Of course it’s never been my intention to turn this blog into an all-obituaries-all-the-time kind of effort, but my love and admiration for the musical cultures of our fading civilization’s ‘50s-‘70s peak era (plus adjacent decades) remains vast and unquenchable, whilst we are meanwhile faced with the bad luck of living through an epoch in which the remaining denizens of said cultures are, to not put too fine a point on it, dropping like flies.

As some kind of self-appointed memorialiser of such things, it’s really been getting on top of me recently… it’s difficult to find the necessary time to process, let alone get anything suitable down in words.

Sticking strictly to those whose music I am familiar with, or that has affected my life in some small way, there’s Little Richard, Florian Schneider, Phil May, Henry Grimes, Betty Wright, John Prine, Lee Konitz, Henry Grimes…. am I missing anyone here? Almost certainly. Smaller, non-household names and non-band leaders especially, I’m sure. Syphoning news has become increasingly challenging lately, so please hit me up in the comments if there are any other departures I should be aware of.

It’s interesting to note that, of the more elderly folks on the above list, very few have had covid explicitly linked to their deaths, yet the numbers, compared to the quantity of noteworthy musicians we’d normally expect to lose in any given Spring, remain exceptionally high. Makes you wonder, doesn't it…. but this is most assuredly not a good time or place to take one’s wondering off in that direction. It won’t end up anywhere nice. Let’s all just pray daily for our surviving heroes and heroines who are not on the above list. Wishing health, long life and the divine spark of creation to them all.

SO, ANYWAY – Little Richard. That’s a strange one, right? Seems like much of the entertainment media didn’t quite know how to play it. Perhaps in some crazy sort of fashion, we’ve still not quite caught up with him yet.



Seems to me that, for the generation of more rebellious/anti-authoritarian rock fans growing up back in the day, he was little short of a GOD, the real number # 1, not-to-be-fucked-with well-spring for that wild, anarchic rock n’ roll energy, but his perceived importance seems to have waned pretty significantly over the years, to the extent that to those of my age or younger, he’s often not much more than that guy did track 5 and track 7 on that Big Bumper Retro Rock n’ Roll hits CD comp you always had lying around.

Perhaps he’s suffered to a certain extent from “wow, is he still alive, I had no idea” syndrome, a symptom of the long, slow 50 year plus come-down experienced by almost all of the household name ‘50s rock n’ rollers, doomed forever to some gothic, ‘Sunset Boulevard’-esque existence – a long life defined almost entirely by the shadow of some mad shit they laid down without a second thought in their early ‘20s.

For the old timers though, growing up without a supply of raging feedback and animalistic punk/metal nonsense on tap at all times…. well, he was something else entirely. As Simon Reynolds notes, writer Nik Cohn significantly christened his pivotal poetical history of rock n’ roll tome ‘Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom’. I just pulled it off the shelf to check the spelling of the title, and to quote from within (pp. 31-34):

“For instance, the first record I ever bought was by Little Richard and, at one throw, it taught me everything I need to know about pop.
The message went: ‘Tuttie fruiti, all rooti, tuttie fruiti, all rooti, tuttie fruiti, all rooti, awopbopaloobop alopbamboom!’ As a summing up of what rock n’ roll was really about, this was nothing short of masterly.
Very likely those early years were the best that pop has yet been through. Anarchy moved in. For thirty years you couldn’t make it unless you were white, sleek, nicely-spoken and phoney to your toenails – suddenly now you could be black, purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased or almost anything on earth and you could still clean up. Just so long as you carried excitement.”
[…]
“Most of his records sold a million each – ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Lucille’, ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, ‘Keep a Knockin’’, ‘Baby Face’. They all sounded roughly the same: tuneless, lyric-less, pre-Neanderthal. There was a tenor saxo solo in the middle somewhere and a constant smashed up piano and Little Richard himself screaming his head off. Individually, the records didn’t mean that much. They were small episodes in one unending scream and only made sense when you put them all together.”

Man, that’s a great book. I should read it again.

Jumping off from this idea, I distantly remember Greil Marcus (I think?!) waxing lyrical about Little Richard as the guy who first introduced a sense of surrealism / situationism to rock n’ roll, marking out a space in which meaning and coherence entirely disappeared – form transmuted into pure energy, combined with a kind of musical glossolalia (and, that’s a trick which naturally ain’t gonna hold up too well over 60+ years).

Personally, I’ve always found Little Richard’s music – great tho it it – makes for an odd fit amongst the first generation rock n’ rollers with whom he is invariably lumped in. Really, his stuff feels less like fully-fledged r’n’r, and more like a form of super-hyped up jump blues, foregrounding horns and piano and powerhouse vocals in a manner that makes it feel more like a weird, ultra-aggressive adjunct to the parallel development of what would soon become soul music, than to anything connected with the thinner, ghostlier, whiter sounds emanating from the Sun/rockabilly universe. A kind of blunt-yet-brilliant musical dead end of the kind more usually dug up on static-drenched compilations of totally obscure, indie label 45s – not on the freakin’ radio, or the Sunday Times obits page.

In a way, he’s always struck me as the kind of anti-Chuck Berry. Whereas Chuck gifted us with smart lyrics and story-telling, emphasising at all times the primacy of the electric guitar, L’il R (as no one has ever called him) made a point of smashing the loose remains of verbal narrative against the wall until they died bleeding, then proceeded to do the same to a brutally over-miced piano, doing his best to drown out the holy rhythm section entirely.

In a sense, perhaps Bo Diddley serves as some kind of weird, stylistic peacemaker here. By which I mean, his songs told stories, but they were nonsense stories, full of his own self-aggrandising, made up blather, whilst he simultaneously drew our attention to the drums and percussion as the most important part of the pie, because I mean, of course they are, you idiots. But, I’m getting off the point….

Whereas Chuck could number the Beach Boys, Beatles and Stones amongst his white boy descendants, Little Richard took a flying leap straight to The Sonics – which kind of says it all vis-à-vis his place in the canon, I suppose. Punk lineage, A plus 1.

P.S.: having just google-searched his image (try it), I’m inclined to realise that, throughout his life, this guy managed to look genuinely insane and frightening about 90% of the time someone was pointing a camera at him. I’d like to see you beat that across six decades, entire world of heavy metal.

Labels: bad news, blather, deathblog, Little Richard, Nik Cohn, rock n' roll, thinkpiece

Deathblog:
Bo Diddley 1928 - 2008

So it’s kind of gutting to get back from abroad to find that Bo Diddley’s up and died.

He of course having a better claim than just about anyone of being the originator of all that crazy, rackety rubbish I went over there to see and hear.

Don’t know if I’ve got the time or energy for a big post, so I’ll try to be concise.

Having read some of the other obits, I guess I’d like to try and make the point that there was a lot more to Bo Diddley than his ‘beat’, his square guitar and some dreary run-down of British invasion groups, post-punkers and garage revivalists who may or may not have dug him.

I guess you could say that where Chuck Berry was your main man in terms of establishing the mainstream of rock n’ roll convention by very knowingly kitting out black r’n’b with lyrics white teenagers could relate to and taking the whole deal to town with winning pop hooks and a big, bright sound, Bo Diddley is more like some fucked up old man of the mountain who might as well have been there forever, doling it out raw in his own uniquely twisted fashion, and changing the world – or all the bits of it that matter – a little more subtly, and a little more thoroughly in the process.

Yeah, that sounds about right to me I think – if you’re following the breadcrumb trail back to the source from a Classic Rock perspective, then Chuck’s your guy, and that’s fine, but if you’re tracing back the past fifty years worth of Underground music – better bow before Bo.

He’s got to be a dead cert for the greatest rhythm guitar player of all-time too (with all due respect to Sterling). His tunes – and it seems like he wrote about a million of them – are all knuckleheadedly simple, practically straight outta the cave… until you sit down and try *playing one*. Have a go, then you’ll see where the genius kicks in.

And despite the vast role he played in shaping the development of rock n’ roll, just about everything Bo Diddley recorded in the ‘50s sounds UTTERLY INSANE to this day, completely unlike anything else on earth, except other people trying to rip off Bo Diddley.

And the stuff he knocked out through the ‘60s, ‘70s and beyond was scarcely any less noteworthy – in fact, many rock n’ roll true believers would contest that his records got even gnarlier, more rocking and more nuts as time went on, refracting the developments of the punk kids he inspired back into his own mad universe, recording endless weird songs in his own homemade studio, answerable to no one.

I mean, he’s fucking BO DIDDLEY, for christ’s sake. What more do you need to know? Like the God of Abraham, he is what he is. The kind of name that can resound in legend forever, be all things to all people and never leave the earth.

He’s got a graveyard hand and a tombstone mind, he’s just twenty-two and he don’t mind dying.

(His earthly vessel nearly made it to eighty in the end, so I guess he must be feeling pretty alright about things.)

“Bo Diddley Is Jesus”, The Jesus & Mary Chain once declared, and maybe they weren’t just pissing around.

But enough talk! Seeing the guy in action will say more than this rubbish ever could.

First, here’s a young Bo Diddley, singing as usual about his favourite subject, Bo Diddley, on the Ed Sullivan show back in 1955.

A placid enough performance by today’s standards maybe, but I mean, can you IMAGINE being some kid, growing up in some suburban hellhole with zero contact with black culture, before rock n’ roll was an established phenomenon, before you even knew ‘the blues’ existed, turning on the TV and being confronted with… THIS?! It’d be enough to give you the screaming fits…



Ok, now move forward maybe, I dunno, 20 years (there’s no date on this next video, but I’d guessing ‘70s), and Bo’s right in the middle of the music world that those kids who probably watched him on Ed Sullivan went out and created, and what’s he doing…? HE’S SHEDDING LIKE A ABSOLUTE MOTHERFUCKER is what he’s doing.

Seriously, just watch:



And, to end, a few tunes.

You’ve probably heard the hits, but still, I’m going to post ‘Who Do You Love’, just because, and a couple of slightly more obscure numbers to go with it.

Until recently, I’d assumed ‘Pills’ was a New York Dolls original (it’s my favourite tune on their debut album), and thus was uproariously happy to discover it was actually a Bo Diddley song, rock n’ roll nurse and everything! Amazing! What a fucking punk! How many other ‘50s legends can you imagine layin’ down something like this as they cruise through middle-age?

‘Dancin' Girl’, which I first heard on the great ‘Songs The Cramps Taught Us’ compilation doesn’t require much of an explanation – it’s just plain rad.

Bo Diddley >
Who Do You Love?
Pills
Dancin' Girl

Oh, and finally, I can’t resist the urge to post ‘The Story of Bo Diddley’ by The Animals, a terrific and very funny tune which I feel will fill out the historical aspects of this post in a far more entertaining manner than all this hyperbolic midnight blather ever could.

The Animals – The Story of Bo Diddley

Labels: Bo Diddley, deathblog, rock n' roll, The Animals, videos

I know, I know.... no new posts for well over a week. Apologies.

You'll have to take my word for it that I'm currently toiling over by far the longest record review I've ever written. Coming soon.

Can you guess which album it's about? - suggestions in the comments box please. Any correct answers will be rewarded with a farcicle prize of some description, maybe.

(Hint: it's not "Grasshopper" by J.J. Cale.)

In the meantime...

Rock N' Roll Video Of The Month: February

It's The Shadows of Knight! They're lip-syncing to 'Gloria'! On a boat! Jerry McGeorge is singing into a fire extinguisher! There are dancing sailors! And I don't know WHAT the guitarist is getting up to halfway through...

God bless the internet.

Labels: 1960s, announcements, rock n' roll, The Shadows of Knight, videos

The Rolling Stones – Play With Fire b/w The Last Time (Decca, 1965)

I spotted this – scratched, dusty and unloved – in my parents’ record collection when I went home for Christmas. Not that I had any sinister record-swiping agenda you understand, it’s just that I was idly sketching out potential cover art for a 7” single and I needed to find one to draw around to get the size right, and… well anyway, there is was. I think the reason I’d never clocked this one before whilst flicking through our house’s shoebox of ancestral 45s is that, as you can see, the label on the a-side has been torn off, rendering the music within a mystery. This time round though, I was drawn for whatever reason to turn the disc over to investigate further, and discovered it was by the ‘Stones! Score! I wasn’t familiar with the song “The Last Time”, but still, a sixties Rolling Stones single! Clearly this one needed to take a trip back with me to London, and a functioning record player.

So, after forgetting about the damn thing for a couple of weeks, it was only the other day that I finally dropped the needle and discovered the a-side is ‘Play With Fire’. Double score! I’m sure I don’t need to waste time telling you how good the song is. Surely the most beautiful, unconventional and sinister of all the early Jagger/Richards songs, slowly rising like scented black smoke from my hi-fi speakers in glorious, fuzzy mono through a thick curtain of crackle. More than ever, it sounds less like a run of the mill Rolling Stones single and more like the kind of thing Mick Jagger’s character from ‘Performance’ might have charted with in his glory days. Evil, decadent jangle-folk for the masses. Wow.

But even wower, it turns out ‘The Last Time’ is a fucking brilliant number too. It’s an r’n’b derived original with a great melody that sees the band hitting the same kind of raucous, party-shaking groove that made their early, pre-fame singles so hot. The twangy lead guitar hook (I’m not enough of a Stones geek to immediately identify it as the work of Keith or Brian, though I’d guess the latter) is absolute punk genius, and it’s got one of those great, lolloping slightly-too-polite Charlie Watts rhythms going on. It’s funny how although the innumerable thousands of garage bands who idolised the Stones had a natural tendency to tear off in crazed pursuit of the high-energy finish-line (and I bless them thrice daily for it), as I get older I’m really starting to appreciate the more subtle pleasures of Charlie’s old-fashioned approach to things, and this song is a perfect case in point. Marvel as he helps cement the band into a fiendishly hot, deceptively mid-paced groove that – I would like to think – could still kick off some smouldering action on yr nearest dancefloor nearly fifty years after the fact, whereas most of our Nuggets faves would simply give rise to carnage and confusion. Let’s hear it for Charlie!

I don’t know whether this record is worth anything in terms of money, and I don’t particularly care. I guess probably not, seeing as it’s a flimsy, scratched copy of a hit single by an extremely popular band, but nonetheless, feel free to taunt me in the comments box by going “Wow, you’ve got original pressing with the blue label! Have you considered taking out life insurance and investing in a fireproof safe?” or something. I’m an idiot, I’ll believe you.

Mp3s:

(Note these are CD versions of the songs, not ones ripped from my old 7”. I’ll leave you to decide whether that adds or detracts from the experience.)

Play With Fire / The Last Time

Labels: 1960s, rock n' roll, singles reviews, The Rolling Stones

MEMO TO ROCK BANDS OF THE WORLD:

YOU LOSE.

THE MC5, live at whatever the hell festival this was in 1970, HAVE ALREADY WON.

Lookin' At You:



Ramblin' Rose:

Labels: MC5, rock n' roll, videos