Dr Feelgood's Live Multiverse

 DR FEELGOOD’S LIVE MULTIVERSE 

 

I’ve recently watched videos of Dr Feelgood’s live performances in four different iterations of the band: the original quartet in 1975, the post-Wilko band with Gypie Mayo on guitar in 1980, the band where only Lee Brilleaux is an original member in 1990 and the totally superfluous current version of Dr Feelgood, with band members who have no historical connection with the brand,  in 2022.

 

I became a committed fan when I heard the then otherworldly sounding “Back In The Night” for the first time on the radio and remained interested after Wilko Johnsons left the band and Gypie Mayo replaced him, as this version of the band had the momentum of the breakthrough years that kept it on an upward, creatively fertile trajectory that peaked with A Case of the Shakes (1980) a bit of a resurgence after the turgid and uninspiring preceding Let It Roll (1979) was a sign of things to come.

 

A Case of the Shakes was, and still is, the last Feelgoods album I bought though I kept up with the news of the band, such as Mayo departing, then Sparko and the Big Figure, Lee Brilleaux’s death and the continuation of the band as a cash grab commercial enterprise with no founding members.

 

The YouTube clips from mostly 1975, from the Geordie Scene television show, some shows in France and a concert at the Kursaal in Southend, feature the band that took the pub rock scene in London by storm with its energy, dangerous looks, the distinctive sharp, choppy guitar sound of Wilko Johnson and his brilliant songs.

 

Dr Feelgood looked and sounded like no-one else and these performances still hold up after all the years. I can see where this iteration of the band could influence the nascent punk rock scene in London.  Dr Feelgood transcended the R & B influences from whence it came, like the Rolling Stones before them, by infusing their original music with the legacy sounds but not simply playing cover versions.

 

By Sneaking Suspicion (1977) the band had run out of steam and personal differences ripped the heart out of it. The remaining trio never really recovered regardless of who joined as guitarist. The band couldn’t replicate their original sound but, worst of all, couldn’t write the kind of quirky, catchy R & B tunes Wilko writes.

 

The 1980 performance in Germany for the Rock Palast show, is by a band that’s been around the block, has seen great success, critically and commercially, for a brief period,  and has now become a professional, proficient “name” band with nothing of the magical spark of their struggle years. 

 

For this particular show, Mayo plays a Stratocaster with a shrill, trebly, tinny sound that’s probably intended to fit in with the New Wave sounds of the time but lacks power and does a disservice to the hard rocking tunes. Brilleaux no longer sings as much as shouts, barks and growls and if he seems as committe4 to the performance as he was 5 years before, he’s toned down the manic aspects of the performance and now comes across as fully professional rather than passionate.

 

The post-Wilko songs aren’t bad, for the most part, especially the ones off A Case of the Shakes but there’s little real excitement about  the performance, even if Gypie Mayo tries his best to throw guitar hero shapes and Brilleaux retains a smidgen of his earlier confrontational self. 

 

By 1990 Dr Feelgood is Lee Brilleaux with backup musicians, though some of the bandmembers stayed with the band for a very long time, and if the sound is tougher, louder and punchier than in 1980, the performances still sound perfunctory and simply professional with zero enthusiasm or passion. The band sounds as if they just want to get the gig done asap, get paid and go home. By this time Brilleaux dresses like a crooner but truly has no voice left and he doesn’t elevate the journeyman-like newer tunes or even the classics. With Wilko and Gypie, Dr Feelgood at least sounded somewhat different to the competition  and had unique elements.  

 

In 1990  Dr Feelgood has become a generic blues rock band relying on well-known brand name for its commercial success but where it might once have been on the cusp of massive success and true greatness, if the original four could’ve kept it together and management was less greedy and shortsighted, Dr Feelgood became an unchallenging, unengaging day job where most concert attendees probably wanted to hear only the Wilko era tunes, of which there is a smattering of dutiful, tedious versions. Dr Feelgood sounds like a cover band of its own tunes.

 

Somehow, 50 years after the first breakthrough, there’s still a band called Dr Feelgood that tours, releases new material and obviously sounds nothing like the Dr Feelgood I came to know and love. There’s clearly no tribute band type intention of replicating the original sound of Dr Feelgood, as if it’s still a creatively innovative band intending to carve out its own path.  That’s all very well, and good luck to them, but if the 1990 iteration sounded generic, this current group sounds generic and mediocre.  The vocalist has limited vocal range and no stage presence and the guitarist, however proficient and experienced he might be, is merely a master of blues rock cliché.  The new tunes are undistinguished and rely on production values and technically proficient musicianship to generate any kind of mild interest.

 

The musicians look to be senior citizens who’d been eking out a living in semi-pro pub bands for most of their lives until this, presumably, plum job came up, to play in a third-tier blues rock band with name recognition with the possibility of making a fairly decent living if you don’t mind the grind of constant touring.

 

Dr Feelgood has returned to being a pub rock band; that’s the level of music they play now. 

 

It’s amazing that Wilko, Lee, Sparko and Big Figure laid the foundations for a. brand name that’s still recognised and can still provide a livelihood for jobbing musicians. There’s absolutely no reason other than commercial exploitation why Dr Feelgood should still exist and I can’t see how the current lot can win new fans. On the other hand, a 25-year-old today will have no sense of the grand  history of the band or of the impact Dr Feelgood made in the mid-Seventies.

 

I still listen to the first four Feelgoods albums with a good deal of pleasure and the opening notes of “I Can Tell” (Malpractice) still thrills as much as ever. Back in the day I bought all the Gypie Mayo era records, up to A Case of the Shakes, of which I’m quite fond, but thereafter I didn’t waste my money. Having listened to all those later period albums on Apple Music, my contemporary opinion of what those albums would sound like, has been confirmed.  Wilko period Dr Feelgood was unique and brilliant. After he left, the band went into a long, slow decline to becoming just another blues rock band among many without any Unique Selling Proposition. I don’t even understand how this version of the band still draws an audience.

 

Of course, it’s an example of still listening to the music that caught my attention as teenager but I’d argue, in this case, that the Dr Feelgood of 50 years ago IS far superior to any subsequent version of it.

 

 

Lab grown; not the real deal., Hackney Diamonds. The Rolling Stones

 Hackney Diamonds (2023)  

The Rolling Stones

 

A very young Mick Jagger, just starting out on his musical career, once told an interviewer that he couldn’t see himself doing “this” (a pop music career) after the age of 30. In mid-2024, with Jagger and Keith Richards both way past 30 and the only surviving founder members of the band (Ronnie Wood is the only other official Stone but he’s been in the band only for about 48 or 49 years), the Stones are touring behind their latest studio record, Hackney Diamonds, the first such release since the blues standards album Blue & Lonesome in 2016 and the first with original songs since A Bigger Bang (2005.)

 

The band has regularly toured over the past 19 years but the creative impulse to write songs and the motivation and drive to record and release them must be sorely lacking. Younger musicians have a fire and a drive to pursue their career, and often contractual obligations, but by the time they turn, say, 40, the fount of basic raw, inspired creativity is replaced by professional ability and craft.  As Neil Young once explained, he writes songs only when he’s obliged to release a record. This might be a simplification of the process but one can imagine, by the time Young said this, his life was so full of matters other than only his career in music, that he wouldn’t have had the time or luxury to sit around all day writing songs. When he does buckle down to it, he, and many other musicians, may well come up with far more material than the upcoming release may require. The artist records many demos and even does proper recordings of many more tunes than will make it to the track listing of the official release.

 

Bob Dylan has a whole Bootleg series of such previously unreleased songs, and so does Neil Young.

 

With the Rolling Stones there was the odds ‘n sods release Metamorphosis and Tattoo You (1981) was famously cobbled together for old outtakes or half-finished tracks. Their BBC recordings are available now and there have been many bootlegs over the years too, mostly liver recordings but also some studio outtakes. Lately I’ve been seeing advertisements for several box sets of multiple records and CDs relating to albums like Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and even (why, I don’t get) Emotional Rescue.  Of course, these records were released 40 years or longer ago and at the time Jagger and Richards may still have been quite prolific songwriters and the band willing to spend more time in the studio.

 

Obviously, the Rolling Stones are no longer bound by a recording contract that compels them to release an album a year, such as still seems to be the case with Neil Young, unless he just wants to record and release as often and as much as possible (and it’s odd that the older some artists get, the more they want to clue us in on  what they did in their younger lives and refused to let us hear then), and so there’s no pressure on Jagger or Richards to write songs or to book studio time.

 

I don’t know whether the Stones have recorded enough material since, say 1989, to be able to release more records than they have or whether there just isn’t that much and the stuff that’s seen official release, is the by far the best of the bunch.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens after the official demise of the Stones.

 

This brings one to the question: why did the Stones feel that they needed or wanted to release a new studio record?  Was it a contractual obligation? Was there a sudden flare up of creativity and the energy to make something of it? Were these songs written over a period of years until the momentum to record them became irresistible? Is it simply one last studio blast before it’s really too late?

 

Now, I’m not the kind of music fan who follows an act for their entire career or buys every release for the sake of completion or because I think everyone is a work of genius because I love the artist.

 

For example: I don’t care for David Bowie’s music after Diamond Dogs, for Aerosmith’s after Night in the Ruts, Dr Feelgood’s after A Case of the Shakes, Blue Oyster Cult’s after Fire of Unknown Origin, Iggy Pop’s after the Stooges and so son.

 

Regarding the Rolling Stones, leaving Blue & Lonesome out of it, my appreciation of their records ends with Some Girls (1978) and I don’t even much like earlier albums like Goats Head Soup (1973) and Black and Blue(1976.)  The canon comprises of the early records, mostly the singles though, and the run from Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) to Exile on Main Street (1972), plus It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (1974) and Some Girls.  I bought some of the later records and have listened to all of them and not one has had anything remotely close to the appeal of the earlier stuff.

 

It's down to the songwriting, recording and production of the records. It feels as if Jagger and Richards were more inspired and interesting as lyricists and tunesmiths; the lyrics are engaging.  The loose, funky and rocking, blues-based rock ‘n roll style of playing is more to my taste too and the ‘60s and ‘70s production style suits my ears.  Everything sounds organic and relatively simple with the emphasis on good songs, musical proficiency without being precious about it and non-intrusive production. 

 

I generally dislike the typical, fashionable, over-polished ‘80s production style that so badly dates many records from that era, and especially on the records of ‘60’s and ‘70s acts trying to update their sound to stay current and commercial.

 

This is exactly what happened to the Stones albums after Tattoo You. The production values are high, the records are busy and loud yet the playing sounds like highly proficient studio musicians who just can’t reproduced the loose, funky swing of, say, Exile on Main Street. Granted, the Stones probably no longer wanted to sound like that but what they achieved was just extremely well produced, tedious music that has the Stones trademark licks but not anything of the original visceral excitement. Even worse, Jager and Richards now sound like professional songwriters who craft lyrics like mathematicians instead of inspired poets. Lastly, Jagger’s mannered singing style, which gained traction in the early ‘70s and became steadily more entrenched, just sounds fake and irritating. The artless, relaxed, naturalism of Blue & Lonesome echoes what Jagger used to sound like in his glory days. Now, he and the band, absolutely sound like the showbiz Rolling Stones. They’re no longer simply a band playing massive gigs but a core trio with MOR backing musicians performing vaudeville renditions of their well-worn hits, with the same core set list show after show. Most of those songs are from that purple period hey day I prefer and if that doesn’t convince you of the value of the rest of the catalogue, nothing will.

 

Okay, so 18 years after A Bigger Bang, we’ve been blessed, so to speak, with Hackney Diamonds. 

 

The following are selected extracts from the Apple Music hype piece about the record: 

“Hackney Diamonds is the band’s most energetic, effortless, and tightest record since 1981’s Tattoo You. Just play “Bite My Head Off”, a rowdy kiss-off where Mick Jagger tells off a bitter lover, complete with a fuzz-bass breakdown by... Paul  McCartney. “At the end of it, I just said, ‘Well, that's just like the old days,’” Richards tells Apple Music of that recording session.

Hackney Diamonds was indeed made like the old days—live, with no click tracks or glossy production tricks—yet still manages to sound fresh. 

 

After years of stalled sessions, and the death of their legendary drummer Charlie Watts in 
2021, Jagger and Richards decided on a fresh start, travelling to Jamaica for a series of writing sessions. Based on a recommendation from McCartney, Jagger hired producer Andrew Watt, who’d also worked with Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Ozzy Osbourne, Post Malone and more, to help them finish the tracks. 

 

“He kicked us up the ass,” Jagger tells Apple Music. 

With Steve Jordan on drums, Watt kept it simple, bringing in vintage microphones and highlighting the interwoven guitars of Richards and Ronnie Wood. “The whole point is the band being very close, eyeball to eyeball, and looking at each other and feeding off of each other,” says Richards. In the spirit of 1978’s genre-spanning Some Girls, the album comprises sweeping riff-heavy anthems (“Angry”, “Driving Me Too Hard”), tortured relationship ballads (“Depending on You”), country-tinged stompers (“Dreamy Skies”) and even dance-floor grooves (“Mess it Up”, featuring a classic Jagger falsetto).

The capstone of the album is “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”, a stirring seven-minute gospel epic featuring Lady Gaga. Halfway through, the song goes quiet, Gaga laughs and Stevie Wonder starts playing the Rhodes keyboard, and then Gaga and Jagger start improvising vocals together; it’s a spontaneous moment that’s perfectly imperfect, reminiscent of the loose Exile on Main St. sessions. “Playing with Stevie is always mind-blowing, and I thought that Lady Gaga did an incredible job, man,” says Richards. “She snaked her way in there and took it over and gave as good as she got with Mick, and it was great fun.”

Richards didn’t expect to make an album this good as he approaches his 80th birthday. But he’s using it as a moment to take stock of his career with the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. “The fact that our music has managed to become part of the fabric of life everywhere, I feel pretty proud about that, more than any one particular thing or one particular song,” he says. “It is nice to be accepted into this legendary piece of bullshit.”

 

 

First off, Charlie Watts’ drumming is sorely missed. Technically gifted as Steve Jordan may be, he doesn’t have the lightness of touch, the nous and the simple groove that Watts brought to the Stones’ music.

 

Secondly, referencing Some Girls as somehow informing the production, sound and tunes of Hackney Diamonds is absolutely misguided. Never mind that contemporary production techniques and values are vastly different; Some Girls sounds fresh and innovative compared to the albums it followed, and preceded, where Hackney Diamonds is of a piece with the Stones’ ‘90s output where loud, hard music is supposed to create an energetic momentum yet leaves one unfulfilled.  You can’t fault the band for effort but they just don’t deliver  memorable music. Just about the only factor that links the music to the classic Stones, sound is Jagger’s voice. The music is just mainstream rock with very little, if any, spark of magic and the musicians don’t sound particularly invested beyond just the professional pride of still being able to do it after all these years.

  

I guess no rock writer in the mainstream, “legacy” media would be so bold as to say anything negative about this record, a kind of monument to, if nothing else, longevity and the power of professionalism of musicians who’ve been plying their trade for such a very long time. The thing is, like Bob Dylan’s recent studio release Rough & Rowdy Ways, Hackney Diamonds is a testament to professional craft and not to creative inspiration. Jagger and Richards know how to write songs and are pretty proficient at utilising whatever the latest studio technology is but none of it, and this has been the case for more than 40 years, comes across as anything but hard graft and journeymen’s craft.  Hackney Diamonds has high production values and probably sounds awesome when you push the volume button to 11 but the songs aren’t any thing other than perfunctory exercises in tunesmithing; they aren’t inspired or inspiring and I can’t see any of them ever making the list of “Stones classics.” 

 

Lots of people waxed lyrical about this album when it was first released and apparently had it on almost endless repeat. I bet there will be a considerable amount of reconsideration in due course and Hackney Diamonds will be recognised as the novelty it really is and I can foresee that those people who obsess about rating albums will place it firmly in the lower half of the pyramid of Stones albums, a companion to Voodoo Lounge and Bridges to Babylon.

 

 

RIP David Johansen

 RIP DAVID JOHANSEN

(9 January 1950 - 28 February 2025)

 

My introduction to the New York Dolls was an article in Hit Parader magazine from August 1974 in which the writer, either Lisa or Richard Robinson, discussed the then nascent New York pun scene and referenced the Dolls as one of the forerunners of the current scene. By this time, Johnny Thunders had left the band and was fronting the Heartbreakers while, if  I’m correct, David Johansen still led a version of the Dolls, managed by Malcom McLaren.

 

The takeaway from this article was that the young Johansen was a kind of Mick Jagger lookalike and that the Dolls played raucous, Stonesy rock & roll while dressed in women’s clothes and high heels, not because they were cross dressers but because they wanted to outrage the establishment. Mind you, this was well before glam rock became a thing in the UK.

 

Of course, at the time, I had no idea what the New York Dolls music sounded like. My local music store didn’t stock either of their two albums and the radio didn’t play any of their songs. If the Dolls were obscure in the USA, other than in their New York scene, they might as well not have existed for South African purposes.

 

Fast forward a couple of years and by mid-1977 I was a regular reader of the NME, usually about 3 months after time because the rock weekly came to South Africa by mailboat, right at the time when it’s focus was on all things punk. NME writers regularly referenced the Dolls, The Stooges and the MC5 as influences on the UK punk scene and it was in the pages of the NME that I was educated about these three, and other, then defunct bands hailed as proto-punk.

 

Between 1977 and late 1981 I acquired the first two Stooges albums and the first two MC5 albums but still never saw any New York Dolls records in the record stores I frequented.

 

I was still buying Hit Parader and they were still championing Johansen  as solo artist, in features and record reviews and those, combined with NME’s recommendations, in that 1977 to 1081 period,  I did buy David Johansen (1978) and In Style (1979) and, in probably 1983 or ’84, Here Comes the Night (1982). 

 

I preferred the first two albums over the third one because they were light-hearted rock and roll fun, straddling the line between what I imagined the Dolls had sounded like and the influences of punk and New Wave. The production of the third record made it sound as if had been recorded with session musicians and was aimed at a mainstream, AOR rock audience and was therefore a far more serious attempt at crafting a radio friendly, commercially successful record than might’ve been the case with the first albums.

 

After that I lost interest in Johansen’s music.  I saw him in the movie Scrooged and took note of his Buster Pointdexter alter ego and thought that he’d given up the struggle to be independent and idiosyncratic and had surrendered to the lures of filthy lucre in a mainstream showbiz career.

 

I was mildly surprised to come across the album Shaker (2002) by Johansen and the Harry Smiths probably about 10 years after its release, at a flea market stall. The well-known blues songs on the track listing convinced me to buy the CD at its discounted price and when I played it, I was smitten by this, to me, really weird deviation in Johansen’s musical direction. I saw the Buster Pointdexter persona as a joke that somehow became commercially successful and hardly thought of Johansen, given the oeuvre I knew, as aspiring to being a bluesman.  Whatever, I liked the record and then sought out the earlier album, just called David Johansen & the Harry Smiths (2000), which was as satisfying as Shaker. 

 

The only New York Dolls track I’d been familiar with, since the late ‘90s, was “Trash” from a compilation of tracks from bands that had influenced UK punk and this fast paced, insouciant and exhilarating song seemed to be the perfect realisation of what I’d thought of as the Dolls sound, based on what the Hit Parader and NME had to say, as a rollicking update on old-school rock and roll with a fresh edge  yet not the same harsh edge that punk often had though “Trash” shared the same sense of melody. And song structure, unlike the hard core or straight edge punk that emerged in the USA after UK punk had finally made its way to the US.

 

It was only after I joined Apple Music sometime after 2015 that I had access to New York Dolls (1973) and Too Much Too Soon (1874).  By this time, I hardly found them life changing but they were fun and hugely pleasurable to listen to and I saw these records as forerunners, not so much to punk, but to other pre-punk bands like The Dictators 9especially their debut album)  and the early Cheap Trick where power, melody and humour were pre-eminent.

 

The difficulty with looking back at bands that were praised by rock critics when they started out,  not being part of any scene, the band was involved in and hearing their music not only years later but also after being exposed to the bands they influenced, is that the discovery is not mind blowing and one doesn’t always get why the band might have been so highly regarded in the first place.  I’ve read the history of the Dolls and it must’ve been a blast being at the Mercer Arts Center in New York when the Dolls played there in the early ‘70s partly because of the way the guys dressed and partly because the music was at odds with the prevailing fashion of heavy metal and prog rock, but, frankly, now, the music isn’t particularly original or impactful. I still prefer the Stooges’ Fun House (1970) and the MC5’s Back in the USA (1970) as records, even well after their original release dates, that had a genuine impact on me but maybe it was also because I was in my late teens at the time.

 

Regardless, I enjoy the Dolls’ albums and I’m really fond of  David Johansen, In Style and Shaker.  With the latter he really got my respect for not being just some New York rocker dilettante dabbling in all manner of activities that would earn him a buck.

 

One odd thing about Johansen though, on a purely personal level, is how badly he aged from the fresh faced, Jagger  wanna be pretty boy to a guy with a ravaged, jowly, deeply lined face that contrasted starkly and incongruously with his youthful, no doubt tinted, locks, in which he still resembled a Jagger wanna be who couldn’t do much about how his face aged but would be damned if he were going to allow his hair to age in the same way.. Interestingly, he was less than 10 years younger than Jagger.

 

Anyhow, Johansen was a large presence, I guess, on the New York scene, at least amongst his peers who experienced and celebrated the same scene though he was hardly a giant in the rock field. I suppose the New York Dolls will always be fondly thought of  and be  noted as precursors and harbingers of a musical genre that briefly turned the rock world on its head in the late ‘70s without themselves ever achieving that level of contemporaneous popularity.  They’ll probably continued to be lumped in with the Velvet Underground, MC5 and Stooges as prophets that were barely honoured in their own time yet whose influence spread like pebbles cast into a calm lake.

 

That is a substantial legacy and David Johansen helped created the legacy and then had a second act, a third act and even a fourth act and during the course of his career created an intriguing selection of music that is, and will always be, part of my record collection.