David Bowie

According to the conventional critical opinion of many old school rock writers, particularly in the British rock press, David Bowie should be celebrated as a genius at reinventing his rock persona, going from peak to peak, never repeating himself and always confounding expectations. At least, this was the perception of the Bowie career by the end of the 70's.

It is no doubt that true that Bowie has changed from album to album from Space Oddity through to Let's Dance and probably did confuse and disconcert his fans along the way. whether all the changed were in fact for the better I do not quite know.

My take on, and appreciation of, the Bowie oeuvre is undoubtedly conservative and perhaps a tad to purist.

"Starman" was quite a hit in South Africa yet I never heard anything else from the Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album until I did my National Service in Voortrekkerhoogte in 1982 and one of my platoon mates during the Junior Leader course had a tape of the album.

"Jean Genie" was similarly a hit from a parent album I never heard in full until about 13 or 14 years later when I bought a budget priced re-issue of Aladdin Sane. Back in 1973 some of my high school class mates were fond of wandering around school with the album under their arms to show off how cool they were. The other cool albums to own at the time were Black Sabbath's Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath and Audience's House On The Hill, none of which I ever had an opportunity to listen to.

In about 1979 NME published an extract of the David Bowie: An Illustrated Record book by Roy Carr and in this extract, which dealt quite in depth with the Bowie albums to date, I read an intriguing account of The Man Who Fell To Earth and its cover of Bowie in a frock on a chaise longue. The music was described as heavier than Led Zeppelin both in conception and execution. When I saw this record, albeit with a completely different sleeve, in a record store in Port Elizabeth in 1979. I bought it. I was not totally blown away. The album felt like a piss take, or some half-conceived project that was too grandiose and pretentious for its own good. Even so I later bought the CD vision of the album that restored the Bowie in a frock cover. This album was stolen in 1993 and never replaced.

In the mid-Eighties I bought the budget re-issue of Aladdin Sane and a cassette tape album of Diamond Dogs. I used to see the record album cover in Sygma Records in Stellenbosch and was always intrigued by it but did not have the money to buy it and in any event, unlike say "Jean Genie" I did not know any of the songs from it.

I doted on "Knock On Wood" from David Live and it was long my cream to own this double album.  Station to Station, Young Americans, Low, ‘Heroes’ and The Lodger were mere blips on my radar. I read the fawning reviews of the last three albums in the NME and heard the singles from the albums on the radio. Neither words of praise nor the singles induced me to buy the records.

I knew all there was to know about the androgynous glam rock Bowie years and I thought that this was a fascinating way of presenting yourself. The Thin White Duke and Berlin years seemed less worthwhile. he main thing was that I preferred the more or less straight-ahead rock version of Bowie to the experimental, electronic version even if the latter represented a progression and an acceptance of new technology and new modes of expression.

My essential Bowie collection would include only the albums from The Man Who Sold The World to Diamond Dogs, with perhaps the two volume Greatest Hits compilation. On second thoughts, I might be persuaded to acquire Low and 'Heroes' too. I've listened to Young Americans and The Lodger and find both irritating and tedious, and that goes for just about everything Bowie has released since. Who now can reel off a list of Bowie's essential songs between 1983 and 2012. Maybe it is such a short list that it would not be difficult to remember them. I cannot conceive of such dedicated Bowiephiles, though, that they would have remained loyal and unswerving in their devotion over the last forty plus years.

I am a rock recidivist and, probably because I was a teenager in the Seventies, more of the rock from that era (and lately the funk, reggae and disco) resonates than any rock since. My three essential Bowie albums would simply be Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs.  if Bowie’s career as "rock star" is theatre, these three acts present the purest form of the grand gesture. These records are the record of the strutting, posturing rock god that may have been a construct but that was a mighty construct. The rock is heavy, the pathos deep and the concept awe inspiring.

The “Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars” rock movie made about the last concert that band played and where Bowie announces the end of the Ziggy phase, was one of the first handful of rock music movies I ever saw, at the Labia Theatre in Orange Street, Cape Town, back in about 1985, in a scratchy print and with the tinny sound of the Labia sound system. It was quite interesting and yet also disappointing because the songs sounded so sloppy compare to the album versions, as if this band, for all its experience and expertise, were not quite up to the task. The theatrics were also not compelling and perhaps one should have been there at the time and stoned and/or drunk.

In either 2005 or 2007, on an overseas holiday, I bought the double album of the music from the movie, the soundtrack, if you will, and was again disappointed by the quality of the performance. The music lacked the power and toughness of the studio recordings of these Bowie classics. I've always liked live albums yet this one was not the goods I would have hoped it would be and I've hardly ever listened to it. My lack of appreciation is illustrated by my decision, in April 2012 in Salisbury, England, to walk away from the DVD of the Ziggy Stardust movie on sale at a bargain price at an Oxfam shop, because I was not sure I would ever want to sit through the movie again, even if the quality of the image would have been much improved.

Having said, I experienced my usual last-minute frenzy of CD buying at the HMV at Heathrow duty free on the way home after this recent English holiday, where several desirable CDs were offered at ₤8,95 for two rather than the two for ₤10 offers in the rest of the country. In addition, this HMV ran a “Best of British” special inspired by the imminent 60^th Jubilee celebrations of Elizabeth II and the slightly more distant yet also imminent Olympic Games. Amongst the wares on offer were albums by Queen, David Gray and Adele, all of which held no interest for me. What was of interest were a couple of classis Rolling Stones albums (Beggar's Banquet and Let It Bleed) and the Bowie albums Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Live: Santa Monica 1973. These were four of the albums I bought at the airport.

My first exposure to the complete Ziggy Stardust (and Ogden's Nut Gone Flake) was to a tape of the album I mate of mine had in Voortrekkerhoogte, where we shared a bungalow during our junior officers' training course. The music was astounding, mostly because it was in general heavy and exciting rock and roll.  “Suffragette City” was my top favourite. It was good, solid bottom-heavy rock and roll that was a long way away from the pop hits Bowie had with “Starman” or “Sorrow” and a bit of an eye opener

PART TWO

Somewhere in either 1978 or 1979 the NME published a supplement which was essentially the print copy of a book called Bowie the Illustrated Record, by c couple of NME writers, part of a series of such books on the then important British rock acts. It was an overview of Bowie's career whit emphasis on his records to date and the in-depth discussion of the albums was very interesting for someone like me who did not know all that much about the man's work. The piece on The Man Who Sold the World was perhaps the most eye opening in that the description of the music was this weird amalgam of science fiction and fantasy in the manner of HP Lovecraft combined with heavy music which was contrary to the way I'd perceived Bowie's music. The radio hits he'd had were not heavy metal and even “Jean Genie”, though bone crunching, was not heavy metal as I understood it.

The album was also controversial for its original front cover showing Bowie reclining on a chaise longue dressed in a frock.

In late 1979 I went on holiday on my own to Port Elizabeth.  I spent one morning exploring the CBD and was not mightily impressed though I did find one interesting record shop where I found The Man Who Sold the World with a completely different sleeve to the controversial one. I bought the album purely because of the NME's recommendation that it was a heavy rock album.

In fact, it was not particularly heavy. “The Width of a Circle” did have the heavy riffing the NME boasted of but the overall sound was melodic, atmospheric rock and the lyrics sounded a tad twee to me. Perhaps it would have been meant as serious by the very young Bowie and the kind of people who really liked The Lord of the Rings and thought HP Lovecraft was a literary genius bur for my part I believed this was the vaunted Fifth form poetry NME so often derided. Of course, given that it was Bowie, these songs had to mean more than the surface suggested and perhaps it was an exercise in arch fantasy in advance of the glam movement Bowie was soon to spearhead.

I quite enjoyed The Man Who Sold The World but I did not think of it as work of genius. There were good songs and there was, to my mind, a great deal of filler.

This album was also the first Bowie CD I ever bought, as part of a series of re-issues of the classic albums with some bonus tracks. the cover was the notorious one with Bowie in a frock and the insert had a history of the various album covers around the world forced on the record company by the mores of local populations. the CD was stolen from my flat in 1993 during a robbery when I lost half of my then quite small CD collection.

It was only in the mid-eighties that I finally ought, in more or less the same period, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, the latter only as cassette. I still thing of these records as the absolute pinnacle of Bowie's work. The continuous shape shifting and restless search for change and innovation that followed on Diamond Dogs never moved me because I absolutely was not into electronic music and disco at the time, and though I still liked the radio playlist tunes off Low and 'Heroes', the product he delivered in the Eighties left me old. 

Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs were the two unknown entities and I was pleasantly surprised at how heavy Aladdin Sane was. “Jean Genie” had been a top favourite for many years and most of the rock songs on the album matched it stroke for stroke in visceral excitement and overall it is streets ahead of Ziggy Stardust, which on listening to it again, is pretty much just a pop album with some rock shapes. On Aladdin Sane the band kicked out the jams. The approach of Diamond Dogs echoed Ziggy Stardust in that the rock was not as heavy and the concepts were high fantasy and sci fi. Great songs and great execution. Diamond Dogs is a favourite album and, for me, is a fitting finale to the rock era Bowie.

"Sorrow" had been a giant hit in South Africa and remained a nagging favourite.  The NME gave the parent album Pin-Ups a glowing review. this along with Bryan Ferry's These Foolish Things, were part of a mini trend of Seventies British acts looking back to their pop fan pasts to revive an revitalise some songs from their youth. Bowie had always liked the Velvet Underground, doing "White Light, White Heat" and "Waiting for the Man" live on stage, and on Pin-Ups he also delved back into British beat music history. It is great album, full of enormously energetic and vibey performances and though it does not have any Bowie songs, it fits right in with those other three masterpieces. I bought the CD of the album somewhere in the late Nineties mostly because it was cheap.

For one reason and another, due to lack of availability and lack of serious interest, I never bought the CDs of the other three albums. Von-Mari owns a greatest hits collection, possibly a double album, that covers the ground between “Space Oddity” to the late Seventies hits.  For me, one needs no more Bowie than that. I lost interest in his music from Young Americans onward.  I thought his Eighties output was crap and if critics regard his later work as being as excellent as, and on par with, his best, so be it.   

There is only one other Bowie album I’ve ever wanted to own, and which I did eventually own as a scratchy second hand double LP with a distressed cover that someone gave me, is David Live (1974), with songs taken from a post Diamond Dogs tour, where Bowie sports the Young Americans type of stylish disco look and is backed by a larger band than during the Ziggy Stardust phase, which has a AOR approach and sound compared to the brute power of the earlier band.  “Knock on Wood” from this set was a bit of a hit in South Africa and one of my favourite tracks from 1974, along with “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” by the Rolling Stones.  Where the new sound works quite well for “Knock on Wood,” I’m more dubious about the, to me, softening of the effect on the older rock tunes that come across as show versions, almost ersatz renditions, of songs that were once much tougher.   It’s not a bad album, and is quite listenable despite my misgivings but I’m not so sure I still want to own it, or even have it on the same playlist as those Bowie albums I rate so highly.

I suppose it’s terrible to abandon an artist at an early stage of his career and refuse even to listen to the rest of his output, especially where, in Bowie’s case, the rock period of the 6 albums between The Man Who Sold the World and Diamond Dogs is a mere fraction of his very lengthy musical career, but nothing I’ve heard throughout the following 30 years of Bowie music ever compelled me to investigate further. He turned to AOR and MOR, as far as I’m concerned and coasted on former glories with rock critics seemingly prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt with every new release and to maintain the mythology.

Interestingly it’s only with Tin Machine, the hard rock band Bowie formed with Reeves Cabrels and the Sales brothers in the late Eighties, and whose debut album Tin Machine (1989) I was very fond of, that the critics excoriated Bowie. The music may not be prime Bowie but I thought it was more entertaining and engaging than any of his preceding Eighties albums. Perhaps I’m out of step here though I’m quite happy to trust my ears and my perception of the music.

I don’t care whether Bowie is a constantly reinventive genius or just a very accomplished song writer and facile showman who was too restless to craft and stick with a long lasting persona.  I like what I like and if it’s a limited appreciation, it’s also a very excellent, unimpeachable selection of classic records.  

Arno Carstens plays De Waal Park, March 2013

Sunday 3 March 2013 was another very hot day in the City Bowl albeit with a bit of a breeze that did not quite cool down the bowl but promised some relief. The streets around De Waal Park, and the secondary park below Camp Street, was overcrowded with vehicles. It was a sure indication that Arno Carstens was a very popular attraction. Inside the park it was even more emphatically demonstrated by the numbers of people there. The audience covered about the half the terrain sitting in clumps on blankets with picnic baskets and wine cooler boxes, lots of kids and dogs running around. Once again the scene resembled some inner city middle class version of Woodstock. I'd thought that large numbers pitched up for Robin Auld and this crowd was at least double that one. Most people were sitting in whatever shade the park offered but by the end of the show the band stand was surrounded by happy, dining people. There were no encored and the crowd did not insist on any and dispersed quickly but up to that point it was pretty much your standard rock audience. There were the young women, the young guys, the old hippies, the strange looking people and a significant presence of older people who much have simply come to the park to enjoy the ambience and got stuck with the music.

I guess Arno Carstens is pretty much rock royalty in South African terms. He came up with the Springbok Nude Girls, the premier hard rock act of the South African scene that erupted after 1994.  He was the front man who was handsome, articulate and could sing. As far as I know the famous local accordion player, music composer and band leader Nico Carstens was a relative. From the Nude Girls Carstens followed on with a solo career, ran with models, did some modelling and became an all-round icon and celebrity. The solo career is about 4 albums old. I have the first two, Another Universe and The Hello Goodbye Boys, of high end pop infused rock with serious production values. Initially the project was called New Porn but the marketing strategy soon demanded that his better known brand, Arno Carstens, replace any band name. He was the man.

In October of 2004 Arno Carstens and his New Porn band, featuring Albert Frost, played the Wellington Cultural Festival, headlining above what was then a cream of local rock talent. I was blown away by the sound of the Carstens band. It was loud, monolithic, powerful and overwhelming and basically blew all the preceding acts away. The negative was that it was difficult to discern any actual songs in the intricate arrangements on which the music relied so heavily.

The albums are lighter though till produced to within an inch of their lives. The melodies come through and the voice can carry them. The debut album is the strongest but on the whole both of them show an artist with ambition beyond his hard rock start and with intelligence and craft. Not pretty pop, but pop nonetheless.

At De Waal Park Carstens played a show of two halves. For the first part he was more or less the solo artist, backed by a guy who added keyboard fills and trumpet solos. The songs were big ballads, typically starting slowly and building to an anthemic climax. I did not recognise any of these tunes. The crowd may have known Carstens’ music better than I did. They were certainly appreciative enough.

The trumpet guy reminded me of the unique feature of the Springbok Nude Girls where Adriaan Brand was the trumpet and keyboard player that brought something unusual to the hard rock of the band. Today the trumpet fills and solos gave the songs an elegiac feel of nostalgia and heartbreak.

Carstens did a version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” ostensibly because it was the man’s birthday and it was a brave choice to do a basically acoustic version of an Eighties dance rock number that was a big hit at the time, and featured a piercing Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar solo, but has never been one of my favourite songs and comes from an era of Bowie music that was pretty barren if you ask me. Anyhow, it was a quirky interpretation and for that one has to give Arno Carstens kudos.

The full band came on stage for the last part of the show and although the sound was not the same kind of monolithic overpowering audio experience as I had encountered in Wellington it was still quite loud and powerful. It was during this part of the set that Carstens finally performed songs that I knew, including one Springbok Nude Girls song, and started rocking the park.

The main issue I had with the show, and that I have with Carstens’ music generally, is that arrangements and technical perfection seems to be at the heart of what he does and not so much real emotional commitment.  This is big music with big aspirations and not actually rock and roll with all its imperfections, quirks and weirdness. The musicians are rehearsed and proficient and make an effort to play faultlessly and with studied intensity and not much spontaneity. The other problem is that the tunes are not very distinguishable. The impact and power of the song lies in the performance and once the sound dies down, one is hard pressed to recollect any particular song that stood out from the rest. Something like “Genie” is memorable because it has a hook or two, and perhaps because I’d heard it before, but the larger than life choruses of the earlier ballads never did.  After last week’s show by Robin Auld I was quite keen on seeking any Auld albums I could find and regretted, slightly, that I had not brought any cash to the park. For Carstens, who was happy to accept credit cards, I had not such regret and no particular interest in acquiring more of product than the first two albums I own. In part it is because I do not truly care for his style of music and partly because the songs did not act as magnets to draw me to him. I cannot see myself going out of my way to attend another Arno Carstens performance.

The truth of the matter, though, is that Carstens was a very big draw at the park and perhaps the biggest draw of this season of concerts, and this must mean that he is a big deal in our music industry and that people still remember him and revere him. More power to Arno Carstens for that.    

Aerosmith

Steven Tyler’s autobiography (Does the Noise in my Head Bother You?) is written in gonzo style that might be his writing style, unless he dictated it (like the way Sidney Sheldon used to work) and someone typed up his verbal diarrhoea. If this is his actual conversational style he could conceivably be a tiresome, intense bore.  Lots of telling yet insubstantive detail that best serves to give us a glimpse into the Tyler psyche rather than illuminate the Aerosmith story. The best part is that he’s much more self deprecating than his stage persona would suggest but, then, it’s trite that many rock frontmen are more shy in private than they are on stage where the  Rock Star is a completely different construct to the human inside the hard edged shell of braggadocio.

Steven Tyler is arguably one of the last very flamboyant, exaggeratedly Jaggeresque frontmen, from an era and a rock culture where his kind of extrovert stage performance was the epitome of rock star fantasy. Nowadays, vocalists seem be more subdued in persona and style, to be more like “ordinary” people and to close the divide that used to exist between rock stars and their audience.  When bands go on stage, they look and dress like the people in die audience. Tyler looked nothing like his audience and was outrageous in look, dress and action, to emphasise that difference between rock star and audience.

Although the Seventies (between the ages of 11 and 20) were the influential years in my musical education, I read about bands more than I knew their music.  Even worse. for a long time I was ignorant about many of the major bands of that ere, specifically the American bands, because they were not covered in the local media and received absolutely no airplay on South African radio.

Aerosmith is a case in point. By late 1974, when I started buying the US monthly rock publication Hit Parader, Aerosmith was starting to make it in the USA and Lisa Robinson, the editor of the magazine, obviously had a thing for the band or maybe it was just Steven Tyler’s Mick Jagger influenced looks and sexual presence as frontman of a rather good rock and roll band.

Aerosmith may have been big in America but they meant diddley squat in South Africa in the late Seventies.  Between 1974 and probably 1980 I read quite a bit about them without having any clue what the music actually sounded like.  I also had no real biographical information on the band, at least not from Hit Parader who treated the band as superstars though the band had released their debut album only in about 1972. 

Tyler was the main face of the band beside Joe Perry, who was the Keith Richards to Tyler’s Jagger, and he sure looked damn sexy and dangerous in his loose fitting low-slung outfits that resembled pyjamas that left most of his white, hairless body bare, and the scarves and floppy women's hats. Tyler was one of the last of the typical breed of Sixties-informed Seventies rock star who clearly loved dressing up for stage and photo opportunities and for whom dressing up meant an androgynous image where the wardrobe consisted of as many items of women’s clothing, barring actual lingerie, as he could find. The look was daringly flamboyant and this held true for his motormouth interviews and pronouncements. The way to get Hit Parader's attention was to look extremely good and to say something extremely outrageous or least highly quotable.

Up to that point my knowledge of hard rock had been pretty much limited to Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Grand Funk Railroad. Acts like Led Zeppelin, Kiss and Blue Oyster Cult were still just names to me and it was a while before I owned some records by these bands and also the likes of The Stooges and the MC5. The whole US FM rock thing of Kansas, Boston, Angel, and others of that ilk, passed me by, except perhaps for Boston who had a monster international hit with “More Than a Feeling.”  I liked faster louder and not the soaring harmonic guitars and anthemic vocals of the AOR bands.  I realised after a while that there were many rock bands in the USA who had successful careers there, yet were unknown in South African, or perhaps the rest of the world, because their careers were localised and parochial  and whatever  hits they may have had at home, never became international hits. A band could do quite well just sticking to their home turf because the market was that big.  On a smaller scale, the same applied to the UK and Europe.

This lack of musical experience of mid-Seventies American hard rock changed when I got my hands on Toys in the Attic (1975) and Rocks (1976), the brace of albums that officially and permanently put Aerosmith on the map as superstars. These first two purchases were followed by Live Bootleg (1978) and Night in the Ruts (1979), all of them bought around 1980 and 1981.  This was within a few years after the punk explosion in the UK and even if I had not heard much of the punk songbook I was ideologically firmly committed to the punk ethos and what I perceived to be its sound, based on what I knew of the Sex Pistols and the Clash and their antecedents in the MC5 and Stooges.

I took a gamble on the Aerosmith albums. I’d read about the band and now I wanted to know what they sounded like and whether the hype had any substance.

To say that I was pleasantly surprised and astonished would be an understatement. This music did not sound like heavy metal; in the same way that Blue Oyster Cult (whose first three albums I acquired at more or less the same time) was much more melodic than the bog standard heavy riffing bands of the time. Aerosmith was far more loose, grungy and visceral than, say, Boston. There was an amazing, fierce, fuzzed-out roar to the guitars that reminded me more of the punk movement (or how I imagined the punk bands would sound) than of the heavy rock styles I knew.  Aerosmith was loud, energetic, scuzzy and rocked like a demon. To my mind I could play Sex Pistols, Clash and Aerosmith  back to back and the music would be of a piece. In fact, most of London Calling was far more AOR than either Rocks or Toys in The Attic. Of course the lyrical content of Aerosmith songs, although undeniably clever, was still the basic building blocks of hard rock, with all manner of sexual innuendo and schoolboy smut and songs about partying. Socially conscious and politically correct it was not.

When I saw  Live Bootleg  in a discount bin I bought it because it would bring me up to speed on Aerosmith tunes I hadn’t heard before plus some interesting cover versions. I was keen on live albums as collections of hits played in rougher fashion than the polished studio recordings.  Unfortunately Live Bootleg turned out to one example of a cheap album that is not 100% perfect in quality. Sections of the vinyl surface deteriorated quickly but there was also  an imperfection in the surface that caused  one of the two records of the double album (I think it was the second disc) to jump when played, which meant I could not listen to it all that much or even record it on an audio cassette. Where the records were playable, it turned out that the live versions of the songs were pretty much as grungy as the studio versions  although an ad more jam oriented and this confirmed to me that Aerosmith were the epitome of dirty rock and roll in the unvarnished Stones sense  of the concept.

Not long after this, Night in the Ruts also appeared in the discount bins and I snapped it up. I believe that it got mostly less than positive reviews taking the view that Aerosmith had become an inspiration-free band wallowing in its success, over-indulging in the rewards and losing focus. In a way it was a departure in sound and vision but in another way I found it highly satisfactory except, once again, the vinyl was scratched and the record was playable only once or twice and then no more. The rough -edged sound had been smoothed out with a loss of that fuzzy grunge I had admired on the earlier records, with some heavy blues and a Shangri Las cover. I don’t care what the rock critics say. For me Night in the Ruts remains a favourite album and a record I’d listen to far rather than anything the band has released afterwards.

Ii is true, though, from this point on, that Aerosmith lost direction. Joe  Perry left, briefly, then the band released a brace of mediocre albums before coming back in the late 80s with Permanent Vacation (1987) and then Pump (1989), both of which spawned monster radio hits that dominated even the South African airwaves and set the band on the path to serious success and wealth. Aerosmith may have made better rock albums in die Seventies but from 1987 they became a commercial megalith with smooth, well produced heavy rock made by older guys in the fashion of the time and, if the hits were entertaining on the radio, none of them ever motivated me to buy any Aerosmith product ever again. The tough braggadocio and brio of the young and struggling Aerosmith were replaced by the streamlined commercial rock with Eighties production values that removed the fire the band once had and replaced it with calculated, eviscerated commercial nous.

It was ironic that the up and coming Guns ‘N Roses, heirs apparent to the original version of  Aerosmith, supported the latter in a late Eighties tour where Guns ‘N Roses were promoting their debut, Appetite for Destruction, and (allegedly) were told to stay away from the newly sober Aerosmith who’d settled into the commercial, mature peak of their career.   

I guess rock bands do have a trite life cycle of struggle before becoming truly successful and secure in their careers later in life. In the first 5 to 10 years the bad members are young, ambitious, hard living and make records full of youthful brio and vim but do not necessarily make a bunch of money partly because they blow their income on drugs and expensive shit that come from the desire to achieve a rock and roll lifestyle. A few years into the career the band has a purple patch where they write and record an album or two with massive hits, commercial success is enormous and the band members at last achieve financial security and realise that a career can be had if they play their cards right and relax a bit into the lifestyle and do not take it to the extreme all the time. This is the corporate phase where production values are high and required to be high, lots of attention is paid to detail. Professional songwriters and producers come onto the scene to guide the band to a sustainable career with continued commercial success. Generally this is where the song writing and production become slick and the tunes sound good on the radio and the quirky rough edges are smoothed out to the degree that the music becomes far less interesting than it might have been at the beginning.

Aerosmith fell victim to this syndrome. From Aerosmith to Night in the Ruts the band released a succession of good gritty Seventies hard rock albums made by young guys wanting to make their mark and loving to rock out. From Permanent Vacation onwards the music was being written and recorded by a bunch of increasingly older guys with the older guys' attitude to what rock is or should be, with an eye on maintaining the commercial initiative and the sense of belonging to the music industry establishment and being proud of it and accepting all kinds of honours they might have scoffed at when they were very young and rebellious. 

Young Aerosmith were rebellious punks who wanted to ultimate rock and roll lifestyle of women, drugs and excessive living. The older, more mature Aerosmith, who had become careerists as much as anyone else in the business who foresaw longevity provided they slowed down and observed a couple of rules, and realized that corporate rock was much more lucrative than rebellious rock and could give one the kind of comfort and luxury being a rebel and showing the establishment the finger, never could or would.

As soon as Aerosmith songs started enjoying serious airplay in South Africa the smooth, glossy pop veneer put me off. This was nothing like the satisfactory rough crunch of their early albums. They got older, more proficient, lost the drug habits and realized that their career demanded closer attention to craftsmanship and maintaining their health than punk rebellion and purely visceral rock and roll.

Somewhere along 1990 Aerosmith crossed the line from outlaw rockers to classic rockers. In my opinion Aerosmith’s best years were the first decade of their existence as band. They’ve going for more than 40 years now and will never equal those first 7 studio albums regardless of how commercially successful later records might have been.

 

Black Sabbath

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973) was one of the albums my peer group at Paul Roos Gymnasium held in particularly high esteem. The album was passed along from boy to boy and all of them ostentatiously flaunted their temporary possession of the album, to arouse envy and awe in their mates who did not have the record. Nobody ever bothered to offer to lend it to me. At the time I didn’t know much about the music (simply known as “underground” in Stellenbosch) anyway and probably would not have liked it much.

The only heavy band I knew and kind of liked, was Deep Purple, with a sound that was far more intricate and musicians that seemed to be technically highly advanced.

I wasn’t much of rock fan then at all, preferring the pop on the radio and the odd heavy tune that became a hit single.  I hadn’t even heard the term prog rock and “underground” was not my pleasure.

Perhaps the cool guys truly liked Black Sabbath; perhaps listening to this stuff was a simply prerequisite for appearing to be cool. The thrill of listening to a group that was ostensibly connected to Satanism and anti-religious sentiment was probably related to the perceived illicit nature of the material in a country and a town that were firmly in the grip of Christian Nationalism.

In 1975 or 1976, our high school principal took the time at two school assemblies to warn us of the subversive and non-Christian nature of the music of the Beatles, who had not been a functioning band for more than 6 years and were no longer very hip and happening. The principal completely missed out on Black Sabbath. This proved to me that teachers were quite ignorant about youth culture and very dumb concerning the real lives and interests of the kids they are supposed to teach.

I wasn’t particularly keen on heavy metal when I was in my late teens. My first musical love was blues and basic roots rock and roll. I did once own, for a few weeks, Deep Purple's live album Made in Japan but soon grew tired of it. Uriah Heep never appealed to me. As far as I was concerned Heep was an obvious copy of the Purple template, but completely crude and clueless with it.  I liked glam rock, with the likes of Bowie, Slade, Sweet (when they started rocking), T Rex, Mud (before they became cheezy) and Suzi Quatro. Then I discovered Dr Feelgood and Cream and was hooked for life.

Around 1979 I started buying Led Zeppelin albums, starting with Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and then moving to The Song Remains the Same (the movie soundtrack) and ending up with Led Zeppelin IV.  Although I understood that Cream and Led Zeppelin were the forerunners of the heavy blues style that mutated into heavy metal, the blues aspects were paramount to me and I hardly saw even Led Zep as particularly heavy. Then I moved on to Aerosmith and Blue Oyster Cult, both of which rocked pretty hard but Aerosmith seemed to be closer to straight rock and roll than metal and Blue Oyster Cult was far too melodic to sound truly heavy. I also bought a couple of Grand Funk Railroad albums and even these seemed kind of twee compared with the others. Apparently Grand Funk was incredibly loud on stage yet their records sounded underproduced and weedy.

At no time did I fancy buying any Black Sabbath product until the closure of the Ragtime Records outlet in Stellenbosch in, I think, 1981. During an extended closing down sale I splurged on a bunch of legendary Seventies records, such as the first three Blue Oyster Cult albums. I also bought the Black Sabbath debut album called, uh, Black Sabbath (1970) with a cover of a sinister figure in what could have been a cemetery, illustrating the title song en emphasising the black magic aspects of the band's image.

 Paranoid (1970) was also available but for some reason I could not persuade myself to buy this record even though I had already heard the title track, which sounded pretty much like the kind of speed freak rock that could have come from Detroit at around that time.

Black Sabbath was ponderous, slow and heavy and the lyrics sounded ridiculous. I did not like Ozzy Osbourne's reedy, slightly shrill, voice either. The arrangements were intricate, a trademark of the band's music, but somehow too incoherent and all over the place for my taste. The darkness of the album was a good theme though and though I cannot say I ever loved the record, I did appreciate it.

I was greatly surprised and incredulous to read many years later that this was the album that kickstarted heavy metal. It didn’t seem that heavy to me and the lyrics were so stupid that I couldn’t imagine anyone taking this band seriously.

A while later I also bought Master of Reality (1971) and was even less impressed. The music was as stupidly intricate and heavy as ever and the lyrics, if possible, even dumber than before and Ozzy's singing style grated all the more because the words were so stupid. Apparently, this album was quite influential on many teenagers who later took up music and one or more the various sub-genres of metal.

My final Black Sabbath purchase to date, was a cassette tape of the album Live at Last (1980), that I could never listen to because the surface of the tape was damaged. It had been a cheap buy but I was still disappointed.

After that I never felt any need to own any further Black Sabbath product, even when I started buying CDs and began replicating a good deal of my record collection. I have Led Zeppelin, Blues Oyster Cult and Aerosmith and I got into Metallica. Heck, the other day I even bought a budget compilation of Mötley Crüe hits. But for all that, Black Sabbath has not made any reappearance in my CD collection.

That was the case until I received the DVD of the documentary God Bless Ozzy as a Christmas present in 2012. This documentary is a biography of Ozzy Osbourne, released in 2011, and was made at around the time Osbourne turned 60, a sober 60 at that after years of alcohol and drug abuse. The basic Ozzy story is familiar and I knew the outlines of it. This documentary fills in some gaps and expands on the life story. Now suddenly it has also piqued my interest in the back catalogue, primarily of Black Sabbath and the Randy Rhoads years, in much the way Some Kind of Monster made me go to the Metallica back catalogue beyond the Metallica (1991) album.

Ozzy's story is almost the Sixties rock star cliché  of an origin in dire poverty, music as escape from that background, massive success coming quickly to young men utterly not emotionally or psychologically equipped to deal with the fame and fortune, the resultant excesses and addictions, the almost disastrous firing from the band that made him famous and then a whole new career and a whole different level of success and, ultimately, after the years of abuse, the redemption of getting clean and sober, connecting with children and loved ones. Now Ozzy is an elder statesman of heavy metal who still tours and who still draws massive adulation.

One thing the documentary does not tell us, is why The Osbournes got made at all. Whose idea was it? I never saw any of the episodes and perhaps I should seek out the box set, but it was talked about and revered. I’d lost track of Ozzy's career after the Eighties and had no idea whether the man was alive or dead or even had an any career left, though I did read that for a couple of years the Ozzfest tour was one of the most successful, if not the most successful, of the type of travelling rock caravan first popularized by Lollapalooza.

In the bigger scheme of things, I guess, there was obviously no reason why Ozzy couldn’t tour when the Rolling Stones were still doing massive tours and in general the heavy peer group with whom Black Sabbath came up during the early Seventies, such as Purple or Heep, were also still touring albeit to more selective audiences.

The original members of Black Sabbath reunited in 2011 to record new material, although it seems that Bill Ward may after all not be part of the package. A new album titled 13 was released in 2013. One wonders why these guys would still want to write and record new stuff to appeal, presumably, to the kind of young audience that follows Ozzy.  Do they want to show up Metallica?  Is there one more economically massively successful nostalgia tour in them as pension plan? 

Yeah, why doesn't either Ozzy as solo act or Sabbath as band play in South Africa?  Metallica is coming; Red Hot Chilli Peppers are coming; Bon Jovi has been; Kings of Leon have been.  Surely these granddads of metal can fill a stadium, or large auditorium, and find some decent local metal act to support them. I guess I would pay money to check them out.

So, after Christmas 2012, I was in my local Musica and came across a Black Sabbath Greatest Hits compilation covering the Ozzy Osbourne years. Coincidence? I think not.  I bought it. The album kicks off with “Paranoid” off the eponymous record and concludes with “N.I’B.” from the Black Sabbath album. In between we have cuts from most of the albums between Black Sabbath (1970) and Never Say Die (1978). The emphasis is on the early years and there is nothing from Sabotage or Technical Ecstasy, and only one track each from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and the final album with Ozzy Osbourne, Never Say Die.

I hadn’t heard the songs I know well, off Black Sabbath and Master of Reality, for many years and I must confess that my re-acquaintance was quite warm. The sound is bottom heavy, but the digital remastering (I presume) adds clarity and the separation of instruments gives one a more dynamic, lively sound than I remember from the records. Bill Ward’s busy, driving drumming is a delight. He sounds like an amalgam of Keith Moon and Ginger Baker and his playing serves to alleviate the ponderousness of the guitar and bass riffs.  The lyrics are still dumb though.

These ‘greatest hits” are meant to be the best of the bunch and this is probably how Sabbath should be approached and appreciated. Ozzy Osbourne’s vocal style is still a tad irritating yet also affecting on “Changes”, which adumbrates the kind of sound and melodic song Ozzy came up with in his solo career.

Unlike, say, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin, who stuck firmly to songs on mock-medieval or mythic themes or simply sang about having a good time, Black Sabbath wrote several songs addressing political and social issues, from “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” to “Snowblind” and “Sweat Leaf,” albeit often in a simplistic, naïve way, and this makes them unique amongst heavy bands for whom the celebration of rock and roll itself was most commonly the stuff of lyrics. Perhaps Ozzy saw himself as the Bob Dylan of heavy metal.

After listening to this collection of prime Sabbath I am almost inclined to seek out the parent albums. When I look at the track listings of the first 6 albums (Black Sabbath to Sabotage) I realise that I know many of them. Although my memory is bit fuzzy it may be that, probably during my last years at varsity, I knew someone who owned the records and lent them to me at least to listen to. The surprising thing, given the incredible ponderous heaviness of Black Sabbath, was how many delicate instrumentals the band had recorded. They obviously arose from Tony Iommi’s ambition to demonstrate that he was not just some dumb-ass metal guitarist but as much of an artist as Jimmy Page or Ritchie Blackmore.  In the pantheon of Seventies British metal, I would once have pigeonholed Sabbath as very heavy and very dumb. They are certainly very heavy. They are nowhere as dumb as Uriah Heep though. 

The San Francisco based band Blue Cheer, and various Detroit bands of the late Sixties, could have been the inspiration for the early Black Sabbath sound though I would not have expected such influences to have penetrated to Birmingham in 1969. Who knows, though. The Ozzy documentary does not offer a detailed history of Black Sabbath and perhaps one should look at the recently published Tony Iommi autobiography, Iron Man, for more information on the minutiae of the genesis and the influences on the musicians. If Iommi’s memory can still serve him. Apparently, the sudden success and easy money went to the band members’ heads and quite a lot of the money went up their noses.

For a reason that eludes me, unless it’s simply a commercial fact that the potential readers of rock biographies are only interested in salacious stories of debauchery and decadence and not the technical stuff of making music, most rock biographies or autobiographies really skim quickly and lightly over the arcane aspects of song writing and recording. Nowadays there is a sub-genre of rock book that concentrates on the making an influential or popular album but even they deal with the surrounding circumstances, band relationships, social context and so forth, and not too much with technical matters.

Anyway, I want to know how Iommi came up with his riffs and melodies; what inspired Osbourne to write lyrics he wrote; what the drumming influences on Bill Ward were; and who inspired Geezer Butler to play bass.

When one listens carefully to the greatest hits it is evident that the band can play and whatever ostensible dumbness can be ascribed to heavy metal, it does not reflect in the virtuosity of the musicians. After all, metal is the one musical genre where great technical virtuosity in guitarists is prized and almost expected.

I’m glad that there is revival of interest in Black Sabbath even if I won’t go any further than the greatest hits. The band had no specific significance to me from my teenage years, other than as a hip name to bandy about, and my curiosity has more to do with my general and eclectic interest in music than with reliving a memory from youth.  Ozzy Osbourne’s lyrics and sometimes excruciating singing style often irritated me and the ponderous riffing does tend to go beyond the limits of my tolerance. Black Sabbath is a good example of the kind of band where I would be quite happy to own only the greatest hits set without feeling a need to investigate or own the rest of their output.  A collection of the best-known songs would represent the best songs period and what more does one want than a collection of killer tracks?

Whether Black Sabbath really was the first heavy metal band is a question that may be debated for as long as there are heavy metal fans. That the band has been influential seems beyond question. That they have recorded some good stuff is also beyond question but Black Sabbath is not the kind of band that bears critical examination beyond the riffs and trite lyrics. It is a force of nature and by now an institution.  From fringe act to grand old men of metal within the space of 40 years the career of Black Sabbath is one more example of rock bands that started as outlaws or marginalised artists and then grew into the establishment, whether or not they made money along the way, simply by staying around and keeping going until the changing times caught up with them.

Around 2013 the band concluded a lengthy final tour with Ozzy and may never tour or record again.

Black Sabbath has been fronted by a couple of different vocalists and changed metal styles according to the changing tastes of the decades and yet, for most, those first albums with Ozzy will always represent the band at its archetypal and those records seem to remain at the top of any ratings list of Sabbath albums.  For me, the idiosyncrasies of those first records, with Ozzy’s whining voice and the plodding riffs, do seem do make the difference between a unique vision and the technical proficiency yet ultimately undifferentiated sound of the later Sabbath. Bands like Sabbath do not quite lend themselves to being smoothed out and made into a more sophisticated versions of the original iconoclasts. The weird rough edges and dumbness are what caught the attention and that will always make the young, fresh and naïve version of any band like Sabbath the most entertaining, riveting and memorable version.

Having said that, a compilation album of Sabbath’s best tracks is probably the best way to listen to them. Stick to the hits and avoid the filler or lesser tracks on the many albums.  Prime Sabbath is easy to reduce to a list of no   more than 20 tracks.

Captain Beefheart

The NME liked Captain Beefheart a lot and declared that Trout Mask Replica (1969) was a solid gold masterpiece and one of the best records ever made. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978) and Doc at the Radar Station (1980) were released during the period I religiously bought and devoured the NME, from roughly January 1977 to December 1981, and each NME review of these albums was pretty much ecstatic. I never bought these records or even heard anything from them at the time. Perhaps they were not even available in Stellenbosch but I probably would never have shelled out good money for them because the impressionistic reviews made the music sound rather uncompromisingly weird in a way I wasn’t keen to experience if it meant taking a chance on paying full price for the records. No Beefheart album ever showed up in any bargain bin I trawled through.

Over time, and mostly from pieces in the NME, I got to know the pertinent facts of the Beefheart backstory and I was quite chuffed when my mate Dan Lombard lent me the Zappa / Beefheart / Mothers live album Bongo Fury (1975) with several tracks recorded on a tour Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart undertook, ostensibly to give Beefheart some income at a time when he was locked in contractual litigation that prevented him from recording or performing under his own auspices.

Apparently, Beefheart believed, for this tour, that Zappa had the best lead vocalist he’d ever had. I would tend to agree with this statement. The title track and the two spoken word pieces “Sam with the Scalp Showing Flat Top” and “Man with The Woman Head,” plus the other Beefheart vocals, were astonishingly different to anything I’d ever heard and in their weird oddness are superior to even Zappa’s eccentricities.  I have never been a Zappaphile and if this were a world where one had to choose between Zappa and Beefheart I would wholeheartedly and unreservedly be a Beefheart man.

I taped Bongo Fury and listened to it often enough to count Beefheart as an influence on my attempts to develop a singing voice. I cannot really sing and thought  that I could camouflage my inadequacies with a Beefheartian growl. Later in life people thought I was imitating Tom Waits when I was really trying to channel Captain Beefheart. I guess their frames of reference were divergent from mine.  I came to Tom Waits only in the Nineties, at least 12 years after my first exposure to Captain Beefheart, and only because an ex-girlfriend became enamoured of Raindogs (1985), a record she’d heard  at the house of her then current lover, and played it to me.

I never heard anything else by Captain Beefheart until mid-1983, when I had an opportunity to listen to Trout Mask Replica in Windhoek, Namibia, of all places. Peter Le Mottée, one of my Army buddies in Windhoek, shared digs on the outskirts of the city with some young working civilian who was apparently quite religious, as was Peter, yet had an interesting and eclectic record collection. I visited Peter at his home once and, as was my wont when in other people’s homes for the first time, I checked out the guy’s record collection to get a grip on where his mind was. I have no particular recollection of the general content of the collection except for the astonishing fact that he owned Trout Mask Replica and professed to be fond of it. Peter was not keen on the record he described as cacophonous.  Peter played one side of it for me and the songs on that side did sound confused and cacophonous and rather shrill and trebly with disjointed rhythms and spidery slide guitar. There was never an opportunity to listen to the whole double album. This brief introduction also did not motivate me to seek out the record, which (given it’s cult status and left-field reputation) was probably not readily available, at least not in Windhoek, and not in Stellenbosch or Cape Town when I returned after the end of National Service.

Matters rested there until the late Nineties when I found a cheap CD copy of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s debut album Safe As Milk (1967). To be perfectly accurate, the CD was called something else entirely (I think it’s Zig Zag Wanderer, after one of the track) and the cover photograph was of Beefheart in the late Seventies, instead of the original album cover, but from looking it up in the Rolling Stone Record Guide, the track listing of this budget priced CD indicated that it was a repackaged version of Safe As Milk.  

Safe As Milk is just a tad unconventional but no weirder than most late Sixties psychedelia.  Ry Cooder plays slide guitar on it and the sound and feel is oddball blues and psychedelic pop rather than avant garde freak out. Safe As Milk has good tunes, pop smarts, wit, blues power and a subtle strangeness all at once and there seems to be no reason why it could not have been as successful as any other psychedelic record released in 1967. When I listen to Safe As Milk, I cannot believe that it would not have formed a small yet perfectly compatible piece of the mosaic of the summer of love in San Francisco.

I was still not motivated to seek out any Beefheart product until May 2014 when I happened on a BBC documentary about Captain Beefheart on YouTube, narrated by the late great British DJ John Peel.  Not only was it a fresh, more informative take on the biography but the documentary featured several old video and audio clips of Magic Band and solo Beefheart performances. Some of the immediately most interesting tracks are the more or less straight blues-style recordings of the Magic Band before Safe As Milk. Beefheart did have the power and intensity of Howlin’ Wolf and I would be prepared to pay good money to own those songs or perhaps just find then on YouTube.

After hearing excerpts from Trout Mask Replica in the documentary, I sought it out on YouTube and listened to it in full.  Perhaps I’d gotten used to Beefheart by then but this album does not sound anything like the otherwordly cosmic shrieks I recollect from that one brief listen in Windhoek. Frankly, very little on this album sounds that unconventional now. My musical experience and tastes must have matured and expanded considerably since 1983.  

Yes, there are humorous skits and off-kilter musical shapes but on the whole, there’s internal logic in the world view and the fascinating fusion of gut bucket blues and ostensibly free form jams that were in fact carefully rehearsed chaos. The skits sound spontaneous but could well have been as carefully prepared as the tunes. Beefheart was the kind of control freak that would want improv to be rehearsed.  Trout Mask Replica might have been as mind blowing as Sgt Pepper apparently was back in the day, yet nowadays both sound interesting but not quite revolutionary. There is nothing here that cannot be understood or comprehended within the context of Beefheart or simply as part of several decades of free from freak out.  Trout Mask Replica is not, to my ears, free form, even at its most loose and rickety. The album closer “Veterans Day Poppy” is about as conventional a blues rocker as you can get.

Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982) are the final trio of Beefheart studio albums and, for me, and perhaps because my musical tastes have become more sophisticated and also because it’s always different experience when you listen to a once revolutionary record many years after its release, rather than when it has a  contemporary shock effect, but these three albums didn’t chock, surprise or particularly enthral me when I listened to them recently. I like the music and the albums would have fitted nicely into my eclectic record collection, yet I also don’t know whether I’d want to own them now. Fortunately, the records are readily available on music streaming services for that moment when you crave Beefheart. The best part is that all the authorised albums plus many other outtakes, oddities bootlegs and rarities, are also freely available for the Beefheart superfan and completist.  

The Beefheart music career came to an end with Ice Cream for Crow, whereafter Don van Vliet concentrated on painting and probably became more famous in the rarified world of art than he ever had been in the mainstream world of popular music. Captain Beefheart was a cult figure then and he is a cult figure now.