Kiss, kiss but no bang, bang

 KISS, KISS BUT NO BANG, BANG

 

During the ‘70s Kiss was mostly just a name and an image of four guys in make up masks to me.  “Rock and Roll All Nite,”   perhaps “Beth,”  and “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” (Kiss going disco) were on the radio every now and then but South African rock radio, such as it was, hardly saturated the airwaves with Kiss.  Ace Frehley’s solo project “Ne York Groove” had a decent amount of exposure and was a favourite of mine at the time. I saw some of the album covers, and read that Alive was regarded by some as one of the greatest live albums of all time (to that date, anyway) and read the quote, from Hit Parader magazine, that Kiss would be the best thing since sliced bread if they could only write number one hit songs. There was the fanatical Kiss Army who dressed up and wore make up to represent their favourite band members. The Kiss sage show was almost over the top theatrical, with the musicians teetering around in high heeled boots, lots of pyrotechnics, including Gene Simmons breathing fire and sticking out a huge, prosthetic tongue and high energy rock and roll. The story was that they dressed up from the start, when they were playing  high school gyms and small club and simply carried on doing it on bigger and bigger stages. Kiss were superstars in Japan before they broke big in the USA. They did unmask themselves for a bit, in the ‘80s, perhaps to regain attention on a fading band, but resumed the masks shortly afterwards.  The drummer left the band and was replaced by another character.  

 

For all this, and mostly because of what I saw as ridiculous costumes and because I didn’t really know the music and wasn’t that keen on finding out, I eschewed Kiss, even as I  began investigating the ‘70s hard rock of Cheap Trick, Aerosmith and Blue Oyster Cult.

 

Somehow, in the mid-‘80s I found a copy of the debut album, Kiss (1974) in a bargain bin somewhere.  When I listened to the record, I was pleasantly surprised and yet also a tad deflated because I’d expected so much more from this legendary band, but, I guess, it was the debut and better would come. The music was pretty much tough edged rock and roll, not particularly hard rock and not metal, with a little melody, big choruses and typical male centred hard rock lyrics about mythical bad girl stereotypes of the time.  Several songs off this debut are Kiss classics and the album is very listenable indeed and holds up well today, along with the aforementioned bands from the period, in that kinda dumb hard rock genre.

 

The first impression of Hotter Than Hell (1974) is that it’s less tough than the debut, with a much more sophisticated, smoothed out sound, and a resultant loss of edge, a much more deliberate pace, without an increase in heaviness, and a general air of an over cautious approach, probably to make the record radio friendly . Only “Let Me Go, Rock and Roll” breaks a sweat.

 

 I reckon, if I’d actually been a Kiss fan at the time, a casual one, and had bought Hotter Than Hell because I liked the debut album, I would’ve thought I’d wasted money buying the follow up and would’ve lost interest.

 

I think Kiss must’ve had the same thought and Dressed to Kill (1975) is out of the blocks fast and loud, albeit with the same kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink teenage boy’s idea of a great rock lyric, where women are nothing but bad, as in hot, or just bad as in scheming, deceitful and troublesome.  After the fast start, though, the style and pace of the music reverts to verging on sludge and there is very little of material interest on the album until the closing track “Rock and Roll All Nite.”

 

Kiss and their management realised that the production values on their studio albums didn’t reflect the band’s live sound and believed that this defect, for a band that thrived on a loud, spectacular live performance, did them no favours and the next release was Alive (1975), intended to give the fans a taste of the high energy onstage performances of fan favourite tunes, and to establish once and for all that the studio albums to date  were not truly what the band was about. The lives cuts do not sound that much better than the studio versions and the joke was that most of the music was recorded in the studio afterwards, which means that you don’t actually hear what the band sounds like live at all. Presumably, the spectacle of the stage show was really what impressed the fans and not so much the music.

 

Destroyer (1976) kicks off with the anthem and ode to a hard rock burg,  “Detroit Rock City” and with the following songs it’s apparent that their ambitions to produce even more radio friendly hard rock have gone up a notch. The rough edges have been fully smoothed out. “Great Expectations” is a ridiculous, anthemic sleazy ballad dedicated to the band’s female followers; “Shout It Out Loud” is more sing-along party noise;  and “Beth” is the sensitive, piano driven, power ballad dedicated to the good woman at home. 

 

CODA

 

My optimistic target was to listen to more Kiss albums than these few, at least until the end of the ‘70s output but it was getting to be  harder work  than I’d anticipated mostly because the band just doesn’t rock hard enough and the songs aren’t particularly good or engaging. The slower riff heavy tunes don’t stomp, they just plod, and the faster tunes are just so frivolously lightweight, and most of the lyrical ideas sound like parodies, except that they’re probably not.

 

Kiss have had more releases after the end of the ‘70s than they ever had in that decade, but I don’t think there’s compelling reason to listen to all of them, unless one wants to a serious, in-depth retrospective analysis, or are a die-hard fan.  The ‘70s catalogue, when the band was young, ambitious, full of vim and vigour, probably represents their best in terms of ideas even if, over time, they became technically better musicians.

 

Kiss has had a long and successful career, yet another member of the classic rock careerist cadres of musicians who’ve managed to maintain a career in hard rock and have proved that rock is not a young person’s game after all. If you’re the Rolling Stones, you can keep on rocking until your late seventies and there is still so much interest in, and money to made for, ‘70s rockers that they can keep going for as long as they like, or can.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Clash revisited one more time, with feeling

 

 

I’ve recently watched Donovan Letts’ documentary on The Clash,  Westway to the World, for the umpteenth time, and afterwards, Viva Joe Strummer, which concentrates on the latter but retreads the material parts of the band history.

 

I was 17 when punk rock became a thing in the UK, and from mid-1977, when I was at university, I bought the New Musical Express every week, although it was a couple of months behind when it arrived in Stellenbosch, and avidly devoured its coverage of punk rock, and then New Wave and the genres and sub-genres that followed.

 

South African radio didn’t play punk rock and the records weren’t available in Stellenbosch and, therefore, if I knew a lot about The Clash, their views and of how rock critics evaluated their music, I never heard any of the band’s music until I bought London Calling in 1979.  The music on this vinyl double album was quite removed from punk rock and I heard an exhilarating mix of  rockabilly, reggae, ska, jazz and pop, along with punk elements. The NME had praised the album highly and, impressionable as I was then, barely 20, I would’ve have loved it regardless but the music was good, the variety was intriguing and the sound impressive.

 

After repeated listening, I developed favourites or, rather, there were tracks I started caring for less, such as “Lost in the Supermarket,” “Koka Kola,” “Lover’s Rock” and “I’m Not Down.”

 

On the other hand, the first 5 tracks, from “London Calling” to “Rudie Can’t Fail,” represent one of the best opening sides of any rock album.   “Guns of Brixton” is arguably the one track off the album that is the stone classic for me.

 

I never brought any other Clash albums until The Story of The Clash, Vol 1 in 1993, which brought me up to speed  with the best of the debut album, Give ‘em Enough Rope, Sandinista!  and Combat Rock. I’d listened to the latter on a Sanyo personal tape player on a night time car journey from Pretoria to Cape Town and hadn’t been impressed, partly because I was mostly in a sleepy, comatose state, I guess, but after listening to the album again, on digital streaming, almost 40 years later, my first impression remained valid.

 

I finally bought The Clash  (probably the version released in the US) in the early year of the 21^st century and then the live album From Here to Eternity.  I’ve also listened to Give ‘em Enough Rope and Sandinista! on digital streaming.

 

I wasn’t around in London, or the UK, when the punk movement flared up. never saw of those bands live and was never part of the general enthusiasm and fanatical appreciation and love for bands like the Clash, so all I have are the various albums and, for me, the first three studio albums are the only albums worth owning. The eclectic music that followed from their musical ambition, technical abilities and interest in exploring contemporary sounds and influences, leaves me cold.  I suppose one must applaud their progressive approach and the understanding that musicians can’t afford to stagnate and endlessly repeat old glories if they want to be true to an artistic vision and to build a legacy.

 

The thing is that The Clash developed into a direction I didn’t, and still don’t, appreciate. For me it’s a truism that the music young musicians make in the first five to ten years of their careers, will always be the most exciting, interesting and entertaining. As they age, mature as persons and also as songwriters and become more technically adept, the initial vigour and creativity slowly dissipates and, if a musician becomes a better technical songwriter, they often forego intuitive brilliance and rely on mechanical methods to create.  Joe strummer seems inordinately proud of the process, and in the abundance of songs,  of  recording Sandinista! but concedes that it might have been better if it had been judiciously pruned. Okay, so the musicians had many ideas and decided to make tracks of all of them and release them too, but this record confirms my contention that mature proficiency in songwriting is no guarantee of quality, other than in process and musicianship. 

 

The first three Clash albums are the only ones worth owning or listening to more than once but they aren’t 100% killer, even London Calling, which is supposedly one of the greatest rock albums ever.  I like the variety of the musical genres and styles but you can definitely divide the songs between the good and the mediocre and there are more of the latter than needs be.

 

Briefly, the Clash were hailed as the greatest rock band in the world, and the only gang in town, and so on, and the documentaries highlight those aspects that did indeed raise the band above and beyond the contemporary competition, and of course the myth making is glorious.  There are only two music scenes I’ve ever wished I could’ve been part of: San Francisco between roughly 1965 and 1967, and punk rock London in 1976 and 1977.  Regarding the latter period, The Sex Pistols started it all and The Clash ruled it all and there was plenty of mutton dressed as lamb but it seems to have been very exhilarating.

 

“(Only) White Man in Hammersmith Palais” is  my favourite Clash song, and it’s telling, I suppose, that it’s not a roaring punk rocker but a more thoughtful reggae number, that epitomises to me what The Clash really meant as musical and cultural force. Nowadays it might be castigated as cultural appropriation but it’s a tour de forcenonetheless from a garage band with pretensions, then ambitions and finally skills and a presence. 

 

 

 

Shared Address is a home for the blues

 SHARED ADDRESS                      ANNIE (2020)

 

Curious how these things work. I attend a Gerald Clark gig and afterwards research Apple Music to see how much of his music is there and then come across a connection with Shared Address who toured with him a couple of years ago and on whose album he’s a featured vocalist on the track  “Maybe I’m a Fool.”

 

Shared Address biography tells me they’re  a Bloemfontein based duo of Joudie on guitar, mandolin, harmonica and stompbox. and Maureen on vocals and
percussion, whose music blends folk, blues, country and jazz ad who are inspired by the likes of Muddy Waters, Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald, BB King, Shovels and Rope, Jimi Hendrix, Jack White, Larkin Poe, amongst others.  A little bit old,  a little bit new.

 

What we have here is a very entertaining,  rootsy yet contemporary, stomping take on blues, with nods to soul and gospel, 

 

Maureen’s voice is reminiscent of Shelby Lynne, originally a country artist whose music mutated into another version of some of the same blues, country and rock influences Shared Address reference, and she has those same powerful pipes to energise the fast songs or to infuse emotional depth to the slow tunes.

 

“Maybe I’m a Fool,” a duet between Clark and Maureen is one of slow songs in a set of otherwise upbeat blues stompers and Clark, as usual, demonstrates why he is one of South Africa’s best soul blues  singers, a slightly melancholic foil to Maureen’s more strident approach which works exceptionally well on the rocking  blues.

 

“The Busker” Is the other slow one, a melodic soul/gospel anthem, with (I’m guessing) Joudie putting in his two cent’s worth on vocals too.

 

For the rest, the album is just upbeat, often raucous, juke joint fun.

 

 

Shelter from Patlansky

 Dan Patlansky                                  Shelter of Bones (2022)

 

A new Patlansky album drops every few years and the question is: why? He is a technically gifted guitarist and knows how to write a riff and arrange a chord progression and must believe that he ought to keep on writing songs and releasing records for the sake of his career, but apart from fully leaving straight ahead blues behind and shifting to a tough blues rock sound, there hasn’t been much innovation in his music over the past decade. Worse, the songs on the various albums are kind of interchangeable and none of them are memorable. All too often the opening riff is the best, most catching part of the track and then it’s just more of the same, with his gruff, sincere vocal style and proficient fretwork that prove that technical ability alone cannot evoke a visceral, emotional response in the listener.

 

Here we have more muscular riffing and gruff vocals, blues based solos and some ghostly Stevie Ray Vaughan echoes in Patlansky’s patented technically slick style of bombastic blues rock.  You’ve got to admire his industry and skill but by now the style has become so entrenched, that the contents of each album come and go without much impact because he’s not a quirky enough songwriter and doesn’t have much gift for vocal melody.  

Having said that, the slow, soul ballads “Lost” and “Sweet Memories” are the best tracks on the record. The title track is philosophically introspective, oddly reminiscent of the Arno Carstens style and obviously intended to be a major statement to conclude the album and quite affecting, though also a tad lyrically clichéd.  For the rest, the arrangements and riffs are respectively intricate and powerful but there are no memorable hooks and very little sticks in the mind once one is done listening.

Patlansky obviously works hard at his career and may be commended for that but surely won’t be remembered  for writing and recording a body of iconic, classic tunes. He’s not a genius musician, has no intriguing musical quirks and relies too much on how well he plays the guitar.  Some people are dazzled by lengthy, intricate solos with an avalanche of notes and licks but when the songs they’re supposed to serve aren’t strong enough, the virtuosity  eventually grates rather than gratifies.

Patlansky loyalists would like this album and neophytes might as well buy this release, instead of earlier releases, to bring them up to speed on the Patlansky sound, and then never need buy any other.  Shelter of Bones is not particularly enjoyable, and is unnecessary and disposable. 

 

 

J J Cale

When I think back on it, the Stellenbosch Municipal Library was the source of a good deal of my musical education in the early to mid-Seventies, with albums like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon and Blue, Neil Young’s Harvest. Crosby, Stills and Nash’s eponymous debut, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s first greatest hits collection, Jethro Tull’s MU (greatest hits), Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman, and other such early Seventies singer songwriter records, plus a lot of early jazz and some blues.

 

J J Cale’s third album, Okie (1974), was one of these records I borrowed from the library, and it was an enlightenment to me regarding an artist I knew very little about at the time. I might’ve heard Eric Clapton’s hit version of “After Midnight” by then, but I’m not sure how much, if anything, I knew about JJ Cale, who was by no means a mainstream pop artist that would’ve received much, if any, airplay on South African radio stations.   I do think, however, that I vaguely recognised the name as a significant musical artist for some reason and obviously whoever bought records for the library must’ve believed that Cale had sufficient artistic merit for inclusion in the library’s collection. They didn’t stock simple pop music.

 

Okie baffled me slightly because a lot of it was just to saccharine and simplistic to me with lyrics that often sound as if Cale made them up simply to fit his admittedly catchy tunes. I didn’t know whether it was rock, country, country rock, or what. There was little of the toughness that I like and prefer in my rock, especially Americana, and too much that sounded like AOR and the type of music that was so inoffensive and smooth it should’ve been on heavy rotation in South Africa.

 

At the time my favourite tracks were “Cajun Moon,” “Rock and Roll Records” and “Anyway the Wind Blows.”  Listening to the record for the first time since 1974, the last is by far the best track and “Cajun Moon” still has the best hook. Now, too, I can appreciate the supple rhythm section and subtle yet insistent grooves of Cale’s music though I’d still say that a collection of his best tunes is the album to own, and not so much all of the individual studio records.

 

At some point in the ‘80s I bought Troubadour (1876), the album with perhaps Cale’s best-known tune, especially in Eric Clapton’s version, “Cocaine.”   By this time, I knew much more about Cale’s music than I did in 1974, partly because I’d read about him a lot, in UK based rock weeklies, and partly because he was act Chris Prior favoured on his week night rock show on Radio 5, and I knew Lynyrd Skynyrd’s version of “Call Me the Breeze” from their One From the Road live album.  I think I might also have heard the rather astonishing studio take of “Call Me the Breeze” from Cale’s debut album, Naturally (1972.)

 

The latter version starts off with the immediately engaging metronomic stomp of a primitive drum machine over which Cale mumbles something, before the swinging riff kicks in. This must’ve been revolutionary for this kind of laidback country blues style music in 1972 and even today it’s a visceral thrill every time I hear it. Sadly, “Crazy Mama” is the only other track on that record those benefits from and is enhanced by a drum machine too.

 

Troubadour is much lighter and more jazzy than Okie and has the same merits of excellent, catchy tunes and swinging ensemble playing but it seems even more saccharine and most of it could fit in well with the lounge music craze of the late ‘90s. It works as background music and is particularly engaging other than as pleasant diversion.  “Cocaine” stands out by a country mile because it has the toughest riff (or my ears, derived from “Sunshine of Your Love”) and the most memorable hook. No wonder Clapton made a huge hit of it. Other than that, Troubadour is a minor record, in the general vein of the Cale style where too much of his songs sound like filler.

 

The documentary To Tulsa and Back, made when Cake was around 65, illuminates him and his career a little bit and the most significant take away is that he made the career he wanted without compromising too much or pandering too much to the large corporations that run the music business. He was fortunate that he wrote enough good songs that other artists wanted to record and had hits with, so that the pressure to follow a standard music career was alleviated or removed entirely, allowing him to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it.  Apparently, he regularly turned down major money gigs because he didn’t feel like doing them or because they made no sense to him, Presumably, his simple lifestyle only requited the amount of money he made, following his own way, and he saw no reason to earn more simply because he could.

 

I own a double CD with what the compilers call his 20 best songs and if most of them are indeed quite good, I would argue that perhaps a single CD with only ten tracks are all you need, though they wouldn’t be representative of his entire output, which is quite varied in style and mood even if the same laidback approach is applied to them all. If you want a complete picture of the guy’s music, buy all the studio albums. If you just want a very good set of songs, make your own compilation from those albums. I prefer the tougher, more rocking tunes, like “Call Me the Breeze” or “Anyway the Wind Blows (and partly also because I prefer the ‘70s production values) to the more ruminative, sweeter songs. 

 

 

Celebrating 30 years of Achtung Baby

 U2                                           ACHTUNG BABY (1991)

 

For me, 1991 was the year of Achtung Baby, Use Your Illusion I and II and Nevermind, and almost in that order of significance too. This was also the year of Metallica but whereas I bought those first four albums on release, I wasn’t into Metallica at the time an bought the eponymous album only three of four years later. 

 

I bought Nevermind, and Bleach just before, because of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the enormous hype around the band and how they brought punk to the mainstream. I bought the Use Your Illusion albums because I as a big fan of Appetite for Destruction (my top hard rock album of the ‘80s), but I bought Achtung Baby because I was a long term afficionado of U2 and, though not necessarily contemporaneously all the time, owned all of the preceding records, starting with October, then Boy, before moving forwards with War, The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum.

 

The last two albums were the absolute pinnacle of the first phase of the patented U2 sound of ringing guitar and impassioned, inspiring vocals, emanating from the post punk sound of the late ‘70s and very early ‘80s.

 

With Achtung Baby, amongst other things, inspired by die fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and time spent in the pre-reconstructed city, if no longer physically divided, still very much psychologically divided, the band abandoned it’s by then almost cliched melodic approach and embraced tough, industrial-style, danceable riffing and beats. It’s as if The Edge decided to unlearn all musical expertise he’d acquired up to then, and to start afresh as if he were a guitar novice learning to play the only songs he knew, the songs he wrote in the first place.

 

From opening track “Zoo Station” to “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” “The Fly” and “Mysterious Ways,” this album is almost intolerably exciting and builds and builds, even taking account the quieter moody songs, all of them with a suppler, groovier rhythm section, to a crescendo of frenzy and exuberance. This record was meant for being played loudly and I guess it’s no accident that so many club mixes were made of the various tracks, those mixes serving as bonus materials on the 30^th anniversary edition of the album, because almost the entire record is just made for blasting out at high volume in a relatively small space for the delight of a drunken, wasted crowd.

 

Like Searching for the Young Soul Rebels 10 years before, I played Achtung Baby at least once a day for a very long time. Truth be told, this was the first U2 record I experienced viscerally, in my heart and mind, and not just as mostly an appreciation of the musical values and lyrical stance, as was the case with most of the songs on the earlier records.  Achtung Baby was big fun. The other records were closer to intellectual discussions.

 

Perhaps because Achtung Baby was so hugely wonderful that I was mildly obsessed by it, it also meant the end of the road for me as U2 fan. Apart from a greatest hits set, covering the band’s ‘80s output, I never bought another U2 album again. I just suddenly had enough and what I’ve heard of their subsequent releases reinforces my lack of interest. Like Prince, U2 is an act I remember fondly for their ‘80s music, and still have a high regard for what they achieved in that decade, and yet have never been able to persuade myself to investigate what they did next. Achtung Baby is not an ‘80s album but it so completely puts the capstone on that era that there’s no need to investigate further.  

Albert Frost and his Sacred Sound make believers of us all

 FROST, ALBERT                                        SACRED SOUND (2021)

 

Sacred Sound is Albert Frost’s 4^th solo album and his best since  Angels & Demons.  It rocks hard and is a positive progression from its predecessor.

 

The Wake Up, apparently a project he had wanted to do for a long time, a proper, grownup rock album with big, important themes, was critically acclaimed and won a SAMA but, on reflection, it was a confection that exhilarated when I first heard it, but soon lost its lustre. The big, AOR rock production, regardless of how intricate and sophisticated the arrangements were and how much effort Frost put into showcasing his skills, and the meaningful, philosophic lyrics, however earnestly meant, were evidence of ambition yet did not deliver a sustainable attraction.   The record quickly bored me.

  

On this new album, Frost amps up the guitar power with ampfli4ifers and effects pedals and invests in voice distorting software to give us a hard rock album, with the usual gentle contrasts, sung in his natural voice, that crackles with energy and rocks with power.  I’m reminded of the dense guitar sound of  Arno Carstens’ (who is a guest vocalist on “Storms are breaking”) New Porn project for which Frost supplied guitar parts.

 

Neil Sandilands, a South African actor making the rounds in  Hollywood nowadays, does a bar room philosopher spoken word piece on “Ecce Homo.” 

 

In its way Sacred Sound is more ambitious than The Wake Up, which, on reflection, is simply Frost testing the waters so to speak.  The earlier album, in contrast, sounds very tentative and somewhat prissily fussy now while Sacred Sound is assertive, not least in the powerful guitar sound, and looser in general approach and conceptual feel. It’s a considerably more entertaining consumer experience, for sure.

 

The opening tracks, the heavy riffing title track and the more streamlined power modern rock approach of “I’m Still Here” simply blast off into the stratosphere with an umcompromising statement of intent and after that the intensity never lets up, even on the more reflective tracks. The lyrics have had a satisfactory upgrade too. Frost has left the blues behind in no uncertain terms and the almost prissy arrangements and production of The Wake Up truly pales in comparison.

 

This record is almost ridiculously enjoyable to listen to at maximum volume. There isn’t a bad song on it.

 

 

The unheard Seventies

From roughly late 1974 to 1981 the monthly American publication Hit Parader magazine and the weekly UK publication New Musical Express (NME), were the primary resources for my knowledge of what was happening in rock, and particularly on the punk / New Wave scenes, but beyond that too, to power pop, ska/TwoTone, New Romantic, electronic pop, first wave Goth, funk, reggae, and so on. 

 

My first introduction to the Ramones, Blondie, Talking  Heads, Television, Richard Hell, Wayne/Jayne County, Dictators, and the other New York bands that preceded the punk explosion in the UK, came from an article in Hit Parader (in August 1974), which otherwise focussed on mainstream rock in the USA. Hit Parader also introduced me to Aerosmith and, in the aftermath of the huge success of Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, it was a  piece on the early, blues oriented version of Fleetwood Mac that induced me to buy an album called Fleetwood Mac: The Vintage Years, an excellent compilation of the best tracks from the Blue Horizon label.

 

I started buying the NME regularly in early 1977, after the Sex Pistols had become notorious and just as the punk bands that followed (The Clash, The Damned, The Stranglers, The Jam, and the hordes of others) began receiving attention from the British music press and for the next five years I followed the successive trends in UK music in the NME, but was also educated on P-Funk, reggae, contemporary comics, Elmore Leonard, Tottenham Hotspur football club, and the artists that were regarded as the godfathers of punk, such as Iggy Pop/The Stooges, the New York Dolls, Big Star and others. NME also covered mainstream American hard rock and it introduced me to Blue Öyster Cult  and Cheap Trick (it liked the latter, mocked the former) and others.

 

So, though I pretty much knew what was going on in the UK (at least in regard to the acts and types of music the NME deemed worthy of covering), and quite a bit of what was happening in the USA, it was mostly theoretical knowledge. I hardly ever heard any of the music I read about.

 

I was studying towards my law degree and living in Stellenbosch. I was buying records but concentrated on bargain albums, due to financial constraints, and primarily on blues records too. I also found that the two local records shops (Sygma Records and the record bar at the CNA stationery shop) still mostly stocked mainstream rock and very little, if any, of the brand new music the NME was so enthusiastic about.

 

The owner of Sygma Records looked baffled and perhaps thought I was taking the piss when I asked him whether he had or would get, the Sex Pistols’ debut album Never Mind the Bollocks. The first New Wave album I bought was Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True, at the twice yearly CNA record sale in 1979 (on the same day I bought Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, also on sale) and at the end of the year I managed to lay my hands on The Clash’s London Calling at Silverstone Records in Cape Town. Sygma Records stocked Never Mind the Bollocks about a year after its release.

 

Ragtime Records was the premier record store in the Cape Town CBD and I probably visited it a couple of times, usually on a day trip to the City during holidays, but, as I’ve said, focussed on the bargain bin rather than the standard price new releases.  When Ragtime Records shot lived Stellenbosch branch went belly up in 1981 and sold off its stock at reduced prices, I stocked up on Bob Dylan (Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited), the first three Blue Öyster Cult albums and the first two Stooges albums. Somewhere along the line I’d also acquired Aerosmith’s Rocks, Toys in the Attic and Night in the Ruts,  and Cheap Trick’s In Color, Heaven Tonight and Dream Police. 

 

In about 1981 I also bought Elvis Costello’s Get Happy (bargain bin) and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Searching for the Young Soul Rebels (brand new), The Ramones’ Leave Home, as well as Funkadelic’s Hardcore Jollies, One Nation Under a Groove and Uncle Jam, and Parliament’s Funkentelechy vs the Placebo Syndrome and  Motor Booty Affair purely because the NME raved about the Parliafunkadelicment Thang so much.

 

The point is, though, that I didn’t buy any punk/New Wave albums, either because they weren’t available in Stellenbosch, or I didn’t look for them in Cape Town, or much of anything else of contemporary value. I never heard The Clash’s debut album, or anything by The Damned, The Jam, The Stranglers, or any of the run of the mill punk bands unless there was a snippet of their music on a Sunday night BBC insert on Radio 5 where the presenter introduced us to some of the new music.

 

I read about Eater, The Cortinas, The Lurkers, Chelsea, The Sound, The Fall, Buzzcocks, Magazine and literally dozens of other bands covered in the NME and had no idea what they sounded like and remained ignorant about them until well into the 21^st century until I downloaded the YouTube app and signed up to Apple Music, and found a smorgasbord of music of all eras and all types, including the stuff I’d never heard between 1977 and 1981, not to mention even earlier in the ‘60s and  ‘70s.

 

I kept scrapbooks of clippings from NME (and some other rock weeklies I bought) with record reviews and articles on acts that covered this five year period, and also from about 1983 to 1987, although the latter was not as comprehensively covered, and I often spent time poring over the scrapbooks, rereading favourite reviews or articles to refresh my memory and sometimes for the simple pleasure of enjoying the prose stylings of, say, Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent, and was therefore regularly  reminded of how little of the music I knew.

 

With YouTube and Apple Music virtually all of that unknown stuff is at one’s fingertips with a little searching. Best of all, I can now listen to, for example, the entire Jam back catalogue in sequence within the space of a day, if I choose and have the time.  The two sad things  is that there just isn’t enough time to listen to all of the music I once would’ve wanted to hear and, even worse, the shock and awe of the new ain’t there anymore and some of the albums, that might’ve been inspiring when I was in my late teens and early twenties don’t always sound that wonderful or interesting now.

 

One of the albums that had always intrigues me was The Lurkers’ debut album, Fulham Fallout, touted at the time, if memory serves, as some kind of rabid, devout replication of The Ramones’ “patented buzzsaw guitar” energy and kinda dumb, kinda poetic lyrics. Well, yeah, I can see where that view of the record comes from, but it’s not nearly as astounding or powerful as the first couple of Ramones records.

 

I think the phenomenon here is that I cannot hear Elvis Presley’s first ground breaking recordings the way they were heard in the ‘50s, when the audience was unprepared for this hybrid of blues and country, and the Beatles’ albums do not have the same impact today as they had when first released.  There have been too many copyists or even original creators who’ve built on the same foundations to render those foundations particularly innovative to the contemporaneous audience.

 

Having said that, The Clash still sounds good, where the Jam’s albums are hard work to enjoy. I bought their last studio album, The Gift (1982), in Windhoek in 1983 and at the time, being so happy to have some Jam product, I was quite fond of the record, with the hit single “Town Called Malice” but when I listened to it again, many years later and after a long gap, it had lost whatever lustre it once had for me. “Town Called Malice” still has the visceral punch hit singles tend to have but the rest now sounds kinda rinky dink, high production values and good songcraft notwithstanding.

 

The Sound and The Cure are good examples of bands I wanted to hear back in the day, and very much wanted to like, but in each case, once I investigated I was incredibly disappointed by a sound (no pun intended) for which I no longer had an appetite.  This specifically applied to The Sound, whom I’d never heard   until a year or two ago when I found Jeopardy (1980), their debut, and couldn’t get past the first few tracks. I’d heard some early Cure tracks, like “Killing an Arab,” and their brand of what sounded like punchy post new wave guitar rock sounded appealing, but I was otherwise not clued up to their various early records. in the late ‘80’s the proto-Goth version of the Cure, and their pretty, tuneful and playful single “Love Cats” was a club hit in Cape Town (in the club I frequented) and much of their subsequent music became radio fodder in South Africa, none of which I like much. When, as with the Sound, I listened to the first couple of Cure albums very recently, I realised that I didn’t have enough patience to make it to the end of any of them and abandoned the project as a lost cause.  

 

The lesson, I suppose, is, whereas I still love the music I did hear when I was a teenager, with some of the records from those times counting amongst my top favourites of all times (Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, In Color, Ramones Leave Home, End of the Century, London Calling, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, Get Happy, Malpractice, Blue Öyster Cult, Tyranny & Mutation, Rocks, Toys  in the Attic) very few of the records I’ve listened to for the first time more than 40 years after the fact have become favourites, or even just records I like.  Amongst the latter I can count almost only The Clash as a current favourite.  The rest of the original crop of punk, New Wave and power pop bands have no traction for me.

 

Radio 5 played very little, if any, of the new music from the UK but on Radio Good Hope the Hobnailed Takkie Show, a short-lived innovative show in the period 1980 to 1981, the programmer or DJ made an effort to select the best of the then current fashionable bands, like the Liverpool contingent including Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, the more progressive rock sounds of Rush, and others. I taped a lot of this music and treasured my tapes for many years, as reminders of this period in my life when there was some actual connection with contemporary music, and not just through reading about it.

 

I recently discovered an interesting use of algorithm on Apple Music in that, after I play a certain album to the end, the music keeps going with a playlist of similar music by various other acts or artists, for example hard rock, blues or reggae, in seemingly random fashion.

 

The most prominent algorithm has been music from the post punk and pub rock R & B genres in that period between 1971 and 1981, which means that, for the first time, I heard tracks by bands like Lew Lewis’ Reformer, The Count Bishops, Ducks Deluxe, Tyla Gang, The Pirates (pub rock), The Skids, Department S (whose “Is Vic There” was a minor hit in 1981), The Pleasers (power pop), Chelsea, Sham 69, The Ruts, Angelic Upstarts, The Anti-Nowhere League, The Undertones (punk or second generation punk), The Members, Secret Affair, The Skids, The Prisoners (post punk) and others.  All of these bands were mentioned in NME and some received a lot of attention too.

 

In general, this stuff is just of historical interest to me now. There is very little that I’d want to listen to more than once. For example, The Count Bishops, later The Bishops, (a band I’d forgotten about) seemed to be highly rated as R & B/blues practitioners, in the wake of Dr Feelgood,  by the likes of Charles Shaar Murray,  and might’ve excited me back in the day, but now the band sounds a tad stiff and lumbering on record, with nothing of the songcraft and visceral punch of Dr Feelgood, Wilko Johnson version, and can only be thought of as also ran journeymen whose performances were probably best enjoyed in crowded, smoky pubs. So, now I can tick The Count Bishops off my imaginary musical bucket list and without regret that I wasn’t exposed to their music when I was a teenager and perhaps less sophisticated in my musical tastes.

 

A contrasting example is the case of Eddie & The Hot Rods, who rose to prominence at about the same time as the punk explosion of 1976 but from the pub rock circuit. Apparently, their guitarist was heavily influenced by Wilko Johnson and the band  had similar Canvey Island roots to that of Dr Feelgood. The band eventually shortened the name to just The Rods and had a middling hit with “Do Anything You Wanna Do.” 

 

Because the NME punted Eddie & The Hot Rods,  I bought their debut, Teenage Depression, as a cassette album when I saw it in a bargain bin somewhere, long before I heard any actual punk rock. I liked the fast, energetic rock and roll on the record but found it a tad simplistic and rough around the edges.  For some reason, although all kinds of Eddie & The Hot Rods compilations, featuring tracks from the debut album, are available on Apple Music (or, at least, the South African version of it) that album is not, and one must fillet the “best of” compilations to recreate the record.

 

In this case, probably because it’s a familiar quantity, I still like those songs off the debut record and if it’s a tad underwhelming and no masterpiece, it has more traction with me than the punk or post punk bands of the era I now hear for the first time.

 

Going back even further than the punk era, I was continuously  amazed and intrigued by record album covers in the shelves of Sygma Records, in its premises in Andringa Street, Stellenbosch with a denim shop right next door, a small section of hipness in a town, despite being a university town, that was conservative, sleepy and downright backward. Sygma Records was owned by one Pieter de Weet, the youngest, and hippest,  son of the family that owned the Gebroeders De Wet’s Department Store in the town, and he stocked the best of mainstream rock in the early and mid-‘70s, and from the ‘60s.

 

The record sleeves were displayed and the records were kept behind the counter, to prevent theft. There were four or five turntables on the counter, with headphones, for those who wanted to  listen to an album to help them decide whether to buy it. in this period, from roughly 1970 to 1976, I almost never had any money and if I had any, I spent it on plastic scale modelling kits, the building of which was my hobby at this time. I did buy some records but only rarely and asked for records as birthday or Christmas gifts.

 

For the most part, I simply flipped through album covers, making mental lists of albums I would buy if I had the money. I hardly ever asked to listen to any record because I knew I couldn’t buy any and felt awkward simply to listen to something I was never going to buy.

 

Going to Sygma Records was part of a long-standing Friday afternoon routine, which began with a visit to the Municipal Library, a stopover at the CNA book and stationery shop where I browsed comic books and ended at Sygma Records for record cover browsing.

 

I dreamt of owning the records, some of them at least, often purely because of the cover image though I had no idea what teh music sounded like, for example prog rock band Flash, whose album cover featured a pair of substantial naked breasts.  When I looked at the credits and saw that the band used a synthesiser, I knew I would never buy the album because I had a loathing for them, and my parents would have been aghast, to say the least, I id’ brought that record home. To this day I’ve no idea what Flash sounded like. Perhaps I should search for them on YouTube or Apple Music.

 

Another band I fancied from the record cover alone was the Edgar Winter Group with They Only Come Out at Night (1972) with a naked Winter, blonde hair flowing in the breeze, wearing shocking red lipstick and make up, at the height of glam rock, and looking decidedly unlike the Texan blues and jazz man he was. It was a while before I heard of Johnny Winter, his brother.  The Shock Treatment (1974) album cover was great too, but nothing as arresting and intriguing as its forerunner. I’ve subsequently listened to Edgar Winter’s stuff and don’t care for it and I suppose I wouldn’t have been impressed by it when I was a teenager. 

 

There was mysterious Van der Graaf Generator (don’t recall which album), with possibly the most fascinating, obscure, non-rock ‘n roll name I’d ever heard at that time. I knew the band from a late-night music show on Saturdays on the SABC’s English Service from the early ‘70s, in which  the producer or presenter featured the best of contemporary prog rock and jazz rock fusion , along with Van Der Graaff Generator also the likes of Genesis, Return to Forever, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and others. Sygma Records stocked albums by these bands too, and the covers were as fascinating yet very far from my interest. I didn’t care for prog rock or jazz / rock fusion  and preferred fast, loud, simple rock ‘n roll.

 

Two other bands I knew from their album covers and that were considered extremely cool by my high school peer group, though I never knew anyone who owned the records, were Audience with The House on the Hill, and Pavlov’s Dog with Pampered Menial. One was British and the other one American and both were niche interests in the world at large but, somehow,  had struck a chord in the South African musical psyche, at least in Stellenbosch that reverberated like nowhere else. Not unlike the high regard South Africans had for Rodriguez’ Cold Fact. None of these bands received much airplay on the SABC radios stations, as far as I knew. In the Eighties Chris Prior might have played one or two  tracks from each album in his Radio 5 show. At some point in my later life, when I was in my thirties, I think, I obtained a copy of Pampered Menial and taped it, and this was the first time I listened to the entire thing. Someone, perhaps Prior, played “Jackdaw” from The House on the Hill on the radio and I also taped that for future reference but I recall hearing “ I Put a Spell on You” on the radio long before that, though I don’t recall when and which snow or station.

 

I must admit that I also heard very little Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin when I was still at school. From about 1977, when had a student job and could afford to buy more records, I started a Led Zeppelin project though not much of a Black Sabbath project before the early ‘80s, eschewed Jethro Tull and Uriah Heep (who I sneered at for being, in my opinion, a shit Deep Purple wannabe), and more or less all of the other “underground” bands my peer group raved about. In some cases, I simply didn’t care for the music but mostly I apportioned my limited funds to blues records and albums by some deep favourites such as Dr Feelgood and Cream, which were groups I’d discovered on my own and who seemed to be unknown, especially Dr Feelgood, to my hip peer group.

 

It’s been a recent development, with the benefit of YouTube and Apple Music and the vast range of music that’s become available through streaming,  that I’ve been able to catch up with some of the ‘79s mainstream bands I hardly  knew at the time, such as Uriah Heep. I made a project of listening to all their early albums, up to about 1980, and my original opinion, that Heep wasn’t going to be my cup of tea, has been reaffirmed.  YouTube has a  real treasure trove of obscure late ‘60s and early ‘70s hard rock bands, and just on this evidence alone I’d say that 1970 was a very good year for this genre. Not only releases by “name” bands but so many records by bands I’ve never heard of and who might have had only record out, and in a local market, especially in the USA, and Europe. The music is not only hard rock, lots of it blues based, but there’s a good variety of psychedelia and progressive rock too.  Too much to listen to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Metallica's Anger Monster.

As I understand it, St Anger (2003) is not very highly regarded by rock critics and the Metallica fanbase but I am quite fond of it, and like it better than, for example, their first two albums or … And Justice For All, to name but a few.

 

The making of St Anger is documented in the Some Kind of Monster documentary, one of the best rock documentaries I’ve seen and by far the best of the various “making of …” documentaries of other Metallica albums. Some Kind of Monster is riveting and almost plays out like well written fictional tale of personal and band turmoil, with many challenges to be overcome before the record, recorded over a couple of years, is done and sent out into the world.

 

The resulting album, with a rule of no guitar solos, is quite brutal, unrelenting and harsh and for this reason very attractive to me. This is how I envisioned thrash metal to sound back in the ‘80s when I  heard of the genre without haring much of the music. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was probably the first Metallica track I ever heard and it didn’t sound like “thrash” to me, but just very good contemporary hard rock.

 

I was mightily disappointed when I first heard, more than 20 years after their respective release dates, Kill ‘Em All (1983) and Ride the Lightning (1984) because the production dampened what I’d anticipated to be  raging fire storm of metal. There was just no power to the music on the records. I also didn’t care for the intricate, variable riffing and shredding style of guitar solos. This went double for … And Justice For All (1988), and album I dislike and have never been able to listen all the way through. I don’t care how ambitious the songs were, how proficient the musicians were or how deep the themes were. I think the album sucks.

 

I came on board with Metallica (1991) because it had really good songs, songs that still resonate to this day, and an awesome power though the production still tended to reduce that power rather than elevate it. 

 

After that, not being a die-hard fan, I abandoned Metallica until Some Kind of Monster. I bought the DVD of the documentary, watched it several times and then bought St Anger.

 

The production imbues the tracks with all the power, energy, brutality, relentless surging thrash and intensity I’d always thought Metallica should sound like. The absence of guitar solos is no loss whatsoever; Kirk Hammett might be an awesome technician but most often his solos simply irritate me because of the show-off noodling they seem to be. The songs on St Anger are better for simply being focussed on tough riffing.

 

Though I own all the albums up to Metallica and St Anger,  I’m not a hardcore Metallica fan and will, push comes to shove, probably just stick with those two albums for repeat listening.  The first for the grandiose, sweeping, cinematic tunes and the latter for its hardest of hard rock intensity. 

 

Audience

From Wikipedia:

Audience is a cult British art rock band which existed from 1969 until 1972 and then from 2004 until 2013.

The original band consisted of Howard Werth (born Howard Alexander Werth, 26 March 1947, The Mother's Hospital, Clapton, East London) on nylon-strung electric acoustic guitar and vocals; Keith Gemmell (born Keith William Gemmell, 15 February 1948, Hackney Hospital, Hackney, East London - died 24 July 2016, Beltinge, Kent) on soprano and tenor saxophone, flute and clarinet; Trevor Williams (born Trevor Leslie Williams, 19 January 1945, Hereford General Hospital, Hereford, Herefordshire) on bass guitar and vocals; and Tony Connor (born Anthony John Connor, 6 April 1947, Romford, Havering) on drums and vocals.

 

When I was in high school there were a couple of records the cool, hip kids talked about all the time,  calling then must haves for cool cachet, such as Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Aladdin Sane, any Led Zeppelin record, Pampered Menial, Bachman Turner Overdrive II and Audience’s The House on the Hill. I saw them bring the records to school, to show off and/or to share with their mates, which never included me so I never got to hear them until much later in my life, well after leaving school. Though I asked my mother to buy me Bachman Turner Overdrive as a my present for Christmas 1974, I’ve never heard Bachman Turner Overdrive II and, even worse, by the time  I could boast of owning Not Fragile, Bachman Turner Overdrive was no longer cool. During the late Seventies, when I was a student and earned enough money to afford records, I  began a project of collecting Led Zeppelin albums. In the mid-Eighties I acquired AladdinSane, Black Sabbath and Master of Reality and somewhere I had the opportunity to borrow a copy of Pampered Menialand taped it. somehow, though, The House on the Hill escaped me almost entirely (I’d heard “Jackdaw,” the opening track of the album on probably Chris Prior’s Radio 5 show and taped it)  until recently  when I had the opportunity of listening to it on Apple Music.

 

The concept of a nylon string electric acoustic guitar is quite intriguing and smacks of high prog pretensions but I imagine it could bring something different to the music, which  seemed jazz inflected and inspired due to the horns, and there were elements of folk, R & B and classical music too, with memorable, tuneful songs.

 

“Jackdaw” is my favourite, primarily because I got to know it so well, but “You’re Not Smiling” (the second track on the album), their version of “I Put a Spell on You” and the title track are very good too. I suspect one would  file Audience under Adult Oriented Rock, or perhaps 12^th form oriented rock, inasmuch as it’s clearly not pop, nor heavy or hard rock, and demonstrates a modicum of intelligence higher than the standard rock composition and lyrics. Whether it’s true prog, I wouldn’t know, because it seems less contrived and less deliberately arty or highbrow, but that could be my interpretation only. I certainly enjoy this record better than the contemporaneous oeuvre of, say, Yes and Genesis. Audience is more accessible and fun than those other bands, especially the fun part, and less pretentious.

 

I suppose my high school peer group championed Audience  because they were a cult success rather than being popular, if only on an underground level,  like, for example, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, and the young like to find bands, musicians or even artists that nobody else has heard of, or not many, adopt them and then sing their praises to all and sundry, most of whom will have no idea of what the band/artist sounds like exactly because the cult is so small.

 

Frankly, I doubt that I would’ve truly fancies Audience when I was a teenager. I didn’t particularly like Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep or Jethro Tull (and certainly not Yes or Genesis) at the time because my  inclination was towards fast, loud and simple.  Circa about 1976, and before I ever heard any of teh fledgling UK punk bands, Dr Feelgood and Cream were my two top favourite groups and if the latter was not exactly simple, they were loud. Cream was a progressive blues rock group before the terms prog rock was coined and were mostly psychedelically progressive when they weren’t a straight heavy blues band. Dr Feelgood (with Wilko Johnson) was a British R & B pub rock band with a unique sound and  probably the best contemporary R &B lyrics. Both bands were viscerally exciting to the max.  Even now, when I can appreciate the music better, Audience doesn’t exactly pack the same visceral punch and it definitely wouldn’t have done in 1976.

 

However, my appreciation for music I would’ve avoided like the plague when I was a teenager, like, for example, acoustic delta blues or the intellectual sounds of Audience, has increased over the years and I have learnt to listen to and enjoy music across the spectrum.