Michael Aron – “Talking Heads: Beyond Safety Pins” (1977)
An early article on Talking Heads by Michael Aron from the Nov. 17, 1977 issue of Rolling Stone…
After touring Europe with the Ramones, opening at the Bottom Line for Bryan Ferry and selling out CBGB’s regularly for two years, it should be a bit of a bringdown for a group to be here in suburban White Plains on a rainy Saturday to play a club that is essentially an annex of Beefsteak Charlie’s restaurant – but Talking Heads don’t seem to mind. While guitarist and lead singer David Byrne walks around in a London Fog raincoat, clutching a copy of a book entitled Musical Cultures of the Pacific, the Near East, and Asia and wondering aloud whether the rain outside is carrying “fallout from the recent Chinese A-test,” bass player Tina Weymouth is disarming a table of women friends with candid talk about David’s penchant for farting.
“He did it during a photo session for our album. That’s why he’s looking away in this shot on the sleeve,” Weymouth says. “Maybe men do it more than women.”
“He really does shovel his food down, you know,” adds an English woman.
“Yes, and he’s still eating junk food,” says Tina.
At a nearby table, Tina’s husband Chris Frantz (the group’s drummer) and ex-Modern Lover Jerry Harrison (keyboards and guitar) are explaining for the nth time why Talking Heads are not a punk band.
“The big difference between us and punk groups is that we like K.C. and the Sunshine Band and Funkadelic/Parliament,” says Frantz. “You ask Johnny Rotten if he likes K.C. and the Sunshine Band and he’ll blow snot in your face.”
“What I thought was healthy about punk rock was that it was a reaction to over-professionalization and technique replacing meaningfulness in music,” says Harrison, who went to Harvard. “I think in a way what punk rock means is intensity of expression, intensity of meaning, and I think that’s what we share…although we convey emotions not exactly limited to anger and aggression.”
A few minutes later, Talking Heads take the stage for a sound check. With the possible exception of Harrison, they look too straight to be rock & roll musicians. But, of course, they look this way on purpose. “Normalcy” is part of their pose – a way of saying hipness is passé and safety pins are irresponsible. As soon as they begin to play, you realize you’re in the presence of a stunningly original rock ensemble whose roots go back to such classicists of abnormality as the Velvet Underground, David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars and Harrison’s old group, the Modern Lovers.
Byrne, 25, writes all the material: a kind of syncopated hard rock, richer in texture than most New Wave music and lightened by riffs that seem to come from pop and disco. The lyrics are deceptively simple and utterly cracked. Like Randy Newman, whose songwriting he admires, Byrne is putting across a sensibility as much as a song. Consider these lines from “Don’t Worry About the Government”:
My building has every convenience
It’s going to make life easy for me
It’s going to be easy to get things done
I will relax, along with my loved ones…
Some civil servants are just like my loved ones
And these lines from “Psycho Killer” (written, by the way, two years before anyone had heard of David Berkowitz):
We are vain and we are blind
I hate people when they’re not polite
Psycho killer, q’est-ce que c’est?
Talking Heads may be the only rock band around whose members could all have had legitimate careers as painters. Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth were classmates at the Rhode Island School of Design, a prestigious asylum for the artistic that also spawned Martin Mull. Weymouth and Frantz painted; Frantz played in a rock band with Byrne, and Byrne flitted between painting, photography, video and poetry before settling on the writing of
questionnaires as an art form. (“I tried to design a Nielson ratings system for the arts, but it never worked out.”) Harrison, a latecomer to the band, painted as an undergraduate and had returned to Harvard for graduate studies in architecture a few months before Talking Heads lured him back to music.
I first saw Talking Heads two years ago when they were breaking in as a trio at CBGB’s. The music was more raw then, more hard-edged, and the lyrics more pessimistic.
Talking Heads usually played on the same bill with Television (a coincidence in that “talking heads” is a name lifted from TV terminology), and those were special nights. Each band had a cult following: Television drew the punks and rowdies, Talking Heads the young professionals, college students, and the critics – in particular, John Rockwell of the New York Times, who used the term “art rock” to distinguish Talking Heads from New York’s 8000 other punk bands, and James Wolcott of the Village Voice, who raved about a band still a year and a half away from cutting its first record.
Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth are so serious about their music and so careful about controlling their careers that for the next year they rebuffed half a dozen management offers and resisted the temptation to deliver themselves up to a large record company.
Instead, they worked on their musicianship, built their repertoire beyond fourteen songs and began searching for a fourth musician who would, in Weymouth’s words, “make us sound more like a band and take some of the pressure off of David.” After finding Harrison, they signed a deal with Sire – “a small, independent company that’ll always take your calls,” says Byrne – and in mid-September released an album, Talking Heads ’77.
Although the album has been received with excitement, it can’t possibly be as rousing as what 150 people witnessed at Beefsteak Charlie’s on a rainy night the week of the Chinese A-test. Having not seen the band in more than a year, I had almost forgotten how incredible David Byrne is onstage.
Everything about him is uncool: his socks and shoes, his body language, his self-conscious announcements of song titles, the way he wiggles his hips when he’s carried away onstage (imagine an out-of-it kid practicing Buddy Holly moves in front of a mirror). But it only makes you love him as you laugh at him – or at the concept he presents.
Byrne is aware of his effect but has, he says, “really no idea what I look like onstage. I know people talk about me as being a gone cat, wacko, and I guess in the context of rock & roll bands that’s valid. But if I cultivate it, I’m completely unaware. My only effort is to play well, sing the lyrics with conviction, on pitch and so they can be understood.”
Still, sitting in the audience you’re never sure whether Byrne’s persona is real or if it’s brilliant satire. Eventually, you stop wondering, because all the while he’s blasting extraordinary music at you, playing and singing with an intensity rarely seen this side of drag-queen cabaret bars and having more fun than anyone else in the room.
As I heard one suburban kid say to another between sets, “Wait’ll you see this guy.”
Michael Aron
Bob Dylan – “Tarantula” (1971)
1971 review (not sure of exact date) from Zygote magazine by David G. Walley of Dylan’s controversial stream-of-consciousness book…
Tarantula: twenty-five year-old visions of reality/letters to himself and posterity, now here in some other form from miracle xerox. Tarantula – visions of Aretha, soul singer in 78 pages of ramblings through the muse. Well, yes they may have caught his soul on cellophane and plastic, and the moving finger having writ, moves on, but this was suppressed by the author and the publisher, dived down into posterity timezone to return years later as underground masterpiece of twisted mind and agonized feelings –
Dylan, the man, the twenty-five year-old genius struggling with precocious knowledge that “one person’s truth is always someone else’s lie”, writing a book which he knew was jus’ goofing, sir, honest, but populated with brilliant wit, album-jacket characters from freaked reality. Fragments connected tissue-thin to Coincidence, and then Beauty, well she stood behind him and laughed into her beer while Muse, in tattered cloak turned headstands on the page… Fragments , connect, separate, titled as trips, bad dreams, paranoia, advice to self and posterity. The moving fingers writ and moved on to Woodstock, Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 was revisited then, worked on from 1964-66 and shelved — too much hubris for Mr. D. tho was some spark not fanned…
Dylan, without benefit of clergy and A.J. Weberman, on the move through twisted famedreams, acid visions populated with amphetamine figures: Lonzo, Murph the Surf, The Senator, Jesus Christ, Suzy Q., The Good Samaritan, James Cagney, all make cameo appearances, like reading the back of Highway 61 Revisited and early poetry, written by a student who walls at U. Minn couldn’t contain. References, cryptic to inside out Dylan Thomas, Joyce, ee cummings…Dylan inveterate punster, funster always reversing roles and then eating them whole…
Structure amorphous, titles and raps ended with poetry /letter /missile to futurity, signed with names of imagination, “compa”, “wimp, your friendly pirate”, “mouse”, “willy purple”, “pig”, lazy henry”, or “truman peyote”…poking fun, crying, masturbatory wordplaying, for friends with obscure references too trivial to recount. Some say there’s many hundreds of pages somewhere in someone’s basement, even mr. d. avers to the fact, but won’t crack a smile, like his mother ought to know why them new-fangled critics beat their heads out on his verse, and Tarantula is something else for them to digest, not really outside for the multitudes to see, no, not really. Filled with messages outside to the other side of bob dylan, “…look down oh great romantic, you who can predict from every position, you who know that everybody’s not a job or a nero or a j.c. penney…look down and seize your gambler’s passion, make high wire experts into heroes, presidents into con men.”
Dylan knowing with twenty-five year old precocity what he knew, the anguish of it…and recognition of basic truths, tho couched in symbolism,”…compared to the big day when you discover lord byron shooting craps in the morgue with his pants off and he’s eating a picture of jean-paul belmondo & he offers you a piece of greenlightbulb & you realize that nobody’s told you about this, & that life is not so simple after all”, and that fragment closed with another letter in form of verse to reader or himself:
“for this chosen few, writing for any what
a drag it gets to be. writing one cpt. you.
you, daisy mae, who are not even of the masses
…funny thing, tho, is that youre not even
dead yet…i will nail my words to this paper,
an fly them onto you. an forget about them…
thank you for the time.
youre kind.
love and kisses
your double
Silly Eyes (in airplane trouble)”
Portraits arrange themselves in fluid style, vinyl-words like they used to be before the ACCIDENT, in another country where he was so fragrant, fresh and warm: “Poor optical muse known as uncle and carrying a chunk of wind & trees from the meadow”, or “green maggie of profanity slapstick & her cast of seven coats shining & fighting the milkmaids & high whining barndoor slam-heavens!” onewordphrase adjectives of names “crowbar jane”, “phombus pucker”, “jacks of spades” or “vivaldi of the coin laundry”…the secret reader is in the free-flowing ideas like spaghetti on typewritten pages and the scansion of that flow — sit down at typewriter and mix up all that kafka, joyce, ee cummings, god, st. anselm, augustine, rufus thomas, and that hitch-hiking angel, jack kerouac/gregory corso — write on. There’s more but now to end with mr d’s own obituary written half-mad and waiting for deadline time from the famemachine:
“here lies bob dylan
demolished by Vienna politeness-
which will now claim to have invented him
the cool people can
now write Fugues about him
& Cupid can now kick over his kerosene lamp-
bob dylan-filled by a discarded Oedipus
who turned
around
to investigate a ghost
& discovered that
the ghost too
was more than one person.”
David G. Walley
AC/DC – “High Voltage” (1976)
Billy Altman clearly did not like AC/DC in this brief Dec. 16, 1976 Rolling Stone review of AC/DC’s first international album. Judging from his opinion of it, you would have never guessed at the time that AC/DC would go on to become one of the legends of hard rock music. Just goes to show that sometimes critics don’t know a damn thing…
Those concerned with the future of hard rock may take solace in knowing that with the release of the first U.S. album by these Australian gross-out champions, the genre has unquestionably hit its all-time low. Things can only get better (at least I hope so). A band whose live act features a lead guitarist (Angus Young) leering menacingly while dressed in schoolboy beanie and knickers, AC/DC has nothing to say musically (two guitars, bass and drums all goose-stepping together in mindless three-chord formations). Lyrically, their universe begins and ends with the words “I,” “me” and “mine.” Lead singer Bon Scott spits out his vocals with a truly annoying aggression which, I suppose, is the only way to do it when all you seem to care about is being a star so that you can get laid every night. And that, friends, comprises the sum total of themes discussed on this record. Stupidity bothers me. Calculated stupidity offends me.
Billy Altman
David Byrne & Brian Eno – “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” (1981)
Paul Morley’s July 2005 thesis on Bush of Ghosts (included with the reissue). This album was a groundbreaking effort and influenced everyone from Public Enemy to Moby. Without this Eno-Byrne collaboration, albums like Play might never have existed. Play’s whole aesthetic of blending original music with samples of old field recordings and found sounds originated with this album. Of course, people like Steve Reich and Jon Hassell did this kind of thing even before Eno & Byrne…but they may have been the first to do it in a “pop” setting.
The reissue is highly recommended...
As time, funnily enough, goes on, as we slip self-consciously from one century to another, from vinyl to CD to MP3, from our younger days to our older days, patterns start to emerge. We can see more clearly where we have been, and what kind of history we are leaving behind us. We can see what is important, what will last, what we will carry with us into the future to remind us of where we were before time, oddly enough, moved us somewhere else, before it moves us once and for all out of the way.
It is interesting to watch as a kind of rock canon is created, a list of albums that seem to have some kind of worth, that were influenced in such a way that they themselves then became influential. A list of a few hundred albums that we might describe as great, or the greatest, can easily be rattled off, and as the 1900’s drift behind us, and the vinyl age remorselessly trickles backwards to antique status, we often find ourselves in a position where we want to compile such a list. Gradually, a kind of truth starts to emerge, about what these great albums are, about how will ultimately survive what is, after all, truly the test of time. There are some albums that quickly come to mind when it comes to considering some of the favourites to make that journey, albums that seem to have altered the course of rock music, or been very visible on the map as the changes occurred that turned one kind of music in the middle of the century into many others kinds of music by the end of the century. Many other kinds of music, but music that ultimately, however strange, intense, experimental, unexpected, wild or eclectic can be safely said to be the type of music that can be, if it’s possible here to use an old vinyl age expression, filed under pop.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts has elements that are wild, unexpected, strange, intense, experimental and it is definitely, definitively eclectic, but it is absolutely a record that can be filed under pop. Whatever else is going on inside the music, however far some of the sounds have travelled to take their place within the music, however obscure or distant the world was where some of the sounds began their life before they were imported into this bush, however intellectual some of the decisions that were taken about what sound fitted where and with what and for what purpose, if any, other than the basically pleasurable, the essential atmosphere of the record is pop. It is broken up into certain sizes, it is pieced together from pieces as if there is a chorus and a verse, it is repetitive and ever changing. It lasts a certain amount of time, about the length of a pop record, and it organises and manufactures rhythms that instantly familiarize the listener into believing all is well with the world even as other noises and voices imply that something a little fishy, if not downright sinister, is going on.
You file it under pop even if as such it was not a popular success. You file it under pop because, even as agitated and harrowing as it can get, even as potentially middle eastern and African as it can become through the finding, borrowing and stealing that’s going on, the singing and the chanting, it sounds like there is a world, maybe one close to us, or one that’s getting closer all the time, where you can imagine music like this being in the charts. You file it under pop because even though at the time it’s combination of studio invention, avant-garde instinct, rhythmical ingenuity and conceptual smartness seemed to place it a long way from the everyday world of pop, since it’s release, music very much like it, and produced in ways that resemble the techniques of cutting, pasting, taping and layering in operation in the bush, often finds a place in the pop charts. Juxtaposition like this is now nothing new – it wasn’t as such when Eno and Byrne broadcast flat out American craziness from the thundering depths of a make believe African jungle, but it was a lot newer than it is now, and there weren’t many who had the wit, imagination and technical capability to conjure up a world where the Middle East was at the centre of civilisation and the West was a strange freak show in the eerie, fading distance.
The music produced by Eno and Byrne with their like-minded collaborators has become more and more familiar to mainstream ears since they first decided to relieve certain creative urges they were having by dreaming up a new kind of hybrid. They followed the path that others had made – Can with their “Ethnological Forgery Series,” Jon Hassell with his imaginary electro-acoustic landscapes, and the Residents with their extravagantly detailed Eskimo fantasy – they were beating from the underground into the undergrowth, chasing phantoms, clearing the way so that Eno and Byrne could begin to see a way forward. They wondered what it would be like if pop music had not been so American, or so European, or so disconnected from the rhythms and textures that first inspired the music that first inspired pop. They imagined a future, or even a present, where pop music might sound like this – might in fact sound like it was music that was the pop music of an imaginary society. Their imagining of an imaginary society that was familiar with music like this has helped actually create that world – it’s one of those things that makes certain records have lasting stature, that, by taking forward the ideas and thoughts of others, and shaping them into a new identity and image, they actually do make a difference to the sound, and often the appearance, of the world. The Bush music has drummed its way into the centre of the city. It’s moved in from out there, into the centre, and then into history, which is where the component parts actually began, the loop feeding back on itself, looping from John Cage to Sly Stone, from Sun Ra to the Bush Tetras, from an invisible world to a mass market.
It’s a pop record. It is also one of those albums that come to mind when you consider great rock albums, albums that fit naturally onto greatest lists, because of the story they tell, and the way they tell it. If I was thinking of say 30 albums from between 1950 and 2000 that I would like to transfer forward in time as the best examples of the incredible changes that took place in sound and recording at the end of the 20th century, as the world of sound literally collapsed into grooves, melted down into sonic signals of greater and greater sensualised complexity, as information about ourselves got filtered through the pop song in more and more ingenious ways, then My Life in the Bush of Ghosts would certainly be one them. Actually, six or seven of the other examples would also feature the involvement of Brian Eno, sometimes when he was part of a double act with a fidgety, thinking city spirit like Byrne – often when he was forging a partnership as if he was trying to find a replacement for Bryan Ferry, his first real straight man. Unless it was Eno that was keeping a straight face. For a while he was his own other half, making solo records with himself that were half sensible, half insensible, and which were the act of a composer making new maps that could join one sort of music with another sort of music and bring experimental dislocation into pop discipline.
Imagine, then, that after the first two Roxy Music albums, the other records Eno was part of, including My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, were still Roxy albums – a continuation of the exploration of sensation begun when the double act was Eno and Ferry.
It is also a Talking Heads album, in the way that the group, whoever it really was, and certainly Byrne and Eno were quickly learning their lines as new double act, had been fascinated with the spirit of African rhythms, and deviant funk, and folding that fascination inside a more conventionally Western – New York – idea of multi-media playfulness.
So it is a Talking Heads album, and it is a Roxy Music album, but nothing of the sort, and it is an album produced by Brian Eno and David Byrne, and it certainly sounds exactly like you would imagine a combination of those things to sound like, in that with Eno’s pop, and his ambience, and with Byrne’s funk, and his hipster paranoia, they’d been creeping, and seeping, and banging, and dreaming towards this kind of destination, this devilish hallucination of Africa, this fretful vision of an ancient history yet to happen catapulted through a fuzzy post-modern filter, for, between them, literally years and years. It may, though, only sound in hindsight exactly like an album the pair of them would make. It may only sound exactly like the album they would make because this is the album they ended up making and it’s not pushing the boat too far out into the bush to say that at times it does sound like Roxy Music meets Talking Heads as fed through the imagination of an Eno and a Byrne wearing hats that they found whilst cruising down the Nile working out just how close they wanted to get to the heart of darkness before stopping off for an iced drink.
So it is the third part of a Talking Heads trilogy – Fear of Music, Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
It is the third part of a Roxy Music trilogy – Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and although the leap from Pleasure to Bush seems longer and loonier than the Byrne trip from one thing to another, it’s not if you see, say, the philosophical Devo potboilers, the Jon Hassell Possible Musics and the moving still life ambient records that Eno had made or help make as stepping stones. Everything Eno has made, leading up to when he led Byrne onto his garden path, and then up it, has seemed not altogether completely Western, even when it was staggeringly white, or profoundly unAfrican, or mildly European, or particularly academic, or delicately English, or faintly neurotic. There was a lot of the world, and indeed other worlds, in Eno’s music long before Bush, so it’s not a total surprise that he takes this interest in this particular what if, the what if there was a world where ancient folklore and religious realities simultaneously existed with Western Christian and scientific realties and you put a rhythm to that, what if American was just a small, bizarre part of Africa, an electric jungle cut off from civilisation, what if ghosts, sorcerers and magic continued their existence in the modern world of clocks, televisions and telephones.
There were many other what ifs as part of this novel mix of race and mix. What if we made an album and eventually people say we paved the way for ambience, sampling, electronica, world beat, trip hop, trance? What if we spliced together our interest in movement through suspended movement with our very white, but what can we do about that, interest in how and why the body moves in response to music? What if the percussion seems to flicker between the spirit and the physical world? What if we achieve some kind of fevered, foaming sound that is somehow the opposite of the canalization of the exotic?
What if we made something completely authentic based on a totally fake premise? What if we got very technical about something very primitive? What if we pretended to make an acoustical landscape painting of a world that doesn’t exist and never could and it ends up more lifelike – a reality that actually hints at reality – than we ever imagined it would? What if we include a possibly blasphemous recording of Muslims chanting the Koran and that actually causes real controversy, and what if legal problems cause the delay of an album that was recorded in time to see off the 70s and in the end appears in time to usher in the 80s?
What if we want to make a funny, funky hybrid of international pop and serious music and we never actually get to the punch line?
What if it actually starts with the punch line?
What if the punch line is Steve Reich?
What if the punch line is Public Enemy, DJ Shadow, Moby, Bjork and being sampled by Goldie and 808 State?
What if we sample whatever we want from all over the world, edit it all together so that it sounds as if there was a very specific plan to place this with that and drag it through there, what if we add the kind of rhythms people will spend decades trying to think of words for and will make up words using poly, ethnic, tribal, world, beat, multi, what if we feed random American religious white noise into a seething pulse of trance motion, what if we make a documentary about what it would be like to piece together sound and words from around the world into something of an event that is all at the same time coherent, and incoherent, trivializing, and celebratory, apprehensive and liberated, .
What if Miles Davis had joined Talking Heads?
What if Miles Davis had joined Roxy Music?
What if Miles Davis had covered Music for Airports?
What if Stockhausen had been African?
What if it meant we were eventually asked questions like;
“How do you feel about the criticism that all this taking black music and adding white-boy quasi-intellectual lyrical concepts to it is imperialist, that is, the critics’ implication is that you’re saying the music isn’t intelligent enough until you improve on it, and therefore that what you do is patronising to black culture “
What if we answered like this:
“It’s the kind of criticism that always happens if you transgress any of those boundaries . . . The critics really think that white people ought to play white music and black people ought to play with blacks. In my case it’s not any kind of intellectual decision, it’s a feeling in my own music that I’m moving in a certain direction and realising that here’s a group of people who have moved much further and deciding I’ll learn from them, consciously use some of their devices. It arrives from a kind of humility rather than a kind of arrogance. I regard myself as a student. I’m very humble about my understanding of African music, it’s a vastly more complicated and rich area than I had dreamed of. I’d say that anything I’m doing is simply my misunderstanding of black music.”
What if in 1954 a Nigerian author named Amos Tutuola wrote a serial folktale about a bush so dense civilisation couldn’t penetrate it, filled with different towns filled with different ghosts? A young boy, abandoned by his family during a slave raid, dives through a little hole in a hedge and finds he’s entered an unmapped world filled with strange spirits. He wanders lost for 24 years. He is so sad that he loses music altogether, except for one scene where a ghost gets him blunted. “I forgot all my sorrows and started to sing the earthly songs which sorrow prevented me from singing since I entered the bush.”
What if this underworld odyssey was called “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” What if Eno and Byrne started making the record before they had even read the book, so that the record wasn’t intended to illustrate it, and in fact it doesn’t have anything to do with it at all, except that in a sense it is a series of unrelated wanderings, and the music on the album called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts leaves behind certain music traditions in order to explore strange new worlds filled with unusual sounds, the voices of spirits that move through the air and appear through speakers, and repetitive rummaging that emerges out of nowhere and takes on the intoxicating power of rhythm.
What if Eno and Byrne dived through a little hole in a hedge.
What if My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was one of those albums that as soon as you hear it’s title you think, that’s the kind of music I love to see filed under pop, that’s one of those albums that has taken it’s proper place as a key part of the story of how rock music ended up taking huge parts of the 20th century with it into the 21st.
Paul Morley
Len Brown – “The Great Pretender: Fela Kuti” (1986)
An Oct. 25, 1986 New Musical Express article on late Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo-Kuti…
So, who is this Fela Kuti? An African musician just out of jail and now threatening to run for President of Nigeria? A polygamist in dodgy underpants? Or the one seriously revolutionary force in world music? Len Brown sees and hears Fela on the job in Paris.
It’s as hot as hell in here.
The heat is on, 12 floors up, mid-80s. A gaggle of colourfully clad-women stare at me, amused by my sweaty pinkness. It could be sun-stroke Lagos, anywhere typically tropical, but it’s Paris in October.
A big-eyed, very naughty, very small boy continually punches me in the leg; his sister giggles at my discomfort. As if this wasn’t enough, the man next to me is wearing only red and blue underpants. Apart from spiritual blasts on his saxophone and scratching his scrotal sac, he assures me he will soon be the President of Nigeria.
He is, how you say, a hero; a celebrated musician of some 50 albums; a world famous political dissident; a man who married 27 women in one day; the possessor of a legendary libido. In layman’s terms he’s a cross between Robin Hood and Bob Marley – a Nigerian James Last, a bandleader whose fame has risen above and beyond the category ’superstar’. For nearly two years, until April 24, he languished in Kirkiri gaol; found guilty of a trumped-up charge of currency smuggling. No jury, no appeal. He was released when the judge, who sentenced him to over five years, admitted the trial was rigged.
His detention was politically motivated. He’s a rebel king, a pretender to the presidency, and for the past decade he has been a continuous thorn in the Nigerian authorities’ side. He refused to be silenced and used his music as a means of exposing the dishonesty and corruption of successive government. At 48, and despite prison, his love of life and his life of love have preserved his physique. In Africa where the ample girth and wealth of leaders is often associated with power corruption and lies, this muscular torso could be interpreted as a sign of honesty.
Wanna Be Elected
The pre-weed, pre-coital Feta Anikulapo Kuti is a rare find. He blinks, he stretches, he scratches. He stares out over Paris in the late-afternoon light. He’s worked his band, Egypt 80, through the night, procreating his familiar brass-and-keyboard dominated big sound, based on traditional African rhythms and featuring the call-and-response vocals of Fela and his queens. It will be his first album since prison, Just Like That, and it’s going to be more political, more direct in its attack on institutional injustice, declaring war on bureaucratic bullshit.
“No one wants the military, the country is telling them to quit. The military are saying they are laying the conditions for a civilian government, but how can you bring a tailor to lay the foundation for a building when he’s supposed to sew clothes. A tailor or a shoemaker cannot construct a building. Yet in Nigeria soldiers want to lay the foundation of government. It’s madness.”
Fela’s solution is to stand for the Presidency – in the 1990 elections if not before: “My popularity is so great now that I could even be made President by acclamation. I don’t think anyone will have the guts to stand against me”.
Undoubtedly he takes his political ambitions seriously. Why else would he have suffered so terribly for his belief? In ‘77, during the reign of Obasanjo, Fela’s self-proclaimed independent state of Kalakuta was invaded by the military. Along with many of his followers he was brutally assaulted and gaoled; the Kuti women were raped (some with bottles and bayonets); his home was burnt down; and his 77-year-old mother died from her injuries. In ‘81 he was detained again, charged with armed robbery and, he claims, the authorities tried to kill him.
And yet, while some take his Presidential candidature seriously and even fear his election, others regard his political dream as laughable. He’s been compared to Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party or the late French comedian Coluche. John Howe of West Africa wrote that Fela “wants to purify Nigerian society, riot from the paternal posture of a real politician, but like a cheeky small boy jeering at the open fly of the passing banker”.
His elder brother Olikoye is a minister in the current government (“you can not make a wrong system work,” Fela argues, “he’s trying his best but they’re using him to give them credibility”). So he has the contacts. And, in the face of the unpopular military, Fela’s vision of democracy combined with his rebel superstar status surely has all the romantic ingredients for mass appeal. But what exactly would be do for Nigeria?
“I want to go everywhere and play my music. I want to make people happy. Imagine the President playing music to announce budgets and policies. I want to preach spiritual and political changes, The Pan-Africanism is the stepping stone to human internationalism. That all human beings are one race; black, white, any coloured shit, it’s just a superficial cover of the inside of human life. Africa will teach that racism is negative, an institutional problem.
“I think artists will remove this negative stereotyped trend in peoples’ thoughts. Artists must be the future leaders of men: they will aim for more freedom of thought, more wanting to meet people, more participation in what will bring happiness. People will tend to remove themselves from what causes violence; the Reagan/Thatcher type leaders cannot do this. Their mind is too institutionally stereotyped.”
Radical idealism, you can’t beat it. Fighting talk for cultural freedom, spiritual enlightenment, peace. But what’s this? He says that when he becomes President he will “create a law to make all citizens members of the police and military force so as to legally annihilate violence”. Sounds ominous, shades of Robespierre. And what’s to stop the Babangida military government from gaoling Fela tomorrow?
“The people. My popularity has gone beyond that now. My last experience has really broken the camel’s back as far as the people are concerned. You can’t keep harassing one man in Africa like that for a long time, people will go against the government. It was getting too much for them even before I went to prison, too attritious. But I’m not putting my guards down, I expect anything at any time.”
Promised Land
Eighteen months off the job may not have affected Fela Kuti physically, but he’s been altered spiritually by the experience and his music is now more “truthful” as a result. Before prison he was influenced by the teachings of Professor Hindi – often described, in derogatory fashion, as a “witchdoctor”, Hindi was last seen on these shores slitting throats, burying the victims and bringing them back to life days later. Now Fela’s developed his own brand of spiritualism, utilizing his experiences in ’60s America with the Black Panther movement, and uniting traditional Yoruba mysticism with the ideals of leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. But these spiritual heroes were assassinated, doesn’t he fear a similar fate?
“Nothing happens in this world that is not supposed to be. I know who Martin Luther King is, I know who Malcolm X is. I don’t want to say was because they still exist. They were special entities, not just politicians, who came to do their bit and die. They were supposed to die and they did. I have found that in my life it’s almost impossible for man to kill me. They’ve tried, I have physically experienced death and went through it and came back.
“When about 15-policemen turn their gun butts and hit you on the head and you don’t have a single scratch on your head and you don’t die, that is power. There is a spiritual life, a life that people don’t see, that people cannot explain. This life is there and you cannot kill anybody whose destiny is not to die. They try to form scientific philosophies on what this life is about but really the truth lies in the spiritual knowledge of the human race.”
The implication of his argument is that Europe is spiritually bankrupt. The colonial governments raped Africa and tried to impose institutionalised morality and religion on her peoples. But now, according to Fela, the boot’s on the other foot.
“I see Africa as the teacher of this new philosophy. I call it truth. The knowledge is not in Europe, it is in Africa, the formula of the spirit world is known in Africa. The secret is there. This information was placed in Africa at the beginning of civilization, in Egypt. Africa was supposed to pass this information to the Europeans and the Europeans were supposed to learn from this. But the powerful entities in European society did not want to wait for this systematic change and instead they came to Africa and took the powers, not wanting to learn how this power was developed. Because of this science was born. They disrupted the systematic plan for the universe, that was made for human beings to progress, so now the knowledge has gone back to Africa, to start to teach again.”
Well, I can swallow this. I’ve been spoonfed centuries of institutionalised, proudly revised English history. I usually welcome alternative interpretations. But what’s this…
“There was a witchpot, a witch-craft pot. Civilisation was placed in Egypt, all races were there to learn civilization. But because of evil the maker dispersed all human beings away from Egypt. He gave the power pot to the Yorubas but instead of it remaining there, in 1470 Queen Elizabeth came to steal the pot. Mungo Park came with the story of exploration and brought the witchpot directly to Buckingham Palace. The pot gave the power of technology to Europe but technology was the wrong step to take at that time. And that’s why the whole thing has to go back again to Africa. Queen Elizabeth at that time was an entity, she knew about the pot, she had powers and that’s how she changed the whole plan.”
It’s an interesting theory.
“Okay people may call it theory, people always call things theories but I’m giving you fact whether people like to know it or not. When you give spiritual information it sounds like theory. Science uses words like theory to debase spiritual happenings. Science to me is doing a lot of harm to people by not allowing them to see the spiritual importance of their lives.”
“Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it in this world” (Oscar Wilde).
Hair of the God
In Studio Davout near Montreuil, in the middle of the night, Fela pushes the 22-piece Egypt 80 through ‘O.A.U.’ in one take; threatening to sack the next “motherfucker” who falters; laying down his own sax solo sublimely, almost lazily. Then it’s his vocals: an attack on the red-taped incompetence of the Organisation for African Unity, answered by his queens with chants of “O.A.Eunuchs”, “O.A.Useless”.
In his blue-embroidered pink suit, he’s a benevolent dictator, hard but fair, a Brian Clough of a bandleader. Although Wally Badrou’s co-producing Just Like That, Fela’s in charge. He’s still bitter about Army Arrangement – the album released while he was in prison – being given the dancefloor treatment by Bill Laswell, with Bernie Worrell on keyboards and Sly Dunbar on drums.
“There was no permission, no asking. He didn’t see the beauty of what I’d done.”
Nevertheless he admits that, as the military’s aim in imprisoning him was to stop his music, the album’s release – with Egypt 80 led by Fela’s son Femi and held together by Fela’s younger brother Beko – was a triumph and drew attention to the injustice of his imprisonment.
And despite the polishing Laswell gave Army Arrangement it marked a return to form, featuring the excellent title track and ‘Cross Examination’, his strongest song since ‘Colonial Mentality’. It may lack the raw, energetic, freshly recorded quality of his past, but Army still ranks alongside his best, his most politically outspoken work – Why Black Men They Suffer (‘71), No Bread (‘76), Sorrow Tears and Blood (‘78), Vagabonds in Power and International Thief Third (both ‘79) and Original Sufferhead (‘81). Before he called his music Afrobeat; now it’s classical African.
“I want to play music that is meaningful, that stands the test of time,” he says with uncharacteristic modesty. “It’s no longer commercial, it’s deep African music, serious music, so I no longer want to give it that cheap name.”
The truths he sings about, the political and spiritual statements he makes, are often hidden in analogies.
“The tune I’m thinking of now is about African women who palm their hair. It’s becoming so disgraceful that every African woman’s hair is shining like white man’s hair. It’s a chemical from America, big business. I will ask these women one question. Why the hair on the head is shining, but not the hair down there? What happens to the hair at the c**t? I want to discourage women from doing this thing because it destroys their hair. African women have not learnt that having hard hair is a gift, that every time you comb your hair, it creates much electricity, so you can communicate much more with the spirit world. That is the only reason your hair is hard. This chemical makes their hair soft and it destroys it. It’s unnatural. In the same way that woman is treating her hair to make it look artificially nice, how many of our bureaucratic leaders are looking artificially nice?”
“Equality between male and female? No! Never! Impossible! Can never be!”
(Fela Kuti, 1982)
They’re everywhere. Hanging around the studio, sleeping in the hallway, cluttering the room. It’s like a medieval court; Fela’s subjects, his women, some of this 27 queens, mistresses, lovers. Of course, in the West he’s taken some stick over the years for his “traditional” views of women. Let’s recall that he wrote ‘Lady’ (‘72) and ‘Mattress’ (‘75) attacking women’s liberation, ridiculing demands for equality and, in the case of the latter, depicting women as mere procreation machines, vessels for man’s desire. But since his release from Kirikiri Fela’s technically divorced his 27 wives. Hasn’t he?
“I’ve not divorced them. I don’t believe in marriage so divorce does not arise. Marriage does not belong to my own environment, it’s evil, it doesn’t go along with freedom. If I’m singing to marry then I’m telling a woman that she belongs to me, that her c**t belongs to me. But how can her c**t belong to me, it’s not possible to institutionalize her c**t? She moves about with it, she can travel to America with it. If they put you in prison you cannot take her c**t with you to prison.”
But what of his attitude to women? Has that changed? Cynics will say that Fela Kuti, while giving his wives freedom, has really just reduced his possessions and is back playing the field. Does he regret the sentiments of ‘Lady’ and ‘Mattress’?
“You see, what I said in ‘Mattress’ then, I did not know I was going to arrive at this conclusion of marriage today. It was a different period of my life and I did not know how to say it. Man must not take woman matters seriously, he must not put woman matters in his head. If you do you will get sick. I’ve seen myself having pain in my stomach, shitting, going through this syndrome people call jealousy. I’ve seen myself sick to the bones. That cannot be a good thing. So you must see woman as something you sleep with, not something that you let go to your head. Woman are mattress, but you must be nice to them, and make them happy. That is what they are and that is what life is about. Use your money to make women happy, make them dress well, make them fine.”
It’s pathetic coming from the son of Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, a pioneer of women’s rights, who met Mao and Nkrumah (Fela’s Pan-African hero), and set up the powerful Nigerian Women’s Union in the 1940s. He says she makes him see what life is all about, that he communicates with her spirit, and he sees no contradiction. Fela no longer gets angry when judged by conditionally Western standards: “Before it annoyed me, before I went to prison, but now I find that to be annoyed is something negative. Happiness is the most important things.”
Just as well. Maybe I envy Fela’s ease with women, but I don’t see woman as merely “something you sleep with”. Okay, so it’s a different world, a different culture, but if we resent the hot-crotched metal muthas and macho rappers for their negative views of women then surely we must resent Fela too. Cultural, social and economic excuses could no doubt be made for every category.
And what of Fela’s wives? Back in ‘82, his wives expressed their contentment with life in the Kuti camp. They remain hooked on charisma, they want to be close to him. Let’s not forget that they’re mainly Nigerian women raised in the Yoruban eliminate of polygamy, and naturally there’s a reluctance on their part to express any discontent with their lot.
The one exception is Kevwe – a Kuti queen for 20 years, who suffered terribly in the attack on Kalakuta and remains emotionally scarred by the experience. She feels rejected and is thinking of leaving Fela’s court. “Do you think he’s normal?” she later asked me. “Because I have no babies he doesn’t want me anymore.”
But back to Fela and the value of woman.
“Sex is life,” says Fela, profoundly. “That’s why I don’t understand those spiritualists, those monks who say they don’t fuck women. Women are the source of power in the kind of spiritualism I understand. You cannot have power without women’s participation. Sex is the main source of power. When people say that sex makes you weak, sex makes you older, that’s bullshit. Much more sex, much more energy, much more everything.”
Nice work if you can get it, and keep it up. Trouble is, particularly in the West, it’s regarded as evil, dangerous to the establishment.
“People who start all these moralistic trends and shit they could be impotent. For me, I see with my eyes, I walk with my legs, I work with my hands, my stomach takes my food, and I need my prick. It’s just as important as any other part of my body. For me, sex is everything clean.”
Yeah, but what about sexually transmitted diseases? How does AIDS fit into your spiritual scheme of things?
“It gets to the point now where they say that there’s AIDS all over the world, so because there’s AIDS I must not fuck? Okay, very soon people will not fuck. But I will fuck because I do not believe that I use my sex wrongfully, so I do not think I will be the victim of sexual disease.
“Sex disease is a spiritually influenced happening. When you die, everything that you do in this world, you are going to get your judgement for every evil. So when you are reincarnated and you have been using sex for evil purposes you’ll be reincarnated as a homosexual.”
Eh up, we’re back at the witchpot.
“That pot breeds societies, it breeds behaviour in societies, secret societies, cults. The pot breeds the misuse of sex in the spirit world, so the punishment for stealing the pot, is centuries of homosexuality in Europe.”
But not in Africa?
“Oh no, we don’t have homosexuals, at least in Nigeria it’s possibly only one per cent” (if true, one per cent of the current Nigerian population is approximately 767,000).
We’ve reached stalemate here. On women and homosexuality we’re worlds apart. But the light is failing, the night’s approaching, and it’s time for Fela to get some ‘rest’. He dismisses his entourage: only the chosen one remains. And me. “Make yourself comfortable,” he says kindly, taking her into his bedroom next door. So I’m sitting there, listening to the telly, French telly, to drown the cries of passion. Fela’s back on the job, and I feel a right goosegog.
Morrissey for Pope
You made me judge him, I didn’t want to do it. No, I didn’t want to do it. He was kind to me; offered me his food, his grass (Didn’t touch it, honest), his hospitality in Nigeria. I could have chucked all this in, woken up in Lagos with a shaker and several wives. I was forced into making these value judgements about him, and I’ve no grounds to believe I’m right. Perhaps I haven’t seen further than my colonial nose and, as a result, trivialized his religion, trivialized his personal beliefs. He let me get close to him, one of my musical heroes, and I can’t be sure that I haven’t betrayed his confidence. I totally disagree with his views on women and homosexuals, but that doesn’t mean I’m right and he’s wrong. And his political philosophy? Well, I totally respect his courage, his commitment in the face of adversity…
Who knows what the future will bring for Fela Anikulapo Kuti? If Just Like That, his Tube appearance (November 28) and the forthcoming London concerts are as uplifting as ‘O.A.U.’, then he’ll easily regain the crown taken by King Sunny Ade’s high-living juju music during Fela’s imprisonment. And with a geriatric cracked actor leading the “Free World”, surely you’re not going to tell me that the man with the two-tone underpants and the red-and-gold horn can’t be President of Nigeria?
Len Brown
Elvis Costello – “My Aim Is True” (1977)
Chas de Whalley review of EC’s debut album, from Sounds magazine circa 1977…
Elvis Costello is a cagey sort of fellow. You can talk to him for hours and still not discover quite what makes him tick.
The same thing is true about his songs. There are eleven of them here on My Aim Is True and although I’ve listened to them at least seven times now, I still don’t feel I’ve worked out what’s going on. I normally expect to get to grips with even difficult albums after about three spins, but every time I put My Aim Is True onto the turntable I hear something else that wasn’t there before. Like a flower Elvis’ debut album is opening up into something of metallic beauty.
With Nick Lowe at the mixing desk, Elvis sings a set of semi-autobiographical riddles and rhymes that refuse to be tied down. Behind his harsh whining voice, there crashes a bright beat group guitar and a hissing cymbal. His tunes and arrangements plunder the jukeboxes of Pirate radio youth. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that he bears some resemblance to the likes of Graham Parker and Bruce Springsteen.
He’s not without pretensions though. Just look at the front cover of My Aim Is True and that Duane Eddie pose of a ’50s guitar here!
But look at the back and you’ll find another image completely … our boy as a mutant midget with a guitar bigger than his body looking pensive and distraught. So which is the real Elvis Costello, the super-hero or the man crippled inside?
As a lyric writer Costello is frequently a little on the verbose side. Imaginative, almost literary at times, he sings of intensely personal problems and views them in fine focus under a hard white light. Mostly he sings about women, but throughout the album Elvis strives to find an emotional identity as an individual and not a mere social stereotype.
In ‘Miracle Man’, for instance, he compares himself with the lover who ‘can do it better than I can’ and pleads humanity in his own defence. The Merseybeat ‘No Dancing’ sits right in at the break-up of a fierce love affair, with Elvis viewing himself in a neurotic third person as if on a movie screen. The idea of life as a cinema crops up again, explicitly this time, in the eerie ‘I’m Not Angry’ with it’s edgy Blue Oyster Cult riff and a strangely sumptuous production. Like the slow, sad ballad ‘Alison’ (Elvis’ current single and surely destined for the charts) ‘I’m Not Angry’ is the tale of a man cruelly confronted with his lover’s infidelity.
But while every separate song scenario is highly charged with emotion Elvis Costello is not above a laugh occasionally. A self-deprecatory sarcasm colours ‘Welcome to the Working Week’ while the doomy and Dylany ‘Waiting for the End of the World’ is a strip cartoon peopled with wierd, surrealist characters and scripted with a fatalistic black humour.
If you want to hear Elvis Costello at his wittiest though, you should seek out ‘Mystery Dance’ on side two. A spoof ’50s rocker, with Elvis camping up his namesake, ‘Mystery Dance’ examines the tender and traumatic problem of a teenager’s first screw. The sheer ludicrousness of the situation is brilliantly exaggerated but the pathos is never sacrificed for the obvious cheap laugh.
Elvis Costello is a songwriter of rare sensitivity and talent. He is backed by a fine band too. The individual musicians go uncredited unfortunately. Guitar freaks should check ‘em out too for whoever plays the stylish Amos Garrett-influenced fills on ‘Alison’ and the Steely Dan lead lines on ‘Blame It on Cain’ and ‘Sneaky Feelings’ is obviously star quality.
But he’s only the icing on the cake. Elvis Costello is the King. Or at least that’s what you’ll find scratched onto the middle of My Aim Is True. I think it’s true.
Chas de Whalley
Al Aronowitz – “A Night with Bob Dylan” (1965)
Dec. 12, 1965 article from the New York Herald Tribune by Al Aronowitz…
Bob Dylan picked himself up from the revolving turntable; staggered into an armchair, waved his hands above his head and sat down to watch the tube. On it, Soupy Sales was grinning from behind a mask cream pie.
Behind him a double exposure of Elvis Presley fired two six guns into the room from a well-silvered Andy Warhol canvas covered with Cellophane.
‘I hate it …’ Dylan said. ‘I’m going to cut a hole in its abdomen and put a water hose through it.’ He got up, walked with cowboy bow-legs into the kitchen and asked someone to make him some tea. The reflection of Soupy Sales still grinned from his grey-coloured shades.
It wasn’t Dylan’s pad; he had borrowed it from somebody or other. On the floor, a mink rug played tablecloth for several cups and saucers, ashes and the ashtrays that the ashes had been intended for. Several other people wandered about the room, some of them while still sitting in their chairs.
The doorbell rang. It was Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones with a limousine waiting outside. Dylan wiped Soupy Sales’s face off the TV tube, Robbie Robertson wiped the autoharp off his lap and everybody split. Dylan was the last to leave. He took the Temptations record off the turntable, hid it under his double-breasted corduroy jacket and winked at a light bulb. His tea, unsipped, was left to cool in its cup.
In the limousine, Dylan asked to be left off at the next block.
‘You must be joking,’ said Brian Jones.
Inside the limousine, Charlie, the chauffeur, asked if the group was going downtown. ‘I’m getting off at the next block,’ said Dylan. ‘These other people’re going downtown…’ ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Charlie. ‘No, we’re not going to any downtown,’ said Milly, a friend of Brian’s. ‘Shut up!’ said Dylan, ’shut up and quit making that racket or else you’ll be thrown to the fire inspectors…. and they are very hungry.’ ‘What?’ yelled Milly. The car stopped at the corner and Milly, one way or another, was thrown out… ‘Watch the fire inspectors!’ yelled Brian. ‘Nonsense,’ said Dylan, ‘I’m just fooling. We really don’t have them over in America.’
The limousine eventually stopped at a bar in the Eight Avenue district. After everyone in the party had entered, a very muscular woman ran up and very surprisingly hugged Dylan. ‘You’re not supposed to do that without an eyepatch!’ he jolted. ‘Hug my friend there, Brian, he looks more like me!’ … ‘You can write on the walls here,’ said Dylan later at the table. ‘This is the only bar I know of where you can write on the walls and nobody calls you a poet.’ … Sailors began wandering over towards the table and eventually everyone decided to leave. ‘Where’s Harold the Driver?’ asked Bob Neuwirth, a third cousin of Bob Dylan’s. ‘That’s not Harold,’ said Dylan. ‘That’s Mr Egg, and there but for fortune go you or I.’ ‘Ahhhhhh,’ said Bob Neuwirth. ‘You must give me two pints!’ said Dylan. ‘And anyway, how do you know his name ain’t Egg?’ ‘Where are we going?’ said everyone called Hare-up. ‘We’re going to the zoo.’
‘You Americans must all be soft,’ said Brian Jones. ‘Do you have any coyotes?’ A sailor leaped on the table, grinning at Brian, who snarled back. ‘I like your hair,’ the sailor said. ‘What about hair?’ Dylan said. ‘I thought we were going to the zoo,’ said Bob Neuwirth. ‘That’s what we need,’ said Brian Jones, ‘Some coyotes.’ ‘Are you sure you mean coyotes?’ said Dylan. ‘Are you sure we’re going to the zoo?’ said Brian Jones. ‘Be yourself,’ said Dylan. Everybody walked towards the door with the sailor leaping off the table and following them.
‘We’re not going anyplace,’ said Bob Neuwirth. Dylan leaped on Brian Jones and asked, ‘Tell, me, Brian, why is it that your lead singer does not have a little, pencil thin moustache?’
Back in the limousine, someone directed the driver to an underground movie house on Lafayette Street. Later on, when questioned about it, Dylan said they were all blindfolded and taken there at gunpoint. On the stage inside, there was no movie, but instead a group of green painted musicians were presenting a spontaneous ritual which had taken them three months to prepare. Timothy Cain, a friend of Dylan’s whom they had run into under the marquee, grabbed the seat next to Dylan. ‘Can you smoke here?’ he asked Dylan. ‘Of course you can smoke here,’ replied Dylan. ‘Put that cigarette out!’ said a long-haired flowery girl who turned out to be an usherette. Timothy ignored her. The usherette left in a huff, returning moments later with a chubby man who wore a handlebar moustache and slippers. ‘Put that cigarette out,’ the chubby man said. ‘Oh, my God,’ said Dylan, ‘it’s Porky Oil.’ Immediately, Timothy rose, grabbed the usherette’s flashlight, unscrewed it, took the batteries out and threw the batteries at the Exit signs and proceeded to punch the chubby man in his ample stomach. At the same time, everyone in the party got up to leave as Dylan mumbled. ‘What good are exits anyway?’ ‘I’m not an art fanatic,’ said Timothy, ‘I’m a cigarette-smoker.’ ‘I like you,’ said Dylan. ‘I wish we were both alive during Napoleon’s time.’
After several more stops, which included a pinball arcade on 42nd Street, the back room of a fortune-teller in the Chelsea district, the Phonebooth, a discotheque, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, the limousine wound up in front of a bar in Greenwich Village. Four people remained in the group, the others having been left behind by accident. ‘Plenty more people inside,’ said the chauffeur. ‘Watch your tongue,’ said Dylan.
The group got out to go inside the bar, but it was already closed. ‘Back to the pad,’ said Dylan. There was a small number of people gathered around the mink rug when they returned. Dylan took the Temptations record out from beneath his doublebreasted corduroy jacket and put it on the record-player. Then he went to another room and closed the door.
There was a W. C. Fields movie on the TV set. Dylan walked into the kitchen to get a bandage. ‘I think Marlon Brando should play the life of W.C. Fields,’ he mumbled. He fiddled around in the kitchen. ‘I also think that Warren Beatty should play the life of Johnny Weismuller,’ wrapping the bandage around his finger. Dylan returned to his room, stopping to say, ‘As for me, I plan to do the life story of Victor Mature.’ ‘Is he serious?’ said the mild-mannered, petite coloured girl, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She was immediately thrown out.
Al Aronowitz
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band – “I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby” (Live)
A live TV appearance…..not sure from what or when (probably around 1972 or so….?)…anybody out there know?
Serge Gainsbourg – “Histoire de Melody Nelson” (1971)
A Pitchfork review from March 26, 2009 discussing Light in the Attic’s recent, brilliantly-done (as usual) reissue of Gainsbourg’s (in)famous 1971 classic…
Serge Gainsbourg had no great attachment to genre. By the time he came to rock music, in his early 40s, the French star had traced his oblique, provocative course through chanson (French vocal music), jazz, and light pop. He’d made percussive café jams about suicide and given Eurovision popstrels France Gall and Françoise Hardy songs full of blowjob puns. Later on he’d make a rock’n'roll album about the Nazis and a reggae take on the French national anthem. A pattern emerges: Gainsbourg hops from style to style, but with a terrific instinct for finding the most startling content for any given form.
So it’s no surprise his rock work — the early 1970s albums, of which Histoire de Melody Nelson is the first and finest — was so original. Melody Nelson is a collaboration with composer and arranger Jean-Claude Vannier, who assembled a bunch of top sessionmen for the album. But Gainsbourg and Vannier had little interest in the conventions that had accreted around early 70s rock. Like a lot of 1971 records, Histoire de Melody Nelson is a concept album: Unlike most, it’s only 28 minutes long. The songs are lavishly orchestrated, yet the dominant instrument isn’t guitar or organ but rather Herbie Flowers’ lascivious, treacly bass, playing a seedy, rambling take on funk.
That bass is the first sound you hear on Melody Nelson, quietly tracking up and down in a windscreen-wiper rhythm: Gainsbourg starts talking in French 30 seconds later, describing a night drive in a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. The album is routinely described as “cinematic,” but the music is more of a mindtrack than a soundtrack — a tar pit of introspection when Gainsbourg’s brooding narrator is alone at the record’s beginning and end, then giddy and savage by turns as he conducts his affair with the 15-year-old Melody across the short tracks in the album’s middle. One of these — “Ballade de Melody Nelson” — is, even at two minutes, one of Gainsbourg’s most assured and alluring pop songs.
A lot of Gainsbourg’s records are hard sells for Anglophone ears — the music is there to illuminate and pace the man’s riotous, sensual wordplay. But Gainsbourg’s alliance with Vannier produced a true collaboration: The arrangements seem to respond almost intuitively to the twists in Gainsbourg’s language and narrative, to the point where they’re carrying as much storytelling weight as the words. Even if your French stops at “bonjour,” the music lets you know that this is a record about a dark, obsessional love. On “L’hôtel Particulier,” for instance — describing the sleazy grandeur of the rented rooms where the narrator and Melody make love — Gainsbourg’s voice shudders with lust and dread, and the music responds, flares of piano and string breaking into the song over an impatient bassline.
The actual story of Histoire de Melody Nelson is pretty negligible in any case — man meets girl, man seduces girl, girl dies in freak plane crash. Melody herself (played by Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg’s then-lover) is a cipher — a breathed name, a ticklish squeal or two, and red hair. The album is all about its narrator: A natural obsessive just looking for an object; introspective before he meets Melody, more so after her death. First and final tracks “Melody” and “Cargo Culte” are musical siblings, with only the wordless chorales on “Cargo Culte” really distinguishing them.
Together these songs take up more than half the record, and when people claim Melody Nelson as an influence, it’s almost certainly with this pair in mind. The soundworld they create is like nothing else in rock — orchestra, bass, and voice circling one another, blending slow funk, intimate mumbling, and widescreen scope. One precedent is the epic soul Isaac Hayes had been pioneering, but where Hot Buttered Soul is full of warmth and engagement, the bookend tracks of Melody Nelson are a trip through far more hostile territories, the black spaces of a man’s interior.
Gainsbourg realized he’d made something special — he named his publishing company Melody Nelson after his fictional muse — but, restless as ever, he didn’t follow it up: His next album was a sequence of pretty acoustic songs, mostly about shit. Herbie Flowers, whose bass is the undertow pulling the album together, surfaced a year later playing on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” whose bassline is the first ripple of Melody Nelson’s wider pop culture influence. Since then it’s been left to others — Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Tricky, Air, Broadcast — to pick up this record’s breadcrumb trail. But Gainsbourg’s dark focus, and Vannier’s responsiveness, aren’t easily equalled. This reissue on luxuriously hefty vinyl is the first time the album’s been released in the U.S. — a superb opportunity to hear a record that’s been occasionally imitated but never matched.
Tom Ewing
Pauline Oliveros – “Four Electronic Pieces 1959-1966″ (2008)
This is a review by Bill Meyer from Dusted Groove (Feb. 10, 2009) concerning a 2008 collection of early compositions of electronic pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Some of this stuff still sounds remarkably modern, and sounds like it was recorded at least 10 years into the future, at the very least…
One of the biggest challenges facing the pioneers of electronic music was simply getting your hands on the gear. To go the high-end route, you had to get have some sort of institution behind you; never mind the cost of proper recording equipment, those early computers that filled up a room were pretty expensive. Even then, others opted for army surplus cast-offs and repurposed consumer electronics. Pauline Oliveros does both on these four pieces, which are finally enjoying commercial release nearly a half-century after their realization.Oliveros, who was born in Texas about five months before FDR first won the presidency, made the earliest piece here with cardboard tubes, kitchen implements and a tape recorder she bought at Sears. “Time Perspectives” sounds remarkably prescient, predicting both the sensory ethnographic work of someone like Ernst Karel and the sound world of extended-technique improvisers like Mats Gustafsson and John Butcher. On the one hand, there’s something almost documentarian in her measuring of the sounds in her home, even if she was unwilling to simply record the sounds available to her (filtering and tape-speed manipulation change the qualities). And although neither the liner notes nor the piece’s title acknowledge it, there’s something pretty subversive about a woman using a woman’s tools and domain to encroach on the men’s club of high-art composition. This was not obedient music. But the way she used cardboard tubes as sound filters also generated sounds remarkably similar to the saxophone as a spit-filled tube, and Butcher in particular makes similar use of radically different sounds in close juxtaposition. This must have sounded pretty alien when Oliveros first presented it at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1960.The other three pieces date from 1965-6, after Oliveros gained access to electronic music studios in San Francisco and Toronto. She used oscillators, amplification and a couple tape recorders to make “Mnemonics III,” and the impact of tape delay upon pure electronic tones brings this piece quite close in sound to the more pop-oriented work of BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. With its episodes of film projector chatter (courtesy of a bigger bank of Canadian-bankrolled oscillators) and its razor-edged high frequencies, “V of IV” almost passes for mid-’90s Pita. And “Once Again / Buchla Piece,” recorded with the titular proto-synthesizer, is bracingly raw and aggressive.None of this music sounds much like the more meditative work Oliveros has made in recent decades, but it shows that she was one of the pioneers of electronic noise and made the most out of the least.
Bill Meyer
