Reflections on ZZ Top

 ZZ TOP

Chris Prior dubbed himself the Rock Professor and I never knew whether it was meant to indicate a vast and molecular knowledge of all things rockular, or whether it simply meant that his tastes were slightly old-fashioned and fuddy duddy, but he sure knew something about a lot of good rock, the kind of rock nowadays called classis rock. He introduced me to a lot of acts and Z Z Top and Van Morrison are the two most important ones from the perspective of my record collection.

Back in the day, in my late high school and early Varsity years, between, 1975 and the end of 1981, SABC radio was divided into various services of which the English and Afrikaans services were the major, broad based channels, then there were the various regional services in either or both of the two official languages, a number of ethnic language stations, and Radio 5 which was the national music station. 

I listened to some English service programmes, a little bit of Radio Good Hope (the Cape Town based regional station) , very little of Radio 5 – in fact, by about 1978 I stopped listening to it altogether because it had a disco format I grew to hate – and from 1978 on a great deal of Radio Xhosa. My favourite programme on the English service was the late afternoon magazine programme Audiomix, aimed at teens I guess, with an entertaining mixture of news, topical subjects, education and entertainment and sports. The style was jocular and semi-hip and it was not a bad hour to spend in front of the radio, but the highlight for a far too brief period was a brief 10 or 15 minute slot in which the relatively young Chris Prior sought to give us a rough guide to some or other band or individual musician he thought we should know more about.

This Prior educational slot was broadcast in the time of UK punk and New Wave, yet I do not recollect him ever introducing any of the newer British or American bands. He focussed essentially on the Sixties and early to mid-‘70s. 

Apart from ZZ Top and Van Morrison, I have no idea who else Chris Prior introduced to the Audiomix listeners. I vaguely recall that the James Gang might have featured, but it could be a false memory.

Anyhow, in his brief slot Prior gave a potted biography of his subject and played selected tunes to illustrate the topic.

I had heard of ZZ Top, probably an article in Hit Parader the US monthly rock magazine that carried at least one feature on the band and its ‘Taking Texas to the People” tour, with live rattlesnakes and wild steers on stage. ZZ Top broke all kinds of attendance records in all parts of the United States. 

However, I still knew nothing of what ZZ Top sounded like until Prior played “Brown Sugar” (not the Rolling Stones tune) with its ominous, slow stop time beat, growling vocals and space age freaky blues guitar. I hadn’t heard anything like this before and I was hooked. Who knows what else he played? Probably any combination of  “La Grange,” “Tush,”  “I just Got Paid,” “Waiting for the Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago,” “Blue Jeans Blues” and “Arrested for Driving While Blind.” What the tunes were, is not important. The important part is that I was an instant ZZ Top fan.

Not long after the revelation, I was in Sygma Records (the only record store in Stellenbosch at the time) and saw a copy of Tejas (1976) there.  I didn’t have any money, or not enough, on me, returned home, got the dosh and went straight back to buy the album, fervently hoping all the time that some fool hadn’t bought the record while I was away.

There was a smidgen of disappointment when I realised that neither “Brown Sugar” or “La Grange” was on this record, and there was in fact nothing as down home as “Brown Sugar” on it.

The music was a tad strange. “Arrested for Driving While Blind” was a great stomping rocker, as was “Ten Dollar Man,” but opening rack “It's Only Love,”  “Pan Am Highway” and “She's A Heartbreaker” sounded more like country to me and “Asleep in the Desert” was a weird, contemplative instrumental that did not jibe with the boisterous, rocking image of the boys from Texas. Then there was “Enjoy And Get It On” with its John Lee Hooker style boogie, and the hard charging “Avalon Hideaway,” apparently based on a true story, and the silly tale of “El Diablo” that seemed like too much of a contrivance without merit. It, and “Snappie Kakkie” sounded like filler to me. No matter, this was a great album and I loved it to death. It might be due to love at first sight, but this is still my all-time favourite ZZ Top album.

After Tejas, and its tour, the Top went on a lengthy hiatus and released no new studio album until 1979's Deguello, which I bought at a discounted price in 1980. In the meantime, the Top sound had changed considerably and no longer sounded like the slightly odd blues and country band of yore. Instead there was a harder, more produced sound and songs that sounded mostly like jokes, as if the struggle years were over and the band could afford to let go of blues credibility and just kick back and mess around. The music was still powerful (and Billy Gibbons had discovered effects pedals  and New Wave production values) but the lyrics were funny and funny.

The album opened with the stomping soul of “I Thank You” and the second side started with heavy version of the venerable “Dust My Broom,” two cover versions that suggested a songwriting drought of sorts.

Then there were the peculiar blues of “Cheap Sunglasses,” “I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide,”  “A Fool For Your Stockings” and “She Loves My Automobile.” 

“Manic Mechanic” is just filler.

I suppose Top decided it was time to change, to adopt New Wave values and to move into the ‘80s and a more contemporary sound and outlook, with basic blues tropes on top of an updated musical backing. in a way it was so forward looking and non-traditional boogie blues that I did not appreciate Deguello as deeply as I did Tejas  and certainly didn’t listen to it as much, but on re-investigation, Deguello ain’t half bad and has enough old-school Top to be mostly enjoyable., even if it will still never be part of my top 5 list of ZZ Top albums; basically the first five records from ZZ Top’s First Album to Tejas.

In due course, I acquired Fandango! and Tres Hombres, probably in that order too though the latter was the third album and Fandango! fourth. 

Fandango! has a studio side and a live side. I guess the intention was to show us how the band worked a room or maybe they just didn’t have enough new songs to fill two sides of a record. I had mixed feelings about the live side. “Thunderbird” was great, “Jailhouse Rock” redundant and the “Backdoor” medley is just the band fucking around on stage  for shits and giggles, with a version of “Boogie Chillen” they called “Long Distance Boogie” just to have the copyright. Frankly, these tracks did make the Top sound like just another bar band and not in a good way.

The studio tracks on Fandango! are the nuggets on the album. “Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings,” “Blue Jeans Blues,” “Balinese,” “Mexican Blackbird,” “Heard It On the X” and “Tush” form possibly the best sequence of brilliant blues rock songs ever, all killer and no filler, to the max. They rock, there is plenty slide guitar, the tales are funky and tall, and the album ends with the truly magnificent “Tush,” one of the most excitable odes to nookie I have ever heard. 

The second side of the album is a well-nigh perfect example of how rockin' blues boogie should be played. For a touring band, they sure sounded a lot better in studio surroundings than on a stage. 

Where Fandango! Was the tough, rocking version of ZZ Top, and Tejas quite a bit country, it seemed to me that Tres Hombres showcased the gospel influences of the band. Not that hard rocking blues were absent. “Waiting for the Bus / Jesus Just Left Chicago,” the opening one-two combination proved that the boys sure knew how to play a powerful shuffle but the gospel thing started creeping in there. Chris Prior was particularly fond of these two songs. Then there is “La Grange,” one of the great blues riffs of all time and a song that became a staple in the repertoire of a number of neo-blues bands in the great blues revival in Cape Town in the late Eighties and early Nineties; it mixed up Slim Harpo and John Lee Hooker and rocked like a demon.

“Hot, Blue and Righteous” and “Have You Heard?” were the two main gospelized tunes, and “Master of Sparks,” allegedly based on a true story, was a weird little ditty with a cosmic and theological subtext. Of course blues and gospel were intertwined in the American South and it is just right that 3 good ole boys should mix up that kind of medicine as well.

For a long while  my  ZZ Top collection consisted of only these 4 records. I just didn’t find the first two albums anywhere and starting with El Loco (1981), I really didn’t care for the cartoonish ZZ Top with the long beards on Gibbons and Hill, and the synth heavy mega successful albums “Eliminator” and “Afterburner.” I can’t think of a single ‘70s artist that updated their sound to fit in with ‘80s production styles and sounds, whose ‘80s albums I like. I far preferred the clean, overdriven, ‘70s production of, say Neil Young, Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and, of course ZZ Top.

 When switched to the CD format for my music collection, I duplicated many of my LP records, and did that with Fandango! and Tres Hombres, as single albums, and had the good fortune to find the ZZ Top Sixpack of the first five albums and El Loco, at a flea market stall. 

El Loco sounded a lot more like Deguello than it sounded like the earlier albums with very little pure blues. I knew “Tube Snake Boogie” from the radio, but the rest of the tunes were unfamiliar and though none are bad, it is not an album that I could bond with. On relistening, the record seems heavy on ballad type material, and there is far more synth and other instrumentation on. it to beef up the basic trio, and to position ZZ Top for its standard world conquering ‘80s sound

Call me a Luddite but I preferred the more straight ahead bluesier version of the band. Updating the sound for a younger, more contemporary pop audience worked out well for ZZ Top but it never worked for me.

El Loco is typical of the type of record I’ll listen to once, for the record, and never again because there is nothing to it to engage or captivate me on any level.

ZZ Top's First Album (1971) and Rio Grande Mud (1972) were the real deal, and for the first time since Chris Prior’s introduction on Audiomix, probably almost twenty years before, I heard “Brown Sugar” (from the debut) in all its glory. it’s probably the best thing on that first record, which sounds tentative and subdued otherwise, as if the band hadn’t found its feet in the studio or in its songwriting. A promising start, with all the elements of classic Top already in evidence, but not yet matured.

Rio Grande Mud is far better, starting with the stonking boogie of “Francene” and then giving us “Just Got Paid,” “Mushmouth Shouting,” “Chevrolet,” “Apologies to Pearly” and “Sure Got Cold After the Rain Fell,” as gold grade Top, with  4 other tracks that are worthy but also seems a tad like filler.

I realised that the Top was not as purist a blues band as I had thought, and was nothing like the early Fleetwood Mac or even John Mayall, and was closer to the blues based boogie bands like Foghat, but Billy Gibbons still played a mean blues guitar that was the mitigating subtle factor midst the good time boogie. 

One can make one helluva solid playlist from the first 5 ZZ Top albums.

The ‘80s were very good for ZZ Top, with the addition of electronics, up to date production, those really stupidly long beards, tender love songs, MTV videos on heavy rotation and the added bonus of at least one Back To The Future soundtrack hit tie-in, and the custom built Topmobile. ZZ Top was commercially even more successful than in the ‘70s. The hit songs (“Sharp Dressed Man,” “Gimme All Your Lovin” “Got Me Under Pressure,” “Legs,” “Sleeping Bag,” “Rough Boy” and “Doubleback”)_were all over local radio, affording the new look ZZ Top more airtime than they ever had in the ‘70s. Once again, the songs on Eliminator (1983), Afterburner (1985) and Recycler (1990) weren’t bad, but I never warmed to this new sound and the concept that the Top were no longer real beer drinkers and hell raisers and were simply putting on a big act for the kids who were now their audience.  For me, ZZ Top going mainstream made them into one of those AOR rock acts of the ‘80s (Aerosmith is another example) that simply did not appeal.

Eliminator, Afterburner and Recycler  are of a piece, sounding like typical ‘80s smoothed out hard rock, albeit with a more direct blues flavour and with synth flourishes, guitar effects, the standard excellent technique and songs that are more sophisticated versions of the themes they celebrated in the ‘70s.

 

After another 4-year hiatus, Top returned with Antenna in 1994, in  the midst of the grunge phenomena and in “the year that punk broke.” The sound is tougher, beefier and crisper, although still in thrall to contemporary production values and technological enhancement.  

Rhythmeen (1996) builds on the previous record’s style and sound. Billy Gibbons is a super gifted guitarist who works hard on developing unique riffs for each song but over the length of an album they start sounding laboured.  The other thing is that, though the song craft and arrangements may improve  technically as musicians age and mature, the lack of youthful exuberance and bravura ingenuity means that the record comes and goes and fails to settle in the head afterward, never mind  giving the listener a satisfying classic. CD length albums, usually substantially longer than LP releases, often become a tedious slog with each track flowing into the other as if it were one long song.

I can’t see how anyone, except the most hard cord of diehard fans, would’ve been eagerly anticipating, after another long hiatus, Top’s last album of the 20^th century, XXX (1999.)  On this record there seems to be more synth enhancements and diddy bopping than before, sometimes almost with a  post-rock, light industrial attitude and a nod to electro. The last four tracks are live recordings of new material. “(Let Me Be Your) Teddybear” is reinterpreted as a blues with the clean, old school sound of ZZ Top’s ‘70s heydays, and the other three tracks are contemporary sounding.

Four more years pass before the Top returns with Mescalero (2003),  66 minutes’ worth of hard rocking, blues flecked, nu metal guitar.  The underlying riff to “Buck Nekkid” sounds like a nod to “La Grange” and 5 of the tracks have cryptic one word titles, as if ZZ Top is becoming an arty band. 

 

The next Top studio album follows 9 years later, La Futura (2013) but this time it’s 12 songs in 46 minutes.  “Chartreuse” has an opening riff that pays homage to “Tush” and there retooled quotes from, and knowing nods to,  Top tunes from the ‘70s amid the now standard big rock sound. 

ZZ Top fell foul of the same trap rock bands with longevity fall in. They become adept at the technical aspects of song writing, want to keep up with the times and embrace the best that contemporary technology has to offer and seek to progress and innovate the sound and sacrifice creative sparks of quirky invention for the purposeful professional approach required to sustain a career over the length of a life time.  The first records, written and recorded with the brashness of youth set out the stall and present the canon by which the band will be known and measured ever after, and nothing that comes later, no matter how proficient or commercially successful will replace the early classics.  One cannot fault the ZZ Top albums after El Loco, or even Deguello, on any technical level, but they are difficult to differentiate from each other and are appreciated rather than loved.

I see no need to own anything released after 1977 except that I should confess that I did buy the Live From Texas (2008) CD but only because I found it on sale at a Musica shop in the Langeberg Mall outside Mossel Bay.

This live set features some of the good stuff from the ‘70s, several tracks off Deguello and the biggest ‘80s hits. The boys sound like they're having fun on stage and they rock hard but somehow the performance is not very satisfying. The first side of Fandango! has more energy and sounds a lot better too, even if more primitive or maybe it’s because it sounds more skeletal. 

ZZ Top continued with its recording career, releasing a new studio album every few years, and a slew of live recordings, none of which ever interested me enough to acquire them.

The modern day version of ZZ Top featured the same three guys who started the band forty years ago and Frank Beard, the drummer, still has no beard, yet the music has changed perceptibly over time. Once the Top was a blues band with a lot of boogie in its stew and now they are close to being a hard rock band playing some blues styled tunes and cracking some risqué jokes in-between while they glorify all things Texan. If this formula undoubtedly spells good fun on the night, it pales somewhat when one puts the platter on the stereo. Play it loud and some of the effect returns but it cannot quite convince me that ZZ Top are any better today than they were 35 years ago.

Once they billed themselves as a little old band from Texas. Nowadays it is more like just an old band from Texas whose members still have some moves and have to rely on craft and experience to excite where it used to be youth and energy.

Perhaps “Enjoy And Get It On” should be the motto, perhaps “Arrested for Driving While Blind” and “Tush” are still the best energy rush experience of the joys drinking and driving and of looking to pull. That is what ZZ Top is about: feeling good and getting high and rocking out and having a damn fine time doing it!

 

RIP Dusty Hill, bassist for ZZ Top

  

(from Wikipedia)

 

Joseph Michael "Dusty" Hill (May 19, 1949 – July 28, 2021) was an American musician, singer, and songwriter, best known as the bassist and secondary lead vocalist of the American rock group ZZ Top; he also played keyboards with the band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a member of ZZ Top, in 2004.

 

 

Chris Prior introduced me to ZZ Top in the late ‘70s, when the SABC’s English Service employed him and when I subsequently saw Tejas (1976) in my local record store I bought the album, followed by Deguello (1979), Fandango(1975) and Trés Hombres (1973.) I acquired ZZ Top’s First Album (1971) and Rio Grande Mud (1972) much later as a part of the ZZ Top Sixpack collection of the first five albums and El Loco (1980.) I have no idea why Deguello wasn’t part of the six.  That was it for me regarding ZZ Top. I had little fondness for their ‘80s mega hit period, and simply had no interest in the even later stuff. For me, as with so many bands that came up in the ‘780s, the music that ZZ Top released on those first five albums are the canon and as much ZZ Top one needs in one’s life.

 

I also read a bit about the band, particularly a piece on their “Taking Texas to the People” concert tour in the mid-‘70s,  in the US rock monthly, Hit Parader, and elsewhere and realised how often musicians tend to go through many bands, and even line ups in the same band, before they strike paydirt. It seems that ZZ Top’s success came from some hit singles but mainly from non-stop touring to build a loyal fanbase.

 

I’ve heard a couple of cover versions of “Tush” and in Cape Town’s blues rock scene of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s “La Grange” was a popular number on a couple of bands’ set lists.

 

Apart from “Brown Sugar,” the debut album sounds too tentative and self-effacing and it’s only from Rio Grande Mud that the Top hits its stride, with classics like “Francene,” “Just Got Paid” and “Sure Got Cold After the Rain Fell,”  and the following three albums are the results of a creative purple patch.

 

If your taste is ‘70s style blues rock, with rather more blues than rock, and with gospel and country asides, then ZZ Top is arguably the ultimate example of how it can be done extremely well.

 

Dusty Hill held down the bass spot, sang some, co-wrote some tunes and played some keyboards and was an equal contributor to the sound and ethos of the band that managed to survive and thrive as a 3-piece for the duration of their career. 

 

Apparently, ZZ Top will continue to tour in 2021, with a new bassist, and I suppose the sound will be pretty much unaltered with only the visual  anomaly at live performances, that the guy next to Billy Gibbons (who’s been releasing sole records anyway) is not Dusty. I have no ideas whether the new guy also has a huge beard.  It’s relatively easy, for seasoned pros, to replicate the music of an iconic band member they might replace, and Billy Gibbons’  guitar sound and vocals remain intact, but it’s the visual incongruity that will jar.

 

So, you’ve probably gone too soon, Dusty Hill, but your eminent stature in rock and roll history and iconography will never be tarnished and will live forever.

 

The Smiths are just ardinary

Along with REM, The Smiths are probably the top ‘80s band I don’t get, have never liked and fail to understand why they were so popular and how Morrissey has managed to sustain his music career over the past 35 years.

 

I understand that The Smiths quickly became critics’ darlings and were heavily punted and that part of this adoration might have been fuelled and stroked by Morrissey’s media savvy, seeing as how he’d once been a provincial correspondent for the NME. He certainly made a highly noticeable, interesting and even controversial frontman. The lyrics of Smiths’ songs were also quite literate in, when one listens closely, repetitive way. 

 

I heard “Reel Around the Fountain” and “Hand In Gove” on a few Radio 5 (as it then was) shows back in the day, and was moderately entertained by them though the  busy, arpeggiated guitar style (not unlike early REM) didn’t appeal much, I didn’t care for Morrissey’s voice and found the lyrics pretentious.  I wasn’t persuaded to go out to buy their records. The band didn’t seem all that special to me.

 

it was only from reading the NME and The Face that I realised that The Smiths had become a far bigger deal in the UK than I would’ve expected. A couple of years after their break out, the C86 generation of jangly guitar pop bands made their mainstream appearance and seemed to be the most pervasive pop rock sound of the day, yet none of them reached the heights of stardom, acceptance and adulation that The Smiths apparently did.

 

I took note of the various Smiths’ albums that my local record store stocked, especially Meat is Murder, whose title track was the best Smiths song I’d heard on the radio  and passed them by. For ‘80s UK rock I preferred The Cult and U2, and otherwise cast my eyes towards the USA.

 

The other day I watched two clips, well, part of one and most of the other, of The Smiths performing live. The longer clip, at over an hour, was of a concert at the Passeo de Camoens in Madrid in 1985. The shorter clip, at less than 15 minutes, was of a performance on the Channel 4 show The Tube in 1984. 

 

The performance on The Tube is by a young band, just making it’s mark, though Johnny Marr is utterly self -assured on guitar and Morrissey’s weird, awkward floppy dancing could only be done by someone who is supremely confident or just high. A bunch of daffodils stick out of the back pocket of Morrissey’s loose jeans and his shirt is equally baggy. He must have been extremely thin.

 

Mike Joyce keep good time on the drums and Andy Rourke concentrates intently on his bass playing, which is a nice, almost melodic, rhythmic counterpoint to the guitar filigrees Marr plays. Clearly, the rhythm section are not the stars of the show.

 

The audience of hip ‘80s kids in their terribly dated hip ‘80s clothes and hairstyles is rapt and dances enthusiastically while the band performs four or five tunes.

 

It must have been better when one was in the audience than watching  the video so many years later. Marr’s guitar style, although he’s obviously technically very able, lacks punch and the convoluted melodies Morrissey croons in a voice almost devoid of modulation, except for the excitable yelps he makes every now and then, aren’t very catchy at all.

 

The concert at a much large venues and for a much large audience, is when The Smiths were at their pomp but the music sound pretty much like it did on The Tube. Morrisey’s famous quiff is hidden under a hat and he wears glasses but his pants and shirt are still loose and his awkward dancing and arm gestures are still present and correct.

 

As I’ve mentioned, I could sit through only a few songs before I gave up. It might be that the sound quality isn’t of the best but the general impression is that the music is kind of anaemic, almost diffident and with almost no force or drive and Morrissey’s almost emotionless, whiny vocal style starts grating too soon for comfort.

 

Somehow, the band impressed enough journalists to be heavily punted and captured something of the zeitgeist of the audience it drew, to become a phenomenon, a cultural icon and an influence beyond its immediate impact. I don’t get it, but I will accept that, like REM, I might not have been the target market and simply did not have the emotional need for this kind of music.

 

Over the past few years I’ve had a couple of projects where I listened to all the albums of various groups or individuals, in order of release, either because it’s an act whose music I’ve always liked but never got around to buying all, or any, of their records, especially rock acts from my teenage years and twenties, or bands I’ve never rated (Uriah Heep, for example) just so I could hear what I’d missed out on, or had happily ignored. The Smiths was one such project and I don’t think I got beyond the debut album.  The music just didn’t engage me in any sustainable fashion.

 

Perhaps I should attempt investigation the oeuvre again, and persist.

 

There is a another generation of jangly, melodic, guitar based bands (of which Two Door Cinema Club  is a prime example) that might have been influenced by The Smiths and their twee, anaemic sound also grates on my ears. It’s all quite proficient, with high production values and plenty earnestness, but  there is no visceral attraction.

 

I did buy Beethoven Was Deaf (1993), a Morrissey live album, some years after its release, because it was cheap and because I’d read that he was backed by a rockabilly band of sorts and this seemed to me to suggest a tougher, more agreeable sound than The Smiths  provided, and I was right.  Morrissey’s vocals were still quite dispassionate and his melodies were as oblique as ever but the tough band behind him elevated the tunes and provided the requisite visceral element that can make recordings of live shows such compelling listening.

 

Having said that, this album also didn’t motivate me to seek out Morrissey’s studio albums. His music is an acquired taste I doubt that I’ll ever acquire no matter how hard I try.

 

 

 

Bob Seger

Bob Seger’s huge 1976 hit, “Night Moves,” a heartfelt, moving, rock ballad was my first exposure to his music. I might have read about him before, perhaps in Hit Parader  magazine, but knew very little of him before his purple patch of late Seventies hits, establishing him as a gruff, ‘authentic’ rocker with a sentimental streak. Later, I read bits of his history as Detroit rocker, struggling and hustling as a local legend, until he formed the Silver Bullet Band, released a live album and made his breakthrough with  chart topping tunes like “Night Moves.” 

 

It was the typical American success story of an artist who remains true to himself and his vision of his art, struggling all the time and never giving up, making only the most minor of compromises, initially out on his own, despite a local following, out of step with the mainstream until the mainstream comes into step with him, after which he reaps the rich rewards.

 

At the time, I wasn’t interested in buying any of the contemporary releases because the radio hits suggested to me that I wouldn’t actually appreciate his brand of heartland rock because I thought he’d mellowed out and that the ballad was his strong suit now that he was older. In terms of heartland rock and roll, I preferred John Mellencamp.

Somewhere along the way, in the Eighties, I found, Smokin’ OP’s, his 1972 collection of cover versions (except for a re-recording of a Detroit hit “Heavy Music”) in a bargain bin somewhere. I’d read enough of his history by then to suspect that this record would be filed under his pre-“Night Moves” rock oeuvre, and that it might be worth investigating. The price was right, too.

 

Smokin’ OP’s is a delightful mix of up-tempo rocker and slow, reflective songs – the archetypical tough guy with a sweet, tender side – and hugely enjoyable to listen to. It’s what the Americans like to call rock and roll, as opposed to, say, heavy metal, or pop rock, with a band of professionals that have been around the block a few times and whose musical DNA contains strands of blues, funk, soul, pop, rock, country, and whatever other strains of indigenous popular music there is in the USA.

 

The rockers were familiar to me and only the slower songs like “If I Were a Carpenter.” “Hummin’ Bird” and “Someday” were previously unknown, so it’s a bit like the proverbial bar band being the human jukebox.

 

During the Nineties, I found a bargain bin copy of Live Bullet (1976), recorded in Detroit  with the Silver Bullet Band and  a neat summary of Seger’s best songs prior to the breakout success of “Night Moves” and its eponymous album. I’d read about it before and saw it hailed as allegedly one of the best live rock albums of all times.

 

Live Bullet is an excellent record of a high energy home town gig before adoring fans, with the can’t fail mix of slow songs and fast rockers.

 

“Bo Diddley,” “Heavy Music” and “Let It Rock” are reprised from Smokin’ OP’s and the other tunes represent the various stages of Seger’s recording career before his commercial breakthrough and is a insightful picture into music made by an artist who aspires to greater things than local success but who could achieve that larger success only by smoothing out his edges and adding superior production values to the recordings.

 

I’ve never added to this small collection of Seger music and, other than the albums preceding Night Moves, I never will. The later, more sophisticated chart rock sounds are not 100% my taste although I’ve always liked the radio hits, and with this kind of musician my interest will always be piqued far more by the earlier work, when he was still finding his way and commercial pressures, or imperative, did not inform his music. I prefer raw over smooth; rough over sophisticated; loud, fast, over mellow and reflective.

 

 

 

The Flaming Firestones Demos from August 1986

 

From January 1984 to the end of 1994 I attended just about every rock gig  I could get to in venues in and around Cape Town and most of those bands never released any recordings that I knew of. They weren’t signed to record labels and back then bands seemed not to have the money or opportunity for  recording in a studio setting and to press records, or make cassette tapes, for selling at gigs.  No-one ever mentioned any merchandise or recordings for sale from some band girlfriend at the back of the venue.

 

I always suspected that most bands would’ve recorded themselves either at rehearsals or from the sound board at live gigs, but only for themselves and not for commercial exploitation. Pity. One could make a monster compilation album from those pre-1995 “SA Rock Explosion” bands, even of only one track each.

 

The Flaming Firestones was one such band that I followed until its demise and whose music was not available to me other than attending the gigs.  At least one of their final run of shows, before breaking  up,  at the Café Royal Hotel in Church Street, Cape Town, was recorded on video, and as far as I know, is not in the public domain at all.

In fact, if you search “Flaming Firestones” on YouTube you get links to fire making apparatus, cooking and some music, but not the band of this name. The only connection is an upload of a cassette album, digitally transferred, of a gig at the Smokehouse Blues Club in Cape Town on 16 August 1991, by an ensemble called The Blue Stones, featuring Clayton Frick, Dave Ferguson (The Mavericks), Rufus Winstain (several alternative bands), Alistair Musson (Have no idea who he is/was) and Russell Weston (once drummer for All Night Radio.) The set list comprises some of the tunes played by the Flaming Firestones, and some by the Blues Broers, and is a mixture of blues standards and Clayton Frick compositions.

 

In the early ‘90s Clayton Frick led a different blues band in Cape Town but eventually left the country and pursued other ventures.  As far as I know, he still plays regularly but  presumably not as a day job.  His younger brother, John, was a founder member of the Blues Broers (still going) but also eventually left the country to go to the Netherlands were he’s been leading the John Frick Band for many years, with at least 4 albums to his credit, the latest one of which is simply credited to John Frick.

 

The other day Clayton Frick posted a brief video on Facebook, of himself doing two songs at a Blues Broers gig in the old drydock at Cape Town harbour in 1992.  After I commented on this video, he sent me copies of the Flaming Firestones’ demo recordings from August 1986.

 

The tracks are mostly standards of many a blues set list and very familiar to anyone who’s got a yen for the genre and has a good, representative collection.

 

They cover ZZ Top’s “Fool For Your Stockings” and my guess is that their version of “Fever” is influenced by Otis Waygood Blues Band’s take on it on their debut album. “Lowdown Woman” is from The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ second album.

 

Then you have the oldies but goodies like “My Babe,”  “Wang Dang Doodle,”  “Smokestack Lightning,” “Killing Floor,” “Walking by Myself,” “Diving Duck” and “Sloppy Drunk” (usually a Rob Nagel vocal and harp feature), and more.

 

 The originals “Hey Mr Coolstuff,” “Got No Love,” “Ain’t Too Late” and “Baby Done Gone” are of a piece with the blues standards and there is a seamless transition from the one to the other. 

 

The recordings present a band that’s instrumentally adept but almost too respectful of the source material yet the rhythm sections swings nicely and never plods. Rob Nagel’s fiery blues harp playing is the most impressive, virtuoso solo instrumental voice. The slight disappointment is that the vocals are foo low down in the mix to make much of an impact, though, if the vocalist is Mervyn Woolf, he already has the promise of being the great bluesman he sounded like live. 

 

When I first wrote about The Flaming Firestones, in 1997,  I mentioned that my recollection of Clayton Frick’s forceful live guitar style was that it leaned towards blues rock, but here he’s definitely more sedate and proper blues, quite lyrical in fact,  perhaps because of the slightly sterile studio situation but none the less very affecting. There’s no bombast about the performances and the respect and love for the source material Is evident.

 

The Flaming Firestones play these blues pretty straight up, without putting much of an individual, quirky stamp on the tunes, but the collection is an impressive representation of a serious band with serious intent on bringing us their take on  a beloved genre, that had seen some bounce back in the early ‘80s, but was still probably highly unfashionable  in this era of  “alternative” rock bands who, try as they might, could not make music as much fun as the rollicking, roistering live sets of the Firestones did. For me there is something incredibly satisfying about a backbeat, a wailing blues harp and a sharp, deep blues guitar solo; generally, it‘s got a good beat and you can dance to it.

 

The Blue Stones was possibly a short lived project, perhaps for  a few gigs only, and by this time the musicians had been around for a while and, if they were ever amateurish, were highly proficient. Clayton obviously knew the tunes inside out. What you get is a professional set of blues tunes played in the atmosphere of a smoky, crowded room at a time when the Smokehouse was probably the only venue for live music in Cape Town and therefore quite well supported. I can’t recall whether I was at this gig but I was at the Smokehouse pretty much each night it was open, so I might have been.  Sounds like a lot of fun, anyhow.

 

Sadly, I was not sussed enough to make contemporaneous notes of the bands I saw and my opinion of them and now I’m left with fond memories diluted over time and with no more than a general impression of the nights and the music. One of the strongest memories is of how much cigarette smoke hung in the air, so much so that at some point I was forced to hang out at an open window at the central air shaft to get some clean, cool air in my lungs. The other memory is of how large the venue was, with different areas where the punters hung out, drinking, playing pool or watching the bands, depending on their predilection.  The music has become just a blur.

 

I guess I can say much the same of The Flaming Firestones gigs, where my only specific memories are of the gigs at the Three Arts Theatre in Diep River and the final gigs at the Café Royal. This is one reason why it’s such a boon to hear these demos from 1986 as a reminder of those halcyon days; they don’t jog my mind much but they’re an assertion that those things did happen: the band did play and I was usually there. 

 

Joni Mitchell turns blue and righteous

  Blue  (1971)

Thinking about it now, the Stellenbosch Municipal Library, my favourite destination after the CNA and Sygma Records, must’ve had a progressive buyer for contemporary pop. The library offered, as to be expected, a good selection of classic music albums, some jazz and a lot of spoken word stuff, but also an excellent selection of contemporary pop and rock though always mainstream stuff.

 

The library had Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Harvest, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Déjà Vu, MU and Songs From the Wood (both by Jethro Tull), various Cat Stevens albums, and probably others I don’t recall, and. for the purpose of this piece Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon (1970) and Blue.

 

I borrowed all these records mostly from curiosity and not necessarily because I  was a fan of, for example, Cat Stevens or Jethro Tull, and because I’d read of, or heard of, some of the artists without hearing any of their music on the radio. This was specifically the case with Joni Mitchell.

 

Mitchell’s literate, confessional, folky style of music was not at all my taste when I was 12 or 13, when loud, fast was my preferred style. Over the years my taste has broadened and I can now listen to many different genres and styles with appreciation and enjoyment but when Blue was released, it was not a record I’d have paid money for or wanted in my collection. Being able to listen to it for free was a blessing and satisfied my curiosity.

 

Ladies of the Canyon was, initially, the more fun album of the two, with well-known songs like “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock” and “The Circle Game” but Blue caught up too, and the amazing thing was that it’s tunes could be as catchy. Just as I know “Woodstock” best from its versions by Mathews Southern Comfort and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.  I know “This Flight Tonight” best in the Nazareth version, which is not a million miles away from the way Mitchell performs it on Blue.  My other favourite tracks from the latter album are “My Old Man,” “Carey,” “A Case of You” and “The last Time I Saw Richard.”

 

The impact of Blue fifty years ago is obviously no longer as visceral or intellectually appreciative when one listens to the record now but I do love the basic, and often quite tough, acoustic backdrops to the songs, Mitchell’s evocative lyrics and the way she makes them both intimate and universal. 

 

Over the years, and probably because I was a teenager in the Seventies, much of the singer songwriter era appeals to me, though not all of it, because it’s still not a genre I particularly favour, but at least partly because the backing musicians were highly proficient session people who did not rely on studio gimmicks, synthesisers or digital enhancement to make music that feels as organic and honest as the confessional lyrics of the singer songwriters. There are many musicians mining the same vein today, and it seems to me that there’s a revival, but they record in modern studios with modern techniques and, for me, the music isn’t as intimately joined to the hip with the lyrics anymore for this reason. Alternatively, when the musicians rely on simple acoustic guitar backing, the arrangements and intricacy of the melodies often make them sound incredibly twee to me and just grate on my nerves.

 

Joni Mitchell may not have the first folkie type to write in the style she perfected, or as radically progressed in her musicianship and styles, but she was pretty good at it and expressed views and emotions the younger musicians repeat today, with minor tweaks for contemporary mores and the zeitgeist, as if theirs are the very first insights into the human condition and interpersonal relationships.  Life is cyclical and every generation seems to disavow the same basic principles afresh, as if their parents never taught them anything and I guess it’s part of our maturing process  that we start out thinking that our parents are old idiots who have no comprehension of the current experience of their children or other young people, yet when the children become parents an elder citizens they, in turn, are eviscerated as old fogeys out of touch with the times.

 

Mitchell’s personal songs appeal, whether they’re strictly autobiographical or not, because they seem to be about real people and actual situations and not merely “universal” truisms that are intended to be vague enough to apply to just about anyone who listens to the song. For the Mitchell afficianado general truths, or just insights, can be extrapolated from the particular, and that’s the great strength of her work.

 

 

Afrobeat's heart is still beating

 

For me the word afrobeat will always be identified with the jazzy, polyrhythmic, guitar, keyboard and horn section compositions of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, with songs that were often longer than 15 minutes and were not unknown to take up both sides of a LP, with an instrumental first part and a second part with vocals, mostly social and/or political commentary. The tracks are hypnotic and enthralling, musically astute and intricate and the words thought provoking.

 

I’d read about Fela long before I first heard any of his music, principally in the UK music publications such as the NME, The Face  and the various other magazines that popped up in the Nineties (Q and  Select in the UK; Spin in the USA), who namechecked him often enough to emphasise to me that he was a musical leader in Africa, a pioneering anti-establishment  and alternative society figure in Nigeria and, not unlike Bob Marley, perhaps not such a great guy when it came to his treatment of women.  So, though I knew a little about the guy, his music was a mystery to me, because it wasn’t played on South African radio and I never saw his records in the local record shops.

 

My introduction to Fela came on a road trip from Cape Town to Clanwilliam in early 2000, when the driver of the vehicle tuned in to an African music show on, I think, Radio 2000, and the presenter played “Teacher, Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” all 25 minutes of it, as a tribute to Fela whose birthday it had been, or was coming up. around that time. I was entranced and captivated and the following Monday I went to The African Music Store (now defunct)  in Long Street, found the CD of the Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense album and bought it. Over the next few years I bought just about every Fela Kuti album they stocked, and each one was a stupendously great as the previous one. The only other African act whose records I collected so assiduously, once I heard them was Tinariwen, the Tuareg “desert blues”  band from Mali.

 

Like so much African music the deceptive simplicity of the repetitive  style makes the music sound samey  yet, when one listens carefully, there are crucial distinctions between songs that  quickly become individualised.

 

I never gave it much thought but, to my mind, afrobeat was so quintessentially identified with Fela that it died with him, though his drummer Tony Allen outlived him and released a bunch of records, more jazz based, that carried on the genre. I had no idea whether there were other afrobeat inflected or informed bands in Nigeria or the rest of Africa.

 

As was to be expected, I guess, also in the way some of Bob Marley’s children, and two of Muddy Waters’ sons, have become musicians (and, if they’re not actively promoting their fathers’ music, they’re at least active in the same genre), two of Fela’s sons, Femi and Seun, lead afrobeat bands though their approach to the music is very much, it seems, motivated by commercial concerns and the perceived sensibilities of their worldwide audience, in that the tunes are standard length and do not run to 15 or 25 minutes. Afrobeat-lite as it were, updated for the modern audience.

 

Much to my surprise, during 2020, I came across Newen Afrobeat from Chile on YouTube, who played a mixture of Fela covers and their own interpretation of afrobeat, and was quickly smitten. The band comprises of young men and women and the lead singer is, almost conventionally, a woman. It was exceedingly odd that an ensemble from South America would have taken up the torch from Fela and were re-popularising, or perhaps popularising for the first time in South America, Fela’s very African style. Some of their performances are, in fact, covers of Fela tunes but they also write and perform their own material in his style and with Spanish lyrics.

 

I did as cursory Wikipedia search and found a list of afrobeat bands, or bands influenced by afrobeat, and when I trawled through YouTube I came across videos of live performances by Kokoroko (featuring a female horn section) and The Young Thugs Afrobeat (hip young Nigerians), and a whole festival of Argentinean afrobeat groups.

 

It seems that afrobeat is very much alive and well and thriving, albeit not necessarily practiced by Africans.  I don’t listen to music from across the African continent but have a general interest in it, with emphasis on afrobeat, the desert blues of the Sahara region (which is also more varied than simply Tinariwen) and, of course, the older musical styles of South African Black music, with diversions into music from Zimbabwe and  Senegal, specifically Orchestra Baobab. Whose Pirate’s Choice album was probably the first music from outside South Africa or Zimbabwe I ever heard.

 

Fela Kuti and Tinariwen are the only African artists whose music I’ve made an effort to collect. The styles contrast, and Tinariwen sings in a language I don’t  understand, but both are satisfying as representations of musical and cultural idioms from a part of Africa where the two styles are not that far apart geographically if the musical styles are almost 180 degrees opposite to each other, with Tinariwen being cool and reflective, and afrobeat (Fela’s version) almost overheated and very militant. 

 

Even where, for example, Newen Afrobeat covers a Fela composition I doubt that they’d be intent on promoting the same socio-political criticism that drove Fela, unless they want to universalise his particular African viewpoint, and that for them the fascination is with the rousing polyrhythmic sound, much as so many white musicians are, or have been fascinated, with US African-American street funk from the ‘70s and attempt to replicate it.  in South Africa, since at least 1994, there have been a number of bands trying to be very funky, with jazz influences on top of the funk, but, sadly, none of them actually have the funk and  it always seemed to me that they’re playing a musician they’ve learnt to play (the formal parameters of the style) because they’re technically capable but without feeling it viscerally.

 

The various neo-afrobeat bands I’ve heard on YouTube do seem to have the chops and the emotional connection but I guess the afficianado may be able to criticise them for the same reasons I’ve mentioned above. So be it, I enjoy the performances very much and for me these bands are doing something important if only to preserve and promote the Fela Kuti legacy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cult Love Electric

 

LOVE (1986)

ELECTRIC (1987)

 

For me, the two biggest contemporary rock albums of 1987 were U2’s The Joshua Tree and The Cult’s Electricity. The first was the monster that propelled U2 to true international stardom and the latter made big stars of The Cult in the USA, and elsewhere I suppose, big enough to sustain a long, successful career without becoming household word superstars at the level of U2.

 

I’d read about Southern Death Cult and Death Cult, the forerunners of The Cult, in the NME long before I could buy the records and they seemed to be also rans in the post punk, post New Wave, post New Romantic Gothic rock branch of popular music, destined to be cannon fodder like so many others bands of the same ilk. I had little idea what the music sounded like  except perhaps for “She Sells Sanctuary,” which was playlisted on the Saturday Shadow Show on Radio 5 (as it then was), the UK centric modern rock (before the phrase was coined) show that showcased the best of British during the mid- and late Eighties, and this tune was just a big, anthemic song yet not significantly distinguishable from the other bands in the genre  and barely registered on my radar.

 

it was only in 1987 when “Lil’ Devil” off Electricity was being punted as the lead single that The Cult totally got my attention. The song sounded like a retro hard rocking homage to, in my mind, mid -‘70s hard rock, and was a huge change from the anthemic, soaring Goth sound of the earlier Cult. I’ve always loved a certain type of simple, loud, hard rock that doesn’t take itself too seriously and “Lil’ Devil” sounded as if it was cut from the same template.

 

I was so enthusiastic about this song that I went out and bought the record (a rare thing for me at the time, as  I usually waited for record sales before I bought anything) and also, when I saw it in the record rack with Electricity, Love which was the Cult’s 1985 release that represents the swansong of their Gothic phase. As it turned out, Electricity was the sugar high, the contact high, the quick fix that quickly faded and Love became the album that grew on me as a highly satisfying, emotionally engaging, ambitious statement.  

 

Electric is obviously fashioned as a throwback kind of hard rock album, with a contemporary sensibility somewhat at odds with the musical climate in the UK at the time, and aimed straight at  the mass market of Middle America where this kind of rock never went out of style as if the various fashions in rock between 1976 and 1987 never happened, and from this perspective it’s highly enjoyable. On the other hand, the production values are so high and the vocals recorded so clearly that the lyrics have greater prominence than they might otherwise have, and, to be frank, for the most part they’re quite risible and sound like stream of consciousness shit Ian Astbury made up on the spot. Maybe the words are meant to be enigmatically poetic, Dylan like mysteriousness even, but to me it just sound naff, at best, and stupid at worst. Hard rock and metal lyricists are prone to writing banal, pretentious and plain dumb lyrics and that‘s okay if the vocals are  lost in the wall of sound, but here there’s no escaping and the lyrics quickly grate on the nerves. The relentless riffing, often with no sense of dynamic tension, also becomes old too quickly. So, if Electric is, well, a bolt of electricity to start with, it doesn’t have legs.

 

Love, on the other hand, with its wall of sound guitars, soaring vocals and words that aren’t so crystal clear, bears repeated listening and remains enjoyable throughout. Every tune reverberates and resonates with energy, tunefulness and high ambition for glorious emotional impact.

 

The bottom line is that Love is worth repeated listening and Electric is nice every now and then, but not nearly as compelling as its predecessor. Hearing Electric convinced me to buy Love but not to buy any of the following albums. I heard the lead tracks on the radio and they sounded of a piece with the best of Electrictherefore more of the same for which I didn’t care that much in the first place.

 

Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy  have had good careers in hard rock, and Astbury even stood in for the late Jim Morrison in Doors “reunion” shows, so I guess Electric did what it was intended to do, and more power to Astbury and Duffy for the ambition and the ability to achieve their aims but The Cult, post-Electric, is the epitome of a band that found a template for success, big success as that, and then continued relentlessly in that vein, with ever diminishing returns for a punter like me and nothing to persuade me to collect their records. 

 

 

 

A Decade of Steely Dan

“Babylon Sisters” (Gaucho, 1980) is probably my favourite Steely Dan song, with “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “FM” and “Reeling In the Years” close behind, and I suppose part of the reason is that I listened to “Babylon Sisters” a lot at one time, having taped it from the Hobnail Takkie Show on Radio Good Hope, as it then was, in 1980. At this time, not knowing much else about Steely Dan, I thought of them as a tuneful, jazz influenced pop band specialising in sophisticated, literate lyrics  and in general they, and this type of music, were not my cup of tea. I preferred loud, fast  and not smooth, sophisticated and intellectual song writing craftmanship. repeated listening to this one, very catchy tune, converted me.

 

I’d vaguely recalled “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” (Pretzel Logic, 1974), which had been a small hit in South Africa as a soul pop tune, in the vein of J Geils Band’s “Must of Got Lost,” released in the same year, and thought that “Babylon Sisters” represented a progressive move to a higher degree of musical sophistication and, as I’ve mentioned, the influence of pop overlap with jazz funk, a style that was quite popular in late ‘70s pop and that I mostly loathed.

 

I was never motivated to buy any Steely Dan records because loving one song was one thing, listening to an entire album of the same kind of thing might’ve tested may patience.  However, around 1993 or 1994 I found a discount price copy of A Decade of Steely Dan and bought it, mostly because of “Babylon Sisters” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” on the premise that collection of hits would be the only Steely Dan record I’d ever want, or need, to own.

 

Over the course of the next year or two, and repeated listening, I came to know the other tracks well and came to love them too. A Decade of Steely Dan was a regular on the CD player, especially when I wanted to have quieter, more ruminative background soundtrack to my day. Having said that, it was not as if I played the album every day.

 

In mid-1995 I moved in with Karen Gagiano, who had only a small CD collection of her own, whereas I already owned a couple of hundred albums.

 

One of the things in respect of which I’m indebted to Karen, was the introduction of Tom Waits to my musical world, and specifically The Heart of Saturday Night and Raindogs, with she’d become acquainted through Daryl van Blerk her lover and father of her child, which I helped rear for about the first 18 months of his life. I’d known of Waits, from the NME and because Sean Rosenberg had a double album anthology of Waits’ early music and  Sean, being a jazz afficianado too, punted Tom Waits to me. However, it was only because of Karen’s enthusiastic proselytising that I bought the two aforementioned albums and became smitten.

 

I don’t recall whether I owned any of the Waits albums when I moved in with Karen, but I did own A Decade of Steely Dan and, also, Maria McKee’s You Gotta Sin to be Saved.

 

For the period of six months that we shared a house, Karen played these two albums virtually every day, not necessarily always both on the same day, though it seemed like it, but at least one of the other. I got to know A Decade of Steely Dan far better than I’d ever wanted to. 

 

It was like listening to Top 40 radio in the ‘70s. By virtue of listening to the same pop songs too many times over the period of a day, I starting loathing many of them and it took years, decades even, before some were rehabilitated to the extent where I now enjoy them. The same thing happened to A Decade of Steely Dan. it went from being a favourite album, when sparingly applied, to a record I couldn’t bear to listen to.

 

I suppose a part of it had to do with the unhappy relationship with Karen and that my unhappiness in the situation was reflected in, and amplified by, the daily dose of Steely Dan, like a continuous musical torture, so to speak.

 

It was so bad that I couldn’t bear to listen to the album at all for at least ten years afterward (it was a very pointed reminder of a very unhappy and disastrous period of my life) and even when I dipped into it again, it was  only very occasionally,  until 2021, when I downloaded the album from Apple Music because, for some unexplained reason, I suddenly wanted to hear “Babylon Sisters” again.

 

A Decade of Steely Dan has been rehabilitated for me. Once again, I enjoy listening a superb collection of superior pop rock tunes with thoughtful lyrics and a good beat.  The slinky-funk style of “FM,” “Hey Nineteen,” "Peg" and “Deacon Blues” are almost the best Dan tunes and the more “rock’ oriented stuff seems stodgy  in comparison.

 

I will still probably never own an entire Steely Dan studio album. A Decade of Steely Dan is still extremely satisfying and I’m quite happy, though it took the better part of 26 years, that I can listen to it, and think of 1995 in historical terms without being mired in depression about bad choices and stupid decisions, and without any taint to the music anymore.