Woodstock: Three days of peace, music and mud.

Of all the times and places in the past when I would have liked to be young and part of the scene, San Francisco in die period 1965 to about 1969 is on top of the list. Perhaps the reality was not as glorious as the myth makers have suggested but after reading Ralph Gleason's "The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound" and Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" and other description of what was happening in the Bay area in those four years and seeing bits and pieces of footage of the tribes and their activities, it seems to me that it would have been absolute bliss to have been young and alive and living in the Haight at the height of the hippie and acid rock phenomenon. I guess one would also have to have been there before the scene exploded, became the haven of weekend hippies and commercial exploitation and was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

Jefferson Airplane is still one of my top ten favourite bands of all time, particularly during the first 5 years of their existence, and I am also quite fond of the early Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and other similar bands. One should also mention that Creedence Clearwater Revival, who hailed from Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, also came up at the same time and if their swamp rock was the antithesis of the rambling acid inflected R 8 B of the Dead or Quicksilver, they were nonetheless a flower power era band who was not afraid to record lengthy, trippy version of songs like "Suzie Q" that would have fitted right in with the basic free form jam concept of so many of the acid test bands.

Anyhow, the conventional wisdom seems to be that where Monterey Pop (1967) announced the mainstream arrival and acceptance of some of the cream of the new San Francisco bands, such as Jefferson Airplane, the more pop oriented bands from Los Angeles and the forces of nature that were Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Who, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair (1969) was at once the apogee and last gasp of hippie idealism. Woodstock was followed by Altamont, which has become a byword for bad organisation, bad vibes and a generally bad idea. There were other rock festivals before and after Woodstock that were obviously little better than the commercial exploitation of the idea of putting on a bunch of bands for kids who are prepared to pay a bunch of money to see their favourite acts, but none of them have ever achieved the legendary status of Woodstock or even Monterey Pop.

Perhaps one of the reasons for the elevation of these two events is that a movie was made of each that have in their own right become culturally valuable and important.

I've seen the Monterey Pop movie only once but I have seen Woodstock a number of times now.

The first time was probably at the Labia Theatre, way back in die mid-Eighties, when the Labia was still very much an art house theatre that made a point of showing off beat, sometimes obscure, always interesting movies, amongst them some of the best rock movies. The celluloid copy of Woodstock was palpably quite old and worn out. Not only did the movie jump here and there and show visible signs of the deterioration of the film stock but it was somewhat truncated, in particular the opening sequence was a lot different to the later, better copy I some a few years down line. The movie still started with "Going Up The Country" but the accompanying visuals were different at that first showing.

In the early Nineties I saw the complete version, also in much better condition, of the original theatre release of the movie. In about 2004 I bought the Director's Cut version of Woodstock on DVD and a few days ago I bought the 40^th anniversary edition in a 4 DVD pack, with the Director's Cut version of the movie spread over 2 discs and 2 DVD's of bonus material, one with performances that were never included in the movie and the other a documentary about the making of the movie.

The first version of the movie I saw was pretty exciting stuff for me because, with the jumps, blurry effects and deteriorations on the film stock, it seemed very much like archive footage from a long forgotten, dim and distant era. I was 10 years old when Woodstock happened but at the time I knew nothing about it all and even a few years after the event it seemed ancient en impossibly mythical. To have the opportunity of sharing, at second hand, with the crowd who attended, was special and to be treasured. Now, of course, I own the DVDs and can watch the movie over and over again, or just select particular performances and, if the event is still rather special, it is no longer as completely magical as it was when I first entered the world of Woodstock.

For a long time I had a very specific set of vivid recollections of bits and pieces of the movie, some of which turned out to be erroneous. There is the opening performances by Richie Havens and his tapping, sandal-and-sock clad foot; there is Joan Baez singing "Amazing Grace" (actually "Swing Low Sweet Chariot"); Ten Years After's boogie with the swaying bass player and Alvin Lee's fleet-fingered riffs and the watermelon someone throws onto the stage; Sha Na Na doing "At the Hop" in gold lamé; The Who doing "See Me, Feel Me"; Joe Cocker's spastic jerks in "With A Little help From My Friends"; Jimi Hendrix playing "Star Spangled Banner" on a white Stratocaster to what looks like an almost empty, muddy, garbage strewn field. The non-musical highlights were: the guy who cleans the mobile toilets; Max Yasgur's speech; the admonition to be careful of the brown acid that is not poison but not specifically good either; Wavy Gravy wandering around announcing breakfast in bed for four hundred thousand; the lesson in Kundalini yoga.

The Director's Cut version of the movie adds a bunch of extra musical performances, most noticeably from Canned Heat, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and more Jimi Hendrix in an extended final segment. I guess there must also be other added or expanded scenes but I would have to watch the original version side by side with the expanded version to tell the difference.

The main difference I recall is in the opening sequence of the first version I saw, with "Going Up The Country" playing on the soundtrack over footage of the construction of the stage. I did, and still do, found it amazing that the carpenters and other craftsmen on the stage were these young, muscular longhairs. For some reason I just never identified hippies with an activity so "manly" as carpentry, or any type of manual labour, for that matter.

In the Director's Cut Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Long Time Coming" plays over pastoral scenes of the farmland in the area where the festival would be held, setting the geographical and demographical scene before getting to the intrusion of the hippie carpenters building a huge, forbidding looking wooden stage amidst the rolling pastures.

After that we have the amazing mix of musical performances from some of the top artists of the time and pure documentary footage of other happenings and goings-on on the fringes of the festival. If Woodstock were a city it is only right that music was not the only activity of performers or that many people would have had small pockets of life on their own amidst the crowd to which the music was a background soundtrack and always the main event. One of the main truths of the festival is that so many people co-existed so peacefully for a whole weekend with all the trials and tribulations of an event in a muddy field far from basic amenities. Perhaps most festival goers were too stoned to be aggressive.

This general peacefulness is all the more remarkable to me considering that the vast majority of festival attendees did not pay to be there. Early in the movie there are scenes of people first climbing over and then simply trampling down fences to get onto the festival site. The security arrangements had not been very good, it seems (they had expected only about 50 000 people, after all), and the organisers did not get heavy about keeping the non-paying hopefuls out. The organisers simply gave up when they realised the scale of the breach and took a policy decision to carry on regardless and to make the festival free, very much in line with a general hippie belief that all good things in life should be free. This wonderful gesture by the organisers, who basically made a virtue out of a necessity, meant that that the enterprise ran at a serious loss. If everyone of the half a million strong crowd had paid to be at the festival, the thing would have been profitable. Somehow it suits the myth far better that Woodstock was a free festival than a hugely profitable one. The long term gains, both in reputation and financial reward, were eventually are more rewarding than short term success.

One should also bear in mind that a large number of people at the site were not there as paying audience anyway. There must have been an army of technicians and other support staff, vendors, security, hangers on, roadies for the bands, special guests, all of whom contributed to the demographic and who not only would not have paid for entry to the festival but in many instances were paid to be there.

The acts featured in the movie are a good cross section of the musical landscape of the time but Jimi Hendrix was probably the only true superstar there. Neither the Beatles nor the Rolling Stones played at Woodstock, but then, the music presented there was more or less representative of the psychedelic and hard rock wave that formed the core of what one could call the Rolling Stone (the magazine) generation of the late Sixties when rock music suddenly became serious and deep. Even so, there must have been all kinds of politics going on behind the scenes when it came to selecting which bands to put in the movie, either because of the cost of getting releases from band management or because the bands were not that great. According to Michael Wadleigh his crew filmed songs with meaningful lyrics rather than the hits and rather than, I guess, stellar musical performances.

This is most evident in the DVD of previously unreleased performances from Joan Baez, The Who, Santana, Mountain, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Country Joe, with and without the Fish, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Mountain, Johnny Winter, Creedence and Paul Butterfield never made it into the movie, not even the Director's Cut of it.

This is the root of my gripe about this 40^th anniversary set: I already own the Director's Cut on a single DVD so why is it necessary to spread it over 2 discs? Why is the never before seen footage of such little real interest or import and, well, pretty crap. Apart from Mountain's 2 dire tunes, there is a ill-focussed and enervating take of "Love Light", a perennial Dead set closer and a less than riveting Paul Butterfield song that just does not seem to come to an end. His jazz cats probably enjoyed tooting their horns ad infinitum and I guess the sax player is pretty hot, but jeez, what a load of useless musical craftsmanship! I looked forward to seeing the young Johnny Winter live and his performance is energetic and fascinating for a few minutes until he starts the interminable guitar noodling so beloved of guitars lingers of the era. I am very fond of Winter's blues stuff and I wished he could have stuck to the economical and to the point style of his late Seventies recordings for Blue Sky records, with the Muddy Waters band in support.

Mountain's two songs are just dire, uninspiring and in no way an advertisement for the band, unlike, say, Ten Years After or The Who's quite intense performances from the movie. I can quite understand why Mountain's tunes were not in the movie; I do not understand why they are part of the bonus features.

Credence's three songs make them come across as very much a swamp boogie type band, not as 3 minute pop single practitioners, and suggest to me that the band must have been a great band to go and watch in the San Francisco dance halls where the psychedelic bands such as the Airplane and the Dead played for huge dances. Creedence could stretch out a danceable rock groove with the best of them.

 

The couple of extra Jefferson Airplane tunes are great though they seem to be of a pieced with the performances in the Director's Cut. The Airplane is just great.

 

One of the very interesting aspects of the festival is that its huge audience was spread out on a hillside, for the most part quite far from the stage, and that this happened in the days before giant video screens on either side of the stage designed to give audience members in even the remotest corners some kind of close-up view of what was happening on stage. The people in front of the stage would have had a pretty good view, but overall the most intimate view one could hope to have is through watching the movie. Michael Wadleigh and his producer wax lyrical about the direct, in your face access to the performers their wide angel lenses could give and ultimately this is why the movie works so well If you were in the audience you are obviously part of the myth and may have a great story to tell about your personal experiences at Woodstock but for me, who does not like camping or mud and would most probably not have spent 3 or four days on the site, the movie is a far superior way of getting to grips with some aspects of the event, such as the music and the activities on the periphery, which I would not have been part of even if I had been at Woodstock.

It is trite that the mythologising of events like Woodstock happens over time and that the myth keeps growing as the years go by and the original organisers and participants get older and grow ever more nostalgic and there is a greater appreciation for the money still to be made from the myth. There has been at least one memorial festival, probably 20 years after the original, with as many as possible, or willing, of the bands and individual musicians who were at Woodstock in 1969. There have even been 2 or perhaps more "Woodstock" festivals that traded on the name, or brand, but with contemporary acts trying to rekindle, I guess, the Woodstock spirit though the spirit of money was the more likely driving force. This is probably also the main reason behind the 40^th anniversary re-issue of the movie. The documentary, though interesting, is more about the making of the movie than about the festival itself, and the extra footage is somewhat redundant too. It would have been much more worthwhile if the movie had been accompanied by a proper documentary of the festival with more of the musicians and other role players and perhaps attendees to give us a broader perspective.

Would I have attended Woodstock if I were about 20-years old in 1969 and had the opportunity? Perhaps not. I do not like camping and would certainly not have been keen on doing it for 3 days, irrespective of the bands on offer. Going to festivals for a grand musical experience is also a bit like going to the Sahara for the flowers. The sound is never all that good, there are too many distractions and there is generally an interminable waiting period between acts that dissipates any of the energy that a particular performer might have built up.

The best way to experience a mythological event is after the fact, seeing the sights and hearing the music and comments in the comfort of one's own home, on a big television screen and with surround sound. I now know enough of what happened at Woodstock, Glastonbury of the Sunbury festival in Australia to inform me of popular culture of the times in which the events occurred and to satisfy my curiosity over what it might have been like to be there. I do not need more and I certainly do not need to be able to say I was at any such a legendary event.

 

Frank Zappa

In the early to mid-Nineties Jan Gertenbach was so heavily committed to his own personal Frank Zappa obsession that he went to a great deal of trouble in the pre-Amazon.com world to source and import the video cassette tape of the Zappa concert movie Baby Snakes, probably directly from Zappa's business enterprise. The story of his efforts to find and purchase this apparently elusive video, which was not available in South Africa at all, was an epic saga for many a braai and beer evening. Jan then invited a bunch of us around to the house he was then renting on Red Hill, in the Simon's Town area, to have a kind of gala viewing of the movie. I don't know what he paid for the video but it was quite a bit and the effort alone probably justified such a grand gesture. Having shared the tale of the quest with us for so long, Jan must have felt it was only right to let us see what the fuss was about.

Baby Snakes (1983) is a concert movie of the late Seventies version (the concert is from Hallowe'en 1977) of the Zappa band with Terry Bozzio on drums and Adrian Belew on guitar and a bunch of the usual musical suspects of Zappa's gang of the era. They were probably the cream of the jazz and off-centre rock world that paid no heed or mind to the punk revolution and in a fashion were at least sartorially and tonsorially close cousins to the Parliafunkadelicment Thang operating at the same time. The movie also has stop-animation footage of Bruce Bickford's quite astonishing (for a first time viewer like me) claymation work.

At the time of the Baby Snakes gala evening I already knew quite a bit about Frank Vincent Zappa, had heard a representative sample of his music and, either on the radio or from friends' collections, owned a Warner Bros "twofer" double alum collection of Hot Rats (1969) and Chunga's Revenge (1970) and a cassette tape album of Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch (1982.)

I was however not in particular a fan of the man's music.

I'd bought the double set of albums from Sygma Records in Stellenbosch somewhere between 1077 and 1981 because I had read that Hot Rats was a work of jazz rock genius and, mostly, because it available at a discount price. The music was kind of interesting though I did not listen to the records all that much, partly because the surface noise on the records quickly became disturbing and partly because Zappa's jazzy noodling just did not hit the spot with me at a time when I was really into very basic rock and roll. My prevailing memory of Zappa's music is the ubiquitous presence of the vibraphone (I always just thought of it as an adult xylophone) and the weird time signatures and tempo changes that may have been indicators of a very sophisticated and advance technical ability but kind of bothered me.

Jan Gertenbach, though, was, like so many of my acquaintances at the University of Stellenbosch, a dedicated Zappaphile who apparently believed his genius was the best expression of what intelligent rock music should sound like, and most of them made a point of collecting his records. Dan Lombard lent me his copy of Bongo Fury (1975), which was also mostly a live album with Captain Beefheart. I taped the album and became quite fond of it. The music was about as straight ahead as Zappa ever got, a lot of the lyrics were mordantly funny (a Zappa trademark) and Captain Beefheart was a revelation.

Dan also raved about a Zappa song called "Billy the Mountain" of which he could talk in lengthy detail but I have to date never heard it.

I was not all that impressed with Baby Snakes because it was too much of the fleet tempo with intricate chord changes type of music most Zappaphiles apparently adored as some epitome of excellence. The japery between songs was also not that funny. Maybe you had to have been there and wasted too. This may not have been prog rock but it sure as dammit sounded like Zappa's personal version of it with less of the somewhat pretentious "poetry" of standard prog rock lyrics and more of the sarcasm with which he viewed the world. And the stupid on stage joking. In any event, the movie is just a live show with a band whose members looked weird and who concentrated on playing Zappa's intricate music. Perhaps I would take a different view of proceedings if I were to see the movie today. Back then it did not persuade me to pursue the oeuvre of Francis Zappa.

Some years before, perhaps as part of the University of Stellenbosch film club or maybe at the Labia theatre on Orange Street in Cape Town, I had the dubious privilege of watching an old, pretty bad print of 200 Motels (1971), the "surreal documentary" that notably featured Ringo Starr in a strange page boy haircut and tight-fitting polo neck sweater. Apart from a scene of Starr dangling from the ceiling in some kind of elastic rope contraption I have absolutely no recollection of the contents of the movie. It might have been a midnight show and I might have been too tired to appreciate it but I do remember wondering why on earth I had paid money to see this shit. 200 Motels is one of the few movies I did not understand at all and almost walked out of. As far as I was concerned this was a big put on that Zappa was allowed to perpetrate because of the perception of his alleged genius but without any presence of sense or intelligence and that it just a simple case of the hubris that afflicted so many rock stars at the time, believing that they were Renaissance men who could do anything and everything and that their audience would lap it up. Maybe 200 Motels is an underappreciated work of visionary genius that I have somehow missed. Is it on list of 1001 movies to see before I die?

Chris Prior was, and may still be, quite fond of Zappa in particular the Apostrophe (') album from 1974, and regularly played "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow", "Cosmik Debris" and "Stink-Foot." These tracks tended to make me think of Zappa as some kind of stand up comedian who also played guitar and composed intricate musical pieces, rather than as a straightforward rock musician. I guess Zappa was never a straightforward rock musician anyway. He had too much of an interest in serious music, famously influenced by Varese, and social commentary to be just a simple rock and roller. I do not know why Prior never played the title track from Apostrophe ('), as it is a really wild and solid guitar and bass (and drums) master class jam between Zappa and Jack Bruce, as if they trying to show where Cream might have gone to if Eric Clapton had been as much a jazzer as Bruce and Ginger Baker.

This mid-Seventies period Zappa, though, with Bongo Fury and Zoot Allures (1976), produced the Zappa music I most like. I heard "The Torture Never Stops" from Zoot Allures at Sygma Records when the sales guy played it over the public address system and fell in love with the song. The combination of Zappa's slow, deep, tactile tone of voice and the weird-funny lyrics were captivating. The main reason I did not buy the record then, other than financial, was that Frank Zappa's music in general was not to my taste at a time when I was into Bachmann Tuner Overdrive, Cream, Dr Feelgood and Golden Earring.

Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch contains the "surprise" hit single "Valley Girl" featuring Zappa's daughter Moon Unit and was pretty much party rock with social commentary about a newly defined American teen age social type. I bought a cassette tape version of the album in 1983 or 1984, at a record sale somewhere, because I remembered reading a Time magazine piece about the song when it was a hit. The music in general is pretty much standard Zappa with the added presence of Steve Vai. He became the premier killer speed metal jazz guitar guy of the Eighties (who played the "impossible parts") and the kind of guitarist whose technical proficiency I can appreciate and whose lack of emotional depth in his playing I deplore. Anyhow, Ship Arriving Too Late … is an enjoyable record with a great deal of emphasis on close harmony and even quasi operatic vocals and the force of a tight band.

At some point between 1996 and 2004, when I still had a turntable, John Abel lent me his copies of Over-nite Sensation (1973) and One Size Fits All (1975), both of which have musicians I think of as the jazz rock troupe de luxe Zappa used after he disbanded the Mothers of Invention, and plays that vibes dominated "jazz from hell" that put me off Zappa for so long. I cannot even recall whether I bothered taping the records. Everything was technically proficient, there did not seem to be much ambition or excitement in the product and it was all much of a muchness.

If one looks at the Zappa discography there is a hell of a lot of Zappaproduct available (apparently 60 albums over 30 years) and quite a bit of it has been released posthumously. There is a series of CD albums I used to see at flea market stalls with all kinds of live concerts from the Seventies and Eighties that looked like "legal" bootlegs and now there are many very much authorised live recordings giving us an idea of the live sound of the various incarnations of the backing bands Zappa used, and there seems to be previously unreleased studio recordings as well. It's a Zappa universe and we only live in it.

Frank Zappa had a unique, distinctive smooth and soaring guitar style not a million miles removed from the distinctive Carlos Santana sound and it always amazed me that a guy I thought of more as a musical director, band leader and lyricist could play guitar that well. I really enjoyed his singing voice and preferred him to most of the vocalists he used over the years, except for Beefheart, of course. The funny songs, at least the best of them, are still funny and still captivating and deserve immortality. Perhaps I should invest in Strictly From Commercial, the "best of compilation" released after Zappa's death, to have a collection of the best moments of a long and productive career. On the other hand, perhaps I should simply buy Hot Rats, Apostrophe (') and Zoot Allures.
Sheik Yerbouti and the Joe's Garage albums were commercial success of sorts but I would not want to own too many Zappa records. I would imagine the schtick might pale after a while if one is exposed to too much of what the man put out there. Technical proficiency is not the be all and end all of good rock.

It seems to me that Zappa was too intent on being the modern composer and showing off that he was intellectually streets ahead of not only the human race in general but his peer group of musicians in particular. The thing is: rock and roll is often at its best when it's a tad dumb, simple and direct. Zappa never seemed to appreciate the "less is more" approach. Perhaps rock has to have someone like that to contrast with the trite and banal and perhaps it was once important to be able to show that rock wasn't just three chords and mindless boogie but ultimately rock should be visceral and not overtly intellectual and calculated and that is where Zappa leaves me cold. And I just do not like jazz rock all that much and technical virtuosity makes no nevermind to me if the music doesn't speak to my heart.

Apart from his sometimes bilious invective against flower power and general reactionary repression, and whatever else Zappa considered stupid and petty, and the amazing ensembles he led, and the vast, eclectic body of work he left behind, Frank Zappa is also known for naming his children Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva. God knows why he thought he had to avoid non-controversial names. I would never have thought that the name Dweezil (even with the surname Zappa) could be of any benefit to any kind, unless it was the "boy named Sue" principle. Apparently Dweezil is as much a monster guitar player as his father and had a bit of rock career once but is now relatively quiet although he tours with the Zappa Plays Zappa "tribute" show dedicated to his father's music.

Who knows what happened to Moon Unit, Ahmet and Diva? Okay, WikiPedia to the rescue. Moon is an author musician and actress and is married to the drummer for Matchbox 20. Ahmet Emuukha Rodan Zappa is a musician, actor and novelist. Diva Thin Muffin Pigeon (I bet the process of finding suitable names for the kids must have been a great source of undiluted fun in the Zappa household) is a musician, actress and artist. I guess one could not expect Frank Zappa's children to live quiet, uneventful suburban lives as wage slaves.

The fact that Frank Zappa recorded soundtracks for admittedly low budget movies and rented a studio for his private recording delight, long before he enjoyed any level of commercial success, must illustrate the ambition the young Zappa had and perhaps also that he would always be somewhat different to the rest of his peers, if he had peers. I cannot think of anyone else toiling in the same field as Frank Zappa or following in his footsteps. He is probably a unique phenomenon but due for revisiting, reviving and emulation.

Way back before MP3 downloads started killing off record companies Zappa was unique in controlling his own destiny by marketing his product through his label Barking Pumpkin. If he'd lived to see 2010 Barking Pumpkin would have been (if it isn't already) a website with plenty iTunes style downloadable content from the back catalogues.

As an artist Zappa was as close to a Renaissance man as a rock musician could get. He wrote music and lyrics and performed with a band as bandleader, singer and guitarist. He wrote rock, jazz and more or less serious instrumental works. He was prolific in his release schedule. His bands did not sound like anybody else I've yet heard.

I must admit that Frank Zappa is the kind of artist I admire more than like, mostly because his music is generally not visceral enough for my liking. If the jokes don't work, I don't care much for the rest of it. By and large Zappa's music has had to grow on me before I could begin to appreciate it and he is therefore the polar opposite of, say, Dr Feelgood, whom I unreservedly loved from the first note of "I Can Tell," the opening track off Malpractice, and who I still unreservedly love, at least for their Wilko Johnson led albums.

When I heard the Hot Rats album for the first time I was in my late teens and (at least theoretically) into punk and very much into blues. "Peaches En Regalia" was a nice, smooth, tuneful song but it sounded too much like the kind of schlock that would have slotted nicely into the type and style of music played on the Afrikaans service of the SABC at the time. It probably was never played on the Afrikaans service but that refusal would have been more of a reflection on the narrow-mindedness of the playlist compilers than on the quality of the music or the fact that it would have fitted right in there. Anyhow, this music was not the stuff of adoration as far as I was concerned. It was nice, that was all. Later on the typical Zappa sardonic lyric, underpinned by very serious music, with his truly scrumptious voice, drew me in to liking more Zappa music but never to the extent that I would have paid much money for his records or make an effort to acquire a collection of them.

In any event, back in the day when I bought a lot of records, the earlier Zappa albums were simply not available. The earliest widely available record I remember is Zoot Allures. Oh, and for some reason Sygma Records stocked Cruising With Reuben & The Jets (1968) and Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1970) at the time when I started hanging out there, which must have been from about 1972 onwards. I knew about albums like Freak Out! and We're Only in It For The Money but never saw the records. Most of the Eighties stuff was more or less freely available on release and in the CD age there was a great deal of reissuing of the classic albums. Nowadays, especially in the likes of Musica, you hardly come across any Zappa product. Under Z you will find Z Z Top and Zucchero but not Frank Zappa. I guess this means that he is not fashionable, or not yet. Just about every musical style is recycled at one time or another and I am sure that a major artist like Zappa is going to have his followers, even among young musicians, and that it is only a matter of time before a currently unknown group or individual releases a Zappa-esque tune or two which is greeted with great enthusiasm by the rock press and voted album of the year, or whatever, then Frank will find himself in public demand again, there will be the remastered re-releases, the eulogies and all of the rest of the trappings.

I've always wanted to own Freak Out!,
Cruising With Reuben & The Jets and even Weasels Ripped My Flesh (strictly speaking these albums are by the Mothers of Invention, but for all practical purposes it is all Frank Zappa.) In the case of the last two records the wish to own them is simply based on the nostalgic recollection of all those Friday afternoons I used to hang out at Sygma Records, flipping through the stacks of covers of albums I could not afford to buy even if I wanted to. I would also like to own Apostrophe(') for the nostalgic reason of recollecting many wonderful hours listening to the Chris Prior Show on Radio 5.

And that would be about it. At this point my main interest in the music of Frank Zappa is purely historical. Purely and simply I would like to know what it was all about and I cannot see myself suddenly developing an obsessed fascination with the man's music to the extent where I start seeking out all, or most, of the 60 albums out there.

I wonder whether Jan Gertenbach now owns the DVD version of Baby Snakes and if he ever watches it anymore? He was young and impressionable then; now he is divorced (so I hear) and works in the snows of Kazakhstan or some such distant oil rich republic that was once part of the Soviet Union. Maybe Baby Snakes is just what you need to pass the long dreary hours when you are not working. After all, it is music, it is funny (kind of) and the claymation effects are pretty amazing.

 

 

 

Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen is one those artists, like Prince and The Cult, who I kind of liked in the Eighties and then abandoned because I lost interest in their later work.

I'd read about Springsteen before I heard any of his music. In the Stellenbosch Municipal Library there was copy of the 1975 issue of Time magazine with Bruce on the cover. I do not recall whether the library also had Newsweek, who put Springsteen on its cover at the same time as Time. Anyhow, the piece, as I recall it, told us about a new street poet New Jersey kind of guy, with a big band behind him and a powerful work ethic and even more powerful huge rock and roll sound who was here to save the world, or at least to entertain us. At the time Springsteen meant absolutely nothing to me and for all I knew it was just some hype by Time magazine to boost the career of a flavour of the month artist.

When "Born to Run" eventually roared from the radio speakers I was immediately hooked. It was powerful, it had a great chorus and the lyrics seemed to be about reality yet also mythical. Those opening chords still thrill me viscerally every time I hear the song.

Other than that I knew nothing about the other songs on the Born To Run album. The record was available in my local record store but for some reason I never asked to listen to it or even had any intention of buying it. My musical focus was elsewhere. I'd bought a copy of Circus magazine with a somewhat gushing review of the album and from I could glean about the music I gathered that it would not really be to my taste and that the rest of the songs were not as mighty as "Born to Run" and so I left it.

Over the next few years I read a lot about Springsteen, mostly in NME where, for example, Tony Parsons was very effusive in his praise of Springsteen's material circa the Darkness On The Edge Of Town release, which surprised me because I had thought of Parsons as a punk booster.

I might have heard "Badlands" on the radio at the time and I liked it but by then I was kind of firmly set in my resistance against buying Springsteen's music. To a degree the idea of a rock band with a large horn section put me off; at the time I did not even particularly like the urban blues style of BB King with his big band. I also felt that there was so much hype surrounding Bruce that I could only be disappointed when I listened to a whole album.

Chris Prior used to play some tracks off the first two albums and these jazz funk (as I thought of them) infected rock song with semi-Dylanesque lyrics were not hard or simple enough for my taste and the words were just too much nonsense. I can understand why it took a while, and a sea change, for America and the world to catch onto Springsteen's talent.

My mate Emil Kolbe bought a copy of The River when it came out, perhaps in Japan, and left it at my flat for a while. I listened to it once and realised, apart from "Hungry Heart" and "The River" itself, which had been on the radio a lot anyway, that I really did not like this kind of rock and roll at all. The slow songs seemed forced and silly in their street seriousness and really dragged, and the fast songs were just all these car songs that quickly became boring to endure. The double album was just too damn long.

In 1983 in Windhoek, Marius Rijkheer, one of my neighbours at the Officer's mess, who was a big fan of the New Jersey fireball, had a copy of Nebraska, the solo album that sounds exactly like the soundtrack to assist in the contemplation of suicide. I'd thought Leonard Cohen made downer music until I heard Nebraska; then Cohen seemed almost excessively upbeat by comparison.

Rijkheer copied the album for me onto a cassette tape and I listened closely to it. It was very strange that anyone in Springsteen's commercial position at the time would want to release an album not only of him on his own but also of such gloomy material. Where The River could have been good music for a party, Nebraska was just good for depressing you even further than you might have been before you started listening to it. Perhaps it is a work of pure genius but to this day I think of Nebraska as an album of demos Bruce got his record company to release because he could. Having said that, the title track and "Atlantic City" are great songs. After that the songs started melting into each other and by the end of the first side the focus is gone.

Marius Rijkheer was a Law Officer like me and in 1984 when I was a candidate attorney based in the Strand he was a public prosecutor out in Caledon. When I had occasion to visit the Magistrate's Court in Caledon I looked up Rijkheer and we had lunch together. He drove to our lunch spot and played a cassette tape of Born In The USA while we drove. This album was to be the record with which Springsteen went from success to mega worldwide success and I would imagine I would have heard "Dancing In The Dark" on the radio by then but it was pretty much a pop song compared to the more rock oriented other tracks on the album and I was impressed by that first cursory exposure to Born In The USA.

The album became a phenomenon of huge proportions. It seemed that about half of the songs on the album were played as plug tracks (perhaps they were actually released as singles; I did not buy singles and was under the impression that they almost no longer existed) on the radio over the next two years, while the album chalked up mega sales. Before 1964 Bruce had been big in the States and popular elsewhere and afterwards he was global rock hero.

I still resisted buying the album, partly because of the hype and partly because I was not convinced that I would want to listen to his music over and over again.

My cousin Raymond Solomon had a different opinion. I think he might have been a fan since Born to Run but in any event he had the records of Born to Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and Born In The USA and somewhere in 1985 or 1986 I borrowed these 3 albums and copied them onto cassette tape and this was then the first time I listened to either with any kind of attention.

Regarding Born In The USA my first surprise was that I immediately recognised a song that had not yet received any radio airplay, namely "Working On The Highway". I recognised it because it was in the set of All Night Radio. My favourite local band of that time, who had been playing "Working On The Highway" without informing the audience of the identity of the songwriter. They also did "Pink Cadillac", which might have been a single B-side.

As the set contained mostly self-penned material and because the Springsteen tunes fitted in so seamlessly I was none the wiser and simply thought Steve Louw had managed to write two great tunes. I would imagine that I was almost alone in the audience in my ignorance. The other people around me probably knew well that All Night Radio was doing cover versions.

Be that as it may, I immediately liked Born In The USA, despite the slightly tedious familiarity of so many of its songs, a lot better than Born To Run where the street poet intensity of most the songs left me cold and made me wonder whether this was not some elaborate joke on Springsteen's part. How could anyone be so serious about this?

Apart from the title track the only other song from Born to Run I unreservedly liked was "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", which I'd heard before and could have been the B-side of "Born To Run" and which was the best other rocker on the album. The overall impression was that the songs were slow, ponderous and almost ridiculous. "Meeting Across The River" was almost a pleasure because it was so short compared to the longer narratives.

I get that the E Street Band is very much a powerhouse of swing and melody and rock and that the emotional depth of the songs is enhanced by the R & B styled big band alternatively playing sensitively and slowly or loud and frenzied as the mood dictates, but it is still not a sound I could instinctively love.

Born In The USA is, for all its pop production sheen, more of a traditional rock album with more fast songs than slow songs and with the heavy myth-making somewhat downplayed. It is indeed the kind of record where every song is good and the whole sounds like a greatest hits package. Given how many songs were taken from it as singles, it might as well be. I don't think Bruce ever managed that kind of popularity since and probably never wanted pop success again.

However, the really big revelation was Darkness On The Edge Of Town. For me this is the great Bruce Springsteen master work and his most effective and affectless album. Where Born To Run for the most part sounded too sleek, bloated, overblown and very calculated, Darkness On The Edge Of Town sounds rough, raw, tight and about as spontaneous as Springsteen could get in the studio. These tunes rock furiously, like "Badlands", "Adam Raised A Cain", "The Promised Land" and "Streets Of Fire" (with the most ferocious guitar solo Springsteen ever recorded) and the slower songs like "Something In The Night" and the title track, do not come across as ponderous or anywhere near as pompous as "Thunder Road" or "Jungleland" from the previous record. . The band rocks harder and Bruce plays really loud, aggressive guitar that truly tears the room apart. This was my kind of rock and to this day Darkness is my top favourite Springsteen album and in fact the only album, apart from the Greatest Hits set from the mid-Nineties, that I've bothered to buy. The only let down on Darkness is "Racing In The Street." It sounds like a reject from Born To Run and builds up painfully slowly and I really don't get the point of the story. Perhaps it is because I did not grow up working class in New Jersey.

This is pretty much where I stopped taking an active interest in Springsteen's music. "Brilliant Disguise" from Tunnel Of Love (1987) got some radio airplay in South Africa, as did "Human Touch" from the eponymous album and "Better Days" from Lucky Town, both 1992, but I do not know whether they could be called great hits and after that Springsteen kind of disappeared from South African radio, which might be a reflection on the state of our rock radio, but I did not much like any of these songs anyway. The radio songs sounded too pop and too twee for my liking and the hubris of releasing Human Touch and Lucky Town almost simultaneously as separate albums instead of as 2 halves of a double album, gave Bruce a hit of a comeuppance. Those two albums were staples in discount bins at record stores or in second hand CD stores for years to come. I was not prepared to buy them even at a massive discount.

In 1995 I did buy the Greatest Hits album because it had a good selection of the best tunes without the tedious ones that surrounded them on the albums from which they were taken. For my money, apart from Darkness, that is the best way to listen to Bruce: do some cherry picking and avoid the dross. This compilation is 15 years old by now and possibly out of date and there has been The Ultimate Springsteen collection since, and a series of albums with previously unreleased tracks form the vaults for the Springsteen completists who wanted to hear demos, out-takes and alternate takes.

This particular practice is an interesting marketing tool of the digital age. From Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series and The Beatles' Anthology series onwards there is now a general adoption of the idea of trawling through any major act's back catalogue of unreleased material with the idea of releasing just about everything ever recorded by the artist based on the assumption that fans will want to hear and own everything. There is also some historical interest here in getting to know an act developed well-known songs, from demo to early version to popular version, and of how the act developed over time from uneasy beginnings to assured globe conqueror. Jimi Hendrix had been something of a victim of this practice given that many early posthumous releases were substandard studio jams tarted up for release, but nowadays the rationale is about presenting the whole of an artist's body of work than simple exploitation of dead superstar.

This piece was inspired by one such archival release. There is a boxset of previously unreleased material from the recording sessions for Darkness On The Edge Of Town plus a remastered version of the album itself and concert footage on DVD, and a cheaper 2 CD version of just out-takes from the sessions.

It is telling that Darkness has been selected for this extensive revisit and not Born To Run, but apparently the Darkness sessions were incredibly fruitful because of the injunction against Springsteen at the time that prevented him from releasing anything although it did not stop recording or live shows. In my opinion, though, Darkness get this treatment and deserves this treatment because it represents Springsteen at his best, at the height of his powers, on the edge between cult (albeit a large cult) success and mass popularity, while he was still thin and hungry looking and before he buffed up and started looking a bit like a caricature.

Darkness On The Edge of Town is the best Springsteen album ever.

Nowadays there is a lot of Springsteen music out there: old stiff, new stuff, live albums, live DVDs and so on and I guess all of it is very worthy and of high quality but I have almost no interest in any of it. Bruce Springsteen may be the most colossal superstar rocker of the past forty years, an American icon and a universal myth, and his talent and gifts and work ethic are undeniable, yet his music has very limited appeal. I do not fancy the great American working class myths he concocted, even after he left that world behind, and too often the overcooked, superheated effect the words and music combine to thrust in my face, simply put me off. In some ways Springsteen has been the Celine Dion of rock: he can invest too much and often very much superfluous emotion into the mundane in an attempt to exalt the base.

As far as I understand the Springsteen approach to life and music he is very much the proponent of the myth that rock and roll can save and sanctify. On the basic level it is simply the story of a lonely loser who makes good in the entertainment industry; from working class lack of prospects to endless possibilities as rock superstar. This is obviously not a new story by any means as the career of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and many other can illustrate and it is very much Bruce Springsteen's own story. I can understand that music can a great deal to a person. For many years music carried me through rough patches, it was the constant in my life, though in my case it did not mean that I made music, I simply bought lots of albums and spent a lot of time listening to music. Where I am different to Springsteen, then, is that music did not change my life. It gave me a passion but that was about all.

I also have a more realistic and non-mythologised appreciation and understanding of what music is and means to me. It is entertainment and has many aspects and many practitioners. It is a business as much as it is an art. By and large musicians all want to make a living at their craft and most probably want to make a lot of money and become famous.

Bruce Springsteen sees, or professes to see, something transcendental and holy in rock and roll and to me that is a tad stupid. Perhaps he sees it like that because it did rescue him from poverty and struggle and gave him a better life than he could have hoped for had he stayed in Freehold or Asbury Park, New Jersey, and worked at some menial job. The blue collar workers of the USA must have known what he was talking about because they were still stuck in their ruts but for a middle class kid like me in South Africa where my past and prospects were very different this fervent claim that music can be redemptive seemed preposterous. Sure, you can become very successful if your musical career takes off but it is far-fetched to claim that somehow God, or whatever rock deity there is, intervened just because you had the music in you and it had to come out. There are plenty stories of how music careers did not redeem and led to early, untimely death or destruction of the self. Lots of aspirant musicians struggle all their lives and never make it big, some have a brief window of success and then lose it again. Springsteen is like every motivational guru who tries to tell everybody to do just what he did to be successful. Unfortunately successes like Springsteen's are the exception to the rule. Rock and roll redemption is highly individual and selective.

Bruce Springsteen is a towering, legendary figure in rock music, not particularly an innovator or taboo breaker but the best example we have of someone who grew up on the first wave of rock and roll, internalised its beat and aspirations and made something entertaining of it, fusing all kinds of elements of the music, and at the same time convinced his fanatical audience that he had something to say to them and about them that was a heartfelt and true and elevated their banal and mundane lives to a plane where myth virtually becomes real. On top of that comes the equally legendary live shows where the phrase "hardest working man in show business" leaves cliché behind.

With Bruce you got a deal that was more than just fluff and young men, mostly, want music that seems substantial and is not just bubblegum. Of course it is all just a schtick, even if the schtick is about sincerity and community but perhaps the good thing about the schtick is that many fans can identify completely or partly with the characters Bruce writes about. Almost all his men are called "mister" and the women are invariably "Mary" and the land is the industrial heartland or just the hardscrabble back country where poverty and bad luck coexist with struggle and failure. Where decency and principles rule. Where true values triumph. Where Everyman is any man but also universal man.

Would I pay to attend a Bruce Springsteen concert if he were to tour South Africa? Of course I would if the opportunity arose. There was no chance of seeing the young Bruce in action but I understand that he still works as hard and that the shows are still awesome. One has to go to see the legends, even the elderly legends, if the opportunity is there. And it must be an unsurpassed thrill to hear the opening bars of "Born To Run" and to know that this is one roller coaster ride that is actually nothing but fun.

 

 

 

 

Eric Clapton Presents Clapton

I am the kind of selective Eric Clapton fan who just about only buys his blues releases and over the past 20 years I've bought Unplugged (1991), From The Cradle (1994), Me and Mr Johnson and Sessions for Robert J (2005). By and large I've skipped the pop / rock releases over the 40-year period since the breakup of Derek and the Dominoes. The only "rock star" Clapton albums I own are 461 Ocean Boulevard (1974). because it was an important record for me in my school years, and Slowhand, because of "Lay Down, Sally" and some tasty old school country rock and blues. The pop stuff from the Eighties, the Phil Collins years, so to speak, does not appeal at all.

Although I got to know Clapton's music through his version of "I Shot The Sheriff" it was his work with John Mayall and Cream that really fired me up. The solo career contemporary rock and pop experiments left me cold, as is the case with so many rockers from the Sixties and Seventies who hit their forties in the Eighties and did not quite want to let go of commercial success and yet did not really accomplish much of lasting value. For me Eric Clapton is a bluesman and the trilogy (of a kind) represented by From The Cradle, Me and Mr Johnson and Sessions for Robert J are my favourite Clapton albums because he digs deep into the blues, is honest in his approach to a music he obviously lives as much as I love it and does the blues proud without pandering.

On the front cover of Clapton (2010), the latest release, Clapton has the face of a guy in his mid-Sixties but with the hairstyle he once had in his mid-Eighties commercial heyday and this is kind of weird as the music as determinedly rootsier and simpler in concept, execution and production than the Phil Collins years. Although the band backing Clapton mostly sounds like a blues band, it is not exactly a blues album for the reason that some of the tunes are basically show tunes, albeit played with a blues sensibility. There is only one Clapton tune and lots of covers of slightly odd choices of song and I am almost reminded of the eclectic almost blues stylings of Bob Dylan's most recent work, but where Dylan's blues sound like pastiches and often are reworkings of familiar musical tropes with a combination of clichéd blues lyrics and Dylan's own take on tradition, Clapton plays it straight. He simply does his own versions of a selection of songs that must be personal favourites.

Clapton's voice is also not nearly as croaking as that of the latter-day Dylan and this means he brings a lot more warmth to his interpretations. Hs blues guitar is always to the point, fluent and subtle. This might be the mellow twilight album of a rock superstar (thankfully not exactly the Great American Songbook pretensions of Rod Stewart) but the bottom-line toughness of the music is undeniable and this is the kind of old fogey record I will listen to a lot, much as Unplugged really caught my attention back in 1991.

This is where he should be, with a sympathetic band, elegant arrangements and a relaxed atmosphere, and good songs. Forget the pop stuff or the introspective singer songwriter stuff. Clapton must do what he does best and what he does best is the blues, with a touch of country thrown in for effect, and for my money Eric Clapton is the ultimate white bluesman of the last fifty years.

 

 

Machineri Revisited

When I saw Machineri at Zula in Long Street in June 2010 I quite disliked what I heard and said so in print. Some while later the band responded via their Facebook page and ostensibly commended me on my awesome and intelligent review. As the "review" was brief and scathing I guessed that Machineri were being sarcastic.

The other day I bought my wife the latest South African edition of Cosmo, their annual "music" issue. Guess who is featured in a full page spread, with large photograph and brief text? Machineri!

I guess it helps having some heavy PR. IF you can persuade Cosmo to give you a bit of hype as hot new young guns, somebody must know somebody and be working hard on your press and publicity. The Cosmo hack tells us the band mixes up a blend of rock 'n roll, country and blues and calls it music to feed our soul. We are also urged to get to their live shows. In the photograph Sannie Fox wears a short, thin summer dress beneath some kind of jacket, with short socks and comfortable shoes, and gives a shy yet bold look. Kind of like Maria McKee back in the day.

This expensive publicity made me wonder whether I'd missed something in Zula. Had I got it all wrong?

In passing I should mention, apart from favourable comments about my Nico Burger piece, that most of the responses to my blogs, when there is any, are from people who think I'm a clueless bastard for slating their favourite artist or maybe their mate. I guess any recognition is better than none and if means that unflattering pieces draw attention, then I should be even more like a blunt object in my battering attempts against crap music.

Machineri at Zula was loud, shrill and not very entertaining. There was no sign of country or blues. I trusted my instincts and called it as I saw it.

Anyhow, Machineri succeeded in drawing me to their Facebook (maybe I should now become a friend of theirs) and MySpace pages. After listening to the studio version of Machineri music I thought it good and even proper to re-evaluate the band and perhaps change my mind altogether. Now I do get the rock 'n roll, country and blues references. Machineri in the studio has some smarts, some musical sense and is long on the subtlety their bludgeoning performance had nothing of.

Damn! I like this stuff!

On MySpace the band displays its wares: a mini album of tunes that I find I cannot buy and download. Now that I have listened to the studio version of the tunes the band might have played at Zula, I am most distressed that I cannot download the songs to listen to more often.

This music is quite good!

"The Searchers" is allegedly inspired by the John Wayne / John Ford movie of the same name and the first impression is that Sannie Fox sounds like Jefferson Airplane period Grace Slick and the second impression is that his song almost has a grand tune and that it ain't half bad. Is this the hit?

"Drop Us A Line Ladder Operator" (I am a sucker for mysterious titles like this) is driven by a glorious lead riff, propulsive bass, freak out lead guitar, popping drums and gleefully thrilled vocals about a subject that makes no sense to me.

"Stranger on the Water" sounds like slowed down early Grand Funk Railroad, with touches of Blue Cheer, fronted by a less tense Siouxsie Sioux. That's a positive.

"Cukoo Child" is scuzz rock Howlin' Wolf style backing, psych fuzz guitar and an almost sweet vocal. This is the Nuggets tribute.

"Shunting Train" mauls the Delta theme of railroads with some spooky blues. It ends rather abruptly just as I am starting to enjoy the ride.

"Machine I Am" has an Eastern music effect and sounds like budget psych-pop, Grace Slick again, and has an almost anthemic chorus. It ends on wordless wailing and a bit of raga rock styling.

Obviously I listen to this stuff with ears attuned to music from the mid and late Sixties and early Seventies. Jefferson Airplane is one of my top favourite bands of all time. I owned the first Blue Cheer album and the first couple of Grand Funk Railroad albums. The original punk rock of the Pacific Northwest area of the USA, and the bands enshrined in the Nuggets and later Pebbles compilations, especially the stupidly lysergic dumb ones, rock in an awesome way. I hear this kind of influence in Machineri, whether they know this older music or not.

Machinery is not doing anything new, except perhaps for the role of Sannie Fox's guitar in the line up (and, hey, is a woman playing a guitar in any way still a novelty as Fox says in her Cosmo quote?) but from the evidence of the recordings they are doing something fun and rocking. The production values of the demos (as I think of them) need some boosting but I guess that will come with time and budget. For now, Machineri probably deserve the attention they are getting. Machineri does not sound like most of the bands on the scene and I guess they never will. If this is blues rock for the current millennium I am all for it, as blues is my passion and basic, primitive rock 'n roll my heart's desire.

The chances of me ever hearing Machineri live again would probably be quite slim. I would however shell out for a CD or downloadable tracks when available.

Never let it be said that I have blind prejudices.

Albert Frost: Devil or God?

Albert Frost must be one of the premier session guitarists in South Africa today, and is also a star in his own right, I guess. The last time I saw him play was on the stage at De Akker in Stellenbosch as part of the Blues Broers reunion tour and then he was the epitome of stylish cool in a dark suit and black shirt and I guess it must be Armani, taking my cue from the indication on his Devils & Gods mini-album where it says he is sponsored by Emporio Armani. Damn! It's straight out of the tradition of sharp dressed bluesmen and jazzbos.

He plays damn fine guitarist too, either in the blues vein or as modern rocker and judging from this album he is a useful songwriter.

My connection with Mr Frost is twofold, one aspect from the mid-Nineties and the other from early 2003. this is how it goes.

In the mid-Nineties the very young Albert, still finding his feet as axman, joined the Blues Broers as second guitarist behind Nico Burger. Albert's dad was the late Frank Frost who drummed for the Broers. Young Albert was a tasty and unflashy guitarslinger who showed much promise. My recollection is that at first he stuck to rhythm guitar, and slowly but surely built up towards playing solos. Hs influences seemed to be Nico Burger himself, who was not a showboating type and who preferred making his licks speak volumes through their precision and impact. For the rest Albert probably also dug early Eric Clapton and Peter Green and perhaps Mike Bloomfield and, as I learnt much later, Jimi Hendrix.

After Nico left the band Albert replaced him and became the man. He is the guy you hear playing the six string all over the Blues Broers' CD albums. He is the guy who, along with Simon Orange, who gave the band that edge so many other local so-called blues bands lacked, and still lack. They had a sophistication of attitude, attack and sound that updated the somewhat clichéd blues sound and brought a touch of psychedelia to the purist tradition.

I followed the Broers for a long time and rated all of their guitarists very highly for different reasons but in a sense John Frick, Nico Burger and Albert Frost were of a piece in their approach in the context of the group. Each of them served the song and supported the other guys and when it was time to solo, they made their stand with a sense of melody and timing and subtle power that impressed more and more as time went by.

Although I will concede that Dan Patlansky is probably phenomenally talented his obsessive homage at the altar of Stevie Ray Vaughan really grates. To paraphrase the comment on Jack Kerouac, that what he did was not really writing but just typing, I want to say that Patlansky is not really playing the blues, he just acts out what he believes blues to be. Obviously I cannot truly tell whether Albert Frost is a bluesman through and through, and his prodigious achievements as session musician probably means that he doesn't, but he sure as shit sounds like one when he plays the blues. To put it another way: I would bet that Frost can imitate Stevie Ray Vaughan as well as Patlansky can but that Patlansky could never quite sound like Frost.

The second connection came about when Albert Frost released his debut solo album, Catfish in 2002. At the time I subscribed to the online magazine SA Rock Gazette and Carina Laubscher was contributing her unique voice and views on the musicians she encountered in Pretoria and Johannesburg. She wrote a piece on Catfish and made it known that it could be ordered from her. I would have bought it just because it was a blues album from a guy I respected but Carina also praised it unreservedly. As it seemed that the album was not available in the shops I e-mailed her to request a copy. From this innocuous enquiry a steamy, long distance romance of sorts developed, completely unexpectedly. To me anyway. It was one of the weirdest things ever to happen to me: that a woman could declare lust for me simply because of an e-mail exchange and then some phone calls. The thing never went beyond being a tenuous long distance interaction. If I had been braver it could have developed but I was also extremely cautious about getting involved with someone who could fall for me, in a manner of speaking, simply because I wrote alluring e-mails.

Anyhow, Carina sent me the Catfish album and I wrote an appreciation of it as well. The set is divided into electric and acoustic and is for the most part composed of covers, except for 2 versions of Frost's own "Kammakastig Land" and he does a bit of Hendrix, a bit of Stevie Ray Vaughan and a bunch of other electric blues artists. The solo acoustic tracks are hot as successful as the electric tracks because they sound too rushed and lack the power of the Frost trio. "Kammakastig Land" is a great song, though not particularly a blues tune and it would fit in well with anything else on Devils & Gods.

Albert Frost has not defined or restricted himself as strictly a bluesman in the same way Dan Patlansky has, and he is probably better off for it, especially because Patlansky additionally defines himself by his ability to "do" Stevie Ray Vaughan and this is severely limiting. If you've heard one Patlansky album you've pretty much heard then all, though True Blue is a bit of an exception due to the varied fare on offer. On the other hand Albert Frost has refused to be tied down to one signature style. This has a lot to do with his role as boss session guy where he has to play the style that fits the artist he backs and to my mind this ultimately makes him far more talented than Patlansky.

Blou Kombuis (2000) is an exciting live collaboration between Koos Kombuis and Albert Frost where Kombuis does a bunch of his hits, playing his acoustic guitar with electric backing by Frost who provides the light and shade that subtly fleshes out some bare bones performances by a man who can sound pretty boring just by himself. It sounds as if a lot of fun was had by the two guys on stage and for all I knew Albert was just vamping improvs behind Kombuis.

Arno Carstens formed New Porn after the first hiatus of the Springbok Nude Girls and released Another Universe (2003) as a solo album (perhaps because the band name was a tad risqué) with Albert Frost as the guitar master of a very fine, powerful modern rock band that blew me away when they played at Wellington in October 2004, headlining over Afrikaans acts like Skallabrak and Akkedis. The other bands sounded kinda rinky dink compared with the monolithic power of Arno Carstens' backing band. This is where I realised that Albert Frost was no mere blues wannabe but possibly the most versatile guitarist active in South Africa today. The album is every bit as powerful and the guitar parts are as inventive.

From there it is a straight musical line to Devils & Gods even if a couple of years separate the two albums. The music is a mixture of what I like to think of as slightly lysergic rock with pop smarts and a little blues just for old time's sake. The craft and nous lie in the ability to make magic with a stringed instrument yet also being able to write a decent tune and good lyrics. The words are not completely cliché free, but they sound honest and deeply felt and the way Albert Frost sets his guitar on stun most of the time more than makes up for any lyrical shortcomings. I am not a car aficionado and it would perhaps be silly to use a vehicular metaphor to explain what I mean, but to me this album is Albert Frost in a muscle car, not yer obvious Ferrari or Lamborghini or Porsche; perhaps a 1970's Mustang, perhaps a vintage Bugatti, where design, function, style and power make a hugely powerful package that is undeniably much more than the sum of any set of parts.

I like this album a lot, even given that I was prepared to like it no matter what even before I listened to it. Where Patlansky's albums tend to be disappointments because I expect so much more, Albert Frost delivers more than expected.

It is my hope that he will keep delivering superlative music for years to come.

Fleetwood Mac: Rumours

Rumours (1977) was Fleetwood Mac's world conquering AOR masterpiece, or something like it. The band went from one of the UK's best, and most purist blues bands, to naff MOR rock, to the pop rock titans of the late Seventies, releasing an album that held records, along Dark Side of the Moon and Eagles Greatest Hits, as one of the ultimate best sellers of the Seventies, and of all time.

As an example of how all pervasive the record became, is that even Radio Xhosa (as it then was) played "Go Your Own Way", the first hit single hit the album. Radio Xhosa did not play much rock music at all and it was a great wonder to me that they selected Fleetwood Mac to be their token rock act. In fact, I don't recall any other rock tune being played on the station in the period between 1979 and 1981 that I listened to it.

It took me a while to realise that "Go Your Own Way" was sung by a guy, Lindsay Buckingham, and the guitar sole it played out on was so freakily wonderful that I loved the song not only for the weird vocals but for this melodic yet driving guitar sound, and Lindsay Buckingham was also responsible for that.

A couple of other songs were pulled as singles and became big hits too, but none had that element of astonished surprise that "Go Your Own Way" gave me.

Back in 1977 and 1978 I was not the kind of music fan who would buy anything as commercially huge as Rumours. More to the point: I was far more interested in the music and story of the first version of Fleetwood Mac, with Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan. I preferred Fleetwood Mac as a blues band to Fleetwood Mac as an AOR band.

In fact, when Rumours was released, I thought of this as almost a new band, then knowing very little about their history in the years between the demise of the blues oriented band and the ascension of the AOR monsters. I had not even taken notice of the release of Fleetwood Mac (1975), the breakthrough album that preceded Rumours.

In 1980 I did deign to buy Fleetwood Mac Live because I liked live albums that were also greatest hits albums, and this one was better than most. It is a splendid album and I would absolutely buy it on CD if I ever find it again.

My mate Emil Kolbe bought a Japanese copy of Rumours on one of his overseas trips as flight steward for South African Airways. He did his National Service stint straight after Matric and then joined SAA for a couple of years, saw the world and saved enough money to pay for his studies at the Film School at Pretoria Technikon. I started my law studies directly after Matric and deferred my National Service for 5 years, while I studied and built up a record collection.

Anyhow, Emil owned a copy of Rumours, (and also Heroes Are Hard To Find, from the early Seventies) that he stored at my flat for a couple of years and then kept in a box at home and finally gave to me when he got married and tossed out superfluous stuff. By that time the vinyl surfaces of both the long players were so full of static or scratches that both records were unplayable. I kept them with my other Fleetwood Mac records until I gave away the whole bunch in 2009.

All of my records were stored in boxes in a garage for about 3 years, since the time my wife and I bought the flat I'd been living in and moved in together. There was no longer any space for my record collection. As it was, even my much larger CD collection had to be packed away in wardrobes. Anyhow, over time water got into the garage and unfortunately the box with the Fleetwood Mac records was right in the way. When I picked up the various boxes with records to dispose of them, the Fleetwood Mac box fell apart and when I opened it up just about all of the albums inside had been ruined.

Fleetwood Mac Live and Tusk were amongst the ruined batch. They were the only examples of the Late Seventies output of the Mac that I owned. The great majority of the other records were all of the blues band Mac. The AOR Mac had a very limited appeal.

The big story about Fleetwood Mac circa 1977 was the resurrection of a British band that was almost moribund, though still coasting on the name en Sixties reputation, by 2 young Americans with a fresh new approach and a sex appeal that the Brits lacked. And in Lindsay Buckingham they found a genius songwriter, guitarist and producer that suddenly gave the band an edge again. Not to mention Stevie Nicks's fey post-hippie appeal and her strong song writing. With Fleetwood Mac and Rumours the band ascended to heights unimaginable in 1974 and put them alongside the other giants of the era, and they have not slipped from that position even if commercial success is no longer that stupendous.

The other thing, particularly around the making of Rumours, was the stories of the convoluted sexual and interpersonal relationship twists and turns within the band, principally the breakups between Buckingham and Nicks and between Christine and John Movie, which led to some inspired song writing and strange interactions in the studio; and the tales of drink and drugs consumed in the making of the album. The oft told tale is of how LA was "awash in a blizzard of coke" in the late Seventies and this probably means that the making of Rumours was no different, from the substance usage perspective, than any other major album from the era. Rock stars always did drugs and at that particular time and place rock stars, seemingly without exception, did a lot of coke.

The Fleetwood Mac of 1977 seemed very glamorous. The publicity shots showed the 2 women in long, semi gypsy dresses and boots and the guys wore satin and blue denim with white shirts. Back in the day rock stars dressed up and did their best to look different to the rest of us. Today bands mostly dress down in street styles that make them look just like the rest of us. A group photograph of a band could just as well be a group photograph of a bunch of work colleagues on casual Friday. The difference could also be that bands no longer want to be rock stars; bands want to be seen as musicians and as simple, regular folks.

Fleetwood Mac were anything but regular. There was the mop headed, handsome Lindsay Buckingham who like an entry in a Magic Dick (from J Geils Band) lookalike contest. Stevie Nicks was tiny, fey, and esoteric and far out glamorous; she gave new meaning to the title space cadet, or so it seemed. In her struggle days she cleaned houses to earn a living while Buckingham, then her lover, lived for music. Mick Fleetwood was the giant drummer, a man with two balls dangling on a rope between his legs. He looked almost twice Stevie Nicks's height. At one time he and Nicks were lovers. This must have made for interacting conjugations. Christine McVie was the much more down-to-earth English rose type who once played blues piano for the Mac (as Christine Perfect) and wrote plain, simple yet very affective love songs. John McVie was the bassist, a small guy, married Christine, was part of one of the best rhythm sections in blues or rock and preferred the simple pleasures of rock star life.

Together this group looked like a bunch of twee soft rock fashion plates, but they rocked on record and on stage and produced killer music. Not many bands get this kind of second chance and when it came Fleetwood Mac's way they grabbed it. It must have bemused Fleetwood and McVie to contrast their earlier success as rootsy bluesmen with their unbelievable success as glam rock stars who sold more records than just about anybody else. If I read the essay in the insert to the deluxe anniversary edition of the album (with second CD of out-takes and demos), Rumours has sold some 48 million copies worldwide since 1977. That is a lot of albums.

 

In 1977 Rumours was not exactly my cup of tea as an album. At the time my favourite bands were Dr Feelgood and Cream, I was just starting to build a collection of blues albums and my general take on rock music was that faster and louder ruled. I liked primitive sounding music that rocked. Synthesizers, the electric piano and the funky clavinet sounds then so popular on so many records, were my pet hates. In fact I avoided bands that had a keyboard player, although this was a tad silly. I loved rockin' boogie woogie piano, it was just the modish reliance on crappy keyboard styles I disliked intensely.

Even the phrase Adult Oriented Rock stuck in my craw. I was about 18 and did not understand how rock could speak to adults much less be aimed at them. And why did it have to sound differently and be more mature and staid than rock for the kids? The thing is that I am now 51 years old and still listen to rock, and though I am now more open to the tasteful use of synths I still absolutely hate the sounds of the Fender Rhodes electric piano so beloved of so many "anthemic" AOR bands, even today. I still prefer primitive, three chord rock to the music made through intellectual application to one's craft. Don't give me endlessly reworked sterility with ten chords, modulations, weird time signatures and crazy shifts in key. Do give me fuzz tone, three chords and a visceral attack to the gut and the feet. Of course there are exceptions but my basic tenet is: simpler is better.

Fleetwood Mac was no longer a blues band by the time they recorded Rumours. I would imagine that Buckingham and Nicks had absolutely no blues background. The other band members had moved away from it in any event when the band became the McVie's and Fleetwood plus guest guitarists, mostly American, and the musical strategy was to write and perform music that appealed to a middle class American audience with middle of the road tastes.

The most immediate impact on me was the sound of the solid, driving rhythm section, pushing the music forward at a deliberate pace. It was not flashy or showy, just a pulse that anchored the keyboards and guitar and melodies. It was not funk but to my mind Fleetwood Mac had the closest to a funk power rhythm that any band of that era ever had. Not only did the bass and drums add power to the performances, they also mitigated the AOR stuff on top. This is a formula that Bonnie Raitt adopted some years later when she made achieved her breakout to stardom.

Once you've absorbed the pulse, you start noticing the musical colouring added by the layering of other instruments. Although Lindsay Buckingham is a superb guitarist the Mac was not a guitar band; Christine McVie could tickle the ivories with the best of them but the Mac was not a keyboard band either. At worst one could say that Buckingham emphasised guitar in his tunes and Christine underpinned her songs with her keyboards.

Stevie Nicks combined these elements for her songs. It seemed she wanted filigree and solidity all at once in the same song, depending on the mood of the lyrics.

"Go Your Own Way" was my immediate favourite even though I was confused over the gender of the singer, as it is a motoring slow burning rocker with a killer guitar coda. Along with "Hotel California" , "More Than A Feeling" and "Don't Fear The Reaper this tune epitomises late Seventies AOR and sold gold rock for me. These tracks should be in every Seventies masters of rock compilation just because each of the is a stunning blend of power rock and hook. Lindsay Buckingham also succeeded in writing a painful lyric that struck a chord with me and his high pitched vocal seemed so androgynous that the words could be the scream of anyone who's been hurt.

I do not quite know why "Dreams" was the really big hit off Rumours. Perhaps it was because the record was a hit and by the time "Dreams" was released the album was fast becoming an event in itself and the single was being played by radio stations that usually only play hits and was being bought by an audience that only bought hits. Of course, the success of this single must have driven album sales as well.

I quite liked "Dreams" as well, not so much because I thought of Stevie Nicks as sex on tiny legs, but because the tune was of a somewhat different stripe to the standard pop single of the time. It sounded like thinking aloud. It sounded like the musing of a wounded yet stronger and wiser creature. It appealed to the stunted romantic in me.

I did not like "Don't Stop" at all because this, in contrast to "Dreams", was much too straightforward and optimistic and almost boosterish. No wonder some American presidential candidate appropriated if for his campaign somewhere in the mid-Eighties. It took a couple of years, and probably the Fleetwood Mac Live album before I could appreciate that Christine McVie was a damn good songwriter. She was more rooted in common sense attitudes than the fey Stevie Nicks, and that is perhaps the difference between growing up in the UK in die Fifties and California.

I must admit that I think mostly of Stevie Nicks songs when I recall Fleetwood Mac's hits but on close examination many of the best songs actually came from Christine McVie.

Eva Cassidy made "Songbird" into a hit (posthumously?) and it was only when I studied the songwriter credits in the booklet to the deluxe re-issue of Rumours, that I saw McVie is the composer. Now, that is a standard that should be a nice little earner for Christine McVie for the rest of her life. Apart from Courtney Love's cover of "Gold Dust Woman" I cannot quite see that many of Stevie Nicks's songs will ever become standards. That is a very different level of song writing.

Listening to Rumours again after many years reaffirms to a degree why I did not like the record in the first place. The reason is that it does not truly rock hard enough for my tastes. Back then I thought it kind of sucked, except for "Go Your Own Way" and perhaps "Dreams", precisely because the production sounded too pristine and immaculate and smoothed out too many edges and smothered whatever rock attack there had been. Not that Fleetwood Mac sounded much like a rock band to me. They had become just a superior rock band, a soft rock band at that. My tastes have probably become more sophisticated over the intervening years and I have become more tolerant of music that I once considered beyond the pale, but it is still difficult for me to love Rumours in any unconditional way. It is not visceral enough. It is too slick. It seems to pander too much to a mass audience. I expect that the latter belief is mostly ex post fact. No doubt the band never expected the almost unimaginable success they would have with this album.

I will probably always prefer the blues Fleetwood Mac to the super successful Fleetwood Mac because the blues band is rawer and to my mind more powerful than the AOR of the later version but I will give kudos to the 3 Brits and 2 Americans who recorded Rumours for producing a record that must have struck a huge chord with the popular audience. Not everyone can do that. I guess Hootie & The Blowfish, with Cracked Rear View, can claim something similar, but none of the individual members of Hootie (hell, apart from Darius Rucker, who were they?) ever had the same iconic solo careers of Lindsay Buckingham or Stevie Nicks and the band itself had no glamour, were not rock royalty or even rock Euro trash. Hootie represents worthy journeyman rock that got incredibly lucky and without the talent or obsessive drive to get that lucky again. Fleetwood Mac were big as a blues band, big as an AOR band and gave us big individual stars. The Stevie Nicks or Lindsay Buckingham solo albums are absolutely worthwhile owning (and I did own a few in pre-CD formats) and so are Tusk (which I actually rate far higher than Rumours as a coherent body of work) and Fleetwood Live. As I do not know any of the later albums at all, I cannot comment on them.

Tusk received a bit of a critical drubbing on releases, perhaps because it was too different and too sprawling compare to the succinct and compact Rumours, but I liked it immediately and still prefer it to Rumours. On Tusk the rockier tracks rock harder and weirder than ever and Christine McVie hits a really consistent high in sustained quality of song writing and Stevie Nicks's songs are truly spellbinding and moving. It seems that Tusk took a lot longer to get together than Rumours did, probably because the band had more money to spend on studio time, they had the monster of Rumours to follow and may have been scared shitless at the prospect and wanted to delay the follow0up as long as possible and Lindsay Buckingham apparently decided he now had the licence and incentive to go as crazy as he could with his songs and his production. For my money Tusk should also have been the giant commercial success that Rumours is, and it should absolutely be regarded as on creative par with its 2 predecessors.

The thing is that Fleetwood Mac probably played it fairly safe on Rumours, making a follow up to Fleetwood Mac and not attempting to break new ground. Fortunately the song writers had the topic of dysfunctional relationships and terrible break-ups as source material and could fashion some very memorable tunes from that source material, but just as some actors win Oscars not for their best performance but more as a consolation prize for being previously overlooked, I think that the success of Rumours had more to do with being at the right place at the right time, and making the most of a situation, an image and a couple of really great songs, than with the intrinsic value of the album as a whole. Obviously the humongous success colours the way one sees the album but I believe that a lot of that reverence has been generated because of the huge success. That success is seen as being a signifier of worth in an ex post facto argument.

Rumours is pleasant enough to listen to but hardly compelling listening if one ignores the back story. It is one of those albums where one can understand that the non-threatening, non-edgy style of music combined with a handful of hit singles was what made the package attractive to so many people all over the world. It is superior pop and often superior pop is best experienced in compilations where there is no let up in the endless series of hits. When almost-filler is on the same record as the hits, the hits shine brighter on the one hand yet on the other hand also cannot lift the whole into a different space altogether.

This is what Rumours is: technically highly proficient, musically polished, thematically coherent, conceptually incisive, and still viscerally lacking.