Jimi Hendrix: Three albums revisited

Electric Ladyland was the first Jimi Hendrix Experience studio album I bought (as two LP set), then more than thirty years later I bought Axis: Bold As Love (CD) and it was only in early 2019 that I bought Are You Experienced as a download from Apple Music. I knew all the best tracks from this debut album already anyhow, from compilation albums I bought over the years.

The first purchases of Hendrix’s music were the double albums I Don’t Live Today (‘best of’ studio recordings from the first three albums) and the soundtrack from the documentary Jimi Hendrix (live recordings) and from these I had a pretty good introduction to the Hendrix canon, or at least the songs and performances the compilers thought of as essential, though some of the inclusions on I Don’t Live Today were as baffling as the exclusions.

(I’ve looked at the Hendrix discography on Wikipedia and it doesn’t mention Don’t Live Today, which I think was on the Polydor label and could be South Africa only release, or perhaps a Europe only release that was also pressed in South Africa. There’s a similar case with Earring’s Believing, a greatest hits collection of Dutch band Golden Earring, from probably 1975, that I’ve also not seen on discographies of the band.)

ARE YOU EXPERIENCED (1967)

Are You Experienced was released in the same year as other notable albums, like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Disraeli Gears, Surrealistic Pillow, The Doors, and others as remarkable, and was perhaps the most revolutionary simply in terms of sound and influence, probably no longer astonishing to the English musicians who were stunned by Hendrix’s playing when he arrived in London, because for them a Black American guitarist was one of the three Kings, Buddy Guy or Otis Rush, and capable as they were, none of them sounded, or looked, remotely like Hendrix who, even as blues guitarist, took the music to a different planet than the rest, Black or White. The pop audience must have been as overwhelmed and impressed as Hendrix’s peers, though the studio recordings couldn’t have replicated the weirdness and ferocity of Jimi playing live.

If memory serves, 9 of the 11 eleven tracks from the UK version of Are You Experienced were included on I Don’t Live Today, as well as the non-album singles “Hey Joe,” “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary.” The exclusions were “Fire,” can “You See Me” and possibly (memory is fickle) “Are You Experienced?”  The B-sides of the first three singles were also left off.

Debut single “Hey Joe” (in a reworking of the more commonly known version by, for example, The Leaves) was an excellent calling card but not far from a traditional, if more powerful, approach, and does not reveal any of the freak out guitar pyrotechnics Hendrix was capable of, and that he showcased later and comes across in second single, “Purple Haze” and album opener “Foxey Lady.”

“Foxey Ladey” with its feedback intro and crunching riff, is of similar hue to “Purple Haze” and is a perfect way to open the album and to announce a new musical force, unlike anything before. The performance is key; the lyrics are simplistic blues braggadocio. That Hendrix introduces himself as a highly sexual being first, and not as a sensitive singer-songwriter, sets the tone for the myth to follow, and for the adoration of young women everywhere, part of the misconception of who and what he was that soon bothered Hendrix. He considered himself as an artist with ambitions beyond pop stardom and the image of, in the parlance of the time, a “psychedelic super spade stud.”

The chief importance of “Manic Depression,” a churning, restless track, is that it properly introduces us to the dexterous, technically advanced drumming of Mitch Mitchell who is, so to speak, the Ginger Baker of the Experience, though Noel Redding, primarily a guitarist, was by no means close to replicating Jack Bruce’s style. Mitchell’s busy, jazz influenced style elevates many of the trucks and is the foil to Hendrix’s guitar pyrotechnics, where Redding mostly just provides bass grooves, the steady centre between the guitar and drums.

Third track (in the three opening tracks, Hendrix sets out his stall, from pounding rocker to thoughtful psychedelia to blues), “Red House” is the only overt, direct blues Hendrix recorded and released and it was a concert staple as a usually lengthy centrepiece of shows. Again, it’s lyrically very simple, an updating of a traditional blues trope, but the guitar playing proves Hendrix’s roots as bluesman, and, if enhanced by Hendrix’s rock influences, is from the school of Buddy Guy or Otis Rush. The concise version of the songs is superior to most live renditions that seem to be excuses for excessive jamming, using all the sonic tricks Hendrix had, so that the blues from is no more than a platform for departure and there  is no emotional depth or, mostly, other reason to be engaged in the performance unless you’re a superfan or guitarist. Eric Clapton’s lengthy improvisations with Cream are far more interesting, especially as the two guys behind him also play as furiously as he does. The backing for Hendrix on live performances of “Red House” seem to plod, possibly to allow full attention on his virtuosity and ultimately that makes it boring to listen to.

From here, the album gives us more examples of Hendrix’s rock style, with a mix of introspective lyrics, a mostly instrumental track, and the very slight “Remember” that I’ve always been very fond of because it also is not a freak out thing.  “Fire” is another horny song, in the vein of “Foxey Lady.” “I Don’t Live Today” and “Are You Experienced?” are mythmaking, pop philosophical treatises; a young man’s insights.

“Third Stone from the Sun” is a wonderful instrumental, based on Hendrix’s apparently dep, serious interest in science fiction, and perhaps a forerunner of the mostly instrumental tracks on one side of Electric Ladyland although those later compositions are more impressionistic and less straightforward.  This was not a compositional trend that was pursued much, it seems, which is a pity. Hendrix could have been a pioneer in the genre of space rock.

Of the songs on the original version of the album, fourth track “Can You See Me” is the most obscure, being neither anthologised or a regular concert staple, yet it’s not a bad song, dynamic enough and entertaining, unlike the stodge of “Wait Until Tomorrow” and “Ain’t No Telling” on Axis: Bold As Love, but in the context must have been just filler on the debut in an era when single. A-sides and their B-sides were not included on album releases. The debut would have been so much stronger if the first three single A-sides had been included and “Can You See Me” been left off, or even if it remained.

The version of Are You Experienced I downloaded from Apple Music, is the same as of the expanded CD version of the album with the six tracks from the first three singles, tacked on after the end of the original tracks.

“Hey Joe” and “Purple Haze” are deserved classics. The intro to the first thrilled me the first time I heard it and thrills me to this day. It’s one of the best introductions to a song and an artist ever, even if the opening riff of “Purple Haze” is more iconic.

“The Wind Cries Mary” seems to be an anomaly amidst the hard rocking songs of the debut album and the singles and when I first heard it, on I Don’t Live Today, I checked whether it was even written by Hendrix. It’s a sweet pop song and possibly goes to show, like so many genius musicians, that Hendrix’s influences were varied and not necessarily obvious. It might also be his manager or record company wanted something more palatable for pop radio, rather than the heavy blues or hard psychedelic rock of the preceding singles.

The three B-sides, “Stone Free,”  “51^st Anniversary” and “Highway Chile,” are just B-sides, though Hendrix seemed to like playing “Stone Free,” a young gunslinger’s celebration of being his own person, no matter what, live. “Highway Chile” is the least worthy of the three, a standard blues jam.

I like Are You Experienced a lot. These tracks, the three singles and the best tracks from Axis: Bold as Love would make a killer double album. The debut album, though, is pretty much prime first phase Hendrix. He was more ambitious later and the last recordings are more expansive and sophisticated in conception and execution but the primal force of Are You Experienced still resonates far more and is easier to love unreservedly.

AXIS: BOLD AS LOVE (1968) 

Seven of the thirteen tracks on this album, the second by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, were featured on the I Don’t Live Today compilation.)

It’s surprising that “Spanish Castle Magic” and “Little Wing” were left off, as their inclusion would have completed the inclusion of noteworthy tunes from Axis: Bold as Love. The other exclusions are `”EXP,” “Wait Until Tomorrow,”  “Ain’t No Telling,” and “One Rainy Wish.” 

It’s probably not surprising that “Wait Until Tomorrow” and “Ain’t No Telling” were left off.  They’re not exactly the most stellar of Hendrix songs and it’s always intriguing to speculate, if these weak songs were deemed worthy of release, that Hendrix had no better songs, or was not able to record acceptable versions of better songs by the time the master tapes had to be handed over for record manufacturing. These tunes sound like compositions influenced by Hendrix’s struggle years of backing Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, the kind of R & B he might have been playing to scrape a living, now tarted up for a rock audience. 

These two tracks, and “Long Hot Summer Night” and “House Burning Down” from Electric Ladyland, really grate and, to my mind, break the flow of the records and reduce the pleasure of listening to the albums; in the days of programmable CD players, one would program the playback to skip these tracks.

“Little Miss Lover” is probably of the same R & B provenance but is elevated by a wicked, thumping bass line and some psychedelia. “She’s So Fine,” Noel Redding’s contribution also benefits from harmonies and psychedelic touches to burnish what would have been rather plain otherwise. “You Got Me Floatin’ “would be bereft of charm too, if it weren’t smothered in psychedelic effects. The lyrics and the tune are as slight as any schmaltzy pop. The thing is: these tunes have a bounce and insouciance the R & B knock offs don’t have, and that’s the difference. They’re fun.

“Up From the Skies,” with a swinging, jazzy wah-wah guitar-and-brushes rhythm and a gentle, ruminative tone in the vocals was the first track on I Don’t Live Today and is the first proper song on Axis: Bold as Love too. It’s the complete contrast to the bravura blast of “Foxey Lady” that opens Are You Experienced, both in sound and lyrical concerns, and it’s long been a favourite of mine. The very long, intricate, feedback drenched solos that Hendrix played live, and which became the focal point of his influence on other guitarists, don’t appeal much to me. The concise guitar playing, mostly more innovative, on the records showcase what Hendrix was about as creative musician, and when he moved beyond the “wild man of pop” songs like “Foxey Lady” or “Purple Haze,” he often hit hardest.

The live rendition of “Little Wing” from Hendrix in the West (1972) blew me away and has always been the epitome of deeply emotional guitar playing, something I hadn’t associated with Hendrix before I heard him. For me, Eric Clapton’s long, melodic, hummable solo on “Sleepy Time Time” from Live Cream had always been, and still is, the gold standard of consummate “feel” (with the extraordinary, continuous emotional expression over the duration of a solo one didn’t want to end) but the live “Little Wing”  is up there and still touches me deeply every time I hear it. The studio version on Axis: Bold as Love kind of pales in comparison because it doesn’t seem as heartfelt or as expressive as that stage version; it’s as if it’s not fully complete because it’s not been played enough live until all the emotion has been extracted. The studio version is good, but the live version is masterful.

Conversely, I prefer the “live in the studio” version of “Red House” on Are You Experienced over all the rather lengthy live versions I’ve heard, because the long solos seem to squeeze the life out of the song. “Red House” is not the best blues ever, but in the short, sharp, concise studio performance Hendrix makes his point, plays the hell out of the songs, and gets outta there. On stage he doodles too much, and this dissipates whatever emotion blues is supposed to have.

“Castles Made of Sand” is cut from the same cloth as “The Wind Cries Mary,” both are languid, philosophical, melodic and tender songs that one can imagine were intended to appeal to those who compile pop radio play lists, wanted to programme some Hendrix tunes but feared that the target audience would be repelled by the sonic attack of, say, “If 6 Was 9” or even “Bold as Love.”  Hendrix shows with these tunes that he isn’t just a show off guitar slinger who humps his instrument and sets fire to it for outrage, but has a sensitive, poetic soul and can express himself in a much more thoughtful manner than the long hair and colourful Carnaby Street finery would suggest.  The message of “Castles Made of Sand” is depressing but it sure is a lovely tune.

“If 6 Was 9” and “Bold as Love” are by far the standout tracks on this album, head and shoulders above the rest most of which are pretty lightweight too, if not as grating as “Wait Until Tomorrow” and “Ain’t No Telling,” and at best Hendrix’s pop moments and at worst silly fluff saved only by the instrumentalists.  These two tracks have heft and menace, strong playing, inventiveness and exhilaration, full on psychedelic rave and so much power they could blow the grid if turned up too psychologically loud.  For me “Bold as Love” and “All Along the Watchtower” (from Electric Ladyland) represent Hendrix’s best as guitarist: melodic and hard charging, mystic and earthy, elegant simplicity and bravura dexterity, all in the same performance.

Although “One Rainy Wish” is lyrically and sonically streets ahead of “Wait Until Tomorrow” and “Ain’t No Telling,” it’s as obscure in the canon, never making it onto any “best of” compilation I know of and was never played live either. It’s doleful, measure pace is sandwiched between the upbeat bounce of “She’s So Fine” and “Little Miss Lover,” probably to avoid two rather slight songs in sequence and to allow the contrast to focus the listener on each track rather than just letting the two faster tracks pass by undifferentiated.

ELECTRIC LADYLAND (1968)

Ironically, given that it’s a double album, proportionally fewer of the tracks from Electric Ladyland made it onto I Don’t Live Today.  If memory serves, it was only “(Have You Ever Been To) Electric Ladyland,” “Crosstown Traffic,” “Little Miss Strange,” “Gypsy Eyes,” “All Along the Watchtower” and “Voodoo Chile (A Slight Return).”

Electric Ladyland is a sprawling double album, and along with Blonde on Blonde, The Beatles, arguably part of a select group of very important late Sixties rock double albums that stood the test of time and were evidence of a degree of ambition in their creators that was barely matched by their peers.

Or perhaps the artists just had too many songs and did not know how to discard the disposable.  That’s almost how I feel about Electric Ladyland, as quite a bit of it seems to be of such light weight that helium would be heavy, yet they nestle alongside the really very good stuff.

Like its predecessor, the album opens with some experimental stuff, not a joke like “EXP,” but a “electronic sound painting” called “… and the Gods Made Love,” what you might call and a progression from the effects on “Third Stone From the Sun” off Are You Experienced and its mercifully short, thought it might have been regarded as far out and groovy in 1968.

The jiggery pokery gives way to the one-two-three knockout punch of “(Have You Ever Been To) Electric Ladyland,” “Crosstown Traffic” and the long, blues jam version of “Voodoo Chile,” which, when I bought the album, I preferred to the album-closing, concise version that’s became one of the most covered Hendrix compositions. “Voodoo Chile” is a blues in form, with psychedelic, jazzy colouring and a languid, reflective style, rather than the more urgent invocation of “Voodoo Chile (A Slight  Return),”  and Hendrix’s interplay with the other musicians represents the only authorised release,  I know of, of the type of jamming with his peers that Hendrix  perpetually seemed to engage in, albeit mostly on stage and it’s an eye opener and makes one wonder whether this approach would’ve been worth exploring in the future, forming supergroups just for recording so that Hendrix could bounce off all  kinds of musicians and not just the three guys backing him, which was the live situation, and when, as time went by, it was clearly  no longer satisfactory or feasible to record only with teh live band. The music cried out for expansion of the audio palate, both guitar-related and other instruments and players.

The second side mostly rocks, with a second Noel Redding song, “Little Miss Strange” and “Gypsy Eyes,” though entertaining, both being fluff, and “Come On” mostly just an excuse for guitar histrionics. “The Burning of the Midnight Lamp,” previously a single, is the best track on the side, a harpsichord driven dreamy, meditative, slow burning tune that amps up as it goes along. Where the other songs on the side are okay and forgettable, this is the real deal, where one could see Hendrix going as a composer.

“Long Hot Summer Night” and “House Burning Down” on respectively  the second and  fourth sides of the album  are my least favourite tunes on Electric Ladyland because I don’t really appreciate the wordiness and the soulfunkrock aspects of them. They seem a tad stiff and wordy.

The  soul inflections are one thing. The attempt to fuse soul with psychedelic rock is altogether a different take.  Perhaps it would have been better if Jimi had a funk rhythm section, say the guys with Sly Stone or James Brown’s backing band, or even The Isley Brothers band.  Not even playing with Buddy Miles and Billy Cox cured that ill. It took Funkadelic to fuse Hendrix with funk.

Side three, comprising of three segueing tracks, was the side I played most often when I had only the LP version. Compared to the noisy, excitable tracks on the rest of the album, this side was tranquil, thoughtful, delightfully complex and just plain beautiful. It was also an excellent way, with headphones on, to drift into sleep while the waves of sound wafted over one’s ears. First cut, “Rainy Day, Dream Away” is languid, swinging groove with organ and saxophone, a new jazz inspired direction that could’ve been one of the directions Hendrix would explore as he matured and moved away from rock into a more progressive sphere. The other two tracks, all of them segueing into each other, build on the dreamy instrumental work and sci-fi imagery of “Third Stone from the Sun” off Are You Experienced. Hendrix plays beautiful, melodic, exploratory guitar on this side of the album, a long way off the feedback noise and speedy licks so many associate with him.

Side four ends the album strongly with “All Along the Watchtower” and “Voodoo Chile (A Slight Return),” As I’ve said above, the first. Is one of the best Hendrix performances on record, with both a good song (if not his) and a stellar interpretation, elevated by soaring, inspirational guitar work.  “Voodoo Chile (A Slight Return)” closes the album with  a blues subverted to hard rock with a raging guitar part. Together these two tracks encapsulate the Jimi Hendrix experience of basic principles and technical mastery, eloquence and simple expression, poetic impulse and hormonal rage.

I like this album. It has only four weak tracks and that’s a good hit rate. All in all, the double album is an excellent summation of what Hendrix was capable of, from sensitivity to rage, blues to rock, straightforward to experimental, noise to tunefulness.

CODA

Electric Ladyland is the conclusion of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and of personally di8recrted studio releases. What follows are the contract fulfilling live album Band of Gypsys and the posthumous Cry Love, both of which can still be included, if only marginally, in the canon or releases with Hendrix’s imprimatur. Then followed a steady stream of studio and live releases, with the studio albums mostly patched together from half- or unfinished tapes and with little, if any, of the quality of the albums released in Hendrix’s lifetime or even Cry of Love, and all of them sound like what they were, desperate, commercially driven attempts to make as much money from Hendrix as possible. Not only do these albums not sound like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, they also don’t even sound like a new direction Hendrix might have embarked on.

The live albums are just records of various performances, some more inspired than others, often of the under rehearsed, jamming version of the Experience, and though frequently interesting, these performances  and especially the long guitar solos, are always somewhat disappointing and far less engaging than the studio albums. Listening to Hendrix showcasing all his amazing technical tricks with the guitar during the course of a lengthy solo soon pales, unless you are a guitarist yourself, I guess.

Nowadays, the Hendrix estate, with its Experience Hendrix project, is in charge of the back catalogue and new releases,  and one must assume that  there is a great deal of financial benefit for the family, none of whom are descendants of the man but still feel an entitlement to share in the bounty, disguised as a mission to keep the Hendrix name alive by regular releases of more previously unreleased tracks from the vault. If you are a completist, this must be the stuff of dreams, especially because it took so long, after Alan Douglas’ trio of works in the Seventies, for the excavation of the vaults to be done so methodically.

For me, stick to Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland  and, if you want live Hendrix, Hendrix in the West, Jimi Plays Monterey, Jimi At The  Filmore East  (same gigs as the Band of Gypsys album) and The Jimi Hendrix Concerts, with Jimi at the Isle of Wight for the final blow out.  These albums will give you all you need to know about Hendrix’s music.

 

Little Richard plays his greatest hits live.

For me, (Little) Richard Penniman has always been one of the most iconic rock and rollers of the Fifties, along with Chuck Berry, not so much Elvis Presley, because he, like Fats Domino too but more frenetically, represented the transition, or acceptance, of R & B and blues styles to rock and roll without much of a change in the music.

Little Richard came from pounding piano led R & B with gospel roots and infusion, and a big beat, and he didn’t have to change anything much to fit right in. in that sense, inasmuch as Elvis Presley combined the more sedate blues of Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup with country influences and amped up the energy levels to create his vision of rock and roll, echoes by so many rockabilly bands, one can argue that rock and roll was also no more than R & B renamed for a White American audience.

Anyhow, Little Richard screamed and hollered “A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom” and pounded the piano,  which took his career from being a R & B prodigy, but probably doomed to the chitlin’ circuit,  to the national and international stage. His “greatest hits’ collections are all very familiar to rock and roll aficionados.

Somewhere between probably 1979 and 1981 I bought an LP called Little Richard’s Greatest Hits Live, mostly because it was very cheap. The tracks were recorded at the Okeh (Okay?) Club, wherever that  might have been, but there was no information on the date of the recordings or the backing musicians. It’s only because the MC who introduces Little Richard mentions the name of the club that I got that much information.

The quality of the vinyl deteriorated quite quickly and the snap, crackle, hiss and pop detracted from the listening experience, which meant that I never taped the record, as was my habit with most of my record collection and played the album less and less. I gave my record collection away about 10 years ago, in late 2009 or early 2010, and  the LP is long gone, and I’d kind of forgotten about it until, while doing an idle search on Little Richard’s hits on Apple Music the other day, it came up as a suggestion, along with compilations of the  studio versions of the hits, and even some re-recorded versions.

Over the years I’d replicated the record collection with CD versions of the records, and more recently, with digital copies from Apple Music, but this Little Richard collection just never came to mind at all.

My guess always was that the tracks were recorded in the mid-Sixties, possibly with Little Richard’s standard touring band, but he might have followed the Chuck Berry route and played with a house band because his tunes were so well-known and ingrained in the rock and roll vernacular that many musicians knew them, or could pick them up quickly enough to provide the backing.

Today, after looking at the Wikipedia Little Richard discography, I’ve learnt that the performance was recorded in 1967 at the CBS Studios in Hollywood, and that the “Okeh Club” referred to, was the Okeh record label to which Little Richard was contracted at the time. It does sound as if there were an audience in front of Little Richard as he played, going by some of the apparent ad libs, but even in those days it was not unknown for audience response to be dubbed onto the studio tapes.

I now know who the musicians were:  Little Richard (vocals, piano), Billy Preston (organ), Eddie Fletcher (bass), Glenn Willings (guitar) and Johnny “Guitar” Watson (guitar.) the drummer is unknown; no records were kept by Okeh. There is also an unidentified horn section.

Billy Preston was a session musician who played with the Beatles and George Harrison and then had a briefly successful solo career in die Seventies. Johnny “Guitar” Watson was a bluesman in the Fifties who had a career revival as a funk artist in the Seventies.

It seems, therefore, that the performance was either live in the studio for an invited audience or the “live” element and ambience were tacked onto studio recordings  to fake a gig.

The album I bought was not, if memory serves, on the Okeh label at all and must’ve been licenced to another, budget re-issue label, or perhaps to the South African outlet of Okeh Records’ parent label. The photograph of Little Richard on the front cover is the same on the original LP, as the CD re-issue and as on the download, but the graphics, as I recollect them, are different.

The performances are energetic and loud, with a hot band and classic screaming Little Richard giving it his all. One has the sense that, as was eventually the case with all the rock and roll stars of the Fifties, Little Richard performed the same sets over and over because his audiences wanted to hear the hits, not any new material he might have recorded.

More than stars from any other era, it seems that the rock and rollers struggled to continue successful recording careers into the Sixties and Seventies, when they were, after, still relatively young. Most of the big rock stars of the Sixties and Seventies kept on recording, for better or worse,  through the decades beyond, even if these more mature recordings are never going to be held in the high regard as the records of the first decade or so of their careers.

With rock and roll stars, the audience appears simply to want to hear the first hits, and it seems that the record companies might have seen it that way too and didn’t care to support the Fifties stars in whatever ambition they might have had to move beyond the hits of their breakthrough years. Of course, there were exceptions. Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich pursued careers in country music, leaving behind the R & B component of rock and roll, and concentrating on the country element. Conceivably, Little Richard’s new focus would have been on soul music because it had the gospel element Richard’s rock and roll had.

At the Okeh Club (which Little Richard commends as if it were real) the tunes are indeed some of Richard’s great hits and he sure sounds as if he’s putting heart and soul into them, hoary as they might have been by them. But for me the standout tracks were the ones I didn’t know that well, like “Send Me Some Loving,”  “True Fine Mama,”  “Get Down With It” (which I always wondered whether Slade covered it), “Anyway You Want Me” and “You Gotta Feel it,” all of which sound less like rock and roll than bluesy soul, as suited to Little Richard’s vocal style as the raucous rock and roll of, say, “Tutti Frutti.”

Listening to this album, after such a long time, was a let-down in that it does somewhat like a contractually necessitated re-tread of past glories, with some forced-sounding showbiz  histrionics from Richard that are supposedly ad libs come across as schtick. Little Richard entertains as if he has a Las Vegas residency, like Fats  Domino, and must please the paying audience who came to see the wild man of rock and roll.

As a live performance album the record is great; both Richard and band play well and strongly. The weak part, ironically, is that it’s a collection of old favourites done quite straightforwardly and almost perfunctory. Richard doesn’t stretch out the tunes, he doesn’t improvise, he doesn’t  bring anything new to the songs and, apart from being for a different label with a new performance royalty stream, there seems to be no point in re-recording the old hits and one almost wants to revisit those original versions for the pureness of first phase rock and roll.

It’s not a bad party album but it’s not an essential album other than as an example of how these songs were being played in the mid-Sixties.

New York Dolls are fun to play with

I read about the New York Dolls for the first time in the August 1974 issue of Hit Parader magazine when the band was mentioned in a piece about the nascent New York punk scene, as a pioneer of the then current New York scene. The piece mentioned that David Johansen had a new project and that Johnny Thunders, the Dolls’ lead guitarist, and Richard Hell, from Television, had joined to form The Heartbreakers. 

This piece was also my introduction to these names and bands such Television, the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads, all of whom became well-known and successful.

It was only from 1977, when I became a regular reader of the New Musical Express (NME), that I learnt more about the Dolls. Hit Parader had regularly mentioned David Johansen and his solo career (and influenced me to buy the records when I saw them) but by then the Dolls were history and Hit Parader was all about what was currently hip and fashionable.

The first two significant facts I learnt about the New York Dolls was that the band played tough, Stonesy rock and roll and that the band members, way before British glam rock, dressed up in women’s clothes, not as trannies, but as accessories to their streetwear, for a bit of old fashioned, rock and roll glamour. According to the NME, the Dolls were part of a trilogy, with the MC5 and The Stooges, of influences on the UK punk bands of the late seventies, in that they were rebellious, outrageous, and played stripped down, loud, fast rock and roll, the antithesis of prog rock and heavy bands of the mid-Seventies.

During 1975 Malcolm McLaren, soon to be the manager of the Sex Pistols, managed the last incarnation of the Dolls and made them wear red leather, and no longer the funky feathers, satin and tat of their early years, to suggest something far more radical and dangerous.  McLaren’s ideas and guidance failed to revive or sustain the Dolls’ career.

The original band released two albums, New York Dolls(1973) and Too Much Too Soon(1974) and neither of them ever made it to the one Stellenbosch record store at the time. I did however buy the first three David Johansen solo albums but probably only from about 1984 when they were floating around in bargain bins.

It was more than 40 years after the Dolls’ albums were released, that I started hearing tracks from them, starting with “Trash” on a compilation of songs that influenced UK punk, and then “Personality Crisis” and “Looking for a Kiss,” presumably three of the band’s best known and most loved songs, but it wasn’t until I joined the streaming service Apple Music that I had ready access to the New York Dolls entire output, as well as that of Johnny Thunders, solo and with The Heartbreakers, and Johansen again. There were also videos of performances by the Dolls and the David Johansen Group on YouTube.

The bounty, and irony, of services like Apple Music and YouTube is that, at the age of 60, I can finally listen to music that was contemporary when I was a teenager but not commercially popular enough to receive airplay on South African rock radio or to be available in record stores, yet became legendary far beyond its time and commercial impact. So, instead of investing time in keeping up with contemporary music, I spend more time seeking out and listening to music of the past, and no longer so much the important acts of the Sixties, but the Seventies bands that played the kind of hard, fast rock I enjoyed then, and still do. These bands were active when I was a spotty teenager and yet I was completely ignorant of their existence.  Today I want to explore the musical landscape of my youth, that was closed to me at the time, partly because I was living in Stellenbosch, a conservative backwater even as a university town, and partly because the bands were obscure to everyone but the cognoscenti and rock critics who had no impact on commercial success despite their continuous praise. 

Johansen is a good, witty lyricist with a marked New York sensibility and the music has tunes, power and groove, and the proverbial Stones-ian swagger that’s so often held up as the hallmark of a great rock and roll group. I suppose Johansen and Thunders could have been presented as the Jagger and Richards of the Dolls, if less legendary, though they weren’t the exclusive song writing partnership in the band.

It’s fun to listen to the Dolls because the music isn’t just dumb fun, though it is tremendous fun, exhilarating and tuneful, and has the same pop savvy that the later punk bands, both US and UK incarnations, had. If they rebelled against the status quo, it was a young person’s rebellion against the establishment with the aim, however vague, to replace that establishment with a new approach to music and fashion that would also achieve commercial success. 

First you want to write songs to perform, then you want to record the tunes for posterity and then you want an audience for your gigs and who’ll buy your records. Bands like the New York Dolls don’t set out to be cult successes and influences on later, more successful bands; they don’t just want to sound like the Stones, they want to be as wildly successful too. sometimes it just doesn’t happen though.

The Dolls had long hair like the hippies but didn’t wear tie dye and natural fabrics. They didn’t live on the farm or in a rural commune. They probably preferred amphetamines, cocaine and, ultimately for some, heroin to weed. As young, hormonal, horny urban guys with a bohemian streak, they dared to brighten up their look with fashion items previously associated with women, a fashion statement presumably as a poke in the eye of the more conservative, straight, older generation, even the older rock generation, and having fun with the English concept of effete heterosexuality, and androgyny. It’s a basic tenet of showbiz that you have to get the attention of the people who can shape your career and of the people you want to persuade to pay hard earned money to attend your gigs and buy your records and merchandise, and that the best way to do this, is to be outrageous and dangerous-looking. Image and attitude is everything when you start out; when you can back that up with decent music, you should be a winner.  

The New York Dolls never made a popular breakthrough, not in the USA and not in the rest of the world, for various reasons. Some of it’s down to the drug troubles within the band. Their first drummer, Billy Murcia, died of a drug overdose, and Johnny Thunders and bassist Arthur Kane had their issues. Failure to launch might also be due to inept management, poor record company support and the lack of hit singles.

It’s sad for the Dolls that the first version of the band only managed two albums, in the same way we have only three MC5 albums and two Stooges albums, but it’s great for us that we have at least that and the best part is: not only are these albums are good to excellent, but the musical snapshots are frozen in time with no lengthy discography of albums over a forty year career, with evermore diminishing returns as time goes by, as is the case (for example) with the Rolling Stones. 

The Dolls (only Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain) did reunite in the 21^stcentury and released three more studio albums but those will not be the records and songs for which the New York Dolls will be remembered. There is also a slew of live releases of gigs and collections of demo recordings from the Seventies, that are historically important for completist fans, but hardly vital or necessary. If, with The Dictators, you only need Go Girl Crazy!, with New York Dolls, you need only the first two albums. That’s all she wrote.

The raw power of Iggy Pop and The Stooges

Raw Power(1973) is the culmination and peak of what The Stooges were trying to achieve yet it’s also not quite how they sounded on the first two albums, The Stooges(1969) and Fun House(1970), because James Williamson’s guitar playing is so different and much fiercer than Ron Asheton’s on the first two records.

I think I’ve heard the 1973 David Bowie mix of Raw Powerand now I’ve listened to Iggy Pop’s 1997 remix of it too. Some prefer the originally authorised mix, some prefer the rawer, later Pop version. I’m one of those people who listened to the original album and wondered what the fuss was all about; it seemed slick, anaemic and ineffectual, hardly the stuff of legend or a record that could have been an influence on the punks of the late Seventies.  The Iggy Pop mix makes the record exciting and vital.

I bought the first two albums probably in 1984 or 1985, well after the heyday of the punk explosion of 1976, but when I heard “1969,” “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “No Fun,” I heard punk rock, or at least the two or three chord musical concept of it, played by people allegedly picking up a guitar for the first time. With the dumbed down two chord riffs there were also the incongruous, psychedelic freak out lead guitar parts that seemed to be from a different band altogether and the 10-minute plus tedious dirge of “We Will Fall” could have been a third band of pretentious twats.

On the second album, “Down in the Street,” “Dirt” and “Fun House” upped the ante again from the defiantly dumb debut to the scarily intelligent second act, with ferocious, tough grooves and scornful vocals. This was post punk and beyond.  Fun Housewas not only ahead of its time, it hasn’t dated and still sounds cutting edge.

The Iggy Pop mix of Raw Poweris the visceral business though and the roaring rhythm guitar parts are a blueprint for punk to come, from the New York scene to the UK scene, and they blow you away. Ron Asheton had a completely different sound and approach on the first two albums and that was effective and supported Pop’s musical vision. James Williamson seems to BE Pop’s musical vision. The guitars are loud, they are awesome, and they absolutely drive the performances. There’s no sloppiness, no raggedness, no quirkiness, just brute power and acceleration. If ever a record was mixed to be played at extreme volume, it’s this one. Even the ostensible ballads rock hard.

I’m not a huge Iggy Pop fan. The Stooges are where I’m at and his solo career has never inspired me to buy the records, though I’ve always felt bad for not getting hold of The Idiot(1977) and Lust for Life(1977) when they were released, because it was then, from the NME, that I learnt who he was and how he’d been an influence and inspiration for the punk Class of 1976. I have listened to those records, much later, and if they are contemporary to their time and have some classic songs, like “Nightclubbing,” “China Girl,” “Lust for Life” and “The Passenger,” the music is too smooth, too groomed and too sophisticated for me, especially when I know The Stooges’ first two albums.

Do you remember Hüsker Dü?

American hardcore was not exactly a direct descendant of the original New York scene that gave us Television, Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads, who were directly inspirational to the UK punk scene in the late Seventies, but, almost ironically, was  a reaction to the UK punks, in different parts of the United States, where kids had nothing going for them  in the repressed, religious middle American heartland, and the soul deadening suburbs around affluent cities.

UK punk was a social, fashion and musical revolution against the stultifying circumstances of Great Britain in the late Seventies but the bottom line of most punk, especially the first wave, and of the successor New Wave bands, was that melody and tune were as important as fast paced noise rock. The Sex Pistols wrote and performed pop songs, as did The Clash, The Damned or The Jam, as much as they tried to outrage the establishment with their conduct or statements. Their songs had choruses and hooks, they were hummable and memorable. The same applies to the Ramones or any of the other New York proto punk bands.

In fact, apart from the fact that the musicians were younger, dressed differently and expressed political opinions, there was not a huge difference between the punk bands and the glam. pub rock and post-Stones rock and roll bands that preceded them.

Over the past year I’ve watched a bunch of documentaries on the variations of US hardcore from the late Seventies to the Nineties, and beyond, and the one single impression is that, at least at first, the point and purpose of hardcore was to make a fast, loud, aggressive noise with no regard for melody, tune, hooks (apart from a shouted chorus), structure, or any element that would appeal to anyone not in the scene or who has an appreciation for old fashioned musical values. I can imagine an older, straight-laced person who might mistakenly have wandered into a hardcore gig, to be physically, emotionally, psychologically and conceptually repulsed by the wall of noise the bands produce on stage.

Hardcore, like extreme metal, seems designed to be liked, if one could truly like such a thing,  only by the people who make it and their fans, who want an exclusive club of outsiders who take pride in making and listening to a style of music that will not and cannot ever, be mainstream. This tribalism also leads to the accusation of “selling out” against bands who develop a more commercial sound, probably because the musicians have more ambition, and eventually develop the technique, to play something more than basic noise rock and who believe it’s time to earn a living from their art.  After a while, it must be exhausting to anyone to keep on doing the same old noise schtick. Everyone grows older, and matures, and grows to like more diverse styles of, and more sophisticated, music.

Hüsker Dü did not receive much, if any, airplay on South African rock radio in the Eighties (and neither did the UK punks when they emerged), and I knew  of the band only because the NME, Spin and the other rock publications I bought at the time, regularly covered the band and heaped praise on it, and in fact followed guitarist Bob Mould in his solo ventures too.

A handful of the early hardcore scene bands became semi-famous, such as Minutemen, Black Flag and Hüsker Dü, and the take on the latter was that it was the first, or one of the first, hardcore bands who progressed from loud, fast songs with shouty vocals to loud, fast songs with recognisable melodies and a pop sensibility that, ultimately, influenced the pop punk generation who broke in 1994, with Green Day and Offspring leading the pack. Hüsker Dü can’t be classified as pop punk but the musical ambitions and abilities of Bob Mould and Grant Hart, the two songwriters, led them closer to that point and further away from their noise roots than they and their audience might have anticipated at the start of their career.

The double album Warehouse (Songs and Stories)(1987) was the first Hüsker Dü album I bought, and probably about 20 years later, Zen Arcade(1984) (coincidentally also a double album), in its CD format, was the second. I don’t even know whether any other Hüsker Dü records were readily available in Cape Town when they were released but, frankly, Warehousedid not inspire or motivate me to buy anything else by the band. I didn’t even listen to the record much or record it on audio cassette as I customarily did with my records, to save the vinyl.

Apple Music has given me the opportunity to catch up on what I’d missed in the Eighties (and, for that matter, the Sixties and Seventies) and I’m ambivalent. Back then the contemporary rock I liked could be represented by most of what U2 released, The Cult, John Mellencamp and Guns N’ Roses. I wasn’t a Smiths or R.E.M. fan.  I never heard US hardcore so it’s impossible now to tell whether I would’ve have been a fan. Doing a quick catchup of Hüsker Dü’s albums before Warehouseconfirms, on the surface, that I probably wouldn’t have cared much for the music but that’s probably just from listening once and not giving anything enough chance to grow on me. 

The one thing I can say is that Grant Hart’s songs are more appealing than Mould’s because they are the pop heart of the generally abrasive Hüsker Dü output,  and he seems to sing where Mould prefers a hoarse bellow, but the post-hardcore music of Hüsker Dü somehow didn’t strike a chord. 

If I think about it now, it’s possible that I hadn’t listened to Zen Arcademuch either, having bought it because it was cheap and not because I was compelled to own it because of its “legendary” status. It seems, as is the case with my relationship to R.E.M., that I can perhaps appreciate that Hüsker Dü, though never in the same commercial realms as R.E.M., is regarded as a great, ground breaking band who deserves all the accolades, but that I will never like the music much.  At least, where I find R.E.M. generally just irritating, some of Hüsker Dü’s output rocks hard and is tuneful enough that I can dig the pop smarts and a cherry picked collection of their songs would be nice to have.

In 2003 Rolling Stone, insofar as it’s establishment views carry any weight, placed New Day Rising(1985) (the follow up to Zen Arcade)  in its list of the 500 best of most essential records of all time. It’s a pleasant record, with the usual mix of abrasive and melodic songs, yet I can hardly think of it as an essential album, much less featuring amongst the top 500 of them. It could be a useful example of the maturation of a style of rock, from confrontational to appealing, but no more.

To be honest, I prefer Flip Your Wig(1985), mostly because it has plenty of what you might call old school guitar, and even some riffing, on it, rather than the hardcore template. Even so, I still ask myself, if I’d bought the album when it was released (and I was 26 years old), would I have listened to it more than a few times, or more than I did listen to Warehouse? I guess not.

A thought that immediately occurs when I listen to this style of punk, is the question: how do the musicians remember the chord progressions of all these songs, and  some of the band specialised in many, extremely brief songs, when there are so many and they all sound similar?  That’s the thing: how does one distinguish one Hüsker Dü track from another over the length of 10 or so LPs, especially if you listen to all of them in sequence? After a while, one track of fast, raging guitar and hoarse, shouting vocals buried in the mix sounds like the previous one and the next one and the act of listening becomes an endurance contest or everything just becomes background white noise because one’s concentration goes.

In a club, when the audience is young, hormonal, drunk and/or stoned, and only a few feet from the band, this music can make sense as an escape from whatever reality the youth want to escape and as a dividing line between being young, cool and alienated from society, and being a member of the establishment of that society. Kids versus parents, if you will. Parents don’t like music they can’t understand and that seems to be a wilfully brutal noise with no apparent redeeming qualities, and kids want to have music that will piss their elders off, music that’s designed to be nothing like the music the parents understand.  Perhaps, in time, as these kids grow older, their rebel music will become orthodox and they, in turn, will hate the terrible music their kids are listening to or making.

Bob Mould has had a solo career (including the band Sugar, which with the album Copper Blue (1992) was his commercial highpoint, but he’s effectively remained no more than a major cult figure who would never have, and has never had, sustained, material commercial success. Whatever it is that he’s doing, presumably it’s successful enough as a low key career, with few of the pressures being a major commercial artist, and he can promote his brand amongst his devoted followers who will always at least attend performances and buy enough albums, whether hard copy or online, to make it worthwhile to continue recording songs.

Many of the rock acts that broke through in the Sixties are still touring and playing shows because there’s a market for it and a decent income to be derived from cashing in on nostalgia. Even major artists, like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, however, have not made any essential contributions to their oeuvres although they regularly release new material. Regardless of how much critical praise the contemporary material receives, it’ll never be held in the same esteem as the songs and albums these guys released in, say, the first 10 years of their respective careers, though Young seems to have done rather better than Dylan. In both cases, too, there is an emphasis on archival releases of material that was never deemed commercial enough at the time of recording, or simply didn’t fit into record company release schedules. Now, there is the opportunity, and apparently the hunger, for previously unknown or legendary live recordings or outtakes to be released for fans, no doubt because this is also a new income stream.

Bob Mould might not be there yet, and perhaps never will be, because one can’t conceive of him ever being mentioned in the same company as Dylan and Young, for after all, if a critical darling, Hüsker Dü was just a big fish in the small pond of the rock sub-genre of Eighties hard ore punk. Conceivably there are hours of recorded live sets from Hüsker Dü, Sugar  or solo Mould, and as many hours of unreleased recordings and outtakes and alternate versions, and, equally conceivably, there might be a market, however selective, for this stuff but I really can’t see, other than for obsessive Hüsker Dü fans, why any of that would be essential listening or be regarded as essential rock archival material that would shed more light on the creative impulses and inspirations of a major rock artist. Obviously, my view is biased because I’m no great fan of Mould but I also believe, taking the rock orthodoxy of Hüsker Dü’s importance and relevance into account, that my assessment is correct.

The plan had been to listen to the Hüsker Dü albums on Apple Music in sequence, for a proper appreciation of the band’s output but I just couldn’t do it. It’s like my attempts to binge watch series. After a few episodes I get bored and must call a halt and most often it’s difficult , if not impossible, to get back to it. Few series are that compelling  that I’d want to watch seven seasons in a week, and that’s how I felt about Hüsker Dü’s music.  After two or three records it just felt like more of the same time after time, with nothing much to distinguish one song, or one album, from another, and I didn’t engage with the songs all that much in the first place. This isn’t the kind of loud, fast music I like.

Hüsker Dü was important and significant in its time and that was, and will always be, the Eighties. I guess I don’t get why it was ever a thing, or influential, and I never will,  File with The Smiths and R.E.M.

A Riposte and a Contrarian View, Part Two

1. Jack Hammer – “Street of Love,” “Sarajevo”  

Piet Botha has kept Jack Hammer going as the parallel project to his solo career as Afrikaans rocker and on paper this Southern rock influenced band sounds exciting. I saw them play at a disastrous rock festival in the Good Hope Centre in the late Eighties and they were an impressive live act. Unfortunately, their early recordings, at least the CD albums Ghosts on the Wind (1994) and Death of a Gypsy(1996), from which these two tracks are taken, don’t do the music justice. The mix is terrible, with the vocals upfront and the guitars mixed way down, making the performances sound muddy and powerless. Where the band should roar and scamper, it merely bleats and plods. These are the most irritating set of mixes since the All Night Radio albums, which have the same issue.  It is only with The Pilgrim (2005) that the production values  are excellent and showcase the full extent of the band’s live power.

Apart from the ill-conceived mixing, Botha’s vocal styling, of not actually singing but kind of intoning, in a portentous ponderous fashion, his “meaningful” lyrics, tends to drag over the length of the songs, never mind the duration of a full album. This would have been mitigated had the guitars behind his voice been louder and more assertive, but the focus is so intently on the vocals that the irritation factor is quite high.

I bought these two albums because I’d read about Jack Hammer, remembered Piet Botha from the late Seventies and dearly wanted to love the music because it seemed that Jack Hammer played exactlythe kind of Southern guitar rock I like a lot. I was terribly disappointed and have hardly ever listened to the albums after I bought them.

Piet Botha might be legendary for his long musical career  with Jack Hammer and as solo Afrikaans act, but these two songs, at least as the tracks of the respective parent albums, are nowhere close to it.

2. Just Jinger – “Sugar Man”

Art (now Ard) Mathews ran Just Jinger and then Just Jinjer from 1997 to 2000, and operated in the anthemic rock realm, also occupied by Watershed and Prime Circle, both of which are still active, which is not exactly my fave but these bands generally have a couple of good tunes one can sing along to a a festival while waving a lit Bic lighter.

In just Jinjer’s case “Shallow Waters” and “Stand in Your Way” represents the best of the bunch but there are other good, if unfamiliar to me,  tunes on the Greatest Hits(2001) album, probably the only Just Jinjer record one needs to own, which also includes the reverent cover of “Sugarman,” a signature song of a real legend, Sixto Rodriguez.

This version of “Sugarman” is nice enough but it’s not so different to the original or just a quirky interpretation to make it interesting, and neither the band nor this recording are legendary. It’s not even remotely the best the band did.

3.  Koos Kombuis – “Who Killed Kurt Cobain”  

Although there are many Afrikaans speaking musicians in South African rock bands, and quite a few Afrikaans rockers, this list mentions only Piet Botha and Koos Kombuis. Valiant Swart must be as “legendary” and I suppose the list is of its time, 2002, and might look a lot different if it were more contemporary but I would seem, for whatever reason, that Brian Currin has never seen fit to update his picks. Perhaps he simply has no eyes for South African rock released in the 21^stCentury.

 “Who Killed Kurt Cobain” is from Madiba Bay(1997), Kombuis’  4^thalbum, and possibly the last good one, where he is an Afro-optimist, still basking in the light of the newly democratic South Africa led by President Mandela, still something of a rebel and fringe artist though he was already heading to the mainstream at a good clip.  He was shortly to be disillusioned by the new regime and its egregious failings, and in his later records he comes across as the chubby, White, middle class, ex-rebel he’s become. Nowadays he is in the mainstream, a national treasure.

Anyhow,Madiba Bay is the first, and possibly only, album where Kombuis performs a mix of Afrikaans and `English songs, possibly an attempt to pander to his English language following or to get some international exposure, who knows.  “Who Killed Kurt Cobain” is a predictable conspiracy song. It doesn’t number under the best songs on the album  and has never become a Kombuis classic, and rightly so.

4. Julian Laxton – “Celebrate”  

Well, here’s a bone fide legend, innit? Laxton was the guitarist for Freedoms Children and an in-demand session guitarist after that and, as far as I know, owns a popular bar in Gauteng and possibly still plays low key gigs. 

Post Freedoms, he kicked on with a solo career and with this tune, and “Blue Water,” from Celebrate (1977) he gave us two prime examples of the fusion of rock and disco he called “glot rock” that are still exciting to listen to, especially at high volume. Pretty much dumb entertainment but joyful nonetheless.

5. Little Sister – “No Man Shall Fall,” “Dear Abbie “ 

Because the band is led by sisters Debbi and Jenni Lonmon, one could see them as South Africa’s Heart, especially the late period, big power ballad Heart. Little Sister was a good, solid workmanlike ensemble, for the decade between 1989 and 1999, with no brilliance but some heart-warming tunes, such as these.

6. Mauritz Lotz – “Six String Razor”  

How a faceless session guy could be a legend is a good question; perhaps he’s a legend in the studio amongst his peers and the acts he plays for. This track is the title track of his 1990 debut.

7. McCully Workshop – “Buccaneer”  

McCully Workshop is a bit of a local legend, one of the pioneering South African progressive bands from the late Sixties / early Seventies, who found themselves with a couple of pop hits in 1977 with “Chinese Junkman” and “Buccaneer”  and the latter, in particular, is still the one song by which most people  remember them. There may have been other, earlier hits, but I don’t recall any.  I disliked both these songs when they were released and I still can’t stand them.

My only memory of the band is of a performance at a University of Stellenbosch  “Karnaval” gig around 1974 or 1975 (pre “Buccaneer”), where they were the headliners amongst presumably the cream of the then Cape Town bands, and performed a rousing version of “Midnight Special,” in which they used the F-word to outrage the nice, god fearing Afrikaans students. I have no clue what the other songs in their repertoire were because this was the first, last and only time I heard the band perform. (I was too young to be allowed onto the festival site and was forced to experience the gig from the other side of a fence, with the bands out of sight.)

For now McCully Workshop is just a nostalgic memory, and if they still perform, it’s far and few between. I guess it’s good to be remembered for at least one hit but it’s a pity that it’s “Buccaneer,” a rather silly, inconsequential tall tale song with a hummable tune and lovely harmonies but nothing else of distinction.

8. Morocko – “Bowtie Boogaloo”

I don’t know who JB Arthur is or where he is now, but this 1981 release seems to have been his one and only shot at stardom, backed by names I recognise as some of the top session men of the day, and with a catchy tune that is borderline schlock. The SA Rock Encyclopedia bio mentions Prince as an influence; this is stretching the bounds of credulity. The music sounds like a  throwback to the bad disco of the Seventies with no hint of innovation or that, in fact, the Eighties have arrived.  

9. Otis Waygood Blues Band – “Fever “

For some reason I cannot recall, Otis Waygood Blued Band was the first local   band (they hailed form Rhodesia, as it then was, but made their bones in Cape Town I took note of when I was about 10 or 11 years old and not very knowledgeable about pop or rock in general. 

I bought the eponymous debut album from 1970 in its RetroFresh CD format in about 2003, and the second and third albums a couple of years later, and was mightily impressed. The debut was an impeccably produced mix of blues, rock and progressive flute trappings that could stand its ground against anything of similar nature recorded in the UK or USA. It is a landmark album in the annals of South African rock.

Their feisty take on “Fever” is highly entertaining but the other tracks on the album are as good.

Simply Otis Waygood(1971) and Ten Light Claps and a Scream(1971) are hugely disappointing, not only because the band no longer plays blues but also because both sets sound like uninspired,  often piss-poor, improvised studio jams recorded in a day to fulfil contractual obligations. The records are not literally unlistenable but I can’t think why one would want to waste time on them when the inspired, energised and inspirational debut album is available.

Otis Waygood should have broken up after their debut and  their legend would have been wholly untarnished.

10. Peach – “Nightmare,” “Complicated Game” 

In the wake of the success of Clout, there was a bit of a rush to manufacture the next all woman band, and there were a couple. Pantha gave us PJ Powers. Peach was the punk  / New Wave group, with a male guitarist, released one okay-ish album On Loan for Evolution,and also competed for a Sarie award with their debut single “A Lot of Things.” They wrote most of their own songs  except for “Complicated Game,” an exemplary cover of an XTC song.

It seems that the band members were of Johannesburg Greek extraction and every chose a nom de plume,of which Carol Wood-Greene was the most un-punk but possibly the most subversive too.

I prefer “A Lot of Things,” to “Nightmare” but that could just be because it’s the tune I heard first. The music is gritty and tough, the attitude is suspect and one can’t escape the suspicion that this was band made by male promoters who discarded them  quickly when there was no more money to be made.  

11. Rabbitt – “Hold On To Love,” “Charlie,” “Hard Ride”

Rabbitt represents my first experience of how a band can be hyped  and if they started as session musicians with serious chops, and a neat version of Jethro Tull’s “Locomotive Breath,” it was soon more about image, and the pretty boy good  looks of a post-Bay City Rollers rock band and teenage female hysteria. Rabbitt-mania, anyone?

“Charlie” was the first and possibly biggest, hit, a lovely, sweet ballad dedicated to a guy named Charlie, yet the music was mostly rock of a rather highly tooled sort, with the accent on the chops and sophistication of arrangements. Never really my taste because it was too smooth and over produced for my liking.

The band broke up after two albums, probably because they too, were screwed by management and label, and the various members went their own solo career ways. Duncan Faure, ironically, played for a late version of the Bay City Rollers. Trevor Rabin joined Brit prog rockers Yes and wrote their biggest ‘80s (and probably ever) hit, “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” Neil Cloud and Ronnie Robot achieved far less success.

For a while Rabbitt-mania was a thing, if heavily hyped and manipulated, and it was as exciting as it was short-lived. South Africa was just not big enough to support the career of an ambitious rock band and at the time, trying to “make it” anywhere else was not in the cards for SA rockers, hence the quick, bitter demise. 

12. Radio Rats – “ZX Dan”  

“ZX Dan” was released in late 1978 and kind of in the wake of Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing.” Both songs featured lengthy, delirious, tuneful outro guitar solos that made them, to me, instantly memorable. The lyrics of “ZX Dan” told a banal sci-fi story of an alien who wants to tune in to rock and roll, and reminded one of Bowie’s “Starman,” though the comparison was unfavourable. 

Having said that, the tune had a lot of airplay on Radio 5 and became a solid chart hit, the first and last The Radio Rats ever had. Into the Night We Slide, the parent album, is a mix of  consciously weird, yet not very tough,  rock ‘n roll that was a bit of post New Wave fresh breath of air in the local scene but forty years later it sounds twee, amateurish and not nearly as strange as it might have been at the time. For all it’s rather terrible lyrics, “ZX Dan” is by far the best thing on the record.

Jonathan Handley, songwriter and guitarist, apparently kept Radio Rats going, and even developed a couple or other bands, but has never been more than a brief entry in the annals of SA rock.

13. Margaret Singana – “Tribal Fence”

Margaret Singana hubristically called ‘Lady Africa,’ as if she were the only African female vocalist ever, became famous in South Africa, at least amongst the White public, as the voice of the recorded version of the musical Ipi ‘n Tombi and then achieved cachet with White musicians and radio as the acceptable face of local Black music. “Tribal Fence” was written by Ramsay Mackay of Freedoms Children and Singana’s recording must have been designed to be  cross over hit for her between Black and White popular music, much as PJ Powers and Hotline, albeit a few tears later, attempted the same.  Nice enough and perhaps a tad daring but hardly epoch shattering.

14. Neill Solomon – “Roxy Lady”

I don’t recall ever hearing this tune from 1980 by Mr Solomon and the Uptown Rhythm Dogs but maybe I did because I think of it as yet another pseudo sophisticated jazzy funky pieced of pablum. The title is cringe worthy and though the band may have been amazing musicians, it’s a retro snooze fest.

15. Stingray – “Better The Devil You Know”

As I understood it at the time, Stingray was a project band formed from seasoned session musicians with an eye on the kind of AOR rock success enjoyed by Boston, Toto  and similar melodic metal bands of the time.  this kind of soft rock, pop crossover was  tepid, by-the-numbers heavy rock with no nous, no verve, no power and no glory. This release was from 1979 and the band never saw the ‘80’s.

16. Suck – “Aimless Lady”

in 1971 Suck was a shock rock band, apparently specialising in cover versions of heavy bands of the era, such as Grand Funk Railroad, whose tune this is, King Crimson, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and which released one album, Time to Suck, and disappeared, becoming legendary probably because of obscurity rather than the quality of their music. It’s extraordinary that a cover band could have been able to release a record and it’s probably a grand testimonial to the ‘underground’ scene of the time but none of the performances on the album are essential listening other than for the historical record.  The band didn’t quite suck, but they kinda blew.

17. Sweatband – “This Boy”  

In 1984 and 1985 Sweatband, fronted by the young, sexy Wendy Oldfield and the guitar god John Mair, played venues in Stellenbosch, trying to make a name for themselves, and then moved North to the Big Smoke of Johannesburg where the career took a massive leap forwards, with big management and a record deal. When Sweatband returned to Cape Town in 1986, they had a swagger second to none and a  bunch of great tunes on a rather good debut album.  “This Boy” and “Shape of her Body” were the best songs but, apart from one weak track, the album was all killer and no filler and arguably the best SA pop rock album of the decade.  Mair could write a catchy tune or riff and play them with the insouciance of the truly talented. Sadly, the band fell apart after a few years, apparently, typically a victim of their own success, bad management and a debt crisis. Oldfield had a briefly successful solo career while Mair went back to paying solo gigs in bars, drank too much and died. Sweatband ought to have been much bigger than they were but the Eighties were not the best time to be a South African rock musician with aspirations.

18. The Spectres – “Be Bop Pop,” “Teddy Bear”  

In about 1987 The Spectres, like so many other Johannesburg bands, played a bunch of gigs in Cape Town, probably during the festive season and impressed with high energy and a bunch of tuneful pop rock songs. At the time The Believers, with a similar line up, were active in Cape Town  one could make a direct comparison between a Cape Town band who was accomplished but seemed to put style before substance and the Johannesburg group who were as accomplished and yet more fun to listen to.

“Teddy Bear” was the big hit, a rather twee piece of fluff pop, and I was surprised by it because from the gigs they sounded more serious than that but I guess lyrics often didn’t translate well in a live situation, because of poor club sound. 

The Spectres had a couple of radio hits, then disappeared without trace. Their one album contains the hits and filler, which suggests that the talent wasn’t really much to speak of. Tara Robb, the vocalist, died in 2000.

19. Tribe After Tribe – “Damsel (As I Went Out One Morning)”  

I went to see Tribe After Tribe  play a New Year’s gig at  the Weizmann Hall in Sea Point in probably 1984, and for the first 30 minutes or so Robbi Robb did nothing but harangue the crowd, whether he was genuinely pissed off about something or it was simply a device to get the blood going, until the audience, who put up with his abuse, was audibly pissed off in turn, yet stayed put, and then the band played a blistering set of the toughest, loudest, densest rock I’d ever heard from a local act, comparable only to Sweatband’s home coming gigs in 1986, after making a breakthrough in Johannesburg, and Arno Carsten’s New Porn collective in, of all places, Wellington, in October 2004.  

The original rhythm section comprised of Fuzzy Marcus (bass) and Bruce Williams (drums) previously of Baxtop, while Robb came from Asylum Kids;  hippy rock roots with punk / New Wave roots.

“As I Went Out One Morning (Damsel)” (the correct title) is a take on a Bob Dylan song from John Wesley Harding, a surprising choice for a cover, especially of a Dylan tune, and though well played, not that captivating. Perhaps it was the only palatable song from the debut album that the SABC was prepared to give airtime to at the time.

Robb took the Tribe After Tribe brand to the USA, Los  Angeles to be exact, and  followed a longer career path there than he did in South African and I don’t even know whether the band has ever played in SA again. 

20. Via Afrika – “Hey Boy”  

Via Afrika’s early Eighties mix of electronics and African rhythms still sound revolutionary and innovative to this day. René Veldsman had a brief, unsatisfactory solo rock career before Via Afrika, before she hit creative pay dirt in a collaboration with two comrades who were not necessarily the greatest musicians but had attitude and the inquisitive, we-can-do-anything energy of youth.

The two albums, Via Afrika(1983) and Scent of Scandal(1984) are South African classics and, for my money, both number among the top ten best local rock albums of the decade. Nobody else sounded like this and more than 30 years later the records still sound avant garde.  “Hey Boy” was a club hit in Cape Town in the late Eighties.