- Out on the Weekend – Neil Young
- Grand Fraud – Weird War
- Feelgood by Numbers – The GO! Team
- Sister Mamie – Yusef Lateef
- Thoughts and Words – The Byrds
- Think – The Rolling Stones
- Help Me Girl – Eric Burdon & The Animals
- All Summer Long – The Beach Boys
- Good to Me – Otis Redding
- Vonal Declosion – Stereolab
- Bag of Jewels – Lou Donaldson
- Elfin Orphan – Scene Creamers
- New Rose – The Damned
- Looking at You – MC5
- Wash in the Rain – The Bees
- Roadrunner – The Modern Lovers
- Marquee Moon – Television
- Reptilia – The Strokes
- Deeper Into Movies – Yo La Tengo
- Ramp of Death – Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
- Goin' Back – The Byrds
2004: A terrible year for music. Debut albums
by Razorlight, Kasabian, The Killers, Keane. Snow Patrol are milking last
year’s record for all its worth, Bloc Party have come into being, and the release of their sophomore LP seems to have dashed any hope I
had that The Libertines might jack it in.
Music is no different to any other art form.
Just as bad novels, bad movies and bad paintings find a market, so too do bad
songs. And just as it requires a deeper reading to appreciate good literature,
good cinema or good art, so it is with music. One more than likely accepts that
Earnest Hemmingway is a better novelist than, say, John Grisham (no disrespect to
John Grisham), or that the movies of Stanley Kubrick are generally
superior to those of Steven Spielberg (no disrespect to Steven Spielberg), and
that Andy Warhol is a more interesting artist than Damien Hirst… so why doubt it when I tell you that Franz
Ferdinand are nothing more than a pale imitation of Talking Heads? That’s not
say it matters if to your ears The Libertines are the same thing as The Strokes. Just be aware that there’s more
to music than the ability to write vaguely catchy tunes coupled with a propensity
for taking hard drugs.
The problem with contemporary rock music is that the music itself is often deemed to be less important than a band’s image or a
musician’s personality. Rock and roll has never been a purely auditory
phenomenon by any means, but there was a time when groups actually put some
effort into what they were doing, learnt their craft, paid their dues. When
Keith Richards and Mick Jagger appeared before court on drug related charges in
1967, the Rolling Stones had released no less than SEVEN albums. Even if we
allow that Richards, Jones and Jagger were probably getting high well before
that, they’d existed as a drug free unit long enough to establish
themselves as viable artists. With a lot of bands these days you get the
feeling they’d rather not bother recording any music at all.
For the mainstream act the situation is different. More often than not they’re in it for the fame and adulation alone, in cahoots with their record company who probably take an even more
cynical view about the whole business than they do. Together, they work to
divest their product of anything approaching artistic integrity. To ensure that
the unsuspecting listener doesn’t call out the cheap pop tune for the
superficial drivel it often is, all aural distractions are erased. Everything is
invested into the melody, which is typically conveyed via the vocal component
of the song. Frequencies are equalised, textures are compressed, rhythm
instruments are buried deep within the mix. You may struggle to identify the
characteristic sound of any specific instrument whatsoever. The idea is to
create something that is completely benign. Why? Because the music industry
doesn’t consider that their art should demand anything of its audience other
than slavish devotion. As far as they’re concerned, popular music serves much the
same purpose as sport.
It’s mid-March. Myself, the guy who used to own a pager, the former Cohabitant from Brighton and
his friend Charlie (also from Brighton) are leaving Monterey, California, in a Chrysler Sebring Convertible. We all have monstrous hangovers after an evening spent drinking
more than we intended to at the
London Bridge Pub down on Fisherman’s Wharf. Checking out of our motel was a
mission in itself. No sooner had we managed it, we had to get one of cleaners
to let us back into our room after realising we’d left something of value in
there. I then had to deal with booking flights from Las Vegas to San Francisco
(in person, from a travel agent). Finally, we paused to pick up supplies in a
wonderfully spacious and air-conditioned supermarket before pushing on along
the Cabrillo Highway to begin the coastal drive south.
What to listen to. How about Harvest by Neil Young? I’ve owned this album for almost a year,
but it goes without saying I’ve never listened to in anything resembling my
present environment. 'Out on the Weekend' kicks in and it becomes rapidly apparent that Big Sur was designed with country
rock specifically in mind.
In the autumn of 2003 the former cohabitant from Brighton informed me of his plan to spend the spring of 2004 travelling around the United States of America. I received his
proposition – for I was invited – with a restrained avidity. Although employed (at Nikon, since you ask) I was recovering from the economic damage my own Asian travels had inflicted
upon me. At the same time I was itching to hit the road again, if only for a couple of weeks.
I made
arrangements to meet the former cohabitant at a specific time and place in San Francisco, persuaded the guy who used to own a pager to accompany me, and then applied for credit. Less than a month prior to our intended departure I booked two return tickets at £240 a head, leaving from Gatwick Airport and only slightly soured by having to change planes in Charlotte, which sounds cheap, and was, but not ridiculously so. The economic conditions as they were, it’s possible that if I’d been more on the ball I could have found a cheaper deal still.
I’m in Haight-Ashbury browsing through records in Amoeba
Music with the guy who used to own a pager who’s off enquiring about lap steel
guitars. I’m looking for If You
Can't Beat 'Em, Bite 'Em by Weird War because I’ve not been able to find a
copy in London. I am successful. Just as 'Out on the Weekend' is the first
song off of Harvest, 'Grand Fraud' is the first song (proper) on If You
Can't Beat 'Em, Bite 'Em. I find that such incipient energy is often transferable
when compiling playlists.
Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team hadn’t been released at this juncture,
but I didn’t want to overload the front end of my compilation with tunes
exclusively related to my two week vacation. My lady friend, the guy who passed
out in Debenhams and I went to see The Go! Team play at The Spitz (supported by
Field Music) in October. The song 'Feelgood by Numbers' reminds me of something Vincent Guaraldi might have composed for the Charlie Brown TV Specials of
the 1970s. It’s an instrumental track which why is I’ve followed it up with jazz, although the tone of 'Sister
Mamie' by Yusef Lateef is very different: a hard-bop groove with eastern
textures. 'Sister Mamie' recalls our return to Lynton, North Devon, in the August, but it’s the only tune
that does. The dye had been indelibly cast a year earlier and I will forever
associate that place with the Rolling Stones' albums Their Satanic Majesties Request and Beggars Banquet.
We’ve not long left San Francisco, by way of an unplanned
detour through downtown Oakland, and the guys from Brighton are flicking
through their CDs. We are driving to Yosemite National Park on
the first leg of a four-day road trip that will take us from San Francisco all
the way to Las Vegas (the long way around). After mildly enjoying Donovan’s
greatest hits, it materialises that the guys from Brighton have with them Younger than Yesterday by The Byrds. I’ve
played this record a lot, but I’m not tired of it. The song 'Thoughts and Words' now replaces 'Have You Seen Her Face' as my favourite – both are Chris Hillman penned tunes. We
will listen to the album again on the final leg of our journey: the drive from
Santa Barbara to Las Vegas through the Mojave Desert.
Turns out I’ve not given Aftermath
by the Rolling Stones the attention it deserves. 'Mother’s Little Helper', 'Lady Jane' and 'Under My Thumb' all
made it onto my Best of the Rolling Stones MiniDisc compilation, but I’d left
it at that. My loss, because there’s at least 'Think' to (re)consider. I’d imagined that a golden age era Stones’ album
would be more suited to driving through California, but there’s something about
Aftermath that seems to suit the mood – an innocence perhaps, or a
particular type of sound. Whatever it is, it sits very nicely alongside Eric
Burdon’s 'Help Me Girl', which was
released the same year (1966 – although what we're really listening to is The Very Best of Eric Burdon & The
Animals).
Coruscations of light bounce upward off the Pacific Ocean blue. Neil
Young’s Harvest has drawn to a close.
What’s next? The Beach Boys of course; All Summer Long. It may only be March but it looks and feels like July.
The guy who used to own pager, who has had to do all of the driving on account
of being the only one of us with a driving licence, thinks the song's hilarious.
Having exhausted my parents’ supply
of 1960s and '70s rock and roll, as well as my father’s jazz, I’ve made a start
on my mother’s limited supply of Atlantic Soul. (I never really understood why
my parents decided to abandon their record collection. They only ended up
replacing records with CDs, and the sound quality will have only suffered.)
It’s The Soul Album by Otis Redding
that’s caught my eye. It could well be that I’ve recently watched the film Catholic Boys (a.k.a. Heaven Help Us) for the hundredth time, which features the Otis Redding track 'I’ve
Been Loving You Too Long', although that’s not on this record. My favourite
track on The Soul Album is 'Good to Me', a similarly slow and plaintive tune. Within a year I will have purchased a copy of Otis Blue.
Margerine Eclipse [sic] is the
first Stereolab album that’s not lived up to my much heightened
expectations. Let it be known that there was never any question that something
from it wouldn’t appear on my annual compendium, and it’s a very good record
by anyone else’s standards, but I sense that the premature death of 'groop' member Mary Hansen in late 2002 has, understandably, taken its toll.
The
quintet Lou Donaldson brought together to record Midnight Creeper in
1968 is quite something: Blue Mitchell on cornet, Lonnie Smith on the organ,
George Benson on guitar, Idris Muhammad on drums, and the man himself playing
alto sax. It’s another one of my father’s records, although funkier than most
of the jazz he used to own. Jazz-funk is a mysterious genre looked down upon by
some, but the calibre of the musicians that have indulged speaks for itself: Donald
Byrd, Grant Green, Jimmy Smith, Herbie Hancock, Ramsey Lewis – even Miles Davis
to some extent.
For a brief moment Weird War became Scene Creamers,
subsequently reverting back to their original name when an obscure French
graffiti collective claimed legal ownership. Ironically, the album
released under the Scene Creamers name is one of Weird War’s best (and if you
google ‘Scene Creamers’ those Gaelic scribblers are nowhere to be seen).
Released in January 2003, while I was bumming around in Southeast Asia, I Suck on That Emotion should
have more rightly featured on the previous year’s compendium, but I didn’t get
hold of it until late in the year and continued to listen to it well
into 2004. [Incidentally, Ian Svenonius dedicated their performance of 'Elfin Orphan' at the Highbury Garage to me after I requested he play it in return for the beer I bought him. (He’d
actually wanted Grenadine, but it was off.) I hadn’t meant to hold him to
ransom but the barman had insisted he pay for his drink, despite the fact that
Scene Creamers/Weird War were headlining, and Ian didn’t have cash on his
person.]
Yosemite
The origins of punk have been attributed to innumerable sources.
Did it begin with the Velvet Underground, MC5, The Stooges, The Sonics, The
Seeds, The Monks, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Dr. Feelgood, 'You Really Got Me' by The Kinks, 'Seven and Seven Is' by Love or 'Louie Louie' by The Kingsmen? No, it started with jazz. Or, more specifically, bepop.
The precursor to bepop was swing and big
band jazz, which was driven by the individual, a bandleader or arranger: Count
Basie, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman. Early rock and roll was
similarly individualistic: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Elvis
Presley. Bepop was interested in advanced harmonics, rhythmic intricacies,
modal chords, with less emphasis on melody. There was no longer any need for a
large orchestra and so the role of bandleader was diminished. The beat
combos that resulted – quintets and quartets mostly – were therefore more
democratic. It was customary for each musical component to contribute not just
towards the rhythm but also improvise a solo. The nominal leader of
these combos might even write a piece with a specific instrument, or even
musician, in mind. The song was no longer the sum of its parts but a grouping
together of singular strands, recorded live, be it in the studio or in a club
or concert hall, where it is left to the individual musician to regulate the volume of
their instrument. There was no technical Svengali sat in a control room,
twiddling knobs, deciding what sound should predominate, emphasising melody
and/or dampening rhythm: all sound was equal.
Despite not being literally recorded live,
punk aspires to very much the same thing. The idea is to allow the timbre of
each musical constituent to flourish in an attempt replicate a live experience. Less emphasis might be placed on a song’s vocal. The bass line is
as likely to carry the melody as the lead guitar. Traditional hierarchies are
disposed of. This is music following the path of least resistance, a communion
between the artist and the listener.
'New
Rose' by The Damned was purportedly
recorded in a day. Released in October 1976, it has the dubious honour of being
British punk’s first ever record – dubious because I imagine that sort of
thing brings with it a certain amount of pressure. Fortunately, 'New Rose' does not disappoint. I borrowed
it from the friend who crashed to the floor in Debenhams, who owned the greatest hits compilation album The
Light at the End of the Tunnel.
My first go at MC5 had not been a great
success. I purchased Teen Age Lust in 1998/99 only to find the sound quality wanting. The album is a live
recording of a gig they played in 1970, which goes some way towards explaining
it. I was careful not to make the same mistake twice and opted against buying
MC5’s seminal debut, Kick Out the Jams,
also recorded live, and instead purchased Back
in the USA, which they cut in GM Studios, Detroit. My opinion of MC5
improved immeasurably and I was able to appreciate why some have claimed them to
be a progenitor of punk.
I can’t recall how I came by 'Wash in the Rain' by The Bees but it
would be a while yet before I picked up their album. It’s possible that I
heard it on the radio and then bought it as a 7” single, but I can’t be sure. I’ve acquired a lot of music this way, where I’ve not known enough about
a band to chance it on an actual album but I’ve been desirous of owing a
particular song. My uncertainty stems from the fact that singles are not really
a thing anymore, and all mine are stashed away somewhere. It’s too much
bother to manually recalibrate my record player to play at 45 rpm, so I rarely do.
It’s Friday night in San Francisco and
we’ve ended up back at Delirium, the same club we went to on Tuesday. That
evening they played an eclectic mix of classic rock, garage, new wave, heavy
metal, punk and indie – ‘a rock & roll party for the 20th century’. Tonight
they’ll be spinning punk and new wave. I get talking to the DJ and put in
a request for 'Terry Waite Sez' by The
Fall, which he fulfils. Between that and the Sex Pistols, The Stooges, The Cramps and The
Clash, something catches my ear. I consult the DJ to find out what it was: 'Roadrunner' by The Modern Lovers.
Proto-punk: designation after
the fact. The Modern Lovers took their cue from The Velvet Underground, so
how’s that supposed to work? The Modern
Lovers was the first album I bought once I got back to Blighty (although I
bought the wrong version: The Original
Modern Lovers, produced by Kim Fowley and not John Cale). If this was
indeed punk then it was my sort of punk. My problem with a lot of punk is that it’s quite shouty. I can’t listen to the Sex Pistols because of Johnny Rotten’s voice,
and when I’ve made forays in other directions I’ve come up against the same
problem. I really wanted to like 'Holiday
in Cambodia' by The Dead Kennedys, for example, but couldn’t get past
the vocals. It’s the same with The Ramones, although I must confess to being
disappointed with them generally. Towards The Clash I remain ambivalent. And
then there’s the clothing. I don’t really go in for all that ripped denim,
heavy leather and graphic sloganeering.
I suppose this is why I’ve
always erred towards new wave. Whether Television qualifies as new wave is debatable
– post-punk at least, which almost amounts to the same thing. I knew 'Marquee Moon' was a great tune and took
myself to Richmond Library to follow up on my interest. Unfortunately, the
album Marquee Moon left me slightly
cold. As with Big Star’s Third (aka Sister Lovers) its reputation may have
adversely preceded it.
A guy I worked with complained that the
first single off of The Strokes’ second album sounded like the theme tune
to the children’s television show Rainbow.
I could see where he was coming from and shared in his disappointment. The
second single, 'Reptilia', was an
improvement, but I still had no intention of buying The Strokes’ new LP. In the
end it was my lady friend who decided that Room
on Fire was worth a punt, and so I decided that I may as well include 'Reptilia' on this compilation.
'Delirium'
In June our landlord decided he wanted to
sell up. Putting aside the rigmarole of having to find a new place to live – as
well the loss of the Royal Oak as our local – it wasn’t such a bad thing. Douglas Bader House had always been a dark and isolated tenement with too
little furniture. We found a flat in Isleworth with an iron staircase leading
up to it, which lent a certain frisson. Down the road was St. John’s Stores,
around the corner Isleworth Train Station, and The Red Lion a few minutes’
walk away. We were better off.
Yo La Tengo released the album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One as
far back as 1997, which was before I had even heard of them. I’ve long since
forgotten what it was that brought them to my attention – maybe The Pastels? –
but theirs is another album loaned from Richmond library. It’s a great record encompassing a variety of styles; I find the noise-pop of 'Deeper into Movies' to be of particular interest. On end of the same MiniDisc I recorded this CD onto, I added a couple of tunes from Pig Lib by Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, his second album since disbanding Pavement. 'Ramp of Death' is included here.
The last record I purchased before
our move was The Notorious Byrd Brothers, also the last Byrds’ album to include material by David Crosby. Crosby was a bit of a
burk really. He fell for the whole trippy hippy thing in a big way, much to Roger
McGuinn and Chris Hillman’s chagrin, who were by now exploring more traditional
forms of American music: bluegrass, country and western, Appalachian folk. They
also wanted to record the Goffin-King composition 'Goin’ Back', which Crosby thought was somehow beneath him. He had
this smutty song called 'Triad'
knocking about and wanted to cut that instead, so McGuinn and Hillman booted
him out of the band.
Intended as a celebration of
my trip to The States, these last three tracks were not present on my original, 74 minutes long MiniDisc. I appended them after making the transition to MP3, partly because they were
discovered too early for inclusion on the following year’s compendium but also
because they raise the overall quality of this one. I hope that you concur.
