CHEAP TRICK COLORED MY WORLD

 

Ostensibly the cheap trick here was the band's dichotomous visual image displayed on the front and back covers of the In Color and Heaven Tonight albums, where two pretty boys gazed dreamily at us from the front cover while two nerds, one thin and geeky and one a chubby accountant-looking guy, hid on the back cover. Robin Zander (vocals) and Tom Petterson (bass) are the good looking guys and Rick Neilsen (guitar) and Bun E Carlos (drums) are the geeks. I guess the marketing strategy was to get the little girls to cream over the pretty guys and therefore buy the record before getting suckered into listening to a band that was not all pin up beautiful. Or maybe the in-joke was just for the boys who liked hard rock and wanted it to be less po-faced and grim than the run-of-mill ugly bands like Uriah Heep, Kansas, Boston or any number of other metal heavyweights of the era.

I read about Cheap Trick in the New Musical Express long before I ever heard their sound. There was a piece that lovingly detailed how wonderful the debut album, Cheap Trick, was because it had this hard rock veneer underneath which all kinds of weird and wonderful lyrics and attitudes hid. Perhaps this was the other cheap trick – it sounded like standard hard rock but it was more subversive. The other neat aspect of the music, particularly In Color and Surrender, was that it owed a big debt to the Beatles. In the New Wave crazy NME and in the wake of the power pop phenomenon, this vaunted Beatle-esque approach made Cheap Trick highly credible. This was excellent praise for an American hard rock band of the late Seventies who did not come out of the New York punk scene that influenced and informed so much of the British punk scene.

'I Want You To Want Me' was the lead single from In Color and eventually became something of a hit when a live version of it, from the Live At Budokan album was released as a single, but it was the studio version I first heard on Radio 5 and which I immediately fell in love with. The song had a kind of clunky, stomping en deliberate riff and vocals and lyrics that very much sounded like something the Beatles might have come up with circa 'Love Me Do' or 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand'. I adopted Cheap Trick there and then and loved them. I did not know much about them, had not heard anything else by them but I still loved them. I guess the imprimatur from the NME had quite a bit to do with it.

The NME reviews for In Color and Heaven Tonight were glowing. They loved Cheap Trick too.

Somewhere around 1978, after the release of Heaven Tonight, the third album by the band, I found a sale copy of In Color, possibly at the bi-annual CNA record sale, and bought it, took it home and loved it for real. The album cover had Robin and Tom posing on serious motorcycles, looking all moody and dangerous. On the back Ron Neilsen and Bun E Carlos crouched over mopeds, looking dangerous in a completely different way. The album had a gatefold sleeve and on the one side of the inner cover, Zander and Petterson really posed their hearts out: they were so pretty either the little girls would gush or the gay guys would. On the other side Carlos faced front like a rumpled accountant in a police lineup and we saw Neilsen from the back with his weird short hairstyle, the baseball cap and a sating bomber jacket with the band name all over it. He looked like a guy trying to avoid the paparazzi after spending time in the same line up as his cohort Carlos. No guesses which band members would grace the official poster.

The music on the vinyl consisted of short, intense, riff laden songs with the incredible vocals of Robin Zander. As is the case with Robert Plant, Zander's voice was another instrument in the lineup. As I learnt later, the music and lyrics fitted in with all kinds of American musical traditions from Pacific Northwest and Nuggets style punk, to the Beach Boys, hard rock, pop, and freak out. This was a fun album where each successive tune was as delightful as the previous or the next. This was music for smiling to.

In Color has echoes of early Kiss, Angel, the Move, the Dictators, Big Star, and a number of other pop-styled bands of the Seventies who also liked heavy guitars. Sometime after I bought In Color, I also stocked up on a couple of Aerosmith albums and the first three Blue Oyster Cult albums, and these records, more than the icons of British metal such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Black Sabbath, were where I really got into hard rock. All of them kicked out the jams, but had a lot of melodic smarts and serious craziness going for them. Where Aerosmith was gonzo sexist riffmeisters with a bent for the Mick 'n Keef frontline, and Blue Oyster Cult were funny and heavy at the same time, Cheap Trick was the quirky kid brother, the one who was not nearly as normal as he looked and was proud of it.

It was difficult to think of Cheap Trick as hard rock at all. I thought of the band as New Wave American style and that was alright with me. So Good To See You was on repeat play for the coda where Robin Zander really gave his pipes a semi-operatic (but in a good way) workout. It would have been a monster hit in any parallel universe where I compiled the charts.

I played In Color so much (this was in the days before I had a decent tape recorder and had habitually recorded m vinyl records on tape) that the snap and crackle and pop of the eroded vinyl made listening a chore.

I found the debut album, Cheap Trick, in some sale bin somewhere. I'd read that this album was far heavier, weirder and less pop-oriented than In Color and I was therefore keen on discovering what the band sounded like before they started listening to proto punk. Indeed, the guitars on Cheap Trick are tough, crunching and almost traditionally hard rock compared to the lightness of touch on the second album. Rick Nielsen's concept was probably a band in the vein of the more intelligent hard rock of, say, Blue Oyster Cult, than the blustering thudding of Grand Funk Railroad or the plod of Black Sabbath. He wanted radio hits as much as he wanted to rock the house. In a way Cheap Trick could have been the precursor of Smashing Pumpkins whose Billy Corgan had a similar approach except that Robin Zander had a much more powerful voice and Cheap Trick probably aimed at direct mainstream success in the days before grunge became an alternative mainstream of its own.

Cheap Trick found success only after the release of the At Budokan album, which was originally meant to be a Japan only release as the band had found favour in the land of the rising sun when it was still a struggling band in the USA. At Budokan sold so well on import that the label released it officially in the States and took the live version of I Want You To Want Me off it as a single, and had a bit on their hands. Cheap Trick had released three studio albums without much commercial success although rock critic, especially the cognoscenti in the NME, loved them to death.

The release of Dream Police the follow up to Heaven Tonight, was delayed because of At Budokan's success. It was going to be the big breakthrough album that would cement the band's position in the mainstream and make them top dogs once and for all. The cover was in full colour and all four band members featured on the cover in their Dream Police uniforms.

I had skipped Heaven Tonight, for reasons unknown and probably irrational. The NME review had been ecstatic but it also seemed to me that it would be a tad pretentious and too weird for me after the first two albums and I never bothered acquiring it when released in South Africa.

Therefore, Dream Police was the third Cheap Trick album I bought. Like all of the others I bought it at record sales, but unlike the others the vinyl was a dud. There were deep scratches all over both sides of it to the extent where one could hardly listen to the last couple of tracks because the record jumped so much. I did not like the music much anyway. There was quite a bit of the hard rock style of the debut album but far too much sweet angelic harmony multi-tracked vocals for my liking. The Trick had gone all sophisticated on my ass and I did not care for it. It was an ambitious record form a band that apparently suddenly had the money to blow on studio time but had not quite managed to produce songs that matched the money spent on the production.

When I spotted Heaven Tonight in yet another discount bin, I snapped it up, took it home and prepared to love it. Funnily enough, though it is much in the vein of In Color, there is no tune on it that hit so hard in the guts as almost every song on In Color. It is on this second album that Cheap Trick perfected their early pop influenced, Beatlesque rocking groove. Heaven Tonight was not bad but I did not have a gut reaction to it and I did not play it all that much.

Next up was the EP Found All The Parts which consisted of tunes in the early style, and a great cover of Day Tripper, which emphasised the critics' fondly held view that the late Beatles informed the quintessential Trick songs. Otherwise the guitar sound was thicker, less gritty and to an extent more conventional than the early Trick but the tunes were great and the brevity of the EP makes for a brilliant record that ranks up there with anything that went before.

My final Cheap Trick purchases, both on one day, and I think it was a Ragtime Records sale in the late Eighties, were the early Eighties albums One On One and Next Position Please. By the release of these albums Cheap Trick were no longer the critics' darlings they had been in the Late Seventies and apparently the albums were not particularly commercially successful either. That is a pity for I loved both albums. Sure, they were not In Color, but the songs were great, the production muscular and the musicians were on top form. Just about every song had a memorable tune or hook and I sensed a deal of joy in the playing, even if this may not have been the case with a band that was facing a steady decline in popularity.

Some years later I found All Shook Up at Vibes Vinyl (long since defunct) in the Old Mutual Arcade in the centre of Cape Town, a shop specialising in second hand records, and even cassette tapes. At the time, and after I had not bought records for a very long time, I again became interested in acquiring vinyl versions of albums I had long wanted, never bought when new, and could not really get on CD. Who knows why I bought this, the 5^th Cheap Trick so long after the fact, but perhaps it was because I wanted to complete my collection and because the record was cheap. Anyway, I bought the thing and played it perhaps twice before putting it away and into storage along with all my other records. Unlike In Color, or any of the earlier records, All Shook Up just did not appeal at first hearing and I was not prepared to give it time to grow on me.

Supposedly the Trick became more experimental with their music on All Shook Up, though I would have thought that Dream Police had already been pretty experimental, but for the most part it sounds no more and no less like a pretty standard, middle of the road hard rock album with not much to distinguish it from anything else around at the lime. The power pop influence and attack was gone, the joy and fun were gone. This album seemed to have been made by a band that was solidly set on producing a professional product that would suit their record company and mainstream rock radio rather than a set of quirky songs that would appeal to a more selective but more appreciative audience, such as the original fans who loved the first couple of albums. Perhaps Cheap Trick embraced a certain amount of hard rock cliché in order to subvert the genre, but on the other hand this cheap trick was not nearly as entertaining as the sneaky pop smarts of In Color.

I have to confess that my current assessment of All Shook Up is based on a five CD box set of the first three albums, plus All Shook Up and Next Position Please I recently bought. It is a good idea, the packaging of 5 early albums by an artist, in replica record sleeves, and with additional previously unreleased tracks except that for some unholy reason, in the 3 such box sets I own, the albums are not completely in sequence. For example, Dream Police is omitted from the Cheap Trick box set though it is the follow up to Heaven Tonight, and Cheap Trick at Budokan is also not in its rightful place in the sequence of releases. Perhaps this is a marketing ploy motivated by the fact that the two omissions were and maybe still are good little earners in their own right and do not need bundling and also because the live set has been released in an expanded double CD version, for the serious fans.

Never mind my small gropes. When I listened to In Color for the first time in many years, at age 49, I was as thrilled by it as I was when I first popped the record onto my turntable when I was about 19. I believe that this album in particular has not aged one bit, is not such a faddish artifact of its time that it now sounds a tad stupid and lifeless like so much self-consciously "new wave" music of the late Seventies or early Eighties does, or even the leaden hard metal of the era. This is something Cheap Trick has in common with early Aerosmith and Blues Oyster Cult; all of them made hugely enjoyable and interesting music with a degree of intelligence and suss not enjoyed by most of their peers and a resultant long half life.

I liked and still like the tricks Cheap Trick played on my mind. Whether they were pretty boys or dorks made no difference. The music in the grooves kiboshed any visual cliché that would have us file the band under this label or that. Melody end power rock, serious skills and humor, light and shade, all of these aspects make Cheap Trick's music a fun experience. In my book In Color is definitely up there with the greatest albums of all time, or at the very least the albums that always brings a grin to your face when you hear the opening chords of the first song and you know you will be mightily entertained for the next 40 minutes or so.

 

 

 

The Beatles

THE BEATLES

 

The first I knew about The Beatles was that their music had been banned from broadcasting on the South African airwaves, at least through the SABC, because their music was blasphemous, or perhaps because they were blasphemers for claiming that The Beatles were bigger than God, arising from a comment made by John Lennon that also got the band into trouble in the US Bible belt.

Many years later, when I was in the middle of my high school career the Rector gave a two part sermon on the evils of pop culture and used a couple of Beatles songs as examples of how subversive popular music could be and how the tunes contained all kinds of disguised drug, satanistic and generally anti-authoritarian references calculated to undermine the moral fibre of the youth. By that time I had heard a number of Beatles songs, owned a greatest hits album of theirs and was not prepared to accept this bullshit for anything but bullshit from an out of touch, conservative Afrikaner teacher. Maybe the songs contained drug references, but who cared? Those subtle or not so subtle references were what made us like the songs in the first place and I could honestly say that no Beatles lyric, or any song lyric for that matter, ever influenced me to renounce Calvinism or made me take up drugs or become a homicidal loner who hated society and everyone in it. I rejected my parents' religion because I did not believe in it, I took up drug long after I left school because I was curious and interested and they were available, and I was a loner through inclination and choice but never became an addict or mass murderer because of my alienation and eventually snapped out of it when I finally grew up, quite late in life.

The point is: no Beatles song ever influenced my thoughts or actions in any way whatsoever. I saw them as a perfectly nice pop group with some terrific tunes, realised their iconic status put them in a different league to everyone else, and left it at that. The Beatles was just one more band I liked.

The first time I really took note of their music was when Oh Darling off Abbey Road got quite a bit of airplay in South Africa, presumably after the band had officially broken up, as understood the reason why the Beatles was suddenly allowed back on the SABC channels had something to do with that technicality, i.e. they no longer existed and the radio ban could only apply to a working, functioning entity. At least that is what I heard; it may have been completely untrue, but in the context of the times and the sometimes stupid rules and regulation we lived under, and the many loopholes that existed, or were created, to allow one to escape from the full force of the repression, this explanation for the Beatles being in favour again, did not seem especially outrageous.

Most of the Beatles hits, apart from parodies of their tunes by the likes of Peter Sellers and the Carry On film series, were beyond my ken until I had the opportunity to listen to the two greatest hits sets, 1962 – 1966 "red" album and 1966 – 1970 "blue" album at the house of a school mate whose older brother owned the albums. I immediately liked most of the early hits, and found Hey Jude almost unbearably exciting with its (to me) inscrutable lyrics and huge sing-a-long coda. The Beatles seemed to be the kind of band one could enjoy on many levels though at the time I was only into the visceral attractions of music. If it had a good beat and you could dance to it, I was into it.

I've owned vinyl copies of the 1962 - 1966 "red" hits album, The Rock'n Roll double album, and had the benefit of listening to Municipal library copies of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be. Latterly I've bought the double CD sets Anthology 1 and Anthology 3 , and With The Beatles and Rubber Soul, to date hereof my most recent purchase.

I own Phillip Norman's biography of the band and Ian McDonald and Tim Riley's two separate song by song commentaries on the music, the infamous Albert Goldman biography of John Lennon, a slim picture volume called The Beatles In Their Own Words, a day to day activities diary, and some other written odds and ends. The Beatles story is pretty well documented in my rock library.

Does this make me a Beatle expert? I suppose not, given the vast mass of material out there, not to mention the latest Phillip Norman biography of Lennon, and the many authors who have had something publicly and in print to say about the group. Having said that, I do have an opinion about the band and its place in pop cultural history, and the relative merits of the various members' contributions to the music and the myth.

Simply put, I believe that George Harrison was the least talented songwriter in the group, that Lennon's supposed genius is vastly overrated and inflated by his so-called premature death -- he had been artistically dead for some time before he was shot -- and that even McCartney, who is most probably one of the most talented songwriter ever, pissed away his talent with inconsequential pop after he left the Beatles. Maybe all of them needed the others (and George Martin) to make something better than the sum of the parts and try as they might none of them ever really improved on their Sixties, youthful creativity.

Double Fantasy was crap when I first heard it, and Lennon's death made no impact on my assessment. I would think it would not have sole as many copies as it did if Lennon had remained alive to promote it. Although forty is by no means old he sounded like an old fogey making old fogey music in a cocoon of wealth and privilege but with no link to reality, either to what was happening musically or socially.

Somewhere in the late sixties John Lennon realised that his wealth and prestige gave him enormous cachet and leeway to do almost anything he wanted. He probably learnt from Yoko Ono that just about any activity could be labelled art and if you were John Lennon your farts could be made into art happenings if you declared them such. Hence sitting in a bed or in a bag for peace. The best things Lennon did after leaving the Beatles can be summed up in the Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine albums. After that he trod water and essentially became famous for being famous.

George Harrison was the "quiet one", interested in guitars and guitar solos (his greatest sphere of creativity on record until he was allowed a song of two per album) and later Indian mysticism, the sitar and a huge beard. Much later, probably when he realised that his musical career was the pits, he bankrolled some good movies, and some poor choices like Shanghai Surprise, and then joined the Travelling Willburys where he could slot into his standard Beatles role and be a great supporting instrumentalist. But really, apart from All Things Must Pass, and some nice early Seventies singles, Harrison could never surpass Taxman, Something or even While My Guitar Gently Weeps and even the latter track became something special mostly because of Eric Clapton's solo. George Harrison was capable of writing a good song every now and then but he was not consistent and that is why he is secondary to both Lennon and McCartney who almost always delivered the good. Even a mediocre Lennon / McCartney tune can be interesting; a mediocre Harrison song is just dull.

I can think of a few prominent McCartney songs from his post Beatles career, such as Band on the Run, Live and let Die, Silly Love Songs, Ebony & Ivory, The Girl is Mine (both collaborations with Black artists that seem to be little better than frivolous novelties), Tug of War and Mull of Kintyre, and these are all from radio play. Apart from the Band on the Run album I have not listened to any Wings or solo McCartney album, and have no desire to. Of all these songs, only Mull of Kintyre is a true classic, a standard, the kind of song that can really bring a lump to the throat under the right circumstances. Lennon's song Imagine comes closest to a standard, but I cannot think of anything Harrison wrote or released after the Beatles break up that would ever be a standard of such proportions. Say what you will about McCartney, he can sure write them if he puts his mind to it.

John Lennon may have been the genius and may have been the true iconoclast in the Beatles, but he is the kind of artist who creates best on impulse and not all impulses are good. McCartney probably has impulse and dedication to craft, and can work a song into something splendid even if the effect is wholly calculated. This makes him the real genius and one of the giants of popular music. Sadly it seems to me that most of his output over the last 20 years or more has relied more on craft and polish than on creative spark.

I used to own a vinyl copy of the late Seventies John Lennon album Rock & Roll, bought as a budget re-release in the Eighties, because I recalled the hit from it, Stand By Me, as a particular favourite of mine back in the day and it seemed to me that the menu of rock and roll covers could not be a bad thing, and I must confess that I did enjoy the album and played it often when I still played records. I would not mind owning it on CD. The only other solo Lennon album I would want to own, is John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, though I would not mind listening to Imagine again, and maybe Mind Games and Some Time In New York City. On the whole, though, a greatest hits collection is about the best way to experience John Lennon.

As for Paul McCartney, I once had a taped copy of Band on the Run and listened to Back to the Egg, (which was terrible)
but I cannot really think of any one Wings or solo McCartney album I would want to pay money for or necessarily would want to listen to either, though I guess I would then be guilty of dismissing a whole body of work because of some individual examples I did not like. The thing is, whereas Paul at least had the gumption to start up a whole new band and drive it to success, he went into a musical direction that was the antithesis of what I was listening to or deeply interested in when I was a teenager, and the adult in me has not reconciled with the AOR rock of Wings. The post-Wings pop has left me totally cold.

As for George Harrison, about the only thing associated with him that I am interested in, is the DVD of the Concert for Bangla Desh movie, which may well have been his shining hour. Maybe All Things Must Pass as well, but in his case I do not think that even a greatest hits package would find favour with me.

As for Ringo Starr, the singing drummer, I must confess that his early Seventies hits such as Back Off Boogaloo and She's Sixteen were firm favourites of mine and they are still fun. He had no pretentions to art or artifice and made records because he was allowed to and fortuitously had some hits along the way. The movie career did not quite take off, perhaps because of bad choices, and nowadays he is on the road again, with a new band and new releases, and I guess he can make a living retreading some nostalgia and offering more modern sounds that will never trouble the charts or find favour with a general rock audience again. Perhaps Ringo is one of the lucky ones, who managed to hitch on to a speeding train to stardom without needing to be the talent or the ambition, and he became as famous as the rest, as lovable, and can now boast of being one of only two surviving Beatles. He is a living legend of sorts and maybe dozens of biographies will flood the booksellers after he dies, but I do not think anyone will ever write a revisionist tome in which he is found to be the most underappreciated genius of the century. About the best one could say about him in the context of the Beatles, it seems, is that he was a very capable drummer who did make a very useful contribution to their sound.

The genesis of this piece is my purchase of Rubber Soul a couple of weeks ago, from a CD seller on Greenmarket Square, along with Anthology 3, which covers the "White Album", Abbey Road and Let It Be final years. The anthology contains mostly demos and it is interesting to hear the naked, unadorned versions of songs better known in full arranged and orchestrated fury, such as Helter Skelter or Hey Jude, and even While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Something, but one allows for the fact that these tracks are demos and if they sound a bit cheesy or flat, the reason is that they have been fully worked out and need polishing. However, it was Rubber Soul that was the revelation, in a manner of speaking, of disappointment.

If one is used to greatest hits compilations of pop groups, listening to albums can be less than satisfactory when not every song is a killer. This is what Rubber Soul is like. As I understand the conventional wisdom of how Beatles albums and the body of work are categorised, Rubber Soul is where they start maturing into the era of the peak that is Revolver, and perhaps Sgt Pepper, before dipping into the trough that is Magical Mystery Tour and the rocky period of the "White" album and the Let It Be sessions, before peaking again with Abbey Road. Before Rubber Soul, the Beatles were quite good, but still somehow a bit twee and hidebound and too much of the family entertainers. From here on in they take LSD and expand their personal and musical consciences and truly become avant garde.

I approached Rubber Soul with much anticipation. The cover is great, my favourite Beatles album cover, and it has a number of songs I knew and loved, close to half of the album's songs can be found on the 1962 - 1966 greatest hits set. As it turned out, the well known tunes are also by far the best of the bunch and the other tunes seem mostly like filler to me. The two Harrison songs are dire, and Lennon's Run For Your Life, that seems like a left over from the debut album or maybe With The Beatles, is just terribly naff. Where was the quality control? These kind of songs counter the argument that the Beatles were simply the greatest pop group ever. Okay, maybe Rubber Soul is just a flawed album by a great band, but it seems to me that just about all their albums are similarly flawed, as most of Harrison's songs up to maybe the "white" album were at best mediocre, Ringo just had his single goof per record, and the quality of Lennon's output fluctuated wildly -- for every Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds there is a Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite.

Apparently a New York rock critic Richard Goldstein was just about the only rock writer who did not think much of Sgt Pepper at the time it was released and found himself lonely and castigated out on a limb of his own making. Perhaps he was more correct in his opinion of the album than everybody who did and still reckon it to be one of the best albums ever made, if not the best. It seems to me that the event of Sgt Pepper has overtaken the reality of the music, which is not that bad and not in total all that wonderful either if you get right down to it. Like most Beatles albums it is a mixture of wonderful and mediocre lent more weight because it is a Beatles product.

If one wants the best of all possible Beatles worlds, buy the "red" and "blue" greatest hits sets, or the later Beatles 1 album, and you will have all the good stuff. The rest, barring an exception here or there, is disposable. The best one can say for the Beatles, to paraphrase John Lennon, is that they became very popular and are now, even more than ever, cultural icons of a magnitude that it would be hard to diminish and, as is the case with Elvis Presley, the music becomes of secondary importance, just background to the big show. The hits will always be with us, the mop top images will always survive on posters and other merchandise, John Lennon will most likely always be thought of as the genius more than Paul McCartney, and the Beatles industry will thrive for as long as pop culture exists.

Despite my high school principal's dire warnings and greatest fears, my only Beatles connected drug experience occurred when I was already close to my mid-forties. It was a night I spent with fortysomething friends when we were all high on some herbal substance (not the obvious one) they smoked and I consumed as a kind of infusion, and the guy played the Beatles 1 album. Somehow he became fixated on and obsessed with Eleanor Rigby. It is probably not the first track on the CD, so we must have listened to the preceding tracks in the ordinary course but for some reason the guy got stuck on this piece of McCartney schmaltz with its deeply meaningful lyrics about alienation, set to a great pop tune. My host identified with the deep meaning he perceived in the rather mundane lyrics. The pause and return and play buttons of the remote control to the CD Player worked overtime. We'd listen to half the song and then he'd pause, share his stoned insights, then return to the start of the track and let it play for a few seconds before pausing again, and sharing more insights, or maybe even the same insight, put slightly differently, before starting the track from the beginning again.

This process lasted a couple of hours, or so it seemed, and we never got through the whole of the song. Obviously the guy and his partner, who had theories of her own, were heavily into their explication of the lyrics and intent behind them and so forth, and may well have had true insight in their attempts to relate a pop song to the greater human tragedy around us, but it got a tad trying after a while, especially as I was not nearly as stoned as they were and rapidly became bored and irritated with having to listen to the same bits of the song over and over. I went to bed and they carried on and for all I know, never did get to the end of Eleanor Rigby.

This experience should probably be a convincing reason why one should not take drugs.

Perhaps it was totally coincidental that the Beatles drove my friends to this kind of excess and maybe it would have happened with any other album they'd chosen to play, but I almost think not. Whatever it was that John, Paul, George and Ringo had, it was something that still has some of us caught up in imagination and awe.

 

 

 

Metallica

From certain angles Kirk Hammett looks disturbingly like Steven Buscemi. James Hetfield has a pockmarked face and looks better after rehab with his glasses and all. Lars Ulrich changes hair style and colour every couple of weeks.

Hammett is the peacemaker and self described ego free guy. Hetfield is at first merely angry and unhappy and then quite self aware and self deprecating and seems to by the kind of guy it would be fun to hang out with. Ulrich comes off as a bit of a pompous prat who seems to weigh up just about everything he says in a kind of million calculations per milli-second in his mental computer.

The music they make together sounds pretty awesome even when they believe it is "stock" or just going through some motions they have gone through many times before. It is a portrait of men who have collaborated for twenty years, have been hugely successful in doing what they do and still cannot quite grasp what it is. They do not have spontaneity in making records, unlike the party pose they might have on stage. Making records is hard work and sometimes unpleasant work if you have competing and uncompromising egos to contend with.

These are some of the insights gleaned from the documentary Some Kind of Monster, the history of the events comprising the making of the St Anger album, released in 2003. I have not watched another rock documentary as often or as with much continued enjoyment as this movie. Some of the stuff seems so out there that one can hardly believe it has not been scripted. Despite myself I kind of warm to Lars Ulrich, even if he seems to be the asshole of the band; he is so serious, he is so analytical, and yet he can bash the drums pretty good. James Hetfield, the sober James Hetfield, is someone I want to hang out with, maybe go for a spin in his low-slung custom street legal racer. There is just so much psycho drama going on, high comedy, farce, weirdness, and through all of it one gets a good sense of what it takes in the world of Pro Tools to make a rock and roll record if you are one of the biggest bands in the world – the biggest metal band of all time as Jason Newstead puts it in one of the rare interview snippets he is allowed. Metallica cannot just go into the studio for a week and bash out ten tunes. It has to take then a year to do it, and not only because they talk their way through the process, but because that is what it takes to make a "Metallica record."

I am the kind of guy whose first Metallica album was the black album simply called Metallica, released in 1991, and which was their serious, large scale breakthrough to the mainstream and mega success. Enter Sandman was the single that got major airplay in South Africa and it must rank up there with the classic rock anthems of the Seventies as a recognisable riff and memorable lyrics and tune. Of course I did not buy the album when it was released because I was not particularly a fan of the band and was at the time much more interested in Guns 'n Roses, with their retro styled Aerosmith like music, and the neo punky Nirvana were much more to my taste.

I bought the black album somewhere in 1992 during my first phase of CD buying, and it was stolen a year later, along with most of my collection, and then I made the effort of replacing it as I did with the Nirvana, Guns 'n Roses and Bob Dylan albums I had lost. By this time I was thoroughly enamoured of the Metallica album and played it constantly. My only gripe and misgiving about the album was that the production seemed to be too smooth. Unlike Guns 'n Roses, Metallica's riffs did not come roaring out of my stereo player. It seemed that the producer had aimed for what one could call orchestral metal: a huge but somehow blunted sound that did not quite kick me in the guts. I guess it would have been a different story when the band played those tunes on stage before thousands.

I was not persuaded to buy either Load or Reload or any of the other Metallica product that followed and precede St Anger, because I simply was not a fan. The black album was enjoyable but it somehow seemed to be an anomaly in the oeuvre of thrash metal purveyed by the band.

The DVD of Some Kind of Monster was a present to myself shortly after it was released in South Africa, somewhere in 2004. The St Anger album had been around for a while and I had ignore it but for some reason the documentary appealed to me and I have not been sorry I splashed out on it . I must have watched it, all the way through or in episodic pieces, about ten times and each time is as enjoyable as the first. It is just a first rate piece of story telling.

Then I found out the St Anger album packaging also contained a bonus DVD containing in studio band performances of all the songs on the album and because I was also curious to hear the full length complete versions of the tunes from the documentary, I bought the album. The live performances featured the then new bassist Robert Trujillo who did not actually play on the album. His audition and selection as replacement for Jason Newstead is one of the highlights of the documentary, and live in studio performances showcase him splendidly.

However, I was not so enamoured of the music on the album. The production was quite in your face and there were some strong tunes but overall it seemed to me that the album was way too long to sustain my interest. Although I am not a huge fan of the technically proficient kind of metal guitar solo practised by Hammett the complete absence of guitar solo did not quite work for me either. The sound seemed grinding and overly harsh and there was nothing as gripping as the tunes on the black album.

Apparently many fans thought so too and the album is not highly rated. Too experimental. Shortly thereafter Bob Rock, who'd been Metallica's producer for a long time, was put out to grass. Not that he was particularly to blame for what had happened with St Anger but I guess he was the only expendable part of that team.

After that and in quick succession I bought Ride the Lightning, ... And Justice For All and Kill 'Em All and I must confess that my earliest suspicions of thrash metal were confirmed and amplified. The arrangements were mostly too elaborate and convoluted – too many changes in tempo, and probably key as well, just to show off -- had no real tunes and did not engage me. And in general it was just too soft. I wanted to be bludgeoned by Metallica, not lightly tapped, and these albums did not do it. I must have listened to them once or twice, did not get it, and have not listened to then again and have no desire to ever hear them again. Maybe I should have been into then at the time they were released and when I was much younger and less critical than I am today.

I do however think I should give St Anger another chance. It is kind of brutal but for that very reason it slams certain metal truths home. This is a mega successful band, very adept at what it does, and when it does it with this kind of intensity, even as a rehab record, it works on very many levels I can appreciate. It should have been somewhat shorter though.

By the conclusion of Some Kind of Monster, some two years after the recording of St Anger started, the band has kind of sorted out its internal issues, the members, mostly Lars and James, have come to terms with each other and their new roles, they have found a new bass player and have been most generous to him to welcome him into fold, unlike their treatment of Jason Newstead when he joined, the album is done and they face the prospect of a new, mega successful tour. All's well that ends well. At least for now. It's exactly like any other movie happy ending – one does not know whether the new found sobriety, unity, peace and happiness will last, but that is a story for another day, for Some Kind of Monster II.

We know that Metallica have released another studio album after St Anger, and that they have therefore not reached the end of the line for their brand of heavy rock or their long term commitment to their band, an Robert Trujillo is still hanging in there.

Metallica, along with U2, could be the Rolling Stones of their generation.

Tarquin Rises Up

A small, skinny bald-headed fucker listening to tunes on his iPod and carrying a laptop carry bag came looking for me at the place I was having breakfast. It was kind of my local, where I ate once or twice a week, and the staff knew me and could almost predict my order. Call it my comfort zone in the morning before I faced the day. It was not the place I wanted to have to dodge anyone much less someone who was there specifically for me.

The baldy came in, looked around, walked past me to the back and then turned around and came to a stop in front of me. I had just scooped up a forkful of perfectly scrambled eggs. He put down the laptop bag and removed the earpieces from his ears. He was bald simply because he'd shaved his head and, if I were any connoisseur of male pattern baldness, that he would soon be hairless for real. In a freaky kind of way he resembled Moby the American musician who once was a punk and then became a guru of electronic beats. The look could have been cultivated. Maybe he liked the idea of people doing a double take when they saw, wondering whether he was not perhaps that famous guy.

Baldy stared at me. I chewed my eggs.

"Hey," he said.

"Hi," I said. I gave him the raised eyebrow of 'can I help you, fucker?' but this did not deter him.

"I'm Craig", he said.

I was very happy for him.

"Craig," he said again as if I had not heard him the first time.

"Hello, Craig. Was there something?"

My eggs were getting cold so I had another mouthful while I waited for Craig to alert me to his mission status. He may have beamed in from Planet Bald-headed Freak for all I knew. I wondered what he had been listening to on his iPod. Maybe he was not only a Moby lookalike but perhaps he also only dug the guy's music.

"Are you still up for the thing?"

The Thing? The Marvel anti-hero from the Fantastic Four comic book? Or was it a thing in the sense you always hear Mob guys refer to the movies when they want to be clear as mud?

"Please sit down, Craig, have some coffee or something. Then you can tell me all about it."

"I don't like coffee. The thing ... are you in?"

In or out, out or in. Why must there always be this dichotomy of choice spelt out in direct opposites? Craig seemed like an overly serious and obsessed individual. Moby is or was a Vegan and I think Vegans are kind of kinky in the weird eating habits they have. It's not like I am a voracious omnivore but I do like my food non-organic and fattening at times.

"Look, mate, I do not know you. I do not know anything about your thing and I don't think I care too much about it either. What is your thing?"

Maybe his thing was nude disco dancing or steroid enhancement.

Craig was not a happy Craig. He was meeting resistance he had apparently not foreseen, which is strange considering that he was confronting a total stranger with some total crap question. I suddenly wondered whether this was an attempt at picking me up. Craig, you are just not my type, my dear. I prefer them slightly more hairy and voluptuous.

"Are you Carl?" Craig asked.

"I am not," I said, for I was not. "I believe you might have the wrong number."

"Why the fuck are you wearing a black T-shirt?"

Now, now, Craig, what has that got to do with anything? Of course I wear black T-shirts. All of the T-shirts I own are black in colour, okay, by now some of them are close to grey, but they were all black once. Maybe Craig is the Fashion Mafia representative in these parts. Guilty as charged. I wear black T-shirts. I guess I will soon be sleeping with the fishes.

"This is my fashion statement for the day," I said. "Life is bleak and tomorrow we die, or our loved ones die. I am a Black Metal fan. Back in Black by AC/DC is my favourite album. Paint it Black is my favourite grim yet catchy Rolling Stones tune. Black Consciousness is my favourite political movement. Enough reasons for you, Craig?"

"I'm supposed to meet Carl here and he'll be wearing a black T-shirt."

"I guess he is not here yet. I haven't seen anyone else in here with a black T-shirt while I've been here. Maybe he is running late, or was way too early for you. Sorry, kid, I am the best I can do for you at the moment. Pull up a chair, have something to drink that is not coffee and we can talk some more."

"Fuck, no," Craig said. "Weirdoes like you freak me out."

Craig re-inserted the headphone earpieces in his ears, took his laptop bag and went to a table at the rear where he set up his laptop and started messing about on it. He completely ignored me now. I finished my eggs and ordered a café latté and sat staring off into the middle distance for a while.

Just as I was about to drain the last of the coffee from my mug a tall, tubby guy in a black T-shirt and baggy shorts came in and sat down at a table between me and Craig who looked up and immediately perked up. My guess was that this new arrival could well be the hitherto mythical Carl. He looked like a parody of a heavy metal drummer with a long ponytail of dark hair and a stupid cap.

Craig got up and went over to the new guy and spoke softly to him. This trick worked. The two of them exchanged exuberant handshakes and the new guy followed Craig to his table where they sat hunched up around the laptop and talked softly amongst themselves. They ordered health juices from the waitress.

Oh, Death!

Tom Waits sounded old when he was young. Now he is old, he looks old and he still sounds old and even crankier than he ever was.

Kurt Kobain looked incredibly young, like a little kid lost in a world het never made. He sounded young and pissed off too. Then he killed himself and entered the legendary world of rock musicians who died young.

Buddy Holly set the bar for rockers who die in plane crashes. After him came Ritchie Valens, Otis Redding and some guys in the Bar-Kays, some members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Denver, who had the kind of career of a guy who ought to have died in his sleep, and Stevie Ray Vaughan who went all modern and died in a helicopter crash.

Keith Richards kept getting older and older, piling wrinkle on wrinkle and allegedly using his body as some kind of medical experiment, yet has never stopped rocking because like a shark has to keep moving, Keith has to keep rocking or he will die.

Lots of rockers, famous and not so famous, have died from all kinds of drug overdoses or the nasty side effects of taking too many drugs too often.

Eric Clapton too heroin and became an alkie, and survived it all and is now a senior citizen in the rock'n'roll old age home and like a veritable Keith-clone he keeps on playing the blues.

I was so angry when I heard Chris Whitley had died. I think he liked a drug as much as the next guy and perhaps a little more and then he shuffled off the mortal coil because his body forsook him. He was once featured in Time Magazine as member of a new peer group of American roots musicians who were harking back to old school blues and country music. Some said he wanted to make a pact with the Devil.

That leads us to Robert Johnson who is the most famous barely known musician in the blues field and one of the most influential too. There are only two known photographs of him. It took me a long time to get into his harsh, doom laden music and now I believe he is the modernist in music, the man who brought a backwoods music into the 20^th century and made art of it. Not many White people ever saw or heard Robert Johnson perform live but lots of spotty teenage blues fans think he is a deity.

More grunge musicians, or maybe they were post-grunge, died drug related deaths, like Shannon Hoon from Blind Lemon, who died just when the band was starting to become really successful. He sang back up on some songs from the Use Your Illusion I and II double albums by Guns 'n Roses whose members were no strangers to substance abuse, yet only the first drummer was fired for being too untogether. Layne Staley from Alice in Chains flirted with disaster for a long time for succumbing. They were grunge before grunge took off, and I never liked their music.

The drummer from Smashing Pumpkins was fired for not being able to handle his drug addiction.

Danny Whitten, Crazy Horse's lead singer, guitarist and songwriter died from a drug overdose, as did one of their roadies. These deaths inspired Neil Young into writing a whole album of dirges that is still some kind of milestone of doom laden depresso music that not many people want to listen to voluntarily. The album, Tonight's The Night, sold poorly. Strangely enough, these drug deaths did not stop old Neil completely from taking a drug or two of his own. It is rumoured that when he went on stage for his turn at Winterland, on the Band's Last Waltz concert film, coke crystals could be clearly seen around his nostrils and they had to be airbrushed out in post-production.

Neil Young also wrote a song about the death of Kurt Kobain.

Bob Dylan took lots of drugs in his time. Speed, weed, LSD, cocaine, to say the least but he survived all of them and all kinds of airplane flights. He had a motorcycle crash but by now it is trite that the damage was inflated to give him time off from incessant touring and to allow him to get his head together in Woodstock so that he could write the songs on John Wesley Harding and The Basement Tapes. Late in life he had a kind of medical scare where there was some expectation that he might not make the age of 60 but now he and the Rolling Stones are way up there in the never say die rocker stakes.

Southern Rock had its casualties too though these ol' boys liked their weed and their Jack Daniels better than drugs, they were probably not totally immune to substances either. Back in the day everyone did everything they could lay their hands on. The thing of it is that the Southern rockers seem accident prone more than anything. Duane Allman and Berry Oakley from the Allman Brothers Band both died in motor cycles creepily close to the same spot and on more or less the same day a year apart. Younger brother Greg Allman was a bit of a cocaine hound in the Seventies but survived. He probably does not ride a motorcycle or is very careful when he does.

Brian Wilson is still alive, having long outlived his younger brothers Denis and Carl. Denis drowned, probably because he was wasted when he swam, and Carl died of a heart attack or something. Some say that Brian was de facto dead to the world for a very long time and that indeed his talent had died while he was still shuffling around like reclusive retard. Recently he has made a big comeback with some new solo material and his reworking of "legendary" Smile suite of songs that was supposed to have put Sergeant Pepper to shame but was never released in the form Brian's vision envisaged until his late period attempt to do it.

John Lennon was shot, cementing the genius legend forever. Yes, well, what did he ever do after John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, not to mention the Beatles years. Someday soon someone is going to take a long objective look at Lennon's creative output and is going to put the myths to rest, as Albert Goldman almost did, except that no one liked his attempt to put a fresh spin on the picture of Saint John so many people fondly hold. Lennon coasted on his status as Beatle for a very long time, way beyond his sell by date and produced a bunch of crap for his final album which only sold strongly because of his untimely death. As was the case with Elvis Presley, Lennon's death was the best career move he ever made in later life to secure his waning status.

Sadly George Harrison could not win his battle against cancer, which also goes to show that living healthily is no guarantee of anything in life. He also made some really crappy music after the purged his creative closer with All Things Must Past. I guess George was a great guy, who loved Monty Python and who could play a mean rockabilly guitar solo but he was no great shakes as a songwriter. No loss to the world of music, just a loss to the world.

I kind of like the idea that Bon Scott from AC/DC and John Bonham from Led Zeppelin both almost literally drunk themselves to death. Ron "Pigpen" McKernan from the Grateful Dead also terminally abused his liver. Brett Mydland, who followed in Pigpen's footsteps as Grateful Dead keyboardist also died from drug related abuses. Jerry Garcia was a long time dragon chaser and crack head whose heart could no longer handle the shit and gave up on Jerry. Now many remember him only because of the Cherry Garcia flavour produced by Ben & Jerry's' ice cream. Many others remember him as the resident guitar genius continuously on display in an endless series of CD releases of Dead live concerts.

One of the weird true death stories in rock connect father and son, Tim Buckley and Jeff Buckley who had rock careers several years apart and both of whom died too young. Tim at least had a relatively long career and left a number of fine albums behind while Jeff managed only one official, though wonderful, album and various releases of outtakes and unfinished material, and some live stuff. Jeff drowned; Tim mistook a lethal combination of heroin and morphine for cocaine. It is a moot point which death was the more tragic. At least Jeff Buckley had a very good looking corpse.

The so-called unnecessary deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin always loom large and seem to serve as salutary lessons in the price of excess and hedonism, but they were probably both completely accidental and almost incidental to the lifestyles of the two dead rock stars. To my mind both of them died at exactly the right time for their place in posterity. They had achieved the heights of stardom and their brand of creativity and who is to say they would have improved during the Seventies? I do not think so. Spare us a jazz funk obsessed Hendrix or a Joplin doing time in Las Vegas.

Brian Jones outlived his usefulness to the Rolling Stones and his meagre talent and there was really no future for him. Sid Vicious was a cartoon and had no purpose beyond his iconic role in the Sex Pistols. One cannot imagine that he would really have mastered the bass or become a singer-songwriter.

Jim Morrison went into exile in Paris to get his shit together and then died in mysterious circumstances to the extent, like the Elvis Presley scenario, many believe that Morrison faked it all to escape from the spotlight and that he is somewhere in the world writing poetry and fucking young girls. I bet the other, less popular members of the Doors are pretty pissed off about this. They had recruit Ian Astbury from The Cult as a make-do-Morrison just so they could hit the nostalgia trail and make some money again.

The late great Johnny Ace died from the after effects of badly played Russian roulette and inspired Paul Simon. Hank Williams died in the back of his car, body riddled with consumption, wracked by alcoholism and a fast life, and inspired a bunch of country stars and rockers, and his grandson Hank Williams III.

Al 'Blind Owl' Wilson from Canned Heat got wasted, laid down next to some railroad tracks in the winter and died from exposure. He was also depressed because he was really going blind. Some years later Wilson's cohort in Canned Heat, Bob 'The Bear' Hite died from a heart attack induced by obesity and an unhealthy lifestyle. Both of them were collectors of blues records.

Somehow Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf died almost peacefully after long lifetimes of playing first the juke joints, lounges and backstreet halls and then the clubs and stages of the wider White audience where they made more money in relative old age than in their younger days.

The biggest death of all is owned by Elvis Presley. He died too soon yet he died much too late. He had no more purpose in this world, yet his death served a greater commercial purpose than his life ever did and now the Elvis Presley Estate is one huge enterprise that never needed the Colonel to run it or steer it into profit. There are images everwhere of the young Elvis, the mid-Sixties Elvis, even the Aloha from Hawaii Elvis in his weird jumpsuit and cape. There are DVD box set of all his movies. There are endlessly recycled collections of his tunes. This is an Elvis universe and we only live in it. He's been gone for almost 32 years and people still see him everywhere in the most remote corners of the earth.

There is always Good Rockin' Tonight because Elvis made the breakthrough. Some say the music died with Buddy Holly, I say the music died with the Big Bopper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Scorcese Shines A Light On The Rolling Stones

The Last Waltz was the first Martin Scorcese movie I ever saw and Shine A Light, the Rolling Stones concert movie, has been the last Scorcese movie I've seen to date.

In The Last Waltz Scorcese presented a combination of concert film and biography of The Band's last performances before retiring from "the road" and becoming a strictly recording unit, although it really meant the end of the group as a functioning entity. Shortly thereafter the individual members went their own ways and if the Band still kind of functioned after that, it was without Robbie Robertson and then Richard Manuel and Rick Danko died.

The thing was that the guys in The Band felt that 15 years of touring was enough already. Compare that to the Rolling Stones who have been going for over 40 years and have never had enough of "the road." Mick 'n' Keef are well past 60 and still wanna rock like the young studs they once were. It should have been a lesson to The Band: maybe staying on the road keeps the group going, keeps you alive (provided you control your substance intake) and acts like and elixir of eternal youth. I guess it also helps that Rolling Stones tours are massively profitable affairs for the 4 official members of the band.

Marin Scorcese is not the first moviemaker to film the Stones doing what they do best. If you want to see the Stones on stage, you can watch Gimme Shelter, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, the DVD of performances from the Bridges to Babylon tour and the Four Flicks multi-DVD set of shows from the Forty Licks. There is actually a lot of footage of latter day live Stones, all wrinkled and desiccated, yet rockin' like demons. Perhaps Keith Richards does believe he can keep old age and death at bay by furiously riffing away in as many locations as possible.

It seems to me that since the turn of the millennium Scorcese divides his attention between "proper" movie projects and musical subjects. There is the series of documentaries about the blues under the banner "Martin Scorcese presents ..." and the No Direction Home Bob Dylan biography of the early iconoclastic years of Dylan's career. This way of going about making documentaries must be like new journalism, where you apply the methodology of making a fiction film to making a factual film. There is no reason why the documentary cannot be as arty as the fiction movie and if you can bring your own stamp to it, you edify the subject and subject matter, in the way serious writers like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote brought literary weight to journalism.

Scorcese wants to be super prepared to film a bunch of old guys rocking out on stage and his concern for finding out what the set opener will be, is almost a parody of comic fear of failure. Scorcese wants to make the best concert film ever and he cannot stand the idea of leaving part of his sphere of control to the subjects he is filming. The Rolling Stones have a huge back catalogue of songs, many hits and many obscurities and can probably play several shows without having to repeat any song, so why is it so important for Martin Scorcese to know exactly which song will open the show?

As it is, the Stones open with a hoary old warhorse, Jumping Jack Flash, and then present a set that mixes well-worn favourites with some relative obscurities, particularly favouring Some Girls and Tattoo You as their nods to the most recent work, and ignoring anything they've done since 1980. This is a festival set, in fact a charity set, and not a concert in support of a latest album so they feel no need to showcase anything the audience would not know by heart if they have been Stones fans over the past 40 plus years.

I guess I am not alone when I say that the Stones tunes I like best all stem from the Sixties and early Seventies, up to (at best) It's Only Rock'n'Roll, but the last of their albums that I truly like as a whole is Exile On Main Street. From then on there are a number of great Stones tunes but there are no studio albums where I can say I unreservedly like the entire thing. Stripped is a good album with some unusual choices in tunes, but it consists of live recordings, and that is about where I drew the line with the post-Eighties Stones. Voodoo Lounge and A Bigger Bang both have the odd decent rocker and some nice ballads but the problem for me with the listening to these albums is that it all sounds too much like the guys going through the songwriting motions of professionals who have perfected the craft part of the deal but no longer have anything left for the art part. The youthful enthusiasm and brio are long gone; all that is left is the necessity to fill up an album with tunes to comply with record company demands and to have something to tour behind so that nobody can say the Stones are nothing but a nostalgia act. The Stones no longer have to release albums of new stuff and perhaps they should not.

Shine A Light is an excellent showcase for the band in its autumn years, refusing to go quietly into that good night, and of how far it has gone in becoming part of the establishment it once eschewed and railed against. Many years ago, in the days when some people seriously held that no one over 30 should be trusted, Mick Jagger indicated that he could not quite see himself doing the pop star thing beyond that age. A few years later, when his career had been well-established and with the wisdom brought by maturity and pragmatism, Jagger used the example of bluesmen who carry on making music into their sixties and said he would want to have that kind of career. And so it became true. The Biggest Rock and Roll Band in the world can keep on rocking well beyond normal retiring age for most workers and still retain some kind of hip cool.

Of course, rock and roll is so young that nobody yet knows how long anyone can keep on rocking. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and the like had careers that stretched for 40 years or more; Elvis Presley's career got cut short but he would have been going today if he had stayed alive. It is al just show business and if the Rolling Stones could keep their brand fresh and alive through 5 decades, more power to them.

It is weird to see the wrinklies in their satin and tat jumping around on stage like very much younger men. Jagger has the body of a young dancer, not too much different to what he looked like back in the Sixties or Seventies, but the face tells a different story. Maybe he made a pact with the devil: his body will stay trim but his face deteriorates. I bet Mick Jagger uses more make up now than he did in the Seventies gender bender era. Keith Richards is also kind of thin, except for a bit of a paunch and has really freaky hear – bad hair day everyday – and his face could really use some Botox to flesh out the wrinkles. Keith was never too pretty but now resembles a bit of a mummy. Ron Wood is just thin; maybe he has an eating disorder or an extremely overactive thyroid gland. Charlie Watts has not changed much over the past twenty years. He went grey early and developed a major bald spot on the back of his head. This is pretty still the situation. Fortunately for Charlie he looked old when he was 30.

For all that, Keith, Ronnie and Charlie still rock out solidly and when they fire on all cylinders it is a thrilling ride. Close your eyes and you could be at any gig the band has played since the Seventies. The only difference would be that the sound is probably much better today than it ever was back in the day.

There are three cameo appearances, Jack White on Loving Cup, Buddy Guy on Champagne & Reefer and Christina Aguilera on Live With Me. God knows why. None of them bring much to the party and Aguilera emotes far too muck all over what is a moderately sinister tune from the Sixties heyday. She would have done much better as backing vocalist on Gimme Shelter, one of the all time great Stones tunes that did not make it to the set list. Apparently this is the first Scorcese movie that does not feature Gimme Shelter.

There aren't any real highlights among the tunes. All of them are well played and well sung, without any interesting creative spark to make them fresh or different. The Stones, and their backing musicians, are professionals who have been doing this thing and playing these songs from a very long time and they deliver a professional product that cannot be faulted for attention to detail and the overall customer satisfaction in terms of songs played and the quality of the presentation should be high. It is a big show, with big sound and big tunes that have been part of our musical history and cultural education for so long they might as well be pre-historic. For most of us the Rolling Stones have always been there, astride the world like a rock and roll colossus and it is sad to think that the evidence of Shine A Light will mostly serve to prove only that you can rock until you are almost dead, but that getting better at it does not mean you are more vital or interesting, except as a bit of a curiosity.

I walked out of the theatre really stoked. This was as close to a live Stones concert as I would ever come, but when I got home I sought Hot Rocks 1 and 2 and Exile On Main Street, and immersed myself in Stones music in the versions that originally won me over and meant something to me. These are the versions I will listen to over and over because they are performed by the young men who turned rebellion into money and made good, solid, satisfying rock along the way, most of them classics that will forever define a particular zeitgeist and also define what rock should be in its rawest primal form. Of course I am biased in my opinion. I like the blues and I like what the Stones have done with infusing their rock with blues without adulterating the one or stultifying the other and for my money, you cannot really make good rock music if you do not fuse the two. This opinion may also make me sound like a relic from a bygone era who has no idea of what informs current rock and who no longer has any clue, and that is alright. I am no longer a teenager and I do not have to like or understand the stuff teenagers listen to nowadays.

The thing is: how many of today's bands will still be with us in 40 years time, going as strong as ever? Maybe the paradigm has changed and maybe rock is no longer so brand strong that anything has to last beyond the initial success and maybe the Internet will kill rock as we know it, but I know this: there has never been anybody like the Rolling Stones and there never will be again. They made records in the days when rock music was really important because it was still in its infancy and rebellion seemed real. Now it is all either corporate or independent and Internet fuelled and making money is the chief objective.

Very little matters in music anymore. There is too much of it, too many genres, too many artists, too many merely technically excellent albums.

One should ask this rhetorical question: of today's big bands or artists, how many will be the subject of a Martin Scorcese movie? Okay, I know he is of a certain age and will prefer acts from his youth, but if there is major movie maker who embraces the idea of making a documentary about a big act, which of today's big guns will be chosen? Are there even big guns amongst us anymore?

The Rolling Stones have become older and have carried on for far longer than they or anybody else would have imagined but for all that their light shines strongly and brightly and still illuminates our lives far better than any alternative currently available.

 

Blue Oyster Cult Brainwashed Me

For a teenager with a creepy interest in the ephemera of the Second World War and in particular the German side of the conflict, the cover of Secret Treaties, the 1974 album by Blue Öyster Cult, the third in a series of quite wonderful tongue in cheek hard rock albums, was indeed fascinating and mysterious.

The cover featured a black and white drawing of the five band members standing in front of a Messerschmitt 262, the first working combat ready jet aircraft, introduced by the Luftwaffe in the dying months of the war in order to achieve a technological advantage intended to neutralise the superiority in numbers enjoyed by the Allied air forces. Unfortunately for the Germans it was really very little much too late. On the back cover of the album there was a different view of the ME 262 alone in a field, with wolves skulking around it. Instead of the swastika or the German cross commonly sported by its aircraft, the ME 262 sported the upside down cross/question mark that was the Cult's pagan style trademark.

The song titles were as fascinating: Career of Evil, Subhuman, Dominance and Submission, Cagey Cretins and the like. There was even a title track of sorts, in ME 262.

I knew all this because I spent a lot of time in Sigma Record bar studying record sleeves of records I never bought and Secret Treaties was one album I loved to look at. The name of the band was equally mysterious: Blue Öyster Cult! What did it mean? Where were they from?

I was too shy to ask anybody behind the counter if they knew anything about this band or even to listen to any of the tracks. My thing was to skulk behind the racks filled to the brim with album sleeves, hoping no one would notice me or ask what I was doing there week after week, flipping through the record sleeves but never buying anything, and making secret lists of the records I would buy if I had the money.

Some years later I started reading about BOC in the New Musical Express who was then on a punk crusade and did not care much for long haired, boring old fart American rockers even if they were supposedly intellectual and Sandy Pearlman, who would airbrush the production of Give 'Em Enough Rope for The Clash in a useless attempt to make the Brit punks palatable for the American market, produced them. A memorable heading to an article about BOC who was then touring the UK< mocked the short stature of a couple of their members but the writer also grudgingly admitted that he found their show surprisingly enjoyable. These guys knew how to rock and were not about bullshit rock star attitudes and took their heavy metal with a serious pinch of salt.

A fun fact about the band was that Allen Lanier, the keyboard player, dated Patti Smith, a heavy icon of the punks and the media who supported them, and she wrote the lyrics for a couple of BOC tunes.

Another fun fact or two is that the band was previously known as the Stalk Forest Group and Soft White Underbelly and once recorded a tune called A Fact About Sneakers.

It took Blue Öyster Cult four studio albums (plus a live effort), many years of hard work and the MOR FM radio blessed Don't Fear the Reaper before they became a household name with at least one certifiable classic, Classic Rock track to their credit, though they had plenty of really good tunes. It took me a while longer to become fully acquainted with the early sounds of the band.

Sigma Record bar in Andringa Street was for many years the one and only record shop in Stellenbosch. By the late Seventies their competition was Adrian & Don's Record Bar in the then fairly new Trust Bank Centre. When Adrian & Don went down, the Ragtime Records people, who owned a big and successful record store in the Golden Acre in the centre of Cape Town, decided to open up a franchise in the Trust Bank Centre in Stellenbosch and for a while going there was almost as exciting as visiting the parent branch in Cape Town but sadly the Stellenbosch shop lasted for no longer than a year before it too closed and had a massive closing down sale. I bought quite a few desirable records at this sale, including Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, and the first three Blue Öyster Cult albums: Blue Öyster Cult, Tyranny and Mutation and Secret Treaties. In a stroke I had caught up with the past of one of the great American rock institutions of the Seventies and beyond, the rarity in rock: a metal band beloved by critics. Of course this was many years after the release of the albums and by this time BOC was on the slick MOR metal of Mirrors but I did not care. The early BOC was the best cult for me.

I also have to mention that I had never thought I would ever in my lifetime come across those first two albums. To my mind they were kind of obscure in the world out there, and much more so in South Africa which was pretty far removed from the rest of the world back in the early Eighties. Coming across such objects of desire in Stellenbosch of all places was some kind of sign; not that I had known that I would desire Blue Öyster Cult before I saw the records in Ragtime Records.

My experience of heavy metal was mostly the British variety, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, and the only American heavy rockers I remembered from early Seventies radio was Grand Funk Railroad, and then later I got into Kiss, at least in respect of their debut album, and most pleasurably, Aerosmith. The British bands tended to favour keyboards and were a bit pretentious – Purple, Heep – or used guitars like battering rams and shouted a lot – Sabbath – or were a tad precious like Led Zep after Stairway to Heaven. Grand Funk Railroad had been a radio favourite with We're An American Band, The Locomotion, Some Kind of Wonderful and others and seemed almost like a pop band, and when I bought their first two albums, I was almost shocked at the raw, stripped down primitivism of the music and the banal puerility of the music. They made Black Sabbath sound like intellectuals. Aerosmith was a whole lot better and in the days of the cliché of the buzz saw punk guitar they sounded spot on like pre-punks with loud, raucous and energized tunes that hit the spot for me.

In the context of these bands Blue Öyster Cult were a little bit different. The band featured keyboards, it had crunchy and melodic guitars, it had bad ass boogies and ballads, and it had long hair, flares and aviator shades. But somehow all of these elements seemed parodic, as if BOC was playing a big joke on all of us and, like Cheap Trick, who rose to prominence only a few years after BOC hit their commercial stride, they wanted to achieve fame and fortune and nookie by playing hard rock and throwing rock star shapes that were ever so slightly skewed, just not quite serious yet also not completely comic.

Blue Öyster Cult were influenced by science fiction and wrote intelligent short story like lyrics with their various collaborators like Michael Moorcock, and could also rock out as heavy as the hardest of the heavy. The favourite party trick was a four guitar line up at the end of their shows – how awesome is that?

The music on the first three albums is a mixture of very melodic guitar tunes and heavier riffs, all with intelligent, literate and often funny lyrics, way beyond the standard banal, sexist and stupid crap so often offered by your base metal bands. In fact, in lots of ways Blue Öyster Cult was simply a heavy pop band with sci fi leanings and did not much sound like the type of heavy metal goombahs that were most popular with the spotty teenage peer group of my high school years. Then Came The Last Days Of May from the debut album was set up like a short story, a pulp fiction style crime thriller. OD'D On Life Itself from Tyranny and Mutation was your basic guitar heaven crowd pleasing rock monster track that would have had the audience on its feet, fists punching the air from the off. In those first three albums BOC did not do standard love ballads but their penchant for writing for memorable tunes was a tonic to my ears and when they rocked out, the roof shook.

Alongside of early Aerosmith early Blue Öyster Cult was my top favourite heavy American band from the Seventies. Aerosmith represented dumb, dirty, gritty rock'n'roll with fuzzed out guitars and big attitude and unadulterated fun. Blue Öyster Cult represented rock music for the alienated teenager stuck in his bedroom, but feeling quietly superior because he found a heavy band that appealed to his intellect and his ass. I could play air guitar to Blue Öyster Cult and also chuckle at the amusing things they sang about. I got the joke and I shook my rump.

J Geils Band Wanna Suck On Your Gums

In 1974 one of the stranger and more interesting songs on the Radio 5 playlist was a soul style rock tune called I Must Of Got Lost by the weirdly named J Geils Band. Not ever seeing the song title in print and not being au fait with America slang, I thought the song must be called I Must Have Got Lost, as that was the proper English, and for all I knew the artists were the Jay Giles Band. I liked the song. It had a sing-a-long chorus and a great lyric about how easy it is to lose your love: you never see it coming but you always see it going.

I Must Of Got Lost ranks up there for me as one of the great Seventies tunes. The Seventies tunes that aren't bubblegum, boogie, glam, disco or Abba. Unfortunately the J Geils Band never made it back onto the Radio 5 playlist until the release of Freeze Frame in the early Eighties, kind of their commercial peak, but not the best of the band by a long chalk. In between there was a long, dry spell when J Geils simply did not feature on the South African airwaves.

Round about 1979 I was at Stellenbosch record bar (I think it might have been Sigma Records) one day when there was a whole bunch of albums in the "sale" bin and one of them was the "Live" Full House album by the very selfsame J Geils Band.

It was a live recording released in 1972, it featured a version of John Lee Hooker's Serves You Right To Suffer (at the time I was listening to a Greatest Hits album of his and was very interested in anything else featur4ing his composer credit) and band members featured on the photographs on the back cover looked weird and mean at the same time, especially the wonderfully named Magic Dick whose hair was a band member all of its own.

I believe I listened to the first couple of tracks at the counter top turntable, as one was still able to do in those days, and was immediately blown away, and bought the album right there and then for something like R1,99, which turned out to be one of the great record bargains of my life.

Suffice to say, "Live" Full House immediately became one of my top albums of all time, a frequent guest on my tape deck (once I'd taped the album to preserve the integrity of the vinyl) and a dead cert for inclusion on my desert island disc LP's along with Dr Feelgood's Malpractice, as two examples, from different sided of the Atlantic no less, of how white boys can play the R & B card with energy, commitment and a sense of humour.

The Geils boys came from Boston, and the album was recorded in Detroit, at the time the hard rock capital of the USA, but they sure did rock the house with the Boston Monkey vibe, Peter Wolf's jive and the incredible talent of Magic Dick who was the blues harp maestro of the band. The other guys were not shabby either. This was high energy the way it ought to be.

First I Look At The Purse opens the album, and if one ignores the chauvinistic lyric – the man cares not for his woman's looks if she has a lot of bank – it is one of the great set openers of all time, soon followed by an equally intense and frantic Homework. The old one-two knockout punch. I could just see the crowd instantly up on their feet at the first notes.

As a quick aside I must mention that in 2004 I bought Nick Hornby's book 31 Songs, because he discussed influential tunes in his life, but mostly because First I Look At The Purse was one of those songs and I figured that a book featuring this song, and the album, as a personal top favourite could not be too shabby a read. Some of Hornby's choices seem a tad strange given my own preferences and predilections, but I guess that is what a personal selection is all about. Perhaps my own choices are not as radical or interesting as I might fondly believe.

"Take out your false teeth, mama, I wanna suck on your gums" must be one of the funniest and weirdest things ever said on a rock'n'roll by a White boy, even if that jiving White boy is Peter Wolf, who was probably born black but just did not know it and so he settled for being a Jewish motormouth with a ghetto slang all his own. This opening line precedes Pack Fair And Square, a fast little boogie showcasing Magic Dick and his blues harp deluxe.

Then Magic Dick really gets it on with Whammer Jammer, and instrumental where he blows his face out and the band rollicks behind him in fine style. The tune is short but makes its mark. Many years later Whammer Jammer became a featured blues harp wailing number for Cape Town blues musician Rob Nagel in bands like All Night Radio and The Flaming Firestones. Just for this reason alone I really rated Nagel; if he could be into such a relatively obscure album, he must be the real deal.

The first side of the album ends with Hard Drivin' Man, a road song of sorts where Wolf really goads the happy and noisy crowd into a frenzy with his reference to various dance routines culminating in the so-called Detroit Demolition, which he probably made up on the spot. For the first time the eponymous J Geils makes a very audible appearance on guitar, and Seth Justman pounds the ivories as if he were channelling Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.

After the power and energy of the opening side of the album, the band slows down a tad to get into the South side of Chicago groove of Serve You Right To Suffer, one of the few really great covers of John Lee Hooker songs. Peter Wolf turns what is actually something a hateful lyric into an almost comedy routine. At almost 10 minutes it is also by far the longest tune of the set, almost the equivalent of the bloated, lengthy jams boogie bands tend to slip into to make up time on their sets, but in this case there is no tedious or extraneous histrionics and the song almost seems to short. Seth Justman goes crazy on the Hammond B3 and J Geils gives every other living White bluesman a run for their money with a rip-roaring solo of extreme blues power.

J Geils Band close the show with another one-two knockout combo of the stomping R & B tunes, Cruisin' for A Love and Looking For A Love, that must have brought the crowd back to their feet, punching the air and generally getting down something fierce. Wolf and the boys took the crowd by the scruff of the neck, made them sweat, wrung them dry and wiped the floor with them. "Live" Full House is one of those albums, and the brevity of the set also has something to do with it, that I used to turn over and listen to again from side one as soon as Looking For A Love ended. It was very much like the brief yet intense rush of crack cocaine long before I had even heard of crack.

Definitely one of my desert island discs!

My next J Geils purchase happened to be Nightmares (and other tales from the vinyl jungle) the 1974 album from which I Must Of Got Lost was taken, and this album too was bought at a record sale at Sigma Records. The low price was the unique selling proposition because it seemed to me that from the track listing on the back that the blues part of the band had gone for a bit of a loop, and I remembered the wise words of some rock critic or other, referring to a later J Geils album, perhaps Monkey Island, that things tend to go wrong in funky R & B bands when the keyboard player takes over the songwriting function. I think the explanation was that keyboard players want to write and record sloppy ballads, showcasing their sensitive keyboard-playing ability and mawkish sentiments that seem to go hand in hand with the ballad fixation. Keyboard players tend to be musically educated and like to show off those chops, whereas the guitar player is more likely to play according to feel and groove.

Anyhow, Nightmares was a different kettle of fish to "Live" Full House and at first listen I was shocked by the difference and very glad I'd paid so little for it. I only like I Must Of Got Lost and the Magic Dick feature Stoop Down #39 which was about the only blues derivative on the album. J Geils had gone all sophisticated mid-Seventies soul infused funk and I was not sure I liked it all that much. The title track was not even much of a tune but more of a skit about, well, nightmares. Nightmares is not a bad album by any means, and it was a bit of a grower for me but it has never had the same visceral excitement as that live set.

In about 1982 J Geils Band popped up as pop-R & B hitmakers with Centerfold and I was happy for them that success was happening at last, or maybe it was a second round of success. Over the years I'd regularly read reviews of current releases, mostly in the NME who had an ideological thing about most American music made by White guys, and a particular dislike for White men who presumed to venture into what was considered to be a Black genre, and on the whole the NME writers panned J Geils Band. For this reason, and after my experience with Nightmares I made no effort to buy any more of their album. It must mean that I was shallow enough to be guided by the not necessarily infallible tastes of a bunch of prejudiced Brits, but I had limited resources and concentrated on records I believed would be worthwhile owning, although I must confess that price was always a serious consideration when it came to making the decision to buy something. If it were cheap, I did not mind taking a risk. J Geils Band simply did not seem like a risk worth taking. I preferred sticking to the unblemished perfection of "Live" Full House.

As an aside I should mention that it took me almost 17 years or so before I bought a CD version of "Live" Full House. In 2005 I was flipping through the electronic catalogue of Amazon when I looked up J Geils Band and saw that they had a terrific deal where you could buy the Houseparty J Geils Anthology double CD and get "Live" Full House thrown in at a special low, low price. I did the deal and waited for delivery. As it happened the albums were delivered to my office during my first ever overseas holiday.)

When I returned home I had the unadulterated pleasure of getting down and dirty to the Geils boys rocking the house in Detroit, and finding out more about their career as set out in the two CD's of the anthology. Some of the tracks were from "Live" Full House, and some from the first couple of albums, but most of them came from the middle part of their career and showcased a soulful R & B band growing ever slicker as time passed. Those early tracks were still the best, though.

I had in any event kind of caught up with the development of the J Geils Band by way of expanding my vinyl collection in the late 90s. There were a couple of music shops in Cape Town that still sold vinyl as well as CD's and they were Outlaw Records and Vibes Vinyl, both of which were favourite haunts of mine where I spent a lot of money over the years.

Vibes, in particular, had the best selection of records and it was from them that I bought The Morning After (the second album), Ladies Invited,
Love Stinks and a third live album. These albums represented the more sophisticated, progressive aspects of J Geils, with lots of good tunes had good playing and they brought joy in not the total adulation I had for "Live" Full House. By the time I bought the records, I had long since ceased to buy vinyl and my interest in J Geils Band was historical more than anything else, and the records were cheap. As had been my practice so many years before, I taped the albums and then put them away and listened only to my tapes. This selection of records represents the kind of collection where one could easily just lift a few tracks off each album and then make a decent double album. Not one of the records made compelling listening on their own and I was glad I had not paid full price for them and to this day I have not felt the need to replicate them in digital format. The Anthology double CD took care of that anyway.

The only J Geils album I would still like to own is the post Nightmares double live set Blow Your Face Out, Baby! that is a record of the band at the peak of their first taste of commercial success, playing stadiums and going large. It may be, as some critics claimed, bloated and self-indulgent but I believe it could well the same powerhouse set of high energy rock and blues and R & B represented by "Live" Full House.

The thing of life is that one can never regain the visceral excitement new discoveries bring, and you can never feel about records the same way you felt about them as teenager, whether you relisten to old favourites or hear new music, but new, previously unheard music is always interesting on first listen and if you are lucky you may well have a hint of that old feeling of orgasmic pleasure that a genuinely great record brought you once. J Geils was one of those bands, one of those unexpectedly delightful discoveries, and for this reason they will always rank in my estimation as being on par with Dr Feelgood and Cream.

How can you resist a record where the lead singer introduces the blues harp player with "On the lickin' stick: Mister Magic Dick!" ?