Suck

Suck played what was known as "underground" in South African in 1970 when their debut album Time To Suck was released on Parlophone Records, not so long before the home of the Beatles. Nowadays it is available on a CD from RetroFresh Records who have made it a mission to introduce us classic South African rock albums that have languished in total obscurity since their vinyl release.

I was 11 years old when Time To Suck was unleashed on the South African rock public but was totally and blissfully unaware of Suck's existence as I was not much into underground at the time, preferring the likes of Neil Diamond and the bubblegum pop of the time.

As I understand it, "underground" was a mixture of heavy and progressive rock, more or less anything that was not pop. The exponents ranged from Freedoms Children, to Hawk, to Abstract Truth, to Otis Waygood Blues Band, to Suck, and probably more.

Suck was apparently quite outrageous and shocking for its time and that someone was prepared to release even one album by them is pretty amazing considering the political and social restrictions applicable in South Africa at the time. The other interesting aspect to this, judging by an album full of cover versions, is that Suck seems to have been just a typical bar band of the time, playing a selection of songs from some of the heavy hitters of the time in the UK and the USA, such as Grand Funk, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Free and Deep Purple, rather than their own songs. In fact there is only one original tune in the set.

I guess, if you could not listen to Black Sabbath at your local club, Suck doing a version of War Pigs was the next best thing. They are nice and heavy, with a powerful vocalist, a guitarist who knows his power chords and a rhythm section with as little subtlety as would be required to stomp the audience into submission. There are also a few touches of flute just to add the progressive edge.

Almost all of the songs on the album were previously unknown to me, but Deep Purple's Into The Fire (utterly without organ flourishes by a Jon Lord impressionist) and Donovan's Season of the Witch are, so to say, old friends. I know the latter song best in the Stephen Stills / Al Kooper version off the Supersession album, though I have also had the pleasure of hearing Donovan doing his song. Suck do a very heavy version that removes all of the psychedelia from it and adds a drum solo; those were the days.

For the rest, I do not know whether Suck improves on Grand Funk Railroad, King Crimson or Free thought I would be so bold as to say that Andy Iannides is a far superior vocalist to Mark Farner of Grand Funk. In any event, never knows whether the songs sound different to the original version because the cover band is inventive and want to bring something new, or if they simply are not capable of an exact reproduction even if they try.

So, as a record of a band Time To Suck is probably important and it was necessary to release it on CD. My impression is that local rock albums were a relative rarity in the Seventies (and remained so until the mid-Nineties) and for that reason each and every local rock LP should be brought back in the public eye by CD release. Having said that, I cannot think that Suck or its one and only album were extremely vital parts of the South African rock tapestry, except maybe for the band members and those living fans who were around at the time. Say what you will, but the album is still a pub band's jukebox repertoire, and there were many such bands at the time and if most of them were less outrageous on stage than Suck, it does make then any less meritorious.

 

 

Lank Sweatband

Sweatband was the second Cape Town band I followed from gig to gig after All Night Radio, from the early days in Die Stal in Stellenbosch to the almost endless series of farewell gigs at the Hout Bay Manor Hotel, and in particular their spectacular homecoming concert at the Brass Bell in Kalk Bay after they had conquered Johannesburg.

At the time, possibly because I found it on sale, I bought the cassette tape version of the Lank Sweat debut album and not the vinyl LP, and now recently I've bought the Fresh Music reissue with bonus tracks from the sessions of the second, never released album.

After the heights of success of two hit singles on Radio 5 Wendy Oldfield left for a solo career, was replaced by 2 female vocalists, first Michelle Bestbier with Kelly Hunter, and then Tanya Malherbe joined Kelly. The band fell apart with huge debts and no record company support. John Mair followed a solo career playing his hits and covers in pubs and then died. Wendy Oldfield had something of a successful solo career but that has long since died the death. I have no idea what happened to the Dieter the bassist, Leslie the drummer and Kelly Hunter.

By the time the debut LP, No Sweat, was released the boys in the band had splendid late Eighties mullets and Oldfield had become a kind of sex goddess of local rock and roll after she lost the puppy fat she had when she joined the band and discovered the effect of tight black leather.

On stage both Oldfield and Mair sang, and in the beginning it was almost an equal division, but once they had gone to Johannesburg and were discovered, management obviously decided that Oldfield, who had a voice, should be the focal point and Mair had the cold comfort of singing just one or two numbers a night. After Oldfield was gone, and even with the 2 new chick singers, Mair reasserted himself and sang about half the songs on stage again.

In the beginning Sweatband sounded pretty much like a standard early Eighties reggae and white funk influenced New Wave band and then mutated into a highly tooled hard rock band with perhaps the best rock songs in South Africa at the time. On stage the band was killer and the best part was that John Mair kept writing superior songs even after the debut album was released and by the final gigs had a store of songs that cried out for vinyl release but not many were.

The CD reissue, called Lank Sweat (with an almost forgotten piece of slang, indicating that it contains almost all the tracks the band ever recorded)
brings together the songs on the debut album and unreleased tracks intended for a follow-up. When No Sweat was released I compared it to All Night Radio's The Heart's Te Best Part, produced by a stupid American Steve Louw had imported, while Sweatband was produced by local guy Kevin Shirley, and found that the completely local product kicked the ass of the sessions on which the ugly American had gotten his filthy paws.

Listening to those tracks now, the sonic effect is still powerful yet the production is so much of its time that the drums sound far too leaden for comfort. Sweatband may have had a heavy inclination but they were at heart a superior pop band and the drums should have skipped where they plodded. If there has been digital remastering, it has done the album a disservice by emphasising this type of flaw.

The effect now is that the songs sound overproduced and overweight and not bright and peppy enough. Ironically the two ballads that close the record (The Ballade and Sleep Like A Child) have the lightest touch of all the songs. The hits Shape Of Her Body and This Boy (originally sung by Mair, and taken over by Oldfield) suffer from the leaden sound and that is a disappointment.

Even at the time I thought No Sweat had too much filler and most of them were songs that had not been in the original set and I have always wondered why better, earlier material was excluded in favour of later lightweight nonsense, and now I see that some of the early tunes were recorded for the second album. There was also a cassette only demo tape sounding album I've heard, of the early Sweatband sound, with even more apparently lost tunes and some of them were integral to the set list in the band's struggle days in Stellenbosch and were quite good. John Mair certainly had great depth as a songwriter.

It seems that Sweatband, whether of their own accord or perhaps from pressure to boost Oldfield as front person, intended to go for more slow songs on the second release, giving Oldfield some work to do, with a mixture of new and old tunes, and this does not really work well. In a way, although it may have been seen as a progression, it seems to me that the band was not hitting any targets with this second batch of songs. The production values are high, with the drums once again way up front in the mix, but the effect is lacklustre, as if the band was going through the motions rather than being passionate about what they were doing. No wonder Oldfield was so easily persuaded to jump ship and forge ahead on her own. Some of the songs could be prototypes for her new career as diva with a conscience.

Sweatband did not have much competition in Cape Town, and perhaps the rest of the country too, in the period 1986 to 1989, and I guess I must have attended most of the gigs they played in and around the city in those years, well, from 1984 in fact, and though some of the shtick, like the unvarying bass solo and the endless soloing on Johnny B Goode, became a tad trying after a while, the band was unstoppable when it was in full rock monster mode on stage. Cape Town had lots of unrecorded indie bands in those days, most of which possibly aspired to be no more than the kind of band the musicians' girlfriends and close mates would be impressed with. Sweatband looked to be something much more than a scrabbling indie group with wacky image or way out sounds and cultural politics. John Mair and Wendy Oldfield were sexy front persons with a lot of va va voom, and they worked it. The leaders quite obviously had a vision of full on biggest act in the land status, not to mention that (then) elusive dream of making it "internationally" and who's to say they would not have had a shot in a different time?

That is why it is such a pity that the songs on Lank Sweat do not truly reflect the potential greatness of Sweatband.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chris Prior

The man was dubbed, or maybe it was self-styled aggrandisement,, the Rock Professor because, I guess, he knew a lot about rock, especially what we now call classic rock and all kinds of esoteric, fringe rock acts of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. For my money he may well have been the single most important DJ on South African rock radio, with only the guy form the Hobnailed Tekkie Show on Radio Good Hope to offer any competition, and Chris Prior is certainly the last rock DJ I made a point of tuning in to.

Back in my late teens and early twenties the NME was the fount of a large amount of information on the rock scene of the time, and some old stuff they covered, but the problem was that hardly any of the music the NME wrote about was freely or at all available to me. Chris Prior was the guy who gave me some practical knowledge of a bunch of acts I treasured then and still do today.

Prior had a regular slot on Audiomix, the youth oriented magazine programme the English Service broadcast in the late afternoon, and he gave short courses on acts he deemed worthy of our attention. This is where I first heard the Texas blues rock of Z Z Top and the folk punk stylings of Van Morrison. He must have had inserts on a number of other groups but these two stand out, perhaps because in time, some years later, I made an effort to acquire the music of both acts, and owned a bunch of records by each.

Prior also championed Tom Waits, and Rickie Lee Jones end though I eventually started buying Tom Waits, mostly, though, due to the influence of a girlfriend of the time, with a little nod to the Waits music I'd heard at m y friend Sean's house.

Chris Prior went to work for Capital Radio 604, based in Port St Johns in the then Transkei so-called independent homeland and, as I could not pick up Capital Radio, Prior disappeared off my radar until het popped up as the late night jockey on Radio 5 in the mid-Eighties, when the station was being revamped and repositioned as a format free rock station, under a British station manager, a welcome change from the awful disco format it had followed under Pieter Human since shortly its inception.

As I understood it, the new plan at Radio 5 was to have a top-notch morning show guy, who turned out to be Martin Baillie, to draw in a large audience, with middle of the road rock and pop during the daytime and early evening, with specialist rock shows later at night, and on Saturday afternoons. From this change we got the Saturday Shadow Show, featuring Barney Simon who later kind of assumed the Prior mantle as guru of modern rock, and Rafe Levine's Friday night metal show, and of course Chris Prior's late night rock show.

At first the Prior show was on between 22h00 and midnight and when Radio 5 became an 24 hour station, the Prior show expanded into a 4 hour showcase for all that he considered top of the range rock, pop and esoterica. It is at about this time that the Rock Professor monicker appeared and it might even have been a pure marketing ploy dreamt up by the station's PR team.

I tuned in to Chris Prior most evenings as I had no television and listened to a lot of music and liked what he played.

By the late Eighties Chris Prior was so powerful he could even tour the country and present DJ set of clubs, filled with the best of his rock collection and could draw substantial crowds. He must have been one of the last local DJs, apart from Barney Simon, who could fill clubs without playing house or trance or any of the other genres of dance music that were so prevalent in the day of the globetrotting superstar DJ.

Prior was very influential and his imprimatur could make acts that were slightly outside of the mainstream, like The Waterboys, whom he played relentlessly, or local act Sankomoto. In a way, the Rock Professor ID could also be related to a slightly fuddy duddy approach to what he found acceptable. This meant, for example, that he could popularise The Waterboys but play only one or two of their songs and not much else from the albums. In a way he must have had a rigid playlist of sorts and if some of the choices of acts were adventurous, the selection of what he played was far less so.

One of the most interesting sections of the Prior show was the nightly Priority Feature, where for 30 minutes to an hour he featured the music of a specific artist. Once a week the Priority Feature concentrated on local rock and he gave exposure to bands and individuals who probably got very little radio play otherwise. Not only did he play the music but he had interviews with the musicians and publicised their ventures, such as the night when he chatted with Steve Louw about the forthcoming All Night Radio album, and played some acetates of a couple of tracks off the album.

Radio 5 paid lip service to the idea of promoting local rock music and did programme some of it during the daytime schedule but Chris Prior made a point of doing it, and doing it properly. This was long before the SA Music Explosion of post-1994 and there was not that much local rock that got recorded and released, and there was not that much good stuff among the releases, and to make the kind of effort Chris Prior made, deserved and deserves recognition. Nowadays you could programme a radio station to play nothing but local rock 24 hours a day and not have to repeat any song. Back then supporting local music was a brave act.

I have no idea when I stopped listening to Chris Prior or when he left Radio 5, or maybe it was already 5 FM by then. At the end 5 FM had been repositioned once again to be more of a top 40 station and with more autocratic imposition of playlists, even on the superstar Prior. Not only that but his show was cut too. To be honest, by the early Nineties I was kind of bored with Chris Prior and he really became the professor who was not prepared to be too adventurous anymore because he was much too stuck in the rut of what he thought of as good stuff. The end came when he insisted on playing Stairway to Heaven every night. I have no idea why. Did he think it was the best rock song ever written? Was it some kind of statement? Was it a big fuck you to those who were trying to dictate his playlist? Whatever it was, I was not happy with the concept and I was even less happy with the other songs Prior was playing, as it seemed that he was no longer the barnstormer I had grown to like way back. Perhaps it was also the constriction of the playlist he was forced to follow so that he became just an announcer of songs he had not chosen. Either way, the Chris Prior had lost its lustre and 'must listen' aura.

I must confess that I stopped listening to 5 FM altogether somewhere in the mid-Nineties. If memory serves Barney Simon took over the late night slot with his modern rock show. Although Simon should be as lauded as Prior for sticking steadfastly to his chosen genre and for being the poster boy for alternative rock, I could not stand him as a radio presence or persona. It amazed me that someone who had been a presenter for as long as he had been by then, could still sound as nervous and awkward as someone who had just started out. Only Tony Sanderson was worse.

Simon's choice of music was also not very compelling but the major turn-off was that he talked so much. He must have loved his own voice, or maybe he just did not have that many tunes to play and plenty of airtime to fill. I soon tuned out. In 1998 I went over to Good Hope FM for the latest in urban music, dance music, R & B, hip hop and whatever else they played.

The next radio station I listened to with any regularity was Radio 2000, in the period 2001 to 2006, when its evening format was a seamless rock playlist in a DJ free environment with lots of local music. One did not always know the act or the name of the tune, but the mix of old and new, local and international, rock and pop, was innovative and compelling. Sadly this is no longer the case.

I have no idea where Chris Prior went to after he left 5 FM. I think it might have been Radio 2000's daytime slots, or some other radio station that would allow him to ply his wares.

I am still thankful to Prior for introducing me to early Z Z Top, the Van Morrison of Astral Weeks, Listen to the Lion and the better Eighties stuff , John Hiatt (mostly Bring The Family but also earlier stuff), Linton Kwesi Johnson (mostly Tings and Times), The Waterboys, and others I cannot even remember now.

Chris Prior was important for bringing us good rock and roll, mostly pretty classic, sometimes innovative, but at all times his choice until the corporate structures took his freedom away and subjected him to a playlist system that stifled the very nature of the beast. Perhaps it was not such a bad thing, all things considered, because he had become a bit of a dinosaur anyway and needed to be shaken up, but it is always bad for a free spirit, and one with nous too, to be caged in such a way.

In the ordinary course I would no doubt have stopped listening to Prior regardless of the playlist because my musical tastes were no longer his and to a degree my perception was that I was a couple of steps ahead of him in my eclectic tastes and was far more willing to adopt, or just to listen to, all kinds of new music. Chris Prior did in effect become the fusspot professor who had made his mark so long ago that one could almost no longer remember the nature of the beast and who was then content to rest on his laurels and never again be as progressive and innovative as he had been when he was young. I suppose Prior's argument might have been that he had his classic rock slot and Barney Simon had his modern rock slot and their respective audiences preferred it that way, and that the two approaches were meant to complement each other, but frankly, I would rather have listened to Chris Prior introducing the kind of modern rock that Simon was championing than listen to the Barney. Chris Prior should have seized the moment and embraced all of the new rock out there in the late Eighties and early Nineties, as he had 4 hours of airtime to fill, instead of sticking to the old stuff he knew so well. There was no reason why Van Morrison could not have coexisted with Nirvana or the Stone Roses, or whoever.

So, Chris Prior turned from revolutionary to radio careerist and disappeared into the void. He must still be out there somewhere, spinning his tunes, in the relaxed style and air of assurance and authority that made him my DJ hero for a number of years, but I do not know where that radio station is or on what frequency it broadcasts and I am not sure I would care to find out.

It is never good to revisit a hero to find out what they are currently up to, as inevitably it cannot be as good or as exciting as what he had done to make him a hero in the first place.

 

Lady Gaga

The video for Bad Romance is all over the local music channel MK, along with Jack Parow's Cooler As Ekke, and though one should always separate the visual from the music as the sights may detract from the sounds and take the place of the imagination when it comes to interpreting the lyrics, this video is probably one of the more arresting and gripping videos I've seen for a dance act.

The high concept is a big production full of erotic symbolism, with lots of pretty explicit eroticism, and plenty of symbols of alienation. There are dance sequences, dream sequences, image vignettes, and plenty of fast paced flow from scene to scene. Red leather, white leather, weird futuristic couture outfits, masks, icy, distant men in suits, and one glimpse of a voluptuous, lace panty-clad ass, which may be the diva's derriere, or at least one likes to think so. Mostly Lady Gaga is hidden behind hair and make-up yet there are also images of her as more or less open, innocent and naïve disco waif.

The video ends with the artist posing elegantly on a bed alongside an equine skeleton. Perhaps it is a homage to The Godfather movie, perhaps it is a visual pun for the phrase "flogging a dead horse." it is possibly one of the more bizarre endings to a music video I've ever seen.

Behind all of this is a disco beat and a catchy tune and it is not difficult to understand why Bad Romance is yet another monster neo-disco hit from the alleged new Madonna.

Some crappy entertainment magazine recently claimed that the Lady is searching for love in al the wrong places and is lonely, lost and desperate. At least, that is what I gleaned from the cover blurb. I did not read the accompanying article as I believed it would be bare of facts and chock a block with half-truths and innuendo, as these articles tend to be. It's not as if I am about to write a love letter to Lady Gaga to advertise my availability.

The only Bad Romance I'm interested in, is the hit tune of the moment.

I believe she has dark hair but the look she sports is blonde and a part early Madonna and part Christina Aguillera when she is blonde. The vocal strength is close to Christina than to Madonna, and the music Is nothing like the very Eighties electro dance tracks Madonna used for her breakthrough hits. Like Aguillera, Lady Gaga relies on her pipes as much as she does on her image to get through to the masses, and I salute her for it. There is nothing like a disco diva with a proper voice singing good, tuneful dance pop songs, though I would imagine that the Lady would want to be regarded as more than mere dancefloor fluff. She has something to say and will say it to a beat you can dance to.

Lady Gaga makes music you have to play loud. And you must want to shake your booty. And maybe you can read the lyrics and marvel at her philosophical insights.

Pretty Blue Guns

Blues rock is a style that is not too popular or prevalent in South Africa today where the modern rock styles of the new millennium are the fad of the moment. Globalisation has caused a situation where the majority of local bands sound little different to any number of foreign acts, and the generic effect is of groups who sound alike and not very interesting. Guitar solos are not cool; big, soaring anthemic rock is the hip thing. That everything sounds alike is a minor issue.

It is always refreshing to hear a band who does something different to what their peers are doing and who then distinguish themselves from the herd in so doing. One such group is The Pretty Blue Guns who may look like emo kids, or whatever look the common or garden band aspires to, but sound a hell of a lot different.

If I cast my mind back the best (relatively) recent comparison I can think of is the defunct Billygoat (one of the Trippy Grape bands from the mid to late Nineties), who came from much the same concept as Pretty Blue Guns, and Delta Blue who started as a purist blues band and then became soulbluesrock monsters by the time of their third album Inbluesstation.

There have also been other blues bands in South Africa over the years who perfected their cover versions of blues and blues rock standards and entertained thousands in pubs all across the land, but apart from being quite entertaining they did not contribute much to the development of the local scene because they hardly, if ever, wrote their own songs.

Then there is Dan Patlansky who channels Stevie Ray Vaughan and is happy to be the hottest guitars linger in the country and is incredibly earnest about it all.

Now we have The Pretty Blue Guns who are named for a Tom Waits song and who bring the proverbial modern rock energy to a blues sensibility in a kind of first for South Africa where this kind of roots blues infused rock is not yet as prevalent as it is elsewhere, because most local rock acts are very serious about their modernist and up to date hip credentials.

PBG look like every other local rock act from Bellville to Benoni yet stand apart because they dig a different beat. They have guitar solos and slashing slide guitar And they write damn good traditionally recognisable tunes.

Lost Faith is the best lovelorn kiss-off song I've heard in a while.

The piece de resistance is Devil Do, the last track, which is a fine approximation of an old timey gospel blues, much like the song Ain't Going To Heaven off Delta Blue's (so far) last album, Heaven. For some reason South African white boys are rather more keen on the delights offered by Satan than the heavenly rewards good Christians are supposed to enjoy.

 

There is not much of a Tom Waits connection here, except for the band name, and the blues is more of a background to the muscular rock the boys play, yet it is a fine debut, assured and full of the kind of energy punk is supposed to have and which sounds so lacking in so much of modern rock today. The guys are young and still have to absorb their influences fully but if they slightly overreach themselves when they sing about subjects best left to old bluesmen, I sense a genuine commitment to the style and sources and perhaps a keen interest to build on a tradition.

If they can get it together to be a bit of a jam band, as blues rock really demands of its practitioners, The Pretty Blue Guns would be a very satisfactory live experience.

 

 

New Holland

Google New Holland and you find a bunch of links for a company that manufactures agricultural equipment and machinery, such as heavy duty tractors. They even have some YouTube videos.

There is also a reference to a very old name for Australia. There is just one link to the band New Holland's 2009 album Exploded Views.

Strange, eh? In this day and age I would have expected the band to have a more prominent profile on the Internet. Anyhow, it does not matter, I guess. Exploded Views is a corker of an album and for my money one of the best local releases, along with the debut from Pretty Blue Guns, of the last year.

New Holland are lumped in with the "Bellville bands" that have been celebrated in a compilation of their own. Obviously the bands that do come from Bellville now completely disavow this kind of shorthand categorisation. On the one hand, belonging to a scene is good when the scene first gets attention, as the identification with what is perceived to be hip and happening can be of great assistance in making a breakthrough to commercial viability, but then it may become a millstone when the tide goes out and the attention moves to another scene. Then you are just stranded along with the driftwood of that faded scene and nobody is willing to accept you in any other context.

The first, and the best, always transcend whatever scene they come from and I believe that New Holland should easily be able to do so as well. This is just a great rock band with passion, intensity, excellent songs and inspired arrangements. New Holland is one more example among many of the kind of band that produces music that makes me believe South African rock need no longer stand back for anyone in the world. There may be internationally hugely successful bands New Holland would never be able to outdo purely and simply because of geographical limitations, but I cannot see many of those bands delivering a product that could surpass Exploded Views.

The joyous thing is that the guitars bounce and crunch in much more individual style than the modern rock bands that sound like cut-outs from the same base metal template. It is refreshing to hear a group with a different aural appeal, who are not scared to fly closer to the sun than the rest, or to jump sideways when everyone else try the slam dunk. The other wonderful thing is the odd washes of electronica that colour the rock with a vaguely ambient, uh, ambience.

Another odd thing is that the band members seem to be nice Afrikaans boys who have obviously decided that it is not their road to stardom to sing in Afrikaans. The Afrikaans rock scene seems pretty substantial, as large, if not larger, than the more internationalist scene where English is still the language of rock and roll. The 'taal' is now fully accepted and acceptable as a language in which all manner of local youth can express themselves from stupid pop to rap to death metal, not to mention Christian rock and roll, yet many of those bands are as unimaginative as their English singing peers and are as interchangeable. If singing in English, even if it is not the home language, helps New Holland gain a worldwide audience, more power to them.

Something To Believe In is the classic hit song: it's about putting your creative efforts out there and only being happy when you sing your song, and it sounds just like something you've heard before but never have. If that is not a sign of a world conquering hit, you can call me Meyer.

 

Fleetwood Mac: The Dance

In 1997 Fleetwood Mac reformed as the late '70s version of the band, the most commercially successful incarnation of an organisation that'd started out as a purist blues band and, after some lost years in MOR limbo, ended up as one of the biggest era defining groups of the '70s and early '80s.

By the late Nineties Fleetwood Mac was pretty well dormant and the various members kept themselves busy with solo careers or simply relaxing by the pool, enjoying their money, or at least one hopes they did. The band did not truly manage to retain its strength and creativity after the departure of Lindsay Buckingham and it limped on for a while before the remaining individuals realised it would be better to have a long hiatus than to try to regain past glories. It is interesting to note that Fleetwood Mac could survive the departure of all its previous guitarists but could not manage the same trick when Buckingham went off to do his own thing. This would possibly mean that he was the creative heart and soul of the band. On the other hand, the band was no longer as hungry and struggling as it had been during the tenure of most of the previous guitarists and this probably meant that it was not too difficult simply to lie back for a while and not flog the deaf horse of a moribund creative unit.

Anyhow, in 1997 the band got back together for a series of gigs. No doubt money played a role, and the rekindling of a monster success story, even if everybody concerned was considerably older than in the heyday of the Rumours juggernaut.

On stage the band dress quite conservatively in good, only slightly Bohemian taste, much like the somewhat older audience it drew to its concert. The 3 frontpersons wear black, which is of course highly chic and fashionable and not an intimation that they are really up there for the eulogy of a once great band whose nostalgic memories they will be attempting to revive. The audience is profusely thanked for listening while the band members do their patented Fleetwood Mac thing with the assurance and authority that come from long years of experience. This is the kind of show that once again redefines adult oriented rock, this time for an audience who may have been kids back in the day.

There is a powerful sound system and the visuals are great because the camera coverage is so extensive, and it seems that a good time was had by all, the musicians on stage and the paying audience. Of course there is no wild dancing in the aisles, everybody is super cheerful and happy and well behaved. You cannot imagine this slightly wonky group of middle aged people, wearing lots of makeup to hide the years of hard living going backstage between numbers to do a line or two just to keep the energy levels up. The look like the spring water and macrobiotic food types, though John McVie was always a bit of a lush, and Stevie Nicks probably had regular whole body blood transfusions to maintain her youthful appearance. Even her profile shows signs of a certain blowsiness and Christine McVie looks exactly like every other well preserved Englishwoman of a certain age and class, perfectly made up and every bottle blonde hair in place. She should be the chairwoman of the parish library and not some kind of rock star. In fact, on reflection, she makes me think of the female sidekick to Donald Trump in his Apprentice reality TV series.

Lindsay Buckingham is a little gray around the temples but otherwise looks quite young and fresh though in close ups his eyes seem rather sad. Maybe he is not really comfortable revisiting the old hits. Buckingham still sings as good as ever and plays great virtuoso guitar, even doing some solo numbers from solo albums just to drive home the point that he had, and has, a life outside of the monolith.

Overall the music is mixture of the old hits and some new numbers and the USC marching band is trotted out yet again for Tusk – obviously the kids of the band that played on the original version – and great fun is had by all. I would imagine, other than the styles of dress, this concert would have been pretty much similar to any performance the band gave at the height of their success and as such it is a good souvenir of one of the giants of pop rock.

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Shaar Murray

In the mid-Seventies Charles Shaar Murray (or CSM as I soon came to know him) wrote the first article I ever read about Dr Feelgood, published in Hit Parader magazine.

Today I watched a YouTube clip from 2009, of CSM and his band Crosstown Lightnin' performing Hideaway, the Freddie King number also made famous by Cream. CSM plays a white Fender Stratocaster and throws a bunch of conventional lead guitarist shapes.

Although he plays a different guitar and has a different stage personality, I was struck by the striking similarity between the way CSM looks today and how Wilko Johnson, erstwhile guitarist for Dr Feelgood looks today. They could well be brothers in more ways than just in the blues.

Crosstown Lightnin' sounds like a lot or competent blues bands and there is nothing in particular about the performance on the video to suggest that we are dealing with a whole new deal in blues. Evidently CSM is having fun, he can play the guitar well and I would imagine I would have a good night out at any venue they play.

I must make a confession and say that Charles Shaar Murray was the first rock writer I really rated both for his erudition in matters of which I knew little at the time, and for his hip, funny style. In 1977 when I started buying the NME I was more or less clueless about rock music in its broad spectrum although I had started on my journey to learn as much about it as I could. The thing was that the books I had dealt with older music, the glam rock of the early Seventies was the most recent music they dealt with and by the dawning of the age of punk such stuff was well and truly old fashioned. The NME provided me with a window into what was happening in the UK at the time, albeit always about 6 months behind the times, and of its many good writers CSM was the guy who spoke loudest to me.

He liked the blues, and I was just starting on my journey into the blues as well, yet he obviously had all the right credentials and moves to fit right into contemporary rock with a somewhat more jaundiced eye than some of the young guns at the NME who either did not know much about anything before punk or chose to pretend that none of it mattered.

It was only when I bought Shots From The Hip that I read CSM's earlier pieces and fully realised how wide his experience in rock journalism had been, and I must also say that the self consciously hip style and gonzo affectations of many of the items from the pre-punk era seemed a trifle pretentious and precious and grated slightly on my nerves, but on the whole it was a good way of learning how a style develops and how a rock writer can change his viewpoint over time and yet remain true to his original vision.

I liked CSM's style in the weekly NME because he was funny, cool, and wrote in clear, precise English and said what he meant and meant what he said, unlike, say Ian Penman who specialised in clear as mud bullshit. Of course I shared many of CSM's opinions and he became a guide. If he liked something, I would like it too and if I did not know anything about the artist, his recommendation was a motivation for seeking out a record.

An NME with plenty CSM in it was a delight; an NME with no CSM in it, was a bit of a dud.

Over the years I've bought Shots From The Hip, the collection of articles for various publications, Crosstown Traffic, the critical study of the music of Jimi Hendrix (the very serious style of this book made it seem like a doctoral thesis, very unlike the loose style CSM usually employed) and Boogieman, the John Lee Hooker biography, where the CSM of old made a reappearance, in the style as well as in the narrative. I wish there was more, either anther collection or maybe just another book. Perhaps he is busy researching or writing something new, and playing blues guitar in his spare time.

Maybe he is doing a Tom Wolfe and is working on his debut novel at this late stage of his writing career which had been focused on journalism. Whatever it is, I look forward to it. This man is a major talent.

Nowadays CSM is gray and wears his hair very short, possibly to camouflage the bald spot. Back in the day he had a mop of curls and liked wearing a dark suit with red Converse sneakers. When I first read of this sartorial style, I thought the guy was unspeakably hip. Not only could he write like a god but he fitted right in with his subjects. I wanted to emulate him and in my home town there was not much call for a pudgy, spotty faced, clueless pseudo punk and I was in any event way too scared of public ridicule to adopt a complete punk attitude and style. In my heart, though, I wore a black suit and red sneakers, and cultivated irony and wit as my defence against a cruel world.

Anyhow, my view of CSM made me believe that being a rock critic or maybe just music journalist, would be one of the best careers ever. In my fantasy life anyhow, as I did not pursue that route but stuck to my law studies instead.

I did not write about music at all until 1996, after I'd heard of the death of local guitarist Nico Burger, and was motivated to write about my interaction with Burger and the music scene in Stellenbosch and Cape Town from the mid-Eighties to the early Nineties. After that I wrote a steady number of pieces about various acts I liked or did not like and started publishing them on my various blogs. So, rock journalist I am not and will never be. CSM may not even write much about music anymore as he is now elevated into the rarefied atmosphere of the famous who can probably elect what they want to write about and no longer has any deadline issues to deal with.

Greil Marcus is another of my top favourite rock writers but he is almost the anti-CSM in that I do not believe that Marcus sees anything humorous in rock and his writing style is far too scholarly and literary and I believe that he overworks the subject matter a lot of the time. It is difficult to understand why anyone could take any aspect of rock music that seriously. Maybe Greil Marcus never practised his craft as music journalist, much less in the cauldron of the competition between British music weeklies in the heydays of the Seventies and spent little time around working, big name rock acts and never really saw the ridiculous side of it in action. CSM met a number of the big names and was not to beholden to mock the pretentious and stupid. He knew that rock stars were not infallible or even intelligently articulates because he saw them face to face and was not going to suffer fools simply because he or she may be earning millions in the popular music sphere.

Greil Marcus may continue to be regarded as some heavyweight observer and critic of popular culture and CSM may become a footnote as just another Brit who got a bit lucky in his career but never quite transcended is roots in the populist rock weeklies, but for my money I would almost rather have a collection of CSM's product than that of Marcus. When I regularly bought the NME I also kept scrapbooks of cuttings from it: reviews, articles, photographs. Those scrapbooks contained copious amounts of writing by CSM, from articles to reviews to Smart Arse Oneliner replies to letters addressed to NME, and covered pretty much everything he got published in the NME between 1977 and 1981 and of course I am talking about many more items than collected in Shots From The Hip. Some years ago, when I amalgated my household with my girlfriend's, I threw away a lot of stuff, including those scrapbooks, some 40 in all, and every now and then I feel a pang of regret. It would still be nice to look back at rock music history on the go as presented by NME and to have a comprehensive collection of CSM's opinions on the passing scene as he observed at the time.

One of the earliest CSM pieces I kept, was a profile of Muddy Waters, then in the twilight of his life and career, though the career had been resuscitated under the auspices of Blue Sky Records and Johnny Winter. For some reason I did not simply cut out the article, perhaps because it ran over a couple of pages and there may have been something else of value on the reverse of the Waters article. So, in order to keep the article (and the fact that it was about a legendary bluesman weighed very much in favour of the piece) I laboriously typed a copy of the article. The typing took much longer than I had anticipated as I used only 2 fingers to type and it turned out that what seemed a relatively concise article in printed form, took up more paper in A4 size than I would have thought possible. Apart from anything else it gave me a new insight in the amount of effort required to produce such a piece.

The NME writers were fond of referring to themselves, perhaps not completely sardonically ironic, as hacks but it is difficult to believe that a hack would have been able to turn out high class prose and entertainment almost each and every time he put his fingers on the keyboard of a typewriter. CSM has talent in spades, has an enquiring mind and sharp wit and was not, and probably is not, afraid to make use of these tools to make his mark and to say his say. Whether he is a genius as a guitarist, is difficult to say from the evidence of one video clip but I must say that I always found it slightly weird that the man would be a blues aficionado, to the extent of playing in a R & B band, amidst the New Wave acolytes of the NME who would have considered the blues as so obsolescent that it would make boring old farts seem fresh, hip and happening. This was one reason why I loved the concept of CSM; he was not afraid to be different amongst the young Turks and to be tolerant of their brutish Philistinism and almost reactionary antipathy towards anything that did not jibe with the new orthodoxy. CSM was not that old but he must have been regarded as fucking ancient by the newbies who seemed not only to know little of rock's history but did not care.

CSM knew that it was, all jokes apart, a big tapestry furl of rich colour and images, that a lot of it would be repeated in different shapes and forms over the future years and that even a young Turk will grow old and be superseded by even younger and more radical Turks. In rock music writing you are only as good as your last published piece, and CSM was good in every one and excellent in most.

 

 

 

Big Bill Broonzy

In the Forties and Fifties there were a handful of bluesmen who became favourites of the hip White establishment particularly those who favoured American folk music and the Black sub-variant thereof, and they were Leadbelly, Josh White, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy. These guys knew the blues and perhaps played quite deep blues in their time but were also successful with White audiences because they sanitised the blue, removed the salaciousness and deep emotion and presented it almost as a pop music.

Big Bill, for example, was well-known as a musician in the Thirties for the Bluebird label, recording blues tunes with small groups that had much more in common with the small group jazz popular at the time than with the typical Delta bluesman. Big Bill's very urban, very commercial blues was very much a musical style that appealed to his audience and not quite a serious expression of any kind of mental state even if being Black in an American city was only slightly better than being Black in the rural countryside of the Deep South.

When he was a young guy, Big Bill was a professional musician who made his living by entertaining his people; he played for dancing and not for contemplation.

Some years later, when his commercial value had waned, he was "discovered" by trendy White loves of Black music, still somewhat of a taboo, and they were some times more purist than truly at one with the music they purported to love and to support, yet I have always thought it had more to do with fashion and the assumption that the so-called love of blues music was more of an intellectual discourse than a really visceral experience.

This was why the British blues and trad jazz aficionados were so appalled by the noise and energy of the Muddy Waters band when he first played in the UK. The British blues fans thought of blues as a quaint folk type of music played by one guy and a guitar, telling tales of a hard life and unfaithful women, not some electrified band concerned with entertaining their audience in the same way they entertained back home.

Broonzy came from the musical background of blues as popular entertainment and not some 'authentic' style practised by unsophisticated back country bluesmen. That aspect of his career had gone forever and he quickly realised that a new career beckoned if he were prepared to change his style and adopt the guise of the type of blues musician approved of by the White impresarios who would market him and of the audience he would be playing to. He picked up his guitar, learned some country blues and suddenly he was lionised all over Europe as the very epitome of the authentic bluesmen. Apparently he lapped up the attention, and who could blame him, and had an excellent last few years of his life, a bit like the resuscitation of Muddy Waters in the late Seventies.

The music from the Bluebird years showcase Broonzy as a musician who can master a number of styles and it is mostly joyful blues, sometimes racy and salacious, sometimes more serious, always played by an ensemble of musicians who probably know more about infusing their jazz with blues than sounding like anything that came from the Delta. One feels that the Delta musicians, even if they were employing the technique of composing new blues from putting together bits and pieces from a standard selection of licks and phrases, more or less reflected the truth of their lives, where Big Bill Broonzy's urban blues tunes sound composed from scratch with an intellectual, musicological approach rather than as life experiences.

Lots of overly serious White blues enthusiasts saw blues as a pure folk expression of the musician who wants to make art out of his life, whereas in fact most blues musicians of the very old school, the guys from the Mississippi Delta, for example, made music as a way of getting out of manual, low paying labour, or to supplement the income from manual labour and not as some expression of high art. The folk art aspect of it was a pure invention of the intellectualised approach to blues appreciation by people who mostly knew the blues because they listened to records and not because they went to rent parties or Saturday night fish fries, or visited juke joints where the audience wanted to eat, drink and be merry, and wanted the musicians to play loud and long for dancing and maybe fighting, not to make art. Those audiences were not sitting down, quietly and reverently taking in the subtle nuances of the lyrics or instrumental backing, they shouted, argued, laughed and had a good time. It was only much later on his career that Big Bill Broonzy found himself playing to audiences who were so well-behaved you would hardly know they were there until they politely applauded at the end of numbers. No rowdiness or rambunctiousness here.

And, being no fool, Big Bill soon realised that he had to present his craft, and his life, as art in order to keep his new set of patrons happy, and by all accounts he did. He had entertained his ghetto audience in one way and he now adapted his act to entertain his uptown audience in another way; but one way or another it was all schtick.

I love the story of how Muddy Waters brought his electric band to Britain on his first visit there, because he heard the English audiences were keen on the blues, and then freaked them out by the sheer loud energy of his superb Chicago band, when the average British blues lover thought of the blues as a quite folk-style performed by some old guy and his acoustic guitar. When Muddy returned some years later, having learnt his lesson, he left the band at home and packed only his acoustic guitar, happily prepared to be the folk blues guy he thought the Limeys wanted. Much to his surprise fashions had changed and now the audience was annoyed precisely because he did not have his Chicago band with him.

The point of this is also to demonstrate that blues is as much subject to popular fads and taste as any other popular music and that the average bluesman had to, and still has to, keep abreast of what his audience wanted from time to time. From this perspective Big Bill Broonzy was no sell out or cynical seeker of the White man's moolah when he turned all down-home and folksy. This was his time, a bit like the revitalisation of Muddy Waters in the late Seventies, or the rediscovery of Mississippi John Hurt or Fred McDowell, who were genuinely country bluesmen, and Big Bill knew a commercial opportunity when he saw one and had been after that pot of gold his entire career in music.

 

 

Prince

For most of my youth Scope was South Africa's premier, if not only, man's magazine with a mixture of features and pin-ups and I guess it kind of aspired to be a local Playboy. The sad part was that it was published in a country that had and enforced strict censorship on political and sexual issues and the naughty bits of the pin-ups were inevitably covered either by invasive black bands or, later, cuter little stars. None of the girls were fully nude, but visible nipples on sexy White chicks were anathema to the guardians of our morality.

The other thing about Scope was that it did its best to cover the local music scene, such as it was back in the Seventies and early Eighties, and there was usually a page or two of record reviews. I bought Scope surreptitiously, hiding it like contraband from my mother, even if it was not quite tame, and cut out the pin-ups and pasted them into dedicated scrapbooks, which I also carefully hid. I guess this was a sad activity, but I was a lonely, alienated, horny teenager with scrambled and raging hormones. I also cut out the record reviews, as I also made scrapbooks of articles and reviews I cut from NME, Melody Maker and other British rock publications, and whatever was published in South Africa at the time, mostly from Scope and some from Kerneels Breytenbach's column in the then Saturday Byvoegsel to the Burger, the local Afrikaans daily.

Scope went from perhaps a single page with some reviews to a double spread with plenty of reviews, mostly quite brief, and with a small picture of the album cover. I guess the magazine did not have a dedicated rock writer or reviewer and the records were given to various staff members. One such was Martin Hendy who also wrote reviews under the name Herman Tindy; why I never fathomed, unless it was that the editor did not want to let on that one guy was writing most of the stuff.

Anyhow, Martin Hendy seemed to be a man of a certain age who perhaps liked rock (or maybe he just listened to jazz or classical music at home and wrote about rock only because it was a job) but who had a fixed, old-fashioned approach to what he liked and did not care for anything new.

This view of mine was corroborated by the review (by either of the noms de plume) of Prince's third album, Dirty Mind (1980). It was perhaps the briefest review I'd ever read in Scope and it basically and simply made the point that Prince was making disco shit and that the album was useless. That was about it. It was disco and therefore crap. Obviously Hendy or Tindy either did not listen closely, did not have the funk in him or was simply turned off by the cover (a semi-naked Prince in black g-string and coat), quite in your face salacious lyrics of some of the tunes and could not appreciate the tunes, the fact that there was quite a bit of funky rock on the album and that even the one long funk jam was danceable if the lyrics were disposable. I guess the P-funk or futuristic variations thereof were not to the Scope's taste and the reviewer was not clued up enough to distinguish between disco and funk. Hendy/Tindy also complained about the exceedingly brief duration of the album or perhaps he was relieved that it was so short.

The guy who reviewed Dirty Mind for NME had quite a different view. He raved. The music was funk with hefty doses of New Wave influenced guitar rock, and the lyrics were "dirty" but probably also not meant to be particularly serious. This was a fun album and the mark of genius was on it.

I always wondered what Hendy/Tindy made of Prince's later ubiquity.

During 1980 I bought the album at a record sale at Sygma records and was totally thrilled by it. On the one level the horny twenty one year old in me appreciated the sexy naughtiness of Head and Sister, but the music fan in me really dug the grooves. By then I was already in the P-funk thing and Prince made absolute sense to me in that context. This was no disco crap, this was big fun. I was also immensely impressed by the fact that Prince not only wrote the songs but also played just about every instrument on the record. He was young and he was enormously talented.

I must admit that I had seen one of the two earlier albums around in record bars in Stellenbosch and had not been impressed. The name and front cover photograph of a chipmunk faced Prince with silly little moustache (he still had it for Dirty Mind) also made me think that this artist was the disco dork Martin Hendy thought he was. Even after I bought Dirty Mind I made no effort to buy that earlier album; it just did not look right.

Even though I was very fond of Dirty Mind it did occur to me that this guy would be a major talent. The music was fun but the lyrical content was so thin it seemed to me he would be just a flash in the pan relying on sexual controversy and risqué songs with diminishing returns before he would fade away.

I read the reviews of the follow up albums, Controversy and 1999 and particularly from the NME views realised that rock critics were taking the man seriously and that perhaps there would be more of a career for him than merely being a kind of perverse low level funkateer.

With Little Red Corvette Prince finally had a hit single that even got airplay in South Africa and when I ran across the 1999 double album (1982) somewhere in early 1984 at a discount price I could not refuse, I snapped it up. This was no Dirty Mind, which has the distinction of being succinct. With 1999 Prince had the then very fashionable and soon to be dominant Minneapolis funk-rock sound down pat and I found that it was a musical style that had limited appeal to me. I preferred the more old school P-Funk approach. This new fangled jerky funk thing with the trebly guitars and lots of synths quickly bored me.

1999 is not a bad album, but it is not a favourite. I listened to it because I had it and wanted to be hip to Prince but my heart was not in it

Between 1984 and 1987 I bought Controversy and Life In A Day, the two albums that respectively preceded and followed 1999 and were quite different to each other. The earlier album had that proto funk rock Minneapolis approach and the latter had a more psychedelic pop inclination that was much more to my taste. Prince had moved away from a certain orthodoxy and was now going to do what he wanted to do, all the way.

The NME thought Life In A Day was a work of genius and I am inclined to agree, the accent is on tunes and joy and the jerky rhythms are gone. The jams are songs and the songs are jam packed with goodness.

In the year of 1984 Bruce Springsteen and Prince, and perhaps Madonna, reigned supreme in their special spheres. Prince starred in the movie Purple Rain and released an album of music from the movie, had a monster hit with When Doves Cry and suddenly became ubiquitous. I went to see the movie, was impressed with the music and never bought the album until the late Nineties. I do not quite know why I did not buy Purple Rain then unless it was because it was so ubiquitous that I decided it would not be hip or cool to buy something everyone else was buying. I did not buy Born In The USA either.

Sign O' The Times (1987) was the monster hit album of 1988 and the title track was a big single. This time around I did make the effort and spent the money on buying the album when it was released and this is the first Prince album I ever bought that was not on sale at a record store. I loved the title track and the whole package seemed to be something worth having. The musical content was more sophisticated than that of 1999 and the funk jams were a lot more loos, tuneful and appealing than the earlier album offered. Prince had discovered that a pop sensibility is no bad thing to employ even in the heaviest of funk scenarios. Not all the songs were that great, to be honest, but by and large I like this album.

The next big Prince song on the local radio was Alphabet Street off the single album follow up LoveSexy (1988), once again with a quite controversial semi nude picture of Prince, and this tune made me buy the album when it came out. Alphabet Street is a perfect pop funk song and is right up there with Kiss and When Doves Cry as the three best songs Prince ever wrote. The rest of the album is more of the same, with lively funky tracks and limpidly beautiful pop songs. As a single album I rate this my second favourite after Life In A Day, with
Dirty Mind a close third.

As it happens LoveSexy is where my Prince record collection peaked and came to an end. Prince went on to lead the New Power Generation, abandoned his "slave" name and adopted a symbol as his name, which led to a great deal of ridicule from the rock press, and continues releasing singles and albums and to my mind became less and less essential, just another guy cutting his own groove with no truly compelling argument for me to keep on buying his product even if heavily discounted. This is no critique of the value or quality of Prince's music; I simply lost my taste for it.

I did however buy a DVD Prince Live at the Aladdin Las Vegas, of a performance for his fan club in 2002. The man wears a sharp suit and leads a band of equally besuited musicians, with Sheila E on percussion, Maceo Parker on saxophone, a female bassist and Nikka Costa as guest vocalist. The music sounds a tad like Las Vegas showbiz lounge funk to me, though Prince resists running through a simple greatest hits set. I guess it is funky and entertaining enough though one has the feeling that he is now no longer any kind of market leader and will therefore concentrate on this kind of lucrative gig for big bucks where the line between cheese and parody is very thin. The music is entertaining and Prince hams it up and the crowd had a good time. I guess that is all one can ask

The thing is that the jams at the end of the Purple Rain DVD (amongst the bonus materials) are much more vital, alive and truly funkifying. It must be that he was so much younger then and on the cusp of a big breakthrough. Now there is little left to prove. Prince is one of the greats, a natural successor to James Brown and will be in the Hall of Fame for sure for his innovative music and attitude of the Eighties.

Someone dubbed Prince the Imp of the Perverse, partly because he is a very small guy. In musical stature he is a giant, perhaps he is the most iconic symbol of a Black superstar who helped define a distinctive style of Black music that fused funk with contemporary rock elements and added dashes of electronica, and had little to do with the blues background of most earlier styles of Black music, and who convinced a mass audience that this was the new serious dance music of the age, before hip hop conquered all. Prince's greatest hits are astonishingly good and even groundbreaking and for this alone he must be given kudos for achieving what few Black solo artists before him could achieve – do something that is radically different yet also popular with a mass audience.

Michael Jackson, who was about Prince's age, is now well nigh entrenched as the King of Pop but who's to say that the Prince of Pop is not in fact the real monarch of all he surveys?

Rodriguez Coming From Reality

What a luck! I ambled into Cash Crusaders in Adderley Street, Cape Town on a very wet day in September 2009 and flipped through the small stack of second hand CDs on offer and came across the Rodriguez album Coming From Reality, known as After The Fact in South Africa, it being the follow up to the locally most popular Cold Fact, for just R19,95 and I had to have it. The sales woman took a long time to find the CD in the drawer where they are kept and eventually handed me a disc and said this is all she could find. The filing number on the back of the jewel case matched the CD but it was in fact Cold Fact and not the later album. Somewhat puzzled I opened the jewel case and found that the packaging actually contained a double CD set, and that the disc for Coming From Reality/After The Fact was still inside the jewel case, at the back. So, for the price of one seriously discounted album I got two, though I do already own the earlier single CD release of Cold Fact.

It is always good to find a real bargain.

Cold Fact is a legendary album from my youth in Stellenbosch and lots of people owned the record. It seemed to be one of the ubiquitous Seventies albums, up there with Dark Side of The Moon, Led Zeppelin IV, Aladdin Sane, Rumours, Hotel California, and the like. The songs I Wonder and Sugar Man were very popular in the repressed times I grew up in because of the sex and drug references, and the album was always available in South Africa, even if as a budget release. When I bought The Encyclopaedia of Rock I looked up the name and found only Johnny Rodriguez, who was not the same guy. It seemed astonishing that South Africa would have made a hero of sorts out of this clearly very obscure American recording artist.

If I remember correctly, I did see After The Fact in record shops in Stellenbosch but never bought it; for that matter I never bought Cold Fact until somewhere in the late Eighties when I acquired a cassette album tape of it, and then later the CD. Cold Fact is a great little album with no bad song on it. Rodriguez had a bit of folk and bit of psychedelia going on, along with lots of Dylanesque rock poetry. It sounded as if Rodriguez was a guy who should have gone far in his career and I chalked his obscurity down to the same old song of lack of ambition or luck or both.

Much to my surprise Rodriguez kind of rose from the dead, popped up in South Africa again on his first concert tour for a very long time, looking very much worse for wear, with tales of manual labour and distance from the music industry, and now resuscitation after some South African fans made a serious effort to find him. In South Africa one can now also buy no fewer than 2 "best of" albums, and a live album, all of which recycle a very limited repertoire. Nonetheless, Rodriguez is back in our lives. Except that Coming From Reality / After The Fact is not all that easy to come by

This CD double pack I bought at Cash Crusaders was released in 2002 and must have been a bit of a cash in on the renewed interest in the man. The booklet has a potted history of the man's career and history of his recordings, which is very useful to the lay person though it still does not explain the obscurity.

Coming From Reality was released in 1972 and apparently renamed for the South African market in 1976 to emphasise the link with Cold Fact and for a while I lived under the fond impression that there might also be a third album called Hard Fact.

Coming From Reality was recorded in England in 1970, with some distinguished British session musicians, notably Chris Spedding on guitar. This is the guy I knew from his late Seventies hit Motorbikin' and association with the first wave of punk bands and hardly a name one would link with Rodriguez, but then, Spedding was a session guitarist and must have played whatever sessions he was booked for, regardless of the artist. It seems that the record company must have had some kind of belief in their artist if they were willing to put up the money for recording in a foreign country. In the early Seventies The Eagles did the same, though in their case, the expense paid off. They became superstars.

Coming from Reality is a departure from the approach of Cold Fact in that the music is mostly acoustic and string laden and the lyrics more romantic. The angry Rodriguez is in abeyance for most of the album and only about 3 songs even have anything approaching the hard guitar sound of the first album. There is no overt drug song. Maybe the record company's advice to their artist was to appeal to the commercial interests of radio and the record buying public, and to aim for tunes that would find a home in the easy listening format. I must say, if I had heard Coming From Reality before I heard Cold Fact, I would never have bothered with Rodriguez. His legend rests on that assured debut. The follow up sounds like too much of a cop out.

Having said that, on the evidence of the lyrics and tunes of these two albums, it is anyone's guess why Rodriguez could not achieve anything like mainstream commercial success amidst the crowd of singer-songwriters who populated the musical stage in the Seventies. He has some lyrical quirks and cleverness that suggests a thinker and a philosopher rather than a rocker, as the music generally bears out, but in a sense, if one listens to the two albums back to back, it is as if he cannot decide whether he wants to be a funkier Bob Dylan or a more roots James Taylor. Rodriguez does not quite get it right and at best he has produced one kind-of-classic-because-it-is-so-obscure album and one not-quite-awful-yet-half-arsed album. This output is not the most imposing of legacies. I wonder if he has some new songs in him, or in the vaults, that may now be released while he is in vogue, sort of, again.

Coming From Reality has nothing much to appeal to me in and of its own right and if it had been the first sighting of Rodriguez, he would never have become a legend anywhere in the world. No wonder he sank into the dark ages of the soul after its release. He should have remained a one hit wonder and then the myth would have been perfect.

Eric Clapton

On my last day of attending school in my Matric year (1976) at Paul Roos Gymnasium we enacted one last schoolboy ritual. Each Matric boy wore a white shirt covered in all kinds of illustrations and slogans, and all his mates and teachers were asked to autograph the shirt in the available blank spaces. One boy asked his artistic mate to draw a huge image of Jimi Hendrix's head, based on the photograph on the cover of the I Don't Live Today greatest hits album. Jimi had been long dead by that time, but he was still kind of hip and happening. In my case I decided to put my own artistic talents to use and created a smaller image of a bearded Eric Clapton somewhere on the shirt. This drawing was based n a photograph of Clapton at the time of his "comeback" Rainbow concerts in 1973.

Clapton was not then particularly hip, or cool. He was seen as just another pop artist who happened to play guitar and did not feature in the same cosmic league as Jimi Hendrix (partly because Clapton was still alive) or even Led Zeppelin, Free or any of the prog rock bands then favoured by the hip boys in school. I knew this, of course, and my act of putting Clapton on my shirt was more of an anti-cool gesture, a way of avoiding the obvious, than an attempt to be hip, because I was in fact terminally unhip, at least according to the definition applied amongst my peers.

By 1976 Clapton was a pop star of sorts, since I Shot The Sheriff off 461 Ocean Boulevard was a massive hit in 1974, and with subsequent releases, and constant touring. I knew a bit about his back story, the 'Clapton Is God' mythology and in particular his tenure with Cream whose later live recordings were compiled in an album titled Cream's Cream Live that I played until the grooves wore out. The pop music stuff seemed very lightweight compared to the heavy blues of Cream and sounded like an unfortunate regression for a musician who once left The Yardbirds because their music was becoming too commercial.

Clapton's hit singles were a staple of Radio 5, even in its disco incarnation, because they were so pleasantly lightweight they could fit right in with the rest of the play list. The guitar hero was absent from the pop stuff even if he were still playing a lot of guitar on his live shows, which we did not see. The thing is: I read that Eric Clapton had wanted to become so much part of an ensemble and so unobtrusive that the other guitar players in his band, took the solos. For the star of the show this approach, if true, seemed to take being self-effacing to ridiculous levels especially when most of the audience probably came simply to hear God take a solo. Clapton looked kind of scruffy, with his scraggly beard and semi-Cowboy cool outfits, which were probably meant to be an indication of his commitment to some kind of roots somewhere else than mod or psychedelia. It was well known that he had been a heroin addict and it was also common place that he now drank a lot, though he most likely was not yet tagged an alcoholic.

Lay Down, Sally and Cocaine were the songs off Slowhand that caught my attention and made me listen with new interest. Lay Down, Sally was a tribute, I thought, to the Tulsa sound of J J Cale and Cocaine latter was a cover of a J J Cale song. Both were laid back and did not rock too hard, but were at least more compelling than the pop tunes on this album and the preceding albums.

The first time I really sat up and took notice of Clapton's contemporary work, though, was with the release of Backless, because a number of the tracks, specifically blues tracks, were played on the radio and I think it was The Hobnailed Tacky Show on Radio Good Hope that was the main exposure for these tracks. Again, the blues intensity was not quite there, but it was interesting to hear Clapton's latter day take on the blues, since I had by then bought some Decca albums showcasing songs from a variety of blues artists, with Eric Clapton somewhere in the backing band, playing authentic blues. There he sounded like the real deal: intense, inventive, and emotional. The blues on Backless were nice, but on repeated listening, that was all they were, nice. I guess the best one could say for them was that Clapton kept the blues alive in a way, kept going back to those roots even when he was ploughing a very commercial furrow, and was trying to make the modern audience aware of where it all came from.

I never bought any of these albums at the time they were released, mostly because I did not buy many contemporary albums in the first place, and specifically because Clapton's pop stuff did not appeal on the whole. I bought 461 Ocean Boulevard as a CD album somewhere in the early years of the 21st century and a budget re0issue of Slowhand in 2009. My mate Emil Kolbe bought a Japanese version of Backless on his travels as air steward and left the album, along with a bunch of other records, at my apartment for a long time while he was working in the then Transvaal, and because I could listen to it for free I never wanted to buy it.

At the time I may well have bought Just One Night (the 1979 live double album) because I liked live albums, it had his hits and a lot of blues but I refrained from buying it mostly because I did not like tone of his Stratocaster on the blues numbers. It sounded too thin and piercing, and not at all like the smooth, roaring humbucking tone of the Les Paul or SG he used in the Cream days.

I was however buying all the Cream albums I could lay my hands on, of which Disraeli Gears was the first and most revelatory, and owned a couple of compilations of John Mayall songs featuring Clapton, and a 'best of' compilation of Yardbirds tracks, with Clapton's utterly astonishing and blistering solo on Ain't Got You.. These were the mother lode. Eric was young, full of blues righteousness and power and he was playing in smaller combos and in a context where his guitar could shine. His technique may well have improved over the years but there is nothing like the gutsiness and energy he displayed with The Yardbirds, John Mayall or Cream. The story is, on hearing the music of The Band and being tired of the super group hype and tensions of Cream and particularly Blind Faith, Clapton wanted to move away from performances based on technical virtuosity and extended jams and get back to playing songs in a group where he would be just one more musician, but to my mind this also meant that he gave up a lot of his power and energy, although these strengths would have waned with time anyway. and went on a musical journey that was mostly just treading water even if his career remained commercially very successful.

The question is: where does the weight of Clapton's best work lie? To my mind it is n his performances, recorded and live, with The Yardbirds, Mayall, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominoes, and then much later with the From the Cradle and Me & Mr Johnson and Sessions for Robert J albums where he returned to almost pure blues. If Eric Clapton started out as a purist blues guitarist, it is only fitting at the other end of his career, that he should return to what he probably does best.

Unplugged was the first contemporary Clapton album I ever bought, mostly because of the great acoustic version of Layla, and because I noticed that there was a good deal of blues on it over and above the versions of more recent pop hits. The late Eighties albums where Clapton was aided and abetted by his mate Phil Collins were successful in the market place, with their glossy production values, but really left me cold, as the Seventies stuff, for all their relative shallowness, was still superior in feel and emotional value, given that they were recorded by the alcoholic Clapton, desperate and slightly unfocused, and that the Eighties Eric Clapton was a man more or less free from the demon alcohol, more intent on rebuilding family life, and the good things money brings, than the psychologically down and out character of the previous decade.

The easy, swinging versions of the recent pop tunes, without the elaborate trappings of contemporary production values, enhanced the songs because the tunes were highlighted and Clapton's often rather limited voice does not have to strain. This album has more blues tunes than the standard Clapton album of the time, and they are also taken at a relaxed pace, that brings to mind the string bands of the Thirties such as the Mississippi Sheiks who were from blues roots but also had a strong element of pure entertainment. These are not truly the kind of blues song where the performer has to dig deep into his memory and experience; they are the kind of songs you play at Saturday night fish fries to get the people into a good mood and to encourage them to dance. It is perhaps not surprising that the album sold so well. It not only had all these excellent performances but also a great deal more authenticity than the pop product. This must have been what Clapton had really wanted to sound like back in the late Sixties, after the extravagance of Cream and Blind Faith.

Not long after I finally bought Layla and other love songs, the Derek and the Dominoes classic with which Eric Clapton really made his mark as individual singer and songwriter, albeit then still convincingly a bluesman. This album is the last hurrah, barring the Live at the Fillmore East set, of Clapton as all out virtuoso guitar hero. After this he preferred to be one more guitarist in his own band, eschewed the fierceness of his youth, went down into the heroin depression and decided that laid back was the new way forward. But Layla is astonishing in concept and playing, and it is as a great a testament to Duane Allman, whose contemporary albums with the Allman Brothers are also incredible examples of how white guys can take blues based guitar playing to different levels, as it is a testament to the power and fury that could be Eric Clapton when he had his mojo working.

Chris Prior, the Rock Professor of Radio 5, played quite a few tunes off Layla over the years, and I had heard some of the tracks in other contexts, but I was nevertheless surprised and enthralled by the songs on this album and the intensity of the playing. It was a toss-up whether I liked the electric Layla or the acoustic Layla better; I certainly very much liked the fire power of the Dominoes rhythm section behind the rampant Clapton and Allman.

Circa 2002 I bought the double CD set of Derek and the Dominoes Live at the Fillmore East, an extended version of the earlier double LP release, which features just the basic quartet with Duane Allman nowhere in sight. The set features several very long jams on the songs from Layla and if one cannot get enough of Clapton's guitar playing, it is heaven, though there seems to be a marked contrast between this Clapton and the Clapton who played with Cream, in that the Derek version just seems to jam somewhat aimlessly, and extends the tunes without much point, where the Cream Clapton seemed more focussed in his playing, somehow more concise and playing with some kind of goal in mind. The later version just seems to keep on playing because he does not how to stop (as Stevie Ray Vaughn once explained away his own lengthy excursions) and does not really know how to make his jamming interesting anymore. Too much of a god thing, I guess.

Live at the Fillmore East gets to be too much after a while, and maybe it was better when you were there and were on drugs. I much prefer the far harder rocking live sets of Cream where all three musicians are worth listening to and you do not have to endure just extended guitar solos.

The second contemporary Clapton release I bought was From The Cradle in 1994 where Clapton not only returned to electric guitar but made a hard rocking blues album of some of his favourite tunes, apparently recorded live in the studio, almost the way the way they made them back in the day. There was such a great striving to achieve authenticity that the band tried to reproduce even some vocal asides from the source records, a trick some reviewers thought a bit pretentious and naff coming from a bunch of mostly white guys and some black dudes who were far too young to have come up the blues way. Be that as it may, it was a very loud album, perhaps the loudest blues album I have ever heard, the playing was full of enthusiasm and good humour and the overall result was thorough enjoyment even if some of the songs were a tad over familiar. These performances were the natural successors to Mayall and Cream, as if the intervening 25 odd years had never happened. Apparently From The Cradle also sold incredibly well, making Clapton the most successful white blues man since Stevie Ray Vaughan. Obviously there is a weird irony there.

The next fed studio albums did not interest me. A mate had a copy of Pilgrim, the follow up to From The Cradle, a weird electronics based moody album of severe introspection that was the polar opposite the energised blues performances of the preceding album, and I listened to it a couple of times and decided that it was not for me. The same kind of vibe hung over the next big mainstream project, Reptile, which was one more exercise in Clapton's journey to MOR-mastery and by no means essential.

The best deals were the series of blues albums that started with Riding With The King, a joyous romp of an album with B B King, and the Robert Johnson songbook albums, Me & Mr Johnson and Sessions for Robert J. Clapton has had a long-time admiration of King and they have been friends since the late Sixties, yet never got it together to do this kind of collaboration of equals until very late in King's life. It is still very enjoyable to listen to two past masters doing what they do best in a happy, relaxed mood, playing and singing mostly other people's songs but having fun because they do not have to prove anything in particular. King's singing and Clapton's guitar make excellent companions, though B B is no slouch at the guitar and Clapton's vocals work out quite well too.

Some 10 years later Clapton recorded a similar type of album (The Road To Ensenada) with his mate from Tulsa, J J Cale, who gave Clapton at least two big hits in After Midnight and Cocaine, and was an influence on the laid back Clapton of the Seventies. This team does not do very well, too much laid back, too little fire. Pleasant enough, but also unnecessary. Interesting that Clapton can do this sort of thing only in the twilight of his own career. It might have been a very different thing if the two had combined their talents back when the Tulsa style was still kind of new to the mainstream.

Anyhow, Clapton had always professed a great deal of awe for the music of Robert Johnson, and has been an avid admirer ever since he bought the King of the Delta Blues Singers album, the record that inspired a whole generation of white blues musicians, and he apparently once had a goal of sorts to record at least one Johnson song per album, the blues quota of his recordings. It took Clapton a long time to get around to doing a whole album of Johnson songs, and then did two for good measure.

I bought Me & Mr Johnson the moment I saw it in my local CD store and played it to death, probably far more than From The Cradle, because it is just so excellent. Once again there is an attempt to bring an authenticity to the performances and there is perhaps too much respect for the material , though there is also a much more modern approach to playing Johnson's songs than just a slavish copying. The fact that Clapton has to have band arrangements already make a difference to the way the songs are performed and anyone who is familiar with Robert Johnson's recordings of these songs may feel that Clapton and the guys are bringing too much of a pop sheen to the material and has removed most of the blues power, and there is certainly a lack of the anguish Johnson brings to his own songs, but the strengths of the set are that the band is respectful of their material. They make it their own without messing everything up, or dumbing the blues down.

The Sessions for Robert J album consists of a CD of tracks and a DVD of the same performances, perhaps a tad superfluous, but I guess the DVD is the unique selling proposition of what may well have been a less than commercial product given that it followed on the heels of a very similar offering. The performances are once again excellent and good entertainment, and the visuals do add some understanding of how this kind of band operates in the studio, although the performances would have been rehearsed for the video shoot and are not simply spontaneous acts of creativity.

Then I made a kind of mistake and bought the One More Rider, One More Car double CD of live performances from some world tour, mostly because it was cheap, and partly because I thought it would be fun. Sadly, this was not the case. Clapton plays with is big touring band, not the tight combos of the blues recordings, and the big arrangements and general feel of pandering to MOR tastes, diffuses the effect and power of the music. One must probably laud Clapton for not simply retreading standards and hits, but the weird version of the venerable blues, Going Down Slow, is not interesting enough to make me like it despite the fact that the band messes around with a classic, and Eric does not remotely sound like somehow who is really at the end of his life and reminisces about the good times he's had. He just sounds lethargic and at death's door. I had consciously avoided buying the 24 Nights double set of the annual Albert Hall concerts Clapton put on during the Nineties exactly because I had heard some of the songs, and they sounded bloated, over arranged and lacking in emotional power, and the One More Rider, One More Car set of performances is really just that kind of showbiz sham again. Lots of flesh, little life.

In May 2005 Cream reformed for a series of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. I happened to be in the UK and Europe at the time, and had I known, I would have made some attempt to see one of the shows, even if tickets did sell out in the space of two hours. It was not exactly the end of my life not to have gone to the reunion shows but I was kind of gutted that I was there at the same time, yet ignorant of this momentous happening. I made up for this lack by buying the double DVD and double CD sets of those gigs. Boy, was I sorry! Never mind all the good, proper reasons for the reunion given by all concerned, I can only see it as one last chance to milk the Cream cash cow, for on the evidence of the music released, there was absolutely no artistic or creative merit behind the idea or execution. Sure, the three guys are virtuosos on their respective instruments, and have been for years, and the music made by the young Cream represents some of the best rock music, studio executed or improvised on stage, ever to be released, but forty years later that spark was gone.

The opening chords of I'm So Glad does send a thrill of anticipatory excitement down the spine and the performance is not bad at all, but once the band goes to the root of the Cream's more rock oriented repertoire it is soon apparent that the guys most certainly do not have the fire or exact ability they had in their heyday, and in truth they sound like just another blues band with middle aged men who have the chops but not the passion. This is one set where I really felt that Eric Clapton did play too many solos, and none of them inspiring, even if technically proficient. Cream did not return undiminished in power; the group returned as a shell of what it once had been, and it was not good. I never thought a Cream live set could be boring, but this one is.

Some years before I bought a DVD of a John Mayall concert celebrating his 70th birthday and featuring musicians he'd played with in the past, including Mick Taylor, but no Peter Green ,and Eric Clapton who is almost a co-headliner. Here Clapton plays blues and plays them well although even this performance is not particularly energetic or energising. He is proficient and gets the job done, and a couple of times his duelling with Mayall's regular guitar player sets the room on fire, but there is still too much of a sense of a musician going through the motions on material he knows too well to be excited about anymore.

Somewhere in the Eighties I bought a little book by John Pidgeon, a relatively simplified biography of Eric Clapton up to the Rainbow "comeback" concerts, and some years after that I bought Ray Coleman's proper biography called Survivor, and last year I bought Clapton's autobiography, and I have also read various other pieces about him. The basic life story is familiar and when I bought the autobiography I thought I would be getting some deeper insight into the musician and the music he created, and not simply the personal stuff about his addictions, Patti Harrison, the death of his son, and the like, but I was somewhat disappointed. Clapton tells us a lot of personal details that other authors may have missed, and is quite frank about his various addictions, but the prose is extremely matter of fact and simple -- almost as if he did in fact write it all himself -- and therefore often boring, and there is far too little about his music, how certain albums were made, and the artistic struggles one faces when writing and recording music. Maybe it all was so easy for him, and he claims that he hardly remembers anything from the Seventies, that none of these things made much of an impact, but still. It is very nice of Eric to share tales of happy domesticity, and even of his affairs, but these are not what interests or intrigues me. I want to know how Cream recorded, what the hell happened with Blind Faith, and so on.

I've recently bought a DVD telling the Cream story, a quick cash in on the heels of the Royal Albert Hall concerts of 2005, and in it one sees a very relaxed Clapton telling a bit of the story, with further snippets of interviews with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, who is the least politically correct and funniest of the three in his continual outrage and general pissed off-ness, and Clapton now comes across as a serious senior statesman of rock and blues who has nothing left to prove and can afford to be magnanimous towards everybody, almost in the showbiz manner of loving everyone and not mentioning anything unpleasant. This may be good manner but is rather bland and simply retreads the clichés already so well publicized.

Interesting thing about this history is that it has a number of clips of Cream's televised performances for European television, and one of British TV, and in common with the way Cream's Farewell Concert (1968) was filmed by Tony Palmer, the cameraman seems to avoid Clapton as much as possible, as if direct instructions had been given. Even when Clapton delivers a major solo, one has to look at Jack Bruce or Ginger Baker, which is not uninteresting, though Palmer tends to focus more on Bruce's face than on visuals of his bass playing, and it just seems outrageous that the filmmaker does not have the simple intelligence to realise that one would like to see how the guitarist plays his solo, especially when it is a virtuoso guitarist, and not look at the drummer when the guitarist is taking a solo flight of no mean proportions. Maybe it was meant to be art, but with hindsight it is just disgracefully stupid.

Just as my favourite Dylan albums are fixtures on my iPod, the Cream albums are as important to me and remain favourites and have been such for more than thirty years. If pushed to pick one (and if it cannot be a compilation), it would probably have to be Disraeli Gears because it gives the best overview of the band's strengths and of Clapton's role in the group, and has an excellent collection of songs. From Clapton's solo career, I think the Mr & Mr Johnson album would be the choice because of the relaxed authority with which he and the musicians tackle these blues standards from one of the great blues songbooks.

Eric Clapton does deserve all the accolades he's received over the length of his career. He's made some astonishing guitar records, he opened my eyes to how lyrical a blues based guitar solo can be and how pure, simple emotional power can drive a song into a different stratosphere. Clapton was the stereotypical guitar legend and though there have been many cult guitarists since he broke free of the constraints of white music and blues so many year ago, there have been none who have equalled or surpassed him in respect of his huge impact. Of course one can debate this topic for years on end, and everyone will have their favourites and their motivations, but to me Eric Clapton at his peak is the most godlike of all of them. I defy anyone to listen to the live version of Sleepy Time Time from Live Cream and not believe that this man could make a guitar go places with your heart and soul no-one else can. It is fashionable to compare guitar players with horn players, and if this is the case, I suggest that Eric Clapton channelled Lester Young when he played that solo. I used to sing along to the solo, it was that wonderful and uplifting and melodious. And if you can sing along to a guitar solo and be entranced and happy at the same time , the guitarist must be a deity.