Neil Young in the land of Zuma

Finally bought Zuma (1975) in HMV Oxford Street, London, on 5 May 2011, the last day of our European holiday that year. Know the live versions of"Cortez the Killer" from Weld (1991) and "Barstool Blues" and "Danger Bird" from The Year of the Horse (1997) but I'd never heard the other cuts.

Although plenty has been written about Neil Young's idiosyncratic waywardness in pursuing his muse since his first solo release in 1969 and the consensus seems to be, though he may have put out some below par albums in a 42 year career span, that essentially he can't do wrong. My opinion is that his most consistently worthwhile body of work consists of the albums released in the first ten years, from Neil Young (1969) to Rust Never Sleeps (1979), with the next 30 years being mostly hit and miss, with a lot of so-so music and banal, clichéd lyrics. The poet in Neil Young kind of burnt out with Rust Never Sleeps but I would imagine this to be an irony old Neil never intended at the time.

Anyhow, in that first decade Neil Young produced wonderful melanges of laid back country rock and some of the most rampant, hypnotic and intense rock music ever. There is just no beating Neil Young and Crazy Horse in full cry, as one can hear from the Fillmore East live set in die Archive series, Live Rust or any of the raging guitar cuts from Everybody Knows this Is Nowhere or Zuma.

It also seems to me that Young somehow felt, the older he got, that it was less and less important to be a rock poet and to write elliptical, allusive lyrics and concentrated on being pretty direct in his opinions and sentiments with a resultant loss in the value of the songs. If the tune and the playing could not carry a particular song onto a higher plane, the lyrics simply stuck in the craw because they were so trite and obvious.

My collection of Neil Young albums was put together kind of haphazardly, starting with the records of Rust Never Sleeps (My first Young purchase), Harvest, Time Fades Away, On The Beach and Re-Ac-Tor. Then I started off my CD collection with Decade, Ragged Glory, Weld, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Freedom, Trans, Harvest Moon, Unplugged, Landing on Water, Mirror Ball, Sleeps With Angels, This Note's For You, Everybody's Rockin', The Year of the Horse, Silver & Gold, Live at Fillmore East, Live at Massey Hall and now Zuma and Le Noise, which brings me right up to date.
Of these albums only Silver & Gold has been an outright disappointment. I do not care what artistic endeavour and level of creativity it is supposed to represents. It just kind of sucks.

You'll notice that (up to Le Noise) I do not own any Neil Young albums from the last 15 years or so, except for Silver & Gold and this is mostly because I lost interest in the music as a compelling passion. The same goes for Bob Dylan, whose mid-Sixties albums are the ones I find interesting. I did buy the two most recent releases and though they have been well-received by critics, and apparently the public too, the triteness of the songs and Dylan's severely croaky voice hardly makes these albums truly worthwhile listening experiences. On Blond on Blond, for example, or John Wesley Harding, Dylan sounded like a man who believed in what he was doing. Over the last decade or so Dylan and Neil Young sound like professional songwriters who must fulfil record contracts and have the ability, acquired through many years of application to their song writing craft, to write lyrics that almost sound significant yet are simply workmanlike and tunes that mitigate the banality of the words.

So. I have come to Zuma about 36 years after its release and after I have listened to a lot of Neil Young music. The first impression is that the music is a mixture of styles drawn from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold rush, Harvest and On Beach. This is good because these are good albums. And Zuma is a good album. Whether it is a great Neil Young record is debatable though. The songs are pleasant enough listening and the weight here is towards the more tuneful, retrospective cuts with even what should have been raging guitar workouts being quite restrained. Perhaps the problem lies in listening to Neil Young albums out of sequence and long after the event. Coming after On the Beach, and if I had bought the record in 1975, Zuma's impact might have been greater and more favourable. It does not have much of an impact now; not even as a previously unheard Young set. Perhaps the lesson is that one should not really be a completist. At some point the artist stumbles, or goes down an unfathomably silly avenue, and then the magic is gone. Or it is simply a case of too much of the same, or more or less similar, thing. Sooner or later stasis sets in and innovation no longer occurs and you realise that merely trying new sounds, techniques or attitudes do not by themselves make for interesting, compelling music.

My impression of Zuma is that Neil Young has collected a bunch of songs that reflect various aspects of his musical vision over the previous five or six years for quite pleasant listening experiences but not a revelatory listening experiences. Whether it is the country tinged balladry, the folky musings or the guitar workouts, this is Neil Young by numbers.

Makes me wonder whether I should bother with any other items from his back catalogue that have not been favourable already, like Re-Ac-Tor or Time Fades Away. If there is no longer any suspension of disbelief and not much belief, what is the point of being a completist collector of albums by an artist one admires?

 

 

 

 

The Dynamics

THE DYNAMICS        (RetroFresh)

This album is a compilation of everything The Dynamics released in the Eighties tracks and some tracks from a 1996 "comeback" album Organic! Cherry picking is great because this selection can make the casual listener believe that Organic! has something going for it, when in truth it is a deadly dull album. The real meat in this compilation are the early tracks recorded when The Dynamics was part of a mini-movement of South African bands who, in the face of a debilitating cultural boycott, discovered home grown mbaqanga and jive and mixed these local influences with jazz, funk and ska to produce a unique local product. "Thugs" is one of the great South African singles of the Eighties, and of all times, with a true air of menace and a killer groove, half Booker T & The MGs and half mbaqanga. No other track truly matches "Thugs" for intensity and verve, but they are mostly quite good fun. The Dynamics mutated from an exciting mbaqanga jive inspired band, through personnel changes and 15 years, into a less than exciting jazz funk conglomerate. This band is living proof is that improvement in the quality of the musicianship does not necessarily equate to improvement in the quality of the music. Technical mastery quite often leads to sterility and this is what happened to the Dynamics. The earlies tracks are by far the best. In the end there were no dynamics left at all.

 

ORGANIC! (TicTicBang, 1996)

Possibly organic, not particularly dynamic. The Dynamics were one of the first local bands to combine jazz, mbaqanga, ska and rock way back in the early Eighties and were by all accounts a very, uh, dynamic attraction then and had a song ("Thugs") that received a fair amount of airplay on the likes of Radio 5 and was popular in Cape Town clubs. The pressures of the struggle years and lack of commercial success in South Africa sent some of the members to the UK and by and by they returned to South Africa in the era of liberation to pick up the pieces of a musical career.. Organic! is the long delayed follow-up to cassette album only releases in the Eighties. The musicians are accomplished and try hard to be funky but they can't hack it. The rhythm section is stodgy, the horn arrangements are lifeless, memorable tunes are non-existent and, suicidally for a band that is meant to be driven by the groove, there is no truly killer jam to mitigate the lack of tunes. The metaphor here is of a band stuck in musical quicksand; the harder they try, the deeper they sink. Good background music for the undiscerning, drunken patrons of bars.

 

Oil City Confidential

I do not know whether I can ever fully describe the visceral impact the first hearing of the sparse, relentless shuffle and slightly off-kilter slide guitar riff of "Back In The Night" made on me when it was played for the very first time on South African radio in 1975 as a featured tune in a "juke box jury" type of program on Radio 5, which was then in the grip of a stifling disco format. This was otherworldly music; music from a distant universe where things look like similar products we have on Earth but are consummately strange and weird and unfathomable.

 

I knew nothing about Dr Feelgood but I immediately knew that I loved their music. Malpractice was amongst the first 10 LPs I ever owned and, along with Cream's Cream Live, one of the most played.

 

In late 1977 I wrote what, in hindsight, was perhaps a naively optimistic letter to the editor of the NME to request copies of all their clippings on Dr Feelgood. Wilko Johnson has just recently left the band. The review of Sneakin' Suspicion and the news item about the break up were the first and almost only rock press items I had been able to read about the band. Before that, there had been a mention in a Charles Shaar Murray piece in Hit Parader and a chapter in Mick Gold's book Rock on the Road, both of which covered the band up to the release of Down by the Jetty in 1974.

 

Dr Feelgood was my top favourite contemporary group at the time, one of my first independent discoveries of music I liked, and no else I knew had ever heard of, but I knew very little about them, apart from the basic history from supporting Heinz to spearheading the pub rock movement to being a bit of an influence on the punk bands that became prominent after 1976. I was desperate for information and I really wanted to be able to read the story as it unfolded, hence the request to the NME, which I was then buying every week. The NME kept me up to date on the London punk scene but I wanted to know stuff about Dr Feelgood.

 

NME never replied to my letter. At the time my first guess was simply that the editor or his minions were for political reasons not prepared to reply from an obvious Afrikaner from the pariah apartheid state of South Africa but by and by I also believed that the NME just could not be bothered. Or perhaps that they did not have a clipping service. Anyhow, it took about 25 years before I laid my hands on a proper biography of the band, albeit a very basic telling of the tale from the Wilko Johnson days toe the late Nineties when the band was still going, run by Chris Fenwick, without any of the four original band members in it.

Then circa 2006 or 2007 I came across a DVD and CD double pack of a Feelgoods show in South End. For the first time ever I could see the band in full-on, raging Canvey Island R & B mode at the height of tis first flush of success.

Now I could see the menacing posture of Lee Brilleaux in his white suit, stalking the front of the stage and barking out the lyrics to songs I already knew well but could now experience visually and Wilko Johnson patrolling the side of the stage with his chopping left hand, psychotic stare and darting runs all over the front of the stage. It was a riveting spectacle and I was sorely disappointed that I never had the opportunity to see De Feelgood in their heyday and would never have the opportunity to experience them now, even if the three surviving members of the original line up ever get back together, which appears to be unlikely.

I was very delighted to read about Julien Temple's documentary about Dr Feelgood in the shape of Oil City Confidential and I immediately contacted my brother in law in the UK to see if he could order it for me but it took about a year before I finally laid my sweaty paws on it during a UK visit in April 2011 when he gave it to me as my birthday present.

It seems to me that Julien Temple likes making movies about music. There was The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle, about the Sex Pistols, and Absolute Beginners, based on a Colin MacInnes book about beatnik London, and the documentary about Glastonbury, which I also own, and a number of others. His style is deadpan. He films what he considers to be interesting and let the subjects speak, without intruding much into the scene. It is almost a simple technique of pointing and shooting, with, I guess, the hard work left the people who do the editing and make a movie out of the raw footage.

Oil City Confidential mixes newsreel footage, contemporary footage and still photographs of Dr Feelgood performing live and interview footage with the band members and various hangers on. Most of the interviewees, particularly the band members, must be north of 60 by now and their interviews were obviously shot especially for this documentary. Lee Brilleaux, on the other hand is seen in two different interviews, one fairly early in the Feelgoods' career and the other one some years later, though we are not told when. Brilleaux's views are presented almost as contemporary as that of Wilko, Sparko or Big Figure but where he still looks young (yet strangely like a middle aged raconteur) the other three look like a bunch of retired lorry drivers. Not much rock 'n roll image there, but then, that was probably the anti-image that Dr Feelgood always had.

The guys share some anecdotes, some stories, about themselves and about each other. There is a slightly sad walking tour of Canvey Island, hosted Chris Fenwick, the "Fifth Feelgood" and long-time manager, who managed to hang on to the Dr Feelgood brand long after the four original members had left or, in Brilleaux's case, died and to a degree flogging a bit of a dead horse. When I read about the "new" Dr Feelgood still playing gigs, it sounded like a case of Dr Feelgood being a tribute band to itself. For my money Dr Feelgood means the original four, and perhaps John Mayo as well, but nothing beyond. At the very least Dr Feelgood meant Lee Brilleaux's voice. How could Fenwick have dared to keep the band going after Lee's death, if it were not simply for the sake of making money without proper regard for the meaning and legacy of the band? This is what I feel about him guiding an odd assortment of gawkers around Canvey. It is a pretty sad tour, pathetic really, and if Fenwick charges a fee for this empty exercise in nostalgia, he probably really needs the money.

Although Wilko, Sparko and Big Figure do meet up in a pub for a brief scene or two we never see them with Fenwick. The absence of a reunion with their manager, who was a Canvey mate from way back, could possibly be ascribed to their distaste for his commercial exploitation of their band name long after the sell by date. And perhaps also because, as has been the case with rock managers ever since the dawn of time, Fenwick has screwed them out of money. Wilko Johnson certainly makes some allusions to the usual record company double dealings that leave an apparently successful group penniless once all the accounting has been done.

The Feelgood story is more or less the typical rags to riches rock 'n roll story of a bunch of mates who make music together, first on a local level, then go to the big smoke, get lucky by tapping in on a new mode of presenting rock in pubs and then gaining a mass audience through live performances and then even having a number one album in the charts. Unfortunately the master plan went slightly askew after that. The songwriter and co-frontman leaves, the band soldiers on to early, second act success but then slowly and surely slipping down the ladder, always managing to draw appreciative audiences but having only moderate record sales and then one by one the founding members leave until only the singer is left en by and by he dies, though the manager keeps the band intact and functioning with none of the founding members.

My interest in the Feelgoods ended in the early Eighties, not long after Private Practice. It is unfortunate though that Julien Temple's interest in the band also ceases after Wilko Johnson's departure. Given that the band had a far longer history post Wilko than with him, it is disappointing that Temple does not cover the entire career if at least only to the degree of giving an abbreviated account of the next 20 years. There is mention of John "Gypie" Mayo replacing Wilko Johnson and the brief flare of second act success with the Private Practice album and "Milk & Alcohol" single, and a quick narration of Lee Brilleaux's last days and last gig. He died in 1994. We also learn that Wilko has had a quite successful solo career outside the band but that is about it. There is no indication of whether Sparko and Figure are still at all involved in music.

Dr Feelgood was never the biggest rock and roll band in the world and I would imagine only a select few in South Africa ever heard of them or bought their records. I have never come across another Feelgoods fan. The band was not even the biggest band in the UK although their influence stretched beyond pub rock and sweaty R & B. the best description would probably be that Dr Feelgood was a jobbing band, with a genius guitarist en songwriter and a mesmerising singer, who worked hard to earn a living and managed to build a fan base and who got lucky enough to have chart albums and singles during the early phase of a long career, that were strong enough to sustain that career well beyond the normal life expectancy of the average R & B band.

To me, however, Dr Feelgood represents something materially significant. Dr Feelgood was the first contemporary band I discovered on my own, with no peer pressure to influence me, and embraced passionately and wholeheartedly. The first 3 albums, Malpractice in particular, were a major part of the soundtrack of my late teenage life. I played Malpractice until the grooves wore out, so to speak. To this day the opening notes of opening track "I Can Tell" are still intensely exciting.

I was not exactly fanatical about Dr Feelgood. My room was not full of Feelgood memorabilia and I did not dedicate scrapbooks to them. Not that there was much about Dr Feelgood to be found in Stellenbosch, hence my letter to the NME. I did play the records a lot and did study the album sleeves and did ponder Wilko Johnson's lyrics. In fact, when I thought of being a songwriter, I wanted to be a modern R & B songwriter in the vein of Johnson who took blues themes and adapted them to his background and environment to make them relevant to a different time and place. In Wilko's worldview the concept of the Canvey delta was not that far removed from the Mississippi delta and was every bit as real. I would also have liked to play guitar like Wilko but that somehow never happened.

The major spin off from my interest in Dr Feelgood, as was the case with my interest in Cream, was that I started buying albums by the genuine article, the old school blues guys emulated by the Canvey boys. I was fond of Dr Feelgood's version of John Lee Hooker's "Boom, Boom" but Hooker's version was just bad and dangerous.

I am glad I own Oil City Confidential. The story of Dr Feelgood was no longer an unknown tale by the time I saw the documentary but there are some new spins and it is good to have more information on their formative days and to see the band in full cry in its heyday and to hear them talk. Wilko looks like a nut job and except for the difference in hairstyles, from pudding bowl cut to crazy baldhead, he looks and acts as weird the images from the late Seventies suggest he used to be. Wilko still plays killer guitar.

Where Lee Brilleaux represented the distinctive vocal sound of Dr Feelgood, Wilko Johnson's choppy guitar style gave the band its unique sound. The thing is that the absence of either would have reduced the band to something like the pedestrian collection of R & B journeymen it eventually became. Having said, I feel, if Brilleaux had left before Wilko, that another vocalist may have been able to do the same amount of justice to the Feelgood songbook, although probably not with the same presence as Lee Brilleaux, but no guitarist could remotely replace Wilko Johnson. John Mayo did not even try and I would imagine that none of his successors (on albums I have never heard) would have dared either, or be capable of imitating the signature Feelgood guitar sound.

This sounds as if I do not rate Sparko and Figure's contributions very highly but my point is merely that, even taking into account their individual skills and Sparko's apparently own unique style of bass playing, it was the frontline that distinguished Dr Feelgood from the competition.

This is why the idea of Chris Fenwick continuing to operate a Dr Feelgood band that does not sound like Dr Feelgood is such a travesty.

I have heard that nowadays Southend is the Essex answer to Las Vegas or Times Square and not worth visiting unless you like crowds of low rent party animals, Essex boys and girls, Eastenders, and the like, and miles of garish neon. Canvey Island does not look any more promising. It may once have been something of a favourite beach destination for the East End, but in Oil City Confidential it looks less like the Mississippi delta than ever before and more like the kind of place where unemployed and unemployable dregs of society have washed up and have stuck because there is no lower step on the food chain, with the giant oil tanks looming over everything. It is a masterstroke of the documentary that Temple is able to project moving images on these tanks to serve as background for some night time interviews. Anyhow, although I would like to visit Canvey someday, I am not sure that it would make any sense anymore. At best I would be able to boast I had been there. It would be like visiting Hertford simply because Deep Purple kind of originated there. I definitely would not do the Fenwick guided walking tour.

So: although I doubt that I will ever have the pleasure of attending a Wilko Johnson gig or the dubious honour of visiting Canvey, these are at least possibilities. I will never attend a Dr Feelgood gig and will have to be satisfied with the archive material in the 2 DVDs I own and my collection of CDS of the first 4 albums. For the sake of it I may still yet buy Be Seeing You, Private Practice or A Case of the Shakes, mostly because I used to own the LPs, but the "classic" quartet would be all I really need and if push comes to shove I would be satisfied with only Down by the Jetty and Malpractice. These two records represent the core of the Dr Feelgood I got to know and came to love.

 

 

 

 

Ken E Henson gives the blues his best shot

Kenny Henson (as he then was) and Brian Finch played somewhat enervated, desiccated country rock back in the Seventies or early Eighties and then split up and went their separate ways. The last time I saw Brian Finch it was at Obz Sessions, a (now defunct) bar on Main Road Observatory Cape Town, where he played a solo gig, back pressed against the window to the road, the crowd literally under his nose. I would be surprised if any punter in the place care about Finch or whatever music he was playing. They would not have been able to hear it.

 

I have never seen Henson perform at all and though I vaguely knew both of them were still around, and that Finch had even released a new album, Henson slipped so far beneath my radar he might as well have left the music business. Maybe, he too was playing soul destroying solo gigs to uncaring punters.

 

Anyhow, I was in the Rhythm Records online store, looking for something completely different, when the Ken E Henson album Rolling and Tumbling came up on my screen as an example of South African blues. I had to have it, seeing as how I consider myself to be a connoisseur of blues and am always interested in South African bluesmen. It is not always a rewarding interest; for every Delta Blue there is something like the Boulevard Blues Band. Not that the latter are technically deficient or untalented musicians. They are simply not part of anything like a vital blues tradition. I feel the same way about Dan Patlansky though I have had a lot of stick for this apparently unfounded and controversial opinion. He is a consummate guitar player but he just does not bring anything new to the table. The wow factor is his technical skill; he does have the ability to breathe new life into the blues genre.

 

I had never thought of Kenny, or Ken E, Henson as a bluesman and the tracks from Rolling & Tumbling have done nothing to persuade me otherwise. Ken has pretty much taken a trip back in time to the late Sixties when a lot of White blues bands started infusing their take on the blues with a lysergic ambience and extended fuzz tone guitar solos. I am in particular thinking of Henry Vestine from Canned Heat, a band that started out as something of a purist blues band but after a couple of years, probably influenced by the Summer of Love, went all progressive with Vestine's rock inspired guitar playing that could at times go on at tedious length. It was still based on blues progressions bur raga rock and psychedelia motivated a flaunting of virtuosity that soon paled.

Not that I want to say the Ken E Henson sounds like Vestine or is as tedious. The point simply is, that Benson's take on making his blues sound more contemporary, I guess, and not like slavish retreads, is to hark back to the halcyon days of the Woodstock generation when blues underpinned a lot of rock, particularly from the San Francisco bands, but the musicians held that progression meant using lots of guitar effects to kind of disguise the blues licks.

The tunes on offer comprise a selection of old blues favourites from what I would call a boogie perspective. My guess is that he made these recordings at home with only a computer programme as friend. It makes the songs sound like second cousins of J J Cale's "Call me the Breeze", especially the insistent drum and bass patterns.

After listening to the album I would not call it a blues album as such. The concept simply seems to be that Ken E Henson probably chose a bunch of his favourite blues standards and decided to record them his way, with a more innovative approach and fresh slant to some hoary blues tropes. He was not about to do a Dan Patlansky or a Blues Broers.

Any blues aficionado knows these tunes only too well, not only in the original versions but probably also as recorded by many other bluesmen. The albums pays homage to Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Billy Boy Arnold and even Peter Green and (I guess) Jeff Beck.

"Baby Please Don't Go" is a venerable blues standard (Big Joe Williams) but Ken clearly knows the more rocking late Sixties psych-punk version by The Amboy Dukes and he amps up his drum machine and bass guitar and drives it down the road at a pile driver pace. The urgency of the vocal plea is echoed and emphasised by the stinging, floating bottleneck guitar that is the closest thing here to the Williams original.

"My Babe" is more of the same, though slightly more subtle on the beat, and with effects laden syncopated country picking guitar solos. Could have used some blues harp.

"Boogie Man" has a riff that is the bastard child of Slim Harpo's "Shake Your Hips" and John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen" (quoting that famous spoken bit), with a side order of "La Grange." The song tells the story of Ken's own life in the blues. Apparently. This tune can be called a homage to the late great boogie man.

"Judgment Day" quotes a Robert Johnson blues ("If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day") and starts off like a disco infused blues, with more country style guitar in the vein of the Tulsa school, and then detours into "Rollin and Tumblin" before returning to the original verse.

In "Smokestack Lightnin" Ken plays a spooky blues with delay and echo on the lead guitar that gives a Hawaiian effect and he does a kind of ghostly Howlin' Wolf talkin' voice. The identifying riff is present but the song is so trippy-slow and hypnotic it is almost voodoo.

"Spoonful" has an equally insistent riff but this time the lead guitar is fuzzed out like something from Barry Melton (Country & The Fish) and an acoustic guitar swings gently along the bottom.

"Who Do You Love" gives the responsibility for the muted Diddley beat squarely to the rhythm section while the guitar soars across the top. Unfortunately the vocal does not do the Diddley original proud and it does not come close to either Ronnie Hawkins' or George Thorogood's versions of the song. Ken just cannot get the dangerousness and badness into his vocal inflection.

"Love That Burns" sounds like a live recording with a somewhat noisy audience. It does do justice to Peter Green's song, at least the vocals do, but the lead guitar is not quite as spine tingling as Green can get. The acoustic guitar backing, saxophone and percussion are the great elements of the performance especially in the rave up in the middle section. Right at the end, Ken, if it is he, gives us a bit of Hendrix style lead guitar and jousts with the saxophonist to crowd pleasing effect. The deep blues meaning of the song is lost though. Peter Green is not about this kind of showboating.

My earlier reference to J J Cale was not so far from the mark. "Travelling Light" is indeed the Cale song and given a Henson reinterpretation of the Tulsa style that brings a new, fresh feel but remains true to the Okie kind of vibe. There is even a bit of guitar picking that could almost be called shit kicking.

"No Money Down" is a really different, somnolent version of a Chuck Berry tune that is normally far more sprightly than Henson's take on the song. It is not rock and roll and it is not even very much a blues; in fact, I would say that this is Henson asking himself: how would J J Cale do this song?

"You Can't Judge A Book" is a psychedelic guitar drenched vamp with a less than inspiring vocal. If you want to do Bo Diddley you gotta have some of that man's badness in your soul. Ken just don't seem to have it. Neither does his rhythm section.

"Jigsaw" is another live take and is a stomping blues harp breakdown that mutates into a lonesome cowboy camp fire tune before turning back into the screaming, wailing juke stomper it really wants to be. This is the one that would get me onto the dance floor and make me get all stupid.

I guess "Blues for Beck" is homage to Jeff and not to Mr Hanson. The drum beats sound almost hip hop but the guitar sounds like the jazz rock fusiony thing Jeff Beck did back in the Seventies when heavy blues rock no longer worked for him.

So: my conclusion is that Rolling & Tumbling a rather fun collection of tunes that I know and love in all kinds versions by all kindsa musicians and if it is not truly blues or even very essential it is very much an album I would listen to a lot and play very loudly when I cook. You cannot beat the blues if it they are done right and Ken E Henson does it right enough. He does not attempt slavish imitation; he does not attempt to pretend to be a dyed in the wool suffering bluesman. He is a musician with a mission to inject some innovation into what is so often just a cliché and he has done it well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.