Tom Verlaine

Thomas Miller came to New York from the American Midwest to find fortune and fame in the Bohemian art world of the city, changed his name and formed a band that lasted about 4 years in its first incarnation and was quite influential yet not as commercially viable as Verlaine might have hoped for. His solo career, with a couple of Television reunions, has now lasted for far longer than the band ever did. It is amazing to think that Verlaine is already 64. But then, his rise in the New York scene happened 40 years ago now.

Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell led Television, one of the major bands of the post New York Dolls and pre Ramones/Blondie/Talking Heads New York punk scene that predated and influenced the UK punk bands. Hell left and formed first The Heartbreakers and then led The Voidoids. Verlaine soldiered on and, with Richard Lloyd as second guitarist, created some of the most adventurous, exciting guitar music of the Seventies, way outside of the heavy blues and hard rock tradition that dominated the decade.

Verlaine reinvented himself in New York, as so many did, with a new surname, that of the French poet Paul Verlaine, and became part of an avant garde arts scene that, in the aftermath of the Warhol experiment, combined the high arts of painting and sculpture and poetry with the lesser, more populist art of rock and roll. Verlaine wanted the excitement of rock without the cock rock bullshit of most other successful American bands of the time. Television was in at the start of the New York scene that produced some of the most influential groups of the time and although it was one of the most exciting and most critically esteemed bands, it did not enjoy the long lasting careers or commercial success of The Ramones, Blondie or Talking Heads, releasing only 2 official albums in its heyday with further live albums and one reunification album to follow.

NME raved about Marquee Moon, the debut, and was less enthusiastic about Adventure, and drooled over the live shows in England. Marquee Moon has one of the classic album covers, an "ugly" colourized photograph of the band, possibly taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, I never found the album in any Stellenbosch record shop at the time of release and my first exposure to it came many years later when I bought the CD album and was immediately smitten. Even in the late Nineties this music sounded like nothing else. One can see where a number of the contemporary "math rock" acts, and similar, would have been fans of Television. Good solid rhythm section with soaring, roaring guitars, playing off against each other and also being individualistic.

Not long after the demise of Television, Tom Verlaine released Tom Verlaine (1979) and Richard Lloyd released Alchemy (1979), on each album showcasing their respective strengths. Verlaine's album sounds pretty much like Television progressing in a slightly new direction, obviously because he is the vocalist and his guitar style dominated Television, where Lloyd's songs fall in to the classic guitar pop category where melody and sweetness of lyric are paramount and not so much the intricate guitar playing of Verlaine or the latter's skewed visions.

I bought Ton Verlaine long before I ever heard the songs on Marquee Moon and I had no idea whether Verlaine's solo sound was basically the same or radically different. Now, having compared the two records, I would say that the solo album is somewhat lighter in mood and tone and funnier where Marquee Moon is pretty much a serious art rock statement. The angular guitar playing and jerky rhythms are present and correct on both albums and there is a continuity for this reason but it seems that Verlaine was having more fun with his solo debut than he'd had with his band, although it might have something to do with the brittle nerves of making your first record versus making your third and without the tensions a band may have that are no longer present when you are the one and only guy, not merely the leader of a band but the solo artist.

Tom Verlaine, the musician and the album, surprised me. From the NME writing on the banc I had a very different, harsher and more uncompromising sound in mind than the actual very approachable and entertaining music on Tom Verlaine. The style might have been at odds with current fashions for punk and New Wave and even contemporary hard rock and metal but it was not so oblique or obscurest that one could not enjoy it on a visceral level as a superior pop record.

Tracks like "Souvenir From A Dream," "Flash Lightning," "Red Leaves" and Breakin' In My Heart" are melodic pop songs with emotional centres. The songs had tunes and choruses and smart lyrics. The only odd thing was Verlaine's voice. He is not the greatest of singers, perhaps in the same way that Jimi Hendrix was more of a guitarist than a vocalist, and yet he does impart the depth the songs need to bring them across. The slightly weird intonations of his singing voice serve songs like "Yonki Time" and "Mr Bingo" which sound like joke songs with a sinister edge. Verlaine's cracked, slightly off pitch voice make them more than they may be. In the hands of a proper vocalist these tunes could have been obvious jokes. On this album they sound as serious, in a quirky, sarcastic way, as anything else on the record.

The band plays tough and Verlaine plays his patented angular, nog-blues based guitar parts with fluent dexterity, illustrating that this new model for a guitar hero may not sound like Eddie van Halen or Joe Perry, to name but two contemporaries, and yet has about the same intensity and power as thy could muster. Perhaps Tom Verlaine never was and never would be a technically masterful guitarist and that is probably not the point. In metal complicated guitar parts are often an end in themselves, to show of the astounding technical skills of the guitar player; in Tom Verlaine's style of music the guitar parts complement the song and are not specifically meant to be separated from the song as a component to be heard or enjoyed separately

Tom Verlaine is one of my favourite Seventies albums, and dovetails nicely with Marquee Moon, and deserves classic status. If I remember correctly I bought at least one more Verlaine album though I am not even sure which one it was and it certainly did not make as much of an impact as the debut album. It is perhaps for this reason or perhaps simply because the records were not readily available that I never made an effort to build up a Verlaine collection and even now I cannot imagine myself going to great lengths to find whatever else there is out there.

Let me just bask in the happy memories of the one album by Tom Verlaine that I truly enjoy and appreciate and not run the risk of being relatively disappointed by his other releases. Provided it is a good one, there is nothing wrong with sticking with just the one hit of a one hit wonder. For the same reason there is nothing wrong with sticking with one excellent release from an artist who has had a long career, as long as that one release is above average and represents a time and a place that can never be replicated anyway. Tom Verlaine is that kind of record.

Neil Young revisited

I've never been interested in collecting Bob Dylan albums beyond John Wesley Harding (1967), although I did buy the last five of the last six, from Time Out Of Mind (1997) to Tempest (2012), where I used to make an effort, not so much lately though, to keep up with the contemporary releases of Neil Young through all of the decades of his career. In fact I own more Neil Young albums than Bob Dylan albums.

Young has not necessarily released high quality music all the way through his career. Silver & Gold (2000), for example, is pretty crap and I am dubious about Prairie Wind (2005), but on the whole his music from, say, 1980 to the mid-Nineties, is more interesting and captivating than most of Dylan's releases over the same period.

Anyhow, I have not kept up with Neil Young's releases after Mirror Ball (1995), the collaboration with elements of Pearl Jam. Unplugged (1992)
had its moments but Harvest Moon (1992) left me cold, especially the banal lyrics. How it could have even considered as anything like a substantive follow-up to Harvest (1972) is still beyond my ken.

Even the big guitar workouts on Sleeps With Angels (1994) dragged somewhat. After Mirror Ball I lost interest and skipped all of the new records released in the new millennium. I bought the Live at Fillmore East set with Crazy Horse and the Live At Massey Hall set, both of which are part of the Neil Young Archives series, mostly because I was keen on the early poetic Young and the early rocking Young.

During a UK holiday in 2012 I bought Zuma (1975) and Le Noise (2010), the older album being a mostly a typical mid-Seventies Neil Young album, and the first recorded with newly reconstituted Crazy Horse after the death of Danny Whitten. Le Noise features an experimental Young playing solo electric and acoustic guitars, which, as oddball, experimental concept, would perhaps have fitted right in with the "unrepresentative" music of the Geffen years. Le Noise does not blow me away and I am thankful that the album is short.

Zuma is much more to my taste. Stupid as it may be as a viewpoint, the Neil Young of the Seventies quite simply wrote far better songs because he was younger and full of some kind of poetic vision which became duller and more prosaic as he got older, more mature and less visceral.

I've recently become a bit of a belated convert to iTunes. I'd browsed in it before, particularly the US iTunes Store, to search how many classic albums were available and then, when the South African iTunes Store came online, started browsing that one too. It was here that I found so many cheap albums, again mostly of acts I'd either once owned records of or had always wanted to own records of, that I started going slightly crazy. The variety was huge and the prices compared to buying CDs in Musica were stupidly affordable to the extent where one could bankrupt oneself.

The other factor is storage. I own more than a thousand CDs and most of them are in boxes in the outside room and the newer ones, bought over the last few years, overflow storage space in the lounge. Digital downloads take up no more space than the size of a laptop regardless of how many tunes you've added. Only the hard disk storage limits one.

In the iTunes Store Neil Young has a large section all to himself, mostly the albums in the canon, plus some other items. This means, for the first time in my life, that I am in the position to fill in the gaps in my Neil Young collection from the debut album Neil Young (1969) to the latest, Psychedelic Pill (2012). If I wanted to, I could own them all. Ironically Young is very caustic in his criticism of the MP3 format for providing less than 5% of the actual audio output of the recording process. He is on record as believing that music recorded with analogue technology and printed on vinyl is still the best medium for music, that digital not only sanitises but also emasculates music and that MP3 is nothing short of a Satanic plot against the very fabric of Western civilization and the quality of music. This may be so, but the unparalleled opportunity of owning music I never had the opportunity to acquire as vinyl releases, is a benefit of modern technology that I am grateful for and relish.

There is also the first massive release in the Archive series. The major good thing is that most of these albums cost around R70 and there are some, the first ones I bought that are on offer for as low as R19,99 (Re-Ac-Tor) and R24,99 (American Stars 'n Bars, Hawks & Doves, Road Rock Vol I) and If this does not represent temptation I do not know what will.

I have no idea why Re-Ac-Tor (1981) has such a bad rep with the critics. It was the last Reprise album, before the wayward weirdness of the Geffen years, and followed on Hawks & Doves (1980), which followed Rust Never Sleeps with which Young ended the first decade of his solo career on a highlight of note.

The complaint was that Re-Ac-Tor was just a collection of jams, like "T-Bone" with repetitive, nonsensical lyrics and pretty much everything on the second side of the record just Crazy Horse country rock by rote. Why these tunes should be considered any worse than the songs on Freedom or Ragged Glory beats me. In my opinion the critics overreacted to the content of these two half decent albums because they were a considerable improvement on the basic Geffen-era Neil Young album. The very long rifferama rockers on Ragged Glory are overbearing and every bit as tedious as "T-Bone." The rockers on Re-Ac-Tor, except maybe for "T-Bone," are at least relatively concise and to the point.

It may be because Re-Ac-Tor was only the second Neil Young album I ever bought that I have such a soft spot for it but I do like it, and much more than such highly rated albums as Ragged Glory or Harvest Moon, and would defend this stance with all the passion I can muster. There tends to be a critical consensus on certain records that seems to come into existence not so much because the music is necessarily that wonderful but because the critical consensus feeds on itself and is then perpetuated by newer and younger writers who do not care to challenge the conventional truths of the genre. Regardless of how crap some Dylan albums have been over the years, you will have those who defend him as an unadulterated genius and find diamonds even in the dross. The same applies to the way Neil Young's output has been received and rated. Once some opinion has been repeated often enough, with no consideration for the actual merit, it becomes the Holy Writ and shall never be reversed or re-evaluated.

Time Fades Away (1973) and On The Beach (1974) were respectively the third and fourth Neil Young albums I owned, specifically because they were part of a Warner Brothers "twofer" reissue, perhaps because neither of them had been major commercial successes when first released. It is perhaps for this reason that both albums are particular favourites of mine and I am quite distraught that Neil Young has seen fit not to let his record company release Journey Through The Past on CD or even as part of the iTunes library. I do not understand what dire defects he sees in it. In my book ii is a fine record and easily as good as anything he's put out and a damns sight better than some.

Tonight's The Night (1975) was recorded before On The Beach yet released later, because it was too stark a contrast to the country warmth of Harvest and would scare the newly won fans away. I know about three songs off this album, the ones that were anthologised on Decade, the double CD version of which served as a neat introduction to the width and breadth of Neil Young's body of work during his first decade of solo stardom.

Well, the opening cut of the title track is certainly stripped down, stark and bare bones, and reminiscent of John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band in its simplistic strength but it is not that far removed from anything that came before, either on After The Goldrush or Harvest and if it were five minutes longer and contained a lengthy guitar solo it would fit right with "Down By The River" and "Cowgirl In The Sand." this is particularly true of "Tonight's The Night, Pt 2" that closes the album with a loose, loping two guitar duet that sounds, as the saying goes, Stonesy.

Tonight's The Night is the first of three Young albums I know of that are framed by two versions of the same song. The other albums are Rust Never Sleeps and Freedom.

Likewise, "Speaking Out" with its pedal steel guitar and country rhythm is of a piece with Harvest's finest. In the middle of the song Young calls out to Nils Lofgren by his first name and because it sounds exactly like my name, Neels, I was startled the first time I heard Neil Young apparently calling out to me. "Borrowed Tune" could be from After the Goldrush. And it so it goes. Musically there is nothing here that we've not kind of heard before or that is completely out of kilter with preceding group of studio albums, from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere to On the Beach. Oddly, Tonight's the Night seems like light relief compared to On The Beach, which was recorded second and released first.

I guess contemporary critics may have been blinded by the back story to the album and by the comparatively dark subject matter of the songs and therefore reached the consensus to pronounce this actually quite typical Neil Young record to be his long dark night of the soul. This is not so bad. Not so depressing as I've been led to believe. If not a jolly romp, then simply standard ranch stash mid-Seventies rocking Neil Young. Having listened to the album a few times now, I am of the opinion that it is one of the masterpieces in the Young canon and a fitting part of that great run of records from Everyone Knows This is Nowhere to Hawks & Doves.

In context Zuma also makes more sense now and is less of a let-down than it was when I first trawled through it. Rock critics took themselves very seriously in the late Sixties and Seventies, especially when dealing with the iconic acts of the era who supposedly had something more to say than just rocking out.

Neil Young was not only a rocker but a "rock poet" rocker and his records were deemed to merit closer scrutiny than that of, say Kiss or Aerosmith, yet if one examines the lyrics they are not always poetical or even very deep. I often think that Young relies to mine significance from the banal minutiae through vocal inflection and tune rather than from the intrinsic value of what he is saying on the surface. The younger version of the artist, the folk poet version, obviously did make an effort to write lyrics that were as oblique as any rock poetry of the time, without the wit and love of language that one associates with Bob Dylan, and made his reputation as one who does not write stupid pop lyrics. However, as Young got older and perhaps found it harder to write eloquent words, he increasingly turned to banality and the mundane, perhaps to prove a point, perhaps simply because he was now old enough to have learnt that one can say what one wants to say without hiding behind metaphors or allusions and elipticism.

So, to get back to my earlier point about Tonight's The Night, it seems to me that this record does not stick out like sore thumb in the Neil Young Seventies canon, as the conventional wisdom seems to have it. The music is as exhilarating a mix of tough rock 'n roll, country and folky sentimentality as can be found on any of the Seventies albums. The lyrical concerns and themes might be more gloomy and doomy but I still do not see how these songs are in any way more depressing or doom-laden and obsessed with death and decay than anything that has come before. I am writing with the benefits of having heard not only the preceding albums but also the ones that followed, which would not have been the case with the writers who critiqued Tonight's The Night when it was released. They could compare it only with what had come before, yet even in that limited context the album simply seems like a variation on a theme that had been well established since the start of the solo career.

Revisionism is a curse word and anathema, I suppose, to the very serious, articulate guys who wrote about Neil Young in the Seventies, or even later, but I would suggest that it is apposite in any artist's long career to take a long, hard, good look at that artist's oeuvre some thirty or forty years down the line to make a proper assessment of particular records and artistic moves with the benefit of the overview as opposed to the blinkered contemporary view. Of course, given that Rolling Stone, for example, is something of a publication of record, I will not expect it to discard the views of its writers from the past. Many of those views have been cast in stone (pun not intended) in the Rolling Stone Record (Album) Guide that has seen a number of editions over the years without material re-evaluation of opinions from earlier editions.

Writers who come later tend simply to rely on the standard view and repeat and reinforce it seemingly without critically listening to the subject matter.

Anyhow, on to American Stars 'n Bars (1977). The first batch of tunes follow the Neil Young country rock template with jaunty rhythms and sweet tunes, and lyrics of little consequence, underpinned and somehow elevated by Ben Keith's pedal steel guitar, and the backing vocals of Nicolette Larson and Linda Ronstadt. Young's youthful whine is the saving grace on the tunes. Thirty years later the same thing would grate. "Bite the Bullet" is the first proper rocker, a bit of a false alarm as it is followed by "The Star of Bethlehem" which sounds like a practice run for Harvest Moon. "Will to Love" is legendarily about Neil masturbating in front of a fire while ruminating on salmon swimming upstream. Nice folk ditty. This dream is followed by the equally legendary "Like A Hurricane" in a version, according to Robert Christgau, that is a pale imitation of the live version that could be heard on the Stills-Young tour that preceded the release of the album. Well, the album version is pretty damn fine and transparently the big killer number on the record. "Homegrown" is a bit of a doggerel sea shanty, elevated by its rock and roll punch and ends the album on an elevated mood.

My take on American Stars 'n Bars is, with this release, that Neil Young is entering the realm of albums that are mostly anodyne and slight, with two or three standout tracks, all the more significant in the context of the undistinguished company they keep. Most of the tunes on the record are okay and quite pleasant but one has the sneaking feeling that they would not have been so esteemed if it had not been for their good fortune of being Neil Young compositions. Neil Young has said he writes songs only when he has to and it is a pity that albums like this seem to epitomise this approach. A songwriter of his quality and pedigree cannot help but come up with really great tunes on a regular basis but the strike rete seems to be 5 middle-of-the-road songs for each gem.

This album could also represent a holding pattern for Neil Young to prepare for the next two records, Comes A Time (1978) and Rust Never Sleeps (1979), to enable him to clear the decks, get a breather and reinvigorate himself. There is definitely a sense of re-invention and rejuvenation about Rust Never Sleeps. As of writing this I've not heard Comes A Time as a complete album. Some of the tracks were played on South African rock radio at the time and the country / folk style was not exactly to my taste. Perhaps I should buy it now, seeing as how I'm finally catching up on the other Seventies albums.

Although I loved Rust Never Sleeps I was never keen on buying Live Rust at the time of its release mostly because of the acoustic, folk-type songs on the first side. Tunes like "I Am A Child" and "Sugar Mountain" just sounded awfully twee to me, like kid's songs, and when I was in my early twenties this style of music was furthest from my interest. The live show also seemed to be heavy on country-ish songs that did not appeal. In contrast, the acoustic songs on Rust Never Sleeps at least sounded sonically robust and the electric tunes on the second side of the record rocked out brutally.

I bought Live Rust eventually in 2012 during one of the typical trawls through HMV that I did when visiting England. On this holiday I also bought, if I am not mistaken, Le Noise (2010) and Zuma. I'd heard parts of Live Rust somewhere during the Eighties and so was not totally unfamiliar with the material on the record and it was in effect almost like encountering an old, long lost affection. I was older and more relaxed about Neil Young's folky fancies and the rock songs still rocked like hurricanes.

The concert ends with a series of fiery renditions of the classic Young rockers from "Cortez the Killer" to "Powderfinger" to "Like A Hurricane" to "My. My, Hey, Hey (Into the Black)" with a positively crackling version of "Tonight's The Night." The two studio versions of this song, specifically the second take, on the eponymous album are pretty much a master class in the tension and release of great rock and roll and as I have remarked above, the second version would have made a great live workout for two lead guitars. The live cut on Live Rust lacks the sparring partner of a second guitarist foil that Young had in Nils Lofgren on the live-in-studio performances of the song, Here Neil Young is left to his own devices to dig deep and extract the pain and misery of the song while Frank Sampedro just chugs along on rhythm. Wonderfully, it transpires that this live version of "Tonight's the Night" is built on a riff very similar to the "Peter Gunn Theme."

Young repeated this electric set, or a variation thereof, on the Weld double live album of the early Nineties and it would be instructive to listen to the two concert recordings back to back. At the time of Weld Young was past 45 and had experienced a resurgence in creativity and critical acclaim with Ragged Glory. I have not listened to Weld in a while but my recollection is that the songs tend to go on a bit too long, wonderful for fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse's on stage rapport but a tad wearying for the home listener. The versions of the same songs on Live Rust are more or feel more concise and therefore more powerful, and obviously the interpretations are rather fresher than they would be ten or more years, and many shows, later.

Year of the Horse and Road Rock Vol 1 (2000) are later live sets, the first a double, and the second a single CD, covering some of the same old ground that one would expect any old rocker to do late in their career, namely the best known and best loved songs. At least one can say that there is little duplication from live album to live album though "Cowgirl in the Sand" remains a perennial jam, a true classic from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), and the template for the big guitar rock Neil Young and Crazy Horse have made famous. Of course I like both albums and this is the type of Neil Young music I prefer listening to rather than most of the country of folk styles. The softer, milder songs tend to have twee trite lyrics that grate all the more for the quietness of the music. When the band rocks out I do not listen to what the singer is telling me in verse but concentrate on the guitar, bass and drums.

I have recently bought Americana (with Crazy Horse) (2012) as a CD album. The somewhat odd high concept is that Young and band do their versions of well-known tunes from the American songbook, essentially by rocking them the Crazy Horse way. As an experiment it works, as a good rock album it works too. Whether there is any point or deep significance to these remakes is doubtful. This smacks of Young not necessarily having any new material yet feeling a need to make music with Crazy Horse that is not simply a retread of the Young canon. On the other hand, maybe Neil Young wants to reclaim some of the old, weird America to prove its relevance for today or maybe it's the same thing as recording non-copyright material to save on costs yet have new product. The terrible thing, for me, is that Neil Young has released so many albums that the impact they make is diluted. It may be because I've lived with them for longer that the older, mostly Seventies albums but also some from the Eighties, have songs I know and treasure unlike the newer albums, where none of the songs have made any lasting impact. I simply believe that he no longer writes important songs with legs and long shelf life. Neil Young no longer speaks to a peer group that is young; he is in his late sixties and has the concerns of a person of that age and cannot hope really to relate to or represent young people in the way he did forty years ago.

So, although I do have had a deeper interest in the music of Neil Young, than Bob Dylan, in the sense of a comprehensive collection of the music, I doubt that I will ever own, or want to own, every album Young has ever recorded. I would not mind listening to them all at least once without having to pay for the privilege. On the other hand, if they are cheap enough I might well buy them all on iTunes.

Elmore James

When I started fooling around on the guitar I had a really cheap, fucked up instrument with a plywood body and a neck that was loose and skew so that the strings were really high off the frets, making it difficult and painful to attempt to play chords. Because I was heavily into blues the solution was to play slide guitar, or at least my untutored take on it, using a piece of metal tubing I found in our garage.

At that point I had read about slide guitar but had no clue of the technique required or the chord structure or progressions of any music, much less the blues. I was just making a noise in my room, approximating what I heard on record without knowing what I was doing or was supposed to be doing.

My main influence, or source, was the Elmore James style slide tunes played by the early Fleetwood Mac, who played "Shake Your Moneymaker" and "Dr Brown" and the like, which were either James tunes or slide blues in the style of James. The basic Elmore James slide riff, as epitomised by "Dust My Broom", is a powerful, almost primitive thing, completely unlike the much more subtle work of, say, Ry Cooder or Duane Allman, and could be unbelievably exciting backed by a stomping shuffle, with our without horn riffs. My version of it was simplistic and obviously way off the mark. I just had no idea of how to imitate that signature slide lick.

The closest I got to it was when I recorded some of my attempts on a very cheap cassette recorder with low battery strength. The result was a distorted, over amped sound that made my cheap acoustic sound electric and vibrant. It was the best thing I ever recorded back then. Much later I read how the Rolling Stones employed much the same technique in recording songs like "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" where the guitars are acoustic and it is the method of recording through a small tape recorder that gives the music the big sound. Apparently, in the case of Elmore James, his signature sound was at least partly due to the fat that he was playing an amplified hollow body guitar and not a straightforward electric guitar.

A couple of years into my record collection I took stock and realised that I could probably fill both sides of a C90 cassette tape with various versions of "Dust My Broom" taken from a number of records in that collection. It was perhaps a project I should have attempted but somehow never did. This song did seem to be ubiquitous in blues recordings. I could have started with the Robert Johnson version from King of the Delta Blues Singers and ended, at that time, with the ZZ Top take on the venerable classic on Deguello. It's a pity that Elmore, who claimed to have written the song, did not live long enough to be able to live off the royalties.

Jeremy Spencer of the blues version of Fleetwood Mac made an entire career out of imitation the slide and vocal styles of Elmore James and I must confess that these rambunctious slide workouts, particularly on the Blue Horizon double album Fleetwood Mac: The Vintage Years, were the tasty little numbers, more than the introspective Peter Green compositions, that made Fleetwood Mac my top favourite White blues band. The signature raucous Elmore James style reminded me of what someone said about Albert King: the riffs are basic and limited and basically you know from tune to tune exactly what you're going to get but, damn, each time the ferocity of the attack is just stunning and awesome. George Thorogood is another example of a young White blues musician who was obviously in thrall to the Elmore James style (although not exclusively) when he started out.

Nor everything that James recorded was an imitation of "Dust My Broom" although there plenty variations on this theme, and if one listens to a collection of tracks from James one is pleasantly surprised by the variety in rhythm and texture.

One of the reasons why Elmore James ranks amongst the all-time top ten, if not top five, of bluesmen is that so many of his compositions are standards recorded by so many other bluesmen and women down the years. "Dust My Broom" is only one of many. Just off the top of my head there are also "It Hurts Me Too," "The Sky Is Crying," "Stranger Blues," "Got To Move," "Bleeding Heart" and "Shake Your Moneymaker." Elmore's big, tough, raw voice was one of the most impassioned in blues. It was nothing like the watchful, deceptive calm of the Muddy Waters approach and in its very tortured extreme Elmore made Howlin Wolf sound like a lounge singer. Perhaps not really, but Elmore's passion seemed born of deep hurt whereas Wolf's passion seemed born of tough defiance.

It would be odious to rank blues people into a top ten or into a hierarchy but if one were to do that Elmore would comfortably fit into that top ten, perhaps even the top five. He was that good and that important. No blues collection of any worth could fail to have at least one good, broad ranging compilation of Elmore James tunes.

 

J Geils Band revisited

Live: Full House (1972) was my full scale introduction to the J Geils Band as a smart, snappy, rumbustious R & B and blues based rock and roll band. That was around 1978 or 1979. I first took note of them, though, when "I Must Of Got Lost" from the 1974 album Nightmares … And Other Tales From The Vinyl Jungle received a fair amount of airplay on Radio 5 (as it then was) in 1975 when it took over from LM Radio as South Africa's rock radio station. This tune was considerable different to the crowd pleasing R & B styles of the live album. It was still R & B bur not the gut bucket variety that caught my attention in the first place and rather a smoother more soulful mid-Seventies version with less brio and more soulfulness, the kind of pathos that is eminently suited to a heartbreak ballad.

The lines "you never see love coming but you always see it go" was quite inspirational to me, who had not even see love go yet and had definitely not seen it coming either.

Anyway, this song was the only J Geils tune that was played on local rock radio, as far as I knew, until "Centerfold" became a massive hit in 1981. I did not even know from album "I Must of Got Lost" came and in fact, until I saw the spelling on the album cover, I thought the song was called "I Must've Got Lost." At the time my knowledge of American slang was sketchy.

I guess it must have relatively soon after I acquired Live: Full House that Nightmares popped up in a bargain bin at a Stellenbosch record store and I bought partly because it was the J Geils Band and partly because it had "I Must of Got Lost" and "Stoop Down #39" on it. I had fond memories of the former and I knew that "Stoop Down" was a harp blues classic and guessed that this was a version of it.

On first listen I was somewhat disappointed because the high energy and brio of Live: Full House was just not there and at the time, when I was in my late teens of very early Twenties, I did not care all that much for soulful White R & B. "I Must of Got Lost" was the killer, and "Stoop Down #39" was as great as I had hoped and "Detroit Breakdown" was a strong opener but the title track was a brief skit and "Funky Judge" was a joke that did not make me laugh all that much.

I think it was Robert Christgau who remarked of the J Geils Band, and possibly particularly when reviewing Nightmares, that it is always a danger sign when the keyboard player in a rock and starts contributing the lion's share of songs. Keyboard player tend to have musical pretences guitar player do not have and want to make more ambitious music, often also more precious and pretentious music. On Nightmares is certainly seemed as if J Geils' fiery guitar playing had been downplayed in favour of the keyboard driven soul grooves.

Over time, after repeated listening and probably as my musical tastes broadened, Nightmares began sounding a lot better and even quite enjoyable if not as viscerally pleasing as Live: Full House, still one of my top ten favourite albums of all time. I spent good money on importing this album and the J Geils Band Anthology double CD from the USA back in 2005 and waited until 2013 and a very good price on iTunes before I bought Nightmares again.

This time around, perhaps because of the nostalgic rush of revisiting of an album I'd not listened to in a very long time, the record does sound damn fine. The rhythm section is tough, J Geils does spank that plank with a satisfactory degree of thoroughness, Magic Dick is still the master of the lickin' stick, Peter Wolf sings the hell out of the songs that are in truth strictly top drawer. In short, I'm loving this record again.

Many years after buying Live: Full House and Nightmares, I went on a bit of a J Geils spree when a couple of their records in Vibes Music second hand record store and I bought The Morning After, Love Stinks and Showtime! The first LP of the three was in a bad state and I could not really play it. And, also, by the time I bought The Morning After my turntable was not working too well anymore. The condition of the other albums was good enough for me to be able to tape them onto C90 cassette tapes and listen to them that way.

The later period J Geils band was a good time late Seventies R & B infuse rock band with a good deal of energy and some decent tunes. The music was not nearly as visceral as the Live: Full House set but every album represented a decent effort at making a pop music with some more smarts than the usual dumb stuff on AM radio. I must admit though, that I would not have paid much attention to that style of music when the albums were contemporary releases because they did not rock enough in the way I liked to be rocked back then.

This also applied to Nightmares, which I bought purely because it was the J Geils Band and because it was cheap. And probably because "I Must Of Got Lost" was on it. I would never have paid the full price for that kind of record. It just was not loud and fast enough for me. Fortunately Nightmares kind of grew on me over time, like the slow songs on It's Only Rock 'n Roll, which I also disliked at first and eventually liked most of all, apart from the title track and "Ain't Too Proud To Beg." In the same way the generally slower tunes on Nightmares also became good friends by and by. It was also due to a degree of musical maturity that had kicked in by then, that I could buy and appreciate the later albums in die J Geils oeuvre, like Love Stinks, which more or less carry on in the sophisticated R & B vein of Nightmares, before the somewhat slicker Eighties pop reinvention of Freeze Frame.

I recently watched a YouTube clip of a section of a 1972 show of the J Geils Band, around the time Live: Full House was recorded, of a medley of "Floyd s Hotel", a Peter Wolf jive novelty number, and "Hard Driving Man," another version of which is on Live: Full House although some of Wolf's vocal antics are a tad over the top and too much like old fashioned huckstering and showbiz, perhaps knowingly so, the performance is high energy and a good visual complement to the live album. The quality of the black and white clip is often poor and every now and then truly odd psychedelicisms pop up, as if 1967 was still alive and well for a fairly non-psychedelic band, but somehow the weirdness fits in well with the music and the performance. It is a blast from the past and it looks so dark and primitive it could be from the archives of the Fifties or earlier. Peter Wolf's neatly coiffed beard gives away that the band is very much early-Seventies, New York hip; not quite the scruffy hippie bears of the late Sixties.

The oddest thing, though, is that Peter Wolf straps on a foam rubber guitar that he plays with while he performs the two tunes on the clip. He doesn't go air guitar crazy with it and that is really the weird part. Why does he have this faux guitar if he is not going to make a feature of it? Having said that, the performance is full of pure, nervous high energy similar to what one hears on Live: Full House. Whereas the prog rock bands of the era simply stood on stage, possibly not even engaging with their audiences and simply getting on with the job of replicating the most recent album, the J Geils Band sweated, jived, hustled and delivered a high octane show that truly entertained the fans who were there to jive too and not simply to stand watching the noodling musicians on the stage.

 

J Geils Band (1970) and The Morning After (1971) provide the material for Live: Full House and are probably the first and last sightings of the band as the tough, gritty and unvarnished White R & B band that first live album celebrates. Three years later the band was a known entity with ambitions to hit singles and career longevity. Progression is the watchword for serious ambitious bands, and was particularly big in the Seventies but in many cases progression means that technical ability improves at the expense of raw energy and passion. Some of this is true for J Geils Band too though they made pretty decent albums all the way through the Seventies and into the early Eighties. Freeze Frame proves my point, I think, in that the album is smooth, sophisticated and has the hits yet almost feels like joke record; music made with the tongue firmly in the cheek and with a knowing smirk, more so than even the younger jive talking Peter Wolf would have let on. There is no longer any sense that the Boston bad boys are keeping it real in any way whatsoever. Now the swagger has become a mannerism where once it was an expression of youthful vigour and insouciance.

This is why one should not be an unhappy that any band made just one damn good record and why, in the main, there is no real need to own every album made by any artist, however legendary they may be. No-one is infallible and no-one can make one compelling record after another for 40 or fifty years.

J Geils Band will always be one of my top bands of all time, and Live; Full House will always be my number one Geils album and will always be in my list of all-time favourites.

 

 

Free, at long last.

It was possibly in my Standard 9 year in High School that a couple of the guys in my class had a discussion about their favourite rock bands. At the time my knowledge of the past and present of rock music was still pretty sketchy, based mostly around the book The Story of Rock and the first two volumes of The Encyclopaedia of Rock, which respectively dealt with the big names of the day (mid-Seventies) and the rockers of the Fifties and early Sixties. I was not cool or hip and had a very small record collection of probably about five albums. Eager to impress, I could only think of Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin as names to bandy about though I knew only a few Purple songs and hardly nothing of Led Zeppelin. Fortunately nobody quizzed to on my knowledge.

In any event, a couple of other names were mentioned, that I knew, and then Dion Kriel mentioned that his all-time favourite band was a group called Free. He did not expand or elaborate. I had never heard of Free and thought that he was making it up. What kind of and name is Free anyway?

Bad Company had recently become big with their first two albums but it was a while before I found out that lead singer Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke had originally been members of Free, along with guitarist Paul Kossoff and bassist Andy Fraser. I'd read about Fraser in Hit Parader as bassist for English band Sharks, and knew that Kossoff had been in a band called Back Street Crawler, had all kinds of drug troubles and died young.

"Wishing Well" (from the 1973 album Heartbreaker) was the first Free song I ever heard. It seemed to be given a bit or airplay on Radio 5. It sounded pretty much like standard mid-Seventies hard rock to me. It was a good few years before I finally heard "All Right Now" (1970) the stone cold killer classic Free cut that has been a hit on more than one occasion, mostly because it was licensed to some television commercials in the Nineties, both in South Africa and elsewhere.

Although a couple of best of compilations were available I never actually wanted to spend money on the band. I had listened to a enough Bad Company songs to realise that it was not that great of a band and that it's hard rock was close to cliché and my attitude was, if Paul Rodgers was the singer for Bad Company, then Free would not really be that much better, apart from the few well known songs.

Over time I read more about Free and learnt that the band started out in the late Sixties as a typical blues band, although the band members were very young, and that Kossoff had been rated as one of the best, most tasteful blues and hard rock guitarists of his time. Their trademark was the slow burning track, of which "All Right Now" is a perfect example. The band broke up and reconvened and the two different phases, of which "All Right Now" and "Wishing Well" are good examples, gave us in effect two different bands with the same name.

For a long time I had a cassette with "Songs of Yesterday" on it, apparently some demo version of the tune off the Free album (1968), that was a another slow burning, piano led song that was quite impressive except for the somewhat stupidly pretentious lyrics.

In June 2014 I found the compilation CD Classic Free (part of a series such as Classic Lynyrd Skynyrd, Classic Status Quo and Classic Mötley Crüe) with a 15 track overview of the Free oeuvre. This was the first time I'd heard their versions of Albert King's "The Hunter" and "My Brother Jake," "Fire and Water" and "Mr Big." It seems that the best free tracks over their career are present and correct here.

In general Free makes the kind of music I am quite fond of and this collection is a fine sampler. It's a pity "Songs of Yesterday" is absent and I do not think that I am now going to be tempted into the original albums. If these songs are the best of the bunch than I'll be satisfied with them, as there is a sense of enough is enough when the final track, "Mr Big," fades out. It's been enjoyable but not particularly compelling. Not like the Lynyrd Skynyrd or Status Quo sets.

Having said that more time spent with the music revealed some subtleties I had missed the first time around and the undulating groove of the rhythm section and the fierce lead guitar made more of an impression even if some of the lyrics still sound a tad trite and glibly "poetic." Free was a band to be reckoned with and the hits on the Classic Free compilation represent an excellent introduction to one of the slightly forgotten hard rock, as opposed to metal, pioneers? Free did not just boogie and they did not play Southern juke joint rock and roll either? There seems to be more, for better or worse, a more thoughtful approach to how one could integrate blues into rock to avoid some of the terrible clichés so many of their contemporaries were trapped in.

Presumably It is far from hip to like Free nowadays but I am glad I took the plunge for fork out R39,99 for this compilation to remind me a little of my ignorant youth and to bring me the enjoyment of the best Free had to offer.

 

 

 

The Dictators

I have to confess that I first bought the New Musical Express because it had a cover feature on Fleetwood Mac at the time of the Fleetwood Mac album that was the commercial breakthrough for the Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks incarnation of the band. The second issue of NME that I bought related the notorious television appearance of the Sex Pistols on the Bill Grundy show, where he made a drunken pass at Siouxsie Sioux and invited s swearing response from the Pistols. At the time it caused immense outrage in the British media, and hence amongst the repressed middle classes, that at the same time brought UK punk, which had been going for a year or two already, into the limelight and made the members of the Pistols recognisable faces about London. From this time forward punk was a big thing and effectively the only thing in British rock for a while.

The NME covered not only the UK punk acts but also the more prominent US punk rockers, from a scene, principally in New York, that predated the UK punk explosion and influenced it. The NME adored the Ramones, made Debbie Harry of Blondie the punk sex goddess, and elevated Television and the Talking Heads to the level of the intellectual leaders of the New York rockers.

Even before I was an NME regular I was an avid follower of the US rock monthly Hit Parader. The first issue I bought in 1975 featured the then fresh and burgeoning New York punk scene with the aforementioned Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, Richard Hell's Heartbreakers, Wayne County, The Miami's, and others, who gigged and released records yet never became as famous as the big names.

The NME also had sympathies for a generation of "lost" bands who predated and influenced the punk scene, such as The Stooges and Big Star; the conceptual descendants of the Nuggets style punk originators from the Northwest of the USA, such as The Dictators; and the newer metal groups like Cheap Trick who were faster and sharper than the dinosaurs of heavy metal.

The NME writers had an obsession with perfect pop. This was not the disco pop flooding the airwaves and that ruled the discotheques. It was defined as perfect rock and roll. According to the NME the Ramones were the very epitome of perfect pop. There was another band that was seen in pretty much the same light and that band was The Dictators who were in fact forerunners of the New York punk scene and the Ramones and in a way initially closer in spirit to Cheap Trick than to the punks.

The Dictators were led by rock critic Andy Shernoff and its first lead guitarist was Ross "The Boss" Funicello (or Friedman) who founded extreme metal band Manowar when he left The Dictators. More weirdly, the wrestler Handsome Dick Manitoba sang lead on some songs on the first two albums and eventually became the band's only lead singer.

Go Girl Crazy! (1975) was The Dictators' debut album and is a fine example of a band with songs awash with hard rock chops, pop smarts and humour. There even a smokin' version of "California Sun," recorded by The Ramones on their second album.

From opening track "Next Big Thing" to closing track "(I Live For) Cars and Girls" this album is a blast. Short, sharp and entertaining. Although the songs are not limited to sub-3 minute blasts, there are only 9 tracks on the album, even fewer than the standard of 60's albums. Handsome Dick does various intros and takes co-lead vocals on "I Got You Babe" and is the only singer on his boastful anthem "Two Tub Man." The band rocked real hard and sounded like they were having fun too. I guess The Dictators and early Cheap Trick were both kind of hard rockers who avoided the cliché of heavy metal bombast and sludge in favour of tunes and the rock and roll spirit, and saw no reason why lyrics should be po'faced or just dumb.

The Dictators were about teenage fun and excess and made no bones about it. Yet it was a knowing kind of excess. Most of the tunes on the album were originals, but they did "California Sun" and brought a whole new sensibility to "I Got Me Babe," the Sonny and Cher hit.

There was a bit of a gap between Go Girl Crazy! and the follow up Manifest Destiny (1977). This in turn was followed by Blood Brothers (1978.) The advent of punk and New Wave obviously gave the band a second shot at a career based on their status as prophets in the wilderness who were ahead of their time. These albums were still not very successful, and were not highly rated, and then the band disappeared off my radar because the NME stopped taking an interest in the band. The second and third albums never showed up in any of the record stores I haunted.

In due course I also bought the CD version of Go Girl Crazy! It was definitely worth duplicating. Yet I still never came across the other albums even on CD. It was only when I trawled through iTunes that I found the two records and at bargain prices too.

iTunes is one amazing record store for someone who still has a keen, if oddly nostalgic, interest in the records I could never listen to in my youth, although I devoured the reviews, because they were simply not available to me. It is also good for helping me replace in digital format certain vital records I once used to own.

Anyhow, I now own the first three Dictators albums as digital albums.

Of course I rate Go Girl Crazy! highly not only because it is a damn fine album but also because it is a record I got into when I was in my late teens when such things really matter. In the first years of collecting records I had so few records that I got to know each one individually really well. I could not buy as many records as I would have liked because I did not have the funds and anyway there was a limited choice. Now I have enough money to buy pretty much what I want when I want and it is impossible to develop the same kind of attachment to any record. There is just not enough time or opportunity to listen the albums as often as I used to do.

Having said that, I still believe that Go Girl Crazy! is that rare beast of an album with no weak track on it. Each and every one has a great hook, strong playing and lyrics that are smart and funny.

The two year break between die debut album and Manifest Destiny does not seem to have done the band much good. This second album was released after New York punk broke out and after the UK punk explosion, in fact it was released during the rise of New Wave that followed punk in the UK. In a way Manifest Destiny seems to be aimed at that New Wave audience. In America these bands were typified by thin young men in skinny jeans, unconstructed jackets and skinny ties. Presumably the Dictators were too old school and punk (in the New York sense) to go for that look. They did adapt the music somewhat to tone the rock and to emphasise the pop and somehow the lyrics are no longer funny and knowing.

The album ends with a rather flat live version of the Iggy Pop classis "Search & Destroy" sung by Handsome Dick. It is as good an example as any of the lack of real power in this version of the band. The increased proficiency does not raise the level of commitment and excitement.

The snotty teenage arrogance is gone, replaced by older and wiser twenty-something attitude. Not altogether in a good way. The tunes are still there. The pop smarts are intact. It is the insouciance that is sorely missed.

If one can say that the Dictators were one of the influences on British punk and New Wave, then Blood Brother is probably heavily indebted to that punk breakthrough with strong echoes of the Ramones leavened through the fast, heavy rock style of the album. Handsome Dick is the undisputed lead singer and no longer the comic relief, so to speak, that he was on Go Girl Crazy. Unfortunately Andy Shernoff's snotty punk tones are more interesting and more appealing. On Blood Brothers the band rocks hard, with plenty guitar solos yet even the high energy of the songs cannot quite drag the album into the reaches of excellence of the debut, from only 3 years before. If one remembers The Dictators at all, it will be for Go Girl Crazy. Both Manifest Destiny and Blood Brothers are workmanlike records that cannot be faulted for lack of work ethic and at the same time cannot be exalted for results.

The story of the MC5 is the same, except that in their case the second album of the three studio albums they released, Back in the USA, is the brilliant record. Debut album Kick Out The Jams was a strong introduction yet lacked the certain something to make it into a must-have experience, and High Time, the third album, has plenty power and presence yet lack the unique attractions of Back In The USA.

The MC5 and The Dictators (and one should include The Stooges) were prime, non-heavy band, influences on UK punk and New Wave and Power Pop mostly for one record each. We should be thankful that we have those brilliant records. It is sad for an act to be a one hit wonder or to be primarily remembered and revered for only one record, but even so, one act of visceral brilliance is better than none.

Blood Brothers closes on "Slow Death" by The Flamin' Groovies who were at the very least spiritual forebears of the original concept of The Dictators and it may have sounded like a stroke of genius to perform this homage. It certainly rocks hard enough. However I do not think that the song is done justice for the subtleties of the Groovies' version of it and what should have been a high point and rousing departure falls slightly flat for that. That is the story of The Dictators.

 

 

The Blasters

In 1983 I had never even seen or heard of the phrases "roots rock" or "Americana" that became a big genre all on its own some 20 years later. I liked blues and basic rock and roll, with a "louder, faster" rule in the ordinary course. I disliked prog rock, jazz rock, jazz funk, folk music and most Eighties electronic pop.

Principally from the beginning of 1977 to the end of 1981 and again from 1983 to about 1987, the NME was a big influence on my musical tastes and knowledge of past and present rock and pop acts and albums. Although I heard, or could buy, only a fraction of the music reviewed and mentioned in the NME I took careful note of the recommendations from the likes of Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Phil McNeil and others, for future reference should I come across the albums. Max Bell was the resident expert on American music, specifically the underground scenes forming part of or following on the New York punk bands. Quite a bit of what he championed would now probably be characterised as Americana though he did not seem to care for backwoods country inflected bands and preferred the various off-shoots of '60's and late '70's punk.

Anyhow, the NME liked The Blasters and punted them as a good example of the kind of American rock and roll that did not suck in the era of mullet haired, narrow tie wearing American New Wave. The Blasters combined the best of a cross fertilisation of American genres, from rockabilly to blues to country to testifying soul, and produced an amalgam of high energy, melodic party music that was highly satisfying. The Non Fiction (1981) album was the one that received all the praise.

Anyhow, The Blasters were another example of a band of which I knew quite a bit and had marked down as something I would be interested in, without ever coming across the records, certainly not in Stellenbosch.

Probably in 1984, after my return from two years of National Service, I saw The Blasters (1983) at a discounted price somewhere; could have been in Stellenbosch, could have been in Cape Town. I bought it though I did not know much about it. I knew the song "Marie Marie" had been a hit for Dave Edmunds, and that "Border Radio" and "American Music" were supposed to be anthemic confirmations of the celebration of American music that The Blasters were all about. No matter, the record was cheap, it was a recognisable name and I bought the thing, took it home, recorded it on a C90 cassette tape and was duly impressed when I listened to the songs. Somehow the recording process had glitched and only a part of "Marie Marie" was recorded but that was a small defect. The rest of the record blew me away.

As part of a semi-serious project to re-acquire albums (essentially the favourites) that I once owned as records and gave away, I bought The Blasters from iTunes and was impressed all over again. This album contains a cracking selection of good American rock and roll. The musicians play tough, Phil Alvin sings like a champ and the tunes are memorable and hummable and the words simple and good. It's the kind of record that brings a smile to my face and belongs up there with Live: Full House (J Geils Band), Malpractice (Dr Feelgood), In Color (Cheap Trick), Go Girl Crazy (The Dictators) and What's The Word (The Fabulous Thunderbirds) as examples of old favourite records that are wonderful, viscerally exciting and satisfying each time I listen to them.

"Marie Marie" opens the album in an impressive, high energy fashion that just makes you wanna sing along and also get up and dance. Maybe it's just good old basic rock and roll but done with such abundance of joy and accomplishment. For the rest of the album the band rollicks through rock and soul and pop, with each song being pretty much a hit on its own. It is not often that one finds a band firing on so many cylinders all at once from track to track. It is a truism that many bands bring you a couple of great tunes and a bunch of filler per album and The Blasters, like the albums I mentioned above, proves the point by the exception of its quality.

This album is a reminder of why rockabilly can be one of the most exciting styles of music ever, when done right. You got the beat, the jumpy guitars and the yelping, hiccupping vocals singing lyrics that deal with the everyday concerns of (American) teenagers, such as car and girls and having drunken fun. There are tunes and hooks and the music makes you wanna get up and dance wildly. There is a sophisticated primitivism to it and an excitement that almost defies rationality. The Blasters understand this motivation and they dig deep down into that roots bedrock. They celebrate being American, in the ways only American can do so well and with so much enthusiasm and authority, and they make us want to be American too; at least, that's how it worked for me. My favourite rock and roll time and place would have to be San Francisco between 1966 and 1967 but somewhere in a Tennessee or Texas roadhouse, with Carl Perkins on stage, in the late Fifties would be a close second. It must have been a similar blast to catch The Blasters live in the early to mid-Eighties.

The Blasters is that rarity of an album where every tune, from "Marie Marie" to final track '"Stop the Clock," is top notch, with smart lyrics, memorable tune, tough and dynamic playing and just a general groove of infectious joy. You want to listen to it on endless repeat and drive fast with the top down along some endless American highway.

 

John Mellencamp gives us “Trouble No More.”

John Mellencamp is one of my Eighties music heroes and one of the acts from that decade that means "Eighties" to me, rather than the electro pop schlock that one founds on so many Eighties collections.

I'd read of John Cougar in the NME, when he was under the wing of Tony De Fries, who once also managed David Bowie, and who was the guy who said that Mellencamp would not work as the name of a rock singer and that Johnny Cougar would be the ticket to stardom. It seemed to me that Cougar nearest peers were the likes Steve Forbert and Willie Nile, both of whom were hyped as "new Dylans" and both of whom seemed destined for obscurity after the first burst of pseudo fame. At least Forbert had a semi-successful Eighties career. I have no idea of what happened to Willie Nile.

Anyhow, John Cougar had a massive breakthrough with American Fool (1982) and the hits singles "Jack & Diane" and "Hurts So Good." Over the length of three or four albums he could do no wrong commercially and also received lots of praise for being an American heartland rocker with a bit of a social conscience. In some ways he was the Bruce Springsteen of Indiana. I was very fond of Cougar, or John Cougar Mellencamp or John Mellencamp's music and bought some of the albums in the Eighties, as records and cassettes, and bought even more of them in the Nineties as CDs. After a while the deterioration in the tunes and lyrics got to me and I stopped listening to his music all that much. For my money Uh-huh (1983) and Scarecrow (1985) are the best of the bunch.

The other day I was browsing in Musica and found a double CD called John Mellencamp: Words & Music, a collection of his best tunes for only R59,99 and I bought it. I was kind of surprised to note how many of the songs were familiar before I even played the album. Then I googled the guy to find out what he's been up to since the early Nineties when I stopped buying his albums or tracking his career. It seemed that he had never been out of the studio for long and kept touring. Probably still a major attraction in the heartland. One album name stood out, "Trouble No More" (2003), and because this sounded suspiciously like a blues trope, I investigated the album and found that it was indeed a collection of blues, with some other old-timey tunes. The album was available on iTunes, also for the quite low price of R59,99 and I bought it as well. For 15 years nothing, and then two Mellencamp albums a few days apart.

Tom Petty and John Mellencamp came up at about the same time in the late Seventies though Petty soon aligned himself with the New Wave and found kudos from the trendsetting British music press of the time. After the critical acclaim came commercial success and duets with Stevie Nicks and he became the cool rock traditionalist with a new wave head. In contrast Mellencamp seemed to be a new kind of Bob Seger, the rocker with a hear full of empathy for the working man yet without the pretentiousness of Bruce Springsteen and his claims of redemption through rock and roll.

The best part of Mellencamp's music on albums like American Fool, Uh-huh and Scarecrow was the crisp punch of the drums and the crunch of the guitars that gave a simple, yet kicking, backdrop for the words and tunes. It was not quite country, not quite blues, not quite heavy and not quite pop. It was entirely tasty and satisfactory. From The Lonesome Jubilee (1987) onward Mellencamp abandoned the rocker sound for a time, for something closer to country and country blues with bluegrass instrumentation. Unfortunately he also seemed to really aiming at being a kind of poor man's Springsteen and although I bought the albums there was a sense of diminishing returns. Big Daddy (1989) and Human Wheels (1993) were patchy and mixed some good songs with some real filler and on the latter album any gift for e big tune Mellencamp'd had once deserted him. Groove and arrangements were utilised to make good the patent lack of interesting and arresting songs and it was from this point on that I abandoned the man and his music.

The Words & Music collection reminded me just how excellent the music is and how consistent the quality is. The Eighties have been big in the nostalgia filed for far too long now, especially the crap Eighties pop that is featured in so many compilations and so often regurgitated on radio and on television. Yet somehow John Mellencamp's hits do not receive airtime at all. Greil Marcus would probably agree that there is a secret history of Eighties music and culture in general. I do not know whether he even rates Mellencamp at all, but for me John Mellencamp is part of that secret history that no-one now seems to remember or want to remember. The decade was not all about schlocky synth pop, Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Prince or Madonna. Mellencamp had a simple formula and it was effective in its way. It punched above its weight and it hit home runs, for me at least, most of the time.

"Trouble No More" is still a strange kind of album for an old rocker but then, if Aerosmith could do a "blues" album, I guess nothing should stop Mellencamp from doing one if it is a genre of music he loves. His voice is more suited to blues anyhow, more so than Steven Tyler's. In Mellencamp's case one could also see it as a mature artist's way of reconnecting with roots or simply trying on a different part to the great American songbook than the type of thing Rod Stewart has made a mini-industry of. Back in rural Indiana country must have been a huge influence and the blues is meant to be the basic building block of rock and roll. It seems that he had no great difficulty adapting his heartland roots rock and roll sound to fit the music on this blues and old American folk collection. David Johansen and the Hairy Smiths is another example of an old rocker, and a New York glam punk rocker at that, heading towards blues territory in his mature years and doing a damn fine job of unearthing some less known classics with a more acoustic driven band than that of Mellencamp.

"Stones in My Passway" with its pounding, rollicking rhythm and its fierce, slicing slide guitar sets the tone for the album. It is traditional sounding without being a slavish imitation and it is modern enough to have that sonic kick the old recordings often lacked. The same applies to "Death Letter," a tune performed by so many with so much reverence that they make it sound like a museum piece. Mellencamp imbues it with the rage and defiance the lyrics suggest the song should have.

"Johnny Hart", "Baltimore Oriole", "Teardrops Will Fall" and "Diamond Joe" fall in the category of songster narrative ballads, as much country or Cajun as they are blues and the musical style dovetails utterly with the roots style Mellencamp adopted in the mid-Eighties to emphasise his distance from the rock star style of his youth. These songs are jewels from the great American songbook of the alternative America we know so little about because it is so carefully hidden. Then you get "The End of the World" which is a proper pop song from the Sixties given new life and purpose as a hillbilly country dance swinger.

With "Down in the Bottom" Mellencamp returns to the blues, a great Howlin' Wolf tune (also known as "Running Shoes" as slightly tweaked by Juke Boy Bonner) in a version that has the signature riff and also a more country blues string band take that gives the song a saucy face lift.

"Lafayette" is more Cajun country swing and "Joliet Bound" is a songster prison song Johnny Cash could have done proud performed as a backwoods hoedown.

"John the Revelator" is the second Son House tune of the set. Where House does it as a doomy, preachy a capella, Mellencamp kicks off the tune as if it were a Creedence swamp rocker, then brings in the gospel choir while the band keeps up the swamp boogie. It is eerie, powerful and exalted all at the same time. Pretty much a perfect illustration of the theme of the song. This is a good example of how one can take a standard, like "Death Letter" cut in so many ways over the years, and having the nous to invigorate it to take it to another level.

The final cut is a sweet, tuneful political ditty called "To Washington" that shows us that John Mellencamp is still an activist with the interests of the heartland foremost in his mind.

John Mellencamp's career has run the course from would-be teen pop star to platinum rocker to introspective, thoughtful roots musician, activist and now a kind of musicologist who preserves and energises music not many people still knew about or care for. I salute him for this and, best of all, I thoroughly enjoy this music. Jif this is where he is heading in the future I will definitely follow him on the journey.

 

 

 

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Lou Reed in Memoriam 2 March 1942 to 27 October 2013

(this piece was written in November 2013)

Lou (Lewis Allan) Reed died on 27 October 2013 at the age of 71 after complications arising from a liver transplant in May 2013.

Lisa Robinson, editor of Hit Parader magazine in the mid to late Seventies, had the editorial jots for Lou Reed and seemed to feature or refer to him in just about every issue of the magazine. To her he must have seemed to be the quintessential Manhattan rocker poet and demi-urge of the demi-monde, the leader of the downtown pack and the eminence grise of everything that was dark, sleazy and exciting about the New York scene.

Lou Reed was the leader and main songwriter of the original version of the Velvet Underground and followed a solo career that was at first touched with all kinds of controversy, both musical and personal, and in due course became an elder statesman of rock. As far as I know the double album Lulu, recorded with Metallica, was his last album release and a fitting epitaph, if it were so.

Rock and Roll Animal (1974), a live album recorded with a hot, guitar heavy band, was the first Lou Reed album I bought, mostly because it was cheap and featured a bunch of well-known songs from the Velvet Underground and from the first years of the solo career. The NME (or some such publication) kind of endorsed it as not-too-bad in an odd, heavy rock kind of way. The album does sound a lot different to "Walk on the Wild Side" from Transformer (1972), which was the Albatross-like mega hit that made Lou Reed the closest thing possible to a household name for a couple of years. He had hits again but nothing to approach the jazzy tune and witty commentary of the New York underbelly of "Walk on the Wild Side." at least not until "Perfect Day," also from Transformer, became another mega hit about 30 years later as part of some charity project by a bunch of musicians who recorded a "We Are The World"-style version of it with multiple vocalists taking turns.

Rock and Roll Animal sounds like a typical mid-Seventies hard rock record with twin lead guitarists (Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner) and it has a supercharged, almost AOR rock sound Reed was not to replicate until the band he employed to record New York (1989.) The level of professionalism from the instrumentalists on this album is far removed from the ragged-sounding yet exciting grooves from the 1969 Velvets live recordings.

Two of the tracks on Rock and Roll Animal are from Berlin (1973), the very dark and different album that followed Transformer, and which possibly destroyed the popular career before it had properly taken off. Berlin has received mixed reviews over the years, has been adapted as a stage musical and is today possibly one of the great classics of Reed's oeuvre.

The other tunes on Rock 'n Roll Animal are Velvet Underground songs. At that time, and later most Reed audiences would have been far more interested in the Velvet's material than in Reed's own contemporary work. Like every rocker everywhere Lou Reed suffered from the ennui that comes with playing the same set of hits more or less every night because that is why the audience is there.

Reed released at least two more live albums before the end of the Seventies: Lou Reed Live (1975) (taken from the same set of shows as Rock 'n Roll Anima) and Live: Take No Prisoners (1978), the latter being a double album on which Reeds spoke so much, as the NME (who were no respecters of the legend) told it, that he could just as well have been doing a stand-up comedy routine interspersed with some musical interludes.

In about 1987 I bought the audio cassette album version of Mistrial (1986), also because it was cheap. There had been no incentive of curiosity over the years to make any effort to acquire more Reed product. I did buy a couple of Velvet Underground albums: a compilation of hits and the first, separate part of a live double album, and these were enough for me. I was guided by reviews of the Reed albums of the late Seventies and Eighties and none of them were very positive and certainly did not encourage me to spend money on his records. Mistrial did have some radio hits and this was the other reason why I bought it, despite the typical Eighties rock production that makes a lot of music from that era sounded to incredibly dated today. It was a pleasant collection of non-essential tunes. The Velvet Underground stuff was far superior

The oddest Lou Reed artefact I owned was the single of "Sally Can't Dance" off the eponymous album from 1974, backed by the truly tedious "Ennui," that I bought at a sale at Sygma Records simply because it was by Lou Reed. "Sally Can't Dance" is a cute, funky little ditty and "Ennui" pretty much sounds like the emotional state it describes and was almost unlistenable to me, especially in contrast to the happy bounce of the A-side.

At the time Mistrial was released Lou Reed was sufficiently acceptable to the powers that were at the SABC at that time that his music was playlisted, if not on heavy rotation, then at least to the extent that I took note of some of his current songs. It was more probably than not only Chris Prior who would have played any Reed music, on his late night show, but nonetheless. "The Original Wrapper" from Mistrial was a bit of a hit and this was mostly likely the motivation for buying the album. It is a typically brightly produced mid-Eighties album, with plenty of guitar and the sardonic style that made Reed famous and though I was not deeply enthralled by the album I was pleasantly surprised. The songs were at least entertaining, such as "Mistrial" and "Video Violence" and also a tad trite. Unfortunately the songs were so lightweight and seemed so inconsequential that the album did not get much of my attention. In keeping with my feeling about so much of the output of Seventies rockers who continued to release records in the Eighties, Reed came across as a song craftsman (which he no doubt was) who possibly enjoyed penning his ditties and pretended to have something serious to say yet was merely going through the motions required by a recording career. He sounded like a poet and heavyweight artist but it was all artifice e and put on. Not essential.

Essentially I left it there and did not pay much attention to his career in the Nineties and beyond other than reading the record reviews. The most flattering in a while were accorded New York (1989), which was on the one hand seen as a typically literate Reed memoir of his home town (as if he had not written about the city and its seedy underbelly all his life) and on the other hand gave us the return of Reed fronting a fiery guitar band. Although these reviews intrigues me at the time I could never bring myself to buy the album, mostly because it seemed to be expensive compared to whatever else was out there and because I was merely curious and not a committed fan, yet also not curious enough. When I did eventually acquire the album, it was because I found it in a Cash Crusaders shop. Even so, I have not listened to it all that much, probably because the moment for it had passed a long time ago.

For me the major Reed career event was Lulu, the double album collaboration between Metallica, who supplied the heavy riffs, and Reed, who supplied the words and vocals. It was the best work Metallica had given us in years and this time Reed, returning to the themes of death, desolation and ruination in Berlin, gave us a proper literary work. He had always used the sing-speech effect and here it is amplified to the extent where he is not really singing but narrating in a dramatic fashion. It is a long double album with some extraordinarily long tracks on it and it was, for me, a tour de force from both parties to the collaboration. Apparently not every critic thought so and many Metallica fans were not impressed. Given how rock history is written and enshrined, the latter view may be the predominant one, much in the same way that St Anger is still not well regarded, but that would be a true injustice.

The first impression of the iTunes version of Rock and Roll Animal is that the sound is clear and gloriously bright and there is none of the usual crackle and pop one had to put up with on records back in the day. These days there is a marked return, by the hipsters I guess, to the vaunted sonic wonder only a record could or can give. The records that are being pressed now should be of better quality than some of the shit I had to contend with when I did buy records and before there were CDs. Now I do not care much for vinyl anymore. I like digital precision and clarity.

The second impression, much as it was when I first heard the record, is that the band does make Lou Reed sound like something of corporate rocker. His vocal inflections and conversational style is pretty much what it was with the Velvet Underground but the crack session musicians behind him sure produce an adult contemporary rock ambience compared to the sometimes odd, tinny, edgy sound of the Velvets. "Sweet Jane" has a riff that lends itself to just about any rock setting but "Heroin" is not the bleak, doomy, terminal thing it was on the Velvet's début album. The musicians surge, drop back, build momentum, and release the tension in well-rehearsed fashion and the twin lead guitars of Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner go into anthemic, show boating mode when deemed necessary and appropriate to drive the interpretation to a climax. It is about a far away from the relative simple style of the Velvet Underground as you can get. Corporate rock per excellence and no wonder that Lou Reed would soon release Metal Machine Music in apparent career suicide or perhaps a high art concept.

This big rock sound is applied to all of the material and somehow adds a dramatic effect, probably intended, lacking in the often stark, bald statements of the studio versions of these songs. Each approach has its virtues and benefits. The Velvet Underground was not about shock as such, though the lyrics and noise could be shocking especially as contrasted to the general Zeitgeist within which the albums were released, and the deadpan, slightly amateurish renditions suited the Warhol inspired background of the band. In 1974 Lou Reed seemed to aim for an audience beyond the cult following with an exaggerated style of music that neatly fitted into your standard rock show of the decade to provide a backdrop and foil for the vivid, ostentatious rock star posing of the front man who had embraced make-up and weird hairstyles, possibly as part of his coming out gay manifesto or as identifying with the sexually and mentally confused freaks of the New York underbelly. The photograph of Reed on the album cover pretty much says it all in that respect.

From the opening "Intro" to the long, exuberant version of "Rock and Roll" that closes the album, one is treated to a smooth, professional heavy rock presentation of some of the great songs of a great maverick when compared to the studio versions of the songs, the performance may seem to be a studied, crafted, choreographed show rather than as a genuine, edgy gig. As my first exposure to some of these songs and because I quite liked the playing of the band, I enjoyed the album and on listening to it again with the benefit of clear, bright digital sound, I can confirm that I still like this record. Will I actually buy more Reed product now? I don't know. I've always wanted to hear what Berlin was all about, ever since I began reading about it and there are perhaps one or two other albums I'd be interested in at least hearing. I've got Transformer on CD and I have the Velvet's début album on CD, and I own Lulu. Perhaps these records would be enough Lou Reed for me. He may have been a contemporary of Neil Young, most of whose albums I have bought over the years, yet Reed never appealed to me in quite the same way.

After writing the above I walked into my local Musica CD store the other day and saw Lou Reed Live on the shelf and immediately took it. It is a matter of curious conjecture why this particular album was in this store. There was no other Reed album available. To my surprise and delight this CD cost me only R50 making it cheaper than an iTunes purchase.

Lou Reed Live's has fewer tracks than Rock 'n Roll Animal and its two big tracks are versions of "Walk On The Wild Side" and "Waiting For The Man" and particularly the latter version sounds a lot more like showbiz rock and roll than the pared down, yet tougher, version by The Velvet Underground. This second set of songs taken from the same shows used for Rock 'n Roll Animal seems somehow to be the B-team, which may be why they weren't released as part of the first album, which could easily have been a double live album, though this division of tracks could also simply have been a measure to make more money off the same event and it and it was some years before Frampton Comes Alive showed record companies how lucrative a double live album could be.

Where Lou Reed's early career was full of controversy and shock the later years saw him accepted and respected as an elder statesman of rock and American popular culture, not only the founder of one of the most influential bands in rock history but also an artist of deep and lasting merit. In the Seventies he was a brat; in the Nineties and beyond he was a mature, considered creative talent. After his death there was the usual outpouring of grief and eulogies from friends and colleagues, none of whom are going to speak ill of the dead. This is the time to re-read the contemporary takes on the man from rock writers like Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Robert Christgau and the other young guns of the time. Quite a lot of the critical perspective was absolutely less than flattering and some of it was vituperative. By all accounts Lou Reed was not a very nice guy during the Seventies, and perhaps into the Eighties as well.

The iTunes Store offers a number of Lou Reed and Velvet Underground albums in a special tribute to Lou Reed and, of course in time honoured tradition, to make some money off the back of the demise of a rock icon. One of the albums on offer is Sally Can't Dance, as is Mistrial, and I am tempted to buy it simply because I once owned the single version of the title track (now available as a bonus track on the digital album) and because it was another example of the kind of record that I never even saw in Stellenbosch at the time of its release or alter. I'd like to re-acquaint myself with Mistrial because I once owned the cassette version of the album and simply to establish whether my original opinion was still valid. I would listen to them all if they were free.

Perhaps Lou Reed was the true genius the eulogies of his friends claimed. He did write some great songs and deserves to be remembered for founding the Velvet Underground but I believe his music is mostly an acquired taste, especially from the Eighties onwards, though, as I've said, in this he is in the same boat as most of his contemporaries. Lou Reed's position and importance in rock history is assured and will remain legendary. I just cannot see myself collecting his albums the way I've done with, for example Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Lou Reed is a curiosity more than a vital presence, a guy who did some weird and wonderful things, not a guy who consistently made music that is consistently visceral enough for me.