Albert Frost: Devil or God?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fleetwood Mac: Rumours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pretty Blue Guns at Zula

It's been a few years since the last time I dressed up and went down to Long Street for a bit of fun and it's been even more years since I've been to a venue like Zula Bar to watch a band kick out the jams.

This occasion was the launch of a brand new video for the Pretty Blue Guns song "Pills" from their debut album Cutting Heads. I really like this album, and rate it as one of the best local rock albums of the recent past, but then I am somewhat biased because I particularly like this type of gritty, rambunctious yet melodic blues rock and fell for the Pretty Blue Guns' sound from the first time I heard one of their tunes on a free CD with SL Magazine. They've been playing gigs all over the place but for practical reasons I have never been able to get to any. So, when Alette de Beer from De Plate Kompagnie advised me the band would be at Zula in Long Street, virtually on my doorstep, it was an occasion I could not allow to slip by.

There was a time, and unfortunately it really is very long ago now, that I was a fixture at just about every local gig in Cape Town and environs and was fully au fait with the bands on the local scene. These days I have to follow the goings on through press and Internet and just buy the albums of bands I like, or sometimes just out of interest. Local music is good and on par with what the rest of the world offers but even so there are few bands or albums that are truly great. Cutting Heads offers the sound, attitude and songs that grab me and I wanted to find out whether these boys can cut it on stage as much as they do in the studio.

At about 21h45 I arrive outside Zula in the back of Rikki cab, the kind that gives a pseudo-authentic London flavour to Cape Town and is very useful to get around in the city centre, especially on weekends when they are on call 24 hours a day. Long Street is buzzing. It usually does, in almost any kind of weather, on any given weekend night and this night is slightly more special, as Ghana is playing the USA in the first game of the knockout round of World Cup 2010. The importance of the game is that Ghana is the last African team left in the competition and has so far advanced further than any African team ever and stands a chance of moving one level up if they can beat the USA.

I'd never been to Zula before and for some reason I expected something high-tech and ultra sophisticated, and that shows how out of touch I am with the Long Street scene. A clue to the reality should be that Zula is in the space where The Lounge used to be. The Lounge, along with Mr Pickwick's, was the first Long Street hangout for the hip set, about 17 years ago, when it was just a place to go before or after clubbing, to have a drink and lounge. It was fairly primitive and as it hardly featured live acts I hardly ever went there.

There is a rope outside the front entrance, to organise major queues of people as and when they occur, I guess, like the ones one always see in movies, with a security on a high chair just outside the door. Just inside the door there is another dude with woollen cap pulled down low, who takes my money and gives me a stamp on the inside of my wrist. He meticulously ticks off that he's just admitted one more person. The entrance fee is R30 but he doesn't have enough change for the R100 note I give him and gives me R60 change. Oh well, I can afford the loss.

I bound up the stairs and find that most of the interior walls of the old Lounge have been knocked out. There is a bar immediately to my right, an open doorway in front of me and another doorway leads to a stage area to my left.

The place is packed. There are a couple of television sets tuned to the game between Ghana and the USA and in the main room a very large screen has been set up for a broadcast of the game. Rows of seats are in place in front of the screed, which makes the space look like a primitive small town town-hall movie show. The seats are fully occupied. Behind them there is a standing room only crowd. More people hang out on the balcony overlooking Long Street.

I turn to the bar and buy a single Jameson's on the rocks for R18. The barman who serves me greets me as if he knows me (as far as I know we rank strangers to each other) and for the rest of the evening he pours me a single Jameson's as soon as he sees me back at the bar with an empty glass. This is marvellous. I almost feel like some kind of VIP. Maybe it is because I am slightly overdressed for the place. I wear pointy boots, my tightest jeans, dark shirt and black leather jacket. This could well be an old fogey's misconception of how to be a sharp dressed man whereas the average punter at Zula is somewhat more casually attired.

I start taking stock of my surroundings. As I've mentioned, the Zula is just one big open space, with sprung wooden floors and walls painted red. I am immediately struck by the resemblance Zula has with the Indaba Project, then at the top end of Wale Street, where I'd spent so many nights back in the period 1986 to 1988. Zula is not high tech; it is not suave and sophisticated. It looks just like the cheap kind of club joints Cape Town used to have back in the old school days and the vibe is much the same, and even the types who hang out there, taking into account an apparent weighting towards tourists, are similar.

My guess is that I am about 30 years older than the average punter at Zula tonight and to a degree I feel just as alienated in my surroundings as I felt when I was in m late twenties and clubbing every weekend. One other weird thing is that, once the football is done, the music played by the DJ is mostly from the Sixties and early Seventies: there is Janis Joplin, Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin. The most recent act on the playlist is The White Stripes, and the hippest selection is The Stooges doing "1969" off their debut album.

The bad news is that the score between Ghana and the USA is tied after full time. I'd already mistimed my arrival by getting to Zula when there was still about 20 minutes of ordinary time play left. My heartfelt wish is that one of the reams should score before the end of normal time so that I would not have to wait through 30 more minutes of extra time or, God forbid, a penalty shootout. As it turns out, the game went into extra time and Ghana scores early in that period, yet the game has to go on for the full extra 30 minutes. Ghana beats the USA 2 - 1 and goes through to the quarter finals. Kudos to them, though I could not really give a damn.

The crowd at Zula, however, is extremely happy to see the Yanks beaten and an African team go through. Outside in Long Street passing motorists hoot, vuvuzelas honk and the party is on. Long Street is where it's happening.

Inside the Zula the first band of the evening sets up. In passing I must also mention that it is kind of peculiar to be at a place like this so early in the evening to listen to bands who'd undertaken to be done by 23h30. Back in the day one went out only at midnight. You may go to a pub during the early part of the evening, but the serious clubber waited until midnight to hit the nightspot of his or her choice.

Anyhow, Machineri (I have no idea what this arty misspelling signifies) is first up on stage. Machineri consists of a tall, thin woman with long blonde hair, loose shirt and tight jeans, playing a guitar and singing; a guy with lanky hair falling over his face, loose T-shirt and guitar; and a drummer. The band has taken the White Stripes, Kills and Black Keys affectation of eliminating the bass player to a new twist. There is no bass player but there are 2 guitarists. The woman's function with her guitar is to emphasise the bottom end, to give a bass guitar like effect, while the other guitarist riffs and plays lead. Furthermore the woman wails the songs over the top of all of this.

To be perfectly frank, I immediately actively dislike this crap. Though the woman has a strong voice, it is wasted on the tuneless rants that pass for songs. The riffing sounds like a cross-breed between boogie, blues, shoe gazing, funk and punk and that is not a compliment. I guess there is a structure of sorts and that the band has actually rehearsed this stuff but a lot of it sounds like they are making it up on the spot and not in a good way. There is a quote from Shakespeare about a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. This is Machineri. If this band ever becomes massive, I will probably look like a fool for dissing them like this but that's all right. They suck tonight and if they do not get some actual tunes together, or have more interesting arrangements, they will keep on sucking. And not in a good way.

Machineri walk off, and take half the drum kit with them. Then the various members of The Pretty Blue Guns shamble on and start setting up before we take a moment to watch the video being projected on the screen where we had just watched the football match. I know the song, "Pills, very well: a well tasty piece of sleaze rock. The video captures the feel of the song quite nicely with lots of sexy, sleazy, scuzzy imagery. The look is cinema verité, You Tube slice of home recording, very hip and unsettling. I wonder if MK, or any other local TV channel will ever play it, as it seems a tad risqué with its sex and drug references.

Once the visual are done the band launch into its set. Andre Leo is front and centre in loose T-shirt and tight pants that kind of look like leggings to me, and he leans into the microphone, one leg slightly raised and poised behind him as if he is about to rush into the audience. He is the front man and the star and I guess he knows it and plays up to it. A cute kid and he can sing and strum the six string. Brandon Visser is at the rear of the stage. He plays a Gibson 335 style guitar, is blonde and looks the somewhat overly plump side of stocky. The guy who stuffs his face with too many pies. He plays tasty lead guitar though, a bit of slide on "Devil Do" and just super confident blues rock rhythm. Greg Thompson is the second blondie in the band, affects a grunge like plaid shirt and shares the front of the stage with Andre Leo. He gets into his bass playing and throws as many rock star shapes as Leo does. Clearly he believes a bass player can be as glamorous as any lead guitarist and he is probably a bit of eye candy anyhow.

Lucas Swart plays drums in the background and I do not get a good look at him but he does his job quite efficiently.

Apart from Bruce Springsteen's "State Trooper" The Pretty Blue Guns play pretty much their album. After the first or second number the pedals in front of Leo malfunction and while this is being attended to Thompson and Swart get a drum and bass groove going on. The crowd is forgiving anyhow and do take the brief interruption in their cheerful stride. According to Leo he wants to get the slower songs out of the way so that the band can rock out and the audience can dance. I find this interesting because, as far as I can tell, the Guns basically play medium paced songs; some may be louder than others but essentially there is nothing that is that much more pacey than anything else.

"Devil Do" gets a slot mid-set, and there is a massed sing-a-long with participation from the team who put together the video, and damn me, but they look more like rock stars than the guys in the band. The audience also knows the words and sing them loudly. A great time is had by all. It should have been the final number. It's made to be the monster party jam at the end of a rousing set.

The band careens on, however, rocks out nicely and entertains us for an hour or so. No encores. It was kind of warmly nostalgic to see a band disassembling their drum kit, amps and cables after a gig. They have no roadies; this must mean they are still paying heavy dues. If I had my copy of their album on me I would have asked them to autograph it for me.

The crowd leaves the room, I have a final drink and then I leave too, pondering what this evening means to me in my life.

The Pretty Blue Guns play with an effortless power; they have an obviously charismatic singer who underplays his appeal but who should be a pin up on the local scene. They play a type of music that is way outside the current rock fashion and bring a lot of hip smarts to it. The tradition is very old and they seem to love and respect it and obviously see no reason why they cannot add to this tradition from their personal, and I suppose, South-African perspective. The vocalist from Machineri announced that the Pretty Blue Guns would be playing some blues for us. Maybe she was being ironic, maybe she has no clue what the blues actually is, but The Pretty Blue Guns do not play blues even if their song titles may contain the word "blues." They play a very exciting, innovative, contemporary blues rock that is neither self-important nor overtly ironic. If I knew what the boys listen to at home, apart from the influences mentioned on their webpage, I could tell you more about the role of blues in their respective musical educations.

Was this a great performance? Probably not. It was good and entertaining fun but it was also your basic club gig where you run through your repertoire for an audience who already knows your stuff and this means you do not have to work too hard to get their attention. The guys had fun, especially Leo, and they are professional and proficient. I would have liked to have heard them at their first gigs, to be able to track the improvement over time. I think they are now at the crossroads where they must come up with new material to perform at the gigs. The debut album is a year old. They need new songs. They need to progress. Bands of their stripe generally tend to be jam bands that play a lot of different songs in their sets, not just their own, to show off instrumental prowess. Pretty Blue Guns aren't there (yet) and maybe will never be. The current musical mode in South Africa does not encourage the concept of jamming. The older, more properly blues bands, and the blues based rock bands, always had guitarists who thought of themselves a hot shot enough to play solos in each song. In the popular rock music of today, the type practised by so many local bands, the guitar solo is not cool and just about absent from any song, no matter how many guitars there are in the arrangement.

My evening at Zula was very much a journey into the past on a psychological level as the venue, the crowd and the act on offer were all so very reminiscent of the Cape Town scene of the late Eighties. One difference is that those bands hardly ever released any recordings and the majority of the bands on the scene are now forgotten by everyone except for the fans. Another difference is that the type of joyous blues rock the Pretty Blue Guns play was not exactly the type of music one heard too much. We had All Night Radio and Any Driver and that was about it. The basic Eighties alternative band had more in common with Machineri, sound wise and conceptually, than with the likes of Pretty Blue Guns. The bands were very serious, very much intent on doing something different, not to fall into the perceived trap of "rockist" cliché and almost pathologically avoided rock, preferring instead to pursue a course of wilful difficultness, with the emphasis on the cult. Not only did they never make or release music videos, they barely released any recordings.

The local bands of my youth seemed not to care for commercial success or decided that anti-commercialism would be the most politically correct stance. My sense is that The Pretty Blue Guns not only want to have fun with their music but want as much commercial success as possible. I would want them to achieve commercial success though I am prepared to concede that they will most probably never be the Parlotones or Freshlyground or Prime Circle. And that is a good thing. Pretty Blues Guns are not like most of their peers and do not sound like most of their peers and they should remain as individual as possible.

Enough about the band, what about me? As I've mentioned, I felt a great deal of déjà vu tonight and not all of it is wonderful. When I did go clubbing on a regular basis I was very much alone and a loner and was utterly alienated from my life and surroundings and though I was compelled to go out at night, to go check out bands, almost just not to have to be at home, I hardly ever had fun going out. I went to the gig, danced my ass off, had a couple of drinks, spoke to no-one and went home alone. There was not much joy in this lifestyle.

At the Zula Bar those memories came back. Once again I was alienated from the other people in the crowd but this time it was mostly because of the age difference. I enjoyed the Pretty Blue Guns experience but beyond that the evening out was a bit of a chore. Will I ever go back to Zula? None of my friends hang out there (we are not of that generation anymore, and most of them never had that kind of inclination in the first place) and if there is no band that interests me, there is hardly any point going there.

Do live gigs interest me anymore? I almost want to say: no, they do not. I've done the small club gig and know the vibe. In 1997 and 1998 I made an effort to go to gigs in central Cape Town, mostly at The Purple Turtle, and was often quite irritated by the bare surroundings and primitive sound systems and that I was so much older than the other punters. I also went to a couple of gigs during the last year or so when The Brass Bell in Kalk Bay still had rock bands on a Saturday afternoon and saw some of the big names from that era, but the experience was disappointing when compared with the hey days of the Bras Bell some 10 years before. Then I stopped going out at night, mostly because I had not car and had no friends who had an interest in local rock. Over the last 12 years I've been to a handful of gigs and some of them were good, only because of the band and not necessarily because of the venue or the crowd or the other hassles of gig attendance one has to contend with.

Maybe I am too old for that shit. It's so much easier and more comfortable simply to buy the album and listen to it in the comfort of my own home.

Blur versus Oasis

Blur and Oasis were arguably the most important British bands of the Nineties. Blur adopted an Englishness that kind of kick-started the whole Britpop thing and became quite popular in an intelligent low-key way, before breaking up, or just taking a long break. Oasis were exponents of big, dumb rock and became phenomenally huge and then faded into being a Rolling Stones type of commercially successful yet creatively empty.

IN 1994 I bought Parklife and Definitely Maybe on the same day at the same record shop in Cavendish Square. I'd read a lot about both bands and had heard the "Girls and Boys" single on the radio but I don't think I'd heard anything by Oasis at the time.

When I listened to the two albums back to back I found that I preferred Blur even though their English inflected pop music was not as much to my taste and the gigantic guitar rock sound of Oasis. It came down to my irritation with Liam Gallagher's voice and vocal mannerisms. He was allegedly the best British rock vocalist of his generation but to my mind he was possibly the worst. There was little emotion in the voice and he had the excruciating habit of extending single syllables into many. Damon Albarn had a less individual voice but sang more conventionally good. The Oasis guitar wall of sound ultimately became too much where Blur obviously valued song craft and production.

I played Parklife quite a lot and listened to Definitely Maybe a few times. When The Great Escape came out and I saw it at Vibes Music I bought it immediately although I did not yet know anything about it. I completely ignored (What's The Story) Morning Glory? when it was released and even when it became an enormous hit.

Ultimately I bought every Blur album up to 13, and only bought (What's The Story) Morning Glory? 14 years after its release when I found it at a Cash Crusaders shop. I had in fact bought Blur's debut album, Leisure, in about 1992 because I had read good things about them in Select magazine and because I thought the album cover photograph was great, but it was stolen from me in 1993 and I never bought a replacement copy, mostly because I did not think of it as such a great album.

The Great Escape was not to wonderful either. By this time I was no longer keen on the Blur pop sound and lyrics about colourful characters that may have been no more than figments of Damon Albarn's imagination and this is no doubt the Blur album I've least often listened to. There was the great fight at the time with Oasis for a number one single and even if Blur won the battle, I thought the winning song, "Country House", was very twee and even stupid without being exciting or interesting. As far as I was concerned Blur was a spent force, perhaps successful but no longer compelling listening.

With "Song 2" my attitude changed completely. "Beetlebum" came out first and I quite liked it and almost thought they had returned to the heights of "Girls and Boys" but the very punk "Song 2" got me back into the fold. It was your perfect slice of 2 minutes' worth of riff, excitable vocals and arresting hook. No wonder "Song 2" broke Blur in America. It was simple yet effective and energizing. It made an old punk like me want to pogo again

The album was Blur, and it is kind of strange for any band to give its fourth album an eponymous title. It is more usual for the debut, but I guess this album was a kind of debut of the new Blur who were so over Britpop and no longer prepared to peddle the cheeky pop chappies image. Some reviews suggested that Blur represented such an about face that it would be commercial suicide. As it turned out, "Song 2" helped make it a very commercial proposition.

I also bought Blur (as was the case with 13 the next year) from Vibes Records, and as had been the case with The Great Escape, I found it when I was merely browsing, without specifically looking for any Blur product. I bought it without considering whether I really wanted it but I guess "Song 2" was as compelling a reason as any to own this album. When I took it home and played it for the first time, I also found that the album was an overall musical success and much more to my taste and liking than its predecessor, or any of the preceding albums. This music was different, darker, more skewed and much more satisfying as a piece of work than the Britpop Blur.

Then came 13, which was the breakup album, after Damon Albarn had parted ways with Justine Frischman and was feeling very sorry for himself. Once again Blur moved away from their previous sound, very far away from the Blur of 1994, and made music that resonated and hit home, emotionally and musically, and made me believe that Blur had at last found a proper, intelligent rock groove. There was gospel, weird post-rock shapes and superior melodic pop. For my money this album is the Blur masterpiece, but I would pair Blur and 13 as two of the best British albums of the Nineties.

About 4 years after 13 and during the making of the Think Tank album, Graham Coxon left the band. By then I was kind of over Blur and the British scene as a whole and never had any intention of buying Think Tank, despite the very positive reviews it received. In any event it seemed to me that the absence of a guitarist would tend to make the music more keyboard and sample oriented and therefore less rocking and this prospect did not excite me. By and large I am into guitar pop and rock.

Somewhere between Blur and 13 I finally got around to buying Modern Life Is Rubbish, the album that was the first of the trilogy that ended with The Great Escape. It was far better than the third album of the group and it was perhaps because the songs were more ambitious and yet also simpler to appreciate. But ultimately it was also an album that appealed to me only so much. The sound of the record is not the type of music that I had listened to before that and still does not truly float my boat to this day. I like more basic, primitive rock music. All this clever pop stuff is all very good but it appeals more to my mind than my gut. I guess that is why it paled after a while.

Today my Blur albums are packed away in a box in a spare room and for a while I seriously considered giving them all away. I cannot think I would ever want to listen to Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife and The Great Escape all that much again, I would imagine that the same would really apply to Blur and 13 as well Blur relates to a certain time in my life, when I still made an effort to follow the music of a contemporary band and I do not do that much anymore for any but South African bands. The other thing is that I never listened to Blur type music in the ordinary course and Blur represented some kind of anomaly in my musical taste.

I suppose I bought the Blur more for what they represented than out of a genuine interest in, and love for, a weird kind of parochial British pop.

After Definitely Maybe I ignored Oasis, even as I was buying all those Blur albums. I did not like the music all that much, mostly for the reason of my dislike for Liam Gallagher's vocal performances, and could not understand why they became so massive in the UK. It was almost because of the phenomenon that (What's The Story) Morning Glory? became that I refused to buy it, although I should have at least investigated the music behind the mega success. Never mind, I was quite happy to ignore it and just read about how massive Oasis was becoming.

There was massive hype when Be Here Now was released. One of the songs was on a freed CD that came with a magazine I bought and it seemed kind of nice but by then I had developed a mindset that militated against buying any Oasis product and that resistance has lasted up to now when Oasis is still a major band but seems to me to be a modern day Rolling Stones where the brand is the thing, not the product the band puts out. The odd Oasis single played on local radio seemed quite nice and solid in a pleasurably dumb rock manner but did not motivate me to spend money on Oasis. Not even on a collection of B-sides or a later greatest hits album.

The drought was broken in 2005 when I found the DVD Known To Millions, companion to a live CD of the same title, in a French supermarket at a budget price. When I eventually played the DVD, and I have yet to play it all the way through, I saw that it was visually a pretty boring record of an enormo Oasis gig somewhere. This is the late period Oasis from the period of Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants and the set list consists of old favourites and more current numbers but over the length of the DVD the songs do tend to start sounding the same and because there is very little to stimulate the eye (the band just stands there and plays) my attention started wandering. I might just as well think of it as a CD album; put it on and walk away and do something else without bothering to watch the so-called action.

In 2009 I finally bought (What's The Story) Morning Glory? because I found it cheaply at Cash Crusaders and finally found out what the hype had been all about back in 1995 and 1996. The sound is more traditionally produced that than the wall of sound of the debut album and songs are therefore more conventionally tuneful and appealing. By this time I had already heard a number of the songs, such as the title track, "Roll with It", "Wonderwall" "Champagne Supernova," and "Don't Look Back In Anger ", and the collection feels like a bit of a greatest hits collection. Very nice album, Liam Gallagher's voice still grates, but it is not a bad little record. I still do not understand why this album caused the band to go so massive. In my opinion the original underwhelmed reviews were spot on, as much as the overenthusiastic, overblown reviews for Be Here Now nowadays seem slightly silly and hysterical, the product of music journalists who did not want to be wrong again.

I have not listened to Definitely Maybe in years and I do not listen to Morning Glory all that much either. I still feel no compelling reason to acquire any other Oasis product though a formal greatest hits album may be an option. Oasis are now old hat, rock monsters going through the motions because that is how they make their money and not because they still matter or have relevance. Noel Gallagher made his mark and it was a large mark and he will go down in rock history for his achievements but in 20 years' time Oasis will be as much of a novelty nostalgia act as the Rolling Stones have become despite all protestations to the contrary.

On Easter weekend 2009 Oasis played at the Coke Zero Fest in Somerset West, Western Cape, as the headliners, above the likes of Snow Patrol and Panic at the Disco. It was a money gig for Oasis. They walked on stage, ran through the usual suspects of their hit repertoire, finished with "I Am The Walrus" and walked off. It was a big sound, it rocked, the audience went crazy for them and it was oddly unsatisfactory. The most I could say for the experience was that I had never thought I would see Oasis live and at least they are not officially a nostalgia act.

The war between Blur and Oasis in the mid-Nineties now seems quaint and silly and not particularly relevant in the bigger scheme of things. I guess you had to be there and perhaps you had to be a publicist for either of the bands or their respective record labels. To make a comparison with the Beatles and the Stones is somewhat odious and I think the more apposite comparison would be between an act that specialised in the clever musical idea and either well observed vignettes of real life or dark autobiography, and an act whose leader boasted of how many musical ideas he's lifted from the likes of the Beatles and where guitar power was the main thing and the lyrics were facile and seemed to be written just to give the singer something to sing. At the end Damon Albarn was not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve and to try apparently difficult music, while Noel Gallagher never revealed himself in his lyrics and has been content simply to keep on refining his basic blueprint.

It is also fatuous to try to define which was or is the better group. They were both good in their chosen field and both deserved the success they attained and who knows who will have the most standards if the fashion finally gets around to the Nineties in the same way the Eighties have been so thoroughly revisited for so long now.

Britpop waxed and waned in the slipstream of Blur and Oasis begat dozens of traditionalist guitar bands. If there has been a longer lasting influence from either it seems too early to show.

Blur dissolved at the right time, before the music got repetitive or bland or just superfluous. Damon Albarn has proved that there can be second act in pop by having a very interesting solo career and piloting Gorillaz to superstardom. Graham Coxon has released a bunch of solo albums ranging from raging full on rock to quite pastoral stylings and if he is not as wildly successful in this as Albarn is, he is absolutely gaining an immense reputation for what he is capable of. Alex James had a side-line pop career, kept on partying and got rather literate as well and I have no idea what he is currently doing. The same applies to Dave Rowntree. For all I know he races model cars in his spare time and raises a family fulltime. There was a Blur reunion of sorts in 2009 for live shows. As far as I know there are no plans for another album but it could still happen.

Oasis releases a new album every couple of years and keeps ton touring and the Gallaghers keep on battling each other. It is a show that can keep running for a long time, for as long as money is to be made from the brand, anyway.

No doubt there will be financial reasons for intermittent Blur reunions.

Both bands will be best served by a "greatest hits" or "best of" compilation to explain to posterity what the fuss was all about way back when they were young and fresh and there was a new optimism in the UK led by New Labour and the media hype of Cool Britannia. In due course there will be the box sets with unreleased tracks, either outtakes or demos, and the adoring notes of long-time fans that never stopped believing. Hey, it's nothing but rock and roll and if you are lucky you can symbolise an era or zeitgeist and make money at it as well.

 

 

 

NEIL YOUNG’S TIME FADES AWAY

Time Fades Away (1973) is the one Neil Young album that he refuses to sanction for CD release and I do not understand why he thinks it is his worst album ever. For my money there are plenty of candidates for that status among his output over the last 30 years or so and if Silver & Gold could have been released in the first place there is no reason why Time Fades Away should not be released, even if Young cannot stand it. Anyway, he is plainly wrong if he believes it is such a bad album. It may not have turned out to be what he wanted for it, but for my money it holds up with anything he recorded in the Seventies and beyond.

Time Fades Away and On The Beach (1974) were the third and fourth Neil Young albums I ever owned because I bought them at a bargain price as part of a Warner Brothers "twofer" re-release campaign of the late Seventies or early Eighties, where they paired oldish albums by selected artists for mid-priced release. In this way I acquired not only the two Neil Young albums but also The Doors' LA Woman and 13 and Frank Zappa's Hot Rats and Waka Jawaka as double packs.

It took a long time for On The Beach to be made available on CD, perhaps because it has always been seen as a "difficult" album and not as commercial as the record company would have liked. To my mind Time Fades Away was the more exciting rock and roll album of the two and the one I found most immediately appealing. On The Beach needed more effort and time to appreciate.

Most of the tracks on Time Fades Away were recorded during Young's North American tour of 1973, in the wake of the huge success of Harvest, and the band is the Stray Gators, with David Crosby and Graham Nash on one or two tracks. From the visceral stomp of the title track to the ripping and roaring Last Dance, the album is a delight and a great record of what a Neil Young live show was like when it did not just feature the grungy mid-paced guitar workouts of Crazy Horse, but a band of varied musicians who could rock as much as they could be subtle and with songs that had melody and poetry.

I recorded the 2 albums on one side each of a C90 cassette tape and played that tape quite a lot back in the day when I still listened mostly to cassette tapes rather than CDs. Along with Rust Never Sleeps and Re-Ac-Tor those two albums made up the core of my Neil Young collection, until I eventually bought Harvest, and in die early Nineties started seriously collecting Neil Young on CD. I still believe that the albums from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere to Rust Never Sleeps probably represent the pinnacle of Young's oeuvre and is a body of work.

Never mind the "lost" years of Eighties experimentalism, the triumphant return as the Godfather of Grunge and the latter-day political and polemical approach, since 1979 and whether deliberately or through lack of inspiration, Neil Young has not much of anything that resembles a sturdy, long-lasting, worthwhile body of work. He can still rock out when he wants to, or go all country folk rock on us, but it seems to me that he writes lyrics just to be able to sing something or just say something and not because the spirit truly moves him. The melodies are still sublime and the voice always sends chills up my spine when he does the high lonesome thing, but over the length of any given album the trite and often baldly clichéd lyrics start to grate and one tries not to listen to what he say and concentrate on how he says it instead. For a songwriter who was thought of as something of a poet this is a terrible thing.

Over the past couple of years Neil Young has released a bunch of recordings from his archives, from a live set at the Fillmore East with the first incarnation of Crazy Horse to a solo concert in Massey Hall in Toronto to a whole box set of studio and live recordings of the very early years of his career when he was making the transition from folk rocker to folkie to rock star. Unless Young just wants to release everything so that one can get a complete picture of what he had done over the years, from juvenilia to mature work, one must believe that there was a selection process and that the stuff that is now commercially available is regarded as good stuff. This is a real journey through the past and I do not believe that every morsel is of the same high quality and some of it is pretty redundant, such as the various solo gigs. If you have Live Rust you pretty much have as much solo Neil Young as you need.

This vast project of trawling through the past makes it even more peculiar that Young refuses to allow a CD release for Time Fades Away. I know that album and it is pretty damn entertaining and no worse than, and really of a piece with, the period from After The Goldrush to Rust Never Sleeps and a damn sight better than Harvest Moon, Silver & Gold, Are You Passionate, Prairie Wind, and the like. In fact, I would like to see an expanded Time Fades Away with more songs from that tour as re-issue extras.

 

Blues Broers Return To Rock The House again

In 1996 I wrote a long piece about the late Nico Burger, guitarist for All Night Radio, Any Driver and Blues Broers, which was the first extended piece about music I ever wrote. I also digressed a bit on various other bands of the era I had followed and so the piece turned into a bit of nostalgia fest of a bygone Cape Town, in the lean years of the late Eighties and early Nineties when so many promising bands either never released any recordings or could not sustain a career in the music industry.

 

Since then I have published a lot of stuff on my 2 music blogs but it is the Nico Burger piece that has attracted the most responses, from merely interested parties, to Nico's last girlfriend, to John Frick, the original guitarist for the Blues Broers.

John now lives in The Hague, Netherlands and leads a blues band there, called the Blues Hombres. He gave me the links and I checked out a couple of videos of his band on stage. Clayton Frick, John's older brother, who played guitar for The Flaming Firestones and then his own blues band, lives in Australia.

In late April 2010 John wrote to me via Facebook and announced that the Blues Broers would reform, or return after a long hiatus, to play a number of gigs in the Western Cape. Clayton Frick would be here as well and they would try to get as many of the old band members involved too. Nico is dead, as is Frank Frost, the original drummer and father of Albert Frost the last Blues Broers guitarist, but the rest are still alive and kind of kicking.

Locally Albert Frost is probably the most successful alumnus of the Blues Broers as a well-respected session guitarist and recording artist in his own right, with Frosted Orange and also under his own name.

Back in the day the Blues Broers were one of the hardest working bands in South African show business and regularly drew happy crowds who loved nothing better than to have a drink or two and get down to the hard hitting R & B and blues of the Broers and to call the band much loved (as the cliché has it) 9is probably not an understatement. There was an entire band of brothers, so to speak, who hung out with the band and attended the gigs, and I was one of them.

Last Friday night (14 May 2010) and at The Hidden Cellar, upstairs at De Akker in Stellenbosch, a bunch of us had a chance to relive our relative youth and once more experience the groove that is the Blues Broers at their best.

In the mid-Eighties the space that is now known as the Hidden Cellar had no name. It was just the upstairs room at De Akker where bands played. One entered through a door on a side street and walked up carpeted stairs, paid your entry fee, and entered a dark, wood panelled smoky room with rustic tables and benches and an equally rustic looking bar at one end. The stage was low and the band usually had a huge stack of speakers on either side of the stage (the gigantic bass bins of yore were a particular favourite of mine as one could stick one's entire drunken head into one) and probably no monitor for the singer. There was no sound guy, just a primitive mixing board at the side of the stage. The band played its own mix tape during the 15 minute intervals between sets.

It was gloriously low rent and primitive, but I spent many Friday and Saturday nights there, got drunk on Tassenberg and danced most of the night away. In Stellenbosch one danced to the band; in Cape Town the crowds danced to the DJ and stood stock still when the band was one.

Nowadays the Hidden Cellar's entrance is through a different stairway one accesses from a Dorp Street entrance to De Akker, and the interior of the room has been somewhat remodelled and it seems the benches are mostly gone, but otherwise there is a real sense of déjà vu for anyone who spent as much there as I once did. This place is a part of my personal rock and roll history.

De Akker was buzzing with students either already drunk or working hard at getting there and it was crowded and the air was pungent with cigarette smoke. Ahead of me on the stairs was a bloke with a ciggy in hand and one of the woman who worked the entrance told him it the Hidden Cellar was a non-smoking venue, took his cigarette, had a puff and put it out. It was somewhat weird listening to the blues in a room entirely free of cigarette smoke as somehow one must have dim lighting and cigarette smoke to have the entirely psychologically and emotionally correct ambience for blues. Anyhow, that is how it was when I went to clubs a lot. No place for asthmatics or sensitive chests.

Clayton Frick took the time to thank the audience for not smoking and this was, as they say, ironic, seeing as how once upon a time he was a founder of the Smokehouse Blues Club. Maybe it was a smokehouse like the one Ina Anderson of Jethro Tull owns in Scotland, that smokes salmon.

I certainly did note a few familiar old faces, like Vernon Swart, artist and drummer, Valiant Swart (no relation, I guess), Gees (who crouched at the side of the stage and took lots of photographs), my old university and Army buddy, Dan Lombard, and his brother Jack, and a couple of faces that seemed familiar though they were people whose names I never knew in the first place. The younger generation was also suitably represented. Dan's one son plays in the band Stack Shot who opened for the Blues Broers, and some of the kids must have been their mates, but there were also a bunch of student types and others who were between 20 and 50 and I would imagine that many of them either never saw the Blues Broers live before this night, or must have gone with their parents. The crowd absolutely did not consist only of the diehard fan base that would have grown older with the band.

As had been my custom since my early days at De Akker I stood stage left (as one faces it) close to the guitarist, and almost next to the rather small speaker on a pedestal that has replaced the PA stack and humongous bass bins of prehistory. My ears still rang for a couple of hours afterwards though.

Tim Rankin is the new kid in the band. I do not know whether he's played with these guys before, but Rob Nagel was highly complementary of Rankin's skill as tub thumper, saying, as a bassist, that he really appreciates the value of a good drummer, and that Tim Rankin is one. I kind of agree. Rankin is that rarity in a blues or rock drummer – the guy who keeps time, keeps the beat tight, and who is unobtrusive.

Rob Nagel and Simon (Agent) Orange are the core of the band because they are the only members who've been Blues Broers in all incarnations of the band. John Frick was a founder member, but left, to be replaced by Nico Burger and, in a sense, John Mostert, and in turn Nico was replaced by Albert Frost. Tonight therefore, we had the founder guitarist returning to cross frets with the (then) kid who was the last guitarist for the band.

Rob is a pillar of strength on bass and a fury on blues harp, and Agent Orange may not quite resemble Memphis Slim but he can pound a keyboard with the best of them. The combination of keyboard and mouth harp as band instruments meant that the band had 3 lead instrumentalists and also gave it a dimension and depth their contemporary blues bands did not have, as most of them were guitar bands with the emphasis on hot shot lead guitar and not the kind of ensemble playing the Blues Broers were capable of.

 

The other good thing about the Blues Broers was that it always had three vocalists. John Frick, Rob Nagel and Agent Orange took turns at the microphone and the variety added enough spice to the mix to keep the show from being boring, especially once John Mostert came on board. Mostert is not much of a vocalist, whether with the Blues Broers or with the Boulevard Blues Band he joined when the Broers went into hiatus. At best Mostert is a serviceable hoarse voiced shouter; at his worst (and this is particularly true of his recorded vocals) his voice lacks strength, emotional depth or any sign of a blues feeling.

Tonight Mostert was not too bad. One could almost forgive him for his past sins against the blues, but then he also did not sing so many of the tunes, and I must say he slowly strangled Dolly Mae, not the best of tunes to begin with, to the point that the concept of bathos started to have meaning for me. By that I mean that he did not do well.

Weirdly enough a fan club of women started shouting for his return to the stage when, to their dissatisfaction I guess, there were too many songs in a row by a variety of the other possible singers in the band. The women must have been friends and family of the singer.

Clayton Frick was never a member of the Blues Broers, as far as I know, and led his own band, but was obviously tight with the Broers, given that his brother was their guitarist and because he was in The Flaming Firestones with Rob Nagel. Clayton was a great vocalist and strong rhythm player but I never did like his lead style, which was a bit too harsh and excessive for my taste. Tonight he seemed a tad subdued, except for the couple of words he spoke on stage to thank the audience for not smoking and informing us of the philosophical nature of his band mates. He played a lot of rhythm, some lead and sang some, but his presence, even if it was right in front and centre, was not very authoritative, as if he were slightly uncertain of his position.

John Frick was a good example of the quiet guy who lets his guitar do the talking on stage, except when he sang a couple of songs. One of the interesting aspects of that original version of the Blues Broers was that not every song had a guitar solo, again unlike so many of the other so-called blues bands where the guitarist somehow felt compelled to solo on each and every tune. It was refreshing to have a guy who was content to serve the song and the performance rather than feed his own ego with his fleet fingered brilliance – and a lot of bad solos were played by guys who could not seem to pull their fingers off the freeboard.

Tonight John did more of the same, though he was a lot more flash than I recollect, but then time and experience would count for something and this was after all a little bit of a guitar master blaster reunion, so why not show off your chops? He was still fiery, interesting, his own man and self-effacing yet effective, and he sang a bunch of tunes and played a bit of slide guitar. Not bad for an international superstar; well, he did fly in from the Netherlands.

 

Albert Frost is possibly not unaware of his status as the kid made good. If memory serves he was 17 when he played second guitar in the Blues Broers behind Nico Burger. When he took over the lead slot, the transition was seamless and, apart from some recordings of shows or rehearsals, his guitar sound is the recorded guitar sound of the Blues Broers.

Albert stepped on stage in spiffy black suit and black shirt and looked like the business, somewhat overdressed compared to the casual attire of the other guys, but he only lacked the trilby to look every inch the professional bluesman. He worked his guitar with the casual insouciance only the very talented and very confident should attempt, and he carried it off. The jacket soon came off, when the sweaty stuff started kicking in, and he showed off all he had and more over the course of the evening, whether he was doing his version of the Stevie Ray Vaughan shuffle, the Bo Diddley beat or just fiery lead breaks.

The Blues Broers managed to have top flight guitarists throughout their lengthy career and tonight the first and the last emphasised that fact over and over.

The songs comprised a heady mixture of own compositions and standards, some from the Broers repertoire and some from John Frick's repertoire. Simon Orange is the best songwriter in the band and his compositions could probably succeed in a pop or rock context as much as in the blues context, and Glove is in my opinion still the best rockin' blues the Broers ever recorded. It is a pity that there was no Hoochie Coochie Man, always a Rob Nagel showcase, or even Clayton Frick's take on Rock Me, Baby, a great tune from the Flaming Firestones days. I guess it was a question of so many tunes and only so much time. As it was, the band finally left the stage at about midnight, after a substantial encore set.

The audience was well entertained and exuberant. A bunch of us hung out at stage front, also because of the pressure from the numbers behind us, and a lot of the youngsters danced and waved their arms about. There is very little to beat hot, sweaty, live R & B on a good night, and this was a good night. It always amazes me that hearing the opening chords or notes of tunes, such as Glove or The Sun Is Shining, still makes a chill of thrill run up and down my spine each time I hear it, regardless of how often I've heard it before. Although I was a teenager in the punk rock era, the blues was my first love (and may well be my last love), and if they run in your veins you can never be separated from them.

I do not care how many bands there are who play similar sets of classic blues tunes. If they are any good, they have my vote. Musical fads come and go but the blues stays, sometimes more fashionable and sometimes virtually ignored by the mainstream, but the blues keeps satisfying those parts of the heart and soul and mind no pop, rock, jazz, rap, funk or classical music can truly satisfy. The blues is not about intellect or deep lyrics (though the topics can often be pretty heavy) or technique or anything to do with mechanical application of principles. You feel it in your gut or you don't. Once you have felt it in your gut, it's there for life.

 

That was, and on recent evidence is, the thing about the Blues Broers. Although the band was obviously serious about what they did and dedicated enough to keep going long after their peers had given up, they were not po faced about it. The Blues Broers realised that one could and should have fun with the blues for it is party music after all; the music of dark backrooms and country juke joints; the music of alcohol and dancing, and fucking. It is a cliché but I guess you left a Blues Broers gig happy regardless of your state of mind when you entered the room.

I certainly left the Hidden Cellar pretty happy last Friday night.

Dan Patlansky Does Not Move My Soul

Dan Patlansky's Move My Soul is album number 4 for South Africa's very own Stevie Ray Vaughan clone and I guess this is one more time where can only say Dan is keeping on keeping on doing what he does best.

The talent is undeniable, as is the drive and dedication, and the pure will to be the most technically gifted blues guitarist he can possibly be. Is there really any soul to this skill, though? Most of these lyrics sound like Patlansky's approximation of what the blues should sound like, a pastiche of tropes, and not truly something he feels deeply, as ought to be the case with blues. You can learn the elements of blues guitar but you cannot learn to have the blues; you can practice your licks till your fingers bleed but you cannot practice having the blues.

Patlansky covers BB King's You Upset Me and Arthur Crudup's That's Allright (more famously Elvis Presley's first hit single) and lesson's are noteworthy. King is arguably the most famous bluesman alive (at the writing of this piece) and perhaps the best blues guitarist there will ever be, not because he could showboat but because his technique and emotional attack combined so seamlessly that he is pretty much own his own at the top of the blues pyramid, with no-one even close. Crudup, on the other hand, was your basic journeyman bluesman who could write decent songs, almost pop blues, yet did not have the talent or ability to do proper justice to his own songs. In his case, other people made his songs shine.

Patlansky falls somewhere between the two poles. He has emotional intensity when he sings, and his guitar can sound like demons screaming in hell, but his own tunes are pretty basic and not particularly memorable. The groove is the thing.

To his credit Dan Patlansky does not attempt to sound like B B King on this version of You Upset Me, but apart from the Vaughnisation of the song, Patlansky brings nothing new or interesting to his interpretation, if one could even call it an interpretation. He just plays the hell out of it and that's he does and that's all he does.

Wendy Oldfield, I guess, adds the gospel wail to Insufficient Man, and Guy Buttery adds sitar to the accoustic Peace of Eden instrumental. The latter tune is so much the better off for being a lullaby of sorts, with bottleneck flourishes, as it provided the proverbial oasis of calm amidst the intense pace of the guitar fireworks

The title track of the album is, natch, a kind of soul blues lament, once again with Wendy Oldfield emoting in the background and one can imagine the tune being a showstopper on stage providing Patlansky plays with more backing than his usual trio. Now that I think of it, weren't there horns on the previous albums? Move My Soul, the song, cries out for a riffing horn section driving the theme home.

Come & Play is obviously a pivotal song as it has a video and it seems to be an attempt at creating a rockin' good times boogie type of thing one would play at a juke joint for dancers a couple of drinks ahead of the game. Not essential but fun.

Unfortunately the album loses its plot round about here.

Luca is the second, almost 12-minute long, instrumental and this time I am reminded of three guys jamming in the studio, with the rhythm section basically vamping behind a masterful improvisatory guitarist. The song has many sections, some quiet and mellow, some relying on intricate jazzy chordal work, and some with bravura soloing. Maybe the track is intended as some kind of guitar masterclaas in which Dan Patlansky can show off his chops without the distraction of lyrics. I do not know who or what Luca is and why he/she/it merited this homage or tribute or compliment and I do not understand why this complete piece of filler, albeit it very well played filler, is on the album. At half the length it would have been too long.

Lord You Are Beautiful is as superfluous but it is less than a minute long.

That's Alright Mama is an exercise in fleet fingered blues, reminiscent of Alvin Lee's Ten Years After way back in the mid- to late Sixties, and not very alright at all. Why did Patlansky bother to maim this song in this horrible fashion? He brings nothing noteworthy to it, does not enhance it and should just have recorded one more of his own compositions to show off how fast he can pick, if that is what he wanted to do.

After the filler comes Backside of Paradise, which is a bottleneck and percussion tune that is about as close to the Delta as Patlansky gets and it is quite wonderful, not least because it is slower, more thoughtful and a hell of a lot more tuneful and succinct than the electric showboating he so loves. If I were to make a mix tape of Patlansky songs, this one would feature on it, no question.

The album closes on yet another instrumental, which again sounds like a jam and like something added because they needed to make up a number of tracks.

I now own all four Dan Patlansky releases and I still rate the second album, True Blue, as overall the best of the bunch for variety of styles, strength of songwriting and the sheer audacious ambition of it in the South African context where a blues band may make money playing live but I cannot quite see that albums would be commercially viable. Move My Soul is too much like "Real – Part Two", and not in a good way. My problem with most of Dan Patlansky's stuff is that there is little that is compelling enough that I would want to listen to it a lot I am speaking as a guy who loves the blues a great deal and who owns a bunch of albums by the real Stevie Ray Vaughan. One can listen to only so much virtuoso blues guitar playing before you start longing for some proper songwriting, some tunes, something that will stick in your mind.

 

All that sticks in my mind about Dan Patlansky is an admiration for his ability and an astonishment that he is as good a guitar player as he is. The songs do not stick. He has a schtick, and it may be sincere schtick form someone who must love the blues, but it is a schtick nonetheless. The blues is meant to be about realness and Dan Patlansky is still way too much of an imitator, an expert at pastiche and not a innovator. He may one day write a proper blues and I would want to around when he does.

 

Until then I'll listen to Stevie Ray when I want to hear someone who sounds like Stevie Ray, or to the old giants of Chicago blues when I want my soul moved by blues.