I wish the ape a lot of success.
Stereo Sisterhood / Blog Graveyard:
- After The Sabbath (R.I.P?) ; All Ages ; Another Nickel (R.I.P.) ; Bachelor ; BangtheBore ; Beard (R.I.P.) ; Beyond The Implode (R.I.P.) ; Black Editions ; Black Time ; Blue Moment ; Bull ; Cocaine & Rhinestones ; Dancing ; DCB (R.I.P.) ; Did Not Chart ; Diskant (R.I.P.) ; DIYSFL ; Dreaming (R.I.P.?) ; Dusted in Exile ; Echoes & Dust ; Every GBV LP ; Flux ; Free ; Freq ; F-in' Record Reviews ; Garage Hangover ; Gramophone ; Grant ; Head Heritage ; Heathen Disco/Doug Mosurock ; Jonathan ; KBD ; Kulkarni ; Landline/Jay Babcock ; Lexicon Devil ; Lost Prom (R.I.P.?) ; LPCoverLover ; Midnight Mines ; Musique Machine ; Mutant Sounds (R.I.P.?) ; Nick Thunk :( ; Norman ; Peel ; Perfect Sound Forever ; Quietus ; Science ; Teleport City ; Terminal Escape ; Terrascope ; Tome ; Transistors ; Ubu ; Upset ; Vibes ; WFMU (R.I.P.) ; XRRF (occasionally resurrected). [If you know of any good rock-write still online, pls let me know.]
Other Place. // One Band. // Another Band. // Spooky Sounds. // MIXES. // Thanks for reading.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Ridin’ Free:
A Comp of Biker Rock and Such, '66-'76
The first in what will hopefully be a series of tenuously themed fake mix-tapes this year, and the theme of this one is, uh, BIKER ROCK, and associated aesthetic frivolity.
To be honest, most of the late 60s/early 70s biker movies were pretty shitty, and had pretty shitty music too. Who can forget Jack Nicholson’s gang in “Hells Angels on Wheels” crossing the Golden Gate Bridge to the sound of something pulled straight off a sub-Les Baxter cocktail party record? Lame or what! Nonetheless though, there’s something about the atmosphere of even the worst of these movies that I love – that unique late ‘60s/early ‘70s world in which the whole framework of society seemed to be collapsing; of naïve anti-cop/anti-government/anti-everything rhetoric, of stoned survivalist fervour, Vietnam vet alienation, weird desert beauty, and the roar of the engines and the grease and sweat and leather blending perfectly into… hey, who’da thought it… the rampant proto-punk snarl of primitive fuzz guitar rock n’ roll!
Because yeah, the few that had good music had GREAT music.
True, a lot of heavy rock from the late hippie era is extraordinarily tiresome, but there are certain strains of it that I just can’t get enough of, and that’s the stuff that I mentally file as ‘biker rock’ – the wonderful, terrifying results of a world where farting, spluttering mass-produced fuzzboxes and wah-wahs had suddenly become standard issue for rock bands, where larger crowds and outdoor festivals had necessitated a vast leap in the level of stage amplification (BIG STACKS), and where seemingly all it took was a flatbed truck rigged up to a PA system in a public park to attract an army of field hippies, ripped on unguessable combinations of bad drugs, waiting to be entertained. What emerges is, at best, a deafening blare that is ragged, thuggish and totally unhinged – the quintessential expression of what Julian Cope terms ‘mung’. Add fatuous revolutionary grandstanding, ‘Nam/Watergate era angst, heavy leftovers from the garage and surf eras and the unwashed, take-no-bullshit momentum of the Hollywood biker aesthetic, and the result is not just great, crazy rock n’ roll, but an ugly and largely unacknowledged precursor to the punk rock that was to be granted a name and official ‘movement’ status a few years later.
I mean, just who in the hell was responsible for the slobbed out assault on human civilisation that is “Hassles” by ‘Fresh Blueberry Pancake’?*
And why, when Lester Bangs made about a thousand cracks at the expense of Grand Funk Railroad and their fans, did he neglect to inform us that listening to their live album feels like being hit in the gut with a cannonball made of HEAVY?
Which member of Big Brother was playing lead on that live cut, and do you think I could track him down and kiss his geriatric hippie feet?
Is Betty Harris’ “Break in the Road” the only ‘60s soul/funk record to feature deliberate use of guitar feedback?
What kind of crazy alternate universe did Lotti Golden’s “Motorcycle” album spring from?
BUT ANYWAY:
On this comp you will hear music and sounds from “The Wild Angels”, “Naked Angels”, “Satan’s Sadists”, “Vanishing Point”, “Stone” and “Psychomania”, together with some primo examples of the aforementioned ‘mung’, and assorted other stuff that I’d like to think I’d be listening to if I was a bad-ass revolutionary biker in 1970, including two cuts from The Deviants’ leather/fuzz/amphetamine classic “Disposable”, some nods to the MC5/Detroit axis, and, weirdly, two New Zealand garage bands that I get a pretty strong proto-punk biker vibe off of.
(72mb .zip file)
Track list:
1. Russ Tamblyn – Anchor’s Speech
2. Davie Allan & The Arrows – Blue’s Theme
3. The MC5 – American Ruse
4. The Dogs [Texas] – John Rock
5. The Deviants – Slum Lord
6. Dust – Chasin’ Ladies
7. ‘Stone’ trailer
8. Jeff Simmons – Naked Angels theme
9. The Challenge – The Crunch
10. Rodriquez – Inner City Blues
11. Betty Harris – Break in the Road
12. The Deviants – Jamie’s Song
13. Link Wray – Fatback
14. Grand Funk Railroad – Paranoid (live)
15. ‘Satan’s Sadists’ radio spot
16. Fresh Blueberry Pancake – Hassles
17. Big Brother & The Holding Company – Down on Me (live)
18. The Blue Stars – Social End Product
19. ‘Hip’s rap’
20. Lotti Golden – A Lot Like Lucifer
21. Badfinger – Suitcase (BBC session)
22. Harvey Andrews – Riding Free
23. Billy Green – Do Not Go Gentle (Rage)
24. Kim & Dave – Nobody Knows
Enjoy.
*The singer on the Fresh Blueberry Pancake tune actually sounds a lot like Bobby Liebling of Pentagram, a band who weren’t adverse to releasing one-off singles under alternate names – just a thought.
Labels: biker rock, mixtapes
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