, but elsewhere Coxe taps a bit more into the increasing uncertainty of the US in 1968: the enchanting “Program” sees Coxe intoning “the flame is its own reflection.” The other trick the band exploited incredibly well was to pair dismal music with non-dismal lyrics. “Lovefingers,” which also happens to feature wicked drums from Taylor, glooms under lyrics that might be superficially read as just another “Love the One You’re With”; on the other hand, the glitchy approach makes it impossible not to read into the false promises of sexual revolution offered in the late 1960s, where Coxe is simply going through the motions of free love. Silver Apples may simply have replaced rock instrumentation with a mass of electronics, but the way it did that solidified a process for all kinds of electronic pop music that would follow.
Haack’s traumatic childhood would influence his approach to music in the 1970s, and while Electric Lucifer is generally separated from his proper children’s albums the influence of his rural Albertan upbringing and his studies in psychology are clearly evident. Part gloomy séance and part Robert Munch, Haack implodes age against angst to form a giddy view into the secret world of under-the-bed monsters and closet creepers. And more importantly, Haack was instrumental in beginning to form a critical language for electronic artists.
The album tends to follow Silver Apples in the psyche-rock sense of melody; however, the lyrics are a firm divergence. It’s difficult to view this as just another 1967 cast-off when on “Program Me” Haack asserts, “I am new / program me,” a chilling or hopeful idea depending on how you choose to interpret it. “War” is interpreted as a joyous carnival celebration, Salvation Army band lung-farts squirting everywhere. “Song of the Death Machine” is like that joint the drunk, poor animals always sing in Disney movies. Except this is a chorus of drunk robots. Haack turns the work of the Silver Apples inward, getting more existential and darker in tone, and that’s why Haack sits at the conception of industrial music: he’s bringing the halcyon sixties down to the very personal and very cold reality of the seventies. And in that insular wash of self-created and performed symphonies Haack is constantly drawing the metallic and the childlike together, offering cartoonish perceptions of different ideas -- exactly the exaggerated portraits that industrial music would depend upon. The album follows an arc where Lucifer becomes a sympathetic character in a way that strips him of any evil, but Haack himself also fears he has been cast from heaven; Haack refers to his response as “techmotion.” It’s that simplistic grasp of technology to express emotion that makes this album so forward and unnerving, and places it so squarely in the trajectory of electronic music. Plus, dude used to show this stuff off on Mr. Rogers when that show was still black and white. And plus, while I was getting ready for this column I discovered it was released for the first time ever on CD like just last week.
Mort Garson was born in Saint John, New Brunswick where I grew up. I had never heard of him until I moved away from Saint John. This album should get his picture plastered everywhere, though I suspect the “Lucifer” cognomen has something to do with that. It’s certainly not the relative obscurity, right? Y’know, since this album only exists as used vinyl copies.
The title should give a pretty clear idea of the trajectory of this album. Much of the album plays elegiac, intoned moments against krautrock-like rhythms, stopping brimming activity mid-sentence to replace it with cold shoulders and condensation dripping from held aloft cups. The relationship to industrial music is again indirect; Garson plays with sound in ways that hints at industrial ideas (the use of the Moog for noise effects as much as melody, the uncomfortable pitch bends, the ricocheting blurps in the background) while at the same time heading in the general direction of that ambience. Some tracks get more of the way there, like “Evil Eye,” which sounds like a Nurse With Wound primer, and “Voices of the Dead (The Medium),” which pairs whiny, portamentoed Moog harmonies with thudding percussive accents. And, to be sure, this album isn’t particularly scary, but play the intro to “Black Mass” loud enough and you’ll get similar vibes to Heresie. Even if the song turns out to sound like an Edison Twins incidental. But despite that, given that Garson was limited by early Moog technology as to how dark he could get in replicating host desecration, Black Mass is still pretty chilling in its own way.
This album is the index patient of music history intersections that are fun and weird to talk about: it’s a no wave album featuring a Silver Apples-style line-up that arguably invented synth-pop and industrial music; it’s Iggy-influenced with members Martin Rev and Alan Vega embracing the art-as-performance mode of musiciality; it’s simultaneously heralded as the advent of no wave and Nebraska (1982); it is damn ugly despite the fact that it was partially written on a fucking Farfisa; it is, in short, the most brutal album the seventies had to offer. And it was produced by Ric Ocasek. Sweet.
Suicide is an intersection as well, caught where the motorik of Hawkwind and the oscillations of Silver Apples meet, with a dollop of krautrock on top of a healthy serving of inchoate punk attitude. And probably some Modern Lovers. But ultimately the album also solidified the place of electronics in rock music by mimicking the movements of analogue instruments in the most robotic way possible. Vega crimps his vocals overtop of Rev’s soundscapes; tracks like “Rocket USA” and “Cheree” are what people mean when they suggest Xiu Xiu sounds industrial. On “Girl” Rev employs a ludicrous pre-programmed bossa nova Casio patch; on “Che” he sprays hiccupping delay everywhere to bring down the horror. The album’s centerpiece, “Frankie Teardrop,” is a mass of pulsing synths that anticipate industrial music explicitly, right down to the minimalist approach to shifts and sighs in the music. Most explicit about the band’s embrace of working class politics and the despair of the late seventies, “Frankie Teardrop” mimics rock and roll to the point where it becomes nothing but a mess of gas valves and mechanical cranking. As Vega disintegrates overtop, man is absorbed into machine, and Rev subtley shifts some delay settings until the thing fades away. This might be the only industrial song explicitly about the people who worked there.
While his work in Yellow Magic Orchestra was obvious in its connections to Kraftwerk, Haruomi Hosono’s solo work was far more in line with developing industrial themes. This particular set was a collaboration with artist Tadanori Yokoo to create a fake soundtrack to a fake movie based on Hosono’s experiences in India. But more than simply reducing the sounds of India’s enviroment to electronics, Hosono pushes even further to make it all sound mechanical. In a sense, this is industrial music by accident, or an album where insects sound like machine guns, or simply an incredibly important electronic album that fed industrial development.
The compositions featured on this album are split evenly between Hosono and keyboard player Shuka Nishihara; all six tracks are sluiced through a wasp’s layer of manipulation ending up on the other side like towering boards of circuitry. This industrial glaze permeates the album, setting the work of Wendy Carlos and Morton Subotnik comfortably next to Ravi Shankar. As everything crunches and curls into new kinds of calculus, the loose and unpopulated narrative (think a generic Bollywood film) is pushed forth with an intensity produced by the drive of all musicians involved (including several of Hosono’s future Yellow Magic Orchestra mates) to sound entirely different. This album is technically more in line with electronic composition than industrial music, but it’s hard not to hear the machines groaning all over every inch of it.
Notorius though they are, Throbbing Gristle’s sense of humor is what really set them apart. The cover of their classic features the four band members standing in a lovely nature scene; flip the album around and there’s a dead body lying in front of them. On Beachy Head, a popular tourist destination for suicides. And then on the inside, they’re all standing around like punks. And there’s no funk or jazz anywhere.
20 Jazz Funk Greats basically takes all the innovations of the albums that precede it on this list and chops it up to a Neu!-style lope. Often that lope is panned, while Pere Ubu squalls circle in either channel, and various voices speak randomly in the corners. Led by Genesis P-Orridge, the group was more than simply about music: the band featured film and performance artists in Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter and early sample-tech junkie and future member of Psychic TV and Coil Peter Christopherson. While the live shows are infamous, this album -- said by purists to be their “most accessible,” which in this case actually means “most coherent and developed and therefore best” -- is an example of the band at top form, attacking dance forms in a context of disco and parodying the very idea of pleasure in music. Or, rather, pleasure is presented here as so run-of-the-mill and mechanic that it’s impossible to get excited about it in the first place. And it’s funny, because there are grooves all over this shit, but they’re trapped inside rusty cages that squeak with every head bob, and that’s pretty impressive too: Throbbing Gristle may be the only band in history who have been able to make a wicked dance record that’s pretty much impossible to dance to. On the other hand, every sunglasses-at-night singalong that rocks your eighties retro party owes quiet allegiance to the tone Throbbing Gristle created here: it’s dance music, not for robots, but for every little dark, humdrum neurosis you’ll eventually end up having.
Geri Reig is as confounding today as when it was released in 1980. Progenitors of the German New Wave, Der Plan’s debut is a mess, as excited about Kraftwerk as reggae, as industrial as it is krautrock. I kind of hate to make this comparison, but there are times where you could be forgiven for thinking you were listening to Ween. On the other hand, the goofy sense of humor that pervades a Ween album is here spun into a manifesto on the possibilities of experimental music, and Geri Reig is therefore coherent precisely because it is incoherent, gleefully cutting the boundaries between music and fuck-ups by intentionally skipping tracks and exploring the boundaries between noise and silence.
Talking about individual tracks on the album is kind of pointless; as fans of the Residents, the band clearly understands that, in the context of this album, it doesn’t really matter that the title track is a reggae song, or rather the only point is that the album consumes reggae as part of a process that includes everything else: “Kleine Grabesstille” sounds like computers in mourning; “Hans und Gabi” is industrial comic relief; “San José Car Muzak” is a bracing movement of pitch bent waves overtop a rustling bed of static and arps; “Gefährliche Clowns (Manisch Idiotisch)” sounds like everything is reversed, a gorgeous union of detuned string patches bouncing in pitch unison with an unwinding set of portamentoed sine waves. Under it all, industrial drums pin noise to the audio wall, a process made more conceptual with the track “Ich Bin Schizophren,” which suggests that calling it a mess is just in the eye of the beholder anyway.
The ways which critics have attempted to describe Stephen Stapleton’s masterpiece are as hilarious as they are varied, but they all get the important part right: this album is fucking scary. And it’s scary because Stapleton is, perhaps more than any other musician, a master of audio space, knowing exactly how to create the kind of nervous, psychotic environment that can only be constructed through heavy tape manipulation. Like, people can’t play this type of shit, an amalgam of minimalist ethos and heavy-weight avant-garde influences.
The original album, only four tracks long, captured a sense of dread by fissuring all kinds of field recordings together. But what’s interesting, I think, is that so much verbiage is devoted to explaining what’s different here that very little tries to find links and touchstones for those who may not want to take a dive after hearing all the hoopla. For starters, it’s impossible not to hear the Varése-inspired percussion of the title track, a glorious turn on the Weill/Brecht approach to absurd horror that is only slightly diminished by a confusing juxtaposition of a title that suggests a change in a woman and a soundtrack that features samples of a young girl discussing blood with her mother. It’s not quite clear what Stapleton’s point is in delving into the horror of menstruuation, although in the context of industrial themes the material realities of sexuality are embraced as much as the spectre of death. I tend to read the track as a play on the hidden realities of female sexuality, and certainly the aristocratic inflection of the maternal voice suggest this is more about criticism of the way young girls are supposed to hide their periods than it is a horror-trope filled indulgence in burgeoning sexuality.
“I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs Are Laughing and I Am Blind” starts the album with a barrage of metallic crunching undercut by sinister drones low in the mix. Again, Stapleton is drawing on minimalist ideas, replacing clarinets with gears. As the track progresses the soundscape shifts to present random voices and dripping fragments, creating a hollow cave from which the rest of the album springs. “The Schmürz (Unsullied by Suckling)” continues industrial music’s fascination with fascism, sucking all the wind out of what sounds like a rally chant and using the results to give scant momentum to an array of bells and industrial noise. The longest track on the album, Stapleton actually constructs a sonic narrative out of a whole slew of samples, including what sounds like a telenova, a bored scholar delivering a lecture, some guitar feedback, a hymnal, some elevator jazz, polka, and a vast array of percussive elements. But it’s the way that Stapleton bridges those elements together, looking back to the prog of Battiato or anticipating the out of John Zorn. Yeah, this album is scary, but it’s also absolutely gorgeous.
Horse Rotorvator: the album where industrial, fully formed, finally went pop? This album is clearly a product of industrial sensibilities and ‘80s new wave dance music, not to mention the gay politics of group leader John Balance. And this is kind of what Coil sounds like: Nurse With Wound producing a New Order single with Balance screaming about the anal staircase (or, as they had on pre-Horse Rotorvator single “Panic/Tainted Love,” employed the title of the second to signify the dismissal of AIDS as a gay disease).
The relative obscurity of Horse Rotorvator is frustrating to its fans; there are plenty of great tracks here, though their success might be mitigated by their inculcated oddities (or, less charitably to naysayers, the fact that they’re way gayer than kindred spirits Joy Division). But the album packs its punches in beautiful packages: the gorgeous stringwork of “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini),” the They Might Be Giants-ish turns of “Slur,” the dense meld of opera and groaning samples of “Who By Fire,” the military pomposity of “The Golden Section,” the driving industrial proper of “Penetralia,” or the military band foolery of “Herald.” The album ends with an almost five minute track called “The First Five Minutes After Death” which is an incredibly joyous route of pristine melodies undercut with tense percussion right until it peters out at the end (like, when you reach the light there’s nothing). It’s a scary and depressing thought, of course, but Coil were never about providing happy endings.
The Inmost Light trilogy is like a raving industrial party to whitch everybody is invited to bring an acoustic guitar. And while Current 93’s David Tibet has always been brilliant with the conglomeration of folk and electronics, his collaborations with John Balance, Steven Stapleton, and Michael Cashmore trip all sorts of Jungian science, locking horns with romanticized psychology and death and all those other goodies industrial artists are so obsessed with. That reissue marking above is actually the first release of the whole suite, which was originally dolled out in three parts: the Where The Long Shadows Fall (Beforetheinmostlight) EP (1995), All The Pretty Little Horses: The Inmost Light (1996), and The Starres are Sadly Marching Home (Theinmostlightthirdandfinal) (1996). The two bookending EPs are marvelous standalone compositions, the former a glassy beast of undulating, unchanging samples (with just the line “where the long shadows fall” repeated endlessly) and the latter a thrilling monologue delivered over constantly nervous shifts and nicely layered vocals. The album between is an actual song cycle that draws melodic themes between tracks (and the EPs) and deals in deliberations on death and religion by exploring Patripassianism concepts of the Christian Trinity. The album is brilliant without being mawkish, sensuous without indulging too juvenilely in the fun of fucking with religion, and incredibly well paced, which might be the most obvious complaint with any other given industrial masterpiece. This is the type of well-conceived dissent that Trent Reznor wouldn’t even begin to understand.
Mark Abraham :: 16 December 2007
I don’t line-dance, though I’ve been to weddings where it’s occurred (I did not partake). I don’t own a spanky hat either, but why would I? The hat is a semiotic nest-egg for a specific socio-cultural spasm that now sneezes outside the black/white visual cues of Sergio Leone; Maritimers don’t play that jive, having spent most of their formative years breathing shades of grey. By which I mean, it’s hard to be a cowboy in the fog on a dock near boats, right? At the same time, growing up in the Maritimes ‘round people who may well have had a hat tucked away somewhere at the back of their closet, I was exposed to country music. Good country music. We took it with black rum more than whiskey, but it’s still the kind of country music that merits the distinction and motivates another thing that I don’t entirely get: the reverence for and emphasis on pure roots music that still drives contemporary country fans, even if debates about what authentic country music sounds like can somehow include Cash and Brooks and Dunn, depending on what color state you come from or what age you are. Consequently, the one thing I don’t don’t is country; I love it, I love the political clusterfuck it represents, and even though it has become the ludicrous punchline to every lame street cred posturing ever (“I like everything ‘cept”), that’s only because Toby Keith and his ilk make seriously seriously bad music. And that’s ignoring the Bush-bop politics.
Here’s the thing about country, which I say as a fan but not a habitator, and that’s another crucial distinction here, because real country fans (like people who only ever listen to country and it’s a real strain for them even to deal with the occasional bluegrass) live country. I’m just a tourist no matter how lived-in a good country song will feel, but anyway here’s the thing: with the exception of the blues, country is the genre of music that is most focused on an artist’s personality. Now, that’s not to suggest that country is a monolithic mass of major chord progressions with different voices; country, though, is very often about the character, the viewpoint, and the politics. Which is why your choice of country is so important, if you care about such things. Because liking Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson over Merle Haggard or Glen Campbell means something: explicitly, it means choosing Texas/outlaw over Nashville; implicitly, it means venerating a specific kind of masculinity. And all you boys in the audience who love Graham Parsons: I mean, that’s just an early example of the indie-construction of the sensitive boyfriend, right? He’s an outlaw on his own gushy terms. Which in its own way is outlaw-ish too, of course, and that’s kind of the point; schools of country are schools of identity, especially since the flag waving brand of modern country is insanely Republican. Point being the hat doesn’t mean much at all, which is why this list offers the lilt, the twang, and just enough imagined controversy to keep law- and non-law-abiding country citizens alike uptight.
You can see the eponymous coat at Dollywood; it inspired what might be Parton’s signature tune, a gorgeous exploration of poverty, class, and the human condition. That song is important. As the decade turned Parton was a rising country music star known more for her image as the young woman who had shown up in Nashville with nothing, recorded the marginal hit “Dumb Blond,” and landed a gig dueting with Portner Wagoner (where she essentially served as the sex symbol for his TV show). Coat of Many Colors, in large part due to the title track, would cement her position as an important songwriter in country music. That is, of course, the status she wanted, and every emotion-laden measured delivery on Coat of Many Colors breathes Parton’s lucid, considered manifesto as a songwriter, a Nashville power to be reckoned with, and a power broker in the music industry. “Traveling Man” thrums with great country guitar and rollicking Nashville arrangements. “Early Morning Breeze” plays with a little psychedelic before more traditional instrumentation joins the funky bass licks. “The Mystery of the Mystery” is all violin and slides groaning under gorgeous harmonies. “My Blue Tears,” with every delicious vocal harmony matrix, should soundtrack all my summer evening outdoor dance parties. Parton started off the 1970s right with one of the decade’s finest albums.
Better known by the name More a Legend than a Band -- the one given to it when Rounders Records finally reissued it in 1990 -- this album was the product of extensive guest-filled sessions in the early 1970s commanded by three Lubbock natives: Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Joe Ely. It was originally released only on 8-track format, which meant basically nobody heard it until it finally appeared on vinyl in 1980, and even then nobody really heard it until it was released on CD in 1991. The beauty of the album lies in its union of pre-War country/gospel arrangements with frank, contemporary lyrics that shirked the chart-baiting country clichés that defined commercial country in the early 1970s. The songs are gorgeous throughout; they usually pare lilting finger picking in one channel with capoed chord work in the other, a walking bass line, and beautiful harmonies. A cover of Willie Nelson’s “One Day at a Time features some singing saw, “Jole Blon” rotates on banjo and violin, “Rose from the Mountain” features some beautiful slide and steel work, and the vocal melodies of tracks like “Keeper of the Mountain” and “Dallas” owe obvious allegiance to early Beatles and other rock ‘n’ roll. “Dallas,” which opens the album, sounds like what the Grateful Dead were trying to sound like on Workingman’s Dead (1971); the Gilmore track uses Dallas as a metaphor for all sorts of clever wordplay. The album’s other strongest track, “You’ve Never Seen Me Cry,” sees Hancock deliberating on the wetness of despair over a track that sounds like it was first performed in a barn on break in 1936. Or the Civil War. Or during the American Revolution. It’s a rare band that can unite timeless and out of time, and admittedly that’s in part the way this album was never really released at the correct time, but it’s phenomenal listening to a band transforming the actual roots of the music that was being released into something deeply subversive.
Biting at Nashville limits, the outlaw brand of alternative country was already running strong at the outset of the 1970s, even if Jennings wouldn’t give it a name until 1972 with the album Ladies Love Outlaws. There’s a debate here, of course; Jennings and fellow famous outlaw Willie Nelson were both well into their careers by this point, and it’s easy to see the duo as opportunists who revived their flagging careers on the backs and style of songwriters like Billy Joe Shaver and Steve Young. On the other hand, it’s also easy to hear Honky Tonk Heroes for what it is: a mid-thirties musician rejecting the constraints the industry had placed upon him for years. And though the immediacy of Cash’s At Fulsom Prison (1968)statement may make his own portrait of outlaw life palpable vicariously through his audience, Jennings sounds no less passionate in his performance of Shaver’s portraits of the common man living, loving, and lying on the fringe of society, and it might even mean more, since Jennings became something different with the release of this album, while Cash has always been Cash. The album was conceived of as a showcase for Shaver’s compositions; Shaver was responsible for all but one of the tracks here, and his songwriting is impressive throughout, owing much to the way Jennings interprets the music, and, apparently, to significant friction between writer and performer that fueled the recording sessions for the album. Equally significant was Jennings’ squabble with RCA where he gained the right to produce his own albums; the results are a stripped down, backwards-looking album that still feels immediately grounded in the present. The result was an album full of career-highlights for both Shaver and Jennings; filled with gorgeous songs like “Low Down Freedom,” “Omaha,” and “Willie and the Wandering Gypsy,” Honky Tonk Heroes is, of course, a love-letter to the anti-hero, and still staggers with its effortless ability to transport you inside an imaginary cowboy life that feels so very livid.
“I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” has always been my favorite Byrds song, so it was obvious that Clark was a phenomenal writer early on, but even if nine years passed between that and No Other the shift and depth are still surprising. Of course, No Other is notorious for a whole slew of reasons, starting with the fact that Clark and producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye spent $100,000 on its eight tracks, enraging David Geffen to the point where the label eventually refused to further promote the album. Charged with decadence, lost between genres, and starting from a point of obscurity anyway since Clark had left the Byrds in 1966 due to his fear of flying, No Other was a monumental achievement doomed to fail.
The album manages to apply the epic gravitas of Mickey Newbury to a charmingly complex resuscitation of country, gospel, and folk, turning the genre of country into something disarmingly mythical. Which, of course, runs contrary to the central impulses of country in the first place, but Clark is so hell-bent on boiling the snares, dust, and rattlesnakes of country mythos into rock, choir, and Elton John-like piano led songs that it’s hard not to cheer him on. Especially since opener “Life’s Greatest Fool,” a jug band rollicker of a tune, is one of the greatest fakes in music, totally disarming his audience before ripping into killer, monstrous tracks like “No Other” and “From a Silver Phial.” “Silver Raven” follows the opener by going down a rabbit hole; the album flows down into Clark’s vision of a Neil Jungian aesthetic. In fact, strip the ragged edges off Young and shape them into mountains and that’s Clark in a nutshell: the same apocalypses built out of sand, the same brooding momentum scarred with melancholy, and the same sheer ambience, except Clark is the extrovert to Young’s sincere reflection. In other words, what begins and ends as a country album from an ex-country rock star bulges in the middle with every hope and fear and insecurity one could imagine. That Clark could bring it full circle without the whole dramatic beast exploding is astounding.
“Blueberry Wine” and “Boulder to Birmingham”; two extremes of Harris’ mastery on this, her first real album, and by that I mean her first album with “Blueberry Wine,” the best drinking song outside a Pogues album I’ve ever heard. Pieces of the Sky is the convergence of so many sad and wonderful motivations that would propel Harris to notoriety: the recent death of her friend and mentor Gram Parsons, the benevolence and cheerleading of Linda Rondstadt, and Harris’ own growing confidence and willfully eclectic song choices. “Boulder to Birmingham,” a tragic ode to Parsons, is the only self-penned track her; it’s so devastating that it’s worth about three albums of original material. Elsewhere Harris tackles Merle Haggard, “Coat of Many Colors” (which is actually the weakest track here, I think, just because the song is so personal to Parton), Shel Silverstein, and the Beatles. Under the direction of Canadian Brian Ahern, the arrangements fold some rockisms into the glowing Nashville-esque sounds. This would become Harris’ hook as country tried more overtly to crossover into mainstream charts; that rock would separate her sound from the smooth Los Angeles production of non-outlaw artists, and eventually disco. In 1975, though, the rock was mild indeed; it’s barely noticeable, and the most impressive track here is “Before Believing,” with its gorgeous elliptical guitar lines and measured pace. Though the album’s biggest hit, “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” has overshadowed the album in popularity, Pieces of the Sky remains the sum of its parts.
Even though Lubbock (On Everything) sounds more Good Ole’ Boys than Grievous Angel at times it still serves as one of the finest examples of the kind of country music that was still being recorded out of the sight of “9 to 5” (awesome song; lackluster movement) and the rest of pop/disco country. And while Ricky Skaggs and the Judds would rise up in the early ‘80s on traditional country roots to reclaim the audiences Nashville lost while courting the mainstream charts, none of those albums would ever quite attain the charm of Allen’s masterpiece, a blueprint for the kind of alternative country that became popular in the early ‘90s. Like the Flatlanders before him, Allen turned backwards to move forwards, but here the sound is more snarky, character-based, and trickily produced. In fact, one of the greatest ironies of this album is that the kind of verbal debauchery that allowed a title like “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” to exist is present everywhere; Allen exists precisely in the mindspace of so many contemporary country artists that are easy to hate on. The difference is, as the comparison to Randy Newman might suggest, that Allen is a master aware of that irony, and these country tales have so much depth to them the album might as well be an easily digestible thesis on culture and class in the South. Dude is clever.
Like, Pynchon clever, I mean. Allen recycles ideas, linking song to song by playing with language like it’s a ball and paddle. At the outset of an odd multi-song arc where Allen displays art burning on the side of the road in a pimped-out 18-wheeler against the backdrop of an aesthetic battle between New York and L.A., “Truckload of Art” is sung in the most hillbilly vocals imaginable, with God eventually advising the now-dead truck driver: “Son, you’re better off dead / than hauling a truckload full of hot avant-garde.” It’s silly, of course, but Allen is so aware of the overriding question -- is the burning truck of art itself art, especially if nobody is around to see it, or if nobody understands what it means? -- that it’s easy to accept the joke, and when “The Collector (and the Art Mob)” rollicks in like a group of bandits, the point of all twenty of these songs becomes clear: to poke holes in pretension, authenticity, and meaning. Just as Allen is a country artist who employs traditional country ideas to non-traditional country ends that in turn highlight traditional country values at the same time that they take the piss out them, spinning irony back in upon itself, Lubbock (On Everything) is a caustic centrifuge of American values and high and low culture. In Allen’s world the background vocal “ooh eee” becomes “Oui (A French Song)”; saying the word “war” in French makes it too fancy to care in “Rendezvous USA”; the same “ooh eee” is appended with another “ooh” in “The Pink and Black Song,” a 1953 revival; the album concludes with Allen breaking up with himself, the only way possible to stop the spinning plates of his own meta-metamorphosis. And believe me when I say you won’t be prepared to feel bad for a guy who can no longer make out with himself in a mirror. But you will, because Allen’s just that wicked.
Kentucky mother/daughter duo Naomi and Wynnona were part of a burgeoning movement to return commercial country to its roots as the country charts increasingly groaned under the weight of disco-country in the early 1980s. Why Not Me is a pop country album, sure, and it also sounds like a 1980s pop album, certainly, but its strength lies in the beautifully bare production that eschews the drama typical to Nashville in this period. And even if you can trace a lot of contemporary commercial country’s follies to it, Why Not Me offered a new direction for country music in a time when it seemed that country in the traditional sense had packed its bags and left Tennessee.
More importantly, all the Shania Twains and Mary Chapin Carpenters in the world wouldn’t exist without Why Not Me, which hit number one on the charts and went 2x platinum -- a staggering feat for a new women’s country group at the time. The four number 1 singles are pretty standard today, but most of the songs here are lovely, emphasizing acoustic guitar soundscapes complemented by sparse piano, electric bass, and slide. “Girls Night Out” is the country version of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” earmarked with the awesome way the Judds enunciate the final word in each line of verse; “Love is Alive” is a gorgeous belt of harmonies and guitar work; “Drops of Water” shoves a cascade of counterintuitive harmonies inside a rumbling guitar trio; the title track is just beautiful, recalling early Dolly Parton and anticipating everything else. One of the finest transitional albums from a period when some feared country was on its last legs, Why Not Me is a textbook pop album.
It’s a live album, sure, but the intimate politicking awesomeness of Griffith has never been caught better, even if she does anchor the set with “From a Distance.” Released after the sensational Last of the True Believers, the album where Griffith’s working-woman sensibilities were finally cemented around an embrace of the good old days and each and every single wart that scar them. Griffith is probably an acquired taste; her voice, which fluctuates between stern admonishment and cute-yet-wholly-deliberate cracks, is maybe a deal breaker.
On the other hand, there’s “Love at the Five and Dime,” a beautiful love song upended by Griffith emphasis on the chimes (represented by the harmonic at the end of each pick line) that signal the arrival of a Woolworth’s elevator and the spectre of marital strife and infidelity eased through a sublime metaphor, never made concrete, that relates love with the commodities you can buy in a department store. There’s “Trouble in the Fields,” a brilliant ode to solidarity against the decline of American agriculture both in the Depression and in the ‘80s where bankers get pared with locusts and rain with sweat and tears: “You’ll be the mule / I’ll be the plow / Come Harvest time / we’ll work it out / There’s still a lot of love / here in these troubled fields.” There’s “Looking for the Time,” a snarky deliberation on the plight of working girls in Manhattan when faced with individuals who don’t get what they’re up to. There’s “Deadwood, South Dakota,” which fakes a solemn appraisal of the grand cowboy narrative before providing the real power of cowfolk: “And they thanked the Lord / for the land that they live in / where the white man does as he pleases.” Meanwhile, the genocide of Native Americans is played out as a conversational rumor spun with every additional drink in a warm, comforting saloon populated by white Americans made rich off the gold rush. There’s “Workin’ in Corners,” a simple, melancholic appraisal of Griffith’s own life as a musician playing backwoods bars. There’s “Once In a Very Blue Moon,” a dreamy love song played out in letters that postscript sweet nothings. And finally, there’s “Wing and the Wheel,” one of my favorite songs ever, here ripped from the overdone production that drowned it in album form, drawing attention directly to Griffith’s insanely sad dissection of the American Dream and the collapse of urban and rural distinctions in the bland suburbs.
Even if you have to slag through “From a Distance” -- and, unfortunately, Griffith’s version is only marginally less cheesy than the well-known Bette Midler joint -- Griffith’s glorious union of working class sensibility and a real investment in human emotion makes One Fair Summer Evening, where her work is so wonderfully pared down from the post-disco production of mid-eighties country, one of the finest albums of the decade.
A much more controversial choice than No Other, the Canadian-born O’Hara (yes -- she’s the sister of that other O’Hara) pulls one of the most interesting tricks ever on her sole album: what begins as a typical late-1980s New Wave effort -- one which has influenced everybody from Michael Stipe to Martin Tielli -- suddenly morphs into a bonafide country album. The first three tracks are spastic, violent things that sputter beneath O’Hara’s equally elastic voice. But as the gorgeous “Body’s In Trouble” fades away, something marvelous happens: slow acoustic guitars and slide fade in and suddenly it’s like the ghost of Patsy Cline pushed O’Hara out of the way. Except even that’s trickery, since the gorgeous voice O’Hara wields like a physical manifestation of emotion is just as weird and late-1980s pop as ever; it’s just that now it’s singing country, and punk and country collide in a way that cow punks never imagined, and oh shit is it beautiful.
Even the cheesy “A New Day” works; positioned after four tracks that chronicle absolute desperation, this sudden confection of violins, bright piano, and a walking bass line is like a cotton candy slap in the face. Buried in the back of the mix slide guitars and eventually more violins roam around like they’re lost, undercutting the telecaster strafes with this hollow ache that is sickening at the same time that you can’t help but bob your head. “When You Know Why You’re Happy” doesn’t actually know when “when” is; stuck like a skipping record in the crevice between country slides and post-punk, the thing is far quieter than either genre makes it sound, a colossal sound experiment serving as the focal point for the album: O’Hara says a lot of words, but very few of them lend any hope. “My Friends” steals stray country licks on the guitar and slides them under a shuffling drum beat and a new wave bass lick; “Not Be Alright” splits the difference between industrial and country and Patti Smith (no…seriously); “Keeping You In Mind” is like country and jazz played against one another in vindictive ballad form; “Help Me Lift You Up” anticipates a whole slew of alternative country in the 1990s even as the bass is mixed in such a way that it sounds like it’s poking the sonic spectrum with a finger. The weirdest country album ever, probably, but who else has taken country lessons to produce a singer-songwriter’s post-punk paradise?
It’s weird -- intuitively, academically, I get that Time (The Revelator) (2001) is Welch’s finest moment; however, it’s her understated debut that spends the most time in my player. Then again, Welch’s career is kind of like that: country traditionalists get up in arms about her Manhattan (ew) birth, her Boston music education, and her folk/country hybrid; I get swoony at the gorgeous and very country “Annabelle”; life goes on. After the clear delineation of commercial and alternative country in the early 1990s the issue of whether Welch is or isn’t country seems pretty beside the point. Welch is channeling Parton as much as she is any folkster; her narratives tend to be less specific than country stories normally are, instead exploring the universal notions she perceives in family (“Orphan Girl” throws her adoption up for scrutiny as the first track of her first album is ballsy), community, and God. This last is the focus of the agricultural apocalypse described in “Annabelle,” which pares daughter Annabelle with “the apple of my eye” in a world where produce won’t grow. Waylon Jennings might have thought he was tough; when Welch claims the only life Annabelle will ever have is the inscription on her mother’s gravestone she’s pretty much destroyed any claims any outlaw ever hard to hardship. And Welch can find sadness even in seemingly mundane portraits of girls on the town (“Barroom Girls,” an emotionally affecting track where literally nothing happens but the titular characters waking up with hangovers), occasional workers who send their paychecks home (“One More Dollar”), Origami (“Paper Wings,” and sort of kidding, but still), and a dying wish to destroy the dead woman’s still (“Tear My Stillhouse Down”). “Only One and Only,” which ends the album with a set of lyrics that trump each other with increasingly devastating imagery, caps a mightily sad album that is, all the same, one of the most weirdly comforting listens I can think of. And I can’t explain that at all, but I can tell you how awe-inspiring it all is.
Poor beleaguered fusion, the elephant in the room of indie cred. I think part of the problem fusion faced and faces is that, despite a large range of styles, the various strains are often conflated and, outside of On the Corner (1972), reduced to its two worst offshoots. So let’s clarify: while fusion means fusing basically anything to anything it normally means, as I’ve argued before, that fusion was mostly jazz musicians appropriating rock and funk. But more specifically, fusion essentially came in four brands.
First, we have the expanded rock-combo of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chicago, or Steely Dan. Rock structures, bright horns, occasional flirtation with overblown instrumentals. Second, we have the jazz-heavy type of, for example, Freddie Hubbard; this style made moves to follow Miles Davis down the rock/funk rabbit hole but hedged in order to try and maintain a traditional jazz audience. In other words, slick, firm on the corners, and steady drumming. I mention these two in tandem because they together have had the greatest effect on what today most non-jazz listeners understand as “jazz”: the Kenny Gs, the Diana Kralls, etc. The former—especially if we’re talking Blood, Sweat & Tears—made the mistake of exploiting the sunny hippy-ness of the ’60s in a ’70s that looked back and declared, “no edge,” which in turn did a lot to drive folks to the more ragged work of glam and punk rockers throughout the decade. Whatever. I’m a huge Phil Collins fan too. The latter, in trimming the jazz-fat to be funky, consequently lost all of the internal tension that made bop soloing palatable—instead, the audience was left with slick, streamlined jazz that privileged consistent rhythm over innovation. Somewhere in the middle, a space opened up where more commercially-minded jazz musicians could somehow play at being “traditional” at the same time that their smaltzy crap bore absolutely zero resemblance to bop, swing, or whatever else happened before the ’60s. And, sure, that was a slow, indirect result, given that I’m about to tell you some of these albums are the my favorite jazz records of the ’70s, but that’s there, and it complicates the way fusion gets viewed.
A view even more complicated by the more notorious brand that followed the Mahavishnu Orchestra school of proggy fusion. The least jazzy, this sort of modulates between the more adventurous stuff Mahavishnu Orchestra did and the Weather Report pocket of smooth guitars and bass bending all over one another. Especially by 1976, where approximately 300 albums were released that typify this school. Jaco Pastorius, Bright Size Life, and Hejira—all of which I really like, mind—solidified electric stringed instruments in the context of jazz musicianship in a way that fundamentally modified its sound. And that’s a complicated thing to say, since it has little to do with composition and everything to do with the instruments themselves, but the guitar/bass blurs and hammer-ons and slides that are prominent in this style of play sound nothing like the sharp notes of, say, a trumpet. It’s a frequency thing, or a velocity thing, or just like somebody sanded off all the edges, but this brand of fusion is almost always equated by certain critics with “wankery” or even “self-indulgent wankery,” because, again, no edge, and therefore those certain people react, like: there’s all this shit going on but it’s irrelevant. Which is taste, of course, but then Chicago had to go and release “The Glory of Love” and wrap all this up into the Fogelberg/Loggins/Messina/De Burgh box of easy dismissal. Next time you want to walk up to some Pat Metheny-wannabe in a New York jazz club and say, “You were amazing!” remember: that’s a line in “Lady in Red.”
But also remember that this stuff in context was crucial to expanding pop boundaries (especially in bass playing) in the ’80s and pretty fucking cool on it’s own merits, if you can just listen to it away from some fanboy who’s closing his eyes and dreamily playing air-slap bass while acting like it does have more edge than horn jazz because it’s on a guitar. Not that I’ve ever suffered through that particular experience or anything. It’s dorky on both sides, is my point: people who refuse to hear it, because they think the corners are too curved and therefore there’s nothing to hang onto, and people who can’t get outside of the minutia of what are essentially jazz solos, like Zappa fans who think that every minor drum whatever is somehow synergistically produced as a result of his band’s utter unity and it’s like they’re talking to one another and their instruments are having a conversation and, yes, of course, another legacy of fusion—which, keep in mind, the Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah (1975) and Terrapin Station (1977) came out around this time and they are definitely indebted to Mahavishnu—is everybody’s favorite punching bag: Phish.
And finally, of course, the Bitches Brew/On the Corner brand of fusion, where Davis found catharsis somewhere between voodoo and the urban environment. This is the brand that maintains the most critical legitimacy, even if traditional jazz aficionados haaate On the Corner and you’re most likely to hear it when some skinny white kid decides it’s a good time to explain to me exactly how much it expresses the urban setting. Not that I’ve ever suffered through that particular experience or anything. But whatever, dude. Hint: Davis wasn’t trying to express your urbanity, or mine, so let it be and just listen to the record. It’s amazing and one of the four integral components in the history of hip hop, along with R&B/Funk, Reggae/Dub, and the Lost Poets. I mean, uh, “spoken word poetry.” Since On the Corner isn’t on this list—I’ve done Davis elsewhere, and it should be obvious, anyway—let me just say, Teo Macero deserves a spot right up there with Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby as early innovators in hip hop production.
That fusion came out of jazz is in some ways irrelevant—certainly, the influence of jazz musicians affected the early aesthetic, but in a post-Hendrix/present-Funkadelic world, Davis and his ilk searching for relevance in what was increasingly a post-non free jazz world makes sense. Y’know, plus the heroin. But when free jazz took root in the early ’60s, rock was still a variable, untested and immature. When fusion took root in the ’70s, it was far more cognizant of the effect of popular music and of the shifting political climate. Even if Davis flirted with the dark side of vague voodoo on In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitch’s Brew (1969), it says something that he dropped the world/mystic/goat’s head imagery almost entirely as the United States careened into a ’70s that seemed to betray the promises of the ’60s. Black or white, the musicians who followed him down the road of fusion didn’t necessarily follow him into the occult. But what they did do was take his cue and strongly situate their music in contextual space, whether that space was the Hindu spiritualism of Mahavishnu Orchestra, the galaxy of Herbie Hancock, or the Africa of Phil Ranelin. And that search for meaning in a very interesting way situates fusion in direct opposition to the other preeminent strain of jazz in the ’70s: if free jazz and free improv sought to deconstruct the traditions and values of the old order, fusion nostalgically looked to spiritual imagery with roots in the old world. There’s exceptions across the board, of course, and certainly African-American free jazz was deeply rooted in local communities and the Civil Rights movement, but that to me is the biggest difference: fusion tried to find meaning; free jazz tried to rip it apart. And even at the points where the two met (which happened a lot, but e.g. Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Yo Yo”) that tension played out in interesting ways, showing that both strains—one that defines present tense commercial jazz, and one that defines present tense underground jazz—were trying to make sense of a world that had maybe left jazz behind. Or at least didn’t view Jazz as a thing that meant much as prog and rock musicians increasingly rubbed genres together.
Part one analyzes the early days of fusion, till 1973.
I’m making a bit of an argument here, I know, since Gale is best known for his work with Cecil Taylor—side-note: check out Unit Structures (1966)—and Sun Ra (though I might argue that Sun Ra’s brand of free jazz is more obviously connected to Bitches Brew fusion than, say, Eric Dolphy). That said, Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music is like the elongated, epic version of Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That?” The most notable thing about the album is the way it flirts with the early funk genre in a way that refuses to actually sound very funky (kind of like Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Yo Yo”). I’ll suggest that this album—and especially the way it uses percussion to emulate corner bustle—is a direct predeccessor to On the Corner. I have no firm evidence that Davis or Teo Macero heard it, but it almost doesn’t matter—if you’re looking for the missing link between Bitches Brew and On the Corner, this is it.
Which isn’t, necessarily, to say that it sounds much like either. What it does sound like is a careful blend of non-Western scales, rhythmic percussion, and funk accents, and like the best albums that deployed Black Power as a raison d‘être, the ideology is in the unrepentant tone. As America turned towards the ’70s, Gale turned to gospel, funk, and mysticism to facilitate an epic and dramatic look at the aftermath of Civil Rights and a specific depiction of his life and community in Brooklyn. Gale’s experience in his local scout’s marching band is very apparent; his two-drummer/two-bassist sextet rumbles beneath and between an 11-piece chorus and the vocals and guitar of his sister Joann. “The Rain,” one of the greatest songs of the ’60s in my estimation, is cataclysmic, the band piling in behind Joann’s guitar/vocal introduction. Richard Hackett and Thomas Holman thunder beneath, Judah Samuel and James “Tokio” Reid throw bass licks at one another, and Eddie and Russell Lyle sport free jazz affectations overtop. “Fulton Street” is more traditionally free jazz, “A Understanding” is the type of thing that OOIOO tries to replicate on their slower pieces, but it’s the closing two tracks that really swing. The gorgeous choral arrangements of “A Walk With Thee” spiral over marching band drums and bass before descending into free territory; like “The Rain,” the solo sections are free but the composed sections are inchoate funk. Similarly, “The Coming of Gwilu” flirts with orchestral woodwind arrangements before the drums enter to provide a bed for the funky, atonal bass line. It’s cooler than that maybe sounds; there’s something hypnotic about the track, certainly, and it isn’t just the steel drums. Elaine Reiner leads a beautiful call and response with the rest of her singers and the percussion becomes more and more insistent. This is what Galt MacDermot was going for with “Three-Five-Zero-Zero”; he didn’t come close. That this curious album still seems slept on is, perhaps, explainable: released at the tail-end of Blue Note’s supremacy, too funky to be free and too free to be funky, it’s a victim of consequence. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s really quite brilliant, and a precursor to all kinds of innovations in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and today.
Hubbard’s a weird fixture in jazz. He played on Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, and John Coltrane’s Ascension, while never really embracing free jazz on his own terms. By the time Red Clay arrived in 1970, the funk and soul influences on his slick brand of hard bop were impossible to escape. In part, Herbie Hancock’s the key here—choosing marital bliss over his steady mid-‘60s gig with Miles Davis meant Hancock had lots of free time, and though he wasn’t yet releasing his own brand of future fusion on the world (though he was releasing great music), his playing here hints at the “Chameleon“s that would follow. It’s Ron Carter and Lenny White who really fuse funk to jazz here, though: the former’s bass never strays too far from jazz conventions while kicking up a little dirt round the corners; the latter’s drums are high hat driven in a way that you don’t normally hear in jazz. In fact, I’d almost argue that if the drums had been brought more front in center (a technique still not common in non-free jazz mixing at the time…or, for that matter, now) this stuff would sound even more like funk.
You can hear the way Hubbard stretches his hard bop background over a funk bass, avoiding the elliptical fits that mark hard bop solos in favor of long, pulsing draws. Interesting though, is the way the band gets into all of these neat riffs that echo bop techniques while they sound funky—in a way, you can hear how funk evolved from soul, rock, and jazz by hearing how this quintet tackles the subject. Joe Henderson, rolling away on his tenor saxophone for his solo on “Red Clay,” for example, sounds for all the world like he’s trying to emulate distorted guitar tones. And everywhere you can hear the upbeat non-bop influence of Sly & the Family Stone and Funkadelic. Hubbard’s ability to update old bop tricks is especially apparent on “The Intrepid Fox,” which is in a way the most traditionally bop track at the same time that all the pieces seem pulled from contemporary pop songs. An idea made more immediate when this track is followed by the band’s cover of John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey.” Well…at least that’s one good version of the song.
So: jazz opera, yes, and possibly better suited to a Retconning on avant-garde curios, maybe, but Bley’s opus is a monstrosity of crossed genre streams and gorgeous interplay: in effect, it is fusion taken to an extreme. And, whatever a “chronotransduction” is as the cover proclaims this to be, the three years Bley and Haines spent bringing this thing to fruition with a cast and band that includes Linda Rondstadt, Jack Bruce, Don Preston, John McLaughlin, and about 50 million other people resulted in an album that defied definitions of what jazz and avant garde meant. It’s the kind of album that shows why perennial weird-music pick Frank Zappa often came off as amateurish when he attempted something this amibitious—see: Thing Fish (1984), which: ew. Is it a Kurt Weill revival? Is it a jazz album? What exactly is the escalator?
I’m not going to spend too much effort justifying this as a fusion album; it is to fusion/jazz what Magma is to rock ‘n’ roll, and Bley was absolutely willing to take the entire band down strange tangents and carnivalesque segues in an effort to tell the book’s story, which has something to do with a hotel and…um…stuff happens? Doesn’t really matter, given that Haines is constructing language to field the music, and the music itself is very much a product of late ’60s/early ’70s revolution and alienation. Roping rock, Indian/world, jazz, and orchestral together in a way that emphasizes cultural expansion/confusion and a loosening grip on pre-World War II cultural traditions, Escalator Over the Hill tells the story of America in flux, searching for meaning but searching for it quickly. Like, my interpretation has always been: if the grass is always greener on the other side, why not build escalators to get there quicker? Given late-‘60s complaints by Indian cultural ambassadors like Ravi Shankar that American youth misused Hindu spiritualism as a justification for their claims that LSD awakened real consciousness (that’s a bit reductive, but I’m sure we can all connect the dots) it seems as likely an interpretation as any. But whatever: this album is fantastic, and fantastically dense and weird, and despite it’s release date it might be the final great ’60s American album.
This is what listening to this album is like:
You are watching a songwriter compose a song in real time with a full band behind them, just trying out different shit and totally giving into the depth of the track and taking little segues and sometimes things seem cheesy but they work in this context because the composer believes in trying anything out just to let it fly. And the songs themselves are just fucking heart wrenching and expressionistic anyway and so it all works because the composer is really good at getting inside their song, because it really means…something to them, and what that something is isn’t necessarily obvious, but it doesn’t matter because that’s what works.
Except, of course, that Nina Simone didn’t write three of these songs, and the one she did right is essentially improvised piano under a fucking poem that she interpolates into George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” and that and “Isn’t It a Pity?” are together almost as long as All Things Must Pass (1970) anyway (kidding, sort of) and she’s doing this in front of an audience, and it’s not like it hasn’t been said a quadrillion times before about her, but: fuck. Fucking amazing, brilliant, insane, epic, elegiac, Allen-Ginsberg-throwing-up-in-jealously shit. Talking about this album is like trying to fuck the sun. Which isn’t to say that it’s the greatest album ever—it’s not even an album so much as a brief window into Nina Simone’s…thing. But there you are, bowled over, confused, and in fucking fright that the band is going to launch into another chorus of “My Sweet Lord” because when she sings David Nelson’s lines “I never dreamed—I certainly never hoped—that one day I’d be screaming for something my mother told me I needed in the beginning” and her piano comes in with bright chords that I’m surprised Kanye West hasn’t sampled yet, but that sound like Daft Punk has, and here she is quoting a Last Poet while singing George Harrison, it’s just fucking incendiary and goosebump-inducing and, seriously: Nina Simone for president, even if it’s posthumous.
Whenever I do Fusion II I’ll talk about James “Blood” Ulmer and Pat Methany; then we can get down to nuts ‘n’ bolts about the influence of Grant Green. Here he is wailing; here’s the critical influence on the direction jazz guitar would take in the later ’70s; here’s the first bonafied funk fusion album on this list that seems more funk than bop. Live at the Lighthouse is a brilliant view into Green’s extensive chops mediated by his adherence to jazz tropes in a funk’s clothing. On Shelton Lester’s “Flood in Franklin Park” Green takes a 15-minute excursion into the world of the jazz guitar. And, I mean, it’s a sound we here all the time now, but those crisp vibratoed frettings and super-quick runs were, in the early seventies, still a fairly new thing. More importantly, Green isn’t just lick after lick so much as creative phrasing after creative phrasing; his solos wove and darted with the kind of expressionism that Sonny Rollins alway achieved: he’s not just evoking mood but telling you something important.
“Walk in the Night” allows his band to flex a bit of muscle too. The whole mood relies on Greg William’s high hat play, while Claude Barte and Shelton Lester color Green’s phrasings on sax and organ respectively. Wilton Felder’s bass is primarily responsible for the funk feel on the track, though Lester’s left hand chords play along too. “Jan Jan” rolls on Gary Coleman’s vibes and Bobby Porter Hall’s percussion, a route of ascending chord formations and quick riffs. Thoughout the album the septet relies on crisp shifts and subtle color, and while this kind of jazz might be scene as too slick for some, it’s rare that you have to listen so close to hear all the endless detail.
Ayers’s is likely the most direct heir to the Miles Davis fusion legacy, mostly because where Hancock slicked everything up Ayers still sounds like he’s creating funk out of whole cloth. As with all things vibraphonist, this live album is driven by quick riffs and odd chords, but it’s the bass and drums of Clint Houston and David Lee that keep things in the pocket. Harry Whitaker is also essential; his electric piano is the slow, considerate thinker in the midst of a storm.
Flirting with free jazz and funk in a way that doesn’t fall off the R.I.O. cliff (which…basically doesn’t happen any more), Ayers created Acid Jazz on this album (which…has never sounded this good since). His sound admired by hip hop artists since the Brand Nubians sampled “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” Ayers is a curious figure in funk, R&B, and jazz history, very active in shaping sounds even at this early time to fluctuate between those poles. On “Move to Groove,” for example, you can here the song become more and more crisp and the vocals become more insistent. His cover of “In a Silent Way” is more insistent than the original at the same time that it doesn’t seem to ground that airy piece in a way that defeats its purpose. Even a slower track like “Sketches in Red, Yellow, Brown, Black, and White,” which sounds like incidental music from Free to Be You and Me manages to work precisely because the band just pushes the interplay throughout. “He Gives Us All His Love” and “Your Cup of Tea” (Ayers’s ode to Dinah Washington) back load the ballads, but even that doesn’t really sink the album. The quartet’s cover of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” brings the funk back in the most ebullient way possible. For an album that starts off so dark and erratic on “Daddy Bug,” it’s a surprisingly satisfying end.
For an album that starts off like Yet Another Bad Company Hockey Anthem the jazz tinges take only a few seconds to assert themselves. “Bodhisattva” throws pianos, those fluid guitar lines, and hand claps into the Steely Dan mixer and comes out the other end with a strange blend of intensity and rollicking boogie woogie. It’s a strange tension-y mix the band maintains throughout; Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have always been known for their studio finesse (often disparagingly, which…why?); their second album clears the gut from their first offering while still seeming inspired and improvised enough to avoid the pristine complexities of their later albums.
This kind of fusion is an acquired taste, certainly—many punk-flavored fans see this as Blood, Sweat and Tears, and while I get that, there’s a little more fun being had all around on this particular album. “My Old School” is one of the greatest tracks ever; it’s a blistering rout of horn sections and gorgeous piano. 7-minute “Your Gold Teeth” begins as typical Steely Dan smooth funk, complete with the shifting jazz chords on the highlighted lyrical phrase. The guitars of Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias throughout toe the line between rock and jazz. Jim Hodder’s percussion, here and elsewhere, is bustling with tight EQ-ed energy. “Razor Boy” is a weird little number, undercutting its own bossa-lightness with weird lyrics that suggest violence. “Pearl of the Quarter” employs Baxter’s steel guitar brilliantly, sounding like a long lost Todd Rundgren track. Not surprising, given that Steely Dan and Rundgren exist at the intersection of glam and fusion, a tight little corner in the music world where the studio is primary, certainly, but some pretty great songs emerged from within.
Maybe it’s just because McLaughlin is British, but the fusion of Mahavishnu Orchestra is the closest to prog that jazz gets. It doesn’t even sound much like jazz, but as McLaughlin unrolls his influences out in front of you, the intersection of Mingus and Indian spiritualism does make sense, especially if you’ve heard My Goal’s Beyond (1971), his solo acoustic album. Featuring a band filled with notable session players (violinist Jerry Goodman is better known now as Jean Luc Ponty; keyboardist Jan Hammer would eventually write the Miami Vice theme; drummer Billy Cobham had been instrumental in Mile Davis’s fusion work; and, uh (cough), Rick Laird on bass.
Okay, so: let’s face it. This band scored with the same audience that liked the Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein,” catching lightning in an early-‘70s-fascination-with-King Crimson bottle. Birds of Fire is a good album, certainly, but it’s unlikely that this band would have received near the same success if that (brief) sea change in the early seventies hadn’t opened up audiences for them in a prog/post-Zep’s first four albums world. This album has lost a little with age (the guitars are mixed way too high, but it snacks on that sweet spot, launching hyperbolic riffs with ample purpose, combing then-called-Eastern world influences at a jazz/rock wall and seeing them stick. And that’s what you’re getting, since the whole album is basically that, and talking about individual tracks is like comparing one punch in the face with another. But for all the prog here, there’s something more scathing and visceral that could only come from jazz; we’re just teleporting off the corner and into some human/Gods tragedy.
The intro to “Chameleon” may be more iconic, but nothing Herbie Hancock ever did was as shocking as the intro to “Rain Dance.” That ARP figure takes fusion into space, lounging, decompressing, and recoiling like a close-miked accordion mechanism. The edits are a bit obvious, maybe, but the brief interruptions serve to reinforce just how smooth and slick (in the awesomest of ways) the track is. It undulates like a cloying predator, spilling out over 9 minutes as Hancock works through his arsenal of funk fusion keyboard mods: a Rhodes, a Hohner clav run through an Echoplex and a Fuzz-Wah, a Steinway, and a Melotron. His band is texture more than rhythm: Bernie Maupin, Julian Priester, and Dr. Eddie Henderson sound more like stray bits of space junk on horns and reeds. Buster Williams (bass) the his percussive duo (Billy Hart on drums and Buck Clarke on percussion) fill in gaps and push noise forward, pin down debris to elongated jams that move like funk but sound like comets. Easily my favorite Hancock album, Sextant shows his Mwandishi sextet seemingly effortlessly merging electronic music, funk, and jazz in a way that is easy to listen to again and again as its always-rewarding sounds seem to shift and re-orient themselves with every spin.
Humphrey was the first female instrumentalist to record for Blue Note.
...yeah. Wild, I know. In any case, Blacks and Blues is a flute clinic of epic proportions, replete with strange tangents (the gritty electric guitar on “Harlem River Drive,” for example) and bouncing rhythm sections that defy any accusations that this is elevator music (though it certainly is a landmark in the development of that kind of jazz). The title track benefits from Larry Mizell’s production wonderfully; the pianos skirt around the channels as the extended band fills in gaps in the spectrum. The flute and synthesizers work particularly well in tandem on this track (elsewhere the synths sound a little too Rick Wright-on-Wish You Were Here) and the builds are constructed from the interaction of the instruments moreso than the individual playing.
Which is not to say that Humphrey isn’t a brilliant flautist. Her solos incorporate lovely little moments where rock riffs and jazz tropes are converted into funky soundbites that push the band into new phrasings. “Jasper’s Country Man” glides darkly on throbbing clavinets and canned cellos before Humphrey reinterprets the whole mood with a rousing flute solo that alternates between elongated squalls and flitty quick notes that echo the clav lines. On “Baby’s Gone” she slows things down too explore the tonal qualities of the flute, expertly snapping notes off as her vocalists hum away in the background. It’s the kind of fusion that would become most notorious as music, sure, but that’s only after all of these brilliant ragged edges were burned away.