First off, I’ve got to offer entirely predictable, prosaic apologies for the delay in getting these ‘end of year’ posts together this year. Basically, the first half of December just proved far busier than planned, which left me behind on things. That’s about it.

With no further ado then, let’s go on with it. The list below has eight items on it simply because that turns out to be the number of reissues and compilations I bought during 2020 which were, a) actually released in 2020, and b) pleased me sufficiently to obtain a place on the list. (For the record, I did buy an absolute ton of new/old jazz, soul and soundtrack discs this year… but they all bear earlier copyrights for the reissue, so hey-ho.)

A marathon run-down of 2020’s new/new music will follow…. let’s be optimistic and say, SOON. 

 

The pricing of 7”s these days makes my toenails curl and my chest hair fall out, but nonetheless, I couldn’t stop myself paying the equivalent of about £4 per minute of music for this sliver of absurdly esoteric library-sleaze, its lineage guaranteed to impress at least four highly reclusive people in any first-world nation you happen to visit.

As the title and beautifully crude cover artwork will no doubt signal to these especially cultured individuals, the two lean slices of raging, big beat strip club dementia herein were offered up by the splendidly named Senor Reverberi for use in his regular patron Renato Polselli’s legendarily distasteful, mondo-ish whitecoater sex film ‘Revelations of a Psychiatrist on The World of Sexual Perversion’ (1978), a work whose lurid rep is surpassed only by its comprehensive obscurity. If Reverberi & Forlai’s thoroughly blazin’, psyched out, prog-carnival stylings are in any way representative of the on-screen action however, well… I think the world may have done ol’ Renato’s perverso rivelazioni a disservice, let’s put it that way. 

 

As any fool know, listenable live recording of the definitive ’69-’70 incarnation of The Stooges have proved an extremely elusive commodity up to this point. Suffice to say then, this basic sound desk mixdown of the ill-starred quartet’s final public performance, ploughing through their ‘Funhouse’ material in more-or-less the same order it’s presented on the album, is probably about as good as it’s ever gonna get, more than likely.

In the cold light of day, the drawbacks of both source tape and performance will become clear as soon as you get this one back from the shop and drop the needle. In no particular order, we’re looking here at the frequent absence of Dave Alexander’s bass [he was famously fired the same night for on-stage inebriation], way too much vocal and sax in the mix, aimless moments of slurred, between-song inertia, occasional cut-outs and variations in volume, a rather murky guitar sound, and, perhaps worst of all, a dry, headache-y, no-room-sound feel characteristic of soundboard tapes throughout the ages.

None of this though distracts too much from the things which continue to make it worth scouring the earth for every piece of Stooge detritus on the market. As fans will be aware, there are two of those things, Mrs Asheton named them Ron and Scott, and happily, they can both be heard large and in charge here beneath Iggy’s yammering. The set might be slow to get going, but by the time Ron drops a hair-raising wah solo on ‘Down on the Street’, sounding like he’s juggling live electric cables, you know it’s gonna be worth sticking around for the duration. ‘Dirt’ in particular benefits from a slinky, heavy-ass groove which I believe is unique to this recording (Alexander is very much in evidence here, for the record), and when they kick into ‘1970’ in double-time, sounding almost like some acid-damaged ‘80s hardcore band, well… holy hell. That’s really something. 

 

A some-time employee of the late Hideo Ikeezumi’s ‘Modern Music’ shop in Tokyo, Go Hirano (that’s a person, not a band, ‘Go’ being a common Japanese family name) was apparently quite a a fixture of the scene from which grew up around the storied PSF label. Though Go was an enthusiastic witness to the extremist outpourings of the label’s roster of envelope-pushing rock bands however, he seemingly found his own musical muse somewhere else entirely, quietly developing a propensity for creating minimal-yet-melodic, home-recorded musical miniatures, picked out primarily on piano, with occasional interventions from melodica, wind chimes, ocarina, and whatever strange, slightly reverb-distorted room sounds happened to be crashing around at the time the recordings took place.

A hermetic, rather intimate, practice, this style came to full fruition on Go’s third LP, ‘Corridor of Daylights’, originally issued on CD by PSF in 2004 and pressed to vinyl for the first time at the dawn of 2020 by Black Editions. Warm, gentle and curiously compelling, the album’s collage of numerous short tracks will tend to evoke all manner of potential comparisons from seasoned listeners - from the murky four track conjurations of New Zealand’s Alastair Galbraith to Erik Satie’s zen-like piano compositions, via Epic Soundtracks’ delightfully cozy home tapes or the tendencies of innumerable ambient artists to incorporate both chance and atmospheric sound into their recordings - but in truth, none of these quite hit the mark.

At points, ‘Corridor of Daylights’ may veer toward the twee, particularly when the melodica or Go’s ‘ba-ba’ing wordless vocals come into play (perhaps recalling label mates Maher Shalal Hash Baz?), but the further you allow yourself to sink into Go’s headspace as the album progresses, the more immersive, calming and innately beautiful his ready-made compositions become, to the extent that you will occasionally feel yourself stunned by the depth of otherworldly ambience casually captured on tape by one guy with a cheap condenser microphone, sitting in a one room apartment somewhere in suburban Japan in the early years of the 21st century. (Of the tracks streaming on Bandcamp, I’d particularly draw your attention to the unusually lengthy ‘Coral’ in this regard.)

Just as the disorientating roar conjured up by bands of scowling, black-clad outsiders in underground rocks club could be seen as a synapse-jolting flipside to the stultifying sound of major label MOR rock which dominated much of Japan’s musical landscape through the 70s, 80s and 90s, so perhaps we could see Go Hirano’s simple, instinctive approach to creating ambient/meditative music as a refreshing, nay necessary, DIY counterweight to the more technologically sophisticated, eminently tasteful and frequently industry-sponsored sounds catalogued on Light in the Attic’s Kankyō Ongaku compilation..?

 

Ken Hughes’ ‘The Internecine Project’ from 1974 is one of those ‘70s thrillers which puts so much emphasis on being dour, taciturn and efficient that it forgets to really be very entertaining, and as such it is infrequently remembered these days. Along with the amble opportunity to watch the great James Coburn drinking scotch and glowering however, Roy Budd’s score is definitely the highlight of the whole affair, and Trunk Records’ decision to dig up the master tapes and throw them on vinyl this year is one I wholeheartedly commend.

Essentially comprising a more brash and outgoing take on the kind of themes and atmospheres Budd employed for his exquisitely low-key work on Mike Hodges’ ‘Get Carter’ a few year earlier, ‘Internecine..’ provides the listener with a one-size-fits-all accompaniment to being tense, duplicitous and/or frightened during the 1970s, incorporating a lavishly orchestrated, harpsichord-led main theme, masses of chime/tabla/woodblock-enhanced clock-watching unease, menacing cello stings, moments of bass-bin juddering synth terror and, best of all, some indelible examples of what synthesizer player Paul Fishman refers to in his liner notes as “hypnotic Budd grooves” (devotees of the ‘..Carter’ score will know exactly what he means).

One repeated theme in particular, with a heavy-ass electric bass line, whip-smart jazz drumming and metronomic percussion, will cement itself in yr brain for all eternity. Easily a match of any of the more bad-ass/head nodding moments found on Morricone & Nicolai’s giallo scores, consider it a must for the next time you find yourself assembling a sniper rifle, hitting the button on the top of an oversized stopwatch or navigating London’s back streets in pursuit of a suspicious transit van.

Sadly this one is not available to stream or download - vinyl only folks, so you’ll just have to take to take my word for it and shell out for a copy, available direct from the source. 

 

“Recorded by Brian Eno in 1981” would seem to be the primary selling point for the sole LP produced by this hard-luck Ghanian outfit during their original run, but personally, I’d much prefer to commend it to you on the basis of it being a set of startlingly inventive and exhilarating, intermittently cinematic, afro-funk featuring musicianship so damn in-the-pocket that James Brown would probably have pointed his finger at ‘em and given them a pay rise. (If that’s not enough first draft hyperbole for you, I also wrote a bit about the record back in this post from July.) 

 

Well, I think I probably said quite enough about this legendary-no-longer platter from the dark heart of Neil’s mid-‘70s creative zenith back in September, but, just for the record, I’d also like to note that if you put all the biographical/career trajectory type bollocks I dug into there aside and just throw it on in the background, it also rather perversely makes for some pretty good porch-sittin’, beer-sittin’ relaxation time - a secondary function which Mr Young, as a devotee of J.J. Cale, must no doubt appreciate.

 

So I’ll freely admit, I’ve wandered into the midst of the world’s trendy new jazz scene over the past eighteen months with all the grace and finesse of an overweight stockbroker donning sandals and a headband and turning up in Haight Ashbury circa 1972 loudly enquiring about where Owsley’s at. So, praise be to Soul Jazz for providing this mammoth compendium of jazz-affiliated U.K. sounds, tailor-made to usher me in, slap me on the back and prevent me from feeling like such a rube as I overcome my inherent fear of anything involving positive broadsheet reviews, arts council funding or Giles Peterson and seek out a quite spot in the corner from which to observe what I hope will continue to prove one of the more positive, open-minded and straightforwardly enjoyable currents to have flowed across the musical landscape in recent years.

There is, as you would hope, quite a range of stuff to enjoy here, and the comp makes a perfect jumping off point for further exploration. From the modal mediations of Matthew Halsall to muscular, live-in-situ chop workouts from groups like Ill Considered and Collocuter, to more electronica/hip-hop inclined rhythmic experiments from Joe Armon-Jones & Maxwell Owin, Pokus and Hector Plimmer, sly jazz-funk burners from The Expansions and Cromagnon Band, flute-driven exotica from Tenderlonious, straight up Coltrane/Sanders worship from Nat Birchall and Chip Wickham, together with the squelching, tuba-driven weirdness of Emma-Jean Thackray’s ‘Walrus’ and extraordinary cosmic/psychedelic excursions from SEED Ensemble and the aptly-named Levitation Orchestra…. all-in-all, this red-eyed homeworker salutes Soul Jazz for assembling a comprehensively enthralling and brain-kneading mountain of music which has at no point caused him to spill coffee on his keyboard or lose track of his morning emails as these discs were spun again, and yet again, through the course of many a 2020 working week.

Once again, this release has not been bandcamp-ed or soundcloud-ed, but you can preview to yr heart’s content via Soul Jazz’s website here.  

 

Very much a shining light of what we might roughly call the ‘second wave’ of Tokyo-based psychedelic rock bands associated with the aforementioned PSF label, White Heaven released this, their first LP, in 1991, and it immediately establishes them as a very different prospect from the black-clad noise extremity of first-wavers like High Rise and Fushitsusha, instead perusing a more intuitive, fragile and essentially song-based approach to funnelling the spirit of ‘60s psychedelia into a contemporary rock context.

To some extent betraying the fearful hesitancy of a young band with a stand-in bass player entering a professional studio for the first time, ‘Out’ sometimes even finds itself echoing the hermetic, too-cool-for-school sound of late ‘80s British psyche revivalists like Spacemen 3 or Thee Hypnotics, with opening cut ‘Blind Promise’ suggesting a distortion-blitzed take on the reverberating chaos of The 13th Floor Elevators (no mean feat in itself), whilst the shadows of both the Velvets and The Doors hang over the band’s tendency to launch into loosely-structured, expressionistic epics at the drop of a hat.

All of which is very nice, but there are two factors in play here which help ‘Out’ to transcend its status as a mere interesting, out-of-time psych-rock record and become something truly special. The first of these is the extraordinary contribution of vocalist/rhythm guitarist/primary songwriter You Ishihara, whose bombastic, tormented crooning may initially be apt to inspire a certain amount of hilarity for first-time listeners, particularly given that his lyrics are conveyed as a kind of absurdist Japan-glish mish-mash which sometimes recalls a less artful version of Damo Suzuki’s work with Can (is he really singing “..your face just like a closet..” on ‘Fallin’ Stars End’?). Once you get used to it though, it’s difficult not to love the sheer courage with which Ishihara attacks these compositions, imbuing them with a kind of crazed, dramatic gravitas which, if nothing else, is certainly entirely psychedelic.

Whilst the presence of such an out-there vocalist could tend to overpower many bands though, Ishihara more than meets his match here in the figure of White Heaven’s most renowned member, lead guitarist Michio Kurihara (whom you may recall from his subsequent work with Ghost, Cosmic Invention, Boris and Damon & Noami). A key figure in the shadowy pantheon of 80s/90s Japanese guitar gods, Kurihara was already in jaw-dropping form even at this early stage in his career, stretching Ishihara’s mangled hymnals out into shrieking abysses of string-bending oblivion, drawing somewhat from the ol’ SF ballroom sound embodied by Quicksilver Messenger Service’s John Cippolina, but expanding that overdriven, vibrato-heavy style to fit the higher velocity and higher volume of early ‘90s underground rock, strafing and dive-bombing as much as PSF fanboys (hi there) may have demanded on rockers like ‘My Cold Dimension’ whilst also retaining the lyrical, questing quality which we all hoped to find (but so rarely did) on all those San Fran jam band-type records.

Coloured by an ethereal sheen of maxed out reverb, and more tentative use of chorus and tape echo, Kurihara provides the perfect ‘church key’ for the bizarre, lysergic visions suggested by Ishihara’s surprisingly dry and up-front vocals, as they together transform cuts like the brooding, multi-part ‘Mandrax Town’ and the album’s definitive title track into immaculate evocations of precisely the kind of electrified, blinding light beauty which keeps me returning to the unkempt fields of psychedelic rock year after year after year.

Labels: best of 2020, comps & reissues, Edikanfo, Gianfranco Reverberi, Go Hirano, Neil Young, Roy Budd, The Stooges, White Heaven

For a brief window at the drag-end of the 1960s and the trudge into the early ‘70s, the now-accepted narrative of rock n’ roll (and subsequently, Rock Music) as a tale of black musical forms repurposed by white musicians could, if viewed from the right angle, have seemed a lot less certain than it does to us today.

Admittedly, the ‘colonial’ aspect of rock n’ roll (a project whose trajectory must still have seemed almost accidental to its largely well-meaning participants, I hasten to add) was already well established by 196X. By most accounts, it was initiated the moment Elvis made the scene, and of course it gained a significant boost in the early/mid ‘60s through the ascendency of British r’n’b, culminating in the black-face pantomime of vocalists like Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart, and the exaggerated buffoonery of the Clapton/Beck school of blues-busting lead guitar worship.

(As an aside, is it merely coincidental do you think that these traditions developed at the same time that the retrospectively mortifying Black & White Minstrel Show continued to be rapturously received by British TV & theatre audiences? Whilst the rock musicians may appear more sympathetic to us in their earnest reverence for “the real thing”, wasn’t the culture that both legitimised and celebrated their desire to recreate it as parody, often at the direct expense of contemporary black music [see for instance the oft-overlooked aggro between hippies and reggae-affiliated skinheads in late ‘60s London], essentially the same?)

So far, so familiar. But, if we go back to ’68-’70, my contention is that the finality of this black-to-white trajectory was not yet set in stone. And the lightning bolt that came to put a big fucking crack in that stone (if you will) was of course Jimi Hendrix.

In terms of the racial dynamic within rock n’ roll at the time, Hendrix very much represented an ‘alchemical marriage’ – a too-good-to-be-true messianic figure, here to right all wrongs, unite the tribes and take everyone to the next level. With his naively sincere appreciation of Dylan, The Beatles and even Clapton, he offered an olive branch to the honky, whilst the quote-unquote “authentic” grit and fury of the blues that was perceived as his birthright continued to boil beneath every note he played.

With THESIS and ANTITHESIS of the ol’ Leninist dialectic thus duly covered furthermore, the golden boy actually proceeded to go the distance and give us SYNTHESIS. Taking on board the one true innovation fostered by the British guitar cult – the utilisation of excessive volume, feedback and pure noise – he immediately pushed it further, and explored it more creatively and excitingly, than any of his fussier, more technique-fixated contemporaries, establishing a new benchmark for all future rock guitar, wherein a level of distortion that had previously only been hinted at by the most unhinged and eccentric of his predecessors subsequently became the norm. (It is here, needless to say, that the obsessive pursuit of pre-amp processing and tonal ‘effects’ that now consumes approximately 98% of the time and budget of the average white ‘indie’ guitarist has its origins.)




Whilst Jimi Hendrix was thus the natural spearhead for a black reclamation of rock n’ roll culture in the late 1960s, he was far from the only figure pushing in this direction,

Figures as titanic as James Brown, Sly Stone and Aretha Franklin were all busy mixing draughts of heavier, angrier, more ‘rock’ influenced sound into their music, that, along with Norman Whitfield’s bold productions for The Temptations and Edwin Starr at Motown, created a nameless, sprawling mass of vast potency that pushed far beyond the commercially defined parameters of ‘soul’, but was not yet fenced off by the exclusionary shelving tag of ‘funk’. (In the music industry as in ceremonial magic, to name something is to control and confine it.)

At the same time, even the re-emergence of originators such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker – returning like absent kings to collect the keys to their kingdom from the denizens of psychedelic ballrooms – must have spawned hope and expectation. (After all, look at the transformative rumpus those guys casually kicked up back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Who in 1969 was to say they couldn’t do it again, and reap appropriate financial rewards into the bargain?)

For the hopeful onlooker, particularly in the vexed climate of the post-MLK USA, the prospect of black America finally regaining the driving seat of Western popular music must have seemed intoxicating.

One such onlooker, peering enviously through the fronds from a camp too fusty and marginal to yet join this optimistic bacchanal, was the ascetic, warlock-like figure of Miles Davis.

On one level, Davis’s blatant attempts to mimic Hendrix, both before and after the latter’s death, could appear rather pathetic to the casual observer. Replacing his earlier wardrobe of impeccably tailored suits with outlandishly garish ‘psychedelic’ attire and feeding his trumpet through a wah-wah pedal, the increasingly emaciated older man could easily have become a laughing stock – were it not for the fact that the music he created as a result of his infatuation with Hendrix and the other ambitious black mega-stars remains so indelibly powerful that to belittle its creator in any way whatsoever would be an act of shameful cultural ignorance.




On first spin, ‘Bitches Brew’ (Davis’s chief statement of intent vis-à-vis the new music that the post-Hendrix era emboldened him to instigate) is not a platter that’s going to blow the mind of many rock fans straight out of the gate. Indeed, in spite of the voluminous litanies of critical praise that the album has attracted over the years, helping to smuggle it into our homes and ears, cloaked by its proximity the rest of the canonical major label ‘classics’, it is a record that functions more like a slow release gas canister or a buried piece of hypnotic suggestion, lurking quietly on CD shelves and in mp3 libraries, waiting patiently for an opportunity to immerse the unsuspecting listener in its ungraspable aural sorcery.

Rich in congas, electric pianos and other recognised signifiers of lameness, it is also, in keeping with Davis’s work as a whole, entirely lacking in the kind of fire-breathing, truth-blurting sax epiphanies that us ruffian rock fans typically gravitate towards when dipping our toes in the jazz canon. An arch piece of contrarianism, ‘Bitches Brew’ presents the novice listener with what initially seems to be several massive, patience-testing chunks of featureless, texturally unfashionable nothingness.

Pointedly lacking in both the technical pyrotechnics of bop and the pungent badassery of black rock and funk, it is liable to slip ever further down the ‘to listen’ pile, ready to emerge again, perhaps years later, to test what we have learned in the interim.

What the listener will need to have learned, of course, is that, to some people (many of whom drive bulldozers), a rainforest looks like nothingness. As inscrutable as it may initially seem, once you have let the texture of ‘Bitches Brew’ sink into your consciousness, it opens up to reveal what must surely be one of the richest sound-worlds ever captured via the conventional recording of traditional instruments.

How many of us dopes have, at some point in our lives, whacked the side of our skulls and proclaimed, “by heavens, this is an AMBIENT album!”, letting the fact that it was laid down and filed so very far away from the time and place in which are teachers tell us Brian Eno and some German guys invented that concept slowly sink in.

Buzzing, hissing, swishing, dripping, hooting and shaking, driven on by a monster groove whose pulse seems to owe more to the breeze and the tides than to Max Roach or the JBs, the instruments wrangled by Miles and his collaborators on ‘Bitches Brew’ form a kind of self-contained eco-system that reminds me of nothing so much as the fantastical jungle paintings of Henri Rousseau.

And if all this sounds a bit hippie-ish, well, as per Eno’s later formalisation of the concept, an ‘ambient’ record can effectively act as a cloak – a kind of signal-jamming encryption beneath which more challenging ideas can be introduced and exchanged. In the case of ‘Bitches Brew’, the rainforest may represent a kind of stasis, but if so, it is a stasis built on perpetual motion, full of sudden movement, cacophonous upset and, for the incautious tourist, danger.

Once you get deeper into it in fact, the barely suppressed violence beneath the placid exterior of ‘Bitches Brew’ becomes impossible to ignore. Like hunting animals, the lead instruments skitter around, leap and retreat, ever wary, avoiding confrontation. The playing of all the musicians is wired and permanently on edge, recognizing that, under the watchful eye of Miles, their conduct must at all times be exemplary, but also painfully aware that they’ll bring down an unwanted showdown the moment they dare poke their heads above the undergrowth.

Creating a sense of simmering, unrelieved tension that passes undiminished through weird passages of shimmering tonal beauty, the overall effect of this atmosphere is utterly enervating, and remains unique in my experience as a listener.

Extending this inherently questionable rainforest metaphor further, it is difficult not to envision Miles himself as the good ol’ King of the Jungle figure - the big cat stalking his prey, the.. hey, why not go all the way with this shit and just call him a PANTHER, shall we?

Through the preceding decades of his jazz career, Miles had been fostering an atmosphere wherein, when he plays a note, people shut up and listen – and by the time of ‘..Brew’, he had it down to perfection. For his fans at the time, his actual playing on the record wouldn’t have constituted anything revelatory - his lines are as minimal, as painstakingly considered and as wracked by loss and frustration as his pre-existing legend demands. What’s new here is rather the experience of hearing how they hold their own against this strange, new electrified background, cutting through the undergrowth like a stalking predator, lethargic but deadly, pushing the twittering chaos that surrounds him deep into the background.



Although Miles Davis frequently claimed to operate a colour-blind recruitment policy when selecting his band members, the feverish obsession with race that increasingly seemed to consume him as he got older belies this, and one name that of course sticks out like a sore thumb on the sleeve of ‘Bitches Brew’ is that of John McLaughlin on electric guitar.

Assuming he ever deemed to speak about it at all, Davis’s decision-making process in selecting McLaughlin remains blurry. I don’t have the relevant biographies and what-not to hand, but the question immediately springs to mind is: wouldn’t he have rather got Hendrix? Did he try? Was Hendrix unavailable, or uninterested? Or, more interestingly for your purposes here, did Miles actually want to avoid being drawn into some kind of epic ego battle that could have worked against their overall musical/racial cause of both musicians? [Of course, McLaughlin had already played on ‘In a Silent Way’ a year earlier, so Miles probably already had him on the payroll, if you want a spoil-sport Occam’s Razor explanation. – Ed.]

Anyway, we got McLaughlin, and his inclusion on ‘Bitches Brew’ proved a stroke of genius the like of which even Miles himself could probably never have anticipated. A nimble-fingered scion of the same British blues lineage that gave us Clapton et al (and who would soon of course go on to take virtuosic bombast to head-spinning new extremes in Mahavishnu Orchestra), one can easily imagine McLaughlin being set up as a ‘rube’ by Miles on ‘Bitches Brew’ – a target to be taken down.

He might well have been expected to enter the tense, electrically charged forest atmosphere of the album like a blundering great white hunter, his bright, bold playing tootling away a mile a minute, saying nothing much beyond “look – rock guitar on a jazz record!”, just waiting for Miles to put horn to lips and deliver the smackdown – a single, sonorous note that would have Big John, like everyone else, quaking in his boots as the Panther treads softly through the grass.

Thankfully for us all though, and to McLaughlin’s eternal credit, that’s not the way things panned out at all. Clearly hip to the heads-down wariness of his band-mates, he slips into the fabric of ‘Pharaoh’s Dance’ as subtly as a ninja, adding a gauze-thin layer of woody, textural fret-scrabbling that demands no retaliation. Growing in confidence as the album progresses, it’s only on the second disc that he really breaks out, by which point he has learned to expertly mimic his potential aggressor, adding piercing shards of hi-end overdrive into furtive solos that feel as incisive and knottily cerebral as those of his band leader.

Surprised and, one hopes, impressed by his guitarist’s gumption (he even named a song after him for god’s sake – not the sorted of thing Miles “everyone’s a motherfucker cept me” Davis did just for laffs), Miles responds to McLaughlin in a spirit of dialogue rather than rank-pulling aggression, and the pair’s spark-spitting interplay across the red skies of ‘Spanish Key’ and ‘Miles Runs The Voodoo Down’ - more an impassioned summit on revolutionary street-battle tactics than a mere “frank exchange of blues” - is the final rocket that puts ‘Bitches Brew’ up amongst the gods – an untouchable achievement whose poker-faced refusal to yield to conventional criticism makes it forever fresh as it searches out new ears.

Miles and McLaughlin would of course go on further build their musical relationship through the louder, ballsier and even more magnificently rock-damaged triumvirate of ‘Jack Johnson’, ‘Live Evil’ and ‘On The Corner’ over the next few years, but it is ‘..Brew’ that provides the pivotal moment – a form of “fusion” whose boundaries extend far beyond the mere mash-up of rock and jazz tropes that later came to define that genre, and a far more important step forward from Hendrix’s initial alchemical synthesis than would likely have been achieved had Miles instead just rocked up at Jimi’s place to record an hour of fuzz-blasting power jams.




The triumph of ‘Bitches Brew’ and its follow-ups provide just one pertinent example of the wider growth of utopian, inter-racial ‘fusion’ music that briefly flourished between about 1968 and 1971. Watch just about any concert film or music doc from this era and you will find some evidence of the new breed of racially mixed big band jam units who were doing the rounds post-Woodstock, both inspired by, and no doubt providing inspiration to, Miles’s electric bands and Hendrix’s own short-lived “Band of Gypsies”.

From Tony Williams Lifetime to The Electric Flag, Buddy Miles Express and Eric Burden & War, the black reclamation of Rock was on the move, positing a two-way traffic of ideas (perhaps even extending to a three, four or five way junction once Hispanic and Asian influences were thrown into the mix), and anticipating the day when entirely non-white ‘rock bands’ might begin to appear on North American stages, shaking – if perhaps ever so gently at first – the foundations of the USA’s historically segregated music industry.

Which sets the stage, needless to say, for what we are sadly obliged to call The White Fight Back. Whilst your correspondent is still a little too sane/conventional [delete as applicable] in his thinking to go in for the full-on conspiratorial mind-set with regard to this rarely acknowledged phenomenon, the inexplicable ascendance of purely ‘white’ East Coast rock in the early ‘70s, combined with lizard-like ivory tower racism hinted at in passing in numerous memoirs of the 1970s New York hipster / record exec elite, make it difficult to discount such possibilities entirely.

Bogus as the aims of this theoretical project must undoubtedly have been however, it is ironic to note that the process of surgically separating Rock Music from its black origins had already been instigated - to novel and exhilarating effect – by several of the best independently-minded white rock bands to emerge from the late 1960s.

Iggy Pop has oft been want to describe his work with The Stooges as “white, suburban, delinquent music”, and indeed this concise summation is more than borne out by the group’s 1969 self-titled LP, wherein brothers Ron and Scott Asheton pointedly refuse to imitate the syncopations and ‘licks’ of blues and black dance music.

Born jointly from cultural honesty, youthful bullheadedness and pure technical primitivism, this refusal (highly unusual amongst the band’s peers) saw the brothers’ guitar riffs and drum patterns simplified into an assaultive, one dimensional grind, expanding the too-dumb-for-the-blues, building block chords of the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ and The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’ into an irresistibly thuggish template that went on to largely define the sound of the self-conscious Punk Rock bands that began to spring up a decade or so later.

Meanwhile, very much at the other end of the innocence/experience spectrum, we find The Velvet Underground, who, tiring of the John Lee Hooker-indebted urban boogie around which their sound had initially coalesced, instigated a conscious attempt to break away from what they now saw as the tasteless and clichéd mimicry of black forms.

Although founding members Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison had initially boasted that, as college students in Boston, they spent their time frequenting wrong-side-of-the-tracks r’n’b clubs where other whites were too scared to venture, by the time the Velvets came to record their second LP in 1968, so the story goes, Reed was actually threatening to fine band members who dared play blues licks in rehearsal.

The extraordinary sound the band created as a result of this decision can be heard on ‘White Light / White Heat’ - a screeching, cathertic tirade of confusion and torment that seems to represent the trauma of embryonic white ‘rock’ being forcibly separated from its mother (black rhythm and blues), after which we hear the troubled child struggling to survive and find its own identity amid an intimidating world filled with nasty things like ‘art’ and ‘literature’.

After the unsustainable, end-of-the-line boogie which literally collapses at the conclusion of the album’s title track, this bloody separation is dramatised in metaphor during the surgical nightmare of ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’, and, by the time we reach the near arrhythmic noise freak-out of ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ and the stentorian anti-groove of ‘Sister Ray’, the poor kid is shivering in an orphanage, wondering what the future holds.

[The author’s attention has been drawn to the fact that ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ in fact goes full circle by taking inspiration from such cutting edge black musicians as Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, but he contends that trying to fit this into his theory makes his head hurt, and he doesn’t want to think about it right now. – Ed.]

A year or so later, the scars of this traumatic birth appeared to have healed, and The Velvet Underground seemed entirely at ease with their ‘white’ musical identity, recording a self-titled third LP whose mixture of gently strummed, clean-toned guitars, wallflower-ish, sexless rhythms and literate, emotionally resonant lyrics inadvertently set the blueprint for the innumerable multitude of “indie-pop” bands who now delight the globe with their scruffily collegiate stylings.




Whilst this initial establishment of a non-blues based rock lineage was artistically valid and formally innovative however, it was when these achievements began to filter up the food chain to the money-men that the trouble, inevitably, began.

Somewhere, (behind glass-fronted windows and amid attractive Scandinavian furnishings, I would like to think), certain desk jockeys and record pluggers who had presumably made hay via the ‘uptown’ r’n’b sound of Phil Spector and the Brill Building began to get wise. Back in the early ‘60s, the natural enemies of these guys had been the regional independent labels responsible for pushing “wilder” black music onto the market, and, whether through necessity or mere habit, the instinct to shut down such insubordination remained.

By the end of the decade, the demands of a newly emergent ‘rock’ audience conditioned to revere the performance of “authentic” American music had made it almost obligatory for white rock bands to swear fealty to ‘the blues’ if they were to achieve widespread success on the festival and concert circuit.

On the West Coast, the music industry had managed to bypass this problem by cultivating acts who substituted equally “authentic” (but reassuringly white) folk and country influences for those of rhythm and blues, but elsewhere across the country, the post-Woodstock listeners’ apparently unquenchable thirst for ever more aggressive and indulgent ‘blues’ performances necessitated a more urgent and comprehensive solution, lest the power-house ‘fusion’ combos listed earlier in this article should gain a permanent foothold from which to spread their dangerous integrationist ideologies.

The eventual solution settled upon by the East Coast industry was so ingenious in its counter-intuitive sneakiness, it should have been awarded some sort of clandestine prize for such things (perhaps handed out each summer at Bohemian Grove?), and the execution of their plan can most clearly be seen by examining the meteoric rise to success of their chief instrument, the ironically named Grand Funk Railroad - a blues-rock power trio who formed in Flint, Michigan in 1969 and signed with Capital Records the same year.

Although they are largely remembered today merely as the punchline of some jokes on The Simpsons and for inspiring the name of the Butthole Surfers’ dog, Grand Funk were a bone fide big deal in the early 1970s. Pushed by a management team whose Mafia-like persuasiveness was rivalled only by that of Led Zeppelin, the band’s mealy-mouthed “we’re-all-together-now-brothers-and-sisters” hippie generalities were propagated through every possible medium, from giant billboards to tie-ins with fast food and soft drinks franchises, and in the summer of 1971, Grand Funk Railroad became the first popular music group since The Beatles to sell out New York’s Shea Stadium, breaking the fab four’s attendance record a mere 72 hours after tickets went on sale.

Whether anticipated by organisers or otherwise, these events became a full scale, festival-style ‘happening’, as legions of the band’s field hippie following trekked across NY’s perilous transport network, establishing makeshift camps in the vicinity of the stadium and generally having whatever passed for a gay old time amid such Quaalude-crunching hair farmers. The main difference of course being that, unlike at Woodstock, these ‘free spirits’ were each paying top dollar for admission, merchandise and refreshments – a development that was no doubt keenly noted within the industry.

Although the music of Grand Funk Railroad (as best experienced on their 1970 ‘Grand Funk Live Album’ double LP) is ostensibly rooted in blues tradition, thus catering to the expectations of the contemporary rock audience, in actuality it does an extremely effective job of *sabotaging* its own purported lineage.

Boiling down the 12-bar-turnaround / riffs n’ solos structure of white blues into an utterly monotonous, knuckleheaded drag of undifferentiated sonic gruel, Grand Funk’s sound seems purposefully designed to make the causal listener – even if he or she is on one level enjoying the music – question the artistic validity of the form to such an extent that, if a laboratory test were carried out, participants who had listened to the entirety of ‘Grand Funk Live Album’ several times in succession would no doubt be liable to express a desire to never again hear anyone singing “the blues” for the remainder of their lives.

As might well have been expected, critics responded to the runaway popularity of Grand Funk Railroad with consternation. Unable to explain the public’s enthusiasm for such ugly and degenerate music through any other means, many writers simply fell back on attacking the band’s audience, who were characterised as deluded drug abusers, too out of their mind on cheap alcohol and what were at the time known as ‘downers’ to sensibly judge the merits of the recordings and concerts they were experiencing. This cruel slight (which was also regularly leveled, even less fairly, at fans of Black Sabbath) has remained so central to the critical perception of Grand Funk that I even used it myself a few paragraphs ago, just for a cheap laugh and to help keep the tradition going.

(Although Lenny Kaye’s definitive article for Creem on Grand Funk’s Shea Stadium concert is unfortunately behind a paywall, a fair picture of the press’s dismissive attitude to the band can be gleaned by consulting Timothy Ferris’s ‘Grand Funk Railroad: Is This Band Terrible?’ for Rolling Stone, available here.)

Far from damaging the band’s commercial prospects however, such snobbish dismissals only served to fan the flames of their insurgent popularity. From the point of view of Grand Funk’s management and the more sinister forces who may or may not have leaned upon them, it was all part of the plan. By turning their back on critical favour, Grand Funk allowed themselves to be marketed as “the people’s band”, cynically exploiting an ideal previously embodied by the far more socially committed and musically enduring Californian group Creedence Clearwater Revival (and, further afield, by such genuinely antiestablishment bands as The Deviants and Hawkwind in the UK).

This easy shuck allowed the industry to pull off one of the most bravura examples to date of the same unsavoury maneuver they had been working since the ‘50s to deal with potentially troublesome rock n’ rollers, and that they continue to fall back on to this day: namely, using media smoke signals and carefully manicured public image to create the illusion that a particular act “means something profound” to its punters, even as the musicians in question make no articulate or coherent statement about anything whatsoever.

In retrospect, Grand Funk’s music is not without merit, and, despite their absence from official histories, they maintain a steady cult following amongst members of the ‘stoner’, ‘doom’ and ‘noise’ rock sub-cultures, who appreciate the group’s hypnotic use of “heavy” low-end frequencies and brutish fuzz-tone effects.

The masochistic urges that drive enjoyment of these latter-day sub-genres however were still alien to the vast majority of listeners and commentators in the early 1970s, and, as the band’s early enthusiasts gradually outgrew their gallo wine & horse tranq binges and found they were required to get a goddamned job by the system to which their hard-rockin’ champions had so conspicuously failed to offer an alternative, the perception that Grand Funk’s strain of full strength blues-rock represented something aberrant, retrogressive and excessive, to be avoided at all costs by respectable citizens, soon became universal.




By 1973, Grand Funk Railroad were beginning to move away from blues-rock, taking what has been described as a more “radio friendly, pop-rock direction” and earning their highest chart placings to date thanks to the more nuanced guiding hand of producer Todd Rundgren.

Elsewhere, bands as disparate as Blue Oyster Cult, Aerosmith and Alice Cooper had appeared on the scene, all making careers for themselves playing an arch, self-conscious form of white heavy rock almost completely devoid of discernable black influence.

(Would it be in poor taste for me to imply at this point that the catalogue of drug problems, accidents and personal tragedies that dogged the careers of many more explicitly blues-based popular American rock bands during the 1970s [cf: The Allman Brothers Band, Canned Heat, Lynyrd Skynyrd] may have been something other than mere coincidence…? Probably.)

Though the Brit behemoths (Zep, Who, Stones) ostensibly kept the flame of black inheritance alight in the USA’s arenas, they did so through the by now thoroughly familiar means of absurdist parody, employing exaggerated put-ons that were increasingly accepted by listeners unschooled in the esoteric history of black music as ‘belonging’ to those bands.

By 1974, the idea of rock n’ roll having grown from black culture had been rendered entirely invisible to younger, suburban fans. Throughout the USA, “Southern Rock” bands now presented weak variations on funk and blues as if they were some kind of ancestral cowboy inheritance, whilst practitioners of actual funk and soul strained against the boundaries their racially-designated genre signifiers had consigned them to, commanded by the industry to be happy with their relatively meagre slice of the pie. (If James Brown was indeed “the hardest working man in showbiz”, his exertions must have seemed a sad exercise in furiously re-harvesting the same narrow furrow by the mid-1970s.)

Soon thereafter, the East Coast music industry delivered its final coup de grace in the form of Kiss – a supposedly ‘rebellious’, teen-orientated rock group, complete with their own cult-ish, quasi-military organisation, whose utterly WASP-ish music and myopic lyrical concerns were so firmly rooted in an acceptance of white, middle-class suburban conformity that they made the car and girl based tantrums of Chuck Berry and The Beach Boys sound like blood-thirsty declarations of bolshevik outrage by comparison.

By the time enraged ‘rock fans’ set out to literally burn the newly demarcated ghetto of “disco” in 1979, having apparently taken umbrage with the music’s perceived message of racial and sexual equality and lack of “authentic” musicality, the noble campaign to ‘even the keel’ of American musical culture that had originally been instigated by Miles Davis and others inspired by the example of Jimi Hendrix was so totally over that no one except Miles even bothered with the shouting.

Ever the seer, Davis must have seen this defeat coming earlier than most. Even if he couldn’t have anticipated the crushing totality of the record industry’s near-Stalinist extermination of the integrationist cause, one imagines he must have seen the writing on the wall as early as 1970, when his tight-as-a-whip electric band found themselves playing second fiddle to the slumberous cowboy music of Neil Young & Crazy Horse at the Fillmore East, and this failure to ‘break through’ perhaps became the primary contributor to the legendary cruelty, resentment and anger that fuelled the musician throughout his final decades.

As in any pivotal military engagement, success was at one point so near, yet remained so far. Even with Jimi out of the picture, all it would have taken was one more big figure, too awesome to ignore, to turn the powers-that-be on their heads. One blazing innovator who refused to be lined up and filed under funk & disco, and a manager or two with the balls to break the barricades and get him or her into the charts. If only Prince had been born a decade earlier, if only Michael Jackson had punched his dad in the chops aged seventeen and got into punk, everything could have been different…

Accompanied by such “if only’s..”, Miles saw out his remaining years in the increasingly marginalized jazz community like Napoleon on St Helena, as ‘rock’ sailed its unfortunate course without him.

Now suddenly, here we are in 2016, and anyone with an interest in the potential of electric guitars played in rhythm is expected to have an opinion on Jack White. No wonder we’re either hiding behind a wall of doom metal or scouring the “world music” racks in search of some reissued Eritrean with a fuzz box.

----

The author would like to make clear that, in spite potentially dismissive comments used for rhetorical effect in the above essay, he personally enjoys the music of Blue Oyster Cult, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Alice Cooper, Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Faces, Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Kinks, The Troggs, The Yardbirds and Grand Funk Railroad. Eric Clapton and Kiss can go suck it, however.

Labels: essays, Grand Funk Railroad, Jimi Hendrix, John McLaughlin, Kiss, Miles Davis, politics, race, The Stooges, The Velvet Underground

1. Iggy’s constant self-mythologising may provide quite a wall for beginners to cut through, but as anyone who’s spent sufficient time with the records will know, the Asheton Bros plus Dave Alexander WERE The Stooges. Now they’re all gone.

2. People writing about punk/rock/garage music often fall back on talking about ‘caveman drumming’, ‘primal thumping’ etc, and most of the time it’s all so much automated cliché, but if you want an example of some PUREST UG, check out Scott A. on the first Stooges album; sounds like they’ve just let him out of his cage in the zoo to lay down some thud! It's like he learned his chops watching the bigger apes beating their chests.

3. Well, that’s on the SURFACE at least…. dig further into the rhythm tracks on any of those songs (bar the long, shit one of course) and you’ll hear what a vicious, unconventional and totally single-minded approach this guy took to rock drumming – rarely equalled, not that many people dared try. Beneath the simplistic/untutored façade, he’s got the Charlie Watts pulse down, plus the crash & band of a big Motown influence, and it is flat-out amazing to hear things come into full-bloom on ‘Funhouse’. Of course, absolutely every element of ‘Funhouse’ is so amazing that it’s easy to overlook the drums, but they are HEAVY man, rolling and crashing and *right there* at the exact second the song needs a push. The sheer PLAYING from everyone on that album, jesus christ, the field of “rock”s not seem it’s like before or since, but… well, there are about a thousand ‘Henry Rollins picks his favourite albums’ interviews where you can read all this crap, so I’ll not go on about it too much.

4. From what I recall from my years studying ye olde history books, Scott was the younger brother, wild and dumb and impressionable, real ‘drug-hoover’ type, and he was very much Iggy’s drug-buddy as the band (or 50% of it at least) plunged heavily into smack. (Seems Alexander was more into the booze, and Ron was the straight man trying to pull them all together.) I believe Scott was also the one at the wheel when the band ploughed their van into a low-headroom bridge, putting a suitably destructive end to Stooges Mk. 1. (Correct me if I’m wrong in any of that.)

5. After the ‘Raw Power’ years, Scott put in some fine (if slightly more conventional) work drumming for Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith’s Sonic Rendezvous Band, whose scattered recordings remain essential listening for anyone with a yen for rough, punk-spirited heavy rock, way-out ‘70s guitar noise and the like. Wikipedia tells me that in the ‘90s, he recorded four whole albums with The Testors’ Sonny Vincent, in a line-up that also featured Captain Sensible on bass. I did not know that.

6. So in summation: a brilliant drummer and key member of probably the greatest capital letters Rock Band of all time, he will be missed.

Labels: deathblog, Scott Asheton, The Stooges

Deathblog: Ron Asheton 1948 - 2009

So I was determined to get that Top 30 out of the way before posting anything else, but during the meanwhilst, as it is apt to do, stuff happened.

In particular, it’s been a bad festive season for guitarists.

Ron Asheton. Need I say more? In the field of memorable and iconic christian name / surname combinations, ‘Ron Asheton’ is hardly up there with, say, ‘Mars Bonfire’ or ‘Templeton Parsley’, but nonetheless, for everyone out there who was lucky enough to be exposed to (and more than likely “transformed into the misshapen wreck you see before you today” by) the first two Stooges records at a formative age, it’s a name that’ll ring out as if I’d typed it in twenty foot high stone-wrought block capitals surrounded by exploding fireworks.

Ron Fucking Asheton. I learned of his death about the same time I was finishing off my #5 - #1 post.

Trying to think of much else to say is pretty futile. I’m sure there are already thousands of people around the internet saying stuff like “No Ron Asheton, no punk rock”, and so forth. And on one level that’s obviously a utterly witless thing to say – punk rock is as punk rock does; you could apply that to literally hundreds of people; witness Lester Bangs bit where he traced the ‘spirit of punk rock’ back person by person to St. Francis of Assisi or something. But at the same time, you can see exactly where they’re coming from – there’s a SINGULARITY, and monolithic year zero power to Asheton’s playing on those records, that defies any attempt at description, and if a daft generalisation gets the feeling across in a moment of several-steps-removed mourning, why not?

I knew the first time I heard ‘No Fun’, on a mixtape, walking ‘round some anonymous country road somewhere aged 16 or 17, that there was no possible way to express what this music did to me; I felt exactly the same way the last time I heard it, for the millionth time, probably in the background at some gig, waiting for a band to come on. Some great music you end up taking for granted after you’ve heard it X number of times; it becomes part of the canon, part of the background. That never happens to The Stooges. An A barre chord, a D barre chord – out of that he makes something that makes you feel like the only sane reaction is to explode into some kinda hummingbird-esque frenzy, followed by plunging your hands into your chest cavity and tearing yourself inside out. Talk about the ‘spirit of punk rock’.

And ‘TV Eye’ and ‘1970’ from a year later, are, like, ten times gnarlier. So gnarly it’s taken me till my mid-20s to even process ‘Funhouse’ to a satisfactory degree, despite regular and ecstatic plays. The second side of ‘Funhouse’ is ALWAYS too much; a vicious, damaged, intoxicating, unrepeatable living thing, like rock n’ roll’s nearest equivalent to those latter day Coltrane albums... if Coltrane had been a knuckleheaded, drug-hoovering, white suburban delinquent I suppose.

Of course, Iggy’s lyrics and implied physical presence are a vital part of making this music what it is too, but this isn’t really the place/time to talk about that. And, no matter how many interviews he gives talking about how he was the brains of the operation, the pecking order on those albums has always seemed the other way around to me, and who needs brains? It sounds more as if Iggy is being whipped up to career-best levels of performance and creativity by the pre-existent force of The Stooges music. Especially on ‘Funhouse’, where his whole being seems to become one more instrument, gasping for life in a purely exhilarating fashion between the lava-storm of Asheton’s guitar and Mackay’s sax.

And that’s that. Rather than say more words, I was tempted to suggest that everyone who owns a guitar and amplifier should pay tribute by, an a predetermined juncture, throwing open the windows and blasting the ‘No Fun’ riff as loud as is electrically possible, like some musical equivalent of the ‘mad as hell’ scene in 'Network'.

Thankfully though, some other people have come up with some fine words where I failed, to save the local police the embarrassment of having to drag me away for breach of the peace.

As is so often the case, Chris Summerlin is right fucking on in every respect, and I hope he doesn’t mind me stealing the picture he used for this post. I wouldn’t go quite so far as he does in condemnation of Iggy (I’ve got some love for the old bastard yet), but all his points are sound, and he runs down all the pertinent info you need to know.

This guy has some good stuff to say about his time roadying for Asheton and J. Mascis prior to the Stooges reunion too.

And man, do I ever now feel an idiot for not getting it together to ever witness said reunion. I mean, I know the album they did was a fucking disaster, but those shows they played must have ruled like nothing else. What else was I doing that was so important every time they played in London? They were even the saving grace headlining some utterly loathsome corporate festival on Clapham Common over the summer. To think – if somebody whispered to my teenage self that at some point in future IGGY & THE FUCKING STOOGES would play within walking distance of my house, and I DIDN’T GO... well I think I’d better watch my back lest some unlikely time travel paradox allows my teenage self to be lurking in a shadowy doorway with a sack full of doorknobs.

Someone else I’m cursing myself for not going to see when I had the opportunity is Davey Graham, who died before Christmas. I’d love to take the time to say some stuff about him, just as I’d love to proof-read this post properly and fill it with Mp3s and other nice things, but I’m posting from work and probably won’t get another chance to write/post for a little while, as I’m taking an uncharacteristic plane flight to Italy tomorrow morning to visit a friend.

I’m sure though that, having spent so much time mastering the ways of the guitar, carving new styles out of thin air and seamlessly blending music from all over the world, Davey would be pretty pissed off to find himself playing second fiddle in the obituary stakes to a guy who just liked to turn it up to 10 and play riffs that sometimes don’t move beyond one fret. Oh well – maybe I’ll write him a proper, if belated, Deathblog upon my return.

Labels: Davey Graham, deathblog, Iggy Pop, punk rock, Ron Asheton, The Stooges