Siouxsie & The Banhees

The career and success of Siouxsie & The Banshees is perhaps the best illustration of the original Brit punk credo of 1976 and 1977: everyone cold learn three chords, form a band, play live and release records. The origins of the band was in a jam by non-musicians at a Sex Pistols gig. The first incarnation of the band was one of the hottest unsigned acts on the punk scene and got a record deal considerably later than most of their contemporaries, lost two of the founding members of the band after the release of the debut album and at a most critical juncture of the nascent career, regrouped and came back better and stronger as ever as leading lights of the post punk and incipient Goth movements and over the course of a very long career produced some amazing music with hit singles to boot. Siouxsie & The Banshees outlasted and outperformed just about every of the early punk bands.

Siouxsie Sioux (or Sue) was a bit of an early punk sex symbol, or so I thought, as part of the so-called Bromley Contingent of Sex Pistols camp followers. She had very short hair, weird facial make up, liked wearing very short, tight skirts and thigh length boots, was not afraid to show off her perfectly formed breasts and was fond of sporting a Swastika, no doubt simply to shock the middle classes and with no neo-Nazi leanings at all.

I was very chuffed (at age 18) with my own intelligence when I realised, without anyone ever explaining it to me, that the girl's name was probably Suzie and that she had seized on the penchant for punk rockers to assume strange and wonderful, and sometimes offensive, names for themselves rather than stick to their boring, ordinary given names.

As an avid reader of the New Musical Express (NME) during the glory days of British punk and the New Wave, I drooled over the images of sexy girls punks, especially as I was a hormonal teenager deprived of much outlet in oppressive South Africa and wrote them off as scenesters and acolytes who'd soon fade from view when the reality of making a living struck home.

I knew most of the punk lore, as disseminated by the NME, such as the night when Siouxsie, Steve Severin and Sid Vicious clambered onstage at the 100 Club to do a version of "The Lord's Prayer" as opening act for the Sex Pistols. At the time none of them could play an instrument but this event must have been the genesis of serious musical ambition, if it had not existed before, in Siouxsie and Severin.

Pretty soon the writers at the NME were lauding the newly formed Siouxsie & The Banshees, with Siouxsie singing and Severin playing bass, John McKay on guitar and Kenny Morris on drums. As a matter of record and pigeon holing The Banshees were categorized as being part of the New Wave, the descriptive term devised for the slew of new groups that followed on punk, and encompassed the somewhat more technically proficient music of bands like The Jam, Elvis Costello, The Cure, Magazine and Siouxsie & The Banshees, who were clearly much more ambitious and creative in their musical endeavours than the raw punk bands had been.

Whether by deliberate restraint on the part of the band or because record companies were initially not very interested in signing a band with a lead singer who was still prone to Nazi regalia, but the Banshees were famously the best unsigned group (at a time when a record company contract was still the yardstick of success and the lifeline for any group's survival as a career choice) in the UK for a seemingly endless period before they did succumb. The Scream was released in 1978, considerably later than most debut albums by their immediate peers. The Banshees were now launched and even had a hit single in "Hong Kong Garden" about the prosaic subject of a Chinese take-away restaurant.

The initial punk thrash of the Roxy Club days, well before the band was signed, gave way to a sound that was definitely New Wave, the name given to the bands and sounds of the post punk bands who formed under the inspiration of the punks a year or two after the Sex Pistols came to national notoriety. Some say the name "New Wave" (after the French film movie of the late Fifties and early Sixties) was used to create a deliberate historical and conceptual separation between the bands that followed the DIY punk ethos and had more musical ambition and ability and who certainly did not want to be tainted by the "punk" pejorative and all it stood for in the UK tabloids and on television.

One of the main differences between the sound of the Ramones and some of the rock and roll bands before them, was that the bass was a lead instrument in the musical mix where the guitar was simply a rhythm instrument, and Dee Dee Ramone played almost melody bass. This sound was adopted by many of the New Wave bands, and beyond, who did not want to be stuck in the Ramalama wall of noise guitar punk first sounded like and this lead to a plethora of bands where the lead guitar played a choppy, trebly rhythm while the bass was prominent as a melodic, lead instrument, pretty much in imitation of a reggae style. Siouxsie & The Banshees was one of those bands. Where The Clash, for example, stuck to the loud punk rock template for their first two albums, The Banshees were already way beyond that on their debut and certainly sounded streets ahead of their run of the mil contemporaries and their roots on the earliest punk bills. The sound was jagged, edgy and featured big drums and fluid bass playing and the band had a big drum sound, very much like Joy Division, and even now sound almost futuristic and a lot more interesting than the Sex Pistols who, as far as I could see, wanted to sound like Slade.

Siouxsie & The Banshees remained mired in controversy for a while. The first thing was that the NME seized on the Nazi imagery and Swastikas and on tunes like "Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)" and others to suggest that the band were espousing right wing causes and attitudes, which was a decided no-no at the time when Rock Against Racism was a rising force and the National Front was making inroads amongst the disaffected. Flirting with taboo images, even if it were ironic, or were intended to make people think, was frowned on. The left wing does not do irony.

The second controversial thing that happened to the band is that McKay and Morris left the band abruptly after the first few gigs of a tour with The Cure in support. At the time the motive was not completely clear but what was clear was that this move must have been calculated to destroy the band. The Banshees were not that easily killed off, however, and the tour carried on with Robert Smith, the leader and guitarist of The Cure, playing guitar for The Banshees as well as for The Cure and Budgie sitting in on drums. As a result het became the band's permanent drummer. This was a good thing for the music, which improved and followed a new course entirely from the early New Wave strivings of the debut album.

The second album, Join Hands, was released in 1980, the last with McKay and Morris, and this in turn was followed by Kaleidoscope (1980) with John McGeoch on guitar, Budge on drums and featuring synthesisers to flesh out the soundscapes.

This is where I got on board the bus. Punk and New Wave albums were incredibly hard to come by in Stellenbosch. By 1980 I owned Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols, My Aim Is True and London Calling. Sometime late in 1980, though, Kaleidoscope pitched up in a bargain bin in one of the record shops I used to haunt and I bought it without a second thought, simply because I was curious and, if I am not mistaken, I had heard the songs "Happy House" and "Christine" from it and had decided I liked them.

Kaleidoscope sounded considerably different to those other records referred to above. Costellos's album had a very traditional rock sound, the Sex Pistols reminded me of Slade and the Clash were in their eclectic phase of changing the style of songs from track to track and giving us British, Jamaican and American roots and not so much punk rock anymore. In contrast the music on Kaleidoscope sounded otherwordly and, well, kaleidoscopic. One could believe that Siouxsie & The Banshees represented some kind of future of rock rather than, say, the Clash who were determinedly returning to and mining the older traditions and perhaps breathing new life into them but still not seeking a completely new way of expressing themselves. The Banshees sounded positively futuristic.

The great difference, and what probably truly makes The Banshees post-punk and forerunners of not only the younger experimental bands of the early Eighties but also of the whole Goth / Industrial / Rock dance crossover scene, is that the traditional instrumental line-up of guitar, bass and drums does not limit the musicians in the creation of the musical landscape. For the most part the guitar creates atmospheres and filigrees of detail, in much like the same fashion as is the case for the synthesiser contributions, while the nimble drums and agile bass set down the rhythmic basis for the performance. This music is a long way from punk. Whereas Kevin Rowland of Dexy's and a class of NME scribes lambasted, did their best to kill off, the guitar in music and the early synth poppers almost succeeded. Siouxsie & The Banshees (and, I must add, many of their peers) realised that the electric guitar had many uses and infinite permutations of melodic noise.

Kaleidoscope is one of my favourite albums of all time and The Banshees are one of my top Eighties bands. I never cared for Duran Duran or Wham, or the Stock Aitken & Waterman stable of stars, or any of the terrible pop; music so many fondly remember from that decade. The Banshees made some of the best music of that era, and into the Nineties, and that fact is proved by die collection of top tunes on Twice Upon A Time, a double album of hits that followed on the Once Upon A Time single record collection of the early hits. In South African "The Passenger" (an Iggy Pop original) was a major radio and club hit and just about every one of the dance pop confections is memorable, like "Kiss Them For Me" and "Peekaboo," as shining examples of how one can make weirdly interesting music with pop hooks.

This piece was inspired by my recent acquisition, from iTunes, of Kaleidoscope. Up to then the CD of Twice Upon A Time was the only Banshees artefact I still owned, having given away my LP copy of the earlier album. Anyhow, I was so happy to hear songs like "Happy House", "Red Light" and "Christine" again that I also bought The Scream, in an expanded version with the addition of "Hong Kong Garden" and Staircase Mystery" that, in the tradition of the times, were singles released at the time the album was out but not included on it.

From The Scream to Kaleidoscope, over just two years, is a very long journey indeed. The debut album has its share of great moments and also the teeth on edge version of "Helter Skelter" that seems to be yet another impromptu jam, and Kaleidoscope has one delightful proto-Gothic pop songs after the other. This is where the band learnt to write songs of lasting impact and value and where it finally left behind any vestiges of an origin in feral punk, setting the scene for the great triumphs of the Eighties which saw Siouxsie & The Banshees rising to the top of the Goth pop pyramid.

 

 

 

The Punk Rock Movie

The Punk Rock Movie was assembled from Super 8
camera footage shot by Don Letts, the disc jockey at The Roxy club during the early days of the UK punk rock
movement, principally during the 100 days in 1977 in which punk acts were featured at The Roxy club in London. (from Wikipedia)

 

It was a really exciting thing to find this artefact documenting truly epochal musical events on YouTube. I was 18 in the year the footage was filmed, living with my parents in Stellenbosch, in my first year at university and far removed conceptually and physically from the events depicted in the movie, vicariously experiencing every move in the punk revolution through the pages of the New Musical Express (NME.)

Don Letts had amazing access to the punk rockers in London because he was a scene maker in his own right. The colour footage has a grainy, blurry, drained, almost psychedelic, look. The sound is bad, typically distorted and messy. The first impression is how young the punks (bands and audience) were and, in a manner of speaking, how naïve it all seems from the remove of 38 years beyond the heydays of London punk. Billy Idol look incredibly young and innocent. Siouxsie equally so, and her acts of swigging vodka rom the bottle and necking pills smack of acting up for the camera. Perhaps the real scenes of debauchery and ugly antics were not filmed. The musicians seem almost sleepwalking through life albeit to the soundtrack of extremely loud distorted guitars. The faces are thin, unlined, not very surly or threatening. It is virtually opposite to how I perceived the punk attitude and conduct as celebrated in the pages of the NME, my sole, authoritative source of information on the punk scene between 1977 and 1979, by which time New Wave and beyond was in full swing. The Punk Rock Movie documents the second year of the punk scene following on the breakthrough of the Sex Pistols in 1976 and we see several of the well-known names in their nascent years making an unholy, energetic punk noise. The scenes at gigs are reminiscent of similar venues and types in Cape Town in the late Eighties and probably reinforces the idea that the scenes would be the same for any underground act regardless of the country. The sound is distorted and scratchy. The camera microphone would not improve the sound, which comes to us from a punter's vantage point. It must really have been just three chords played as loudly and as energetically as possible. Two American acts are on show: Wayne County & The Electric Chairs (he had the operation and then became known as Jayne County), a drag artist; and The Heartbreakers, fronted by Johnny Thunders, ex-New York Doll. The Heartbreakers' "Born to Lose" has a catchy pop chorus even through the murky sound. Where the British punks simply frantically strum the three bar chords the know, the Americans play recognizable rock and roll, have a slightly better sound and altogether appear to be the more professional musicians they were, more so than the average punk musician who allegedly picked up an instrument after seeing the Sex Pistols. Thunders and County had been gigging since at least the early Seventies.

Some of the best musical ideas emerge from rehearsals of the Slits and Alternative TV. Siouxsie & The Banshees has as much of a distorted thrash sound on stage as anyone else and it is a far cry from their recorded, post punk sound. The Clash are roaring; also clearly more rehearsed and versed than some of the others.

There are many scenes of tedium on the tour bus. Just a bunch of kids bored out of their skull on a long journey, seeking ways to amuse themselves just to get through the day. No Rolling Stones touring party excess here. The interview snippets are unintelligible because of the poor sound.

I was in my late teens when punk rock broke, living in Stellenbosch where there was a dearth of any kind of entertainment much less live music or anything resembling punk. I could not even get the records in the local record store and when I asked the manager for the Sex Pistols' debut album he looked at me blankly as if he had never heard of the then most exciting phenomenon on the UK music scene. The NME taught me all I knew about punk. I bought it very week, on a Wednesday, and absolutely devoured the contents. Sad fact was that it was generally a month to six weeks behind the times because it was sent to SA by mail boat instead of being flown in overnight, as is currently the case. It was like the light of a dead star that we see only long after the star has died. I read about vents that had long since happened and of bands that may not even have existed any longer by the time I read about them. It was still exciting though and informative, and because the NME carried such detailed coverage of the movement I might as well have been there. The great deficiency was that I never saw the bands play live and never heard the records. I had extensive theoretical knowledge of punk and its antecedents and almost no practical experience of it. Punk was not playlisted on SA radio. The record store in Stellenbosch did nit stock the singles or the albums and they were expensive to buy as imports in Cape Town. I wasn't a punk, at least I did not look like one or try to act like one. Best I could do was to wear a grey school shirt, skinny black tie and baggy, faded brown pants and read the NME. I did buy Never Mind The Bollocks, Ramones Leaver Home, Road to Ruin, End of the Century and My Aim Is True as soon as I could after release, and London Calling when it was released. That was the sole extent of my punk or New Wave record collection, except for a compilation of punk and post punk singles on the Fast label. During the Nineties I began buying some of those punk albums that I'd missed back in the day but it was merely scratching the surface of the significant amount of punk singles and albums released between 1977 and 1979. The Punk Rock Movie is a jolt to the memory, a reminder of all the major and minor punk bands the NME had covered and whose names were engraved on my mind at the time and who are now almost forgotten except by those who were there.

The last batch of songs in the movie are performed by the Sex Pistols at a Screen on the Green gig featuring Sid Vicious as new bassist in place of Glen Matlock. It is not an outrageous performance. As is the case with all the other bands, the Pistils take their performance seriously and concentrate on getting it right. Steve Jones does throw guitar hero shapes but Rotten does not behave outrageously or do or say anything that could be called confrontational. Sid looks like the guy who has recently joined and is scared shitless that he will make a mistake. The music is well played and over familiar and emphasises that the Pistols did have some good tunes. The footage is an intriguing look at the band that was briefly the most loathed group of individuals in the UK, for little or no reason at all, except fir swearing a bit on TV and for looking and dressing differently to the mainstream. For all that, the core values of the musicians were firmly linked to mastering their instruments, playing them competently and writing good, meaningful songs. Although the credo of the day was that anyone could do it and that it was not meant to last, I would imagine that the musicians, and everyone else involved in the business aspect of it, quickly became more ambitious once they realised that money was to be made and got addicted to the rush of fame or notoriety. The punk fans, whether hardcore or week punks, were the ones who were really outrageous, really got out there to challenge conformity and the establishment. They were the ones who were still gobbing long after the bands had expressed their extreme distaste for an act that had been a kind of joke in the beginning but was then saw as mandatory behavior at punk gigs, like violence. Ultimately the musicians wanted to play and to be taken seriously and to be respected for what they were doing.

Typically the success of punk was its downfall and in the pages of the NME many of the first generation punks, who were part of a truly underground scene where the musicians and the audience were mates, were starting to moan about how the influx of suburban weekend punks was ruining the scene and the music. That is how it goes with any new thing that becomes a media phenomenon. The original ideals are misunderstood and diluted and often completed trampled on by the newcomers who are in it for the fad. This is also why punk gave way to New Wave and New Wave gave way to the succession of musical movements that followed in the Eighties.

The Punk Rock Movie is not of the best video or audio quality but it is an amazing and vital document of some aspects of probably the first significant sea change in rock music since the mid-Sixties change over from clean shaven bands with neat hair and in neat uniform to bands with beards, wild and colourful clothes and psychedelic music. The first punks were probably as naïve as they look in the movie but they were determined to do what they wanted to do and quite a few of them became famous and significantly important musicians, such as Siouxsie & The Banshees whose career has stretched well beyond those noisy, ill-focused beginnings at The Roxy club in 1977.

Watching The Punk Rock Movie was almost an emotional experience. I'm thinking I should look for the DVD to add to my collection.

 

The Blues Projects

The Blues Project (1864) was initially a compilation album issued by Elektra Records, of Greenwich Village based folk blues artists, one of whom was Danny Kalb who formed an electric band he called the Blues Project in 1985. Al Kooper, who famously played organ on "Like A Rolling Stone", joined the band for a time and Tommy Flanders was a member for the first, live, album only.

 

The debut album Live at the Cafe Au Go Go (1966), was basically your standard blues set of the along with the psychedelic infusions that were becoming the rage in San Francisco and were soon to be de rigeur for all kinds of band with progressive intentions. "Catch the Wind" and "Violets of Dawn" represented the poppier psychedelic side of the band.

 

In November 1966 the band released Projections, in its way a template for what counted as progressive in the mid-Sixties. The songs were a mixture of blues and gospel tunes, re-imagined in a psychedelic mind-set, and more proper psychedelic pop songs with plenty of flute, which was the alternative rock instrument of choice on so many records of the era. A flute part seems to have been code for progressive. A blues band would abandon blurs harp and replace it with a flute and play raga melodies and be counted among the adventurous, forward thinking musicians pushing the envelope to develop rock into an art form.

 

Projections also had a bit of Chuck Berry and an 11-minute long version of "Two Trains Running," a Muddy Waters live tour de force, just to bring home that this was still a band that was serious about the blues.

 

Between 1977 and 1979 I found a copy of Projections in a discount bin in some Cape Town record shop. I do not recall whether I even knew who the Blues Project were but I was collecting cheap blues records and this record interested me because it was cheap and the track listing featured a number of blues and gospel songs I recognised by title alone. The major USP, though, was that very long version of "Two Trains Running," of which I'd read but not yet heard.

 

The band members had worn their best 1966 New York hip, proto-hippie outfits, all flower shirts and floppy hair, as if they had been styled to look excruciatingly contemporary. The guys look almost self-consciously cool and stylish and it just looks forced and weird today. The Blues Project guys looked like the kind of dudes who normally wore T-shirts and jeans but were told by their publicist and record company to go out and buy some new shirts for the photo shoot.

 

The record cover was of thicker cardboard than was customary for locally pressed records of the day and this suggested to me that I had bought a copy of the original, probably American, pressing from 1966 and therefore some 12 or 13 years old by the time I laid my hands on it. This possibility was reinforced by a terrible flaw in the vinyl that made an annoying buzzy sound when one played the record which seemed to be in good condition, unscratched and flat.

 

I had bought, and would still buy, many discounted and low budget records and I was very fortunate in that almost none of them were ever in a bad condition when I got them. It was trite that local pressings deteriorated in quality after a number of plays, which is why I eventually taped all my records and then listened only to the audio tapes and no longer played the actual records. That was expected but not that a record would be bad from the off. Projections was one of the few exceptions to the general rule; off-hand I cannot recollect any other records that showed flaws as soon as I played them for the first time.

 

I had experience with deteriorating South African vinyl surfaces and was used to applying anti-static spray and wiping the surface with a cloth to eradicate the snap, crackle and pop of locally manufactured records but in the case of Projections none of those methods helped. The irritating hiss was ingrained in the vinyl and remained for as long as I owned the record. Listening pleasure was therefore very much diluted, especially as the hiss became worse during "Two Trains Running" to the point where the track was unplayable in its entirety unless you wanted to go crazy.

 

This annoying flaw in audio quality was a great pity indeed, as the blues songs on the album were arranged in interesting ways and played with an enthusiasm I had not often heard. At the time I was not fully au fait with the American White blues boom of the mid-Sixties and this record was a revelation to me who was more used to the original bluesmen and to the Brit-Blues guys. Blues Project sounded very much like early Jefferson Airplane, and other bands of that era, in the sound of the rhythm section and with a particular style and tone of lead guitar that I associate with the psychedelic rock and blues of the period. The American guitarists had a more trebly, piercing, pinched, staccato style than their British counterparts who loved loud sustain and feedback in their solos. The British blues guitarists seemed to prize fluency in soloing; the Americans seemed that prefer short piercing runs of notes.

 

There was no point in taping Projections. I put the record away and never listened to it anymore.

 

More than 20 years later I found the CD Reunion in Central Park (1973), yet another live album by the older and wiser members of the band who perform their best known material with what sounds like some enthusiasm and love for the history. It was not quite the Sixties sound though and some of it did almost sound like a band running through it back catalogue because there is money in it rahter than as a living, breathing and continuing organism. Pleasant afternoon in the park and no more.

 

Jump forward about 13 years and I discover, duh, the usefulness of iTunes in recovering the music of records I once used to own or to buy the digital versions of records I once wanted to own. Projections was one of the first and followed shortly by the Anthology album, with tracks from the three major Blues Project albums. It was once exhilarating to be able to listen to music off albums I would never have owned otherwise and also disappointing because it just seemed to me that too much Blues Project music, given that the template did not vary that much, with the same mixture of blues standards and psychedelic pop, was a bit of a drag. The earliest blues tracks are not more roots than anything of Projections and, if anything, sound more rinky dink. On the cuts taken from Live At The Café Au Go Go. Tommy Flanders does not have much of a blues voice and sounds like a pop singer indulging in the flavour of the moment.

 

All of the blues tunes from Live At The Café Au Go Go are light years away from the contemporary British blues band of the time, such as John Mayall, The Yardbirds, The Pretty Things, and others, who took the blues seriously and whose guitarists were vastly superior in technique and feel to the White Americans, except perhaps for Mike Bloomfield or Johnny Winter, both of whom were steeped in respectively the Chicago and Texas traditions. Danny Kalb, from the Blues Project, could be just one more psychedelic guitar player. He can play the blues runs in piercing solos yet does not sound convincing as bluesman, in the same way that Tommy Flanders does not sound anything like a guy from Mississippi.

 

The Blues Project must have been serious and earnest and dedicated to the genre, even if the pop smarts and nous of someone like AL Kooper who was not a blues guy at all, would have been a major influence in the writing and recording of the poppier songs designed to give the band hit singles with a sound that was not typical of their stage shows. On the other hand, even Cream had lightweight pop jangles to entice the masses, as did the Yardbirds.

 

Projections numbers among the first 100 records I ever owned, perhaps even the first 50, and is one those albums that rakes me back to a time and place, not necessarily a happy place, in my life which has nothing to do with the contemporaneity of the albums because so many were bought well after the initial release date, in some cases decades later. I am glad I have the album back in my life.

 

 

 

THE GROUNDHOGS

The Groundhogs started out as a purist blues group led by master guitarist Tony (TS) McPhee and once backed John Lee Hooker when he toured the UK, and recorded with him. Allegedly The Groundhogs was one of the few groups of that time and possibly the only bunch of White British blues lovers who could keep up with The Hook's musical idiosyncrasies.

In the late Sixties, following in the footsteps of so many Brit blues boomers, they transformed their purist blues into heavy blues, became a power trio and had a reasonably successful career in the hard rock idiom.

At some point between 1980 and 1981, Sygma Records, my local record store in Stellenbosch offered the double album Groundhogs' Best 1969 – 1973, at a very decently discounted price and I bought it, partly because of the price and partly because I'd read about the band and knew of the John Lee Hooker connection. In fact, the second Hooker album I ever bought was probably the album he'd recorded with the Groundhogs although there was absolutely no information on the sleeve.

Another reason for buying the Groundhogs' hits album was that John Lee Hooker's "Groundhog" (the song from which the band took its name), was the opening track of the album. At that time I'd not heard Hooker's version of his song.

After I'd listened to the whole album I was torn in two. On the one hand there was quite enough tuneful blues rock but on the other hand the songs seemed to lean towards unsubtle sludge and bombast, really silly "meaningful" lyrics and excessive soloing. "Groundhog" was essentially McPhee on his own, in a long, somewhat sparse version of the song. "BDD" was to my mind the best tune on the album with great melody and awesome playing, a proper song. Songs like "Soldier", "Eccentric Man" and "Split" (parts 1 and 4) (two of the tracks on the eponymous concept album about schizophrenia) were just cringe worthy. The trio was not always a power trio and reminded me of Grand Funk Railroad in that the guitar did not have enough power to my taste, nothing like Cream, Led Zeppelin, The Who, or any number of true power trios. McPhee also did not have the most expressive of voices.

Most of the songs are built around blues based riffs and McPhee's virtuoso guitar playing, as befitted a blues rock band. Some of the songs are much too ponderous and rely on too much aimless jamming, and then you have "Bog Roll Blues", which is some kind of a joke about a, um, toilet roll in a public lavatory in Birmingham. Well, on close listening it is social commentary.

To my mind, then, The Groundhogs had some interesting songs but were on the whole not a band whose other albums I would buy. The Groundhogs were a band of their time and I could understand why the band did not last much beyond 1975. They would perhaps have stood a better chance of survival if they'd stuck to the purist blues thing.

As is the case with so many of those old bands, The Groundhogs did get together again, even if only with McPhee as frontman. I actually bought a low budget CD featuring a concert of the Groundhogs somewhere in the Nineties, which was more or less the same set list as the hits album, albeit played in a very rough and ready way compared to the studio versions. Perhaps a nice souvenir if one attended the gig but not a memorable album.

In late 2009, and in anticipation of a move of residence and because I never played the records anymore, I gave away all my records. In 2013 I realised that I could recover some of the lost music by way digital downloads from iTunes. I did not want to replicate my entire record collection but there were some significant albums I did want to hear again and that I never found the CDs of. Groundhogs Best was one of those albums.

I must say the iTunes album sounds a lot better than how I remember the record sounding. At the moment (2014) records (now called vinyls) are trending big time and I've seen a statistic that claims record sales are at a 12-year high. Even Musica is making an effort to sell records and turntables. This is all very well but back in the day vinyl deteriorated quite quickly and even if the analogue sound is meant to be superior to digital, the lack of scratching and surface hiss makes the digital versions a far more user friendly choice for me. The Groundhogs actually sound good on digital.

If I were to hazard a guess I would say that Tony McPhee wanted to position his band somewhere between blues rock and prog rock and not so much at the super heavy end of the spectrum. The blues influences are palpable. The prog rock part may be my fancy, but the lyrical concerns of some of the tunes and the conceptualisation behind albums like Thank Christ For The Bomb and Split must have come from a more ambitious mind set than mere boogie with long guitar solos. There is no bludgeoning bombast here and some bloody artful guitar playing and a good handful of decent tunes.

The blues rock songs "BDD", "Cherry Red," "Mean Mistreater" and "3744 James Road" show the band at its best, with relentless, catchy grooves and no pseudo philosophy. Having said that, though, I am much more impressed with all of the tunes on the album than I was way back when. Groundhogs were no mere boogie purveyors and no arty farty prog dunderheads either. Now I would be quite interested in exploring the albums from which this selection was extracted and, with iTunes, why not?

On reconsideration the songs sound much better than my recollection of the vinyl versions, and though some of the more po'faced, serious lyrics are still a bit much, they are in fact mostly quite good, and McPhee may ot have the most expressive of voices but he carries his tunes quite well. The band is very good and every now and then close listening reveals a gem of an arrangement and McPhee's guitar playing is always inventive, fluid, and melodic or fierce as may be required. The Groundhogs' sound and concerns are still very much of their time yet I can now honestly say that this is a late Sixties or early Seventies band I would rate highly as worth investigating and preserving the memory of. There has always been a lot of chaff in rock and Groundhogs does not count amongst that number at all.

Tony McPhee led his band on a truly progressive path from straight blues to innovative rock with a modicum of intelligence and subtlety that is rare in blues rock. The music married power and melody. One can hardly fault him for the changing times and the punk rock revolution of the late Seventies making his music non-commercial and forcing the demise of the band. There is no telling whether The Groundhogs will ever be rated as better than the B-list band it was even at its peak. It is good to have something to remember them by ad this best of album is a grand addition to my (digital) music collection.

 

 

MACHINERI THE ALBUM

(first draft written in 2013; additions in 2013; finished off in July 2014)

I bought Machineri's eponymous debut album (2011) at the African Music Store in 2012, a couple of months after its release. I stacked it in a shelf along with a bunch of other CDs, with the vague plan of sitting down with it one day and listening closely with headphones for full sonic effect, in order to do the work justice when I wrote about it. Somehow I just could not get it together. The CD was usually on top of the stack so that supposedly I would not forget about it but for one reason or another it always ended up underneath something else end I would forget about it until I saw it again when I was looking for another album and had to pick up every CD in the stack to find the object of my curiosity.

The first part of this piece was written when I got the album and before I'd listened to it. The second part was written after listening. The curious thing was that I had uploaded the album on both my iPhone and iPad and often played the music on shuffle yet for some cosmic reason Machineri simply never came up, at least not recognisably, as the two devices carried a bunch of music that was unfamiliar to me. These days I hardly have the time to get to know any new album I buy. Firstly there is not much opportunity for listening and secondly I keep buying new stuff before I've become fully acquainted with the older stuff. When I owned 10 records I knew every word, chord and note of every song of every group intimately. Now I barely know who I'm listening to at any given time, unless it is a digital version of a record I used to own.

Anyhow, it's been a long time coming, but here are my considered thoughts on Machineri's debut album.

 

(Probably about March 2012)

Great cover. A naked woman, I guess, squats on a phallic looking rock with her back to us. Her back is painted with psychedelically styled cogs, no doubt an unsubtle allusion to the band name. My guess is that the Sannie Fox is the naked woman, as the inside section of the cover insert, which forms a single, large picture when folded out, features an equally naked man also squatting on a rock with his back to us with similar cogs painted on his back and chances are that he is the other band member, Andre Geldenhuys.

This is the type of great album cover that should feature in a coffee table book of classic album covers. Should have been an LP with gatefold sleeve. Reminds me of the work of Hipgnosis, and that is not necessarily a bad thing, even if Hipgnosis did some Pink Floyd album covers.

On the back cover there is a nice sepia, Photoshopped photograph of the band members, with Sannie Fox front and centre in her silky flowery top and mini skirt, left hand firmly on the headstock of het Fender. Andre Geldenhuys gazes dreamily at something we cannot see. Sannie Fox raises her chin slightly and stares us straight in the eyes, not necessarily confrontational but definitely direct and challenging. Maybe she is thinking about what I may write about this album, bearing in mind that I think Machineri does not quite work out as a stage performing proposition. There is a third, ghostly presence on her left and slightly behind her, looking away to the right of the viewer. Who he? Must be the drummer.

I have listened to MP3 versions of some of the songs on this collection and was quite impressed with the tunes. I must confess that I had been eagerly awaiting my acquisition of this debut.

By early 2012 this album had been out for a couple of months and I'd been idly looking for it in various branches of Musica without finding it. I suppose I could have made a real effort by going to the very large Musica at the V & A Waterfront or looking for it online, or even attending some Machineri gigs on the chance that the album would be on sale there, but that is not the way I do these things. I do not seek, I find. On my first visit to The African Music Store in 2012 I found Machineri and bought it without hesitation.

I am not exactly a huge fan, particularly not of the live Machineri. It has perhaps been my misfortune that I saw them live well before I heard any recordings, unlike, say, with Pretty Blue Guns whose album I'd bought on the strength of a teaser track on a SL Magazine sampler CD, years before I saw them play live, coincidentally headlining a bill with Machineri in support. Petty Blues Guns were great; Machineri grated.

The description of Machineri's musical and other influences on their website indicated that we should have a lot in common and that, all things being equal, I should like their music. This suspicion was confirmed by the MP3 tracks I listened to, yet as a live proposition the band did not do it for me. The riffing was ponderous and dull and Sannie Fox wailed and exuded rather than sang. The songs also seemed formless and tuneless.

Machineri does have good PR though. The band has appeared in magazines and on local television and has gigged quite regularly. Sannie Fox is a striking front woman that certainly advances the cause. Machineri must be successful if one judges solely by media attention.

Over the last 14 years I have bought a lot of local music of various genres. For my money South African rock, to use only one example, is on par with the best the rest of the world has to offer, even if South African has not yet produced a huge, dominant international success even if many local acts do tour overseas and may even make a decent living from their music. There is also a lot of mediocre, and sometimes flat out crap, music. Local boosters insist that we must support "local is lekker" regardless of the quality on the premise that all local music is almost by definition good simply because it has been released on CD. This is not so. In these days when independent releases are as much a norm as record company support, it takes only money and time to record, print and release a CD of one's own music.

 

(I9 September 2012)

I finally listened to the album only about six months after I'd bought the thing. Not only did I have a weird resistance to listening to the album but I'd also bought so many other CDs in between that I almost had no time to do it. Now I'm sitting at Arnold's restaurant in Kloof Street, having breakfast, listening to the album on my iPad through headphones, making notes on the iPad's word processing app, in-between mouthfuls of muesli, fruit and yoghurt.

Opening track, "Soul People," is Sannie Fox accapella over a drum brat.

Second song, "Stranger On The Water," starts "standing on a beach like a stranger now" which sounds like a restatement of the opening lines of a Cure song.

By the third tune the Sannie Fox vocal schtick has settled in. She has a good voice, and on "The Searchers" reminds me of Grace Slick with less histrionics, and perhaps some unknown folkie, yet the tunes ain't present much. The musical backing is subdued, perhaps mixed too low, and Fox rambles. Later on the guitars surge into a power rock finale.

Fourth tune, "Spider Suitcase", has a boogie intro that's closest to the blues they claim as influence and one hears a good twist of Canned Heat here. Fox is still wailing without much tune, double tracked on the chorus. First proper Hendrixoid guitar solo, albeit brief.

Fox goes for smouldering and sensuous, holding back on the full throttle roar.

"Drop Us A Line Ladder Operator" could be the early Black Sabbath homage albeit with less punch. This is one of my main concerns about this album. The music is just not powerful or dirty enough. What the hell is it all about? Could be that Sannie is just making it up as she goes along.

"Blood On Our Hands" sounds the most like a blues, particularly the lead guitar, and Sannie Fox sounds kind of committed to her complaint about not being good enough for the significant other in her life. With a little work this is a room filling live anthem with hot guitar solo to boot. Actually, this guy just plays lead breaks, not proper solos, but they are fiery.

Next up there is another spiffy, snappy riff, possibly the best of the album. Fox chants about a "Big Bad Machine" and mentions a broken engine, perhaps a reference to blind Willie McTell's broke down engine. Absolutely the best track so far. When I listened to the track again, on my iPhone, I got it that Fox was singing about a working engine. Oh well, the best lyrics are often the misheard ones. I hardly ever read the printed lyrics. Rough and tough little number though.

"Lovers Whim" is a rocking, wailing, lament. Sannie goes big voice in what sounds like soul diva meets metal. Good stuff.

Penultimate track, "Cold Sister," has another plodding would be heavy riff and some soaring lead guitar and a good vocal hook.

Album closer "Father Gun" illustrates the serious weakness in the Machineri musical template. The track revisits tuneless Sannie shouting about something or another she takes too seriously backed by some tasty Hendrixy guitar that seems to have no connection whatsoever with her vocal histrionics. It is dysfunctional and disconnected and irritating.

 

(July 2014(

By July 2014, when this outro is being written, Machineri has either broken up or is in hiatus and Sannie Fox has a solo career. It is probably typical of the modern music industry that bands are mostly just projects with limited life span and no expectation of, or even desire for, career longevity. Hit, git and split. The debut, and possibly only, album may then well be the only record we will ever have of the music Sannie Fox and Andre Geldenhuys made together.

Machineri was part of the South Africa blues rock revival and to their credit came to it from a completely different angle to the rest of the more traditionalist bands. The main ingredient in most in the music of their contemporaries is some element of heavy blues boogie and if Machineri employed some aspects of the heavy riff it was always just slightly skewed and off-centre. The main difference, thought, would be Sannie Fox as a female presence in an otherwise male dominated genre, barring Natasha Meister and Ann Jangle, perhaps, and the fact that the band either refused to or could not write tuneful songs with strong hooks. The performances on the album are strong and also forgettable. There are perhaps two, maximum three, really good songs on the album and the rest are no more than superior filler. Sannie and Andre had a high concept and presumably achieved their specific goal and made the record they wanted to make but I cannot see it on the list of "1000 South African rock albums you have to listen to before you die."

 

 

 

 

 

 

NATASHA MEISTER GOES ONLY HALF WAY

(first draft written in 2012; finished off in July 2014)

On Friday 20 January 2012 there was a full page article on Natasha Meister in the Top of the Times entertainment supplement to the Cape Times. My impression was that she was some kind of young, beautiful Canadian blues guitarist, now settled in Cape Town, who could not only trade blues riffs with the likes of Dan Patlansky but who was a serious songwriter too. Meister was due to support Patlansky at a Kirstenbosch gig on the weekend following this feature. I then looked her up on YouTube.

There were a handful of Meister clips on YouTube, including some of a solo performance for some internet based radio station, in which she is seated on a high stool and accompanies herself with her Stratocaster.

My first reaction to these clips, after the reinforcement of how young and beautiful Meister was, was that she was not in any particular way a blues guitarist or blues singer. She sounded more like a folkie with an electric guitar, writing pop melodies with deeply meaningful lyrics. So much for the hype, I thought. The chick toted a mean looking Strat yet made music that was soft at the centre and pointless in the bigger scheme of things.

On one day of madness, not long after, at The African Music Store in Long Street I bought Sixgun Gospel's debut EP, Peachy Keen's debut EP and the full length album, Half Way, credited to the Natasha Meister Band. I guess Meister had both more ambition and more money than the other two bands, hence the full length album. The band is ostensibly a trio, with the rhythm section comprised of veterans Roger Bashew (bass) and Paul Tizzard (drums), but Bashew and Shari Meister also contribute guitar parts.

Half Way is definitely not a blues album. The set is a mixture of bluesy singer=songwriter pop and some tougher soul-blues tunes. Meister has an affecting voice, at times reminiscent of Nora Jones or a less soulful, less gritty Bonnie Raitt, that is a tad too smooth but she sure can sing. The pop songs are low-key, melodic and sang in an understated manner. The more soulful songs are sung in an altogether more assertive tone without actually giving us any of that old soul fervour or burning passion that would make all the difference between efficient and glorious. Along the way one does hear a good deal of jazzy blues chord progressions and tasty blues licks. Natasha Meister can play guitar – if the most prominent guitar parts are her contributions. Even better, she has a voice that bears repeated listening.

"Winter Storm," "You're So Good For Me" and "Good Thang" are the toughest blues inflected tunes on the album and are agonisingly brief glimpses into what Meister is capable of beyond the anodyne pop of the general trend on the album.

In the USA, at least, there are currently a number of women who are taking on the traditional male dominance of guitar blues as singers and guitarists of no mean ability. Meister is still young enough to have a long, hard, dues paying road ahead of her and in due course she may well achieve a tougher blues approach but on her debut she seems to be hedging her bets. She writes, and seemingly wants to make, radio friendly music in late period Bonnie Raitt territory. Unfortunately there is not much on this record that is memorable beyond the moment the CD stops playing. The tunes are just not strong enough and there are no catchy riffs or definitive moments. Even if Meister would just sing with more abandon and get a little crazy the album would have been more interesting.

This collection of tunes is what one would call an assured debut, an album that makes one look forward to the next one, which hopefully will be an album that will be more assertive musically and with more memorable tunes. The production is excellent but, as is customary with producers (and studio savvy backing musicians) who are more keen on eliminating flaws than retaining a bit of looseness, the edge has been taken off and sophisticated production values win out over a the necessary modicum of rawness or quirkiness that would have made a nice enough album a powerful album.

I like this record yet I am not moved by it. Too much care was taken with it and it is too careful. Pleasant is not always pleasing. The blues have to be at least a little dirtier than this. This is a late night, quiet hours, kind of album, which is not a bad thing, just a subdued thing and background music will never grab your attention. Next time Meister should not merely go half way but dare to strut it all the way.

THE PARLOR VINYLS

This band sounds uncannily like the White Stripes to the extent that one really has to check the CD to make sure you did not mix up the discs. To be precise, the heavier, less quirky, side of the White Stripes or perhaps Jack White singing for the Black Keys in their earliest heavy blues style.

There has been a real revival in blues and blues rock in South Africa of late and the number of bands ploughing this furrow seems to have increased exponentially over the last few years. Most seem to align themselves to the ponderous heavy blues rock of the late Sixties and early Seventies with few actually playing anything like straightforward blues.

I've been going to Mabu Vinyl (currently in Rheede Street, Cape Town) for a number of years now, not to buy second hand records (nowadays commonly referred to as vinyls) but to search for cheap CD albums by South African rock acts. On one such visit early in 2014, when I was looking for Crimson House Blues' debut album (having just bought their second release) and met Brian Currin, who told me he has a blues radio show, but could not assist me with the Crimson House Blues album at the time. I ended up buying albums by a couple of other blues related acts, like Mean Black Mamba.

On another such visit Brian showed me the debut albums by Ann Jangle and The Parlor Vinyls, describing the latter as acoustically based old timey blues. Perhaps Brian had never listened to the album. It is most definitely not acoustic based traditional blues at all. In fact, if I were to give a pithy sound bite description of the record I would say the tracks sound like a White Stripes cover band playing their own material. Singer Niel Smit, who plays all the instruments except drums, must want to sound like Jack White and the fact that Parlor Vinyls is a duo brings the comparison closer to home.

The band is from Stellenbosch. I'd never heard of Niel Smit. Riaan Nieuwenhuis, the drummer, is probably best known as the former drummer of Delta Blue.

On reflection Brian Currin might have been guided by the album cover in his assessment of the music. The cover photograph is styled n sepia to look like something from day of old, featuring an acoustic guitar and a general vintage feel, with Nieuwenhuis dressed as a caricature of a small time Brooklyn mobster and Smit looking like a guy who has fixated on the Indiana Jones look.

I was quite excited to hear that these guys were delving into really old school blues, as it is not really a thing on the local blues scene, and I was relatively disappointed to find a wholly electric album and a rather heavy one at that. Not to mention a pseudonymous Jack White album.

One must recognise and salute the ambition and enthusiasm of the two guys or perhaps really just Niel Smit, as the songwriter and prime mover behind the project. He knows his way around a riff, and really and truly gives it a go. According to the sleeve notes the tracks were recorded over three days in late June 2013 but there must have been some extensive rehearsals to evolve and perfect the intricate riffing.

Although each song is individually crafted they tend to start sounding the same once you get past the first three tracks. There is no single stand out cut. The songs sound pretty much alike in style and tune. The intensity of the attack is also the same from song to song and eventually one longs for something simpler and softer, like the acoustic blues Brian Currin promised me, or that Jack White can write. Okay, right at the end of the album there is the staccato piano on "Inner City Blues" (not the Marvin Gaye song nor even the Rodriguez song), and there is the acoustic guitar of the clumsily titled "Ringing of a Clock Bell." I guess the consistently applied concept of the album makes sense though greater variety would have made the record more compelling. I cannot quiet see myself listening to this album a lot.

The production values are high and the technical abilities and skill of the musicians cannot be doubted but production values and technical skill do not make a record. One needs actual song writing, with tunes and hooks and one needs some quirkiness, some unique selling proposition that will make the listener return again and again. The Parlor Vinyls do not have that quality or advantage. It is a project and, like most projects, will quickly disappear into history once it becomes apparent that the project was fatally flawed.

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN FRICK BAND AT THE URBAN CROSSROADS

John Frick was a founder member, guitarist and vocalist of the Blues Broers, still an institution on the South African blues scene, staring as part of the vanguard of the new blues scene in Cape Town in the early Nineties and now the grandfathers of the current revival of blues and blues based rock.

Frick left South Africa in the mid-Nineties to settle in the Netherlands where he has kept his personal blues flag flying. As far as I can tell there has always been a thriving blues scene in the Netherlands, since the Sixties, and it seems to be as alive and well today as ever. Certainly Mr Frick is doing his best to vibe it up and give it fresh, sustainable life

As a musical form blues is always described as deceptively simple and yet intricate and full of complications at the same time, with the infinite variations on the basic tropes a skilled bluesman or woman can work. The changes are well known and not difficult to master as such but it takes someone with real feeling and talent to innovate and to refresh the clichés. One can try to replicate the blues standards as closely or as loosely as possible or one can try to bring a new twist and interpretation by writing one's own blues.

John Frick does a bit of both. He knows and loves the standards and he writes his own tunes with an urban contemporary infusion of what the blues means today to a musician and an audience that did not grow up in the Mississippi Delta or the Southside of Chicago yet have troubles, trials and tribulations of their own, even in the Netherlands.

Most blues seem to be about a woman. You could write a song about the issues you're having with the woman in your life or you could disguise the issues you're having with your employer with the metaphorical reference to your boss as a woman who gives you shit. You could also write about generic tough times, such as the Great Depression so many of the original Delta bluesmen had lived through or the similar economic woes the world has been suffering from since the great stock market meltdown of 2007. Virtually any blues theme that was relevant in 1927, 1937, 1947 or 1987 can still be relevant today

John Frick wrote all the songs for the John Frick Band's latest album Urban Crossroads (2014), sings them and plays guitar and is backed by bass (played by Rob Nagel, John's old mate from the Blues Broers, who also contributes mouth harp) keyboards and drums, and with horns on a couple of tunes.

I would say that Frick is influenced by both the electric downhome style of the Southside and the more sophisticated Westside style of the Chicago blues school, with a bit of Texas blues too. He likes melody and punchy yet lyrical guitar solos and his slide playing does not seem to be influenced by any particular school, being neither completely as raucous as the Elmore James or Hound Dog Taylor approach nor as sweetly soaring and subtle as the Duane Allman way of playing. Inevitably it is an amalgam of influences that produces a strong, striking alloy. To top it all, the songs are masterfully arranged with all kinds of intriguing musical business going on to make each one an individually engaging experience that is not only rewarding listen after listen but also reveals new quirky twists each time. A lot of modern blues consists purely of a competent, if one is lucky, rhythm section, running through the tropes to allow the lead guitarist to play long, loud and technically intricate solos with almost no emotional depth in support of workmanlike songs designed to be no more than the excuse for the excessive guitar playing. That John Frick writes good songs is what truly makes it rewarding to take the time to listen to Urban Crossroads.

Urban Crossroads is what I would call a grower of an album, the kind that really settles into our psyche only after a few spins and then won't let go. I knew a few tunes from YouTube clips and they made the most immediate impact. In fact, my first thought on hearing the album for the first time in the car, was that "Blinded," the slow, loping opening cut, was misplaced as the kick off number and that the record started engaging me completely only from about the halfway mark. That just goes to show that the first introduction to a new album should not be via the car stereo.

By and by I sat down in my easy chair, hooked up the headphones and really listened to the damn thing carefully and with due attention and, damn, it revealed a whole bunch of cleverness and delights! The second and third cuts, respectively "Get A Load" and "Same Way Too," set out the brilliant wares of John Frick's stall in their different ways. "Get A Load" is a slide and horn driven, pounding, shuffle thing with one of the many intricate arrangements on the record. The interplay between the horns, the guitar and the rhythm section gives the track an infectious bounce that is hard to resist. Then Frick digs down deep into his melodic blues box for "Same Way Too," which is a deep Southern soul blues that echoes Little Milton to me. This tune is THE killer track on the album and the showcase for exactly how good Mr Frick is as songwriter, arranger and performer. You can absolutely not beat heartfelt emotion expressed through the medium of a solid tune.

The next 6 tracks alternate slow and fast blues, each one as inventive as the other. There is never a sense of same old, same old or of the band sitting back to jam on the hoary old changes. With "Sadder And Wiser Man," another slow blues lament for missed chances, the band pulls back on the reins for a little breather before gearing up for peaking on the last three tracks and a climactic set final. Penultimate cut, "She Got Ways," is so flat out good it could be an undiscovered Willie Dixon composition and once again has that wonderful interplay between slide guitar, horns, and tuneful chorus, and a fiercely melodic slide solo. The final track, "Gotta Be Worth It," is by far the shortest track on the album, apparently in order to secure airplay, and is a good, positive, funky shot of energy to say goodbye on.

There are a number of South African bands and duos currently giving themselves out as blues bands but hardly any of them actually play blues. The accrual trend leans towards heavily rocked up blues, blues rock or eclectic blues influenced roots music. Even John Frick's old band, the Blues Broers, nowadays is an adult rock band infused with the spirit of the blues rather than direct from the Delta. Their albums mix in blues with whatever else they have to offer. John Frick Band is the real deal. There is no mistaking the music for anything else than stone blues with the infusion of contemporary influences and attitudes, which is just what blues has always been about. No contemporary bluesman, whether in the Mississippi Delta or on the Southside of Chicago, or elsewhere, every thought of themselves as playing old-timey, traditional music. Each and every one was as hip and as modern as he could be, reflecting contemporary mores and woes rather than being stuck in some moribund folk tradition. In The Hague Delta this is what John Frick is doing. He mixes the tradition of blues with his view of life as he lives it, writes great tunes to go with the words and plays brilliant guitar parts that are understated when required and brash when required. The rhythm section swings solidly and Leo Birza's keyboard parts are the filigree detail. Tom Moerenhout's horn parts are proof that brass and blues should live in symbiosis.

By the way, by now I am also quite impressed with "Blinded" even if I still believe that is a very low key opener for the album.

So, I love this album. It is a good collection of blues. There are at least killer cuts that deserve to become standards over time. Can't wait for the next album.

 

 

 

In Memoriam: Johnny Winter (1944 to 2014)

On 16 July 2014 Johnny Winter died at age 70 on tour in Europe. 

Johnny came from the Texas blues guitar tradition, which is what he practiced for most of his career except for a digression into hard rock in the mid-Seventies, aided and abetted by Rick Derringer after overcoming a heroin addiction. 

In the late ‘70s, leaving behind the grandstanding hard rock, Winter was an integral part, as producer and musician, in the revival of the fortunes of Muddy Waters, starting with Hard Again. After that brief interlude of brilliance, which included a couple of records recorded with the Muddy Waters band, he kept going as a journeyman blues musician, releasing several albums and touring regularly, without much further distinction other than as becoming a grand old man of the blues. 

As a teenage White, albino blues aficionado in Texas he must have been a strange sight with his huge talent and fierce ambition to carry him through. There are some photographs of the young Johnny looking very cool with his almost pure white crew cut and Ray Ban Wayfarers. He could’ve been part of Booker T & The MGs. By the late ‘60s he was known for his ultra-long, very straight hair and almost invisible eyebrows that gave him a true otherworldly presence.

In 1968, when Winter was 24, Columbia Records signed him to a recording contract with the largest advance paid to any blues or rock act at that time. He played at Woodstock and though he’s not in the movie there’s video material on YouTube. 

Like Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter sunk into heroin addiction in the ‘70s, and was then guided into rock and roll stardom by Rick Derringer's hard rock nous with versions of  "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo"  and “Highway 61 Revisited,” and became known for his blistering live performances with plenty of white hot lead guitar. 

Johnny had a brother Edgar, a keyboardist with leanings towards jazz rather than blues, and with whom Johnny recorded a couple of albums over the length of his career even if The Edgar Winter Group was part of the glam-rock zeitgeist.

Johnny Winter came to my attention with the reviews of Hard Again (1977), that revived Muddy Water’s fortunes, along with the two following albums. Johnny Winter produced Hard Again, played guitar on it, and toured with the Waters band during the subsequent tour.

Winter’s own career in blues received a new spark with White, Hot & Blue and Nothing but the Blues recorded with the Muddy Waters band. Both Hard Again and White, Hot & Blue were my introductions to the Chicago style blues pioneered by Muddy Waters.

Before this, though, I'd become acquainted with Winter as rocker with "Rock and Roll. Hoochie Koo," "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Jumping jack Flash." I didn’t care much for this side of Winter whose  piercing, fast fingered turbo boosted style of playing on these tunes, particularly live, showed an astonishing ability but dragged after a while. The short, more concise and more fluid playing on the blues albums was much more to my taste.

For many years the  White, Hot & Blue LP was the only Winter album in my collection eventually I bought CD versions Nothing But The Blues, an anthology of blues tracks from the ‘90s, a few collections of pre-fame releases and, in only about 2024, White, Hot & Blue.

Winter released blues albums on Alligator Records, Virgin Pointblank and other labels, and none of them appealed to me. I imagined that the music would be based around Eighties production techniques with an emphasis on a rockier rhythm section rather than a swinging blues rhythm section with Johnny Winter's flamethrower guitar on top. Alligator Records, in particular, made an effort in the ‘80sto bring blues up to date with contemporary production techniques and simply produced a great deal of stodgy, lumpen music. An anthology of the best of his releases made much more sense for the collection.

In the late ‘90s there was a sudden slew of very early Winter blues recordings on low budget CD compilations, often with the same tunes reshuffled from CD to CD with different covers and titles. I believe that these tracks were recorded in Texas during the dues paying years before the big Columbia Records contract. The truth of the matter is, despite somewhat dubious production at times, these early blues performances are quite tasty and satisfying and a good record of the state of blues in the early to mid-Sixties, before the major boom that led to Columbia showing interest in Johnny Winter, otherwise no more than an albino, White blues guy on the chitlin' circuit.

Johnny Winter has the distinction of releasing two debut albums in 1969 because the small company with whom he was contracted before the Columbia Records signing had a album's worth of tracks in the vault and they obviously decided that it was time to cash in on a guy who had unexpectedly been pushed onto the big stage. This small label record was The Progressive Blues Experiment. The big label debut on Columbia Records was called simply Johnny Winter.

On the first of these two albums Winter leads a power trio, with Uncle John Turner on bass and Tommy Shannon on drums, and plays a set of blues standards mostly electric but also some solo acoustic guitar tracks, in what can only be called blues with amplifiers turned to 11. One could compare the Winter band with Cream, the original blues power trio, and the main difference would be that Cream's rhythm section is far more interesting to listen to in its own right where Turner and Shannon simply stick to the basics and keep it together for Winter's guitar pyrotechnics. Johnny plays a Gibson Explorer where Clapton plays a Gibson Les Paul and Winter emphasises piercing high notes and a style where a dexterous flood of notes drives the music and Clapton plays with a greater melodic fluency and a less shrill tone. Overall Johnny Winter sounds like a guy playing deep blues really loudly and Cream sounds like a heavy blues band with ambitions beyond the blues.

On Johnny Winter the man leads a larger ensemble, with the core rhythm section, and, amongst others, his brother Edgar on keyboards and with a horn section. The set mixes Winter originals with blues standards and the feel is that of late Sixties heavy progressive blues (more so than the probably ironically named The Progressive Blues Experiment, which was experimental only in the volume at which Winters played) and the production values are clearly far higher than on the other album. Although the blues tropes are present and correct the roots of the later hard rock sound are already in place. Having said that, Johnny Winter still plays the blues with feeling and his trademark rolling cascades of notes.

The rock and roll version of Johnny Winter didn’t appeal to me because he just seemed to play too much loud, unsubtle guitar, in keeping with the post-Clapton, post-Hendrix overlordship of the guitar hero in rock. Where Winter once covered blues standards with a sense of understanding of the blues, he now selected prominent rock songs by Dylan and the Rolling Stones to showcase his furious attack and basically started jamming on stage for as long as possible to get through his sets with minimum attention to quality. It seemed to me, from the live albums, that he could pretty much just set himself on cruise control and solo for as long as he could while his rhythm section kept the beat going. He was on junk and his audiences were stoned as well and it must have made a lot of sense in the context. Listening to those albums now are nothing but a trial.

For my money, the Muddy Waters band has produced the best, most sympathetic setting for the Johnny Winters blues experience. The band swings behind him; the veterans know when to lay back and when to push and never overwhelm or sound workmanlike. The tunes ate mostly well-known and have actual tunes to them, and the ensemble playing suits Winters well because he can be as fluid or as sharp as he likes, while seamless fitting into the groove. It is an ensemble, with each instrumentalist playing a part and not one overpowering the rest or showboating. 

The later blues albums tend to be too much of Johnny Winter with rhythm section that is always solid and dependable yet seems to be designed to be a backdrop for the guitar and voice and not part of a band of equals. It is all very well to have a distinctive style as your trade mark but you gotta alleviate it with actual tunes and enough variations on the theme to keep the listener's attention.

There is a YouTube clip of Johnny Winter playing four numbers in a small club in Copenhagen in 1970 that illustrates the point. He is backed by bass and drums and plays a blues set, with a detour to "Johnny B Goode." His main ax is a Fender with a humbucking pick up and for "Mean Town Blues" when he plays slide he switches to a 12-string electric. The performances are extended and he plays plenty of guitar all over the songs. The audience seems rapt, or maybe they are overwhelmed by the extended solos. Although the fluency and talent of the guitar player are not in doubt the performance is curiously enervated. There is no spark at all and the guitarist could have been any local body with the technique and the repertoire and at the time the world must have been over supplied with blues bands. I can only imagine that the Danes came to hear Johnny Winter because he was an American and something of a legend and not because he was a certified genius of the blues.

This is why I maintain that the substantive legend of the Winter legacy will not rest on the totality of the body of work he's left us but principally on his first couple of albums from the Late Sixties, where the style was introduced and defined, and records with Muddy Waters and the Waters band in the late Seventies. Johnny Winter had to reign in his natural tendency to over play and to go on far beyond the bounds of necessity or pleasure when playing guitar solos and rather to rely on the strength of the song he was performing and the ensemble playing of the band to carry the entire tune.

No doubt Johnny Winter will always be held in high regard by blues lovers, lovers of blues guitar and all round rock fans who appreciate the craftsmanship, drive and talent of someone like Johnny Winter. I cannot see myself investing heavily into the back catalogue except for Johnny Winter and Second Winter. 

For all the technical skill on display, one needs only a few Johnny Winter records in one’s life.

Other than White, Hot & Blue and Nothing but the Blues, I’d argue that Winter’s best recordings are as a sideman for Muddy Waters Hard Again, I'm Ready, King Bee and Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live. These records represent the best of Johnny Winter because he’s restrained and plays to serve the songs. You can tell that he’s a master of his craft without being bludgeoned by endless  facile soloing.

 

  

The Animals

Back in the days of my youth "House of the Rising Sun" was the one tune every aspirant young guitarist wanted to play, learnt to play and usually played at parties. Perhaps because it was an intricate, memorable melody that demonstrated a skill that was of a higher level than merely strumming three chords. Anyhow, this song was the monster hit of The Animals, a traditional blues song, arranged by Alan Price with the distinctive organ motif, and the best known song by Newcastle's finest exponents of mid-Sixties R & B.

"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" and "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" were the other well-known tunes. None of them were written by the band, as was the case for most of their recordings. The first two are Brill Building pop re-imaginations of soul and the third is another traditional song, previously recorded by Bob Dylan for his debut album. Allegedly the Animals' electric R & B version of "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" motivated Dylan to go electric.

In the early Sixties, after the decline of the skiffle and trad jazz scenes, the UK pop scene was divided roughly into two camps, the poptastic beat groups following in the footsteps of the Beatles, and the rough and ready R & B groups like the Rolling Stones and The Animals who cared less for pop music unless it was Motown and who had something of a purist bent towards the blues that influenced them to play it in the first place. When one looks at the histories of a number of prominent British bands of the late Sixties, one will see how many of them originated as R & B or blues bands who eventually became more musically and artistically ambitious.

Apparently the Animals were called by such because of a wild stage show when the band sill had no permanent name and the group adopted the nickname as a badge of honour. Eric Burdon, vocals, and Alan Price, organ and piano, were the leading lights. Burdon had the voice and demeanour of the great White blues singer and Price was the musical genius. The band was pumping and if one closed one's eyes you could imagine you were listening to a Black bar band somewhere in the Deep South of the USA.

The Animals, in common with the Beatles and Stones, and many other contemporaries, liked R & B because it was a tough kind of music and had a pop edge too. The Stones and The Animals might also have had blues roots but these were sublimated to a degree as the music was somehow more serious than the party flavour of the R & B styles they preferred.

I knew the history of the Animals from The Story of Pop and I had heard "House of the Rising Sun," without knowing much more about the music before I bought a double album of The Animals' greatest hits from Sygma Records in Stellenbosch. I was a regular browser in the record store, with as much knowledge of the inventory as the sales guys, and one day I saw this Animals' double album there at a good price, always a motivation to me.

I asked the sales guy to play me some of the tracks on the turntable on the counter. In those days it was almost de rigeur for a prospective buyer, or even just a browser, to ask to listen to records before putting money down for them.

"I'm Crying" was the opening cut on the album. I had never heard this song before and within 30 seconds of listening to it I was hooked. I only listened to this one track, took the headphones off and told the shop guy that I wanted this record without further ado. Just that first track convinced me that it would be worth the asking price of the record.

This collection was great. The music was exuberant organ driven R & B with Eric Burdon's knowing, sly Britblues voice on top, sometimes almost goofy, sometimes just giddy with excitement at the pounding beat. This was by no means deep blues; this was sweaty, smoky club music for dancers.

The guys mixed Ray Charles ("Talking 'Bout You" with gospel fervour), John Lee Hooker ("Boom Boom" as a blues twist), Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and stomped with gusto, verve and brio; all that good, good stuff. I could understand why their wild onstage antics, fuelled no doubt by Newcastle brown ale and pills, and this outrageous energy could have brought them the nickname "animals."

More than thirty years later I've bought a similar album from iTunes, with some tunes I'd not heard before, such as "Gonna Send You Back To Walker", "I Believe To My Soul" and "Let The Good Times Roll" and with the omission of "For Miss Caulker" and "The Story of Bo Diddley." It is still a splendid collection of tunes I've loved for a long time. The album represents a joyous and fiery pleasure.

In the early years of building my record collection I bought blues albums by the greats like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and others alongside records by White blues and R & B artists and got to know a number of blues standards in their interpretations by the White guys before I had a chance to hear the original versions and in some cases I yet have to hear the original. The Animals provided one such education. Although, for example, "Boom Boom" and "Dimples" are made over as blues influenced pop dance tracks fit for a mid-Sixties discotheque, the Animals do something really special with "I'm Mad Again" in a way that I have not heard John Lee Hooker improve on.

The purist blues approach was much more prevalent in the late Sixties British blues boom especially with the rise of the superstar guitarist, than at the time the Animals and their peers came up. The early bands were not built around, nor relied on, virtuosity and star soloists and followed a pattern closer to that of the classic Chicago Southside electric blues ensemble template. The R & B guys were also more into entertaining in dance clubs than playing to audiences who preferred paying respectful and rapt attention to their idols.

The Animals played the kind of blues that defied you to stay still even if the lyrics somehow portrayed some sad situation typical of the blues. One could therefore argue that the likes of The Animals were far closer to the spirit and reality of the Southside of Chicago than the more purist bands that followed.