Blues Missionary

Fela Anikulapo Kuti

2012-01-23T22:24:00.001-08:00

He was probably one of the first African musicians north of the Limpopo I ever took notice of. When I was a kid, there was Fela Ransome Kuti, as he then was, and Osibisa, and that was it. Not that I had any idea what Fela's music sounded like. In the mid-Eighties the NME championed the high life sounds of King Sunny Adé and mentioned Fela Anikulapo Kuti every now and then and the most basic facts I learnt about him, was that he was very political, opposed the then Nigerian government and often suffered incarceration and violence for it, and that he had a bunch of wives and a very large band. He had dropped the colonialist name of Ransome and adopted Anikulapo or reverted to it, to emphasise his African roots. He was called the king of Afrobeat and Ginger Baker played with his band once in a while when Baker was living in Lagos and running Airforce. Fela died of AIDS in 1997. There might have been more bits and pieces of information I have now forgotten.

I still had no idea what the music sounded like.

All that changed on a sunny Saturday afternoon in early 2000 in a car on its way to Clanwilliam. In the car were Braam Botha, Margaret Follett, their two daughters Emma and Tessa, Kim Pinkerton and me. Margaret had recently become owner of a piece of land fronting on the Clanwilliam dam and we were going there to see it and spend the night. The trip was eventful for two reasons. The first was that Kim and I became lovers, and the second, and with perhaps a more lasting effect, was that I heard the music of Fela Anikulapo Kuti for the very first time.

Somewhere 13h00 and 15h00 of a Saturday afternoon one Richard Mawemba presented a radio show in which he showcased a selection of mostly contemporary music from all over Africa. Braam who listened to the radio a lot and who liked all manner of slightly off-beat music religiously tuned in to Richard Mawemba's show when he was at home and it was no different on the long journey along the N7.

I'd heard this show before and although I never made an effort to listen to it when I was at home; I enjoyed the music, as I like music in general and African music in particular. It was one more genre amongst dozens out there that had merit and moved me. It had a good beat and you could dance to it. There was always a language barrier but because music is a language that transcends language barriers and cultural divides as well, it did not matter to me that the lyrics were, well, foreign to me. The fact that I could not understand what the singer was going on about simply made the whole effort, words and instrumental backing, one big, integrated piece of music.

Anyhow, Richard Mawemba announced that he was going to commemorate Fela by playing one of his songs. The track he chose was "Teacher, Don't Teach Me Nonsense." It is over 25 minutes long and blew my fragile mind a little to the extent that I went to the African Music Store in Long Street, Cape Town, to look for the album, also called Teacher, Don't Teach Me Nonsense. To my delighted surprise they had the CD in stock and I bought it. There are 2 very long tracks on the album: the title track and "Look and Laugh," which is longer than 30 minutes

If the album had been a record "Teacher, Don't Teach Me Nonsense" would probably have been divided into 2 parts over two sides of vinyl, with the instrumental opening on one side and the section with the vocal on the other. I guess the CD version makes the best sense and as it has the impact of the full power of the build-up of the tune, because it can be played as one organic piece with the instrumental section constructing the groove slowly but surely, before the song moves into the political diatribe that is the point of the exercise. There were all manner of funky percussion, fluid bass, lots of interweaving guitar parts, hot saxophone and slinky keyboard parts. There is the message, which sounds a bit like an Africanised "Another Brick In The Wall, part II" and is sung in some kind of pidgin English that makes sense some of the time and no sense a lot of the time, but I guess that could be just me. The intro has electronic organ and saxophone and a loping bass and a riffing horn section and this mix is something between funk and big band jazz without sounding exactly like either. Tony Allen's drumming, precise and strong throughout, is a joy. It must have been a gas to be at a Fela concert. The band might not have played many songs but the endless groove would have driven an audience into a frenzy.

"Looking an Laughing" follows a similar pattern but the instrumental opening section is a lot more restrained and cooler, with electric piano leading the way.

Anyhow, this song and this album was my introduction to the music of Fela Anikulapo Kuti and I absolutely loved it. "Look and Laugh" was every bit as exciting as the title track.

It must be the never-to-be-repeated impact of the new that makes this record seem so brilliant to me, but I nonetheless believe that is great and thrills me each time I hear it. When I saw that it was released in 1986 I was slightly shocked. I am used to what Eighties music sounds like in general, and it is not a good sound, yet this record does not seem to have dated at all, though I do not yet know what the Seventies style of Fela's music sounds like. Even in South African, though, there was a marked, and in my opinion not very wonderful, change in local African music during that decade where African pop producers adopted the feel of White rock and pop product from that era and manufactured a more sophisticated hybrid that utterly turned me off. Fela's music does not have any of that influence as far as I can tell; it is not primitive but it is of its own.

Given that I love Teacher, Don't Teach Me Nonsense so much, it is perhaps strange that this was the only Fela album I owned for a couple of years. I guess I did not want to buy anything else by him for fear that another album would be a relative disappointment.

Then I found an album called Music of Many Colours (1980), an interesting combination of one track each by Fela and American jazz / funk musician Roy Ayers, at a sale at a CD shop in Cavendish Square and I bought it because it was cheap and I was intrigued to hear this combination of African and Afro-American musical styles. Roy Ayers contributes "2000 - Blacks Got To Be Free", a somewhat prophetic song for 1981, when South Africa was still very much in the throes of apartheid, as it not only foretold a more liberated Africa in general but also spoke of a free and democratic South Africa. Fela gives us "Africa – Centre of the world", which (I guess) is your early version of the kind of African boosterism that is now quite prevalent and the result of which is all the furore about the first FIFA soccer World Cup being hosted in Africa in 2010, some 30 years after this tune was recorded. It took Africa a while to get there.

Why the record is called Music of Many Colours is a mystery to me unless it is a reference to the "rainbow nation" cliché of South African after 1994, which it obviously is not. Black seems to be the only colour thought I guess you can say it has a few shades of black in it, given the cultural differences an American and an African must have, for all the vaunted back to the roots claims of African-Americans. There is plenty of funk groove to it, but at first listen it was not as wonderful as Teacher, Don't Teach Me Nonsense. It's taken time and repeated listening before Music of Many Colours started working for me. The Ayers tune sounds pretty much like a conventional funk track from the late Seventies, with added political consciousness, and the Fela track is more horn driven and more overtly Afrobeat, as it would be, somewhat lighter and more jazzy for it. The musicians backing both stars are mostly from Fela's Africa 70 band and the big guys play on each other's tracks. One explanation for the difference in mood and swing might be that Flea writers his tune whereas Ayers relies on somebody else, two of them in fact.

My Fela Anikulapo Kuti collection suddenly grew over a few weeks in August and September 2010.

In mid-August I was at The African Music Store, primarily looking for the latest album by Tinariwen, pretty much my favourite African band of the moment, and saw that the shop had a whole selection of Fela's music, part of a recent programme of re-issuing the entire catalogue, of Fela albums, mostly value for money two vinyl release per CD album and often with bonus tracks. Amongst this lot I saw the CD album Original Suffer-Head / I.T.T (2000),
featuring the title track from 1984 and another well-known diatribe called "I.T.T (international thief thief)" from 1981 plus "Power Show", a much shorter track.

Some months ago I upgraded my contract cell phone and when I messed around with the set-up I found that I could download a bunch of so-called welcome tones and individual ringtones from a strange list of tracks. One of the tracks I could download was the Fela song "Original Suffer-Head" and I did download it, thinking that this would be a brilliantly different ringtone to have. Well, I tried to download it and somehow the download just did not happen, or if it did, I could not find the tune on the cell phone to allocate as ringtone.

So, when I saw the eponymous album, I had to buy it, and I did.

As I often do, I checked out Robert Christgau's consumer's guide website to see what he had to say about Fela Kuti. He had a lot to say and had his trademark potted reviews of a whole lot of Afrobeat, including the two albums I owned and he also referred to Army Arrangement (1985) as probably Fela's best album. The next time I visited The African Music Store, I bought this album.

Then, on another visit to the shop (it is conveniently located on my route from Labour Court to High Court) I not only found the latest Tinariwen album, Companions, but also again had a look through the Fela albums and saw Teacher, Don't Teach Me Nonsense there. I had started writing this piece and could not remember the second track of the album, and could not look it up on my CD of it, as it is packed away in a box in our outside room, so I picked up this copy in the store and saw that this CD had a bonus track as well, called "Just Like That", 22 more minutes or Fela music added to two other quite long tracks. Of course I had to have it. For good measure I then also bought a CD entitled Fela Ransome Kuti with four tracks recorded in the early Seventies.

"Just Like That" starts off with a mix of chanted vocals and stabbing, raging horns before it settles into Fela's tale, starting with him and the chorus exchanging call and response exhortations, much like an entertainer on a stage asking his audience to respond by completing a catch phrase of which he shouts the first word.

Shakara is a collection of 4 tracks from the early years of Afrobeat, when Tony Allen was the drumming powerhouse. The sound is slightly more inclined towards funk and R & B but the African influences are there, all right.

Why Black Men Dey Suffer is another album of early Fela, recording as Ransome Kuti and allegedly featuring Ginger Baker who settled in Lagos for a few years in the early Seventies. The particular album I have is not part of the re-issue series of albums with additional tracks and sleeve notes. This CD has just 2 tracks on it, that would originally have been the A and B sides of the LP release. I have to confess that the R75 selling price was the decisive factor in my decision to buy it.

The other factor was the sleeve's indication that Ginger Baker plays on the album. After a few listens I still do not detect any presence of Baker on any track and it sounds to me like only one drummer after all, which would be Tony Allen. I know Baker's style of restless, relentless polyrhythmic drumming from Cream and believe that he would have fitted in well with Afrobeat. Tony Allen's style may be polyrhythmic as hell but it sounds too much like funk drumming to me. Baker's propulsive drive is not discernible at all. For all that the 2 tracks are pretty good anyway.

True story. In early January 2012 I popped into The African Music Store to check out whether there was anything worthwhile. I was still looking for the debut album of Cape Town rock band Machineri and wanted to see if there was a new Tinariwen release. The Machineri album was there, as well as the third album by another Cape Town band called Hot Water and for good measure I thought it might be time to increase my collection of Fela music. After browsing through the Fela albums on display it came down to choose between a collection of very early recording under the name Fela Ransome Kuti or the album Zombie from about 1977. I picked Zombie. When I got back to my office, where I was keeping most of my recent Fela acquisitions, I saw that I already had Zombie. The point was that I had not really completely acquainted myself with the Fela albums I'd bought after Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense and therefore had no strong memory of what I did or did not own. Fortunately I could return to the shop the following day to exchange the duplicate copy of Zombie for Confusion / Gentleman, two vinyl albums collected on one CD and credited to Fela Ransome Kuti and the Africa 70.

When I played the very long track "Confusion" the unfocused, free form keyboard intro, unlike any other intro to any Fela song I'd ever heard, did not impress me. It sounds like a kid messing about on his doting dad's instrument and the dad then thought it would be a bit of a lark to splice that "improvisation" onto a proper track as intro. I wondered whether I had made the wrong choice of Fela album even though I deliberately selected a Ransome Kuti set as being of earlier vintage than the Anikulapo Kuti albums. The weird drumming gave way to a fat, deep bass groove and perhaps one of the best Fela tracks I've heard. The lyrics, as usual, may be important and significant but it is this monster Afrobeat groove that shakes the floor and fills the room. Even at 25 plus minutes it feels too short when it comes to an end.

The slightly strange thing about collecting Fela's collected works is that there is a whole slew of product available under Flea Ransome Kuti & Africa 70, Fela Anikulapo Kuti & African 70 and Fela Anikulapo Kuti & African 70 and then there are re-issues of the original albums in single record per CD format and in two albums per CD format. The latter is the best deal not only because you get two albums on a CD but also because there are often previously unreleased tracks too.

My collection currently consists of Why Black Man Dey Suffer (1971), Shakara (a single record) (1972), Shuffering and Shmiling (1978) / No Agreement (1977), Confusion (1975) / Gentleman (1973), Zombie (single album with previously unreleased tracks) (1977), Music of Many Colours (single album) (1980), Original Sufferhead (1981) / ITT (1980), Army Arrangement (single album with one previously unreleased track) (1985) and Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense (two different versions: one the original single album and one with unreleased tracks)(1986).

That is quite a lot of Fela product yet is but a drop in the ocean.

The thing about owning this much Afrobeat, much like owning a bunch of Tinariwen albums, is that it is difficult for me to have anything but a vague recollection of the tunes. Obviously it partly has to dot with the fact that I have hardly lived with these recordings. I have listened to "Teacher ..." and "Looking and Laughing" more than to any of the other tunes because it was the first Fela album I bought and because I had lots more time to listen to music when I bought it. Music of Many Colors comes second and as for the rest, most of them have had one or two spins on the CD player. On the one hand I have limited time to devote to listening to any kind of music and on the other hand I keep buying new albums that I also need to listen to at least once. It is not only Fela that does not get the attention his music deserves. It is the case with just about everything I buy nowadays.

I like the music of Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The polyrhythms of Afrobeat, with the grooving basslines and stabbing horns, is very much to taste. This music has a kinship to the Parliafunkadelicment Thang, which is where I first learned to appreciate and enjoy deep funk. Flea's lyrics are often inscrutable and almost unintelligible because of his patois but where I do understand them, they are sharp, funny and make points about (his) society that give pause. I like the fact that most of these tunes go on for a very long time. Dance parties with Afrobeat as the rhythm must be insanely great.

The myth or reality of Fela as man, activist and rebel is interesting but not something I dwell on too much. He was an articulate libertarian with a social conscience and the means of expressing his worldview in a commercially viable way. He did not change Nigeria and did not change the word yet he was a powerful force that deserves to be heard and remembered. If there can be a Bob Marley legend, there certainly should be a Fela legend.

Fela's sons Femi and Seun carry on their father's tradition, albeit with far shorter songs on their CD releases. At the time of writing this I have not listened to anything by the two Kuti offspring and I suppose I should, even if it is just to find out what they have done with the legacy. My fear is that they will have updated Afrobeat in a way that is not as satisfying as the template is. There is an organic feel to Fela's music, probably because he had real musicians playing real instruments and did not go for an "Eighties production" sheen even when he was recording in the Eighties. I can believe that contemporary producers would want to make Afrobeat hip for today's young audiences and although this may not be a bad thing, it would not be an authentic thing. Having said that, one cannot be hidebound and reactionary about music. If it works, it works, regardless of which traditions have been adapted or destroyed.

Miles Davis on the corner

2012-01-08T11:35:00.001-08:00

My god! This is just the most amazing shit! I wanted to play On The Corner on iTunes on my laptop and somehow I managed to play Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime" and thought it was a pretty extraordinary type of thing for Miles Davis to be doing in 1972, until I discovered my mistake when David Byrne started singing. Then I switched to On The Corner and was blown away. Talk about visceral, kick in the guts, gobsmacked and highly charged up! This is awesome stuff and I not use "awesome" lightly in any context. It WAS a pretty extraordinary type of thing for Miles Davis to be doing in 1972.

The interlinked suite of tunes on the first side of what was once a record are connected by restless Africanised funk drumming, a relentless groove that sounds like a vamp on one chord, much like the best of James Brown from the same era, minus the grunting vocals, interspersed by all manner of weird soloing in short bursts of intensity.

If this is jazz fusion I am all for it! This music is so totally unlike the tunes on Kind of Blue, recorded 13 years earlier than On The Corner, and a lifetime away from the pretty, pastel tunes of that typical cool jazz album from the late Fifties. On The Corner does not sound like background jazz; it does not sound like anything that belongs in a smoky after hours joint on the legendary 52^nd Street in New York. On The Corner is just some kind of monstrous groove thing that grabs hold and does not want to let go. Man, this is great!

In my comments on Kind of Blue I made the point that it is the kind of pleasant listening album that does not demand much attention and could easily fade into the background and that I cold visualise the kind of movie scenes for which its tracks could serve as soundtracks. This kind of jazz may be hell of impressive to musicians but to my ears this is cool jazz by any other name and not qualitatively too much different from the hundreds of similar records recorded during the Fifties and early Sixties.

I understand that Miles Davis was one of the most important jazzmen ever and that the musicians on Kind of Blue were stellar and not merely side men but potential band leaders too. The thing is: for all the talent in the room when those tracks were recorded, they produced a work that is not different to the competition but, at best, only a superior sound-alike to the many acts hoeing the same row.

The cuts from On The Corner are startlingly different to any jazz album I've ever heard and startlingly different to almost anything else I've heard in any other genre. Having said that, I can hear echoes of music that came later as much as I can hear the influence of contemporary funk. The Miles Davis of Kind of Blue could have been copies wholesale to great commercial effect. I cannot see how anyone would have copied the Miles Davis of On The Corner in the same wholesales fashion and hoped to retain any kind of audience. Yet elements of this record have obviously more or less directly emerged in popular music, both from the northern and southern hemispheres.

I should mention, again, that I have only recently for the first time listened to Kind of Blue because I bought the remastered CD at a second hand book shop in Montagu where my wife and I spent a couple of days in the week before Christmas 2011. Emma Follett-Botha, who now lives with us, spent a couple of days over Christmas with her father Braam Botha in Darling and brought back a bunch of music on her flash drive that she took off her father's portable hard drive. In this haul she copied three Miles Davis albums: Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain and On The Corner. I have no idea why she chose these albums, as she is not much of a jazz aficionado, as far as I know. Anyhow, I copied these three albums to my laptop and elected to listen to On The Corner before I tackled Sketches of Spain, for the older album is orchestral jazz which I've listened to before and found a tad boring and pretentious, and I think of it as of a piece with Kind of Blue even if it was recorded by a nineteen piece orchestra as opposed to a sextet.

Well, On The Corner has warped my fragile little mind. Apart from the fleeting touches of trumpet or saxophone emerging from the monolithic percussion and bass grooves, it does not sound like my idea of jazz, or anything else for that matter, or like Miles Davis. This is not Jamiroquai. That is a good thing. This record is an astonishingly good thing.

Where Kind of Blue is universally acclaimed and allegedly one of the bestselling jazz albums of all time, On The Corner was hated by mainstream jazz critics and fans alike and was one of the worst selling albums ever released by Miles Davis. Forty years later, though, there has been a much more favourable reappraisal, even if the common or garden jazz fan still hates the album. Perhaps I have more of an open mind because I am neither a jazz fan nor a Miles Davis fan, and in any case I have a very eclectic approach to music. If it fits in with my aesthetic, regardless of where it comes from or how different it is to the mainstream, I will like it.

Kind of Blue is not going to induce me to buy more Miles Davis albums. On The Corner makes me want to find everything Davis released between 1972 and 1975 when this new approach was being fully explored. No more introspective, "proper" jazz tunes. No more running the changes on standards and wowing audiences with the prowess of a jazz soloist expressing himself at length while the rhythm section vamps behind him. No more orthodoxy. All of this was replaced by the deranged fury of fat funk bass, clattering poly-rhythmic percussion and the absence of a recognisable tune. Glorious!

Somewhere during the past ten years I had the opportunity to listen to Bitches Brew (1970) for the first time ever and was quite impressed. The tunes made sense and the furious pace of some of them, and John McLaughlin's guitar did make this jazz sound more like a bastard child of rock. Although the album took jazz somewhere it had not been before it is still almost orthodox compared to On The Corner.

The first great thing about the album is that the opening cut and title track "On the Corner" just starts in the middle of nowhere and "Mr Freedom X", the final cut, ends in the same way. There is no opening theme from which improvisation flows and there is no neat resolution. The album arrives and departs in thin air. This must be something like the state of the universe before the big bang: once there was nothing and then there was something and who knows how it happened. Or how it will terminate.

This big bang theory of mine is not so farfetched. Apparently Davis wanted to combine street music with space music, whatever that might have meant, and I guess this urban space was what he came up with. As I understand it, On The Corner was built, like Frankenstein's monster from various parts to form a monstrous whole, in that improvisational jams were fitted together in a cut and paste fashion, on top of the groove, to make up the "compositions" on the album. The sum of these parts absolutely makes more sense, probably, than the individual parts would have made. The interpolated blasts, squalls and wafts of guitar, keyboards and horns could and would only have significance amidst the sitar drones and rhythmical maelstrom that ties the album together.

In my iTunes library On The Corner follows straight after Kind of Blue and the transition is shocking. There is a small gap (the silence before the storm) after the fade out of the tasteful, doleful final notes of "Flamenco Sketches" and before the aural assault that is "On the corner" and the tracks that follow. One cannot believe that we are dealing with the same band leader, albeit a totally different band. The cool sounds of Kind of Blue, no matter how great an album it is supposed to be, just do not lodge in my consciousness in the same way the rock jazz funk raga sounds of On The Corner does. The latter is a gut reaction enjoyment whilst the former is an intellectual appreciation. The tracks from the earlier album could easily be separated from the parent body and played individually or as part of a selection of similar tunes. It would make no sense whatsoever to separate the tracks from On The Corner or to attempt to make them fit on a compilation of Miles Davis tunes. The impact derives from the whole suite played in sequence.

I guess nobody is going to write a book about the making of On The Corner or spend too much time on it in any biography of Miles Davis but that would be a crying shame. Davis may have recorded many landmark albums that will always feature in a Top Ten of jazz albums but to my ears much of his Fifties and early Sixties output is a tad anodyne and not that much different from the much derided cool jazz movement. Maybe it is because I am not a musician and cannot appreciate the infinite subtle variations that Davis and the various instrumentalists can weave. Music that goes in the one ear and out the other is just about meaningless to me. If it does not grab my attention it probably does not deserve my attention. Bitches Brew serves up something that does demand close attention and On The Corner absolutely shook me when I first heard it and not many records do that these days.

I've said previously that owning Kind of Blue would not make me go out and search out other Miles Davis product and it was fortuitous that I got my hands on Sketches of Spain and On The Corner (as MP3 tracks) so soon after I bought the Kind of Blue CD. Now I am quite convinced I should search out more of the Seventies output of the Davis electric funk jazz ensembles, such as the live albums Live-Evil, Agharta and Pangaea, which may replicate the type of funky, hard edged electronic jazz of On The Corner.

Eden Brent

2012-01-03T00:24:00.001-08:00

Valiant Swart went to Mississippi and New Orleans to discover the roots of the blues and along the way he discovered Eden Brent playing amazing blues and boogie woogie piano in a bar in the heart of the Crescent City. She featured in his television programme about his pilgrimage and was invited to perform at the Aardklop Festival in Potchefstroom.

In 2003 she released Something Cool, with the track "South Africa" that celebrated her visit to this country. It is a great bluesy, jazzy old-timey pop album that came to my attention because Carina 'Katvrou' Laubscher sent me a copy. Before that I had never heard of Eden Brent and never expected to hear of her again. She seemed a novelty act of sorts; a White woman pounding a piano and shouting gutsy songs on the topic of the traditional blues tropes. As far as I was concerned she would probably be stuck in bars all over the States performing to drunks and blues parasites to ever diminishing returns.

Anyhow, now I not only own Something Cool but also Mississippi Number One, a 2008 release of more of the same, yet every bit as good as the earlier album, if not better. It is once again a pleasure to make the acquaintance of Ms Brent.

Recently I made the effort and spend the money to buy Hugh Laurie's Let Them Talk album, a set of songs seated in territory not a million miles away from Eden Brent's 'hood. She hails from Mississippi and Laurie's influences appear to be early jazz and blues with the N'Orleans touch, with an earnest Englishman's application to a style he had to learn whereas Brent no doubt lived it. This is the difference between the two albums: Laurie, for all his apparent love for the genre and the material, does come across as earnest, mostly simply trying not to fuck up. Eden Brent clearly revels in this music and the connection she has with it. Some of the songs are introspective and some are rollicking; all are great fun.

Some of the songs were written by Eden Brent, some by her late mother Carole, and some are standards. All of it is seamlessly, uniformly excellent. From novelty tunes like "Fried Chicken" to the serious concerns of "Afraid To Let Go", "Close The Door" and "All Over Me." Brent plays and sings with powerful authority and fluency. She is a real deal and should be a big deal.

She IS the Mississippi Number One.

Eric Clapton Blues

2011-12-30T00:46:00.001-08:00

I'd long lusted after this double CD of Clapton's blues recordings in the decade between 1970 and 1980 but it had always been too expensive for me to buy in a record shop. Somehow there were many other double CD albums that were cheaper or became cheaper over time. Not this one. Even though it was still expensive I bought it in September 2011 because I had a Kalahari.com voucher. Of course I bought 3 other CDs at the same time and still spent a bunch of money but on average the Clapton double album cost me R121 from my own pocket. Not bad.

Clapton is one of my favourite blues guitarists ever, in the top three with Peter Green and Albert King, and his work with Cream initiated me into blues and prompted me to seek out the old bluesmen from the Mississippi Delta, whether they stayed there and played at country juke joints, or went to Chicago, electrified and played taverns on Maxwell Street. Clapton's solo on the live version of "Sleepy Time Time" from Live Cream will always be in my personal top ten of great guitar moments; in fact a lot of his work will be in that top ten list.

I won't pretend to be a Clapton completist. I am fond of the Yardbirds stuff; the tunes he cut with John Mayall are pretty damn amazing and his work with Cream is unsurpassed. That is more or less where I stopped listening to or buying any Clapton release before Unplugged, and then From the Cradle and the two albums dedicated to the music of Robert Johnson. The rock star stuff from the Seventies, Eighties and beyond leaves me mostly cold. I do own 461 Ocean Boulevard and Slowhand but that is mostly because those songs resonate with echoes of my youth and rock radio. I also own Timepieces: Live in the Seventies because it was cheap and I have One More Rider, the live double album from the late nineties because it was cheap, but only the performances on the first named are any good. Obviously the Clapton band is professional and proficient yet they kind of suck the life from the songs they play. It is one thing reinterpreting your best loved songs; it is quite another thing to smother them with sophistication and stagecraft. There is a large pop audience out there for Eric Clapton and kudos to him for finding that audience in the first place and continuing to satisfy it. I prefer the bluesman Clapton and always will.

The general way in which Clapton has dealt with the blues over the years has changed considerably as can be expected from an artist with such a long career. In the early days, when he was young and hungry and played a Gibson Les Paul, it is all fury and attack with the famous "woman tone." When Clapton switched to the Stratocaster he also forsook the youthful brio and found a somewhat brighter yet also mellower sound, sometimes a tad too bright and trebly for my taste. The roar of twin humbuckers is just so much more to my taste than the piercing tone of a single coil pick-up. This was especially true of the Seventies Clapton, when he wanted to be just another guitarist in the band and not the overweening solo star, and it was a great relief to me to hear, in From the Cradle in particular, that Eric Clapton could still play dirty blues and make them count.

If I think of solo artists of the Seventies, Neil Young stands out as the guy whose records from that decade I would want to own, and I do have a bunch. When I think of Eric Clapton the only truly compelling album is Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs. 461 Ocean Boulevard is important but not a desert island disc. Nothing else really matters though I would not mind owning the expanded (CD) version of EC Was Here and perhaps Just One Night, both live sets that showcase different aspects of the repertoire. The first of these had a cover that was highly risqué for Stellenbosch in the mid-Seventies, featuring a close-up photograph of a naked female torso. It was the kind of record cover a hormonally charged teenage boy like me could secretly perve over when flipping through album covers in a record shop. I would have been embarrassed to buy the record though even if Clapton was a legitimate rock god. The music is a mixture of tunes from Blind Faith and Derek & The Dominoes and is weighted on the contemplative, acoustic side of Clapton's repertoire. The original record was flawed in that, as single platter, some songs were faded out long before the actual end of the liver rendition. In those days, it seems, Clapton liked stretching out on his blues.

The later live double album was recorded at the Budokan in Tokyo and is the typical combination of old and new, rock and blues, that was the staple raison d'etre of live albums in the late Seventies, when, after Frampton Comes Alive, record companies woke up to the realisation that this relatively low cost product (no need to book lengthy studio recording time) could be massively profitable. By 1979 Clapton had been a solo pop / rock act for most of the decade, and very successfully for about 5 years, and had a good selection of hits to entertain an audience with, and given that he is a master musician with a crack band behind him, one could expect more powerful, more expanded versions of his hits. The only tracks from this album that interested me were the blues tracks but at the time his updated version of songs like "Rambling on my Mind" did not appeal because of that trebly Stratocaster sound which sounded kinda thin and anaemic to me, compared to the versions with John Mayall or Derek & The Dominoes. In later years I have come to appreciate this sound for what it is, without hankering back to the old days. He moved on and his sound moved on.

I am not a big fan of the pop Clapton, especially the latter day version, from the Phil Collins years in the Eighties to the present. He may have made a number of accomplished, polished non-blues albums and have achieved a good measure of commercial success with them but his laid back pop style is not to my taste, however sincere and committed he may be. I now own the CDs of 461 Ocean Boulevard and Slowhand, mostly because of the significant impact their respective4 hits had on local radio, and I would not mind owning Backless either, simply for the inclusion of the two blues standards "Early In the Morning" and "Floating Bridge", but that would be just about it. The Another Rider live collection was a complete disappointment, even with the inclusion of some old favourites, because the arrangements were so anodyne and lifeless, although I can see where a live audience would have appreciated the big performances. There just does not seem to be much energy in these renditions and reinterpretations. The album of the Cream reunion concerts suffer from the same failure. Most of the venerable Cream tunes sound like Eric Clapton being backed by some anonymous session guys, churning out tired versions of songs for a nightclub audience who are as old as the band members and who are there for nostalgic reasons and not because the music is still vital. Cream once had fire, energy and brio; in 2005 it was just about the money, I guess, regardless of the protestations to the contrary.

It is the bluesman Clapton that I truly appreciate and like. Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, From the Cradle and the two albums dedicated to the music of Robert Johnson, and even the Riding With The King collaboration with B B King, are the desert island disc Clapton records in my collection. Then there would be the entire Cream oeuvre, and probably also Bluesbreakers With Eric Clapton. All of these are, to my mind, imperative choices.

In the Seventies Clapton regularly recorded blues tunes for his albums and interpreted them within the context of his band sound of the time, which often contrasts sharply with the sound and attitude of the specific blues records from 1994 onwards. The blues bottom line is there but the songs tend to sound merely bluesy as opposed to being deep, heartfelt blues.

The first CD of Blues consists of recordings from the Seventies, mostly with the core bands of the time, one track with Derek & The Dominoes, one guitar duet with Duane Allman and a solo recording. Some of these tracks have never been released and some have been taken from their parent albums.

The second CD consists of live recordings from the same period.

The studio set is bookended by two different versions of "Before you Accuse Me." I know the version from Unplugged quite well and the full band take is quite interesting, given that the syncopated interplay between the guitars is reminiscent of "Lay Down Sally" from Slowhand, and typical of the Tulsa sound of J J Cale. It was recorded during the session for Backless, the album that followed Slowhand but this take did not make it to the album. It sets the tone for the type of blues interpretations Eric Clapton essays on most of the tracks on this album. Here the blues is expressed as world weariness and deep melancholy and not particularly insouciant. The approach may be intended as being laid back, in keeping with the general tenor of the Clapton sound and emotional connection to his material, yet some of the tracks, and here I am thinking of the jams on "Meet Me In The Bottom" or "Country Jail Blues", just come across as enervated and lacking in inspired drive. "Meet Me In The Bottom" sounds like an out-take studio jam, with Clapton making up the lyrics as he goes along. No wonder this track is "previously unreleased." Apart from making up the numbers on this album, there is no good reason to have unearthed it from the vault, unless it is intended to illustrate that Clapton and band could have great fun messing around with a well-known blues tune.

Strangely, "Give Me Strength" works better than the blues covers, perhaps exactly because it sounds like a real plea from a man with real problems and is not merely a regurgitation of blues tropes.

The two songs that I am really glad to meet again are "Early In The Morning" from Backless and "Floating Bridge" from Another Ticket. The first of these was the tune that made me want to own the record, as it was the first Clapton blues, other than his work with Cream, I'd heard and by then I already knew Junior Wells and Buddy Guy's version of it too. I'd recorded "Floating Bridge" from the radio but had not been completely on station for the opening minute or two, which gave the taped performance an outer space weirdness I really liked. Great performance of an interesting Sleepy John Estes tune, too, and kudos to Clapton for honouring a relatively obscure country bluesman.

The second interpretation of "Before You Accuse Me" is more of proper blues than the cut that opens the CD. It is rhythmically less interesting yet also rocks harder and has more of the feel of the disgruntlement the lyrics suggest.

It is perhaps the greatest failing of this collection of tunes drawn from a commercially successful and personally bad period in Clapton's life too often sound a tad gutless and enervated. Obviously Clapton plays the blues because he loves them and I would not say that these performances are perfunctory or rote nods to his roots and influences but on occasion, and this holds true for the live set, I would have liked some fire, some intensity. The Englishman's quiet desperation does not inform the blues as well as the oppressed, and repressed, rage of the Mississippi bluesman.

The clue is the inclusion of "Wonderful Tonight" in the live set. It is a beautiful, heartfelt and tender love song to Patti, the opposite of the emotions expressed in "Layla", also about Patti, and the latter song would have been a better fit in a blues context, as it comes from the same tortured space as "Have You Ever Loved A Woman", which is included in the live set.

The problem, though, is not really the song selection but the way in which Clapton performs them. The required intensity is just not there; some of these performances sound like a band going through the motions one more time on old favourites. I appreciate that one cannot expect Clapton to revisit the blistering version of "Crossroads" released on Cream's Wheels of Fire album but I would have hoped for something with more punch and urgency. In a way the version on Blues adumbrates the sound of the reunited Cream at their 2005 Albert Hall concerts and that was the sound of three older guys who no longer can, or want to, play with the same power and raw inventiveness of their youth. The thins is that Eric Clapton was only in his Thirties when the live performances on Blues were recorded and he already sounds like the 60-year old guy at the Albert Hall in 2005.

My belief is that Clapton recorded and performed blues during the Seventies because it is a music he loves and not particularly because he wanted to pursue it as a dedicated genre. For this reason the blues performance had to fit in with the general ambience of the rock tunes and this is why the blues on Blues seem so anaemic compared to the recordings on From The Cradle and Me & Mr Johnson, where Clapton set out to pay dues to the blues. He is always the consummate craftsman and does not overheat the blues, like (for example) Gary Moored, whether ii is with the big Clapton band of the Seventies or with the small combos of the later blues recordings, but this also means that he does not sound all that committed to the material, even if he may have been, presented on Blues.

This double album is probably an excellent compilation to represent a facet of Eric Clapton's recorded and live output during the Seventies. It reflects the fact that Clapton never abandoned the blues and that it formed the bedrock of his oeuvre over the entire length of his highly commercial solo career path following on the high pressure of Cream and the relative failure of Derek & The Dominoes. Although I am somewhat disappointed by the lack of urgency and intensity in most of these blues performances I am nonetheless glad I now own Blues. I will never be a Clapton completist, as I do not much care for his more popular recordings though I will always be appreciative of his take on the blues, whichever way it goes.

Eric Clapton may not be God and he may not be blues incarnate either but he is a jolly fine bluesman all the same.

Miles Davis

2011-12-28T01:56:00.001-08:00

I love second hand book shops and I love flea market CD stalls. In either one can find amazing bargains and copies of books or albums that are no longer easily available in your mainstream book or CD stores and often one can come across an obscurity that catches the eye and the attention and turns out to be a marvel.

In late December 2011 my wife and I were in Montagu for a couple of days and one our last day, on our way out of town, we stopped at a second books shop about a block from our hotel because my wife was looking for a religious book as Christmas present for her brother . The bookshop is quite large and would have made wonderful browsing for a book fanatic and previously I would happily have spent an hour picking through the stock but I don't do that these days, as I have too many unread books at home.

I did however take the time to look over the small stock of second hand CDs on display in the front of the shop. They were mostly classical music albums but there was some jazz there too. The one jazz album I bought is a live recording of the guitarists Charlie Byrd, Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis.

The other jazz album I bought is Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959) in a digitally remastered version.

I do not have a particularly close relationship to jazz and especially not to the kind of jazz played by the various Miles Davis groups over the years or, simply put, modern jazz as whole, which mostly sounds like background mood music to me. The style of jazz I like the most and have liked since I first heard it on records borrowed from the Stellenbosch municipal library is the hot music made by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five and Hot Seven groups of the Twenties and Thirties. This is visceral music that makes me wanna get up and holler. Miles Davis may make music of utmost genius but ultimately it hardly moves my soul.

My mate Sean Rosenberg has a handful of Miles Davis albums he'd bought when he was a student, mostly the classic records from the late Fifties and early Sixties, well before the fusion excursions of the late Sixties. I guess Sean's musical tastes as student were much more sophisticated than mine. Although jazz is deeply rooted in blues it is not the expression of blues I prefer and certainly did not prefer when I was in my early twenties. As I've said, this stuff sounds like dinner party music you play to set a quiet mood in the background. My kind of blues has to be played loudly to work for me.

Back in the early Seventies the Stellenbosch municipal library did not have many modern jazz records and I do not recall any albums by Miles Davis. The library did, however, have John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (1965), which I borrowed, because I knew the name of the artist (and had the impression of him that he was an iconoclastic, revolutionary saxophone player) and listened to a bunch.

The album consisted of two longish tracks on the first side and a 17 minute long track on the second side. This was challenging for me who was very much into short, sharp stabs of rock or blues and my overall impression of the music and my recollection of it after all these years, was that Coltrane had an abrasive, confrontational style of squawks and honks and endlessly spiralling harsh notes that did not sound very musical to me and absolutely not remotely comforting or soothing. This, to me, was anti-jazz, in relation to the type of modern jazz, for example Dave Brubeck or the Modern Jazz Quartet that I had been exposed to at the time. On the one hand this stuff made no sense to me, as I was not musically trained and could therefore not understand or appreciate the intricacies of what Coltrane was doing, yet on the other hand this stuff was so "in yer face" aggressive I made me think of it as jazz with a punk (circa 1976) attitude that made it quite cool to like simply because it was not pretty.

I have listened to a lot of jazz over the years, mostly incidental to other activities and my thoughts on the subject have not changed much. It is still a music I can only appreciate on an intellectual level and it is a music that often, where I have encountered it as a live music, has come across as fussy, technical and highly irritating because the musicians take the music and themselves so seriously. I believe one can study jazz in the same way that one can study classical music, and nowadays can study rock music. Jazz is meant to be an improvisational music and it seems to me to be counterproductive to study it; surely the magic of jazz is in the moment of creation?

I find modern jazz, the acoustic, small group variety, palatable enough. For some reason, though, jazz fusion, whether with classical music, rock or funk, is one of my pet musical hates. The level of virtuosity may be boundless yet the vacuity is often as boundless. One of the worst listening experiences of my life was a record with John McLaughlin and some noted jazz drummer. I could not distinguish between the tracks. To my untutored, primitive ear, each performance sounded the same as the previous or next one on the album, and each of them was pretty dire. The playing was obviously of a high professional standard and the tempos were frenetic yet the emotional impact was nil. It was a pointless record as far as I was concerned.

Many years ago I bought a biography of Miles Davis and more recently I bought a book on the making of Kind of Blue. Although I have not pursued a jazz path, it is always important to have more information on one of the most important jazz artists of my lifetime.

Now, finally, I own a copy of what is thought of as one of the most important records of all times in all genres. There are 5 tracks, all of them over 5 minutes in length; three exceed 9 minutes and one track is longer than 11 minutes. That's a lot of improvisation.

On first listen it seems that the first two tracks, "So What" and "Freddie Freeloader", are based around the same intro theme and are differentiated only by what the musicians do to that theme over the length of two different takes.

"Blue In Green" sounds like the soundtrack to a scene where movie character meanders introspectively down a beach at a cold dawn. It is very pretty and doleful and perhaps it is a million movie soundtrack clichés that brings this visual accompaniment to mind. It is no good listening to even the most revolutionary of music about 53 years after it was recorded, as time and many imitations usually blunts the impact considerably and probably does an injustice to the original purpose and sense of the music. Having said that, I cannot believe that Kind of Blue truly served as some kind of call to arms for a revolution in jazz.

I guess it would help to know something about music to have a complete understanding of what it is that I am listening to. The untutored, primitive ear just hears the superficialities of mood and texture and probably cannot comprehend the complexities of the musical innovation or subtleties of the infinite variations on chord, melody and mode run by the musicians. On the other hand, I know what I like and why I like it and I know why something grips and engages me when it does, and why it does not. One does not have to understand the technique a painter employs to appreciate the work of art and one does not have to know how to read music to feel the visceral attraction of a particular piece.

I find it interesting that for the most part the performances consist of horn solos over the backing of a muted rhythm section of piano, bass and drums. This is quite unlike the busy, sometimes frenetic, style of the Louis Armstrong Hot Five or Hot Seven combos where it seems that all the instrumentalists are fighting it out for space in the tune, none giving way to the others yet none getting in the way of the others. That is a way of playing that is akin to the electric blues band Muddy Waters put together in Chicago in the early Fifties.

In the Miles Davis approach, the soloist has all the space while his fellow horn players lay out, possibly with the intention to listen to his solo more carefully than if they were also playing at the same time, but this method also adds to the feeling of enervation and lethargy. It would have been nice, for example, to hear a duel between Adderley en Coltrane, given that they have such diametrically opposed styles. I guess that kind of thing was reserved for R & B style honkers and was the farthest away from what Miles Davis would possibly have wanted any of his groups to sound like.

Nothing on Kind of Blue sounds out of the ordinary to me. On the face of it, this music is of a piece with all manner of different jazz records released in the Fifties in the so-called cool jazz style. Maybe musical conventions I know nothing of were broken but I can hardly listen to this record and believe that it was anything as important as, say, those first recordings Elvis Presley made for Sun Records, many of which were quite conventional, with only a handful standing out as truly a breakthrough from country and blues to rock and roll.

I can see where Miles Davis achieved commercial success with this music. It is not offensive or weird and would make the perfect background for a hot, lazy day by the pool or a cold evening by the fire, whether you are indolently happy or neurotically depressed. Unfortunately it still comes down to the perception I have of this type of jazz as background music and not music that is interesting or engaging enough to make me sit up an listen intently.

I have come to Kind of Blue as an adult, with a wide and varied interest in music, as evidenced by my very eclectic collection, and it has been a long time since any piece of music affected me to the extent where I became obsessed with it or the artist's output, or where hearing a song for the first time was a light bulb moment. If I choose to explore the music of Miles Davis now, it will be a pursuit driven by curiosity rather than passion.

Nuggets

2011-12-15T10:31:00.001-08:00

In 1972 Elektra Records released Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, a double album of songs from the mid-Sixties by a group of bands who had been influenced and inspired by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Dylan and psychedelics to make music that was of the youthful arrogance of musicians breaking new ground and perfect pop. Many of these songs were hits of a kind, if not always Billboard number ones. All of them are great.

In the early Eighties I bought the 1976 re-issue on Sire Records, with a different sleeve to the original. NME had highly recommended the album as at least conceptually an influence on the late Seventies punk movement the NME was championing and had more or less insisted that it was an essential part of the well-dressed record collection. Lenny Kaye, then guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and rock writer, had made the compilation and had written the comprehensive sleeve notes. All in all, Nuggets was a must have.

At the time I my first-hand experience of American rock music from the Sixties was pretty much limited to the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. The bands on Nuggets came from a completely different angle and, often, geographical location, than the better known mainstream artists. Their basic guiding principle was to write short, fiery pop songs with an edge: that punk attitude that informed the likes of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols roughly ten years later.

The first two volumes of the Encyclopedia of Rock (which I bought in 1974) gave me a theoretical basis for my explorations into rock music by providing brief biographies of the bands and individuals the compilers of the encyclopaedia considered to be the most important rock acts. Volume 2 of the Encyclopedia covered the Sixties and amongst other luminaries, had entries on The Electric Prunes, the Blues Magoos, The Seeds, The 13^th Floor Elevators, Standells and The Amboy Dukes. Nuggets afforded me the opportunity of putting a sound to the names. By and large I was blown away by this stuff. It was intensely good end enjoyable fun. The music re-emphasised to me that the experimental Sixties, when bands were trying out new sounds and new experiences, represented the best period in music ever. There was innocence, a naivety and a knowing cynicism all at the same time in the music industry. Particularly in the USA where the music industry was as much a calculated moneymaking enterprise as the movie industry, and where record companies jumped on trends and exploited them to the max for as long as the record buying public could be persuaded to buy the songs from the latest dance craze, and at the same allowed all kinds of weird and wonderful songs out on record and on to the radio. Hence the songs on Nuggets.

Neil Young recorded a version of The Premiers; "Farmer John" for the Weld live double album but could not do justice to the rough and tumble of the original version. "(Just Like) Romeo & Juliet" by Michael and The Messengers is probably the most exciting, revelatory previously unknown to me track on Nuggets. This is the most supreme of one hit wonders and I believe that it is best that the bend was never heard of again. Just for the sake of preserving the pristine sugar rush of this glorious slab of soul inflected doo wop style rock and roll.

There is the glorious mid-period Beatles pastiche of "Lies" by The Knickerbockers or the early electric Dylan pastiche of Mouse's "A Public Execution" or the inspirational version of "Hey Joe" by The Leaves (copied by Japanese psych rockers The Golden Cups) and the snotty snarl of "Let's Talk About Girls" by The Chocolate Watchband, probably my favourite Sixties band of all time.

I could write a eulogy of just about every one of these tracks, as each one is great in its own way, one visceral surge of excitement after another. I would imagine that this album could have been sequenced as an idealised example of perfect, parallel universe style, Sixties pop radio programming. These songs were never Top 40 hits and would therefore not have made it to heavy rotation and that is why it silly to believe in this selection as an accurate reflection of the wonderful world of Sixties pop. Then, as now, a lot of crap made it to the Top 40 and most of the best stuff never did.

The amazing difference between the CD re-issue and my original vinyl copy is that digital remastering gives the tracks far more sonic depth than I knew they had. Perhaps the analogue recording studios and techniques could give these recordings a lustre and a power that belie the relatively primitive times these tunes were recorded in.

Man, I love this kind of stuff! These songs are the reason why I could never get into prog rock. The music on Nuggets is not introspective and the lyrics are not the kind one pores over to seek deeper or hidden meaning. It is the kind of music where you turn up the volume and do a freaky, happy dance.

Gary Moore’s Blues

2011-12-06T11:05:00.001-08:00

When I think of the great blues guitarists Gary Moore does not readily come to mind. A blues shuffle is one of the most basic guitar skills to learn and running up and down the blues scale to construct a riff or a solo is not that difficult to learn and I guess the blues is the base from which many young guitarists start their career even if they progress to something much more technically complicated or just heavier. Jamming on a shuffle in A or E, or any one other key, is one of the commonalities of guitarists the world over, a language two guys from opposite ends of the spectrum can understand.

Gary Moore was a heavy rock guitar player, with Thin Lizzy, a heavy jazz fusion guitarist with Coliseum and had a solo career too, in the rock anthem arena. He is one of those rock artists who had an entire career of which I know little and for which I could care less, as his kind of rock bombast never appealed to me. It is based on the kind of triumphant virtuosity that does not seem to have much more effect than to sound impressive yet have very little visceral impact.

In the early Nineties Moore saw the commercial light and released a trio of blues albums. The trilogy comprised of two studio albums (Still Got The Blues [1990] and After Hours [1992] ) and one live set, Blues Alive (1993). He recorded a mix of blues standards and his own compositions. On at least one track he performed alongside Albert King, whom Moore dubbed "King of the Blues", a title Albert had always claimed though that right had also always been disputed by B B King.

I guess this collaboration with Albert meant that he was a greater influence on Moore's blues style than B B King ever was, given Moore's rather muscular hard rock approach to the blues. I really rate Albert King and, if pushed to make a choice, would prefer him over B B King, good as the latter is, because I like the powerhouse Albert King style. Not that either Albert King or Gary Moore is incapable of subtlety; it just does not seem to be quite the norm. Having said that, Gary Moore also recorded a tribute to Peter Green's blues from the Fleetwood Mac years, called Blues for Greeny (1995) that amply illustrates Moore's ability to replicate the style of one of the most exquisitely tasteful and subtle of blues players.

A couple of years ago and at a now defunct flea market stall on Green Market Square I bought the album Ballads & Blues 1982 - 1994 (2006) that featured, as appears to be mandatory for Gary Moore compilations, "Parisienne Walkways" in a live incarnation, along with some rock ballads and a couple of kind of blurs tracks. I bought the CD because it was very cheap (the inlay was missing) and I was disappointed because it was not that much of a blues album and I do not care for the Moore take on would-be-anthemic rock ballads. Three or maybe only four of the tracks are worth repeated listening. "Blues for Narada", an instrumental, was the biggest surprise of the album, as it is a very moving performance, more blues in conceptual feel than dirty downhome wailing and in the same ballpark as "Parisienne Walkways" as a song that could be a major crowd pleaser at a gig. One can see the thousands of flickering lighters or, as a more contemporary innovation, flickering cell phones.

Having googled the Gary Moore discography I now know that there are even more blues albums than the four released between 1990 and 1995. I have never seen the more recent albums or even been aware of them. Clearly the commercial appeal of the blues remained even amidst the more standard rock fare. I would be so bold as to say, though, that the earlier albums are still the best.

There are a couple of compilations of the 'blues years'. The one I have is Parisienne Walkways: The Blues Collection (2003), which is in fact a compilation of tracks from the blues albums released by Moore, plus the mandatory "Parisienne Walkways", a song on a Phil Lynott solo album and which seems to be so closely identified with Gary Moore that a collection of his songs must include it to have any chance of selling in significant volume. The version generally available is a live version, with an incredibly long sustained note that is probably the moment the listener waits for as the song is not bad but hardly compelling other than for the Moore guitar part. In this instance "Parisienne Walkways" comes from Blues Alive.

I picked up this blues collection for a song at Cash Crusaders. The presence of "Parisienne Walkways" was not a unique selling proposition; in fact, I would have preferred an album without it.

As I recollect Chris Prior played a few of these Gary Moore blues numbers on his late radio show on Radio 5 and they sounded pretty good on the FM airwaves. I really like the blues and have a fondness for good blues rock as well, or maybe I should call it blues influenced rock, as a bunch of bands who have tried to make rock songs out of blues just made crap. The two main issues are the rock rhythm section just cannot get the backbeat that is so necessary to swing the blues and that the lead guitarist believes he should solo as often and as long as he can, usually to boring effect over the length of an album.

Blues is meant to be about feeling and not simple technical ability, awesome as it might be. Gary Moore comes from a musical heritage where he could use his technical skill work for him in the blues context to produce music that satisfies as a whole. The backing musicians are often not, as far as | know, blues musicians but most probably simply top session musicians who can play in any style you require.

On this collection we have few Moore tunes, a couple of standards, including a duet with Albert King on "Oh Pretty Woman" and, significantly, a handful of songs either written by one P A Greenbaum, better known as Peter Green, or associated with the Green-era Fleetwood Mac.

"Oh Pretty woman" is the bravura opening track with a big blues rock guitar attack that belies any semblance of a deep attachment to the spirit of the blues though, of course, the Albert King signature tune, is pretty well standard braggadocio by a bluesman who was never ashamed to grandstand when he could. It is just that the bluster of the rock trappings do not do justice to the song or to the concept. This version could easily have fitted in with the Gary Moore heavy rock show.

I know "Walking By Myself" better in a much more sympathetic treatment by Johnny Winter from Red, Hot and Blue, the second album Winter cut with the Muddy Waters band in the late Seventies, and Moore's take on this Jimmy Rodgers classic is not as leaden as the opening track, yet also not as easily swinging as the Winter interpretation. I guess this is the difference between a guitarist who grew up in Ireland listening to the blues on record and a guitarist who grew up around the Texas juke joints.

"Need Your Love So Bad", "Merry Go Round", "Showbiz Blues" and "Love That Burns" represent the Fleetwood Mac tribute and are the most bluesy and sensitive of the tunes on offer. Moore has an appealing lovelorn voice and does justice to his material here. He cannot quite beat Peter Green at his own game though. Who can? Nonetheless these versions are worth revisiting.

The weirdness on this compilation is a George Harrison song that is rather appealing and melodic but I would hardly have thought of Harrison as a bluesman. The pop smarts of the song works well in this context of good time rocking blues. Great sing-a-long chorus. Coulda been a hit, I guess.

The three versions of "The Sky Is Crying" I know best are by the composer Elmore James, Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Here Moore takes the Albert King approach with piercing, forceful leads though he adds to the more or less dimensional King thing with a nod to Stevie Ray Vaughan's virtuosity. The basic thing one can say about Moore's take on the blues is that is loud end powerful. Unfortunately it is also somewhat too technically proficient and clinical to move me in the way Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf or Albert King move me. The blues should be about a feeling and the feeling Moore gives me is that he is making a commercial move and not a heartfelt one.

The album ends with three Gary Moore compositions: "Cold day In Hell", "Only Fool In Town" and "King of the Blues" and these tunes show that he is facile songwriter who knows his blues moves and can contemporise them to fit in with his big rock anthems. Rock solid rhythm section with melodic lead guitar combined with rousing choruses, is a formula for audience enjoyment and Moore knows how to work a room. He does not write blues from the heart, though. It is an exercise in song writing, albeit a successful exercise, that cannot truly touch the heart or even the gut, at least not mine.

Whereas I have listened a lot to Eric Clapton's blues and will continue to do so. The same applies to early Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green, Michael Bloomfield and even Stevie Ray Vaughan, all of whom were steeped in the blues and tried to do justice to the music and the emotion of it. My feeling is that I won't spend that much time listening to Gary Moore's version of the blues. Owning this compilation has more to do with satisfying my curiosity, after all these years, than with a desire to immerse myself in the man's product. Undoubtedly talented and skilled, yet not nuanced enough for my liking.

MC5

2011-11-09T11:54:00.001-08:00

As far as I know Chicago, the band, is the only prominent rock band from the city of Chicago, which is otherwise known as a cradle of electric downhome blues, on its Southside and its West Side. On the other hand, Detroit, although it had its own blues musicians, was not a blues town but is well-known as a rock city and gave birth to a number of important bands such as The Stooges, Grand Funk Railroad and the MC5. There is even Bob Seger. Not all of them originated in the inner city of Detroit, in fact they came from the satellite cities and communities around Detroit, such as Flint and Ann Arbor, but for all practical purposes these bands can be called motor city bands.

The cliché has it that the industrialised Detroit ambience gave rise to a particular brand of high energy, uncomplicated rock and roll for the people. Grand Funk Railroad represents the truly dumb end of this spectrum, especially on their first couple of albums as power trio with somewhat pretensions revolutionary and anti-establishment rhetoric, mixed in with the paeans to good times, fast women and a tearaway lifestyle. The Stooges also sound pretty dumb and basic and had a sex god type as front man. The MC5 were the revolutionaries who belonged to something called the White Panther Party, played truly furious rock and roll and were not only influenced by revolutionary politics but also free jazz and, apparently John Lee Hooker and classic Fifties rock'n'roll.

The NME liked the MC5 and wrote about them as doomed outlaw rockers who tried their hardest to be bad ass and perfect pop and were ahead of their time, or not quite of their time. The MC5, along with the Stooges, were seen as forerunners of the punk wave that swept through the British rock establishment from 1976 onward.

By that time the MC5 were long gone as functioning unit. Wayne Kramer was leading his own band, Fred 'Sonic' Smith hooked up with Patti Smith, and who knows what the rest were doing. The Detroit unit released 3 albums and exited.

The second album, Back In The USA (1970), is deemed to be masterpiece of concise rock that not only spoke to teenage concerns but also made serious political points with a rock and roll beat and truly invigorating guitar fire-power. Jon Landau, one of the early rock critics and by all accounts a very conservative one at that in terms of what he regarded as perfect rock, and later Bruce Springsteen's manager, produced this album and made a short, sharp Fifties style pop record of it. Previously, on Kick Out The Jams, the debut, the MC5 had played to their strengths of brute rock power and advocating the revolution that was expected to sweep the nation. It was kind of in yer face and too basic and confrontational to make either the record company or the public happy.

Apparently the perfect pop album did not make it either. The MC5 could not or would not write perfect pop hit singles and were probably too notorious for their pop moment to make the commercial breakthrough.

In the late Seventies the MC5 was an influence but the records were not all that available and I was pleasantly surprised when I found Living In The USA at Ragtime Records, and at a bargain price as well. I snapped it up. It had a great black and white cover photograph of a sweaty, post gig band. It must be one of the classic rock album covers of all time. I did not listen to any of the record before I bought it, partly because I thought it a bit infra dig to listen to a bargain price record and partly because I was buying it purely on the recommendation of the NME. It was simply a record one had to own, an essential part of the well-bred record collection.

My anticipation was rewarded with great joy and happiness. From the opening cut "Tutti Frutti" to the last cut "Back In The USA", this was indeed an album of high energy, powerful rock, and rock that had something to say and said it well.

"Tutti Frutti" sets the mark for the obscure language of rock'n'roll that sounded like gibberish to adults and yet required no translation to have meaning to the teenage audience. "Back In The USA" was an ironic song, whether sung by Chuck Berry, its composer, or by Rob Tyner. Either way it was sung by an outcast from the perfect American society it describes and that obviously does not exist anywhere outside of some tourist brochure. The America eulogised in this song is most likely the America the White Panther Party was geared to destroy.

In the middle there are songs of teenage lust and of rock band member lust (something of a theme) and there is a tender ballad "Let Me Try", somewhat at odds with the general tenor of the songs, and a couple of punchy, funny political diatribes, such as "The American Ruse" and "The Human Being Lawn Mower." Not only are the songs snappy, they are also short and to the point.

A fascinating thing about the general information on the band, given on the record sleeves, is the very specific reference (Kick Out The Jams) to Fred 'Sonic' Smith playing a Mosrite guitar and Wayne Kramer playing a Fender guitar. Who knows whether it is Telecaster or Stratocaster? The only other Mosrite guitar player I know of is Johnny Ramone; perhaps Fred Smith influenced him. Which other bands ever took the trouble of telling you exactly what brand of guitar you hear on their records, unless it was an endorsed product?

On Back in The USA we are specifically informed which solos Kramer plays and which Smith plays. The only other album I know of where this information is available, is on Bachman-Turner Overdrive\s Not Fragile, a band that also featured two lead guitarists.

The other thing is the seriously large puffball hairdo Rob Tyner sports. Even more than the long hair of the other guys in the band, this kind of outrageous hairstyle must have shrieked rebel and flouter of social convention. Plus it is pretty awesome. I always wonder how such a magnificent hairdo stays in such pristine condition but I guess it was specially puffed up for the photo shoot.

Back In The USA is a brilliant album that deserves to ranked up there with the usual top ten suspects on best rock album lists.

It was some time later that I finally bought Kick Out The Jams (1968) and it was a relative disappointment after the brilliantly concise pop rock of the second album.

The notorious aspect of the debut album is the war cry of "Kick out the jams, motherfuckers" just before the band launch into the title track of the album. Sadly, my record had the sanitised version where the words "brother and sisters" have been crudely patched in to replace "motherfuckers", as the latter was apparently highly offensive to middle class America and in particular a chain of Detroit department stores that not only refused to stock this record but eventually refused to stock any record by Elektra Records, the record company with which the MC5 had a short-lived business relationship. Apparently Jac Holzman could kind of deal with the radical politics but the offensively vulgar language. At least not commercially. This was in days before gangster rap.

Anyhow, the music was a lot rougher and more brutal than on Back In The USA and a lot less pop friendly. This was the MC5 amping it up, riffing it up and rocking the house with sheer noise and balls. The energy is undeniable yet also seems somewhat pointless on occasion, such as on "Rocket Ship" or "Rocket Reducer. No 62 (Ramalama Fa fa Fa)" The sex rock chant of "Come Together" is not the more funky Beatles song. If the MC5 song is indeed intended as a sonic re-enactment of sex, I would pity the poor woman on the receiving end.

This kind of breakout may have meant a lot to the audience at the Grande Ballroom, especially if they were wasted and spaced but on record the noise palls somewhat. For all I know Kick Out The Jams is a much more accurate reflection of what the MC5 were about than is the case with he following album. It does seem a tad trying though. The shorter, sharper songs, like "Rambling Rose" or the title track are the stuff of legend; the lengthier noise workouts, not. MC5 were not a jam band and their long extrapolations sound a tad too formless for effect. The effort and the sweat are palpable yet the result is a tedium and not a longing for release. At the end of this Grande Ballroom set the audience would have gone home with ringing ears and not necessarily expanded minds, whether cosmically or politically.

For many years I owned only those first two MC5 albums and it took until October 2011 before I finally acquired the third, and last, studio album High Time (1971). I had known of its existence but had never seen it anywhere, whether as LP or CD, until I order the trio of albums from Amazon.co.uk. The CDs were manufactured in Germany, though.

Apparently one can categorise the three releases as the Sinclair album, the Landau album and the MC5 album. It took the band five or more years to get to the point of being themselves, musically speaking. Perhaps, but I believe that the first two albums were simply the instalments of an ongoing process of refinement of the primal rock force the MC5 were from the beginning.

High Time has a terrible cover, a very literal interpretation of the album title, with photographs of the five band members as part of the clock face of a smashed alarm clock. Perhaps it was intended to be symbolic of the destructive power of revolution. Perhaps the destroyed clock was the result of a drug orgy gone wrong. Perhaps it was meant to evoke the almost cartoonish timer mechanism of a homemade bomb. What it true, is that it is terrible. It reminds of the similarly terrible cover photograph of Grand Funk Railroad's debut album, On Time, where the three Grand Funkers hold similar time pieces and look kind of sheepish, as well they should.

The one thing High Time has in common with Kick Out The Jams is that both album feature only 8 tracks, most of them on the long side.

The opening track, "Sister Anne", is as relentless a three chord rock attack as one could possibly want (could be the template for Status Quo if it wasn't for the far rougher vocals of Rob Tyner) and ends with a Salvation Army brass band outro. Trippy is not the word. It is also the most catchy track, by a long chalk, of the first four tracks, on what would have been side one of the LP. The concise, bright rock and roll of the previous album has been consigned to a dustbin of history and has been replaced by a sleeker version of the brute rock intensity of the debut album.

"Gotta Keep Movin" has a riff and lyrics, commenting on the state of the nation, that would have fitted right in, with brighter production, on Living In The USA, as complementary to "The American Ruse." "Future/Now" tries to do the same but the riff is too stodgy and there is no tune. "Poison" has an almost pretty vocal and "Over and Over", another deeply political song, has very impassioned singing that at times borders on the hysterical.

High Time comes across as a heavy rock and roll album. It is not heavy as in heavy metal even if tempos are often slower than the frenetic pace of earlier records, but it is hard and bottom heavy and almost deliberate, in strict contrast to the bright, crisp sound of Back In The USA. The heaviness is also a moral and political heaviness because the MC5 have not forgotten or abandoned their radical roots although John Sinclair is a mentor of the past. Instead of advocating revolution the MC5 are more concerned with highlighting the evils of the establishment society rather than smashing the walls for they are, after all, a rock and roll band and a rock and roll band cannot make a career of violent confrontation.

Although High Time is as visceral as the previous albums, it is not as immediately accessible and exciting, apart from "Sister Anne", as Back In The USA yet it is a more engaging and album than Kick Out The Jams.

The MC5 came in kicking and went out on a high. That is no mean feat.

Rob Tyner and Fred Smith are dead. Wayne Kramer spent time in jail for drug dealing and has resurrected a rock career since his release, as elder statesman of a distinctive style of high energy Detroit rock and roll. Blues Oyster Cult regularly performed "Kick Out The Jams" live and recorded one such performance for Some Enchanted Evening. The NME rock writers who championed the punk and New Wave waves from 1976 to about 1979 name checked the MC5 as definite influences, both conceptually and musically, on the destroyers of AOR. The MC5 cannot be rated by the numbers of records they sold in their lifetime. They will be rated by the longevity of those records and the impact they will continue to have on brash young rockers everywhere.

Status Quo

2011-11-08T13:16:00.001-08:00

NME once described Status Quo as a bit of a national treasure and this was in the days when the Quo was still a serious gigging band who toured the UK constantly and was probably also quite big in Europe yet meant diddly squat in the USA. Quo had perfected the heads down, no-nonsense mindless boogie, with sing-a-long times. and had built a loyal following of mostly young men that made touring a financially viable prospect and they even had hit singles and hit albums. They were big without ever becoming truly massive.

Status Quo came to my attention with their 1974 single "Down, Down", which was a tremendous bit of that no-nonsense, mindless boogie. It sounded good on the radio and it sounded even better being blasted from a fuck off PA at a University of Stellenbosch student carnival rock festival at the university's Planckenbrug River picnic site, probably in early 1975.

I was underage and not allowed to enter the grounds where the festival was being held. For most of the afternoon I was in position next to the fence that surrounded the picnic terrain. It was a rock DJ and he played the best rock hits of the past few years. "Down Down" was among them and the one I remember best because it sounded so much heavier and dumber than on the radio.

I had no clue what the band was about or who they were. The Blue For You album, with the lads dressed almost totally in blue denim, was available at Sygma Records and it was one of the records I made a mental note to buy one day when I had the money. When I did have money, though, I did not buy Status Quo. In the meantime, Status Quo was an excellent advertisement for Wrangler jeans, or whatever brand it was that they wore.

The next Quo single of note was "Rocking All Over The World", their 1977 version of a John Fogerty song and if it was pleasant enough, it did not have the brute rocking power of "Down Down."

"Rocking all Over the World" and its eponymous parent album were released in year as Status Quo Live!, a good collection of hits recorded at the Glasgow Apollo. For some reason it did not feature "Down Down".

I acquired Live! about two years after its release when it was on sale at one of the bi-annual CNA record sales. Coincidentally the other records I bought at that particular sale were Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True and Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps. This must be an indication of the eclectic nature of my record collection.

My relationship with Live! was not exactly wine and roses. Some of the time I really liked it, especially the fast paced boogie songs, yet the interminable "Forty Five Hundred Times" with the audience sing-a-long soon started to drag. Unlike say, Cream's Cream Live or Live Full House (J Geils band) I just could not fully internalise and unreservedly love Status Quo though, on paper, the Quo sound is just my kind of thing. Pile driving shuffle rhythms, lots of melodic lead guitar and hummable, memorable tunes. For all that, Status Quo live on stage did not gel with me.

Live! has this lack of complete identification in common with Deep Purple's Made in Japan. "Smoke on the Water" is in my all-time top ten of great rock songs and the piano breakdown from "My Woman From Tokyo" is so awesome I once taped it over and over into a ten minute repetitive loop. For all that the live Deep Purple also did not gel. I bought the album from my friend Native Grief, had it for a month of two and sold it back to him to raise cash to buy Cream's Cream Live, a truly seminal album in my record collection.

By the time I bought Status Quo Live! I had enough of an income not to have to sell records to buy other records and I kept the album until 2009 when I gave away my entire record collection. I had not listened to the album in probably 15 years or more. From about 1981 when I bought a Yamaha tape deck it had been my habit to tape all my records and then to listen only to the tapes and save the records. I never taped the Status Quo album.

Somewhere in the early years of the 21^st century I bought a CD with some tracks of the early Status Quo, with songs like Pictures of "Matchstick Men" and "Down The Dustpipe", one of the earliest boogie Status Quo songs I knew. Some years later I bought Disc 2 of the 3-CD The Essential Status Quo set. It was the only one of the three available at a Cash Crusaders store. Somehow I never got that much into either of them though the older, more poppy songs on the one CD were on the whole tastier than the more rocking tunes on the other album.

Now I have bought a twofer one set of the albums Quo (1974)and On The Level (1975), mostly because On the Level has "Down Down" (in fact two versions; the single edit is a bonus track, along with a handful of live recordings) and also because each of them has a couple of songs I know from the Live! set.

Either Francis Rossi or Rick Parfitt complained about the tinny sound of their early albums. It was only once they stopped touring and got to the Eighties that they learnt how to make records that had a full, solid sound, the sound they had always had in their heads but could not reproduce in the studio. Perhaps they were just happy to have the typical Eighties production values at their fingertips, given that that sound was then the cutting edge of recording technology. Today the stereotypical Eighties production just sounds terrible to me whereas the stuff from the Seventies seems to have held its own over the years despite the relative primitivism.

On the Level does have a solid bottom end sound. The guitars do sometimes sound a tad too brilliant and fussy, until the shuffle kicks in, for the boogie the Quo boys make and the vocals often come across as weirdly nerdy. The pop aspirations of the Quo, who wanted audiences to be able to sing along, almost undercut the power of the guitar crunch.

Status Quo came from psychedelic pop and knew how to write recognisable tunes. Then they put down that bottom heavy boogie sound and rocked the house. If that is not a winning formula I would not know what is. They ought to have had many number one hit singles.

The sight of Rick Parfitt, Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster dressed in tight denim flares, denim waist coats, legs wide and head banging in unison while digging deep into a Quo riff must have been impressive sight at the Glasgow Apollo, or anywhere else the band took the stage circa 1975 or 1976. The term bone crushing comes to mind. In their day, with the power cranked up, Status Quo would have been louder than Led Zeppelin. This is why the records sound so weirdly like the simple bubble-gum rock of The Sweet, Mud or Suzi Quatro. Status Quo has harmonies, arpeggios, tunes and pop smarts on record. Live they had no mercy for the audience and their collective eardrums.

In this twofer collection Quo is the straightforward album as released in 1974 and On The Level has 5 bonus tracks from the era, mostly live (except for the single edit of "Down Down") that could be outtakes from Live!, if it weren't for the duplication that would suggest previously unreleased versions of well-loved anthems. Both albums have the requisite number of ingenuous variations on the basic shuffle I will always associate with Status Quo as its unique contribution to rock and also the requisite number of slower songs. On the whole On the Level is more satisfying and has the better songs. Quo has been called the heavier album of the two but I do not quite see why this would be so. Each album has the same crunch and same heaviness; Quo simply comes across as having less inspired song writing. And a drum solo that serves as a segue between "Lonely Man" and "Slow Train."

The four live bonus tracks to On The Level take me back to Quo Live! though the more interesting connection is that the opening tracks of both On The Level and Quo, respectively "Little lady / Most Of The Time" and "Backwater / Just Take Me" were paired together on that official live album. This would probably be an indicator that these two albums are prime Status Quo, hence the budget price pairing.

The well-known songs are much better than the rest of the songs on these albums and that is the likely reason why they have become Quo standards. The albums do not by themselves serve as inducement to investigate the rest of the band's oeuvre. I would perhaps not mind owning Quo Live! again and my interest in the band would be limited to the preceding studio albums but that would be a passing interest motivated by curiosity. I would like to own Blue For You but only really because I knew the album cover so well back in the day and not because I believe the music would be completely fabulous.

Status Quo is an acquired taste now, though once acquired, it is not a bad taste at all. The singles sounded fabulous on the radio and a greatest hits package would be the best way to experience the band's music. Alternatively one should have been at the Glasgow Apollo, or any of the other venues where the Quo rocked the house time and again. The albums are not intended for the quiet listening experience or the intense studying of the meaning of the lyrics. They are intended for playing loud, very loud, and for heads down no nonsense air guitar boogie.

Bob Marley

2011-11-08T08:54:00.001-08:00

Robert Nesta Marley is probably to this day still the greatest reggae superstar there is, has been and always will be. No doubt he was the first internationally recognised reggae artist and the principal reason why Rasta and reggae are synonymous in many people's minds. Bob not only wrote early hits for Johnny Nash, but also "I Shot the Sheriff", Eric Clapton's monster comeback hit from his 461 Ocean Boulevard album, all of which gave him an entrée into the world of rock superstardom, but also wrote "No Woman, No Cry", which probably is as much of an anthem as "I Shot the Sheriff." in the late years of his career, from Kaya onwards, Marley also wrote a series of pop hits that leavened the heavily politicised Rastafarianism he had become known for and proved that reggae could be as much a vehicle for popular standards as for political expression.

Reggae, like Seventies funk, is an example of a genre of music I truly enjoy because I experience it viscerally and should have explored more thoroughly yet never have. Mostly because there is so much other music out there I love, that blues and rock is the predominant flavour of my CD (and my record before that) collection.

I guess my first exposure to reggae, or even ska, would have been Milly's "My Boy Lollipop", Johnny Nash's version of "Stir It Up" and Eric Clapton's monster hit version of "I Shot The Sheriff." I also heard the live version of "No Woman No Cry" every so often on local radio, as well as whatever reggae influenced pop was given airtime. Other than that, reggae was mystery music.

In about 1979 I attended the first of two (Cape Town) Woodstock music festivals in the Good Hope Centre. The Steve Walsh Buddies Band was one of the acts and amongst the other cover versions they played, they slotted in a couple of Bob Marley tunes, such as "Crazy Baldhead" and gave us a taste of White reggae at just about the time The Police were about to make it a lucrative genre.

Bob Marley was the big guy in reggae and the only international star; a household name. He had dreadlocks, was a Rastafarian (whatever that was) and smoked copious amounts of ganja. it was called from time to time. All of that made Marley the antithesis of what was considered a good, wholesome role model for South African youth. Apparently Rastas were also incredibly chauvinistic and sexist.

One of the interesting little facts about the punk movement that took Britain by storm in 1976 and 1977 was the NME reported that the leading lights of the movement seemed to listen to little else but heavy reggae.

The NME gave their favoured JA (it took me some time to realise that this as an abbreviation for Jamaican Archipelago) acts quite a bit of coverage and I knew a good deal about the top reggae acts long before I heard much of the music. One of the interviews with Marley that always stuck with me was headed A Lickle Love an' T'ing, by Cynthia Rose, if I am not mistaken, and if I remember correctly this was one of the first times a journalist raised the vexing question of the sexism that was prevalent amongst male Rastafaris who thought of women as little better than second class citizens whose job was to serve the menfolk and to be sexually available to their men and otherwise be chaste, while the men could avail themselves of whatever young stars truck women were hanging around the Rasta camp.

I found Burnin', the second album on Island Records of the internationally focused Mailers at the OK Record Bar as a budget release and bought it from curiosity and because it was cheap. My expectations were dashed. The main reason why I liked reggae was the deep, bottom heavy bass sound and drum rhythms that we wanna get up and dance. Burnin' sounded tinny and weedy, unlike the "rock" production I was expecting after reading how Catch A Fire had been gussied up for international rock palates. It seemed to me that Burnin' just had no power and that it was no better than a series of limpid, lazy songs of Rastafarian praise. I cannot say that it hardly ever left my turntable. In fact, I did not even take the trouble of recording it on a cassette tape.

I bought the Bob Marley & The Wailers Live album only some time afterwards and this, too, was unfathomably great, not only because of the rock solid grooves but the magisterial tone of the incantatory lyrics. This album made me understand why Marley was the superstar and not the other excellent reggae musicians show albums I owned.

During one of my moves from home to home in the early Eighties this album was stolen (along with most of my rap collection) by the movers. As was my practice with all my records I had taped the album and therefore still had the music and listened to it often. For some unknown reason I never replaced the record with its CD equivalent.

In 2005 I bought a DVD of a live performance of Bob Marley in 1977, at the Rainbow theatre in London, with a cover that was an almost direct copy of the live album. The songs from the Rainbow shoe overlapped with the songs from the Lyceum show released on the record, but there were some older songs and some newer songs from the then current Exodus album. The DVD is exciting, as it showcases Bob Marley and his touring band at the height of their powers with a powerful set of definitive songs in the Marley canon, and it was intriguing, so many years after Marley's death, to see him perform. He had played in Harare in 1980 as part of the celebrations of Zimbabwe's newly established lawful independence and democracy and some of my Varsity acquaintances had gone to see him but I did not have the gumption or even the inclination.

By the time of his untimely death Bob Marley had become a huge legend, one of the international and iconic superstars of the Seventies and one of the few who was not White and wasn't born in either the UK or the USA.

The live version of "No Woman, No Cry" from the Live album had been played on South African radio and it became one of my favourite tunes of all time, and more loved than even the mega hit "I Shot The Sheriff" but I was totally blown away when I heard the original studio recording of it, many years later, as released on Natty Dread. One of the revelations was that the slightly jerky, funkier rhythms of the original sounded miles different to the streamlined live version. It seemed to me that there had been a serious change in how reggae sounded from the early to the late Seventies. The latter sound was bigger and more monolithic and the earlier sound was lighter and more ska inflected. In most respects I found the early reggae sound preferable but I guess it is all good.

Somewhere in the first half of the first decade of the new millennium I bought the CD of Rastaman Vibration at Cash Crusaders and for the first time I got why Bob Marley became so huge. The songs were mostly unfamiliar to me, except for "Johnny Was" that I had heard in a version by some British band, perhaps The Ruts, from the early Eighties, and "Crazy Baldhead", the very same tune Steve Walsh had performed at the Woodstock festival in Cape Town in 1979. I had read about the Haile Selassie speech that formed the backbone of "War." On the whole I experience Rastaman Vibration a joyous, uplifting album, musically in transition between the early reggae style of the band that record Catch A Fire and Natty Dread, and the rockers style of Live.

I must also point out that the version of "No Woman, No Cry" on Natty Dread is a million miles away from the live version that became the international hit, and though the studio cut sounds kinda emotionally lightweight in comparison to the somewhat ponderous gravitas of the live version, I prefer the studio cut to the live performance.

My best Marley memory comes from taping one of his later studio albums that I'd borrowed from a friend. I'd put the record on the turntable, let the needle drop, pressed "record" on the tape deck and sat down at my dining room table where I was busy with some task or another, only half concentrating on the music. What I did notice of was a really good repetitive, rhythmic, dub-like instrumental groove that opened the record. It sounded like an extended, rather catchy, jamming intro to something that might promise to be a satisfying tune. After maybe 15 minutes it struck me that the instrumental intro had in fact become a long instrumental number and I was curious because I would not have thought that Bob Marley would record a song without vocals. I stood up and went over to the record player and found that the needle had stuck in one of the first grooves of the vinyl. The first track on the album was not a long instrumental after all. I had in effect been listening to a loop of the opening chords.

I immediately stopped recording but I listened back to the tape I still liked that loop and kept about 5 minutes of it. Then I cleaned the record surface and recorded it again, this time without any loops. The first five minutes of the tape was still the best part, though.

My most recent Marley & The Wailers acquisition is a CD called Classic Wailers and it is another version of a seemingly endless recycling of recordings the Wailers made in Jamaica before Chris Blackwell took them under his wing and made international stars of the group, and Marley in particular. After Marley's death the budget CD market was flooded with compilations of these early tracks and up to recently I resisted buying any of them because I suspected the music would not be all that wonderful. This album, though, cost less than R50 and was therefore not much of a risk if it turned out badly.

As it happens, the album turned out quite pleasantly even if the songs and performances generally feel more poppy end lightweight than the later more Rastafari infused albums. The songs are very tuneful, the rhythms grooving, bottom heavy and infectious and the material is a good cross section of almost straight R & B styled pop and the more philosophical and militant type of song the Wailers recorded when they became international stars. There are "Small Axe" and "Duppy Conqueror" I knew from Burnin and here they sound very much of a piece with the glossier versions on the Island Records release. There is Peter Tosh's very self-assertive "Stepping Razor," a number he re-recorded a couple of times in beefier versions but it is still one of his best tunes. There is "Stir It Up," there is "Lively Up Yourself" and there is a conceptually strange, though captivating, and version of "Sugar Sugar" by The Archies. The Wailers could do serious and militant and they could do sweet pop. They could absolutely do compelling listening, long before Chris Blackwell got his hands on them.

After spending some time with these songs I would almost say I prefer the pop reggae incarnation of the Wailers to the more militant incarnation. Catchy is as catchy does and these tunes are spectacularly catchy. Perhaps the Rasta influence and identity was the motivator for a less overtly commercial sound and a more "rock" approach that could co-incidentally lead to international stardom, given the strong, striking image righteous dreadlocked Jah warriors could parlay into recognition and success far beyond the borders of their island home.

Dan Bern

2011-11-04T13:15:00.001-07:00

My favourite saying, or personal philosophy, is the Picasso statement "Je ne cherchez pas; je trouve" translated as "I don't seek, I find." This way of looking at things, in my case, applies particularly to the way I once built up a record collection and how I now go about building a CD collection. I have gone, and still go, to various CD shops simply to browse and then come out with unexpected finds, some of which turn out to be unexpectedly brilliant finds. Dan Bern's debut album is one such find.

Vibes Records in the Old Mutual Arcade, Cape Town CBD, was, with Outlaw Records in Riebeeck Street, one of my favourite music shops in Cape Town from the mid-Nineties through to its demise in the early years of the 21ste century. As the name implies Vibes originally concentrated on LP records, vinyl, as kind of specialist collectors' and second hand shop for old fashioned vinyl, which somehow clung on and even regained cachet in die era of the CD.

I, for one, completely abandoned records when I started buying CDs, because I saw no sense in duplicating my expenditure and because the quality of sound on CDs seemed so far superior to records that it was a no brainer to adopt digital technology and abandon analogue. The other really pertinent factor was that the surfaces of compact discs did not deteriorate as rapidly as record surfaces did. Anyhow, I did not frequent Vibes all that much when it mostly sold records, as I had no interest in their vinyl.

After a while Vibes started stocking CDs as well, probably when it realised that diversity of stock would ensure more sales. At first the CDs were displayed in a row of display cases along the outside window of the shop, with the central floor area given over to the mass of records. By and by the stock of LPs shrunk and CDs took over more and more space. When the store relocated to larger premises in the main part of the Golden Acre Concourse, Vibes sold CDs almost exclusively. The time of records, especially second hand records, was well and truly over.

I did buy a couple of records at Vibes, though, mostly J Geils albums, such as The Morning After,
Love Stinks and a live album. This was when I still had a working Yamaha tape deck and could record the records to audio tape, which I listened to rather than the vinyl.

Anyhow, browsing through the CDs at Vibes became a regular lunch time routine for me and I was in there at least twice a week, just to see what they had in stock. Over the years I bought many good items there, such as the 2-CD Neil Young live album, Weld, and the Fleetwood Mac double album Blues Jam in Chicago, to name just a few. I also started my South African music collection at Vibes, with the likes of Squeal, Sugardrive and Springbok Nude Girls, and many obscure others. I quickly became adept at sniffing out local product even most of the bands were completely unknown to me before I laid hands on their CD. Lastly, I bought a whole bunch of equally obscure, mostly American, rock music on the basis of price, primarily, and just curiosity. I was not averse to risking R10 on the album of some American punk band I'd never heard of and had not become internationally famous. I googled most of them and discovered that in many instances I had bought the first and only album the band had ever released. The best part was that most of the albums were quite good. Some of the hard rock was pedestrian and not very compelling but the punky type stuff was often excellent and made me wonder why worldwide fame and fortune had not followed.

One of these discoveries, based on price, was Dan Bern. The cover photograph shows Bern (for I guess it must be him) strolling along a dusty alleyway in what I guessed to be Los Angeles (don't know why) carrying a low slung acoustic guitar, and dressed in long shorts and T-shirt as if he were a skate board punk playing folk music. When I studied the CD inlay I could see that he was backed on some tracks by musicians but none of the information gave any clue as to what the music would sound like. If I remember correctly the CD was priced at R8,99 which was dirt cheap. I think Vibes had a whole selection of obscurities they were trying to get rid of by pricing them way down and I was steadily working my way through these. After a few weeks of seeing the Dan Bern album at Vibes I finally bought it along with some others.

I have a lifelong habit of buying music by obscure artists simply because the records or CDs were cheap enough for a gamble. Ninety nine percent of the time I've been pleasantly surprised. Apart from some records by early Eighties American new wave artists, I cannot recall any disastrous purchase. A number of the albums actually became hot favourites. Dan Bern's debut is one of them.

When I studied the CD insert I saw that Bern was backed by musicians, though the front cover photograph suggested that he was a punk folkie, and this was a motivation for buying the CD as I was not particularly interested in purely acoustic music, even from a punk folkie. The pleasant surprise was, even though Bern's musical backing was mostly his own acoustic guitar, that the accompaniment was a mixed bag of furious strumming and small combo, at times reminiscent of the breakthrough sound of "Like A Rolling Stone" with its emphatic, yet also almost subliminal Hammond organ part.

As soon as Dan Bern opened his mouth on opening track, "Jerusalem", I realised that I was dealing with something unexpectedly weird and delightfully eccentric. Mr Bern's persona was very much modern neurotic Jewish guy, unlike the poetics of, say, early Bob Dylan, and that he had a way with words that was kind of out of the box, semi-hysterical, funny, sardonic and very, very erudite and articulate. The two antecedents that come to mind are, again, Bob Dylan in his days of Desire, where he told cinematic stories that were far removed from the Dylan the Rock Poet days of "Like A Rolling Stone", and the similarly erudite, articulate and wordy songs of Paul Simon. Dan Bern just came across as much more neurotic than either of these examples.

I guess that Dan Bern is a storyteller and does not rely overly on biographical detail. When he starts ranting about how many olives he ate in "Jerusalem", apropos of nothing much, I realised that I was listening to either one of the best minds of his generation or to a crazy weirdo with a recording budget. Seeing as how Bern has released more than one album, though I've never seen the others, I guess he must have found an audience.

Apart from the seemingly autobiographical tales like "Jerusalem" and "Rome" (he must be well-travelled) Bern also muses on the fates of Marilyn Monroe, Henry Miller and James Dean, and waxes lyrical about the best minds of his generation playing pinball in the modern cultural wasteland, and other such concerns of the intellectualised artist of today.

There is even a song that is very much a pastiche, or adoring homage, to that "Like A Rolling Stone" sound I've referred to above. That Al Kooper organ part is so distinctive and makes such a dramatic impact on the song that it has been copied in various songs over the years by artists who want to emphasise to a greater or lesser degree their debt to the master rock poet of all time (to date hereof anyway) by a musical reference to one of the great songs of all time. Some of the music of Lloyd Cole and The Commotions are in this vein and Michelle Shocked's "Anchorage" plays to the same strengths, and was the compelling reason why I actually bought Short Sharp Shocked.

"Estelle", Bern's take on the "Like A Rolling Stone" template, works better than most because he may actually be trying to do an entire homage to the |new Dylan" cliché by doing an impersonation of the kind of impersonation comedians used to do when they spoofed Dylan and the school of protest folic singers that followed in his wake. Bern seems at the same time deadly serious and slyly humorous.

This is in many ways an amazing and truly delightful set and I would almost never want to hear any other Dan Bern record, in case the shock of the new and the delight in the weird wonderfulness of his worldview cannot be sustained. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was great; Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, less so. The first Matrix movie was innovative and marvellous and the next two provided seriously diminishing returns. I would not want to spoil my perfect record of the Dan Bern experience with a less than brilliant follow up.

This debut album also shows that one can pay less than R9 at a budget shop and find a treasure simply by taking a chance.

Iggy Pop

2011-11-04T13:11:00.001-07:00

The Stooges were a legendary kind of band for me in 1977 when I embraced the NME and its tales of punk London. Iggy Pop was the Godfather of Punk or something stupid like that. There was a photo of a semi-naked Iggy (I think he wore a dickie bow and something to cover his cock) next to an equally naked 15-year old looking girl. There was a photo of Iggy on the floor of s stage, tangled in wires and with cuts all over his body. There was the photo of Iggy walking on the hands of a crowd.

The Iggy albums of the day were The Idiot and Lust For Life (both 1977) and they were very contemporary and Berlinesque and did not seem too dangerous at all. The NME wrote up Iggy as some kind of demi-god or wild beast or universal bad boy and spun tales of his out of control behaviour and notorious lifestyle. There were plenty references to The Stooges, the band he led before he went all proto new wave and weird electro disco. Allegedly Iggy taught the musicians in The Stooges his songs note for note. All the songs on their first two albums, The Stooges and Funhouse, were his visions and his destiny. The best songs on the debut album, basically everything not written by John Cale, are so basic that it is hard to fathom what the big vision was. Or how much Iggy had to do to teach his band his songs.

Anyhow, I read about Iggy and his awesome past for a couple of years before I actually owned any of his records. I do not remember whether any of the songs from The Idiot or Lust For Life were ever play listed on any of the South African radio stations I listened to then. There was no incentive for me to buy these records. I was much more interested in the legend and the assertion that The Stooges, along with the MC5, were giant influences on the punk bands.

Ragtime Records was a major independent music store in Cape Town that opened a branch in the then Trust Bank Centre in Stellenbosch. This branch lasted maybe a year and at the end it held a massive clearance sale. I bought not only the first three Blue Oyster Cult albums and a couple of Dylan albums but also the first two Stooges records. In one fell stroke I owned the original Iggy Pop firestorm of punk delights.

The Stooges sounded very much like punk, or how I imagined punk to sound like, basing my impressions purely on what I was reading in NME, as none of the punk bands were played on South African radio and their records were not available at Sygma Records. The Stooges played simple, basic music that sounded like the kind of three chord rock the NME was celebrating. Except for the weird psychedelic guitar freak-outs on the tunes. The basic rhythm sounded like punk. The guitar solos sounded like a totally different band altogether.

The second side of The Stooges (1969) from "No Fun" to "Little Doll" and the first side from "1969" to "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (and that would be from first cut to second cut) are well-nigh perfect as punk statement of intent. That this album was recorded and released in 1979, the year of peace and love Woodstock generation seems impossible. This rough, tough and ridiculously exhilarating stuff must surely have come from the heydays of punk, somewhere in 1976 or early 1977.

Only the 10 minute long tedious drone of "We Will Fall" seems of its time. it is a 'what the fuck' song, after "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and I've always thought it was imposed on The Stooges by John Cale, who produced The Stooges, as penance for the gall of all the other tunes. I think I listened to "We Will Fall" about once, on my first spin of the album and then ignored it for ever after. I don't care how avant garde it might have been or still is. I don't care if it represents a higher form of artistic expression. It sucks. It sucks and it fucking sucks.

"1969", "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "No Fun" were my top tunes. I could easily sing along to them. I could sing them in the shower. I could shout out their words and not care whether I could hold a tune. It seemed that Iggy was the king of the non-singers. His words were not as profound and certainly not as knowingly poetic as the best Bob Dylan songs and yet they were probably truer.

Funhouse (1970) was the eye opener though. The first side from "Down In The Street" to "Dirt" (only 4 songs) and "Fun House" on the second side are just so achingly visceral; somehow more of a punch in the gut than even the debut album's finest moments. The words are better, the emotions rawer and the guitar dirtier. The most startling thing is the punk saxophone that excoriates the mental flesh. The two albums could have made a deliciously addictive single record – take away John Cale and "1970" and "LA Blues" sand you have perfection on vinyl.

I love primitive in music and The Stooges had that in spades. The MC5 were prog rock by comparison.

Nude & Rude is a collection of what the compilers must deem to be the best or best known Iggy Pop tunes. It starts with "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and ends with "Wild America" from American Caesar (1993.)

The narrative is the rock journey of a primitive, who was not as self-destructive as the myth would have it, reaching towards the standard rock dream of making a living from the only thing he was good at, gaining sophistication and experience and longevity along the way and where he might have been the Godfather of Punk when he was much younger, he is now the Michael Corleone of punk. Although incredibly wrinkly and loose of skin, Iggy still has an incredible body and it seems, like Anthony Kiedis from Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Iggy insists on performing with bare torso. I would imagine he no longer cuts himself with shards of broken glass on stage.

The Idiot and Lust For Life, the back to back comeback albums recorded with David Bowie guiding Iggy in Berlin, are probably the best Iggy albums to own other than the first three or four Stooges albums and this late Seventies era rock modernism no doubt inspired by metronomic Krautrock, gave us "Nightclubbing" and "The Passenger", respectively interpreted by Grace Jones and Siouxsie & The Banshees. "The Passenger" was a big hit in South Africa and remained a club favourite into the late Eighties.

I have no idea how many other artists have covered Iggy Pop songs or how many of those interpretations have been commercially successful in any way but my guess is that that there can't be that many. Iggy has an idiosyncratic vision and off-kilter way with a song and this approach is not for everyone.

One rather alarming impression, given how I have also thought of Iggy Pop as some kind of extreme rock performer, is that the majority of the late period tunes in this compilation seem kind of thin and without much rock muscle. The Ig can croon and he can roar and I prefer the roaring Iggy, or at the very least the petulantly yelping Iggy of The Stooges or Funhouse,

with Ron Asheton's freaked out guitar blasts. Iggy got older and perhaps wiser and needed a more commercial sound to sustain his career longevity, but his producers did him no favours by smothering the guitars.

On the evidence of this package I'll stick to the first two Stooges albums. I no longer have the LPs and I should order the CDs from Amazon.co.uk. Dumb fun gets no better than this.

Absinthe

2011-11-04T13:05:00.001-07:00

The African Music Store in Long Street is one of my favourite CD shops. The other is the Cash Crusaders chain of modern pawnshops that look more like small department stores than the old-fashioned, dingy pawnshops in the Long Street of yesteryear. The African Music Store, as its names suggests, specialises in African music from across the continent. All of my Flea Anikulapo Kuti albums and all but one of my Tinariwen albums were bought there.

There is also a small section of South African rock music CDs where I have also found some interesting stuff. One such album is the (so far I guess) debut and only album of Absinthè, a trio that looks more like the dreaded "project" than a genuine working band. The two main guys are respectively Paul E Flynn from Sugardrive and Cito from Wonderboom.

The high concept seems to have been: "Let's learn a bunch of songs from the Eighties and Nineties, songs that have influenced us or mean something to us, and then play them live and record the performance." as I have never heard of Absinthè before I came across the album I have no idea why or whether the project was successful beyond drawing an audience and releasing a CD.

At first hearing the acoustic interpretations work well. The accompaniment is understated and accomplished and the two front men can sing. Unfortunately Paul E Flynn has such a distinctive voice that his vocal turns make the group sound like unplugged Sugardrive. The tunes were recorded in front of a live audience; the photograph on the CD insert makes it look as if the guy performed in someone's living room but that might have been simply the rehearsal space.

The audience is very appreciative and it must have been a blast, of sorts, to hear these slightly odd interpretations of songs that were not necessarily acoustic to start with, such as the tunes from The Pixies, House of Love, The Mission, Joy Division or PIL.

Chris Isaak's "Blue Hotel" is a weak spot. This treatment really shows up a rather weak tune that was obviously trussed up and elevated by the band performance in the original version. One misses the twanging, crying guitar. This version just drags.

On the other hand, "Long Black Veil" and "Hallelujah" (coincidentally I know the Jeff Buckley of this Leonard Cohen song far better than the Cohen interpretation) work quite well, though no-one has quite rendered "Hallelujah" like Buckley and no-one will ever do it that kind of justice again.

So: what have we here? An accomplished set by accomplished musicians playing some favourite old tunes. It does sound like a lot of fun though it also seems to serve no purpose whatsoever to release this live set, other than as souvenir for those attending the gig.

I like this album. It is just not gut feel attractive and I would imagine it will have to grow on me for any lasting appeal. That is not necessarily a bad thing as sugar rush appreciation often only lasts as long as the first sugar rush does. Slow burners tend to be keepers.

I believe that absinthè is not a drink to be taken lightly as it can be quite addictive and quite dangerously addictive at that. Time will tell whether Absinthè is poison or pleasure.

The Revelators

2011-11-02T12:16:00.001-07:00

Neo garage punk from Cape Town, based firmly on a template that is one part Pacific Northwest freakout and one part New York attitude. Johnny Tex, named after a local chocolate bar, no doubt, writes, sings, guitars and produces on their debut album We'll Make It Like New, from 2010. The sound is basic heavy trio with a frustrated, hormonal yelp over the top and there is plenty of sharp, concise guitar solos of a kind almost no-onw does anymore. It's like the decades beyond 1976 never happened. This is no bad thing in this time of anodyne soundalike bands who make me feel old, not because they are too loud, but because I just don't get why any of them are in any way popular. They all sound the same to me and that sound is nothing less than crap.

The Revelators may never have learnt how to play more than three chords in a row. Their influences may be bands that roamed the earth long before they were born. The lyrics may be as dumb at the concept they espouse. The Revelators may never progress beyond releasing one album of tasty, short, nasty and visceral rock and roll. Who cares. This is all good. They do make it new. Not much updating, just contemporising.

I would dearly love to see them share a bill with Shadowclub. Both trios, both highly energised. Both kick out the jams and both are instantly addictive. Neither can ever be too loud.

Although The Revelators are not overtly bluesmen, they do make a valiant attempt at making "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day" their own. Never mind Pacific Northwest punk influences, Robert Johnson is seriously retro and was never quite a godfather of punk. This version is not blues. The original is almost unrecognisable in the way it gets the shit kicked out of it.

Okay, maybe the blues connection is via Jack White. On "You Missed It" Johnny Tex does an unnervingly accurate White imitation, or is it piss take?

Whatever. I love this record!

Nazareth

2011-10-27T13:47:00.001-07:00

Nazareth is a British hard rock band formed by a bunch of Scots from Glasgow and who could be called a B-list heavy band of the Seventies. They are still going, touring and releasing albums though their hey days were almost 40 years ago.

"Love Hurts" was the big hit that dominated South African airwaves in 1975 to the extent where I started hating the song, especially as I was not into ballads in 1975 and could not abide the endless repetition of it. I think is it was Ray Stevens who had a faster, lighter version of the song that briefly, sometime later, achieved a lot of exposure on local radio and I really liked what Stevens had done with the tune, though he made it seem less of an ode to heartbreak that the Nazareth version. Perhaps the upbeat rhythm of the Stevens interpretation was meant to contrast sarcastically or sardonically with the bitterness of the lyrics.

Anyhow, though Nazareth was supposed to be a hard rock act, their greatest success came from a sloppy ballad. They never quite repeated the ubiquity of "Love Hurts" but had a couple of hits after that, mostly still slow songs like "Place In Your Heart". As the harder rock tunes got no airplay on South African radio I had little idea what the rest of the oeuvre sounded like, except for Hair of the Dog, also from 1975.

My then mate Natie Greeff had quite a little collection of contemporary rock albums, such as Queen's A Night at the Opera, Deep Purple's Made in Japan, Uriah Heep's Live and Hair of the Dog. He also liked the Moody Blues.

I guess he must have bought the Nazareth album because of "Love Hurts", given that his musical taste seemed not cater for the more progressive end of rock and not to the quite basic grind of the hard rock practised by Nazareth on tracks other than the hit single. I was impressed by the title track's repetitive reference to a "son of a bitch" and Natie was very impressed by "Don't Judas Me", a slow building, emotive final track that aspired to grandeur and melodrama and would obviously have made a fine set closer at a concert. I just dug the big, hard, driving rock beat of the band and the screaming guitar solos. Natie pointed out how poetic the lyrics of some of the songs, like "Guilty" or "Beggar's Day" were. He and I did not exactly have a meeting of minds on why we liked music and why we liked what we liked.

I did not have the heart, or maybe I did have the circumspection, to confess to Natie that "Don't Judas Me" did not have the same appeal to me as it did have for him. He was into the poetry of rock and I was into louder, faster and damn the lyrics.

It would have been madness trying to explain Dr Feelgood to someone who believed that A Night at the Opera (which contained another pet hate of mine, "Bohemian Rhapsody") was some kind of pinnacle of artistic ambition and endeavour.

Even exposure to Hair of the Dog did not convince me to buy any Nazareth albums and nothing I heard on the radio persuaded me otherwise. The hard rock songs did not make it to any playlist and the soppy ballads were not my thing.

This attitude changed somewhere in the Eighties when I bought of double album of Nazareth's greatest Seventies songs. I guess I must have been inspired by a budget price and thought that the low risk monetary gamble would be worth it. For the life of me I cannot think of any other reason why I would have shelled out money for an album by a band that was by then no longer a front-line attraction and, for all I knew, had ceased to exist as a working unit.

The album, probably called something like "the best of Nazareth", turned out to have an excellent cross section of top class Nazareth tunes and all the favourites were, as they say, present and correct. There was "Razamanazz", a great live set opener of intent to rock, "Expect No Mercy", "Hair of the Dog", "Broken Down Angel", "Turn On Your Receiver", "Bad Bad Boy", "My White Bicycle" and many others I cannot recall now. When I heard "My White Bicycle" I realised I knew the song from somewhere, either in its Nazareth version or perhaps in the original, but it was familiar.

Apart from slower yet rocking songs like "Broken Down Angel", "Turn On Your Receiver" and "Bad Bad Boy", that fall in the category of power sing-a-long, with great guitar, the song that made the biggest impression on me was the interpretation of "This Flight Tonight", a Joni Mitchell songs I had heard many years before in her album version of it. Somehow Nazareth, and in particular Dan Cafferty's voice, turned the song into a truly affecting and effective plaintive cry of imminent disappointment mixed with lovelorn anticipation. Just a great, great performance and perhaps my top favourite Nazareth song.

The entire double album was a winner, the purchase price well spent. By that time I had matured somewhat and no longer had a knee jerk adverse reaction to ballad type tunes from rockers and I developed a fondness for "Love Hurts" as well. The performance and to a degree the sentiment too, are of a piece with "This Flight Tonight" and the two songs can probably bookend a story of doomed love.

I was still not persuaded to seek out any Nazareth albums but the best of collection was a treasured part of my record collection.

About a year ago (2010), and after I had given away all my records, I came across a budget priced CD called The Very Best of Nazareth, with a similar collection of Nazareth hits although, sadly, it was not an exact duplication. The biggest Seventies songs are there but there are also a number of tunes I had not heard before, and some of the interesting hard rock songs from the LP, such as "No Mercy", are not on this compilation, which probably is intended to represent a broader spectrum of the career. The previously unknown songs, such "Telegram", "Dream On" "When the Lights Come Down", "Star" and "Holiday", are as good as any other Nazareth track I'd heard before and confirm the quality of the output over the years.

It is still a great collection. For all I know just about every Nazareth song on every album of theirs is worth hearing and my yet surprise me but Nazareth is the kind of band where the hits compilation is the best representation of their oeuvre. The compilation is usually all killer and that makes for a very satisfactory listening experience without the risk of being exposed to clunkers hidden away on albums that you've paid good money for.

It seems that Nazareth is still a going concern and is touring and releasing albums as late as 2011. Not that one would find any recent product in the local CD store. Good for them, though. If Seventies dinosaurs like Uriah Heep. Deep Purple, Z Z Top, to name but few, can still be out there pursuing their careers, albeit at lesser wattage, there is no reason why Nazareth should not have more time in the spotlight too. AC/DC seem to be as popular and strong as ever, and they come from the Seventies too.

The good old-fashioned rock and roll that Nazareth plays, with tunes and memorable choruses along with the crunching guitars and danceable beat, is extremely satisfying and enjoyable.

This brings me to my latest Nazareth acquisition, a low budget CD called Nazareth Live, with the kind of packaging that gives one no information on when these recordings were made. I bought it, along with two South African rock albums, at a Cash Crusaders outlet and it cost met less than R10. The cover photograph shows us four middle-aged guys that make me think the live tracks could have been recorded during the last 15 years or so. For some strange reason studio recordings of "Broken Down Angel" and "My White Bicycle" have been added to the 14 live tracks.

The opening cut "Live From London, Intro" is a ridiculous James Last girl chorus type thing, redolent of the Swinging Sixties vibe, or perhaps a European imagining of that scene, from the days when London was the hip capital of the world.

After that "Telegram" kicks in and it is immediately distressingly clear that this is not prime late Seventies Nazareth, but more probably a band stuck in the time warp of Eighties big rock production values where the tough Glasgow grit is long gone and AOR reigns supreme. The band may be playing in a chintzy nightclub to a middle aged, middle class family audience. And hey, they look like their audience!

The torpor resumes with "Razamanaz" which was written as a rousing battle cry for rockers everywhere. It once got up and danced, now it kind of shifts around in its seat for a more comfortable position. The drums truly plod. Man, this is not good. No wonder the previous owner of the CD flogged it to Cash Crusaders.

J J Cale's "Cocaine" is the first of a couple of cover versions made more famous by other acts and the unique Nazareth interpretation is to give it a jazzy funk workout that gives the song truly bizarre new twist that does absolutely nothing for it.

"Teenage Nervous Breakdown" (Little Feat) also makes no sense, especially given the apparent age of the guys playing the song. It should be retitled 'middle-aged nervous tension.'

Dan Cafferty's ragged, somewhat over-used voice works quite well on "Love Hurts" because he now truly sounds world weary and disgusted with a huge dollop of resigned sadness. Maybe he has been through a truly unpleasant divorce. However, this version suffers from being probably being the thousandth time Cafferty has had to sing the big hit.

"Hair of the Dog" with its lengthy drum thud intro and vocoder section actually works. Whatever reservoir of viciousness the band still retains shows itself a little bit. Cafferty can't scream as he used to – I bet he protects his nodes – but there is a vestige of the younger man's ire and nastiness there.

I cannot say the same about "This Flight Tonight", great song as it is, and valiant as the attempt is to replicate old glories. This also sounds like one too many performance.

The album ends kind of weirdly. The band starts up "I Ain't Got You" and it fades inexplicably, to be replaced by the same stupid "Live in London" jingle that opens the set. Obviously some clever dick's idea of a framing device. The even weirder part though is that studio recordings of "Broken Down Angel" and "My White Bicycle" have been tacked on after the live recordings. These songs sound like the original versions from the Seventies and the intensity and rock power contrast sharply with the torpor and journeymen-like plod of the live set.

What is the purpose of this album? It sounds like a souvenir, of sorts, of a Nazareth tour or maybe a bootleg cheaply recorded for cheap release in countries where Nazareth never tours and yet is still a recognised name, at least if you are of a certain age. I would be surprised if Nazareth has made any significant money from this album; I would be surprised to hear that the band sanctioned the release of this stuff unless any buck earned is a buck earned, regardless of the source.

I'm glad I have the studio versions of the big Nazareth songs on CD. This live set sucks. Perhaps I should resell it to Cash Crusaders.

AC/DC

2011-10-27T13:41:00.001-07:00

AC/DC are purveyors of old school hard rock. I am so old school that I prefer the version of AC/DC with Bon Scott as vocalist. He could sing and scream as required and sounded as naughty and slyly salacious as some of the earliest songs require him to be. For all I know Brian Johnson is more technically gifted as singer, and he has certainly been AC/DC's vocalist for far longer than Scott was, but his gravelly, raspy voice just does not do it for me.

The band has been a going concern for almost 40 years now and recently thy provided soundtrack music for Iran Man 2 and released a DVD of a massive concert at the River Plate stadium. Many of the big metal and hard rock acts from the late Sixties and early Seventies, and I guess beyond as well, still tour though I would imagine they do so more as nostalgia acts as living and breathing organism and vital creative forces. AC/DC may not tour as much as they used to do and may no longer have regular new album releases but it seems that they are anything but a nostalgic act and in their own inimitable fashion remain vital and attracts new fans as much as they have retained the old ones.

I have only ever owned 3 AC/DC albums: the LPs of High Voltage and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap as part of o twofer one Warner Records budget re-issue schedule, and now (since early May 2011) a remastered CD version of Got Blood If You Want It, a live set, with Bon Scott, from the late Seventies.

The original AC/DC hard rock style was based on amplified blues riffing with Malcolm Young's relentless rhythm guitar contrasting with Angus Young's piercing lead guitar. Bon Scott sounds like the naughty schoolboy Angus Young represents in his school uniform and altogether the music is fun even if some of the lyrics are terribly schoolboyish smutty. Hard rock and infantile humour, Australian style, are not necessarily antithetic to each other. Anyway, the two albums rock quite nicely, thank you, and songs like "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" and "It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Want To Rock and Roll)" are very good.

Many years later I got hold of an MP3 version of the Lucinda Williams album Little Honey on which she does a pretty good version of "It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Want To Rock and Roll)." It is perhaps not the strangest cover version ever but who would have thought that a singer like Williams would have dared to do AC/DC and remake their song as roots rock and roll?

Long before this, though, Joan Jett recorded a version of "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" for her The Hit List album, which recast this song as a kind of jokey pop punk number. It wasn't bad but it was not exactly as much fun as the AC/DC version. Bon Scott's tone of voice gave the song a strength that gave more gravitas to the slightly silly words.

That was my last AC/DC purchase for a very long time, until early May 2011 in fact. The band kept rolling along. After the death of Bon Scott AC/DC became bigger than ever, perhaps because of the groundwork done in his lifetime through relentless touring, perhaps because his death caused a sympathetic fan reaction or relieved them of the burden of a guy, although a brilliant frontman on stage, became more and more of a liability as result of his excessive drinking habits. Brian Johnson's voice grated on my ears, he did not have that tone of joyous mischief and the music seemed to become more and more monolithic and therefore less interesting. The early post-Scot albums were probably okay. Radio 5 played some of the lead tracks and they sounded good on radio though not compelling enough to make me want to buy the records. I was not all that much into metal at the time anyway.

From the mid-Eighties Radio 5 started the practise of specialist shows in the evenings, such as Chris Prior's late night rock show and Rafe Levine's Friday night metal show. Levine like AC/DC and played a lot of stuff from their releases over the duration of his show. The things that he played were powerful slices of hard rock, I guess, but the lyrics were mostly banal and barely serviceable and seemed to have been written just to give Brian Johnson something to shout between riffs and solos. Of course the band still had a huge, loyal following and their work ethic was commendable. Like all kinds of musicians before them, the Young brothers became middle-aged, raised families and, away from the stage, looked and acted like most middle-class males with women, children, property and the general worries and concerns of daily life. The rock and roll image was just the stage version of their personalities; Angus Young did not wear his schoolboy suit at home.

I must confess that it baffled me that this band could have carried on for so long, more or less underneath the radar of media scrutiny, but I guess rock and roll is a job and AC/DC did their job well. Every couple of years there was a new album and a tour to support the album. The brand was lucrative enough to sustain and even to grow and the surprising thing is that AC/DC's fan base may well have grown. That they have provided the music for 2 Iron Man movies is weird yet also exactly right.

At the end of our April/May 2011 overseas holiday I had some money to burn at Heathrow airport while we were waiting to board and I bought a bunch of albums at the HMV shop, mostly because they were on special offer. One of them was Got Blood If You Want It, one of the albums in the remastered re-issue programme of "classic" AC/DC albums. The price was a factor but this is also the only AC/DC record, other than High Voltage or Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap that I would want to own. It was a pity that neither of them was available at the airport.

"Whole Lotta Rosie" from the live set was played on Radio 5 back in the day and is the main reason I wanted to hear the rest of the record. The song reminded me of the MC5. I cannot really say why; it just did. "It's A Long Way To The Top" and "The Jack" were familiar from those two early records.

"High Voltage" rock and roll about sums the AC/DC intent and approach and from the opener, "Riff Raff" to set closer "Rocker", they do their very best to do just that. The riffing is relentless, Bon Scott is on top form and the Young brother's guitar interplay tears the roof off. The songs celebrate rock and roll and the bad boy lifestyle rockers are wont to indulge in. there is no introspection, just good times. Unfortunately the songs tend to segue into each other to the degree that it tends to sound like one long jam though it must have been great to be in that room on the night, a couple of metres from the stage. One's ears would have been ringing for days afterwards.

Since Got Blood If You Want It there have been other AC/DC live albums and recently there has been a couple of DVDs of live shows, most recently from the River Plate Stadium, that feature the mega successful almost corporate rock version of a band that has made comfortable career of the hard rock lark, something they may not have envisaged at the time that first live album was released. The difference between then and now would probably be that as youngsters the band were still excited and struggling and doing it with raw enthusiasm and now it is the day job, whenever they tour.

I would imagine the production values on an AC/DC tour must be high, far higher than in the late Seventies, but this efficiency and proficiency often robs the music of the visceral effect it supposed to have. Hard rock in snot all about extreme volume or expertly executed guitar solos. The style of music for which AC/DC became famous, though blues based, had more in common with the nascent punk movement than with the big metal acts of the Seventies and it is for this reason that I would tolerate only the first handful of AC/DC albums, and have avoided and will avoid the Brian Johnston era.

Having said that, I cannot quite see myself delving deeper into the AC/DC back catalogue, unless it is to buy Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap or High Voltage again. The Australian bad boys are done with their career yet, at least I don't think so, and may yet do a Rolling Stones on us and tour the world when they are in their mid-Sixties but a 64 year old Angus Young in his schoolboy outfit is going to be so totally ridiculous that it might just be right.

Freedom’s Children

2011-10-13T12:10:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid the term "heavy metal" did not mean much to me. The term I did know and, as far as I knew, applied to almost any rock music that was not pop, was "underground." Bands classified as "underground" were heavy and perhaps even progressive, and in many cases were not necessarily non-commercial, though not part of the pop mainstream. Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep and Black Sabbath were underground. Slade and David Bowie were not.

Up to my late teens my exposure to local music was pretty much what was played on local radio and the intermittent coverage given to local acts in the publications I read. The first time I actually experienced live local rock was as a distant spectator at a rock festival held on the Stellenbosch University picnic grounds next to the Planckenbrug River in Stellenbosch. I lived a couple of streets away.

The picnic grounds were under shady trees, between the railway line and the river. I was too young to be allowed in but I could stand on the Adam Tas Road pavement on the other side of the fence from the railway line, and hear the music just fine. The festival was part of the university "karnaval" or Mardi gras, and featured what was then the cream of Cape Town rock bands of the time, most of whom would probably have fitted into the "underground" category. I have absolutely no recollection now of any band names, except for McCully Workshop who was quite well known as a commercially successful band.

The point I am trying to make is that I knew very little about the local rock scene of the late Sixties and early Seventies. I knew of McCully Workshop and I knew of Hawk because I'd either heard them on the radio or because I'd read about them. Freedom's Children meant nothing to me until much later in the Seventies when the Julian Laxton Band had a couple of hits and he was invariably referred to as ex-Freedom's Children. Some years later Brian Davidson fronted the Lancaster Band for a couple of years and he, too, was referenced as being ex-Freedoms. It was weird that he was a refugee of the Sixties "underground" scene and then found himself in a New Wave, ska inspired band. Other than that Freedom's Children was at best a name whispered in the wind. They had existed but I never saw any of their records, not even at Sygma Records that I used to haunt, enviously flipping through empty record covers. This also applied to Otis Waygood. I heard the name from someone or had read about them somewhere without ever hearing what they sounded like.

All of this changed for me in the early years of the 21^st century. Fuelled partly by cheap CDs from Vibes Records in the Golden Acre in central Cape Town and then really cheap CDs from various Cash Crusaders and Cash Converters outlets along the Simon's Town railway line, and from subscribing to the SA Rock Digest, I started collecting local rock music, both contemporary (initially mostly the bands of the post 1994 "SA Rock Explosion") and more historic recordings and re-issues.

The RetroFresh label was very important as a source for giving a new lease of life to hitherto unknown or almost forgotten albums from South African rock heroes of yesteryear. Not all of these re-issues are that vital but albums by Freedom's Children, Hawk, Otis Waygood Blues Band, Abstract Truth and Suck really opened my eyes to the extra-ordinary rock scene that had existed in South Africa during the period of my early teens; a scene I would have loved to be part of in the way I was part of the mid to late Eighties scene in Cape Town that produced dozens of bands who never released any recordings that I was aware of, yet played a vital role in defining a Zeitgeist of an era when apartheid was crumbling and fighting tooth and nail to survive.

The likes of Freedoms Children and Hawk came into being, lived and died very much in the heart of the beast, when apartheid not only appeared to be monolithic but was pretty much impregnable and so all-encompassing in its authoritarianism that it was very difficult to fight the system; either you left the country or you bowed down. And, truth be told, the system that oppressed you was not merely apartheid. There was also an established way of doing things and of controlling things, even in the arts, that simply came from the notions of an older generation that was not keen on the long hairs who were taking over music or popular culture as a whole and who were going to retain control for as long as they could, and did.

This last notion applied particularly to the way Freedom's Children's debut album, Battle Hymn of the Broken-Hearted Horde, came to be released. The band's record company, who probably had as watertight a contract as was possible, had enough control over the backing tracks, recorded before various members left for the UK, that it could instruct a producer to polish and complete the tracks to turn them into complete songs for commercial release, even without any input from the band itself. This seems such a typical story of the times and is by no means unique in the history of popular music. Even long haired rebels, perhaps especially long haired rebels, could not get out of the contractual ties demanded by the record industry who saw no reason to abandon tried and tested principles of corporate control simply because the new breed of musician had long hair, dressed strangely, took drugs and expressed a need for so-called artistic freedom.

For all that Battle Hymn turned out to be quite good.

Now, perhaps like most interested folk, my first Freedoms Children acquisition was Astra, apparently the 1997 re-issue, which (allegedly) is not that great sonically speaking. I think it came from Vibes Records and I bought it strictly because by then I'd read enough about the legendary Freedom's Children that this album became an object of desire and was in fact one of the first 10 or so local rock albums I bought once I had seriously embarked on the path of collecting local music.

Somehow I had expected (given that Julian Laxton was the guitarist) a fairly heavy, guitar driven sound. What I heard was an album, admittedly incredibly heavy, dominated by keyboards with actually very little guitar fire power. Brian Davison's voice is so distorted that it is almost impossible to make out what he's singing and the overall mood is very portentous and almost pompous. This must have been the progressive end of local "underground."

I do not have a very broad range of knowledge of the non-mainstream progressive bands of the era, nor of the similarly inclined European rock acts who did not sound much like the big heavy bands from the UK or USA. From the little Krautrock I did hear I realised that this is a genre I should have explored, as the music is not only heavy but it is often quite weird as well. These guys wanted to play rock but not blues based rock and a lot of European rock from the Sixties and early Seventies sounds like the music of trained musicians who desperately want to play rock because they have read so much about it but have no clue because they have never actually heard what rock music sounds like and must therefore make up their own version of it. Obviously this is just my fanciful take on the issue. Many UK and US based bands toured Europe and aspiring Krautrockers would have had access to records and rock on television as well.

Freedom's Children sound like a Krautrock band in the sense that they do not much sound like any contemporary British or American band, even if the same conventional instrumental line-up is in place. The musicians have a sensibility that may not be overtly African but is of this continent in that the influences and effects are otherworldly in the context of the international rock scene. Initially the musicians were isolated from what was happening on the ground in the rest of the world and had to make up their own version of what they saw as rock music. In addition Ramsay MacKay had a vision that went beyond mere cover versions of popular hits or simple pop lyrics. The words were complex and the music had to be complex to match the words. It was not easy listening, it was head music, with a beat you could kind of dance to if you took enough of the right drugs but perhaps it was only music to trip to.

A couple of years after I bought that 1997 version of Astra, I copied a mate's Galactic Vibes, the final Freedom's album. This time the line-up is a four piece and more guitar dominated than Astra and more like the band I had expected to hear in the first place.

As an aside: it is telling that each of the 3 Freedom's Children albums was recorded by a different group of musicians. It must be a reflection on the nature of the music business in South Africa at that time, that so many people passed through the ranks. Ramsay MacKay, Colin Pratley and Julian Laxton are three longest serving members, with a supporting cast of thousands. I was surprised to learn, when researching the band's history, that Ken E Henson was once Freedoms' guitarist and that he later formed Abstract Truth. I'd known Henson only as a member of Finch & Henson and in that context he did not impress me at all. It would be interesting to hear him playing with Freedom's Children but for that I guess one had to have been there at the time.

Finally, in mid-2011 I came across Battle Hymn of the Broken-Hearted Horde for the first time (on CD) and immediately bought it. The style of music fits in with the so-called baroque pop that was prevalent in the late Sixties, with the heavier rock elements of the more progressive non-blues bands of the day to give the album the underground edge. In a way it is much more complicated, intricate and accomplished than the records that follow it and perhaps that is due to the studio sheen applied in the absence of the band members.

A professional producer made a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It is mildly astonishing, even bearing in mind that the music on the CD has been remastered, that South African musicians, studios and producers could have made a record this powerful, polished and wide ranging. Freedom's Children sound more like a European rock band to me than a band particularly influenced by American or English styles and I believe the distance from Europe and the indirect sources of rock the musicians would have had while growing up must have been important factors shaping the sound and vision. There is also the African thing, the infusion of colouration and aroma from the continent on which most of the musicians were born, and on which all were raised.

The most irritating and non-essential aspect of Battle Hymn is Ramsay MacKay's narration. To give credit, this poetic story serves to turn the record into more of a whole, rather than just a series of tracks which it might have been considering the recording process, and to make one think it is a concept album of sorts. On the other hand, I would have preferred just the music as the narrative interrupts the flow and does not quite seem to make sense amidst the tunes it may or may not connect. MacKay has a weird accent, part Indian, part Celtic, and his musings sound like the dreams of a very old man, when he clearly was not.

I now know that the brass and strings were added in the studio and were perhaps never intended as elements of the music initially recorded by the band. The thing is that these elements add a great deal that is beneficial to the finished work and somehow makes the record a much more sophisticated and enjoyable product than the original vision might have been. There is a sense of over achievement, but in a good way.

Battle Hymn did not set the world alight. I do not even know how many copies it sold in South Africa. Clive Calder believes that Freedom's Children could and should have made a worldwide impact, if circumstances had been different. If Freedom's Children had not come from apartheid era South Africa and if they'd had decent record company support, they had the wherewithal to make it big, if not globally, at least in the UK and in Europe where this kind of music was gaining a lot of ground in the late Sixties. The album does not contain anything that sounds like a sure fire single hit but at the time of release it was not necessarily a bad thing. Bands like Freedom's Children would have toured their arses off to gain a faithful following that would have bought the record in sufficient numbers to make it commercially successful and would have given them a decent income from touring.

The 2005 RetroFresh remastered version of Astra does immediately sound much more impressive than the 1997 re-release. The sound is heavier, louder and punchier than the older version. The bottom end provided by the bass and keyboards is huge. It is still remarkable how little of Laxton's guitar is audible. The drumming is restless and relentless and drives the beast forward. When Laxton does turn up the volume his guitar pierces through the heavy fog laid down by the other instruments. Brian Davidson's vocals are filtered through effects that distance him from the action, as if he is just commenting sardonically on the action on earth below. Who knows what he is singing, though. It is about feel, not about veracities.

The sonic presence is so huge it is almost claustrophobic and if this isn't art rock on a very grand scale, I do not know what is. Freedom's Children can only be described as a heavy band, purely on sound value, though they are not a metal band of the type so prevalent in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Two other keyboard dominated bands of the eta that come to mind, are Deep Purple and Uriah Heep and Freedom's Children sound like neither of these bands, partly because Brian Davidson does not have the vocal chops of Ian Gillan or David Byron but mostly because the artiness of the heavy rock of the two British bands seem more like a veneer than the portentous and ominous Freedoms sound.

Typically, heavy bands had songs that were either mock pastoral ballads or were about rock and roll itself or the pleasures of partying and sex. Freedom's Children, perhaps because they are based in South Africa during an oppressive time, not only apartheid but also simple repression of anything that was deemed to be subversively different to the Afrikaner Christian-nationalist norm, have other concerns. As I've said, I have no idea what Brian Davidson is singing but it sure sounds serious and important. Maybe his words are great poetry, maybe they are schoolboy twaddle; the presentation is the factor that lends significance.

The RetroFresh repacking not only features an album cover with a different typeface for the band name and album title but also three bonus tracks, cover versions of songs by Cream, the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.

"The Coffee Song" is what a minor Cream pop song I first heard on a German compilation album of most of Fresh Cream and a couple of tracks from Disraeli Gears. It features a melodic, heavy bass and sinewy guitar, but is essentially s simple narrative ditty that seems completely out of place in the Cream canon. It sounds like a B-side. Freedom's take on it, with two vocalists, is almost straightforward; still a slight song but given some "underground' moves.

"Satisfaction" is a second cousin to Grand Funk Railroad's interpretation of "Gimme Shelter" with a hint of the sitar jangle of "Paint It, Black"

"Little Games" is a tune by the heavy rock Yardbirds in the days when Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page joined forces in the band. It is a kind of psychedelic breakout rave up and Freedom's Children have fun with it. I don't think I've ever heard the original version.

Not long after I got Battle Hymn, I also bought Galactic Vibes, possibly from the large Musica store in the V & A Waterfront, because I kind of felt guilty for owning only a CD-R copy of the album.

Galactic Vibes is the third and final instalment of the Freedom's Children canon. The feel of the music is quite different to that of the earlier records. The baroque pop psychedelia of the first album is long gone and so is the electronic organ driven heavy sound of the second album. The musical elements that make Freedoms recognisable are all present and correct but this set of recordings allows Julian Laxton more room to move as guitarist. It does however suffer in comparison with Astra, as it is a bit of let-down after the huge impact of that album. Galactic Vibes is a very heavy album and a million miles removed from Battle Hymn.

It is literally so that each Freedom's album was recorded by a different line-up and perhaps this is the reason why each album has such a distinctive and identifiable sound. Perhaps it was all down to the notion of progression. The imperative never to repeat one's moves and the creative necessity of continuously exploring new modes of expression.

The extended version of "1999" is a bonus track. The "edited" version was on the original album. It boggles the mind that a record company could have released this song with the hopes of chart success, if that were the motivation. Freedom's Children was never ever a pop group and was very much the kind of band that would have sold albums to their adoring, hard-core following but not to the teenagers who followed the Springbok Radio Top 20 every Friday night. And apart from a late night progressive music show on the English Service on Saturday nights, I cannot think of any radio station in South Africa who would have play listed this music and I am not talking about purely political reasons for keeping Freedoms off the airwaves.

The other track of interest is the 15 minute live rendition of "The Homecoming" at the Out of Town Club, announced by an MC with a plummy middle class accent who sounds a bit like a hip high school teacher introducing something innovative to a roomful of adolescent boys who would like sex, drugs and rock and roll but do not yet know how to go about getting them. It is a storming version of the tune anyway. Ramsay MacKay and Julian Laxton jam to great effect. The booming bass must have been a room filler all on its own. The guys could certainly cut it on stage, but, then, those were the days when popular bands cut their teeth and learnt their craft playing residencies at clubs and hotels.

Could Freedom's Children really have been international contenders? Maybe. I believe that their vision was too singular and possibly too out of kilter with worldwide rock trends for true commercial success. They did not write hit singles and were not that hot on simple, driving memorable rock anthems either. In a parallel universe there may have been a place for them on the international stage and it was their dismal bad luck to have been from South Africa at a time when the country was increasingly coming under pressure and its musicians were no longer particularly welcome anywhere else.

The trilogy of albums will serve as a lasting memorial to a bunch of ambitious rockers with more depth than one would have thought possible of popular, underground music.

Hugh Laurie let’s them talk

2011-10-10T04:15:00.001-07:00

I've not yet seen any episode of House, the apparently hugely popular medical drama on US television and so I do not know why it is so big or why Hugh Laurie has suddenly become this mega star after many long years toiling in the show biz salt mines. My impression, possibly because of the Fry & Laurie comedy team, was that he is a comedian. Perhaps he is a comedian who wants to play Hamlet and found in House the next best thing. The American comedian Dennis Leary plays a fireman in what seems to be a dramatic role and Robin Williams hardly ever does comedy in movies anymore. Not that his so-called comedy films were that funny. But that is a subject for another time.

Hugh Laurie has a love for early jazz piano styles and blues end is quite accomplished as piano player and his fame as the doctor in House has given him the golden opportunity of recording a bunch of his favourite blues and New Orleans jazz tunes. This is not quite Scarlett Johansen recording an album's worth of Tom Waits songs.

Let Them Talk (2011) is this collection. Half of Hugh Laurie's unshaven, wrinkled face stares out from the CD cover. The look is not quite confident or daring. Perhaps it is wariness or weariness. Perhaps the expression does not need to mean anything and the shot is just some art director's grand concept.

As far as I can see Laurie is modest and self-effacing about this project. The obvious questions would be whether he is any good, whether he would have had this chance if it had not been for House and whether the world needs another White British would-be-bluesman. Laurie's best strategy for dealing with this kind of stick would be to face it head on and answer the queries before they are put to him, to deflect the criticism by pre-empting any questioner by raising the objections or issues himself rather than waiting to be assaulted with scorn or incredulity or simple bafflement.

Anyhow, Mr Laurie is not the first successful star to venture into a different field of artistic endeavour to the one he found his success in. It was always a show biz staple that musicians turned to movies. Nowadays actors front bands, or have solo careers, and some or quite successful and others are sneered at. If one is a renaissance person, why not try it all? A buck is a buck.

Another riveting example of a well-known personality taking on a surprising new direction is David Johansen who was the singer for the New York Dolls, then followed a solo New York rocker career (with a crack band and three or four great records), became the parody figure Buster Poindexter (with a hit song and all) and finally arrived at the blues from more or less the same period as the music on Let Them Talk, with the Harry Smiths, a reference to one of the pre-eminent collectors of American folk music, Harry Smith.

David Johansen has recorded 2 blues albums and I own one of them, Shaker (2002), which I came across at a flea market stall on Greenmarket Square many years ago. That guy had a box of cheap CDs with a deal of R20 each or 3 for R50 (or something like that) and the most interesting finds on his table were in that discount box, among them Shaker. My initial interest was that it was blues and cheap and therefore worth the risk that it might be crap. Surprisingly it turned out to be quite worthy. The song selection is good, the musicians know their stuff, play with subtlety and do justice to the material. Johansen's gravelly, lived-in voice suits the songs though he still sounds like a White guy doing the blues.

The good thing is that he sounds like a White guy who loves the blues and isn't trying to outdo the original artists whose songs he covers. He wants to do justice to the blues and he wants to have fun with it. In my book that is all right.

Hugh Laurie plays piano and guitar. He also sings the songs, albeit with some background assists on a couple of tunes from the likes of Irma Thomas, Dr John and Tom Jones, who can probably sing the proverbial phone book though I've never thought of him as a blues or soul singer. He is nicely understated and complements "Baby, Please Make A Change" and does bring gospel fervour to it that may be a bit hammy but is not out of place.

Laurie's home accent is probably middle class mid-Atlantic posh and he does not try to sound too Black, or blue. There is a curious similarity to the singing voice of one of our imminent local musicians, and coincidentally also a keyboard player, the inimitable Simon Orange, one of the main members of the Blues Broers. They must be of an age, too.

The musical backing is provided by a small, sympathetic band of easy swinging professionals. I bet these guys can do this kind of thing in their sleep and know, given that the star of this show is also the star of another show, their job is to do their job with effective circumspection. This is what they do. You can't beat a bunch of American roots musicians playing their roots.

The songs mix very old jazz tunes, spirituals, archaic pop and blues. In a way this feel and mood is what Eric Clapton aimed at on his Clapton album, and maybe what Bob Dylan was trying to hit with the blues tropes on his most recent albums. Dylan's band sound more electric and spirited yet the more traditional approach of Clapton and Laurie is more effective In doing justice to the material. The guys obviously have respect for their material as reflecting a time and a place now only dim legend but once live and absolutely kicking. Dylan sounds like he is spoofing the blues; Clapton and Laurie interpret the blues and mould that vision to their particular strengths.

The piano playing is great stuff. I guess Laurie is the main guitar player on "The Whale Has Swallowed Me" but otherwise I would not know the difference between his contributions and that of his band guitarist.

My main gripe against the music is that it is a tad too tasteful and respectful. The old blues guys were often rough and ready and got nasty when it suited the song. They were not necessarily technically gifted or trained and when they developed a signature sound it took a while to get there and, once established, remained unchanged for the rest of their lives. As in the case of, say, Elmore James or Albert King, they made the most of what they had and managed to ring the changes with sufficient ingenuity to keep their music fresh. The people behind Laurie do not come across as musicians who would ever just get crazy for the hell of it; they are too much the professionals' professionals for that, and that is the missing link between authentic blues and homage to the blues.

Lonnie Johnson's blues recordings are some of the most studied, regular solo acoustic blues tunes I've heard and they completely lack excitement, especially as Johnson does not even have an interesting singing voice. He simply utilises the blues as a commercial style unlike, say, Son House, Charley Patton or Robert Johnson who come across as visceral on record as they must have been in person when they were at the peak of their performing careers. Hugh Laurie at least has a better, more versatile, vocal instrument than Lonnie Johnson. The danger is that he is also most likely utilising a style for effect rather than as an expressed internalisation, however much he loves the songs he performs on this album.

The other White blues band leader whose album I've listened to recently is Mick Fleetwood, who led an electric band along with guitarist Rick Vito, to record a selection of blues and Fleetwood Mach standards. Fleetwood's album sounds a lot more like showbiz blues than Hugh Laurie's earnest effort, partly, I guess, because Fleetwood had been in the music business and the blues business for far longer than Hugh Laurie and knows more about pleasing an audience with more of the old, familiar songs. Laurie's choices are not particularly obscure, especially for any aficionado of blues and early jazz, yet they are not hoary through endless repetition and recycling either.

Ostensible the title track "Let Them Talk" is a declaration that the singer will love his lover come what may but my guess is that the subtext is Laurie's deep and lasting affection for the music on this album and his intention to pursue this muse irrespective of what the critics may say. Good for him. This may be the first and last record Hugh Laurie ever gets to release and it is not a bad testament to his abilities as pianist, singer and interpreter of old timey music. I hope there will be more. If this album sells by the truckload and the television series House remains popular the record company will want more product. That is the nature of the beast. They do not care whether this collection of tunes represents something elemental in Hugh Laurie's life adventure, or reflects his no now longer secret creative passion, and if the album dies the death, they will write if off to experience and tax and will no longer assist him in sharing with us another side of his psyche. If it fails commercially Let Them Talk will become just another vanity release. If it sells, Hugh Laurie may find himself doing world tours playing for adoring audiences and recording an album a year, like some non-crooning Michael Bublé. Stranger things have happened.

I like this album. Not as much as, for example, David Johansen's, as it is just too smooth to be the kind of visceral musical experience I dig the most, but I will listen to it more than once and I suspect it will grow on me. It is damning with faint praise to call this a decent effort. That, however, is what it is. It is tasteful, proficient, effective. It is neither iconoclastic nor over-awed by his influences. It is good, not excellent. It is enjoyable, not thrilling. Perhaps this is what Hugh Laurie set out to achieve, with modest aims and modest expectations. He is not a bluesman but my guess is that he does not pretend to be one, though he may love the music, or intend to be seen as one. He has simply taken a bunch of old tunes in a genre he loves and recorded them with a crack band and some heavy show biz friends, with good humour and excitement and has produced a result.

He talked the talk and I believed we can credit him with walking the walk, on his own terms and with his own style.

Shadowclub

2011-10-04T11:40:00.001-07:00

The three guys in Shadowclub are seriously groomed and styled to the extent where Emma, a 20-year old of my acquaintance, remarked that they look like models when I showed her the CD I had just bought at The African Music Store, along with a Fela Ransome Kuti album from the early Seventies. Nice contrast this: the Nigerian revolutionary musician and king of Afrobeat versus 3 young White guys from southern Africa who make music that does not sound very much informed by Africa at all.

A month or so ago there was a live set on MK recorded at some venue in Greenside Johannesburg where Machineri and Shadowclub performed. I guess both bands have a buzz. Machineri just played their patented riff and wail type songs and Shadowclub impressed me mightily with a powerful trio sound that seamlessly married muscle and melody.

Guns And Money (2011) is their debut album and the immediate first impression is that the production values on this record give them an immense presence on disc, a room filling sound of awesome proportions.

Shadowclub probably owes as much of a debt to the blues as Machineri claims they do. It is not exactly the blues of the Mississippi Delta either, though it may be filtering through the punk attitude of the music. This is not the punk of the Sex Pistols, but the punk of the Pacific Northwest circa 1965 when a bunch of young White guys mixed up their roots with the new style of the Rolling Stones and Animals who were copying old Black American guys in the first place, and produced an outrageously energetic sound inspired as much by pissed off teenage hormones as it was influenced by rocked up blues. Shadowclub have seemingly internalised that attitude and that anger, have turned up their amps and are coming for us. I, for one, welcome them with open arms. They can have my mind.

On the opening track I hear an echo of "Purple Haze" and elsewhere too, and the dissonant noise blues of Chris Whitley in the later years of his career. There is the 22-20's a British group of young blues enthusiasts who interpreted the old blues themes with a modern twist, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion who did something similar in the USA, and many more. There is even a quick flash here and there of Robin Trower, minus his guitar virtuosity. Who knows what lurks in these guys' record collection?

The sound is bottom heavy and harmonies and tunes float on top. The guitar throws hard rock shapes from days gone by, with that all important contemporary revisionism and does not quite break into the frenzied soloing one would expect, and I guess that is the saving grace. Jacques Moolman does not want to be Stevie Ray Vaughan. In fact there is a much more garage rock enthusiasm here than Texas roadhouse blues professionalism. This is where and how Shadowclub can be distinguished from The Pretty Blue Guns, a much more traditionally inclined blues rock band with rather more subtlety. Shadowclub are quite gleeful in showing off their guitar noise, as can be heard in the title track of the album, which is a major show piece of exhilarating rave up.

If I have ever heard an assured debut, this is it. It is confident, brash and inspired. It delivers on the promise of a brief glimpse on television, and with interest. When I saw the album in The African Music Store I took it without a second thought even though the store offers the option of listening to albums before you make your decision. My decision was made by the mere presence of the album in the kind of situation where I had not been looking for it. I found it. That was enough reason to buy it. I was not disappointed.

The good and salutary thing about Shadowclub is that they do not give us the weedy, wishy washy, jingly jangly kind of music that passes for modern rock these days. They do go large and they sound incredibly ambitious and they pull it off. This is sexy music simply because it dares so much and does not shrink from boldness. The last local rock album with this much absurdly enthralling greatness going for it, is New Holland's Exploded View.

These guys do not lurk in the shadows and they will not easily be overshadowed.

Muddy Waters

2011-09-24T01:52:00.001-07:00

McKinley Morganfield is such a great name I don't know why Muddy Waters preferred becoming famous under his nickname.

Howlin Wolf, once Muddy's greatest rival, also had a great name: he was Chester Burnett.

If McKinley Morganfield and Chester Burnett had not been musicians they could have done well as two tough-guy Chicago cops. McKinley is the urbane, confident one, the man who deals with city hall operators as efficiently and effectively as the hoods on the street. Chester kicks ass and takes no shit. He has no finesse and he gets the job done and when he's done no-one will undo it.

Today rappers use nicknames almost without exception. The only rappers that I can quickly think of that don't or didn't are Will Smith and Tupac Shakur, and Tupac's monicker sounded like a street name anyway. The thing is this: why would the magnificently named Calvin Broadus want to be known as Snoop Doggy Dogg?

Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall's plantation where he learnt his music, became a tractor driver so that he had an easier job than picking cotton in the field, so that he could play his guitar at parties and fish fries and was eventually recorded for the Library of Congress, at least partly because he was a kind of repository of Robert Johnson's style/. During World War II Muddy moved to Chicago, became a truck driver, a job that gave him a lot of time to recover from late nights in Southside clubs, bought an electric guitar, was discovered by Chess Records and recorded a bunch of hits that were also hugely influential in establishing the so-called electric down home style of blues and, once Muddy put together a band, the Southside style of blues. In his modest way Muddy was as great an innovator and original thinker in music as Louis Armstrong had once been.

I knew the name and I somehow knew that "Hoochie Coochie Man" was a big Muddy song, though I got to know the song through a live version by Chuck Berry, and I knew that both the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" were tributes to one of Muddy's most well-known songs but other than that I hardly knew anything about Muddy's music or life until Charles Shaar Murray wrote a piece about him in the NME after the release of the Hard Again album that revitalised the bluesman's career during the last five years before his death. Murray supplied biographical information as well as telling details of Muddy's then current success.

NME also published reviews of Hard Again and its follow-up I'm Ready that made these records sound like parts one and two of the second coming, in blues at least. The blues were back with a vengeance and the master of the blues was romping and stomping like days of old.

Of course none of these records were readily available in Stellenbosch and they got no airplay on local radio. The first time I heard any of the songs at all was when Dr Feelgood, post Wilko Johnson, recorded a version of "The Blues Had A Baby (And They Named It Rock and Roll)" on Be Seeing You. It was a pleasant enough versions, without the urgency Wilko Johnson\s guitar style could have brought to it, and seemed like a lightweight composition for the man who wrote "Rolling Stone" but my guess was that the song simply pandered to the age old cliché of rock coming from the blues.

It was a couple of years later that I found Hard Again, probably at a discount price somewhere in Cape Town. It was not the first blues album I owned but it was pretty well the best blues album I owned at the time. Albert King's Years Gone By was a close second but it did not quite have the triumphalism of the Muddy Waters record, especially since the King album was an original release from the late Sixties.

The first noticeable thing about Hard Again was the incredible loudness and toughness of the music, from opening track "Mannish Boy" onward. It was kind of like a hard rock production of a very traditional blues sound. This was modern blues, not so much in the style as in the production values that emphasised a clean, crystal clear definition of, and differentiation between, instruments and with in-your-face, yet warm, vocals. The musicians were sharp and emphatic in their profound understanding of what makes Chicago blues tick, that ensemble sound where there is hardly any lead instrument and yet there is space for everyone, and on top of this solid foundation the magisterial, imperious Muddy Waters declaimed his blues. It was Muddy's world and I was just so much in awe to be able to behold its splendour.

Yeah, I liked Hard Again that much!

The NME review of I'm Ready made it sound like even better of a deal than its predecessor. Somehow this record just never showed up in any record store I visited and I never bought it and never heard the album at all until I bought a Columbia Legacy 3-CD package of Hard Again, I'm Ready and King Bee. I have owned the records of Hard Again and King Bee but not I'm Ready or Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live, though I have the Columbia Records CD Blues Sky, which is a compilation of tracks from this quartet of albums that will serve as the legacy of the grand old man of electric down home blues as testament that even an old guy could rock the house pretty good.

A good five or six years after I bought Hard Again I found King Bee as a budget album somewhere in Cape Town. If Hard Again was the surprisingly strong and emphatic resurgence of the Muddy Waters career, King Bee was the more rollicking, almost fun, cap on the illustrious career, a fitting finale for a colossus of the blues. The songs seemed more tuneful and catchy, for example "Champagne & Reefer", which is very much what I call a pop blues. It is definitely not a song about the hardships of life; it is a celebration of life even if Muddy has to explain clearly that dope is his only vice after champagne and that he will not do that cocaine.

The utterly weird thing, thinking about it now, is that the surviving Rolling Stones, who were relatively young men at the time, are now approaching the age at which Muddy died. For the White blues influenced rockers of the Sixties it was all right that their bluesmen heroes could be older than forty but the conventional wisdom was that rock is a young man's game. If you're over thirty you're over the hill. Now they have come to appreciate that rock can be a lifelong career and can be a lifelong imperative. Muddy Waters was as much of a pop star in Chicago or elsewhere in the African American community of the USA as the Rolling Stones are. It is a fallacy to think that Muddy was expressing deep, heartfelt blues emotion about his living conditions or his tragic love life. The blues tropes we are so familiar with nowadays can be described as folk wisdoms carried on from generation to generation though a more accurate description would be that these tropes are blues clichés as much as one has pop clichés. Sociologists can investigate the meaning behind the words and the hidden messages behind the lyrics of braggadocio, sexual prowess and lovelorn tears all they want and describe the secret society of Black America oppressed by the White majority and being reduced to code language to express their plight, anger and frustration, but the bottom line of Muddy Waters' music is that it was intended to be popular music, to sell, and not only or merely to be the expression of frustration and rage blues is often deemed to be. Ultimately blues is a style of music.

My second exposure to Muddy Waters was an audio cassette I bought at the Windhoek branch of the SADFI defence force store at Suiderhof Military Base, when I was stationed in Windhoek as Military Law Officer in the second year of my mandatory national service. The SADFI store was a basic warehouse building serving as a bare bones department store for military personnel and it even had a small music corner, mostly with contemporary popular music. The two strangest items were two compilations, on cassette, from the Chess Records archives. One was a selection of Chuck Berry tunes and the other was the Muddy Waters collection. It featured the usual suspects and the two outstanding tracks was the heavy rock version of "Let's Spend The Night Together" from Electric Mud and a gospelised version of |I'm Going Home", both of which sounded completely different to the other, more conventional blues on the album. Those two tunes demonstrated that Muddy Waters probably made a number of turns in his career that were nods to more populist styles for the sake of commercial success. Like all other professional musicians he would try many things at least once if there seemed to be money in it,

Today I own a number of CDs of Muddy's music. A budget compilation of his popular tunes from the latter part of the Fifties was one of the first two CDs I ever bought, along with a similar budget compilation of Howlin' Wolf tunes. Most of these Muddy Waters CDs are compilations. The only complete Muddy Waters albums I do own are the 3 Blue Sky albums referred to above and the Muddy Waters Woodstock album, his last album for Chess Records. There is an excellent chronological compilation of songs from "Gypsy Woman" onwards and a couple of live sets, one from the early Sixties and one from the late Seventies, that are great examples of the working band Muddy had behind him, and a number of compilations of the old favourites and lesser known songs, one of them even showcasing a batch of the Library of Congress filed recordings made my Alan Lomax.

My latest Muddy Waters acquisition is a mini box set from 2004, with the albums packaged in small scale, cardboard replicas of the original record sleeves, of the three final studio albums of Muddy's career, released on Blue Sky records between 1977 and 1981 and produced by Johnny Winter who gets the kudos for revitalising the moribund career of one of the giants of post war electric blues. The albums are Hard Again, I'm Ready and King Bee. The live album, Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live, that was released between the second and third studio releases is absent from this package, maybe because this would have meant too much of a duplication of studio material. Or perhaps Columbia thinks the live set is worth more or perhaps it is available as an expanded CD.

"Mannish Boy" opens Hard Again and its opening chant of "Everything's gonna be all right this morning," emphatic stop time rhythm, assertive lyrics and Muddy's triumphant vocal delivery set the scene for an album full of superlative contemporary blues in the traditional Chicago style. Muddy is back, in charge and ready to roar. The best thing about the electric Chicago blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf is that it does not feature endless guitar solos by superstar axmen. The guitar plays rhythm and fills, the harmonica is the most obvious lead instrument, yet also serves mostly as a counterpoint and the singer is front and centre. The formula is simple and effective and exhilarating, each time.

Muddy was known for his ferocious slide style on stage but does not play any slide guitar on this album. Bob Margolin takes care of the rhythm and Johnny Winters, who takes care not to overpower the music with his usual thousand notes a minute style, provides the extremely tasty lead and slide guitar. The whole is very much better than the sum of the parts and the lasting impression is of a highly tooled, powerful machine doing what it does best and doing it extremely well. Pure pleasure.

The songs are mostly quite lengthy and give everyone an opportunity to stretch out and make the most of the space and time they are given within the structure. Even after 5 minutes or more the tracks do not pall. This is prime stuff and hard again is absolutely apposite as a description. If Johnny Winter is not remembered and celebrated for any accomplishment other than his production duties and guitar playing on Hard Again and the two studio albums that followed, he will still have built a monument to himself.

The production values give the band a big, solid, commanding sound that verges on the kind of audio a rock band would have. The blues need not sound weedy or tinny or scratchy. It is music of dominance and exultation as much is it can be music of heartbreak and trouble and on this album the exultation dominates.

The original electric version of "I Can't Be Satisfied", the hit that launched Muddy's career in Chicago, and featuring Muddy on vocals and slide guitar and Big Crawford on bass, has one of the most memorable opening slide riffs ever and still thrills me every time I hear it. On Hard Again Muddy reprises his venerable hit but does not play any instrument and is accompanied by Johnny Winter on a National steel guitar. Johnny emulates Muddy's slide riff without slavishly copying it and provides a more old fashioned Delta version of the tune, as one would perhaps have expected the Mississippi Sheiks to do, and it is rollicking good fun. A lyric of ostensible despair is turned around into a performance of triumph over adversity rather than a depressed wail.

"I'm Ready" is not as much of a powerhouse opening track to the eponymous album as "Mannish Boy" was to Hard Again. The lyrics are a "Hoochie Coochie Man" retread and probably want to make the same statement as "Mannish Boy" made but somehow "I'm Ready" is less dynamic and less emphatic. For a reason I cannot quite explain it has never been one of my favourite Muddy Waters' tunes anyway.

This 1978 album was recorded with a different line-up to the group that went into the studio for Hard Again. Jimmy Rogers is back in the band alongside Bob Margolin, and Walter Horton and Jerry Portnoy replace James Cotton on harp. Muddy does entertain us with some examples of his fiery slide technique and Johnny Winter contributes some guitar, though perhaps not as much as on the previous album.

Most of the songs seem to be new compositions, at least they are new to me. Willie Dixon has two songs on the record: the title track and "Hoochie Coochie Man." They are old songs and the rest of the bunch could be contemporary.

For the most part the songs follow the same template as laid down on Hard Again and the grooves are as tight and solid as before. The sound is streamlined, efficient and effective the album won Muddy his first Grammy ever, not only for a good record (actually two good records in a row) but as the typical long denied recognition for a stalwart of a less fashionable genre who found a new lease of life and became a breath of fresh air in a somewhat moribund style of music.

I'm Ready suffers a bit because it follows Hard Again and the shock of the brand new and improved Muddy Waters is no longer as acute. He's made the comeback with the stunning return to form and now simply consolidates his gains. There is less exuberance and more professionalism. It's as if Muddy wants to convince us, if we did not already know it, that his resurgence is not just dumb luck. This album is every bit as good as its predecessor.

The CD reissue of I'm Ready has three additional songs: "No Escape From The Blues", "That's Alright" (probably Jimmy Rogers' best known composition and on which he is the main singer) and "Lonely Man Blues".

King Bee is Muddy's last album, released in 1981 with tracks recorded in 1977 (Hard Again outtakes) and 1980. Muddy's health started to fail and he died in 1983. I bought this album as a budget reissue somewhere in the late Eighties. It was a valuable addition to my collection of blues records and a record I listened to a lot because the tunes seemed to bright, upbeat and joyous.

The title track is once again a celebration of Muddy's sexual prowess that packs more of a punch than "I'm Ready." "Champagne & Reefer" is a glorious paean to the simple joys of life. "Mean Old Frisco"
is yet another example of an Arthur Crudup song done justice by a singer other than Crudup himself, who wrote some noteworthy blues standards ("That's Alright, Mama" and "My Baby Left Me" are two more examples) but was at best a workmanlike guitarist and singer. "Deep Down In Florida" is a different version of a major track from Hard Again and there is another version of "No Escape From The Blues", one of the bonus tracks on the I'm Ready reissue.

The band consists of more or less the same personnel as on the previous records except that Luther Johnson is the third guitarist, along with Bob Margolin and Johnny Winter. Muddy sings and plays some of his always incredible slide guitar. The power of the band is undiminished, or seems so, even if outtakes had to be used to put together a complete album. The CD reissue adds two more tracks.

Having all three albums is special. I rate Muddy highly and his style of ensemble blues is more to my taste than the modern predilection for hot guitarists who solo endlessly and proficiently and who do not satisfy in the ways the Muddy Waters band could when it was in full flight. On his solo records Bob Margolin shows off the many styles of blues and rock and roll he's capable of but it is only on the odd Southside of Chicago's style tune that he throws into the mix that he really catches fire. On A Bigger Bang even the Rolling Stones tried their hand at this style on "Back of My Hand" and produced one of the most convincing songs on the album. It might be a homage but, unlike most of the rockers, it does not sound like a pastiche or a calculated move. This kind of music is their roots and if you dig deep into your roots you will almost always come up with the goods.

I gave away my entire collection of blues records when I disposed of all my records in 2009 and to a degree I am now sorry that I did, as some of them were seminal in my appreciation for the blues and will probably never be replaced. On the other hand I never really had that many blues records and my CD collection of blues albums far exceeds the couple dozen blues records I used to have. Since 1991 I have really dug deep into the blues. I've reacquired Albert King's Years Gone By, Junior Wells' "It's My Life, Baby" and John Lee Hooker's In Person. Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac debut Fleetwood Mac and The Original Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Ray Vaughan's Texas Flood. I am always on the lookout for CDs of records I used to own. Perhaps I should make a serious mission of it by ordering from Amazon but I have always preferred the method of not seeking and finding (a little philosophy I learnt from Picasso) than the more organised method of making an effort to acquire the many items on my wish list.

All of my Muddy Waters collection was acquired by chance when simply browsing through CD cases at various music stores and the same is true of this three album box set. I came across it, of all places, at the Willowbridge Mall (Bellville) branch of Look & Listen, in the heart of the northern suburbs where one would not expect such old school blues to have much of a footprint.

The three most important names in my blues music collection would be Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf and John Lee Hooker, going by the impact their music had on me and by the number of albums of each I have. Albert king is also pretty important but I don't have that many of his albums. BB King is also getting there though his urban style is not always to my taste. Too sophisticated. I prefer the electric down home styles of Muddy, Wolf and Hooker above all else. Their blues are generally exciting, visceral and intriguing. The solo Muddy and Hooker recordings are at the top of my list but even the records made with various bands are pretty damn fine. Wolf led a crack band from the beginning and is best appreciated in this context. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard him other than backed by a band. For a long time I wanted to be able to play guitar like Willie Johnson, Wolf's main man in Memphis, before Hubert Sumlin joined him.

When I listen to Howlin Wolf I can understand why writers like Robert Palmer call him a feral beast. He does sound dangerous. Muddy, on the other hand, is magisterial and even imperial. He does not have to be in your face to impress his value on you. He does what he does with understated power and eloquent gravitas. Wolf can be hectoring and over the top. Muddy is calm, unruffled and as relentless in his drive as Wolf yet persuades almost with logic where Wolf wants to leave you no room to think.

Obviously one cannot and should not be expected to choose between any of these giants of the blues. Each is simply different to the rest in his respective style and not better than any of the other two.

John Lee Hooker had a far longer career than Muddy or Wolf and his comeback in the late Eighties lasted longer and produced more albums than Muddy's. Wolf never had the good fortune of such massive popular success late in his life and never won a Grammy. Somehow that is appropriate and fitting. Feral beasts do not stoop to collecting Grammy's.

Muddy was happy to experience the late coming success. It was better to have it late in life than not having it at all. I guess he was a realist and a stoic. He had been commercially very successful in the early part of his career and was critically acclaimed for most of, regardless of record sales. The black audience for the blues had declined by the end of the Fifties but the White audience, particularly the young Brits who fuelled the early Sixties and late Sixties blues booms, picked up the slack and Muddy may have had comparatively lean times but was never completely down and out. Perhaps he only became less of a vital innovator and more of an institution of the blues revered and respected but no longer at the cutting edge.

The three studio albums recorded at the end of Muddy's career revitalised the career and gave him a fitting final few years of glory: some kind of reward for consistently doing what he did best. I would imagine that no-one would claim these recordings are the best of his career, though they probably come close, and they do not break new ground, yet the enthusiasm and pleasure that come across, are infectious and both leader, band and producer deliver a product of certified quality.

Ultimately blues seems to have been taken over by purveyors of the West Side and Texas styles where a virtuoso lead guitarist is the dominant and characteristic element. Southside blues is still my favourite electric style and will always be.

Muddy Waters or McKinley Morganfield? What does it matter? At an advanced stage of his life he was the king bee, hard again and ready to take back his crown. And he did. It is still his and no-one will ever take it away.

Publicity Machineri

2011-09-16T13:13:00.001-07:00

One of the wonderful benefits of having an Edgars charge card and belonging to the Edgars Club is the monthly Club magazine that is essentially an advertorial for Edgars merchandise. Now Woolworths, with which I also have a charge card, offers me the same, the W magazine, probably printed on recycled, organic paper.

That's the intro. Here's the thing: in the first W magazine I received there is a couple of pages worth of fashion for the young, which no longer speaks to me as I am way beyond the retro, neo-grunge look and never took to the original grunge look of 20 years ago either. The clever device the Woolworths marketers have come up with, and they are not the first, is to use local music scene celebrities as the models for the apparel they want to flog.

In this particular spread we see two members of Machineri, Sannie Fox and Andre Geldenhuys, somewhat self-consciously throwing supermodel shapes. There are others but these two are the only ones I recognise.

The main impression I gain from this spread is that Machineri's publicist must still be working hard for them to get them as much media attention as possible and possibly an extra income as models, even if this kind of mainstream fashion is not exactly rock and roll. In this day and age, though, one has to compromise with the corporate dollar to earn a crust from your main day job as bona fide rock star, or just an aspirational rock star. This is a small pond and if your media image is positive end ubiquitous, you can parlay a party trick into something approaching fame, or whatever passes for fame in South Africa.

The spread is 8 pages with photographs and text. Two males are featured: Spoek Mathambo (producer, designer, singer, DJ, rapper) and Andre Geldenhuys who is not the renaissance man Mathambo is made out to be. He is introduced merely as a guitarist and band member of Machineri. Where Mathambo resembles a parody of the guy from The Aloof, Geldenhuys poses like one of the more anonymous members of Alice In Chains, circa 1992. Mathambo is obviously not into neo-grunge; I guess Black dudes were not much into old school grunge either. Geldenhuys claims to be 27 and he must have infused the grunge from somebody else\s CD collection.

One of the problems with the youth of today is that they tend to look so much like the youth of some years ago. Grunge as a fashion was pretty much of a drag twenty years ago and nothing much has changed, except the age of the devotees.

The second chick singer in the mix is one Zoë Kravitz who is yet another multi-talented or at least multi-aspirational person. She is actor, singer, songwriter and member of Elevator Fight. Are these people serious about every aspect of their creative aspirations or is one or more of these facets merely the hobby while there is a core interest and talent? Hey, I am a lawyer, poet, writer, guitarist, songwriter and chef.

Zoë looks like someone who is small, feisty and trouble. She wears a little black dress and, in a solo spot, a white shirt and jeans combination that is classically sexy in a Patti Smith kind of way, though Zoë is more appealing to the eye. Hmm, I must seek out the music of Elevator Fight. Would it be more pussycat dolls or more punk rock? Sophisticated lounge-core prog rock? Math rock? Acoustic instruments, harmonies and songs about healing the hurt inside the world? Someone at W magazine must have thought Zoë connects with the youth of today who are likely to shop at Woollies.

One of my all-time favourite Page 3 models is a girl called Zoë who must be close to 30 now.

Second rock chick du jour is Gabi-Lee Smit who is also a mere guitarist and vocalist, in a band called The Pinkertons. I have no idea what they sound like, either. Reminds me of The Finkelstiens but that would be just my imagination, I guess. Why does Gabi-Lee not write songs? She looks like the kind of girl with something to say and those kinds of girls tend to want to say things and write songs if they happen to be in bands. Does Gabi-Lee even belong in the lustrous company of Zoë and Sannie Fox if she has such limited talents or aspirations?

I like the look of Gabi-Lee in her abbreviated short sleeve black and white plaid shirt (though plaid is a style I absolutely abhor) and tight short shorts, long thin legs and combat boots. Roadies dress like this, although maybe not as sexily. I also like Gabi-Lee's long, straight, dark hair and fringe that cover the eyes. She does not need Ray-Bans.

Then there is Sannie Fox. Actress, singer, songwriter and (mark you) electric guitarist in Machineri. She has been in a movie called Long Street and her band has played at venues in Long Street.

In one pic Sannie wears an off the shoulder America crop top and skinny red jeans with faded denim jacket tied around the waist. She shares the pic with Zoë and Sheila Marquez, a New York model who seems extremely superfluous to requirements. We are not told what other talents Marquez has. She sits, facing the camera while the other two appear to be dancing in front of a speaker or bas amp and next to a Vox amp. So very rock and roll. I can't see the handbags around which they were dancing.

In the last pic of the piece Gabi-Lee and Sannie lean against each other and where Gabi-Lee has fun with the setup, Sannie has an embarrassed, distant look in the one visible eye as if she is hoping the pay check will make up for this absurdity. Sannie wears another white top, denim jacket and red short shorts. Hey, maybe she is not into blue denim at all. Maybe red is her favourite colour. Her footwear is what I think of Cuban heeled Beatle boots and that must be an indication of my stunted fashion sense. Sexy, grungy shorts with Doc Martens obviously ain't the image anymore.

There is quite a bit of text in the 8 pages, mostly in the language of superheated publicist. Andre Geldenhuys lives in the here and now and in his head. Of course. Sannie Fox is fragile, soulful, open-hearted, tough and weary at the same time and fiercely private. All that and more. Without question.

What's my gripe? Nothing. Kudos to Machineri for being able to penetrate mainstream marketing opportunities. This is not the first time they've been featured in a South African glossy magazine and may not be the last time. Will this help them sell records? Perhaps. I would guess, though, that their sound is not exactly geared to great commercial success and if they want to make money from their music it will not be through selling CDs or even playing gigs.

The sound is defiantly anti-commercial in the pop song sense of that concept and this generally means that the songwriters cannot write pop songs for toffee and then turn this deficiency into a virtue. Does Sannie Fox enjoy wailing tunelessly simply because she has something serious and significant (to her) to say? The music has to carry the entire performance and bears the responsibility for grabbing our attention and making us stay. Who gives a damn for the private hell or private pleasures of the songwriter unless those insights touch the fucked up interior of the listener.

Music is not that important and not that significant. The world did not stop turning and music did not wither because Kurt Cobain topped himself. Courtney Love did not throw herself on the funeral pyre. Nevermind is significant for what it represented at the time, not for the actual content. Kurt did understand the need for a memorable hook, though, along with the crunchy guitar noise.

According to W magazine Machineri's debut album was released in July 2011. I have not seen it in my local Musica and I must find it. It is an album I want to own, as the on-line tracks I listened to a while ago sound mostly good and compelling. I saw Machineri for the first time last year, supporting The Pretty Blue Guns at Zula in Long Street, and my opinion was that the Blue Guns pretty much blew Machineri away because they had songs and Machineri had this free form noisy crap that is so tedious unless you are wasted and do not care anymore. The recorded songs have structure and some of them have hooks. Even so, I doubt that Machineri plays in the same league as the Blue Guns. The latter band just does not have the publicist's wet dream of a front woman like Sannie Fox or the same publicist. Can't see them in a retail brand's house magazine modelling middle of the road fashion tarted up as edgy. Might be their loss in the long run.

Machineri has the cogs. The cogs are oiled. They are cranked up to go. We just don't know how far yet.

Soul Brothers: mbaqanga for the people

2011-09-02T12:26:00.001-07:00

On a 2011 Gallo Records compilation Soul Brothers are referred to as the kings of mbaqanga and there is a statement that they have sold 4 million records in South Africa. Even when I first heard of them back in the late Seventies, the basic statement about the Soul Brothers is that they were probably the most popular South African act of the time, white or black.

My first exposure to local Black music came in about 1979 when I started listening to Radio Xhosa because I was fed up with the terrible disco centric format of Radio 5. I happened on the radio station while I was turning the dial on my radio and was immediately captivated by the wild music I heard. A trebly guitar played a weird, fast, repetitive pattern, the bassist played a fluid bass line low on the neck that is a co-equal lead instrument (and is reminiscent of the more bottom heavy reggae style), and a horn section played stabbing interjections. It sounded wild, crazy, out of control. It was The Other. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. I was hooked.

Radio Xhosa's playlist not only included this type of wild music, for which I had no name at the time, but the programmer also included a lot of current American R & B and, completely bizarrely, Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way." I could not understand what the announcers said and therefore had no idea who I was listening to unless they were foreign acts. I truly wanted to be able to buy the records I was hearing but had no idea how to identify them or where to find them. My local record stores, Sygma Records, Adrian & Don's Record Bar or, later, Ragtime Records, did not stock this type of music. I was not about to venture into KayaMandi, the Black township outside Stellenbosch, to look for this music, however much I wanted to have it.

Somewhere in the period 1977 to 1981 the SABC very surprisingly broadcast a documentary on Mahlathini "The Lion of Soweto" and the Mahotella Queens, as backed by the Makgona Tsohle Band (featuring West Nkosi and Marks Mankwana). This was as much an eye-opener as listening to Radio Xhosa for Mahlathini and his three female backing vocalists were portrayed as superstars in their community and in South Africa, and yet I had never heard of them before. It dawned on me that there must be an entire segment of the music industry in South Africa to which the White population is not exposed and which aims straight at the largest demographic in the country. On pure numbers alone even a moderately successful Black artist would have a far large audience than the most successful of White artists.

The Makgona Tsohle band played the stuff I wanted to desperately to hear yet I had no idea where to find their records.

My opportunity to acquire local Black music came when I noticed from the discount bins at the record bar of my local OK Bazaars that they were selling some records by local Black artists cheaply. Somehow I was expecting exactly the same wild sounds as the bands I heard on Radio Xhosa. In fact the first handful of records I bought by bands like The Grasshoppers sounded more like an African take on the Stax soul sound of Booker T & The MGs, with a prominent electric organ and no wild lead guitar.

It was still interesting music but not quite what I had hoped for.

A few years later OK Bazaars really started dumping records by local Black acts. I bought a stack because they were cheap even if I had no idea what I was buying. There was little description of the style of music or who the musicians were. Some of the albums would state that the music was Sotho vocal or Zulu vocal but that meant nothing in particular to me. I wanted the weird piercing guitar and fluid bass that I had heard on Radio Xhosa. What I mostly got was a bunch of vocal groups with a kind of plodding backing that was far removed from the wild excitement of the sounds that had attracted me to local Black music.

Amongst the best albums was a gospel record by the Rustenburg Boys; there was a very strange, almost completely percussion free album by Boyoyo Boys, who seemed to have only guitar between them; there was the Abaqondisi Brothers whose harmonies I liked; and various others. The only record that came close to the mbaqanga I wanted to hear, was called Tshungu Hits and, as I later gathered, was a compilation of tunes from the then Rhodesia. Although there were no Mahlathini & Mahotella Queens albums among the cheap records, there was one Soul Brothers album.

The best stuff, though, came from a series of audio cassette albums that seemed to be compilations of single tracks by various artists. I thought of them as the Mabone series, as some of the album titles featured this word, preceded by a number that suggested it might be a series number. This music was the mbaqanga in the style I'd heard on Radio Xhosa: fast beats, lots of sharp guitar and honking saxophone playing off each other in call and response patterns. The cassettes had no information other than the track listings. It would have been great to know more about these groups, the songwriters and producers. My guess was that the Black audience for whom this music was intended, did not care much about this type of information.

What I learnt from these records was that South Africa must have a significant Black recording industry and that a small band of writers and producers ran it to the extent of putting out the product. I guess the actual record companies may well have been White owned.

Anyhow, I thought that the Soul Brothers record was quite a find as they were legendary. Yet the music was that same tame backing of so many lesser bands with strict, metronomic four on the floor percussion that had no syncopation or poly rhythmic effect at all. It seemed that the drum kit consisted of only a bass drum and maybe one cymbal. The guitar was subdued. Usually the only interesting part was the agile, fluid bass playing. Obviously the emphasis was on the vocal harmonies but it would have been nice if the music added some excitement to the mix.

During the Eighties and Nineties I had the opportunity of watching a good deal of Black music television, mostly the fairly traditional stuff, and almost all of it had that same lethargic effect produced by the staid, though solid drumming. It seemed to me that the harmonies, the matching clothes and the dance routines were more important elements. The musicians had the simple job or providing backing music and they were not stars in their own right nor were they expected or required to be more dynamic than the vocalists they served.

The traditional Black music was only part of the entirety of the Black music industry. There was township pop, there was hip hop, more sophisticated R & B and jazz styles and, biggest of all, kwaito., all of which also had their share of exposure on the SABC but for a long time it seemed to me that the SABC was making an effort to preserve and promote the traditional music, perhaps beyond demand, in the same way the old SAUK Afrikaans Service had promoted "boeremusiek" far beyond what I thought of as necessary. Perhaps, as is the case with "boeremusiek", there is a far larger audience for traditional Black music styles than I knew.

From the late Nineties I started buying CDs of local Black acts, first a series by band leaders that played what was called "saxophone jive" that resembled the music on the Mabone cassettes. Some of it was pretty dull and some of it was exciting. One of them was a selection of Wes Nkosi tunes. He'd been the saxophone player in the Makgona Tsohle Band and I hoped the compilation of alleged hits would be something but over the length of the CD it just got wearying. I would imagine that the songs made sense as singles heard in different contexts. As album tracks the tendency was towards too much of the same thing. Something similar happened to the Mahlathini & Mahotella Queens greatest hits CD I bought. I knew a couple of the songs and they remained interesting but on the whole the set dragged a tad. It was just not the crazy mbaqanga music I wanted to hear, particularly as these greatest hits tended to favour the late Eighties revival of the Queens. There has to be a proper compilation of their early hits somewhere.

I guess it must be difficult selecting appropriate tunes by such a prolific recording unit as the Soul Brothers. How does one summarise a 40 career in 10 songs?

"Imali Yami" is a good example of the mbaqanga sound of the Soul Brothers starts off with a swirl of electronic organ, followed by a wiry bass that serves as a second lead instrument after the organ, with guitar way down in the mix and the drums supplying a solid, bass drum heavy foundation. It seems to me that the typical mbaqanga is the least technically able of all the musicians. He simply and only has to count out a strict, unvarying beat and stomp the bass drum pedal on that beat. There is some saxophone riffing to add an extra texture. The guys weave their harmonies over the top.

Damn it! I know this tune! Was it on the sole Soul Brothers album I used to own?

Anyhow, that is the template. Fortunately there is a lot of variety within patented style and the benefit of cherry picking 10 tracks is that each one sounds like prime Soul Brothers. There are variations in the musical palette from tune to tune though the prominent bass and metronomic drumming remain constants.

I cannot read the Soul Brothers' song titles and I have no idea what the lyrics say. Frankly I do not know whether the Soul Brother sing in Zulu (as I suspect) or in isiXhosa. All I can say for sure is that they don't sing in Tswana or Sotho.

Back in the day when I listened to Radio Xhosa a lot the fact that I did not understand the language were no hindrance and very much a plus factor, as far as I was concerned. The music was the universal language the cliché has it and it was a boon not to know what the many advertisements were about, though the jingle punch lines were often understandable enough, or what the radio presenters were saying. Call in shows were prominent during the times I tuned in and some of these calls seemed to last forever but because I could tune out to what was being said because I could not understand it, it was not that much of a bother and certainly not as irritating as similar shows on Springbok Radio had been. The only negative was that there seemed to be an incredible amount of talking and advertisements between tunes.

So for all I know, the typical Soul Brothers song is nothing more than a bunch of heard-it-all-before platitudes about love. Maybe they sing about social conditions and advance arguments for socialism and poverty alleviation. Perhaps the songs are calls for revolution (though I guess this is probably just a fantasy) and retribution. It does not matter much to me. The fact is that the tunes are great to listen to, move the heart and the feet and just seem generally like top of their game South African soul music by two veterans of the showbiz game.

The "soul" part of the group name could come from the soul in their music; it could be a reference to Sam & Dave, who were not brothers at all, but were kind of brothers in soul and soul brothers as well, at least until the one guy shot his wife and the other one no longer talked to him. Anyhow, my guess is that the Soul Brothers chose their name to reflect all these interpretations of the name.

Apart from the rather inflexible drumming one could well imagine that the basic mbaqanga sound was modelled on the Stax house band, with a resolutely African twist. The instrumental line up behind Soul Brothers is just about the same as with Booker T & The Mgs but the Soul Brothers band does a whole new thing with the same tools. The bassist is less about locking in with the drums and more about a solo voice and is generally played at a higher register. The keyboards do vamp behind the singers but the keyboard player also has the opportunity for wild intros and various flourishes within the songs. The guitar plays less choppy rhythm like Steve Cropper and more of his solo style, continuously throughout the song. The horn section does not always play simple stabbing riffs but present a kind of African jazz sweetening. It would have been nice, however, to have an Al Jackson understudy on the drums. I am not a musician but it seems to me that the basic mbaqanga drummer eschews the back beat and drums strictly on the one, which is funk or disco thing, and not really the soul thing.

My experience of listening to African music, from anywhere on the continent, sung in the vernacular is purely visceral, as I do not have to understand or analyse the lyrics. The totality of the song, words and music and beat, is the enthralling package. The words do not distract, as they are simply an element of the whole, equal to everything else and the vocals could easily be just another instrument.

This is very true of how I experience and appreciate the Soul Brothers. This compilation of 10 top tunes is a delight and a pleasure. Will I seek out more Soul Brothers records? I do not think so, unless it is yet another compilation of 20 of their best tunes that I see mentioned on the Gallo Records website. As I've said, I think the Soul Brothers would be best in the context of a hits package. On reflection I would say, musically speaking, that mbaqanga is not about drums at all; it is all about the bass. I can get behind that.

Give the bassist some!

Suzi Quatro

2011-09-01T12:58:00.001-07:00

Suzi Quatro was one of my early pop music fave raves, along with Slade. Mud T Rex and The Sweet of "Ballroom Blitz." Quatro came from the Nicky Chinn / Mike Chapman stable, along with The Sweet and soft rockers Smokie. She was the tiny, bass toting leather clad bad girl of glam rock with a series of killer rock singles. She is an American who made it good in the UK. Her sister Patti was in an all-girl band called Fanny. Suzi's husband Len Tuckey played guitar in her band. For some people Quatro became most famous as the character Leather Tuscadero in the sitcom Happy Days. And, apparently, she is still going at the age of 61.

Suzi Quatro was the best female rocker I knew before I heard Joan Jett.

Some NME 'scribe" paid Suzi Quatro the backhanded of saying that "Can The Can" (the first major hit) was a brilliant proto-girl power song and that she had lost it by the next release, "48 Crash." Honestly, I preferred "48 Crash" but this may be because I actually owned the single. In fact I also had "Daytona Demon." "Devil Gate Drive" and "The Wild One." I bought the singles, long after they were released, at Sygma Records who had a table full of boxes with budget priced singles in a room behind the main record store.

Suzi Quatro's music can be called glam rock or bubblegum rock and roll but the drum and bass heavy music was very exciting and energising to a gawky kid like me. I cannot say that Quatro ever was a rock 'n roll pin-up for me, as she did not seem all that sexy. The leather did not exactly do it for me and she was too small to seem dangerous. It was many years later before I could appreciate the virtues of being small, dark and dangerous

I've watched YouTube videos of "48 Crash" and the later song "Rock Hard" and in both videos Suzi Quatro looks incredibly young and vulnerable, especially in the older song, released when she was about 23 years old. She has serious lung capacity and could really scream in tune (like the Bee Gees) whilst playing a bass guitar that almost outranks her, though I believe she is an excellent bass player.. it is just slightly weird that one of the first upfront front women in rock looked so much like a 16 year old

The Quatro band had the unique selling proposition of a powerful chick singer who could also play a mean bass guitar. This also meant that the four piece band could be an instrumental four piece with guitar and keyboards. Most chick singers with bands just sang. Suzi Quatro was the first female rock front person I knew who also played an electric instrument. That she played bass was disturbingly unusual and cool at the same time. That she had a powerful voice was a major virtue.

The Chinn / Chapman songs were relatively simple, straightforward rockers with instantly memorable sing-a-long choruses and the production emphasised the booming, stomping drums that would have give these songs a distinctive edge at the rock disco. Quatro also recorded a fair share of standards like "All Shook Up", "You Keep A-Kockin:" and "Move It" but the tailor made tunes were by far the best probably precisely because they were written to suit her image.

"Daytona Demon" and "Devil Gate Drive" not only alliterate well but are clever examples of bubblegum rock with extended metaphors to suit a rocking chick like Suzi. I do not recall "Devil Gate Drive" ever receiving airplay on the SABC probably because the powers that be would not allow a song with 'devil' in the title to sully our pristine, Christian airwaves.

EMI Records has a budget priced compilation of Suzi Quatro's greatest hits in the period 1973 to 1979 that I recently bought at Musica as part of a 3 CD's fro R99,00 promotion. The other two albums were Gallo Records' compilations of best tunes of South African acts Mango Groove and the Soul Brothers. I guess I have a pretty eclectic record collection.

Be that as it may, the Quatro collection has all the songs you would want to hear and some I had not heard of before, such as her versions of Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run" and Steve Harley's "Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)". There are also the slower songs "If You Can't Give Me Love", "Stumblin' In" and "She's In Love With You" to showcase the more mature, sensitive side of the rocker chick. And possibly the point that rockers need to get serious about love too. A glaring omission as far as I am concerned is the failure to include "Rock Hard" from the Times Square movie soundtrack. "Rock Hard" was Quatro's take on New Wave and a damn fine take at that. Perhaps it did not fit the compilation's theme of Seventies hits or perhaps the soundtrack was not on EMI.

The pure sugar rush of the first batch of singles is still unsurpassed. I find that I want to keep playing this CD over and over again. The sequencing is chronological and only the slight slow down in pace of "Fever" interrupts the adrenaline run from "Can The Can" to "The Wild One." After that first wave has crashed against the beach, the songs become more proficient and businesslike, like Suzi-by-numbers and to a degree the cover versions of more contemporary songs like "Make Me Smile" or "Born to Run" are more satisfying because the evade the stereotype Quatro attitude. I must say, though, that where "Make Me Smile" works quite well., this version of "Born To Run" makes no sense. The pace and dynamism of the Springsteen version are sore missed and though the point of the song seems a good fit for the Quatro image, she sounds a little lost.

Although Suzi Quatro was no one hit wonder I would imagine her music is best appreciated in the format of an all hits compilation like this. It is just about all killer and no filler.; even my doubts about the latter-day Suzi-by-rote and dubious cover versions cannot really sustain a contrary opinion.

Having said that, I could happily have lived with a 10-track greatest hits album. Just the super hits and nothing but the super hits. That would be mainlining the Quatro factor and it would be no bad thing. It's silk sash bash, after all.

Mango Groove

2011-08-28T02:12:00.001-07:00

in the late Eighties and very early Nineties Mango Groove and Johnny Clegg were the two most commercial South African acts in what one could loosely call the rock field. Both of these acts in succession sold out the Good Hope Centre, then the premier (and only) large venue in Cape Town and surrounds for such popular entertainers.

Not so coincidentally both Mango Groove and Johnny Clegg were proponents of a style that combined the best of "international" rock or pop and local flavours. In Clegg's case it was Zulu guitar music and mbaqanga and in Mango Groove's case it was marabi, a South African twist on big band jazz and with the colouring of a penny whistle as sweetener. Claire Johnston, the petite blonde vocalist for Mango Groove, was a kind of pop sex symbol who went solo when the band had more or less run its course but this solo career was never as successful as Mango Groove had been.

I believe there has been a fairly recent attempt to resurrect Mango Groove without much apparent success.

Mango Groove was the Freshly Ground of its day: a group of White and Black musicians mixing up a potent brew of indigenous music combined with pop sensibilities, hit singles and management that could package the image and the sound into a commercially viable package. Sadly for Mango Groove they hit their stride and peaked locally before the great cultural thaw that came with the democratisation of South Africa and, unlike Freshly Ground, did not have much of an opportunity to expand into international markets.

I never saw Mango Groove live. The closest I came was at the Three Arts somewhere in the early years of their career, when the band had already made a splash in Johannesburg and was an unknown quantity way down south. The Quibell brothers had refurbished the Three Arts in an attempt to make if more of a money spinner than it had been for a while. The main theatre had been refurbished and an enclosed bar venue was built in the old lobby. Somehow, and well before Mango Groove had any kind of radio hit, their management booked them into the Three Arts for a week of shows, Monday to Saturday.

I had no idea what this allegedly hot new band sounded like. When I'd read about them in Vula magazine I thought that the band name suggested a tropical, Caribbean sound, perhaps salsa perhaps calypso. Then I read about "Big Mickey" Vilakazi and the make-up of the band from young White musicians pairing up with veterans of the Soweto music scene and thought the concept was something like disco mbaqanga with a White female vocalist and this idea did not attract met at all.

It made no sense to me for Mango Groove to be playing at the Three Arts for 6 nights throughout the week. They were not that well-known and the Three Arts was hardly a hip and happening venue, out in Diep River. Capetonians do not like to travel that far. A week at the Baxter Theatre would have made more sense, but I guess the choice of venue was forced by the then lack of popularity of the band. The way to do it, should have been what all Jo'burg bands did at the time: come down to Cape Town for 2 weeks and play a bunch of weekend gigs at the club venues in town.

I was kind of interested in checking out Mango Groove just for the hell of it, particularly as I did make an effort to catch all the local rock gigs I could get to but I was not going to drive to Diep River during a week night.

As it happened, on the Saturday night I decided to make the trek to the south, The Flaming Firestones were also playing at the Three Arts. I thought they were the opening act and this contrast struck me as quite weird. The Firestones were a blues band; Mango Groove was African pop. Who the hell had thought this up?. The Firestones were a must see for me because Nico Burger was then their lead guitarist and so I thought, given that the entry fee to the venue covered both bands, that I could kill the proverbial two flies with one swipe.

When I walked into building Claire Johnston came storming past me in a very tight fitting,low cut strapless evening dress. The first impressions was that she was small, had small breasts, a funky haircut and was steaming mad about something. She could not really stride in that tight dress but she was motoring as best she could. Ii never knew what had annoyed her and I never saw her again.

On enquiry I was told that The Flaming Firestones were playing in the bar in the lobby and were not opening for Mango Groove at all. Okay, that made sense. The problem was that the two bands would be performing concurrently. As the Firestones were more of a priority for me I never did get to the main hall to check out Mango Groove.

It had seemed to me, even at the time of 21h00 I pitched up at the Three Arts (in those days one hardly ever went out earlier than 22h00 and mostly much later), that there was an altogether sparse audience for Mango Groove. The venue, which could accommodate about 3000 punters in the main hall, was not in any way buzzing with young trendies out to witness the ascent of an imminent local pop phenomenon. The Firestones had attracted the usual number of usual suspects who were by no means the the typical Mango Groove would be fan and in the main part of the building there was no sighting of anybody else. Perhaps more people came in after I entered the bar but for ever after I felt sorry for this band to have been subjected to this ignominy. Never in my wildest dreams at the time would I have foreseen that they would become as big as they did.

And they did become big. Not long after the stand at the Three Arts, and after their return to Johannesburg, Mango Groove started having chart hits with their African pop amalgam and then found themselves in the position of being able out to sell out the 8000 capacity Good Hope Centre.

For a shining couple of years Mango Groove was probably the biggest local pop sensation and Claire Johnston, who was the face and the voice of the band, became a celebrity. She was pretty and could sing. And fortunately for her the hits songs were great, memorable tunes.

Now, in 2011, Gallo Record Company has released a series of low budget compilations of the best tunes from various artists on their roster. Mango Groove is one of a group that included Lucky Dube, the Soul Brothers, Stimela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba and Jabu Khanyile. There may be more.

The Mango Groove compilation is not the first greatest hits set. This album contains 10 sure fire hit tunes. If there are any other of their well known songs not included here, I would not know.

I must admit I bought this CD because it was cheap. I had never been inclined to buy any Mango Groove product, whether the original records or the later greatest hits album that is still out there as well. This collection is a bit of a delight. I know all of the songs, except for their version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and "Together As One" which sounds like an anthem for the 1995 Rugby World Cup (or it could be for another similar event) and I have to acknowledge that each one of them is a pure pop gem. John Leyden's tunes and Claire Johnston's voice, alternately breathily sexy and gleeful, and the swinging backing of a bunch of relaxed pros, make for great, exhilarating fun. The sum of the parts is far more powerful than the individual contributions, wonderful as those assorted elements may.

Mango Groove managed truly to make a gleaming alloy from the best of both worlds and to give us classic and classy pop.

Fat Possum cuts the crap

2011-08-12T13:17:00.001-07:00

FAT POSSUM RECORDS

NOT THE SAME OLD BLUES CRAP (1997)

Fat Possum Records is a label you gotta love just for the name. My other favourite blues label name is Blind Pig Records. Fat Possum wins out over Blind Pig because the blues on Fat Possum is really downhome, primitive and unlike a lot of stuff I'd heard before. Blind Pig artists have a much more sophisticated sound and approach to their blues. Fat Possum bluesmen look, sound and are very rural. The blues they make is electric but the music sounds as if comes from parts of the backwoods where they don't have electricity.

I read about Far Possum. How, not unlike the birth of Alligator Records, a young White guy founded Fat Possum to record the music of some very obscure country bluesman. These were guys whom time had passed by. They were still making blues the way it had been played in the rural juke joints for many years while blues went uptown and got all sophisticated and commercial in the hands of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, B B King, Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan to outline just a brief history of time.

Since 1992 Fat Possum has given us Junior Kimbrough and R L Burnside (once backed by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) and T-Model Ford who sounded mean as hell and twice as unsophisticated. They rocked the blues pretty good and made as cathartic a racket as any punk rocker.

The first handful of Fat Possum albums I saw in Cape Town, a couple of R L Burnside records, were rather expensive for my taste, especially for blues records and I passed them by. Then I found the debut, and possibly only, album by Paul "Wine" Jones who is probably in the second league of Fat Possum artists and who truly has an excessively simplistic wah wah guitar style that makes me think of my own capabilities. How on earth and why Jones made the wah wah pedal his own is a mystery. Perhaps he found a second hand pedal in a local pawnshop and when he tested it he realised the noise it made could set him apart from his peers.

Even with the wah wah pedal Jones is no Jimi Hendrix, Steve Stills or Eric Clapton and the description unholy, over-amped roar fits his guitar playing. The backing is as simplistic and furious and his huge echoed bellow of a voice doesn't so much sing as chant the very straightforward lyrics. Jones is no poet and he mixes and matches traditional blues phrases with this own witticisms.

Paul "Wine" Jones makes riveting, though limited music. Over the length of an album the schtick pales. The ideal setting for a Paul "Wine" Jones tune is amidst a collection of other acts on Fat Possum, such as Not The Same Old Blues Crap, released in 1997.

T-Model Ford, Junior Kimbrough, R L Burnside, The Jelly Roll Kings and other more obscure names feature on this album. Not Paul "Wine" Jones, though.

Kimbrough does music that can be as lonesome as any of the solo John Lee Hooker sides or as relentless as Howlin Wolf's Memphis band with Willie Steele on guitar. Burnside sounds feral and extremely dangerous even when unarmed. The Neckbones and The Jelly Roll Kings are juke joint houserockers. Where The Neckbones, with "Crack Whore Blues", are as in your face as their song title suggests, the Jelly Roll Kings swing like a cool jazz combo with extra boogie backbeat.

Then there is Elmo Williams who does a dirty guitar boogie, backed by rudimentary drums (that kind of drumming is par for the course for Fat Possum artists) and almost atonal mouth harp. Williams could be a Hound Dog Taylor without slide guitar and his boogie is relentless, motorvating and just dares me to get up and dance in a silly, yet energetic fashion. Perhaps an album's worth of this fierce boogie would be too much, but damn it, one track ain't enough.

Robert Cage does a wordless chanting blues backed by alternately pounding and slicing acoustic guitar. This is the way to resolve the age old conundrum of avoiding blues clichés

Hasil Adkins closes the album on what sounds like an old timey hillbilly song to me. It even has a spoken bit where Adkins get all maudlin over the memories of his long gone love one, and if that is not the true sign of deep country, I do not know what is. The acoustic guitar and thudding drum are as simple as any of the blues tracks and the entire lyric is something like your memories are still loving me." Tear-jerking brilliant.

On the strength of this compilation I would seek out more of Kimbrough, Burnside and the Jelly Roll Kings and probably Elmo Williams too. At 44 minutes the CD is about the same length as records used to be and as a teaser it delivers a lot and promises a great deal more. That is what a good compilation is all about.

Whether the Fat Possum artists have ever become fat cats on the strength of their releases on this label is doubtful. Even severely primitive bluesmen will sell only so many records. If it ain't commercial it won't get on MTV and it won't be on the Disney Channel.

That's all right with me. These blues deserve attention, respect and, most of all, pure and untrammelled enjoyment.

Mick Fleetwood Blues Band

2011-08-12T10:58:00.001-07:00

On 8 February 2008 the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band played the Sheldon Concert Hall in St Louis Missouri. Apparently the intention was to do homage to the Fleetwood Mac founded by Fleetwood, Peter Green and John McVie as 2007 was the 40^th anniversary of the founding of one of the great brand names in blues and AOR.

Fleetwood is the drummer in this 4-piece blues combo. He has played behind two of the greatest guitarists ever, Peter Green the bluesman and Lindsey Buckingham the pop-rock guy, and on this night one Rick Vito is the guitarist. In the late Eighties Vito replaced Buckingham as guitarist in Fleetwood Mac.

The concert was recorded and the results have been released on the CD album Blue Again!, along with a second CD of 4 studio recordings with 2 Peter Green instrumentals and 2 Rick Vito instrumentals. The studio is in Hawaii and the four instrumentals have a decided island flavour.

The set list comprises of 6 Peter Green tunes, 5 Vito compositions and one classic Elmore James blues. This means that seven of the songs played by the band are from the Peter Green era of Fleetwood Mac, the band to which Fleetwood lent his surname and in which he made his fortune. Mick Fleetwood had probably been in the Buckingham Nicks incarnation of Fleetwood Mac for far longer than he ever played with Peter Green and I have no idea how often he returned to the blues during his years of AOR fame and fortune but here he is, in the heart of blues country, fronting 3 Americans who, proficient as they are, tend to be more show biz blues than roots blues.

In this day and ager of reunions of all kinds of old bedfellows, for nostalgia or money, it is almost strange that Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Christine McVie have not played at least some reunion concerts. Peter Green is one of the greatest blues guitarists of all time, especially the modern time, and if Eric Clapton can still be seen as hovering near the very peak of that particular pyramid, Peter Green deserves a spot right next to him.

The difference between the two is that Clapton, though serially a junkie and an alkie, moved beyond his addictions, survived his afflictions and continued to have a smart, commercially viable career, whereas Peter Green apparently could not handle the LSD he took so prodigiously, was dealt a bad hand with the medication he was put on subsequently and when he did recover elected to follow a much more low key career path, concentrating on the blues and avoiding pop stardom. Both of them recorded the Robert Johnson songbook but only one had a commercial impact with his renditions. Peter Green is not that guy.

Anyhow, Mick is a great drummer and has long been part of one of the greatest rhythm sections ever. He does not sing, he does not write songs, he just hunkers down behind his drum kit and empowers the musicians in front of him. His style is simple, effective and swinging. Fleetwood knows that the drummer is the engine room and not the top deck and he never gets in the way. He may be the band leader but he does not showboat and just serves the musicians.

When Vito sings he sounds like a kind of Cajun guy from the swamps, though not with the accent, and not exactly like a downhome bluesman. He plays guitar well and digs deep into the tunes but cannot quite shake off the cover band image when he plays the Green tunes. Although the album sleeve notes claim that the band is not attempting to do a straight imitation of Fleetwood Mac's blues and do make an effort to bring their own stuff to these well-known tunes, there is still a sense of homage gone wrong. The most glaring shortcoming is that Rick Vito does not bring any of Peter Green's naked emotion to songs like "Looking For Somebody", "Love That Burns" and "Black Magic Woman" and turns them into slightly ordinary renditions of otherwise deep blues songs. The lightness of touch in the original arrangements is sorely missed. These versions do not exactly plod (Mick Fleetwood's drumming is much to supple and subtle for that), nor do they exactly take off and soar.

"When We Do The Lucky Devil" is a great Zydeco hoedown that fits the Vito style perfectly. The rhythm section bounces along merrily and the swamp guitar picking is sprightly and joyful. This is Vito's own song and this is probably why he inhabits it with confidence and owns it.

On "Shake Your Moneymaker" it is Jeremy Spencer's vocals that are sorely missed. Vito bellows the lyrics a bit and does not have that sly intonation that Spencer brought to an arguably naughty song. The band rocks out nicely and the beat is as infectious as ever. The enforced audience sing-a-long at the end is truly showbiz and unnecessary.

Fleetwood Mac prided itself on being as authentic a blues band as a bunch of White boys from England could be and they were pretty damns authentic to my ears. Although blues is still a career path for musicians and will probably always have its practitioners and adherents, it is as if the deep blues no longer really matters. The latest generation of blues musicians for the most part have had no direct contact with any of the original bluesmen. The likes of Peter Green, Mike Bloomfield, Johnny Winter and Eric Clapton not only met but also played with some of the giants of the blues and gain first-hand knowledge and experience from these guys, who started it all. Nowadays the aspiring blues musician must rely on recordings and DVDs to be able to have any kind of influence from the older generations. In this context Mick Fleetwood is probably a kind of elder bluesman. He can also lay claim to having met an older generation of bluesmen and should therefore be in a position to pass on some of what he learnt from them.

The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band is not an exercise in blues education. It is a vehicle for playing blues, in particular the blues of Peter Green, to an audience who may or may not be purist blues fans but who would recognise the name and attend almost purely because of the star attraction and perhaps like what they think of blues as well. After all, it's difficult to beat a backbeat and a fluent lead guitar for party fun. Blues isn't all sad or maudlin; a lot of it is dance music, party music, sex music, and that can't be bad.

I would imagine Fleetwood recalled Vito to his blues conglomerate because he knows the guitarist from his days in Fleetwood Mac and not because Vito is much of a bluesman in the first place but on the evidence of Vito's tunes in the live set he has something of the swamp thing in him and could well have a heritage that is mostly Cajun and not Delta blues but still in just about the same ball park of southern music.

Vito cannot replicate Peter Green's melancholy vocals or his floating, stinging guitar but he can do the Zydeco style quite well. His voice and blues rock guitar are better suited to that kind of party music as the upbeat raunch works better for a guitarist with not much subtlety.

Nobody does Peter Green like Peter Green. Gary Moore came close on Blues For Greeny and Lindsey Buckingham, who must be the polar opposite of a bluesman, did "Oh Well" proud. Vito learnt the songs and the licks and tries his best to do something new and exciting yet retain the original magic but he cannot quite get there.

This live set would probably have been a great night out for the audience. I am not quite so sure whether it is the kind of album that would stay on my CD player for any length of time. I would rather revisit the Fleetwood Mac recordings of the same tunes.

There has always the question of whether a bunch White guys, even well-meaning, committed White guys, could ever do justice to the blues of a bunch of old Black guys from the Mississippi Delta. In the case of the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band the question is whether a bunch of White guys (however professional) can do justice to the blues of another White guy. Sadly, they cannot quite hack it. Entertainment is all right; and slickness is not always a pejorative.

In this instance I would have preferred more toots and more guts. Peter Green deserves a touch of purism..

A tale of two chickies

2011-08-09T09:06:00.001-07:00

On a good Friday in late July 2011 I bought 7 second hand South African rock CDs at the Claremont branch of Cash Crusaders.

Two of them were the debut albums of respectively Louise Day (Swallowed By The City) and Jessika (Shout) (actually Jessica-Kate Kinnear). I had not previously heard of either of them.

Louise Day's album interested me because I wondered whether she was the daughter of local rock chick (or rock matron) Jo Day and because Theo Crous produced the record.

Jessika interested me purely because of the cover photograph on the CD inlay card. She is a pretty brunette who is photographed giving the viewer a sidelong, sexy glance from underneath eye level bangs and she wears a top that leaves her right shoulder and top of the right breast bare enough to suggest that she has ample bosoms. I think the image is meant to convey a shy yet confident sexuality, or maybe it is just a blatant come on to enchant heterosexual old guys like me. Anyhow, the trick worked. I bought the CD simply and purely because I wanted to hear what this sex kitten sounded like. The fact that it was priced at R19,95 was another inducement.

Oh, and another persuading factor for buying Jessika's album is that it is on Musketeer Records, one of the better local labels. Along about 2002 I bought the debut and so far only album by The Fortune Cookies, top class guitar pop, that I did not like at first and which then grew on me to the extent that is one of my top ten local records of all time. Therefore, I was prepared to take a chance on Jessika in case she presented the same unexpected bounty as The Fortune Cookies. I must that my expectation was that the album would be wall to wall disco pop fluff.

Shout was released in 2008 when Jessika was 19. According to the press release on the Musketeer Records website Jessika came from the same music training school as Candice (Hillebrand), another local pop thrush who started out as a tasty television pin up morsel and then turned out to have a voice and some good tunes.

Jessika's album is a mixture of dance rock and pop rock, of which the title track (it is not the Isley Brothers song) and "Addicted" are infectious examples. "I Never Meant to Make You Cry" and "Stay", the final track, am two particular highlights; they show off the putative soul chops of Jessika's voice. She writes some of the lyrics herself, though not all of them, and has a couple of collaborators who contribute music. The inlay card, which has plenty more tasty photos of Jessika, does not tell us much about who recorded the backing tracks. I guess some of the names mentioned in the page of thank you's could be the musicians involved in the project. Melanie Louw, a top ten finalist in the first South African Idols competition also receives thanks as inspiration.

Jessika has a really good, strong soulful voice, though she is also a bit of a belter on some of the tracks, and I would like to hear her doing something more in that vein. She could be a local Joss Stone, Amy Winehouse or Duffy given the right material. When she gives it all she has, there is also a strong reminder of Christina Aguilera's voice.

As far as I know Jessika never became a household name and perhaps she now makes a living doing corporate events where she sings cover versions.

Swallowed By The City is of a more recent vintage than Shout. It was released in 2010 and is in the Sheer Sound stable, also a well-respected local label that has an eclectic roster that encompasses various genres.

Louise Day makes melodic, anthemic AOR rock. She has a regular band that sounds extremely professional and somewhat uninspired. Theo Crous gets a good solid rocking sound and puts a smooth sheen on the product. One can imagine that Louise Day has area rock ambitions and in a way this record is a female version of the stuff Watershed or Prime Circle puts out. The disappointing realisation is that there is not much of distinction on the album; no single tune that stands out; nothing to hit you in the gut and say, damn! Louise Day's voice is passable, though a tad expressionless, and the band rocks quite nicely when required but the rock and roll tropes are so generic that the whole album passes by in the background without much fuss.

The album opens with a portentous intro called "intro" that makes one anticipate something prog rock. Fortunately the classical gas segues into the glare of "Sunlight" and the band is away and cantering with Louise Day wafting about on top. The musicians are capable, the arrangements are well-crafted and the tunes tend towards the Big Statement though the hooks are kind of absent. Everything about the production is top notch and Theo Crous deserves kudos for his work on this album. The simple truth, though, is that this is no more and no less than proficient, high end journeyman rock of the sort that is perennially the support act and not the headliner, unless Louise Day tours by herself and has no competition.

Point to note: Jessika has a song called "Addicted" and Louise Day has a song called "Addict". In both cases the addiction is to a loved one and not to a drug. "Addict" is the last track on Louise Day's album and actually probably the best song on the album because it is mostly just a jazzy pop song with piano and a bit of rock decoration.

Having listened to these alums back to back I would be much more inclined to sync Shout to my iPod than Swallowed by the City, purely and simply because I like Jessika's voice more than Louise Day's and because Jessika's songs afford a superior listening experience over the length of an album. When "Stay" fades out to its final piano chord, you want to start from the beginning again. Hmm, maybe this is The Fortune Cookies all over again.

I prefer my rock relatively primitive and hard and Louise Day is too polished and anonymous for my liking. When her record is done, there is no impulse to listen to it again other than to revisit something that did not quite make an impression the first time around. One could perhaps make the effort to pay more attention a second time around just to get a sense of it, not because it was a compelling thrill you simply have to repeat. I guess the Louise Day Band live experience could be a good clubbing night out. In the cold, harsh reality of my lounge in the middle of the day, it is not so compelling or different. It makes no difference. Jessika made a difference because I had no expectations and was exceedingly pleasantly surprised. That is a good thing.

B B King

2011-08-09T06:17:00.001-07:00

If I am not mistaken Riley "Blues Boy" King is currently the most famous old school bluesman alive today. There is also Buddy Guy but he is a generation younger.

B B was one of the originators and supreme practitioner of what was once categorised as urban blues by academic bluesophiles who wrote the story of the blues and had to pigeonhole various offshoots of a very broad river. Urban blues was smooth, sophisticated, and jazz and gospel influenced and a million miles away, supposedly, from the Mississippi Delta country blues of sharecroppers and levee camps. Urban blues was big city blues: uptown and sleek. For a while in the Fifties B B King toured with a big band with a full brass section that could riff behind him as if they were Count Basie's big band our of Kansas. In contrast the typical Delta bluesman was a solo performer on guitar. The electric downhome sound featured a small combo, with no horns, except that the blues harp often simulated a horn section, and was still more primitive than the big band sound.

For the first 15 years or so of B B King's career in blues he played almost exclusively to black audiences paradoxically because his ostensibly more sophisticated style was not recognised as an authentic folk expression by the White bluesophile academics that researched the blues and wrote the story of the blues. These White guys preferred the Delta blues of Robert Johnson and the new-folk blues stylings of Big Bill Broonzy and the electric downhome style of Muddy Waters, as these musicians were considered as authentic. Somehow, B B King was a showbiz bluesman who had none of the deep blues feeling some guy on the porch of a Delta juke joint was thought to have.

The joke was that King came from the Mississippi Delta and was as authentically steeped in blues as any of the musicians so admired by the blues scholars. Today, of course, King is as venerated as anybody else in the genre and possibly more than most. Maybe it is simply down to outlasting so many of his contemporaries.

I came to the blues via Dr Feelgood and Cream. A VeeJay album of John Lee Hooker's greatest hits was the first blues album I ever bought. My initial interest was in electric blues from the southside of Chicago, as this type of blues was more to my taste than the sophisticated style of B B King or T Bone Walker. At first I did not even care for acoustic Delta blues or blues piano.

I started reading about blues and came across the name of B B King, as part of the trilogy of Kings (BB, Albert and Freddie) and as a practitioner of a gospel inflected jazzy style with fluent guitar playing. This sounded good until I actually bought a B B King album.

Before that my first exposure to B B King's music was on an ABC Bluesway compilation where his "Blue Shadows" (taken from the 1971 album B B King In London) was a serious contender. King was backed by a small group with a solid rhythm section powering a relentless performance with pained vocals and elevating, piercing guitar playing. Many years later I also bought the CD of B B King In London.

Not long after being impressed by "Blue Shadows" I saw a B B King record (I think it was an album called The Best Of B B King, Volume II) on sale at Sygma Records in Stellenbosch and bought it, along with a John Lee Hooker album on the same label. I played the Hooker album to death. I later learnt that the British blues band The Groundhogs, or elements from the band, formed Hooker's backing band. Their version of "I Cover The Waterfront" was spectacularly spooky and affecting. On the other hand, I barely played the B B King album.

The problem with the King set was that it comprised recordings from the mid-Fifties where he was backed by a big band. The album cover gave no details of the musicians on the record and if I had seen that there was big band backing, I would never have bought the record. It was seriously disappointing after "Blue Shadows" and its powerful, piercing guitar licks. The first impression of these songs was that King mostly just sang and played very little guitar and if he did, it was mixed way down behind the riffing brass section. This was just about exactly the kind of music I did not like when I was in my late teens and early twenties and it was absolutely not the kind of blues I wanted to hear. Sophisticated, uptown and jazzy were anathema to me. It took many years and a lot of growing up before I realised that jump blues could be as exciting and interesting in its own right as downhome was.

Anyhow, though I investigated the blues and started collecting blues records in a serious way, I avoided B B King like the plague. My perception was that his music was all like that blasted cheap album and I did not care for gospel blues with no guitar at all.

I found the Albert King album As The Years Go By in a budget record shop in Cape Town and this record was a revelation. Albert King was a big, powerful man who played his Gibson Flying Vee guitar left-handed with an unmatched force and aggression. The conventional truth was that Albert King was no match for B B King when it came to imparting that deep blues vibe, either on the guitar or vocally. B B's patented vibrato and soulful gospel tones were technically superior to Albert who had only a few licks up his sleeve. If Albert had only a few good licks he made the most of them. His power sometimes outpunches B B's fluency and vibrato.

On As The Years Go By Albert King was backed by a small group of session musicians from the Stax soul machine and turned in a pretty effective set of blues underpinned by the solid groove of a Memphis soul band. This is what I liked. Brute guitar power, screaming string bends and a supple, driving rhythm section. Albert King became my favourite King in the blues field.

My aversion to B B King's music softened over time because I started getting into jump blues and R & B from the Forties and Fifties, which was very similar to B B King's style.

Then there was the second album he recorded with Bobby Bland, Together Again … Live, the second of two releases documenting live shows where the two giants of urban blues entertained audiences with their trademark gospelized blues. There was still not enough King guitar for my taste, as he played second fiddle to Bland, or so it seemed, but the tunes were big and it sounded as if the two stars were having fun. The main conceptual breakthrough for me was that I came to appreciate B B King's voice and impassioned singing style. The guy was worth listening to even if he put his guitar to one side and he gave Bland, s specialist singer, a run for his money.

My attitude towards B B King materially changed with The Blues Collection, a weekly part work publication during 1995 and 1996. Each issue told the story of a selected blues artist and came with a free CD of the music of the subject of that issue. The CDs could be free as the tunes selected for them were not necessarily the best work of the artists but it was nonetheless eye-opening for me in respect of a number of bluesmen whose music had hitherto been unknown to me. One of the first batch of issues concerned B B King. The music chosen for his CD was a mixture of old tunes: some deep blues and some blues ballads.

These songs kind of whetted my appetite for more B B King. In relatively quick succession I came across some more budget compilations of his music. One in particular, called something like King of the Blues (perhaps in homage to an apparently seminal Sixties album by the man, which had a very good cross-section of tunes that were mostly quite powerful readings of BB King standards and unfamiliar material too.

By and by I built up a nice little selection of B B King albums and eventually even found BB King in London, the album from which "Blue Shadows" had been extracted for that ABC Bluesway compilation. I still do not much care for those Fifties big band blues tracks but for the most part King's music is pretty well up there along with Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf and the rest of the downhome gang. I know that B B has his guitar schtick, his signature licks, like most other players and yet his solos thrill almost every time. Of course his many versions of his big hits get a tad overfamiliar and if I had to select my favourite blues albums of all time it would be difficult to pick any particular album. In his case I would definitely simply want to make a good mix tape.

A moment that stands out for me is the segment of B B King duelling on guitar with somebody like Steve Vai on the Access All Areas concert movie that played at the V & A Waterfront's IMAX theatre somewhere around 2002 or 2003. The concept of the movie was a bunch of acts filmed on stage, maybe at one concert. The standouts were George Clinton doing his parliafunkadelicment thang, Kid Rock and this amazing performance from B B King and Vai. King was seated during his time on stage (he was already a pretty old guy) while Vai moved around. At the end of whatever song they were doing, the two guitarists engaged in a quite nasty razor fight with guitars. I knew that Vai was a master of weird guitar tones and fleet fingered solos but it was B B's brutally nasty guitar tone and violent attack on the strings of Lucille that was the astonishing thing. King got sounds from his guitar strings I would never have he was capable of. For every nasty tone Vai produced King produced something even nastier. He was like the guy who brought a gun to the razor fight Vai had anticipated. For an old guy he could sure make a lot of amplified, electrified noise. I was reminded of that scene from the movie Crossroads where the character played by Ralph Macchio blows away the satanic character played by Steve Vai, who plays in much the same way as when he faced down B B King. Vai loses in the movie too, but not because Macchio is nastier. In Access All Areas Vai gave it his best shot but he sounded like a wanna be compared to the old blues guy with the nastiest tone this side of any crossroads at midnight.

Then there is the DVD of the concert King played in Kinshasa as part of the festivities around the "Rumble in the Jungle" heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Before the fight there was a 3 day music festival featuring a bunch of the biggest black acts of the time and somehow B B King, the indomitable international ambassador of the blues by then, was on the bill as well. I bought this DVD, called Sweet 16 (after one of the songs King performed), in 2005 at a flea market stall just off the Chinatown section of Soho in London, along with a DVD of the live Parliament experience from the late Seventies.

On the night B B wears a natty grey suit and a white shirt with a crisp, pointy collar. His backing musicians include a large brass section, some extra percussion and a rhythm guitarist. The second guitarist, piano player and about half of the horn section are White, which seems a tad incongruous at a celebration of African Black culture and celebrity.

The opening song is a bit of a soul ballad, "To Know You Is To Love You", where B B does his patented 'can't play when I sing" thing and emotes mightily. The songs that follow ("I Believe To My Soul:, "Why I Sing The Blues", "Ain't Nobody Home", "Sweet Sixteen", "The Thrill Is Gone", "Guess Who" and "I Like To Live The Love") comprise the core of the kind of hits repertoire King has reprised, in various combinations over many live albums.

Throughout the rhythm section is tough yet supple and King's guitar playing is smooth, fluent and affective. He sings equally strongly. Of course he has performed these songs many times before and will perform them many times in the future but there does seem to be a freshness and enthusiasm that gives a great deal of power to the familiar. As the cliché has it: this is a musician at the top of his game. This is what he does for a living and he does it with consummate ease and professionalism and delivers the blues goods. As I have mentioned, I am not too keen on the big band blues thing and for this reason this would not be a top favourite DVD to watch, except for the historical values of seeing B B King play.

Towards the end of the set BB introduces his band. Everyone has been with him for a number of years. In particular the drummer has been part of the B B King band/orchestra for 17 years and the bandleader and arranger has been with him for 20 years. That these two guys could stay with King for so long either shows a tremendous sense of loyalty or very simply that being in blues can be a career in music regardless of how tough times might have been for blues musicians over the years.

Eleven years after this gig and in 1985 MCA released Six Silver Strings, B B King's 50^th album. I did not buy it at the time. I found it a flea market stall in the Gardens Centre one Friday evening in late July 2011. I bought a stack of second hand CDs, including a couple of blues compilations and this B B King album, because it was there and cheap and not because I expected much from it.

BB was about 60 at the time of Six Silver Strings' release. Since 1974 he had recorded a couple of jazzy-funky albums backed by the Crusaders. His producers and record company had done their best to modernise his music and to bring it up to date. The perception was that blues could only advance beyond a small, fanatical core audience, and B B in particular could only continue to thrive in his career if he got with the program of embedding his brand of gospel blues in smooth soul and cocktail funk that would be radio friendly and would fit right in with so-called urban contemporary playlists.

Many rock giants of the Sixties and Seventies tried to embrace Eighties production values and recording techniques that makes so much music from that era sound so distinctive, in particular the big drum sound that often threatens to overwhelm any other instrument in the mix.

Six Silver Strings falls into the category, I guess, of what Robert Christgau called night club funk when rating a different King album from that era. The rhythm section is somewhat robotically regular and the production values give the music a deep sophisticated sheen, with the prominent drum sound, that kills any vestige of deep blues feeling despite King's best efforts. I won't say he phones in his contribution but it is mostly kind subdued and without the fire one associates with blues. This is blues as background music for an uptown party where evening dress is mandatory. Obviously B B's management and record company must have tried to sell him to an audience that would not normally appreciate Mississippi delta blues but who liked lightweight jazz funk and for whom the term quiet storm was invented as a radio format. BB King therefore aimed at urban contemporary.

Luther Dixon wrote (in the case of one song, co-wrote) 5 of the 8 songs on the album, Ira Newborn wrote 2 and there is one track written by Steve Cropper and Wilson Pickett. The concept is that blues is the feeling imparted by the songs and not so much the deep emotion behind them. Apart from "Big Boss Man" there are no blues standards on the album and apart from "Into The Night" there is no song from this album that has become a B B King standard. This is a R & B slbum slanted towards blues, mostly because B B King is the artist, but the songs could have been placed with almost any R & B singer from the era and they would have worked as well in a lounge soul, quite storm context.

B B King's guitar is the big theme, in that no fewer than 3 songs allude to Lucille the Guitar. The title track, "My Lucille" and "Why My Guitar Sings The Blues" all deal in one way or another with one of the primary reasons King is world famous: his infinitely special blues guitar playing. Without the guitar B B King would have been simply Bobby "Blues" Bland.

The second track on the album, "Big Boss Man", is one of Jimmy Reed's hits and is generally played with a relaxed swinging groove that is typical of the patented Reed boogie. The lyrics serve as a warning to the singer's employer to take him more seriously and not to mess him around, in case the employee takes a fancy to give the bossman a few slaps. Reed himself doesn't sound too aggressive when he delivers his message of warning because his lazy drawl is not exactly the best way to make anything sound life threatening. Yet King's take on the song is even less urgent and has less of the sense of imminent aggression that the lyrics promise. It is just a weak version of a blues classic that makes no sense. Was there nothing better to put in its place?

Next up is a stone soul classic: Wilson Pickett's big hit "In The Midnight Hour", which is also intended as being a badass song of sexual braggadocio of the type that is common in blues. Wicked Pickett gave the song an air of menace and a promise of sexual fulfilment that was an offer impossible to refuse. It is well known that King himself liked, and probably still likes, the ladies and had many of them over the years. He should know a thing or two about sexual attraction.

B B King imbues "In The Midnight Hour" more with a melancholy than with threat. The band plays tough (though still not as tough as the Stax house band would have done) and the guitar sings the solo but the power of the song is diluted to the degree where it is a pleasant diversion and no more. It could be a showstopper at a concert; here it sounds too much like filler.

"Into The Night" comes from the John Landis film of the same name, with Michelle Pheiffer and Jeff Goldblum and does sound like soundtrack blues for a nightclub audience somewhere in uptown Hollywood.

Ira Newborn, a piano player as far as I know, wrote "My Lucille" and with the double entendres this song could be about a woman or B B King's guitar Lucille. He does get passionate enough about the title character that one might think it is actually about his six stringed instrument and his undying love for her. It has been with him long enough, through thick and thin and has no doubt never let him down and has given him more confidence and support than any woman could ever have done.

"My Guitar Sings The Blues" is a 1985 rewrite of "Every Day I Have The Blues" or "How Blue Can You Get" in that it is a medium paced shuffle in which King narrates all the reasons he and his guitar have to sing the blues. Essentially the blues come from the different ways his woman treats him badly. Of course he actually confides in us that it is the guitar that has the blues but we know the man with the guitar is the one that suffers. Surprisingly, this is not the track with the best, rawest guitar sounds. Even "In The Midnight Hour" is a better showcase for Lucille the guitar than the track about the guitar and its blues.

The final track, "Double Trouble", is another Luther Dixon original and not the Otis Rush tune of the same name. it features some Eighties synths, funk drumming (not to mention an electronic percussion breakdown) and some of the tastiest, if brief guitar licks on the album. This sounds like a strong attempt at making a contemporary R & B artist out of B B King. Not a bad tune and a stellar performance from the man, but overall pretty weak and pointless.q

I would imagine that Six Silver Strings would have disappointed long time B B King fans and committed blues fans alike, as it does not deliver much that sticks in the mind. One should never demand that an artist simply keeps repeating himself or sticks to a well-known and well-established method or path, but an artist should also not venture onto paths that are dead ends, regardless of the initial promise, or be different simply for the sake of change. On Six Silver Strings B B King may be as professional as he ever was and may be giving the material his best shot but the impression is that his heart isn't truly in it. Maybe he realised that yet another attempt at commercialising his blues for a generation for whom the blues was a tad too archaic was not actually going to make a difference.

As 50^th album celebration Six Silver Strings falls short. It is not B B King's best album by any means and even if it finds a place in a complete discography of King's work, I cannot imagine that anyone would recommend it as a must have. It sounds more like a contractual obligation.

Riding With The King, B B's album with Eric Clapton, is more of a real deal. The band is tight and the production favours a sound that is more rootsy, taking contemporary recording techniques and philosophies into account, and the songs are top notch, a mixture of old favourites, brand new songs and some judicious covers, like the title track by John Hiatt who would probably not have conceived this song, a tribute to Elvis Presley, as a blues tune. Appropriating as referring to B B is audacious and amusing. The two guitarists spar delightfully and sharply and both sing well and seem to have a lot of fun. Clapton is not in the same league as vocalist as King but he is up there as blues guitar player and for that reason alone this album is a great listen. But it also emphasises the trite truth that good tunes done well go a long way.

I wonder why there has never been a similar project with Peter Green and B B King. Reportedly B B once said that Peter Green was the only (White) blues guitarist who made him sweat. Green's style with Fleetwood Mac certainly sounded a lot more like B B King's than Clapton's sound with John Mayall or Cream.

I believe King played some concerts in the UK in mid-2011. The audience must now be of the type who goes to see him as much for being able to say they saw one of his last gigs as for the pleasure of prime B B King. However he strong he may still be, he is still north of 80 and if he was already sitting down at his gigs ten years ago, I would imagine he does so now. For that matter, that was what John Lee Hooker did in his last years but whereas Hooker's guitar and vocal styles seeme4d to lend themselves to a seated delivery, I cannot quite see how B B King's gospel take on the blues survives being delivered from a chair.

I guess a DVD is going to be the closest I will ever get to experiencing B B King live. Even if he ever comes to South Africa while he still can, I would not want to go to any of his concerts, for much the same reason I never went to Deep Purple, Uriah Heep or Z Z Top when they played Cape Town. I would never want to pay to hear Uriah Heep and I would have preferred the other two bands in their mid-Seventies heyday. In B B King's case, I would probably have enjoyed him in the late Sixties and very early Seventies, after he found that he could tour with a small backing group and before he was paired with the Crusaders.

My CD collection probably contains an elegant sufficiency of B B King albums and compilations. Maybe if I ever find Live at the Regal I will buy it, and probably anything from the period mentioned above, but I truly love the blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf in an unconditional, visceral way, B B King has been an acquired taste with a lot of provisos. I cannot see how that will ever change.

Now he is King of the Blues but the blues of the King is not exactly the greatest souvenir of the blues one can own.

Wondering about Makhulu

2011-08-07T13:02:00.001-07:00

Makhulu is a kind of South African blues supergroup as a studio project in 1999 for jobbing musicians with some time on their hands. Larry Amos, once guitarist and vocalist for Baxtop and leader of his own band, sings. Willem Fourie, once of the Flaming Firestones and Southern Blue and some other projects, plays all guitars. George van Dyk, once of Hotline and some other projects, in the UK and in South Africa, plays bass. Junior J Botha, whoever that may be, plays drums.

All these musicians are storied and have been around for a while. I've written about Baxtop before and will not rehash that here.

Hotline is a subject for further investigation. P J Powers, Alistair Coakley, Van Dyk (supported by various keyboard players and drummers) were the leaders of one of the biggest commercial rock prospects in South African in the Eighties. Hotline started off as a bog standard hard rock band, then discovered mbaqanga and crossed over to the townships, and charts, with a mixture of rock and jive that was very right for the times. At some point Van Dyk went to the UK, lasted for a couple of years and then returned home to record a mega pop hit with the same mbaqanga jive influences Hotline had used to such good effect.

If Junior J Botha is Piet, as I am guessing, then I have also written about him elsewhere.

Willem Fourie is an interesting study in ambition and perseverance that leads to achievement without genuine talent. Steve Louw and Valiant Swart are much more successful local examples of this phenomenon.

Like me, Fourie attend Paul Roos Gymnasium but was a year or two behind me. He reappeared on my radar when he started playing with the Flaming Firestones as part of an occasional horn section. Fourie played trumpet and Jannie van Tonder played trombone. One of my abiding memories is of the Flaming Firestones doing a red hot flaming end-of-set version of "Rock Me, Baby" powered by horns. I think Rob Nagel might have joined in on saxophone. No other blues band in Cape Town ever had this benefit.

As it turned out trumpet was not Fourie's only instrument of choice. He also learned to guitar. By the time Clayton Frick left the band, Willem Fourie was accomplished enough to join the Flaming Firestones as second guitarist behind Nico Burger and as singer. In the beginning it took two sets and probably alcohol to get Fourie to relax into his vocals and not sound so stilted. He could carry a tune but he had no passion with it. He was okay as rhythm guitarist. Unfortunately he also took some solos and th9s showed off his limited chops and the journeyman nature of his skill. It sounded as if he were just running up and down the scales with a certain degree of fluency yet once again without passion or fire of intensity. His dexterity was a mark of plenty hours of practice. The thing is: you cannot practice feeling and he had none of it.

When Nico Burger left the Flaming Firestones Willem Fourie was left as lead guitarist and this was not a good thing. He could replicate the chords and licks but he could not bring the necessary spark to the band. I guess he tried and maybe it was simply his inexperience that let him down but the Firestones had had two really excellent and interesting guitarists before Willem Fourie and the comparison was not flattering.

Not long after the Firestones fell apart Fourie popped up leading the Southern Blues Band, later abbreviated to Southern Blue, and all of a sudden he had a new authority on vocals and guitar. Not that he was in the league of, say Nico Burger, as axman, but there was a new deal that made it an interesting prospect to go check out his new band. He sang better and played fewer banal solo's and the songs were great.

Southern Blue lasted for a short time and then Willem Fourie dropped out of sight. I heard that he went north to Gauteng to seek more lucrative opportunities in his chosen career. Nothing more was heard until I saw the Wondering album by Makhulu (on Spook Records) in either Vibes Vinyl or at a Cash Crusaders outlet, took note of the musicians and bought the CD.

It is probably down to the combined experience and professionalism of the four musicians on the project that this album ain't half bad. I always wonder how and why albums like this are recorded. Did Makhulu ever gig? Why did Willem Fourie and Junior J Botha write these songs? Was there ever a hope that the album would be a good little earner?

Well, all I can say is that Wondering is a good testimonial for the song writing skills of the Fourie and Botha and the combined efforts of the musicians. The production is crisp and clear; the playing is tight and concise; the songs have tunes and hooks. The format is blues rock, though there is quite a bit of African musical influence in the mix. The mbaqanga thing is filigree, a tasty decorative pattern that lightens up the potential stodginess of the chosen genre. Having said that, though, the take on a well-worn staple of rock music is fresh and likeable. Willem Fourie shines on guitar. On this showing he has mastered his instrument to the point where it does not really matter whether he has the talent or not. He knows his stuff and the deftness of his touch is a delight. It is truly amazing that such perfection is applied to very minor release in the bigger scheme of things.

On top of that Larry Amos brings a world weary soul voice to songs of love and experience. The man can sing and he sings the hell out of songs that may be somewhat trite otherwise.

Wondering is not the best South African record I have ever heard but I would put it in the category of "must own" for anyone who is serious about local music. The unique selling proposition is that such quality exists in a project that must have been pretty low key.

It goes to show that one should not sniff at second hand albums in Cash Crusaders. Many may be total shit; every now and then a gem like this comes along that makes the endless browsing worthwhile.

Machineri rocks Greenside

2011-08-07T11:31:00.001-07:00

In June 2010 I saw Machineri live at Zula in Long Street and immediately and intensely disliked what I heard. About a year later I listened to their recordings on their MySpace page. This time I was impressed. The tracks were not only well produced but the songs had dynamics and even a certain tunefulness to them that had been lacking at Zula. This was good stuff.

I believe a Machineri album will be released in the South African Spring of 2011 and I really look forward to it. I really want to love Machineri because on paper they make exactly the kind of music I am into.

On Sunday 7 August 2011, I saw a part of the Studio 1 show on satellite music channel MK, in particular a 3 song set by Machineri at a venue in Greenside, Johannesburg.

Despite the apparent bitter cold (the two presenters of the show were well bundled up and the woman even for a fur hat as if she were traversing the tundra on a dog sled) Sannie Fox wore a sleeveless, long black dress and seemed to have no, or almost no, make-up on which made her look older than her years, given her grievous thinness. She looks like a well-worn woman from the Appalachians, somewhere in the West Virginian hollows. This must be part of her credentials to sing the blues.

Andre Geldenhuys (lead guitar) and Daniel Huxham (drums) were dressed a lot more warmly, especially Huxham, who must really have felt the cold. One would expect a drummer to work harder than the rest and therefore to feel the cold less.

Both Geldenhuys and Huxham look like they are imitating Dave Gilmour circa Dark Side of the Moon. I guess that there is a deliberate Seventies thing going on, not only visually (at this gig in Greenside Sannie Fox resembled a non-fey, taller, angular Stevie Nicks) but musically as well, if one listens carefully to the riffs Geldenhuys plays.

The band claim John Lee Hooker, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Black Keys, Jimi Hendrix, Ali Farka Touré, Chopin, Paganini "and many more" as their influences. I can hear the Hendrix and Led Zep references and maybe the purported wildness of a Paganini violin solo, but for the rest, I am a tad perplexed. John Lee Hooker? Surely shome mishtake. Sannie Fox sure does not sound like him and the music does not have much actual deep blues in there; maybe it is Fox's simplistic guitar playing that echoes Hooker's open tuning style. However, influences do not mean imitations. Perhaps the secret lies in the unnamed "many more" influences. Thalia Zedek and Come must surely be part of the deal ....

MK recorded three Machineri performances at Greenside and broadcast two in their entirety and a part of the third tune. Apparently there was also an interview with the band but I skipped that.

The three songs were "Spider Suitcase", "Ladder Operator" and "Father Gun." Sadly the set peaked with the first song, "Spider Suitcase" (a brilliant title and I am very curious what the lyrics are about), which was by far the best of the three, mostly because the musical arrangement has shape and purpose and Fox carries what one can call a tune. "Ladder Operator" features the patented Fox wail that may have roots in blues but just sounds like too much Yoko Ono and too little Janis Joplin and Geldenhuys riffs away with great dexterity but no real impact. It is this kind of aimless emptiness that turned me off so much at Zula. For the third and last song Fox puts down her guitar and really gives it a lot of lung on "Father Gun", mercifully cut short by MK. Obviously the woman has a strong voice and is not shy about it. She is also not embarrassed to impersonate a banshee with issues in front of an audience. I guess the lyrics may well be deep and meaningful and the performance meant to be soul bearing and cathartic with the intent of leaving the punters gobsmacked at the raw emotional intensity of it all, but once again the single guitar of Geldenhuys, however intricate the guitar part may be, cannot carry the crushing weight of that excruciating Fox wail.

Lots of bands over the past decade of so have proved that a duo can rock as well as a full band and that a bass player is actually superfluous if you at least have a drummer. Further in the past John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed, for example, on occasion both recorded with only another guitarist backing them and those recordings worked because the second guitarist took on the roll of both second guitar and bass behind the leader's guitar, to give the song a dynamic and a dramatic tension. It also helped that both these guys sang well enough for their songs to gain an emotional depth beyond the often banal words of their blues. Sannie Fox is supposed to be that second guitarist behind Ander Geldenhuys but because they do not really play strict blues and prefer a modern take on a peculiarly bare bones late Sixties and early Seventies style of underground rock, she provides more of a drone than a rhythmically complex backing that would dynamically complement the lead riffs.

Now that I think about it, some of this sounds an awful lot like the last two Otis Waygood albums, without the flute and bottom heavy bass and with Sannie Fox, who cannot possibly be the Rob Zipper of Machineri. She would do well to seek out the recordings of female blues singers, such as Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Koko Taylor and the vocalists from Saffire the Uppity Blueswomen. If she wants white models there are Janis Joplin, Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Nelson and Eden Kane. These various examples over the last 80 years or so only scratch the surface. The point is that these women have voices that convey a blues feeling. Sannie Fox does not yet do it. She does not go to church, or if she does, it is not Southern Baptist.

Machineri do not write classic songs yet. According to their website they jam until something presents itself that they feel can be developed into a song. No one expects them to be Cole Porter or Willie Dixon but if you want to leave a legacy in music, you have to write songs that will become standards. They must be tunes that are memorable for the right reasons and that will make other musicians want to learn them too. At Zula Machineri backed The Pretty Blue Guns who have the ability to write seemingly simple yet catchy and impactful tunes. Recently I revisited Foghat's Stone Blue album from 1978 and was once again impressed with what one can do with the rather trite genre of blues rock when you apply a little imagination, a lot of tune and brio to your performance. The song is the thing. There must be a tune or a vocal or instrumental hook that will stick in the listener's mind. If the tunes have a life apart from the album on which they are featured and apart from the songwriter, they will be likely to live forever.

Another example comes to mind: The Dead Weather. There we have a very powerful female vocalist with a band of guys who rock out hard, influenced by heavy blues and modern sound experiments. In sequence the songs are loud and powerful yet the two albums do not hold together all that well, and apart from the energetic performances very little remains with the listener once the CD stops. It is the aural equivalent of the fourth Indiana Jones movie: the albums move at a heck of a pace, have a lot of thrills and spills and yet do not satisfy, Robert Christgau summed it up when he points out that none of the songs, strong as they may sound in the context of the albums, have much of a reason for existence outside of the context of the other songs in the sequence.

Machineri may not be in the business of making radio friendly unit shifters (as cynical as Kurt Cobsin had been about this necessity, he had the ability to do just that) but, as musicians, they should be in the business of writing decent songs that will stand the test of time; always bitter, never sweet is not such a great attribute for songs though.

I am still looking forward to the release of the album and I will buy it. I am hoping the recorded versions of Machineri songs will be closer to what I heard on MySpace than what they sound like on stage.

Machineri probably has more cogs than I know about and I trust that they have enough grease for the mechanism to perform smoothly for a long time to come.

Foghat

2011-07-26T13:45:00.001-07:00

Once I owned just over a thousand LP records; a very eclectic mix of genres. In 2009 I gave away all of them bar the first 2 Dr Feelgood albums. I had basically stopped buying or listening to vinyl in the early Nineties when I started buying CD albums. I now own more CDs than I ever owned records. Most of the CDs are albums I never owned before in any format but there is a good selection of them that represent the digital versions of well-loved records, such as my Bob Dylan albums, the early Cheap Trick albums, the first four Dr Feelgood albums, Exile on Main Street or Bridge of Sighs, and a bunch of blues albums. Over the years I've replaced some important records with their CD equivalents because the music had meant something to me when I was much younger. Not all of my records are worth replacing but every now and then I come across a CD of a record I once owned and had not listened to in years and suddenly want to hear again.

Foghat's 1978 album Stone Blue is an example that illustrates my point.

Foghat was a not untypical example of the blues and boogie crossover band making it kind of big in the USA and perhaps Europe without making much of an impact on the UK even if the members of the band were Brit expats in the land where boogie was king.

If I understood the story correctly Foghat started out as a kind of Z Z Top clone where blues was an important and predominant element in the mix, then more or less allowed the boogie element to take over, as this was what the teenage male audience in the American Midwest really liked, while still at least paying lip service to the blues, with some hit albums, particularly Fool for the City and Foghat Live before the band slowly but surely descended into what the NME was prove to describe as mindless boogie hell.

Dave Peverett was the leader end he and bassist Tony Stevens (who was no longer with the band by the time Stone Blue was released) came from Savoy Brown, one of the premiers British exponents of blues rock, who also started as an almost purist blues band before discovering how much money could be made in the USA if one emphasised populist boogie over purist blues.

As a Gonzo style aside: some time during the early Nineties Tony Stevens visited Cape Town and played a pick up gig on a Saturday afternoon at a so-called action bar at the corner of Strand and Bree Streets. A guy called Richard Hyde, who I knew through mutual friends, knew the people who would be playing with Stevens and came to me to borrow my Casio "super Strat" style guitar as the guitarist with the band did not have his own ax.

Anyhow, long before, in 1978, I read a piece in Hit Parader magazine where the band was interviewed about the then forthcoming release of Stone Blue. Peverett and second guitarist Rod Price emphasised that the band was following something a path towards a more blues directed sound since having something of a hit with the Muddy Waters standard "Just Wanna Make Love To You" to which they added a bit of that old Foghat magic.

As I was into the blues and liked blues influence rock and R & B this sounded interesting to me though I did not quite rush out to buy Stone Blue. In fact, as was the case with so much of my record collection, I bought Stone Blue because it was on sale at a significantly reduced price at one of the record shops I frequented.

Well before I bought Stone Blue though, I bought I bought a copy of the 1974 single "That'll Be The Day / Wild Cherry" from the album Energised. Sygma Records in Stellenbosch had a back room with a couple of trestle tables with boxes of old, unsold seven singles and, though I was not in the habit of buying singles I did trawl through these boxes because, once again, the singles were cheap and because there were a few interesting things, such as "Telegram Sam," by T Rex, "Sally Can't Dance / Ennui" by Lou Reed, "Never before / When A Blind Man Cries" by Deep Purple, "Rocky Mountain Way" by Joe Walsh, "Cum On Feel The Noize" by Slade and some others.

Foghat's treatment of "That'll Be The Day", the big Buddy Holly hit, was to amp up the energy level and turn it into a hard rock cry of rage. It was a runaway locomotive of relentless boogie momentum and impressed the hell out of me.

Apart from the impact of "That'll Be The Day", a major factor that influenced my decision (I did not simply records because they were cheap) is that the album contains no less than 3 blues tunes I recognised, namely "Sweet Home Chicago", "It Hurts Me Too" and "Chevrolet." In also knew that Rod Price played slide guitar and I was a sucker for slide guitar. Lastly, there was no indication of any keyboard player; it was just 2 guitars, bass and drums. At the time I did not like keyboards on records, especially not prog rock keyboards, but also not even blues piano. These factors, combined with the low price, made me risk the purchase.

Stone Blue, was a pleasant surprise. It was blues rock of a high calibre, with not much, if at all, mindless boogie; at least not in the way I understood boogie. The songs had a lot of tunefulness to them as well. It was not just a bunch of guys making it up as they go along. Rock lyrics were not known for being very articulate or even original in concept and design as they tended to be no more than words for the singer to sing so he had something to do in between guitar solos. On this album the verse, chorus, verse bit worked out quite well and the set of songs was eminently listenable and thoroughly enjoyable. For all that I would not say that Stone Blue ever became a top favourite album and it did not make me want to buy any other Foghat product. Not that I ever came across many of their releases. I think the follow up to Stone Blues, being Boogie Motel in 1979, was around and I did see Fool For The City in record stores in the Transvaal, as it then was, but that was it. Foghat was probably seen as a very commercial property in South Africa.

So, now I've bought (at a discount price, natch, at the large Musica store in the V & A Waterfront) a Castle Music re-issue pack of Stone Blue and Boogie Motel (1979)
on 2 separate CDs with the artwork of the original albums and sleeve notes detailing some of the history of the band and these recordings. Makes me wonder whether there are similar re-issue pairings of any of the earlier albums. I had never heard Boogie Motel before; it was Stone Blue that interested me.

Stone Blue was released in 1978, during the heydays of the then very current and hip New Wave movement of bands that survived and fed on the punk explosion of 1976 and although boogified blues rock may still have been big business in the USA it was not fashionable amongst the movers and shakers of the rock press, particularly the NME, my style bible of the time. It just goes to show that New Wave, which had the attention of the rock press almost to the exclusion of anything that was not New Wave, was even then only one more genre among many and simply benefitted from the publicity that the media gave it but that this was also no more than another example of hype and that it was no guarantee of any degree of quality or longevity.

Foghat would probably not sound too much out of place in the contemporary musical landscape even if blues rock is no longer the big nosiness it once was. The White Stripes and The Black Keys, amongst others, in their own ways have been and are torchbearers of that tradition and it is probably trite but true that the blues will never really die even if the old school bluesmen do. Every generation of musicians will produce its fair share of blues aficionados who may try to replicate the old music or try to make something contemporary of it, but will nonetheless keep the tradition going. In South African we have the very good example of Pretty Blue Guns who use blues influences as an infusion into a rock sound.

It is always slightly strange listening to an old favourite record for the first time in many years. It could be easily 20 years or more since I last heard any of the tracks off Stone Blue.

The title track is essentially a paean to the ability of rock and roll to uplift the beaten down human spirit. The lyrics are modern blues takes on age old themes, there is pumping bass and lots of agile, melodic slide guitar, and the theme remains that rock and roll can redeem. This is so very Bruce Springsteen but not in the somewhat pompous, overblown fashion that is his trade mark, or was when he was young. Foghat make a very simple statement: when I am feeling blue listening to rock music makes me feel better. Maybe they meant something universal and life affirming but my feeling is that they are just stating an obvious truth. For people who like music, that music can soothe and relax and revive. Bruce Springsteen's life may have turned around from imminent terminal sojourn in loserville to becoming the voice of his generation and quite wealthy too, but not everyone who loves music will experience such a significant life change simply, merely and only because rock and roll is important to them.

The point is, though, even if rock critics probably do not rate Foghat all that highly on the philosophometer and would dismiss the band as common denominator boogie purveyors, the statement made in "Stone Blue" is in its own, simplified way every bit as deep and meaningful as anything Springsteen might have expressed in more wordy songs.

And "Stone Blue" rocks quite nicely too, thank you.

Next up is "Sweet Home Chicago", probably after "Dust My Broom" the most covered Robert Johnson song ever, a staple of all kinds of blues musicians over the years, as it is a call to arms for bluesmen everywhere, elevating the myth of the southside of Chicago where electric downhome blues was born and nurtured, and the tune has a signature riff that promises a thrill ride as soon as you hear it. Foghat do not exactly elevate the tune into something better than just an above average work out but they do it justice and it kicks ass. The track opens with a neat bit of acoustic bottleneck guitar, as if the boys were going to get unplugged years before the term became common parlance but at the turnaround the acoustic turn neatly segues into the fast paced electric boogie shuffle developed over the rest of the track. This song is a text book example of exactly why blues rock can be so great when it is done right. Shuffle rhythm, piercing slide, that same pumping bass and solid drumming, with a tune and energetic singing. What more can one ask for?

"Easy Money" and "Midnight Madness" are the first of the originals on the album and they lean towards the funky end of rock, with the blues element present in spirit rather than form. In each case the lyrics are workmanlike – bands like Foghat never pretended to have a new Dylan in their ranks – but workmanlike can be good too, as long as it is not cluelessly embarrassing. The music is not just mindless boogie either. The tunes have memorable choruses and Dave Peverett can actually sing and carry a tune.

The elements that make up the Foghat sound never vary from track to track but are implemented in subtly different ways to ring the changes. There is a great deal of musical intelligence at work here that rock critics who dislike the perceived boogie genre would not appreciate. The thing is that I have heard a good deal of crap heavy rock from the same era as Stone Blue and, believe, there is some truly stupidly dumb stuff out there. This is not it.

"It Hurts Me Too" is an Elmore James number with a big, almost pop, hook and calls for lots of slide guitar. Like, "Sweet Home Chicago" it is a number that one can almost not fuck up if you simply stick to the basics. Foghat bring energy and commitment and skill and make a great version of a great song. It is not a transcendent version; I would almost say that Foghat are not that inherently genial, and this is where the limits of workmanlike can be reached. It is a good version and one cannot ask for better.

"Chevrolet" which starts off with a bit of acapella and plays out with a flourish of acoustic bottleneck guitar, is the final blues songs on the album and the passion and energy remains high. Foghat may emphasise the rocking end of blues rock but they do not turn "Chevrolet" into a heavy blues tune, the way Led Zeppelin strung together "The Lemon Song" from a couple of blues standards.

"High On Love" and "Stay with Me" are the original songs on the second side of the record. The first of these songs fits in with the prevalent style of similar highly tooled, polished mid to late Seventies hard rock with a pop edge. I'm thinking of Kiss, Agents of Fortune era Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick and Foreigner but there were many others. Not quite metal, not quite straight ahead pop. Big hook, harmonies and blistering guitar solos. "Stay With Me" also has the acoustic intro bit that slowly builds into a big, soulful rock ballad with a plaintive chorus. This is a great album closer; it leaves you wanting to turn the record over and play it from the beginning again, or to put the CD player on endless repeat.

Stone Blue was never one of the top favourite rock albums in my LP collection. Revisiting it after such a long absence was a very pleasant surprise. Perhaps the digital remastering has improved the sonic impact of the album; perhaps it simply sounds fresh but damn, this stuff is good! When the band takes off, particularly behind Rod Price's melodic, soaring slide work, it does get the toes tapping and it does bring a joyful smile to the face. Not all rock needs to be either mindless or esoterically intellectualised. Good time rock and roll is often just what the doctor orders and this, on Stone Blue, is what Foghat delivers. And plenty of it.

And then there is Boogie Motel. I cannot remember whether I ever came across the LP version of this album back in the late Seventies or early Eighties but I must confess that the name of the album alone would have put me off buying it. The title does make the record sound like some species of particularly mindless, stupid and obsolescent (given that it was released in 1979) type of music made by the kind of out of time dinosaurs punk was supposed to have disposed for good.

It is a mark of a true artist that he or she does not want to repeat previous success (Neil Young is the poster boy for this attitude) and Foghat may have had exactly the same belief about how they should follow up on Stone Blue. The approach must have been to avoid repetition, to bring something new to the table and, most likely, on the evidence, to make music that would fit in commercially with the prevalent skinny tie mode yet remain recognisably Foghat. Boogie Motel, therefore, is not Stone Blue part two; sadly, in my view, it would have been a better album if it had been Stone Blue part two.

The Foghat of Boogie Motel is more or less a commercially inclined boogie band. They wanna rock and they wanna do it in a slick radio friendly way. The fatal flaw in this simple plan is that the song writing does not hold up and the glossy production sheen just dims the light without making it truly romantic. The lyrics are not great, the tunes are thin and the music is kinda stodgy. This is by the numbers anonymous hard rock and by no means a vital, energising set. In my book a lot of dumb rock and roll is just what the doctor ordered and the problem with this album is that it is not dumb rock; it is not even stupid rock; it is misguided rock. Worst of all, there is no single track, unlike, say, the storming, stick-in-your-mind memorable "Stone Blue" off the previous album. It is one of the classic opening tracks of all time and a deserved drive time classic.

This is what so many critics complained of when they dissed boogie: it is anodyne, anonymous, mediocre. Title track, hidden late on the second side of the LP, stands out a little, with stabs of brass, a killer slide solo and a jazzy fade out with some jamming on saxophone, giving an almost New Orleans feel to the bottom line boogie. The band go a tad nuts on a classic rave up on the last track, "Nervous Release", that starts with echoes of Z Z Top, rocks hard, goes into guitar solo overdrive, has a bit of drum solo and a parody of Robert Plant's echoed vocalisations on "Whole Lotta Love" before hitting the riff and then playing out as if it were the finale of a really hard rocking live set. The album ends on the kind of high it ought to have kicked off with but for all that "Nervous Release" is still not the barnstormer the band may have believed it to be and it does not make one want to return to the beginning of the album. Whatever stuff Foghat had when they recorded Stone Blue was gone by the recording of Boogie Motel.

If Boogie Motel had been the first Foghat album I ever heard, I would never have bothered to look any further. I guess I was fortunate that Stone Blue was my introduction to this band.

I notice from the CD inlay card that there is a whole reissue program of paired Foghat albums. This is something to look out for though I will probably not make a serious attempt to collect any of them but if any of them come up at reasonable prices I might take a flutter.

The truth is that journeymen rockers can be inspired on occasion and punch above their weight every now and then. On the whole, though, and over the length of a career, the brilliant moments tend to be just that. I would imagine that one could make a seriously great compilation of individual Foghat tracks. There would be much less reward in buying everything they released because the likelihood is that there would be too much Boogie Motel and too little Stone Blue.

The Sex Pistols

2011-07-25T14:07:00.001-07:00

Raw [Music Club, 1997]
live boot (Burton Upon Trent, 9/24/76) as budget-priced history--crude, kinda slow, a few rare titles, four demos added ("Substitute," "No Fun") **

(from Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide)

The Sex Pistols must surely have one of the best rock and names of all times. It was so bad back in 1976 and 1977 that not only could the band's music not be played on the SABC but the announcers were probably not even allowed to say the name. Many years later we had a home grown neo-punk band called Fokofpolisiekar with a similarly unpalatable (for some) name. I daresay, though, that the overall sound, vision and impact of the Pistols were far more disturbing and genuinely powerful instrument for change than almost any band since.

After I'd read the Julie Burchill review in the NME of Never Mind The Bollocks, the 1977 début (and only studio) album of the Sex Pistols I started pestering the owner of Sygma Records in Stellenbosch for a copy of the record. Given the long time between the publication of any particular weekly issue of the NME in the UKT and the date on which such a copy arrived in South Africa, this would have been in 1978. Since 1976 the NME had been carrying news and stories about the punk, and by 1978, New Wave bands that had taken the UK music scene by storm yet very little of this music was being played on South African radio and very few of the albums made it to Stellenbosch.

The guy at Sygma Records professed not to know anything about the Sex Pistols; he certainly did not have the album in stock. My impression was that he thought I was taking the piss. What kind of band would be called "sex pistols"?

The first punk / New Wave album I ever bought was Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True, which I really only bought because it was cheap, being on sale at the bi-annual CNA record sale. At the same sale I bought Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps and Status Quo Live. Goes to show how deeply committed I was to all things punk rock.

Anyhow, roughly a year after its UK release Never Mind The Bollocks made it to Stellenbosch and Sygma Records to boot. The owner must have wised up eventually. By that time I'd heard "Pretty Vacant" on Radio 5, as part of a 15 minute Sunday night slot presenting a BBC worldwide magazine programme on contemporary pop music. "Pretty Vacant" sounded very much a New Wave, as I understood the term, power pop song and nothing like the revolutionary, dangerous, wiping-the-slate-clean of dinosaur rock acts I had expected of punk rock after reading NME on the subject.

I had Julie Burchill's somewhat enigmatic and obscurantist review of Never Mind the Bollocks as a pre-listening guide to the album, yet it did nor prepare me for the music on the album, partly because she did not make much of an effort to describe the music. Essentially she said that Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook were as professional and accomplished as any of their contemporaries and that the music did not sound like the piss-poor efforts of a bunch of amateurs. Burchill spent a little more time on the lyrics, of "Bodies" specifically, to make a point about the vileness to which Rotten was capable of sinking. The overall impression was that the Sex Pistols had made a perfectly adequate yet unremarkable record with some unacceptable lyrics.

I realised where Burchill was coming from when I listened to the record for the first time. The Sex Pistols had a load of loud, buzz saw guitars and thumping drums and the 4 tunes that had been released as singles in the UK were quite entertaining. They had tunes, hooks, choruses. The works. The guitar sound, though, immediately reminded me of Slade, one of the big British glam rock bands of the early Seventies, and the type of band punk was supposed to replace. It was comforting to know that punk, not to mention the music of the most antagonistic and in-yer-face of the punk bands, was not all that different from music I knew and liked anyway. I also felt kind of cheated that punk was not as radical as I had hoped for. It must have been my naïve teenage ignorance that persuaded me to believe that the palace revolution could have been anything more significant than simply replacing the old orthodoxy with the new orthodoxy.

Never Mind The Bollocks ain't a bad little record. Not an earth shaking one but it's okay. "Anarchy In The UK" is one of the great album openers of all time and it is just pure and simply a great song that belongs with the big Seventies rock anthems. The other singles, "God Save The Queen", "Pretty Vacant" and "Holidays in the Sun", are great pop songs too. Whatever it is that Johnny Rotten brought to the band, Glen Matlock's pop nous were what made the Pistols an enduring musical force to reckon with. I doubt that these songs, even if they were UK Hits, will ever feature on decent Seventies compilations but the Pistols belong with T Rex, Slade, Suzi Quatro and The Sweet.

The other songs seem more like the image of the Pistols as rude, crude and anti-establishment and are memorable mostly for Rotten's extreme vocal performances and the anti-social anger of the lyrics and the posturing.

The Pistols had one official album release and after the band's demise in 1978 many compilations followed with the single aim of extracting as much money as possible from the limited back catalogue, just to recoup the record company investment. The members went their separate ways. Sid Vicious died. Rotten started PIL and had a good run of albums into the late Eighties. Jones and Cook tried various projects of varying success and the same went for Glen Matlock. In 1996 the four original Pistols reunited for a 20^th anniversary cashing in tour and, as far as I know, there have been a couple of those since then. The Sex Pistols brand is much stronger than any individual marks any of the gang of four might have had on their own.

There was a live album from the 1996 tour and then in 1997, as reported by Robert Christgau, there was the album Raw, which documented a September 1976 live performances by the young, well, raw, Pistols before they became really notorious. It was recorded before "God Save the Queen" or "Holidays in the Sun" and a handful of other songs that can be found on Never Mind The Bollocks.

In July 2011 I found the same album, now repackaged and called The Original Sex Pistols Live on the Hallmark label, at a flea market at the Gardens Centre. I had never, or at least not yet, replaced my vinyl version of the début album with a CD of it. Somehow it had never seemed necessary but now I am having second thoughts about it.

The good thing about the September 1976 gig is that it features Glen Matlock and is therefore quite an authentic document of the band at the time. The sound is low in fidelity though Steven Jones's guitar roars impressively and with a raw verve that is exciting enough to make one want to have been there and not only for the sake of the history of being able to boast attendance at one of the relatively few Pistols gigs from that era.

The set is not very extensive. There are most of the songs from the début album, minus the 2 singles mentioned above, "Bodies" and "New York" and plus a few cover versions like "Give Me No Lip Child", "Substitute" and "No Fun." The music is direct and to the point: very basic, relentless, no finesse. Rotten sings with gusto and says very little; at least there is not much recorded stage patter. At the end of songs some audience members applaud, some scream. Pretty much your average small venue rock audience. The deal is that the Pistols get in, get the job done and get out.

As the last flurry of pounding drums on "Problems", the final track, comes to an end amidst guitar feedback, Rotten shouts, "If you want more, you can ask."

Perhaps Johnny Rotten is mocking the traditional cry of the MC who wants to work the crowd into a frenzied request for an encore, whether the crowd is interested or not.

Someone takes the bait and replies, "We want more." At point the CD ends. We will never know whether the Pistols were show-bizz enough to please their audience with another song after they had just done their last song.

The Pistols debut was as lovingly polished as Nevermind some 15 years later and should have been a major hit and only one of a series of albums, much like the Clash or Damned, who were also part of the birth of punk, and who became as careerist as any of the dinosaurs they were supposed to have banished to the well-known dustbin of history. The Pistols shone brightly for a year or two and then imploded and left a legend. This is what needs to be printed. The Nineties return, however cynically embarked on, was a large scale cabaret act. The blues has no age and you can sing it from 16 to 76. Punk is not an old man's gig and there is something truly disturbing about the concept of a middle aged Pistols doing the rounds with their astutely adult take on the punk rage and outrage of their youth. If you cannot make money with your new stuff you might as well make money with your old stuff. Nostalgia is what it used to be.

All of a sudden I am of the opinion that the Pistols were as much part of my Seventies record collection as Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick or Aerosmith and if I can replace my LPs of those bands with CDs I should replace Never Mind The Bollocks with its CD version. I've just been holding out for the 2 CD remastered release with the extra disc of outtakes, demos and rare live recordings.

Skanking at the Pink Hall

2011-07-15T12:56:00.001-07:00

Think of a pale pink church hall at the bottom end of Vredehoek where a cloud of incense and dope hit you as soon as you entered the room full of some truly alternative Capetonians. It was a mixture of Black and White, many very thin, dreadlocked males and women in long dresses and with ethnic headdresses standing around while the band was taking a break or dancing meditatively when it was on stage. Apart from the ganja, as we used to call it back in the day, the other predominant aromas were of the organic vegetarian food being cooked on trestle tables at the back of the hall and a weird body odour from the actual Rastafarians present, as if they washed with some peculiarly scented soap. It was, as the cliché has it, a heady brew. It was a lot of fun, even for non-Rasta, non-alternative me and I never missed a reggae night for the couple of years they were held at the Pink Hall. I did not eat their food or smoke their dope but I danced all night to their music.

Reggae spoke to me because of the deep bottom heavy yet nimble bass sound and that insistent "chicken scratch" guitar rhythm on the off-beat, with sweet melodies and infectious chanting over the top. It is groove music per excellence and great to dance to, even if I got the beat or skanking moves wrong.

In the period 1985 to 1989 there was always at least one reggae act, who appeared alongside the alternative rock acts at the anti-conscription events I attended (just for the music; I'd already completed my 2-year National Service stint) but the best reggae music was at the Pink Hall. This venue was a church hall, perhaps no longer used for the original purpose, on the lower fringe of Vredehoek, close to where De Waal Drive becomes Roeland Street. From 1986 through to 1989 and about once a quarter the Pink Hall hosted a reggae event, most often featuring 3 bands a night, mostly Sons of Selassie, The Spears and another band.

The audience was a mixture of the seriously alternative right on Cape Town crowd. Even the white people, male and female, had dreadlocks, everyone seemed to wear tie dye clothes with the de rigueur funky African theme, were stick thin and very deeply committed to a vegan lifestyle and politically correctness that eschewed racism, chauvinism, sexism, anti- Semitism, and espoused radical feminism and gay rights and freedom from the oppression of apartheid and freedom from conscription, and so on.

At the end of each song the vocalist praised Jah to the extent that I was wondering whether he was taking the piss or whether the church hall was in fact simply hosting a different kind of religious experience as alternative to the Christianity otherwise practised in the hall. Haile Selassie, apparently a god0like figure received his fair share of sanctified praise as well. It was rather odd for a non-religious sectarian White guy like me.

I really only cared for the deep reggae grooves and dancing the night away. I did not buy their food, smoke their dope or take their propaganda pamphlets. I did not mix with anyone or try to pick up weird looking, mixed up chicks.

The aroma of marijuana hung in the air and the band members openly smoked it on stage. I was always astonished that the police were nowhere to be seen. My belief was that the powers that be considered these reggae nights to be some kind of safe outlet for White radicalism, as the politics was pretty ineffectual and harmless and posed absolutely no threat to the status quo. It was all right to let the White liberals have their infrequent nights of solidarity with the oppressed. On the other hand, perhaps the police just did not know and nobody ever tipped them off about what was happening at the Pink Hall.

The reggae bands got a bit of exposure in the Cape Town press and it seemed to me that there was a significant Rastafarian movement on the Cape Flats and Black townships.

I do not know why the Pink Hall gigs came to an end. Perhaps the police eventually wised up; perhaps the owners of the hall got to know of the free dope smoking and did not want to have anything to do with it; perhaps the gigs were no longer commercially viable. Whatever the reason, the reggae scene at the Pink Hall in Vredehoek did not survive the Eighties. There may well have been a continuing reggae scene in the townships but as a cautious Whitey I had no intention of going there simply because I happened to like reggae.

Neil Young in the land of Zuma

2011-07-15T12:50:00.001-07:00

Finally bought Zuma (1975) in HMV Oxford Street, London, on 5 May 2011, the last day of our European holiday that year. Know the live versions of"Cortez the Killer" from Weld (1991) and "Barstool Blues" and "Danger Bird" from The Year of the Horse (1997) but I'd never heard the other cuts.

Although plenty has been written about Neil Young's idiosyncratic waywardness in pursuing his muse since his first solo release in 1969 and the consensus seems to be, though he may have put out some below par albums in a 42 year career span, that essentially he can't do wrong. My opinion is that his most consistently worthwhile body of work consists of the albums released in the first ten years, from Neil Young (1969) to Rust Never Sleeps (1979), with the next 30 years being mostly hit and miss, with a lot of so-so music and banal, clichéd lyrics. The poet in Neil Young kind of burnt out with Rust Never Sleeps but I would imagine this to be an irony old Neil never intended at the time.

Anyhow, in that first decade Neil Young produced wonderful melanges of laid back country rock and some of the most rampant, hypnotic and intense rock music ever. There is just no beating Neil Young and Crazy Horse in full cry, as one can hear from the Fillmore East live set in die Archive series, Live Rust or any of the raging guitar cuts from Everybody Knows this Is Nowhere or Zuma.

It also seems to me that Young somehow felt, the older he got, that it was less and less important to be a rock poet and to write elliptical, allusive lyrics and concentrated on being pretty direct in his opinions and sentiments with a resultant loss in the value of the songs. If the tune and the playing could not carry a particular song onto a higher plane, the lyrics simply stuck in the craw because they were so trite and obvious.

My collection of Neil Young albums was put together kind of haphazardly, starting with the records of Rust Never Sleeps (My first Young purchase), Harvest, Time Fades Away, On The Beach and Re-Ac-Tor. Then I started off my CD collection with Decade, Ragged Glory, Weld, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Freedom, Trans, Harvest Moon, Unplugged, Landing on Water, Mirror Ball, Sleeps With Angels, This Note's For You, Everybody's Rockin', The Year of the Horse, Silver & Gold, Live at Fillmore East, Live at Massey Hall and now Zuma and Le Noise, which brings me right up to date.
Of these albums only Silver & Gold has been an outright disappointment. I do not care what artistic endeavour and level of creativity it is supposed to represents. It just kind of sucks.

You'll notice that (up to Le Noise) I do not own any Neil Young albums from the last 15 years or so, except for Silver & Gold and this is mostly because I lost interest in the music as a compelling passion. The same goes for Bob Dylan, whose mid-Sixties albums are the ones I find interesting. I did buy the two most recent releases and though they have been well-received by critics, and apparently the public too, the triteness of the songs and Dylan's severely croaky voice hardly makes these albums truly worthwhile listening experiences. On Blond on Blond, for example, or John Wesley Harding, Dylan sounded like a man who believed in what he was doing. Over the last decade or so Dylan and Neil Young sound like professional songwriters who must fulfil record contracts and have the ability, acquired through many years of application to their song writing craft, to write lyrics that almost sound significant yet are simply workmanlike and tunes that mitigate the banality of the words.

So. I have come to Zuma about 36 years after its release and after I have listened to a lot of Neil Young music. The first impression is that the music is a mixture of styles drawn from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold rush, Harvest and On Beach. This is good because these are good albums. And Zuma is a good album. Whether it is a great Neil Young record is debatable though. The songs are pleasant enough listening and the weight here is towards the more tuneful, retrospective cuts with even what should have been raging guitar workouts being quite restrained. Perhaps the problem lies in listening to Neil Young albums out of sequence and long after the event. Coming after On the Beach, and if I had bought the record in 1975, Zuma's impact might have been greater and more favourable. It does not have much of an impact now; not even as a previously unheard Young set. Perhaps the lesson is that one should not really be a completist. At some point the artist stumbles, or goes down an unfathomably silly avenue, and then the magic is gone. Or it is simply a case of too much of the same, or more or less similar, thing. Sooner or later stasis sets in and innovation no longer occurs and you realise that merely trying new sounds, techniques or attitudes do not by themselves make for interesting, compelling music.

My impression of Zuma is that Neil Young has collected a bunch of songs that reflect various aspects of his musical vision over the previous five or six years for quite pleasant listening experiences but not a revelatory listening experiences. Whether it is the country tinged balladry, the folky musings or the guitar workouts, this is Neil Young by numbers.

Makes me wonder whether I should bother with any other items from his back catalogue that have not been favourable already, like Re-Ac-Tor or Time Fades Away. If there is no longer any suspension of disbelief and not much belief, what is the point of being a completist collector of albums by an artist one admires?

The Dynamics

2011-07-11T23:39:00.001-07:00

THE DYNAMICS (RetroFresh)

This album is a compilation of everything The Dynamics released in the Eighties tracks and some tracks from a 1996 "comeback" album Organic! Cherry picking is great because this selection can make the casual listener believe that Organic! has something going for it, when in truth it is a deadly dull album. The real meat in this compilation are the early tracks recorded when The Dynamics was part of a mini-movement of South African bands who, in the face of a debilitating cultural boycott, discovered home grown mbaqanga and jive and mixed these local influences with jazz, funk and ska to produce a unique local product. "Thugs" is one of the great South African singles of the Eighties, and of all times, with a true air of menace and a killer groove, half Booker T & The MGs and half mbaqanga. No other track truly matches "Thugs" for intensity and verve, but they are mostly quite good fun. The Dynamics mutated from an exciting mbaqanga jive inspired band, through personnel changes and 15 years, into a less than exciting jazz funk conglomerate. This band is living proof is that improvement in the quality of the musicianship does not necessarily equate to improvement in the quality of the music. Technical mastery quite often leads to sterility and this is what happened to the Dynamics. The earlies tracks are by far the best. In the end there were no dynamics left at all.

ORGANIC! (TicTicBang, 1996)

Possibly organic, not particularly dynamic. The Dynamics were one of the first local bands to combine jazz, mbaqanga, ska and rock way back in the early Eighties and were by all accounts a very, uh, dynamic attraction then and had a song ("Thugs") that received a fair amount of airplay on the likes of Radio 5 and was popular in Cape Town clubs. The pressures of the struggle years and lack of commercial success in South Africa sent some of the members to the UK and by and by they returned to South Africa in the era of liberation to pick up the pieces of a musical career.. Organic! is the long delayed follow-up to cassette album only releases in the Eighties. The musicians are accomplished and try hard to be funky but they can't hack it. The rhythm section is stodgy, the horn arrangements are lifeless, memorable tunes are non-existent and, suicidally for a band that is meant to be driven by the groove, there is no truly killer jam to mitigate the lack of tunes. The metaphor here is of a band stuck in musical quicksand; the harder they try, the deeper they sink. Good background music for the undiscerning, drunken patrons of bars.

Oil City Confidential

2011-07-08T06:59:00.001-07:00

I do not know whether I can ever fully describe the visceral impact the first hearing of the sparse, relentless shuffle and slightly off-kilter slide guitar riff of "Back In The Night" made on me when it was played for the very first time on South African radio in 1975 as a featured tune in a "juke box jury" type of program on Radio 5, which was then in the grip of a stifling disco format. This was otherworldly music; music from a distant universe where things look like similar products we have on Earth but are consummately strange and weird and unfathomable.

I knew nothing about Dr Feelgood but I immediately knew that I loved their music. Malpractice was amongst the first 10 LPs I ever owned and, along with Cream's Cream Live, one of the most played.

In late 1977 I wrote what, in hindsight, was perhaps a naively optimistic letter to the editor of the NME to request copies of all their clippings on Dr Feelgood. Wilko Johnson has just recently left the band. The review of Sneakin' Suspicion and the news item about the break up were the first and almost only rock press items I had been able to read about the band. Before that, there had been a mention in a Charles Shaar Murray piece in Hit Parader and a chapter in Mick Gold's book Rock on the Road, both of which covered the band up to the release of Down by the Jetty in 1974.

Dr Feelgood was my top favourite contemporary group at the time, one of my first independent discoveries of music I liked, and no else I knew had ever heard of, but I knew very little about them, apart from the basic history from supporting Heinz to spearheading the pub rock movement to being a bit of an influence on the punk bands that became prominent after 1976. I was desperate for information and I really wanted to be able to read the story as it unfolded, hence the request to the NME, which I was then buying every week. The NME kept me up to date on the London punk scene but I wanted to know stuff about Dr Feelgood.

NME never replied to my letter. At the time my first guess was simply that the editor or his minions were for political reasons not prepared to reply from an obvious Afrikaner from the pariah apartheid state of South Africa but by and by I also believed that the NME just could not be bothered. Or perhaps that they did not have a clipping service. Anyhow, it took about 25 years before I laid my hands on a proper biography of the band, albeit a very basic telling of the tale from the Wilko Johnson days toe the late Nineties when the band was still going, run by Chris Fenwick, without any of the four original band members in it.

Then circa 2006 or 2007 I came across a DVD and CD double pack of a Feelgoods show in South End. For the first time ever I could see the band in full-on, raging Canvey Island R & B mode at the height of tis first flush of success.

Now I could see the menacing posture of Lee Brilleaux in his white suit, stalking the front of the stage and barking out the lyrics to songs I already knew well but could now experience visually and Wilko Johnson patrolling the side of the stage with his chopping left hand, psychotic stare and darting runs all over the front of the stage. It was a riveting spectacle and I was sorely disappointed that I never had the opportunity to see De Feelgood in their heyday and would never have the opportunity to experience them now, even if the three surviving members of the original line up ever get back together, which appears to be unlikely.

I was very delighted to read about Julien Temple's documentary about Dr Feelgood in the shape of Oil City Confidential and I immediately contacted my brother in law in the UK to see if he could order it for me but it took about a year before I finally laid my sweaty paws on it during a UK visit in April 2011 when he gave it to me as my birthday present.

It seems to me that Julien Temple likes making movies about music. There was The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle, about the Sex Pistols, and Absolute Beginners, based on a Colin MacInnes book about beatnik London, and the documentary about Glastonbury, which I also own, and a number of others. His style is deadpan. He films what he considers to be interesting and let the subjects speak, without intruding much into the scene. It is almost a simple technique of pointing and shooting, with, I guess, the hard work left the people who do the editing and make a movie out of the raw footage.

Oil City Confidential mixes newsreel footage, contemporary footage and still photographs of Dr Feelgood performing live and interview footage with the band members and various hangers on. Most of the interviewees, particularly the band members, must be north of 60 by now and their interviews were obviously shot especially for this documentary. Lee Brilleaux, on the other hand is seen in two different interviews, one fairly early in the Feelgoods' career and the other one some years later, though we are not told when. Brilleaux's views are presented almost as contemporary as that of Wilko, Sparko or Big Figure but where he still looks young (yet strangely like a middle aged raconteur) the other three look like a bunch of retired lorry drivers. Not much rock 'n roll image there, but then, that was probably the anti-image that Dr Feelgood always had.

The guys share some anecdotes, some stories, about themselves and about each other. There is a slightly sad walking tour of Canvey Island, hosted Chris Fenwick, the "Fifth Feelgood" and long-time manager, who managed to hang on to the Dr Feelgood brand long after the four original members had left or, in Brilleaux's case, died and to a degree flogging a bit of a dead horse. When I read about the "new" Dr Feelgood still playing gigs, it sounded like a case of Dr Feelgood being a tribute band to itself. For my money Dr Feelgood means the original four, and perhaps John Mayo as well, but nothing beyond. At the very least Dr Feelgood meant Lee Brilleaux's voice. How could Fenwick have dared to keep the band going after Lee's death, if it were not simply for the sake of making money without proper regard for the meaning and legacy of the band? This is what I feel about him guiding an odd assortment of gawkers around Canvey. It is a pretty sad tour, pathetic really, and if Fenwick charges a fee for this empty exercise in nostalgia, he probably really needs the money.

Although Wilko, Sparko and Big Figure do meet up in a pub for a brief scene or two we never see them with Fenwick. The absence of a reunion with their manager, who was a Canvey mate from way back, could possibly be ascribed to their distaste for his commercial exploitation of their band name long after the sell by date. And perhaps also because, as has been the case with rock managers ever since the dawn of time, Fenwick has screwed them out of money. Wilko Johnson certainly makes some allusions to the usual record company double dealings that leave an apparently successful group penniless once all the accounting has been done.

The Feelgood story is more or less the typical rags to riches rock 'n roll story of a bunch of mates who make music together, first on a local level, then go to the big smoke, get lucky by tapping in on a new mode of presenting rock in pubs and then gaining a mass audience through live performances and then even having a number one album in the charts. Unfortunately the master plan went slightly askew after that. The songwriter and co-frontman leaves, the band soldiers on to early, second act success but then slowly and surely slipping down the ladder, always managing to draw appreciative audiences but having only moderate record sales and then one by one the founding members leave until only the singer is left en by and by he dies, though the manager keeps the band intact and functioning with none of the founding members.

My interest in the Feelgoods ended in the early Eighties, not long after Private Practice. It is unfortunate though that Julien Temple's interest in the band also ceases after Wilko Johnson's departure. Given that the band had a far longer history post Wilko than with him, it is disappointing that Temple does not cover the entire career if at least only to the degree of giving an abbreviated account of the next 20 years. There is mention of John "Gypie" Mayo replacing Wilko Johnson and the brief flare of second act success with the Private Practice album and "Milk & Alcohol" single, and a quick narration of Lee Brilleaux's last days and last gig. He died in 1994. We also learn that Wilko has had a quite successful solo career outside the band but that is about it. There is no indication of whether Sparko and Figure are still at all involved in music.

Dr Feelgood was never the biggest rock and roll band in the world and I would imagine only a select few in South Africa ever heard of them or bought their records. I have never come across another Feelgoods fan. The band was not even the biggest band in the UK although their influence stretched beyond pub rock and sweaty R & B. the best description would probably be that Dr Feelgood was a jobbing band, with a genius guitarist en songwriter and a mesmerising singer, who worked hard to earn a living and managed to build a fan base and who got lucky enough to have chart albums and singles during the early phase of a long career, that were strong enough to sustain that career well beyond the normal life expectancy of the average R & B band.

To me, however, Dr Feelgood represents something materially significant. Dr Feelgood was the first contemporary band I discovered on my own, with no peer pressure to influence me, and embraced passionately and wholeheartedly. The first 3 albums, Malpractice in particular, were a major part of the soundtrack of my late teenage life. I played Malpractice until the grooves wore out, so to speak. To this day the opening notes of opening track "I Can Tell" are still intensely exciting.

I was not exactly fanatical about Dr Feelgood. My room was not full of Feelgood memorabilia and I did not dedicate scrapbooks to them. Not that there was much about Dr Feelgood to be found in Stellenbosch, hence my letter to the NME. I did play the records a lot and did study the album sleeves and did ponder Wilko Johnson's lyrics. In fact, when I thought of being a songwriter, I wanted to be a modern R & B songwriter in the vein of Johnson who took blues themes and adapted them to his background and environment to make them relevant to a different time and place. In Wilko's worldview the concept of the Canvey delta was not that far removed from the Mississippi delta and was every bit as real. I would also have liked to play guitar like Wilko but that somehow never happened.

The major spin off from my interest in Dr Feelgood, as was the case with my interest in Cream, was that I started buying albums by the genuine article, the old school blues guys emulated by the Canvey boys. I was fond of Dr Feelgood's version of John Lee Hooker's "Boom, Boom" but Hooker's version was just bad and dangerous.

I am glad I own Oil City Confidential. The story of Dr Feelgood was no longer an unknown tale by the time I saw the documentary but there are some new spins and it is good to have more information on their formative days and to see the band in full cry in its heyday and to hear them talk. Wilko looks like a nut job and except for the difference in hairstyles, from pudding bowl cut to crazy baldhead, he looks and acts as weird the images from the late Seventies suggest he used to be. Wilko still plays killer guitar.

Where Lee Brilleaux represented the distinctive vocal sound of Dr Feelgood, Wilko Johnson's choppy guitar style gave the band its unique sound. The thing is that the absence of either would have reduced the band to something like the pedestrian collection of R & B journeymen it eventually became. Having said, I feel, if Brilleaux had left before Wilko, that another vocalist may have been able to do the same amount of justice to the Feelgood songbook, although probably not with the same presence as Lee Brilleaux, but no guitarist could remotely replace Wilko Johnson. John Mayo did not even try and I would imagine that none of his successors (on albums I have never heard) would have dared either, or be capable of imitating the signature Feelgood guitar sound.

This sounds as if I do not rate Sparko and Figure's contributions very highly but my point is merely that, even taking into account their individual skills and Sparko's apparently own unique style of bass playing, it was the frontline that distinguished Dr Feelgood from the competition.

This is why the idea of Chris Fenwick continuing to operate a Dr Feelgood band that does not sound like Dr Feelgood is such a travesty.

I have heard that nowadays Southend is the Essex answer to Las Vegas or Times Square and not worth visiting unless you like crowds of low rent party animals, Essex boys and girls, Eastenders, and the like, and miles of garish neon. Canvey Island does not look any more promising. It may once have been something of a favourite beach destination for the East End, but in Oil City Confidential it looks less like the Mississippi delta than ever before and more like the kind of place where unemployed and unemployable dregs of society have washed up and have stuck because there is no lower step on the food chain, with the giant oil tanks looming over everything. It is a masterstroke of the documentary that Temple is able to project moving images on these tanks to serve as background for some night time interviews. Anyhow, although I would like to visit Canvey someday, I am not sure that it would make any sense anymore. At best I would be able to boast I had been there. It would be like visiting Hertford simply because Deep Purple kind of originated there. I definitely would not do the Fenwick guided walking tour.

So: although I doubt that I will ever have the pleasure of attending a Wilko Johnson gig or the dubious honour of visiting Canvey, these are at least possibilities. I will never attend a Dr Feelgood gig and will have to be satisfied with the archive material in the 2 DVDs I own and my collection of CDS of the first 4 albums. For the sake of it I may still yet buy Be Seeing You, Private Practice or A Case of the Shakes, mostly because I used to own the LPs, but the "classic" quartet would be all I really need and if push comes to shove I would be satisfied with only Down by the Jetty and Malpractice. These two records represent the core of the Dr Feelgood I got to know and came to love.

Ken E Henson gives the blues his best shot

2011-06-09T12:28:00.001-07:00

Kenny Henson (as he then was) and Brian Finch played somewhat enervated, desiccated country rock back in the Seventies or early Eighties and then split up and went their separate ways. The last time I saw Brian Finch it was at Obz Sessions, a (now defunct) bar on Main Road Observatory Cape Town, where he played a solo gig, back pressed against the window to the road, the crowd literally under his nose. I would be surprised if any punter in the place care about Finch or whatever music he was playing. They would not have been able to hear it.

I have never seen Henson perform at all and though I vaguely knew both of them were still around, and that Finch had even released a new album, Henson slipped so far beneath my radar he might as well have left the music business. Maybe, he too was playing soul destroying solo gigs to uncaring punters.

Anyhow, I was in the Rhythm Records online store, looking for something completely different, when the Ken E Henson album Rolling and Tumbling came up on my screen as an example of South African blues. I had to have it, seeing as how I consider myself to be a connoisseur of blues and am always interested in South African bluesmen. It is not always a rewarding interest; for every Delta Blue there is something like the Boulevard Blues Band. Not that the latter are technically deficient or untalented musicians. They are simply not part of anything like a vital blues tradition. I feel the same way about Dan Patlansky though I have had a lot of stick for this apparently unfounded and controversial opinion. He is a consummate guitar player but he just does not bring anything new to the table. The wow factor is his technical skill; he does have the ability to breathe new life into the blues genre.

I had never thought of Kenny, or Ken E, Henson as a bluesman and the tracks from Rolling & Tumbling have done nothing to persuade me otherwise. Ken has pretty much taken a trip back in time to the late Sixties when a lot of White blues bands started infusing their take on the blues with a lysergic ambience and extended fuzz tone guitar solos. I am in particular thinking of Henry Vestine from Canned Heat, a band that started out as something of a purist blues band but after a couple of years, probably influenced by the Summer of Love, went all progressive with Vestine's rock inspired guitar playing that could at times go on at tedious length. It was still based on blues progressions bur raga rock and psychedelia motivated a flaunting of virtuosity that soon paled.

Not that I want to say the Ken E Henson sounds like Vestine or is as tedious. The point simply is, that Benson's take on making his blues sound more contemporary, I guess, and not like slavish retreads, is to hark back to the halcyon days of the Woodstock generation when blues underpinned a lot of rock, particularly from the San Francisco bands, but the musicians held that progression meant using lots of guitar effects to kind of disguise the blues licks.

The tunes on offer comprise a selection of old blues favourites from what I would call a boogie perspective. My guess is that he made these recordings at home with only a computer programme as friend. It makes the songs sound like second cousins of J J Cale's "Call me the Breeze", especially the insistent drum and bass patterns.

After listening to the album I would not call it a blues album as such. The concept simply seems to be that Ken E Henson probably chose a bunch of his favourite blues standards and decided to record them his way, with a more innovative approach and fresh slant to some hoary blues tropes. He was not about to do a Dan Patlansky or a Blues Broers.

Any blues aficionado knows these tunes only too well, not only in the original versions but probably also as recorded by many other bluesmen. The albums pays homage to Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Billy Boy Arnold and even Peter Green and (I guess) Jeff Beck.

"Baby Please Don't Go" is a venerable blues standard (Big Joe Williams) but Ken clearly knows the more rocking late Sixties psych-punk version by The Amboy Dukes and he amps up his drum machine and bass guitar and drives it down the road at a pile driver pace. The urgency of the vocal plea is echoed and emphasised by the stinging, floating bottleneck guitar that is the closest thing here to the Williams original.

"My Babe" is more of the same, though slightly more subtle on the beat, and with effects laden syncopated country picking guitar solos. Could have used some blues harp.

"Boogie Man" has a riff that is the bastard child of Slim Harpo's "Shake Your Hips" and John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen" (quoting that famous spoken bit), with a side order of "La Grange." The song tells the story of Ken's own life in the blues. Apparently. This tune can be called a homage to the late great boogie man.

"Judgment Day" quotes a Robert Johnson blues ("If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day") and starts off like a disco infused blues, with more country style guitar in the vein of the Tulsa school, and then detours into "Rollin and Tumblin" before returning to the original verse.

In "Smokestack Lightnin" Ken plays a spooky blues with delay and echo on the lead guitar that gives a Hawaiian effect and he does a kind of ghostly Howlin' Wolf talkin' voice. The identifying riff is present but the song is so trippy-slow and hypnotic it is almost voodoo.

"Spoonful" has an equally insistent riff but this time the lead guitar is fuzzed out like something from Barry Melton (Country & The Fish) and an acoustic guitar swings gently along the bottom.

"Who Do You Love" gives the responsibility for the muted Diddley beat squarely to the rhythm section while the guitar soars across the top. Unfortunately the vocal does not do the Diddley original proud and it does not come close to either Ronnie Hawkins' or George Thorogood's versions of the song. Ken just cannot get the dangerousness and badness into his vocal inflection.

"Love That Burns" sounds like a live recording with a somewhat noisy audience. It does do justice to Peter Green's song, at least the vocals do, but the lead guitar is not quite as spine tingling as Green can get. The acoustic guitar backing, saxophone and percussion are the great elements of the performance especially in the rave up in the middle section. Right at the end, Ken, if it is he, gives us a bit of Hendrix style lead guitar and jousts with the saxophonist to crowd pleasing effect. The deep blues meaning of the song is lost though. Peter Green is not about this kind of showboating.

My earlier reference to J J Cale was not so far from the mark. "Travelling Light" is indeed the Cale song and given a Henson reinterpretation of the Tulsa style that brings a new, fresh feel but remains true to the Okie kind of vibe. There is even a bit of guitar picking that could almost be called shit kicking.

"No Money Down" is a really different, somnolent version of a Chuck Berry tune that is normally far more sprightly than Henson's take on the song. It is not rock and roll and it is not even very much a blues; in fact, I would say that this is Henson asking himself: how would J J Cale do this song?

"You Can't Judge A Book" is a psychedelic guitar drenched vamp with a less than inspiring vocal. If you want to do Bo Diddley you gotta have some of that man's badness in your soul. Ken just don't seem to have it. Neither does his rhythm section.

"Jigsaw" is another live take and is a stomping blues harp breakdown that mutates into a lonesome cowboy camp fire tune before turning back into the screaming, wailing juke stomper it really wants to be. This is the one that would get me onto the dance floor and make me get all stupid.

I guess "Blues for Beck" is homage to Jeff and not to Mr Hanson. The drum beats sound almost hip hop but the guitar sounds like the jazz rock fusiony thing Jeff Beck did back in the Seventies when heavy blues rock no longer worked for him.

So: my conclusion is that Rolling & Tumbling a rather fun collection of tunes that I know and love in all kinds versions by all kindsa musicians and if it is not truly blues or even very essential it is very much an album I would listen to a lot and play very loudly when I cook. You cannot beat the blues if it they are done right and Ken E Henson does it right enough. He does not attempt slavish imitation; he does not attempt to pretend to be a dyed in the wool suffering bluesman. He is a musician with a mission to inject some innovation into what is so often just a cliché and he has done it well.