The Ratrod Cats rattle their snake

The Ratrod Cats are a refreshingly retro rockabilly trio from Cape Town who definitely do not worship at the psychobilly altar. Their debut album, Come On Snake, Let’s Rattle (2013) is a showcase for an apparent love and respect for a genre that is one of the most enduring rock and roll offshoots from the Fifties, probably the  most exciting too. 

The term rockabilly is an obvious combination of rock and hillbilly, the fusion of the visceral power of early rock and roll and rollicking backwoods country, with the volume pushed to overload. The typical Fifties rockabilly act was powered by a simple, relentless backbeat, walking bass lines and a shrill skittering lead guitar with leads that are all over the place, the whole guaranteed to promote excitement and frenetic jiving. The Fifties rockabilly bands were the Pacific Northwest punk bands of their day. There were many of them that never made it big, yet released local records and were big in their hometown for a year or two.

Rockabilly, like the blues, never died out and just went underground for many years, apparently kept alive only by the Teddy Boys and neo-Teddy Boys in the UK. It is not coincidental that The Stray Cats made it big in Britain before they became popular in the USA. In the Eighties bands like The Cramps pioneered the punk meets rockabilly subgenre that became known as psychobilly and South Africa even had its own psychobilly band in The Psycho Reptiles. It seemed that psychobilly simply required a huge quaff, punk speed and bad attitude. Currently we have Martin Rocka who not only has the wrestler mask and the power rockabilly riffs but also specialises in quite offensive sexist humour that is probably meant to be cartoonish.

The Ratrod Cats have a quite traditional sound with the obvious advantages of modern technology and they are determined to update a genre that is often the subject of po-faced imitation rather than innovation. The Ratrods do not particularly innovate and there are many echoes of well-known songs and riffs in their self-written songs but, having said that, they also do not sound like a tribute band. On the whole this is a satisfying album though one wishes every now and then that the musicians were not so careful and would just go crazy for a few minutes. Perhaps they save that craziness for the gigs they play.

I am not sure whether the lyrics are sometimes deliberate throwbacks and knowing steals from the standards or are just lazy rhyming. When one seas song titles like “Rock Tonight” or “Rockabilly rebel” one wants to cringe but then there are the wonders of “I Ain’t Lying,” “Under Your Spell” and “Katalina” and the penny drops. These guys can write really good tunes. The only real let down is that vocalist KC Royal does not quite carry off the braggadocio or outright menace that the songs demand. A rockabilly singer must have some manic in him that is just eager to burst out in song.

Although some of the knowing rock and roll clichés are a tad forced and makes one wonder why the songwriters could not have been more original and inventive in their homage, the music is party music and swings quite nicely and is enjoyable to listen to. I would say that this is decent effort as a debut and would hope that The Ratrod Cats can sustain their career fro long enough to release another record with some improved songwriting and music that truly captures the feral intensity of the best rockabilly.

Going Ballistic

Calling for the Crazy (2014) is the swaggering, self-assured debut album of a young blues-rock band previously known as Ballistic Blues with a tough version of Buddy Guy’s “Mary Had A Little Lamb” (erroneously credited to Stevie Ray Vaughan) on the SA Bluesbreakers album,

According to a Rolling Stone article from February 2014 the band member found their way to deep blues through Jimi Hendrix and discovered Vaughan relatively recently. The article does not elaborate on their music collections and I would dearly love to know how they actually came to the blues and what blues albums they own and listen to.  If Joe Bonamassa features large, we’re talking epic fail, as an example of technique and “craft” triumphing over soul and guts and sheer emotional energy.

Anyhow, if the blues influence The Ballistics, it is an influence that permeates their music rather being the overt calling card.  The Pretty Blue Guns had the same thing going on over the length of two albums, and they are sorely missed.

This blues and hard rock mix is a significant strand of the fabric of the local pop tapestry at this time. A number of bands take their cue from the classic blues rockers of the Sixties and Seventies, the bands that exemplified hard rock as opposed to heavy metal, and latter-day purveyors from White Stripes to Black Keys to Rival Sons, and others. On the local scene, to cite a few examples, Taxi Violence and The Black Cat Bones play hard blues rock, Shadowclub just plays hard and tough, Crimson House Blues play weird-ass roots blues music, Mean Black Mamba plays primitive juke joint blues and Albert Frost and the Blues Brothers play pretty traditional blues when they don’t play superior AOR.  Gerald Clark brings soul to blues. Dan Patlansky sucks the soul out of blues.

Where does this leave The Ballistics?

It leaves them with a damn fine record of high energy rock with a blues core.

Opening cut “The Dust Song” kicks into high gear from the first note  and the pace is well-nigh relentless from there on. Not that the band plays punk rock fast, they simply channel intensity throughout. The arrangements are not very intricate yet each song has something interesting going on: a riff, a lead guitar part, a strong chorus, some interesting lyrics caught on the half volley.

“No Harm,” following the title track has a naggingly familiar guitar hook that sounds like something from the heydays of mid-Seventies hard rock, as does the brief lead break. This is not a bad thing at all and is yet more evidence of the band’s roots.

Something similar occurs with the rhythm guitar part of “She’s With Me” which sounds like Big Star or something. It is also the most poppy song so far, with a solid hook, great tune and splendid chorus.  This is the kind of song that should be the first single off the record.   

“Blueberry Pie,” on the other hand, sounds like Status Quo.

“A Night In You” is yet another mid-Seventies throwback with a big, big chorus and anthemic status. Followed immediately by “He Who Knocks” which is cut from similar fabric although not so much of an anthem.

Last cut, “Sugar,” is a boogie stomper that ends the set with as much swagger as with which the band entered.  The Ballistics know they’ve rocked the house fearlessly and unapologetically and carry the promise of doing it some more on another day in another place. Or  all the time on my iPod.

I am currently truly enamored with The Strypes from Ireland, a four piece of very young guys who are influenced by blues ant the UK pub rock scene of the mid- to late-Seventies. On the surface they seem to have much in common musically with The Ballistics. The two bands clearly look back to a similar era of rock history after heavy blues and glam rock and before punk and late period heavy metal, when hard rock, influenced by blues and informed by pop smarts, was the cutting edge of rock and roll when played by non-mainstream bands.

The South African music scene is very diverse, with room for almost every genre there is, and to my mind there is a great deal of dross and mediocrity there, and I am not talking about lack of technical proficiency, because often the proficiency is exactly what drives the mediocrity, but a pervading sense of pandering to some kind of standard MOR thing that is so calculatedly commercial that it reeks.

To play the kind of music The Ballistics play one must have a dedication to something else than mere commercial success and that things is love for the roots of the music and your own ability to transcend those roots and make something new out of the age old clay.  Tick that box. You also need to have fun with it. It seems to me that The Ballistics are having fun with it to the max.  That means I’m having fun with it and that is alright with me.

Gerald Clark pours Black Water

(I wrote this, or at least most of it except for the track by track analysis, way back, shortly after I bought album, but never got around to publishing it on my blog due to technical difficulties with accessing the blog. Hence the lack of contemporaneity.)

Gerald Clark, once the vocalist for Delta Blue and now a solo artist, is one of the treasures of South African music. He has a genuinely soulful voice, writes lyrics that sound old even when they are brand new and makes music that never fails to thrill.  His chosen field is blues and though he does not walk a lonely road along this path, he does not have many peers in this country.

He has released an Afrikaans album called Sweepslag en there is a virtual album as MP3 tracks on the Rhythm Records online store website. I’ve not bought any of these songs.

Late in 2011 I looked at Clark's website and contacted his manager to enquire whether Clark had released any CDs and was told that none was available but that I could have a copy of a DVD of a show recorded at a West Coast location earlier in 2011. I duly acquired the DVD called “Concert on the Coast.”

“Concert on the Coast” is a multi-disc package with the DVD of the live gig plus a CD with the audio recording.

In November 2012 I popped into The African Music Store and found Black Water, a proper studio album with a quite elegant cardboard sleeve with poster.

The two sets are companion pieces as they have a number of songs in common. Presumably Gerald Clark was road testing his songs before recording them in a studio setting.

At the live gig Clark is backed by Henry Steel, his old mucker from Delta Blue, bassist-to-the-stars Schalk Joubert, and drummer Tim Rankin. A solid, tight, tasteful combo that respects the blues and knows how to make simplicity powerful.

Clark plays a lot of acoustic guitar, one tune with a Telecaster and a handful of tunes on a Gibson 335, which allegedly was made in the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo and is wholly authentic old school, then.

The packaging contains no detail on authorship of the tunes. Clark performs a bunch of blues and R & B standards such as “Hallelujah, I love Her So”, “Stand By Me“, “Come On In My Kitchen”, “Stranger Blues” and “It's Alright”, as well as a bunch of his own compositions, including the anomaly that is “Elandsbaai”, the only Afrikaans song in the set and  the only non-blues.

The performances are energetic and powerful and swing easy. There is no grandstanding from any one and the musicians give the tunes room to move. I guess it is not authentic given that we are listening to a group of |South Africans and because Clark, to my mind, fits better as a soul singer, or a R & B artist in the vein of Ray Charles or Bobby 'Blue” Bland than as some Mississippi Delta bluesman.

The easy swagger of this live is a far cry from the rather stilted performances on the Delta Blue debut album, recorded live in Stellenbosch, where the musicians were not yet fully acclimatised to the blues and were   acting it out instead of feeling it. In the blues game you cannot beat time and experience as the vital ingredients for producing music that lives and breathes, and truly satisfies.

The Black Water album is a different proposition altogether. The album packaging contains no background information whatsoever and I do not know when or where it was recorded or who plays on it. Clark wrote all but three of the songs.

 The 2 opening cuts, “It Ain't You” and “Black Water” perhaps not so coincidentally are also the first 2 songs performed at the live gig. “Ain't going to Heaven” is a new version of one of the standout songs on Heaven, so far the last Delta Blue album.

For my money Delta Blue may be the most underrated band in South Africa. The run of 3 albums from Turn through Inbluestation to Heaven represent a pinnacle of blues and soul inflected rock from this country, and would fit proudly alongside similar music on record shelves all over the world. 

Well, whatever crack band Clark put together to back him on Black Water acquit themselves magnificently. This is an insanely great soul-blues album that not only nods the head to tradition but is also fiercely contemporary. Clark has one of the best voices in the country and writes the best lyrics in the blues and soul context, that sound as if they were written decades ago yet do not slavishly imitate the standards. Clark follows the folk blues tradition of taking well-worn phrases and concerns and making them his own in the fashion of, for example John Lee Hooker.

The band plays tough when required, bluesy, soulful and with finesse, like a countrysoulblues band with a unique approach to the music. Delta Blue did not much sound like anybody else, once they got past the debut album, and neither does Gerald Clark. Sometimes this kind of individualism is more of impedance in the quest for commercial acceptance and the hope of making a living in music. In Clark’s case the independence of thought and approach makes him a star, albeit not perhaps of mega proportions, but I can see him developing a following akin to the devoted following of one Van Morrison, another guy who has always followed his own path and refused to pander.

“I Ain’t You” is a mellow a dn soulful country blues roots type thing and “Black Water” is a swamp boogie with tasty bottelmeck slide guitar  and a driving electric guitar solo. With these two tunes Gerlad Clark sets out his stall. The vocals are going to be soulful and the music is going to be  tough, stripped to the bone. The opening cuts are followed by the over-amped shuffle blues of “Giving Up On Love” that sounds like something you’d hear at some juke joint back in the woods, played by guys who have labouring day jobs and little finesse when it comes to their music.

“Ain’t Going To Heaven” is done as an acoustic string band knees up. It is a brilliant song, both in the age-old, insant classic lyrics and the instantly memorable tunes.  “Breaking Down” is an acoustic soul tune about love lost badly and “Poor Man Blues” in driven by jazzy piano and swinging rhythm section, like ‘30s urban blues, by Big Bil Broonzy or Sonny Boy Williamnson I (without the harp)  on the Bluebird label. After this quiet, introspective interlude “Let Me Tell You” strides swageringly into view with a rumination on thte blues and with a vigorous, to-the–point  guitar solo that yet again illustrates how oftne less is more in the blues and how Calrk’s generally understated band supports him with easy authority.

“Stranger Blues” by name at least, is a venerable classic, and I know version by Elmore James and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Clark’s rake on the song seems to be influenced by the Terry and McGhee version, particularly because it is an acoustic treatment, though again minus blues harp.  Clark also does not quite sing the tune I  know. Never mind, it is good.

“House of the Rising Sun” is done as a sprightly, almost jolly, Cajun string band jig. It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.   It is a diffident stroke of genius to reimagine one of the best known blues songs as a joyful noise in contrast  to the very tragic tale the lyrics tell.

“Feel So Good Can’t Keep From Crying” sounds like a medley of the well-known Junior Parker song and a gospel blues classic, best known to me in a version by The Blues Project, but it is not that.  Clark simply tells us that he feels very good though he can’t keep from crying. Hopefully he’s talking about tears of happiness. It is another up-tempo scoustic band tune followed by the  brief, solo bottleneck guitar blues of “Late Night Blues.”

The two final tracks are “Marry Me,” which is a straightforward energetic,  affecting  soul pop invitation to the love of Clark’s life and “As The Crow Flies” (a Tony Joe White tune), with which the band kicks out the jams one more time on a stomping blues rocker that ends the set in fine style.

There is a lot of mutton dressed as lamb on the South African blues and blues rock scene at the moment and often technical proficiency is hailed  as the mark of brilliance and excellence. Gerald Clark is probsbly as good as any mucician in the country and has been paying dues for a long time, from the very humble beginnings of the first Delta Blue album to the work of genius that is Inbluestation and now this gem of an album.  Clark does what the best creative musicians, or artists in general do, and that is to take the myriad influences that inform his musical education and to remake and remodel them into something new and different yet still can sound traditional and as old as the mountains 

Hot Water plays De Waal Park November 2013

I'd never heard of Hot Water until some point last year when I was gifted with a couple of Gigs of music amongst which were the first two Hot Water albums. I liked this amalgam of mbaqanga, jive, maskande, blues and folk so much that I sought out and bought the third album too. Donovan Copley's very White South African voice sounded a tad odd in the context of the music the band made, but on the whole the records were fun, entertaining and joyous.

For all I knew Hot Water was defunct by the time I got to know of them, despite the many albums, but as it happens it seems that they are quite busy touring the world with the South African music and, judging from the recent show I attended, Copley might be a kind of Johnny Clegg for the current millennium, an ambassador for musical styles that are unique to our country.

Hot Water opened the new season (2013/14) of the "Concerts in the Park" series of live gigs in De Waal Park, an event that is now in its third year. I never got to any of the events of the first year, mostly because I was never around when the acts I would see, played. Last season I got around to Steve Louw, Robin Auld, and Arno Carstens.

On Sunday 17 November 2013 the streets around De Waal Park were crowded with parked cars, obviously attendees at the gig. It was a bit of a miracle that the show took place, as it had literally rained the entire day on Saturday 16 November. By Sunday morning, though, the clouds were dispersing and by the afternoon there was enough blue sky and sunshine to make it a pleasant day after all and just right for a concert in the park.

I arrived on site at about 16h00, the scheduled starting time, and the park was as crowded with people as the cars parked along the surrounding streets would have suggested. This told me that Hot Water must be a much bigger name and therefore much more popular drawing card than I had thought. Both Robin Auld and Steve Louw had drawn crowds but the only comparable number of people had been the attendees at the Arno Carstens show that closed the previous season in early 2013. Once again there was a significant amount of people (I can't estimate crowds but would have said they numbered about a thousand), of all ages, dispersed on the lawns around the band stand, with their picnic baskets, beer coolers, dogs, kids and so on. That the event is free must have been a motivation too, though the size of the crowd could only have been due to the act on offer and not merely the lack of an entry fee.

The younger and more active members of the crowd were on their feet and rushed to the front of the stage as soon as Copley strummed the introductory chord of the first of two up-tempo jive style numbers. The dancers jived all through the show. It was going to be an afternoon of partying to music that defied one not to go crazy dancing in the dust, or at least to tap a foot.

The band is made up of a rainbow nation of musicians: Copley, a Black dude on bass, a White second guitarist, a Black woman on background vocals and the wall-known Tim Rankin on drums. Copley plays a Castrol oil can guitar (he calls it his "South Afri-Can guitar"), once endorsed by David Kramer and which is meant to be one of the iconic images of South African roots music although the original oil can guitars were acoustic resonators and not amplified.

For this season of the Concerts in the Park, there is a Nando's sponsorship and new local MOR radio station Smile FM is also on board. In fact, Eloise, possibly a broadcaster, is the on-stage announcer who keeps telling us that this series of series of shows are "fired by Nando's" (probably the PR slogan) and announces prizes and the like. I guess the concerts will receive more publicity if a radio station makes a point of mentioning the shows, even if it's a new station. The shows are free and large audience numbers will therefore not affect the box office but would be good for the ego of the artists who perform.

The chairperson of Friends of De Waal Park is called upon to give the same speech I heard at every show last season, despite his protestation that he had thought he would not have to do it again this year. It is an interesting story but not so exciting that one would want to repeat it show after show. This time around he gives us the blessedly short version of it.

The opening groove consisted of the bassist enunciating and chanting the phrase "hot water" in as many syllables and with as much gruff authority as he can muster, while he plucks his bass and the drums do a funk thing behind him. It does go on for a bit, a tad longer than necessary but is presumably deemed necessary to vibe up the crowd. Then the previously mentioned two fast jives set the park on fire and from then on it was party time. I recognised many of the tunes. Copley is a showman. He was engaging, lively, funny and appeared to be a guy who obviously believes in interaction with the audience. Apart from the fact that the music was not strictly based on traditional Zulu guitar music, Copley could be a Johnny Clegg for today. There was Zulu guitar music in there, with the typical lyrical lines played on a somewhat distorted electric guitar which gave the tunes a bluesy feel and a more modern attack, almost reminiscent of the desert blues that has become so popular. Copley also did "In my Time of Dying" with plenty of hot slide guitar from the second guitarist, a heavy version of "Tribal Man" and a long, jammy take on a Busi Mhlongo song. During this part of the show Copley invited all manner of audience members onto the stage and exhorted them dance in full public view. The music was markedly more jam band than the carefully rehearsed and played rock styles of Arno Carstens or Steve Louw / Big Sky. It was also a fun experience, it would seem, for both band and audience.

There was no encore. Copley thanked us and left the stage. The crowd dispersed slowly, some just back to their blankets, some to the exits. By now there was more clouds over the City Bowl, the wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped. The Hot Water jive had kept the unpleasant weather at bay and, as if the elements had patiently waited for the show toe end, they now moved in to put their stamp on the rest of the day. A Cape Town summer without wind is no summer.

 

 

 

 

Notes on some South African bands found on the Score website

(this piece was probably written in late 2013 or early 2014)

Browsing around on the Internet, googling local bands and coming across a site called The Score that features brief biographical notes and music videos or SoundCloud clips of the featured bands. Most of these groups were totally unknown to me and this find emphasised again how easy it must be to form a band, to write en rehearse some tunes and then either make a video or just record some tracks for internet dissemination. Who needs to release CDs? Do any of these bands gig regularly, or just fool around in the lead singer's basement, or even exist for longer than the university degree courses of the band members?

I did not have the time or inclination to investigate each and every band but spent some time on a couple.

The first band was the interestingly named The Deaf Commission. They have a good number of videos and I watched the live in concert clips of "Ramblin'" and "Your Time Has Come," and the official video of "You're Gonna Lose." The gig could have been filmed with an iPhone but jerky visuals and an almost out of focus image but the true beauty of the videos lies in the shitty sound. These performances sound so much like the product of the bad sound one usually encounters at gigs of young bands in small spaces. The music is distorted and loud yet listenable while the vocals are just about unintelligible. The singer may as well be singing gibberish. Often it was the saving grace for a lot of bands. If you can't understand what the singer is singing, you won't realise how terrible some of the lyrics are.

The official video has much better sound and is therefore a neater, cleaner product that lacks some of the visceral excitement of the live clips, especially the studio sound makes the band sound like a straightforward heavy band whereas the live clips give a blues rock and punky edge to the guitars. Cleaning up is not necessarily the answer either.

The Heavy Souls, with "Run with the Hunted," is a proficient hard rock band with little to differentiate them from the rest of the local pack. They do what they do, well and yet have no apparent spark of genius or just a glimmer of that little something that will distinguish them from the many other rack bands in this country.

For my money The Cheap Bad Habits from Kwazulu Natal are the pick of this small bunch. They look like a classic Nuggets era garage band or perhaps one of the punk bands from New York in the late Seventies. The sound is more New York punk than Pacific Northwest punk, yet somewhat more deliberate and slower, so perhaps Detroit is the reference point. There is a video clip and a number of SoundCloud clips. Their big song is "Chasing Down the Devil." and it is suitably snotty and punchy and just dumb enough to be a smart take on an old trope. The video for "French Kiss" was shot on a beach full of gyrating bodies and beach babes. Car and girls and sun, sea and sand. Not exactly blissed out summer rock though. This is the band whose CD I would buy if there were such a release. Big dumb rock and roll fun is never a bad thing.

Junkyard Lipstick is an all-female thrash punk type of band from Cape Town. The photograph with the bio shows four emo/Goth/punk women in a playground and, dare one say it, there is a definite odd sexiness about them, and one would be tempted to say, I do not care what the music sounds like; I'd be prepared to pay just to see them on stage. The one clip I listened to, "Bio Terror." sounds pretty much like old school thrash to me with riffing guitars, punchy fast drumming and shouted vocals that may have deep meaning but are not quite intelligible.

Who knows whether any of these bands are currently active? I don't go to gigs and am obviously not part of the word of mouth of the young set in any of the towns in which these bands operate or used to operate. If it had not been for this fortuitous trawl through the internet I would probably never have heard of the groups. This type of find simply re-emphasises how relatively easy it is these days to record your music and even to make a video to accompany it, whether the production values are high or simply basic. There must be more money available and more facilities as well. Back in the Eighties and early Nineties, when I was young and followed local bands, hardly any of the ever released a record, or tape, much less made videos of their shows. Of course the internet was not a thing back then and neither were cheap video cameras or the smartphones with their video capabilities, most of which puts media and the outreach to an audience within the easy grasp of just about every band. Back in the day you could obviously record your rehearsals or gigs onto a reel to reel tape or maybe, once things got sophisticated, a DAT tape, and if a mate had a video camera he or she could make a movie of your rehearsal or stage show. However, there was no outlet like YouTube for your video and it must have been prohibitively expensive for most bands without proper recording contracts to book studio time, produce and master their songs and to have records and sleeves printed. Nowadays every one with a PC or laptop can run a home recording studio and the costs of fine tuning a song are much less and the costs of manufacturing CDs and the jewel cases and inserts must be reasonable and in reach of most budgets. How else do so many independent albums get released? You can sell your product at your gigs and by mail order and get onto iTunes or offer downloads through sites like Band camp. You can put your music out there on Myspace, YouTube or SoundCloud. There is no reason, except for failure to do something quite basic, why any and all bands cannot disseminate their music to everyone who may be interested. One might not make money from all of this endeavour but at least your music will have a presence and recognition that was not possible 20 or 30 years ago unless one had a recording contract or very deep pockets.

In the period 1984 to about 1994 I followed many local bands in and around the Cape Town area, and also a good number of Johannesburg bands who used to come down to Cape Town for the summer season. Some of these bands, like All Night Radio, Sweatband, The Believers, Cherryfaced Lurchers, Petit Cheval, The Genuines, The Blues Broers, Valiant Swart, Koos Kombuis, and so on, managed to release one or more records. Many more, like The Flaming Firestones, The Mavericks, Duck 4 Cover, The Tarantulas, Raissa's Farm, Shrinking Railroad, and many others whose names I don't even recall any more, did not release anything that I knew of. If there are home tapes of rehearsals or gigs, I am not aware of them and it seems nobody has made any attempt to transfer such recording to digital format to release them in any shape or form. An entire generation of local bands lived and died and left no permanent record except for the memories of those who were there, musicians and audience, and the faded newspapers in which the gigs were advertised.

 

 

 

The Fabulous Thunderbirds

Jimmie Vaughan, guitarist for the Fabulous Thunderbirds, is the elder brother of the perhaps more celebrated late Stevie Ray Vaughan. Both came out of the Texas blues scene of the Seventies. Jimmie rose to prominence with the Thunderbirds, a quite rootsy four piece that combined jazzy swing with deep blues feeling. Jimmie was kind of the anti-Stevie Ray in guitar playing terms. His forte was understated, yet never dull, accompaniment and quirky piercing solos as part of an ensemble and not as flashy frontman. Kim Wilson was the flamboyant guy up front who wore a turban, sang and played harp. In contrast Stevie Ray was the main man and he sang and played fiery almost interminable guitar that initially served the songs but over time started taking on a life of its own. The Fabulous Thunderbirds was a band, a combo of like-minded individuals. Stevie Ray & Double Trouble was a leader and two sidemen.

My introduction to the Thunderbirds was through a review of their second album, What's The Word? (1980), in the NME. At the time blues was not exactly fashionable. It was at the tail end of the post punk / New Wave period and the blues acts were not front cove subjects. The only other contemporary blues act that received some attention was George Thorogood and the Destroyers, a similarly rootsy three piece mainly inspired by Elmore James. Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash and not so much the Texas roots of the Thunderbirds.

Anyhow, What's The Word? received a really positively review and recommendation. Because I was a collector of blues albums I made a mental note to look for the record, though I found it in some Cape Town record bar only a couple of years later. It truly was fine.

From the opening cut, "Running Shoes" I was hooked on What's the Word? The tough, exciting houserocking blues never let up to the end of the record. The most interesting and interesting part was the concise, to the point rhythm guitar parts and the relatively brief guitar solos. This was no guitar hero doing his best to sound like a maestro of the fretboard but rather a man who was clearly maser of his instrument and his chosen idiom and was not going to overplay his hand or overshadow his band by his histrionics. The music was also just so damn loud and could have given any of the punk bands or New Wave guitar bands a go. I would have given my left testicle to be present at any bar where this band was playing.

I could recognise that the playing was tough and traditional enough and that the production gave the music a hard, punky edge without losing the essence of the blues. Some of the songs, like "You Ain't Nothing Nut Fine" and "Sugar Coated Love", for example, were even sing-a-long blues-pop type tunes. This record quickly became one of my favourites and took pride of place in my blues collection.

In all the years since I never saw any other Fabulous Thunderbirds albums in the various record stores I haunted on a regular basis. Why on earth What's The Word? would have arrived in Cape Town on its own and not be followed by other releases by the band was a mystery then and remains a mystery. The only exception was Tuff Enuff (1986.)

The Thunderbirds had a bit of a purple patch with this album and eponymous single and also "Wrap It Up." Possibly the commercial success of Stevie Ray Vaughan helped and perhaps also the Eighties production techniques for music where the straight blues element was pushed into the background to give way to a pop-rock attitude, with subdued blues flavour, that would guarantee radio airplay. The two singles were played on South African radio and impressed me enough to buy the audio cassette version of the album when I found it in a discount bin. Having said that, the singles had not been impressive enough to persuade me to pay full price for the record and certainly did not motivate d me to buy any later product. My deepest wish was to own the debut album, Girls Go Wild.

My attitude towards the commercially successful Thunderbirds was similar to my attitude towards the very commercially successful Z Z Top of the Eighties who also modernised ad updated their sound and left behind the dirty blues of the Seventies albums, which were the records I preferred and still prefer.

Somewhere at the beginning of the 21^st century I bought a Thunderbirds anthology album on CD that concentrates on the early, blues years and avoids the commercial years and that is why I bought this particular set, as there are a number of "best of" and "greatest hits" compilations of Fabulous Thunderbirds music.

I had not listened to What's The Word? for probably 20 years until May 2013 when I bought and downloaded the Fabulous Thunderbirds' first three albums, Go Girl Crazy (1979), What's The Word? and Butt Rockin' (1981)
from iTunes. Not for the first time I blessed the advent of the digital media revolution that has made it possible for me in Cape Town, South Africa, to acquire and listen to music that I craved to hear when I was a teenager or in my early twenties and never had the opportunity due to the relative backwardness of South Africa at the time. My musical tastes were never exactly mainstream and most of the artists I wanted to hear were not stocked in my local record store. Since the Nineties we have not only had the benefit of multiple re-issues of almost forgotten records but now there is even more stuff available on the Internet. Today I can build a collection or records I would have wanted to own when I was a kid or simply rebuild my record collection in digital format.

This is why I decided belatedly to catch up on the Thunderbirds buying that trio of ground breaking albums. For all I know there were lots of white blues combos in the USA who sounded exactly like the Fabulous Thunderbirds yet this was the band I got to know and to love. To play blues in 1980 was hardly a serious commercial move and to play it with such authenticity and intensity probably did not enhance the commercial appeal either.

During the Eighties Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray brought blues back into the mainstream though neither of them had quite the nous or intense blues power of the early Thunderbirds. Stevie Ray just played too much damned guitar and Cray was too much too smooth for me. I own a bunch of Stevie Ray Vaughan albums and only one by Robert Cray, an early effort issued with the part work publication Story of the Blues. As far as I was concerned The Fabulous Thunderbirds were more of the real deal than their contemporaries.

Each of the iTunes versions of the first two albums comes with extra tracks. In the case of Girls Go Wild they are a couple of studio tracks and with What's The Word? they are live cuts. From the latter it is evident that the band was smoking hot as a live proposition.

The mix of songs varies from tough shuffles to melodic Fifties-styled pop and the latter is a tendency in the evolution of the band as if there had been a policy decision to ensure some radio play by positioning the band in a poppier place than the juke joint blues shuffles would have put them in. No doubt the songs were staples of the set anyway in a bar where the band is usually expected to be a human jukebox of sorts and to play for dancing, whether it would be the frenetic jiving to stompers like "Running Shoes" or the romantic slow dancing to a slightly cheesy "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White."

It may be the long-time familiarity that even now makes What's The Word? resonate with me more than the other two albums, especially Butt Rockin' which seems to be heading towards the more commercial, less appealing sound of Tuff Enuff.
What's The Word? is simply more satisfying because it seems to be the best basic blues album of the trio, with the best songs too. I can well imagine, if I had bought Butt Rockin' on first release, that I would have given up on The Fabulous Thunderbirds for having taken a commercial direction in the blues that did not appeal to me at all. Perhaps it is significant that this relative decline in the Thunderbirds' music happened just at the time that Stevie Ray Vaughan's blues star was rising with a much tougher take on the music.

What's The Word? is one of a number of albums, that I first owned as records, that represent the period in my life between high school and National Service, when I had the money to start collecting records and scoured the records stores of Stellenbosch and Cape Town for bargains, informed by records reviews in the NME and found many gems, this album included, at bargain prices. It was astonishing that a record store had to discount a record like What's The Word? in order to sell it. This album belongs to a group of albums that I truly loved and admired and treasured because they were just so astonishingly good. I have never grown tired of those records and each time I listen to one of them I have the same enjoyment, perhaps out of nostalgia too, but in general simply because they are great records.

If one is allowed to have only one Fabulous Thunderbirds album in one's collection, What's The Word? should be it. Not even a best of collection can replace it for pure, unadulterated quality and good fun.

 

 

 

Tom Verlaine

Thomas Miller came to New York from the American Midwest to find fortune and fame in the Bohemian art world of the city, changed his name and formed a band that lasted about 4 years in its first incarnation and was quite influential yet not as commercially viable as Verlaine might have hoped for. His solo career, with a couple of Television reunions, has now lasted for far longer than the band ever did. It is amazing to think that Verlaine is already 64. But then, his rise in the New York scene happened 40 years ago now.

Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell led Television, one of the major bands of the post New York Dolls and pre Ramones/Blondie/Talking Heads New York punk scene that predated and influenced the UK punk bands. Hell left and formed first The Heartbreakers and then led The Voidoids. Verlaine soldiered on and, with Richard Lloyd as second guitarist, created some of the most adventurous, exciting guitar music of the Seventies, way outside of the heavy blues and hard rock tradition that dominated the decade.

Verlaine reinvented himself in New York, as so many did, with a new surname, that of the French poet Paul Verlaine, and became part of an avant garde arts scene that, in the aftermath of the Warhol experiment, combined the high arts of painting and sculpture and poetry with the lesser, more populist art of rock and roll. Verlaine wanted the excitement of rock without the cock rock bullshit of most other successful American bands of the time. Television was in at the start of the New York scene that produced some of the most influential groups of the time and although it was one of the most exciting and most critically esteemed bands, it did not enjoy the long lasting careers or commercial success of The Ramones, Blondie or Talking Heads, releasing only 2 official albums in its heyday with further live albums and one reunification album to follow.

NME raved about Marquee Moon, the debut, and was less enthusiastic about Adventure, and drooled over the live shows in England. Marquee Moon has one of the classic album covers, an "ugly" colourized photograph of the band, possibly taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, I never found the album in any Stellenbosch record shop at the time of release and my first exposure to it came many years later when I bought the CD album and was immediately smitten. Even in the late Nineties this music sounded like nothing else. One can see where a number of the contemporary "math rock" acts, and similar, would have been fans of Television. Good solid rhythm section with soaring, roaring guitars, playing off against each other and also being individualistic.

Not long after the demise of Television, Tom Verlaine released Tom Verlaine (1979) and Richard Lloyd released Alchemy (1979), on each album showcasing their respective strengths. Verlaine's album sounds pretty much like Television progressing in a slightly new direction, obviously because he is the vocalist and his guitar style dominated Television, where Lloyd's songs fall in to the classic guitar pop category where melody and sweetness of lyric are paramount and not so much the intricate guitar playing of Verlaine or the latter's skewed visions.

I bought Ton Verlaine long before I ever heard the songs on Marquee Moon and I had no idea whether Verlaine's solo sound was basically the same or radically different. Now, having compared the two records, I would say that the solo album is somewhat lighter in mood and tone and funnier where Marquee Moon is pretty much a serious art rock statement. The angular guitar playing and jerky rhythms are present and correct on both albums and there is a continuity for this reason but it seems that Verlaine was having more fun with his solo debut than he'd had with his band, although it might have something to do with the brittle nerves of making your first record versus making your third and without the tensions a band may have that are no longer present when you are the one and only guy, not merely the leader of a band but the solo artist.

Tom Verlaine, the musician and the album, surprised me. From the NME writing on the banc I had a very different, harsher and more uncompromising sound in mind than the actual very approachable and entertaining music on Tom Verlaine. The style might have been at odds with current fashions for punk and New Wave and even contemporary hard rock and metal but it was not so oblique or obscurest that one could not enjoy it on a visceral level as a superior pop record.

Tracks like "Souvenir From A Dream," "Flash Lightning," "Red Leaves" and Breakin' In My Heart" are melodic pop songs with emotional centres. The songs had tunes and choruses and smart lyrics. The only odd thing was Verlaine's voice. He is not the greatest of singers, perhaps in the same way that Jimi Hendrix was more of a guitarist than a vocalist, and yet he does impart the depth the songs need to bring them across. The slightly weird intonations of his singing voice serve songs like "Yonki Time" and "Mr Bingo" which sound like joke songs with a sinister edge. Verlaine's cracked, slightly off pitch voice make them more than they may be. In the hands of a proper vocalist these tunes could have been obvious jokes. On this album they sound as serious, in a quirky, sarcastic way, as anything else on the record.

The band plays tough and Verlaine plays his patented angular, nog-blues based guitar parts with fluent dexterity, illustrating that this new model for a guitar hero may not sound like Eddie van Halen or Joe Perry, to name but two contemporaries, and yet has about the same intensity and power as thy could muster. Perhaps Tom Verlaine never was and never would be a technically masterful guitarist and that is probably not the point. In metal complicated guitar parts are often an end in themselves, to show of the astounding technical skills of the guitar player; in Tom Verlaine's style of music the guitar parts complement the song and are not specifically meant to be separated from the song as a component to be heard or enjoyed separately

Tom Verlaine is one of my favourite Seventies albums, and dovetails nicely with Marquee Moon, and deserves classic status. If I remember correctly I bought at least one more Verlaine album though I am not even sure which one it was and it certainly did not make as much of an impact as the debut album. It is perhaps for this reason or perhaps simply because the records were not readily available that I never made an effort to build up a Verlaine collection and even now I cannot imagine myself going to great lengths to find whatever else there is out there.

Let me just bask in the happy memories of the one album by Tom Verlaine that I truly enjoy and appreciate and not run the risk of being relatively disappointed by his other releases. Provided it is a good one, there is nothing wrong with sticking with just the one hit of a one hit wonder. For the same reason there is nothing wrong with sticking with one excellent release from an artist who has had a long career, as long as that one release is above average and represents a time and a place that can never be replicated anyway. Tom Verlaine is that kind of record.