 |
 |
| Library |
| Subscribe |
| Get Newsletter |
| Free on RBP |
| Audio |
| Contact |
| Writers |
| Writers' Blogs |
| Content Services |
| Magazine Archive |
| About Us |
| Press Room |
| Your Account |
| Home |
| search the library
|
Fact: the post-Barrett Pink Floyd only wrote one good song…
…and we probably think that song is about him
Have you ever experimented on yourself? You know, pulling your own finger nails out, that sort of thing? I have: I recently downloaded Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and Wish You Were Here from iTunes.
As a kid I was pretty familiar with Pink Floyd. I saw them a couple of times at free concerts in Hyde Park circa 1970, and that sleeve upon which the fourteen-year-old me would be sticking the rizlas together on would, at friends’ houses, inevitably have been Ummagumma, or Meddle, or Atom Heart Mother. I didn’t particularly like them, but they were hard to dislike either: a sort of muzak for stoned heads. Dark Side of the Moon registered as some kind of monument; impossible to ignore, just there. But by 1973 anything that could be described as prog was strictly off the menu so far as I was concerned. Wish You Were Here and The Wall simply didn’t exist for me, beyond despising The Wall‘s title track and hit single.
So why did I download those albums last week? In my rôle as Chief Proof Reader for Rock’s Backpages I’d come to look forward to reading lengthy pieces on the Floyd. So entertaining. All that British reserve cracking under the weight of its own inarticulacy. All those grim power plays, all that poorly expressed angst. All that hatred for Roger Waters. Fantastic stuff. And I suppose I’d started to confuse my enjoyment of these retrospectives with the actual music itself. Surely something that could encourage such copy had to be worth revisiting?
Well, not really. Dark Side remained what I thought it had been in the first place: a few decent ideas stretched to breaking-point. The Wall was and remains an absolutely vile record in which Roger Waters barks stupid, reductive lyrics (“Hey teacher! Leave those kids alone!”) over teeth-grindingly awful music.
But Wish You Were Here, despite being a slight wee thing essentially made up of just a couple of songs, contains one total gem: ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. It, indeed the whole album, is about Syd Barrett. Perhaps because it has a direct emotional core, as opposed to the usual didactic, rhetorical approach so beloved of Roger Waters, it finally does something that the Floyd were rarely able to do: tug at the heartstrings.
You gotta earn the right to grow old in rock’n'roll
Keith Richards makes great play of the way bluesmen are allowed to grow old and retain their credibility. He fondly likes to think that he’s going to follow the same path. Bullshit. Keith is just stretching his wretched adolescence into his equally wretched old age.
The fact is, when white rockers reach a certain time of life, their potency shrivels. What seemed charming even as late as their mid-’30s is frankly cringeworthy come the fifth decade. The obvious exceptions may just be Dylan, Neil Young, and Al Green still has his moments, but by and large most rockers are roadkill by their 30th birthday.
However…
A while back I attended a Muscle Shoals Night at the Barbican. Remnants of the legendary rhythm section backed some of the usual suspects (Mavid Staples) and the less usual (George Soule). I love Mavis, but let’s face it, what with the usual connoisseurs of Dad Rock stinking out the hall, it was a pretty turgid evening. Until Tony Joe White turned up.
Now this was a white man who could give Muddy Waters a run for his gerontocratic money. With no backing, and a Strat plugged into an elderly baby Fender amp, a hat pulled down over beshaded eyes, he growled blues that absolutely lived in the here and now. With none of the sweat-stained effort of the nouveau alt.beards, with no sense of flogging the deadest of horses (see Keith Richards above), Tony Joe White made my blood run cold.
I have no idea what gave Tony Joe White such authority, but there it was. If anything, he seemed stronger and distinctly darker than I ever remembered from his records. Maybe CSI will find his DNA at a crossroads deep in the bayou, whatever, but here was a man who had grown into his skin.
Sorry Keef. It ain’t gonna happen to you.
Things and people I really despise #2: “Vintage”
OK, so it’s neither thing nor person. But this is from eBay:
Yamaha DX7 Synth – A vintage classic
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but the DX7 was a hideous piece of egregious digital junk. Which sounded fantastic at the time because we were all Young and Stupid. (By the way, did you know that “egregious” is an early example of the “bad=good” crossover thang, only in reverse? 1 outstandingly bad; shocking; 2 archaic remarkably good.) And now it’s “vintage”.
This isn’t actually a time-dependant concept. The DX7 came out in, what, 1986? 23 years old. My old blonde dot-neck/black P-90s Gibson ES330 was vintage when I got it in 1977; a mere 22 years old at time of purchase. I sold it for £300 in 1980 to pay the rent. I am somewhat mortified to have recently discovered that it’s now worth around £15,000. Fifteen grand. And that’s leaving out the fact that Jimi Hendrix actually played it.
But anyway, I digress. The 330 was vintage. It had qualities available only through the passage of time. The DX7 was, and is, a case full of bits. Any kind of garbage can become “vintage” now. Hideous furniture we despised in the 1970s. Britpop haircuts. Austin Allegros. Select magazine; you get my drift. It has become, essentially, a turd-polishing exercise in which folks hope that they can maximise their return by palming off junk on gullible trendies.
Sounds like fun.
Hideous reminders of our grim, distant pasts #1: Traffic On The Road
TRAFFIC WERE a strange item that hovered around my youth. As a youngster heading toward my teens that voice somehow transmuted from ‘Gimme Some Loving’ to ‘Hole In My Shoe’. They were on my map.
I saw Traffic at the Albert Hall in 1971. They looked like they’d smoked too much strong black hash. Winwood’s hair hung in lank curtains over his palid, inscrutable face. It was conceivably the least dynamic rock’n'roll show I’ve ever seen.
A homeless spell whilst at art school found me staying at a fellow student Edward’s family home in Putney. Traffic On The Road was one of a handful of albums he had. We would snort cheap sulphate and smoke cheap Moroccan hash, and nod-our-heads/fidget-and-babble to it, whichever was winning. Then Traffic disappeared, to be replaced by a blow-dried horror singing “take me to a higher ground”. No thanks.
AND NOW, fuelled by the discovery that Free were fantastic, I raid iTunes for my past, and up comes Traffic On The Road, and it is frankly pretty ghastly. I revisit in part because this version of the band had the Muscle Shoals chaps – Roger Hawkins, David Hood and Barry Beckett – adorning it. Well the Alabama trio are perfectly fine, though what they made of the experience is beyond me. But the rest of the band…
Part of the problem is that they weren’t really a band at all. Chris Wood was a feeble tenor player. His flute has its moments as we know from Electric Ladyland. But a single reed/woodwind player is a waste of space in a rock band. Reebop Kwakabu bangs and rattles things without disturbing the groove one way or another. Jim Capaldi, meanwhile, does nothing whatsoever. OK, maybe not nothing, but waving a tambourine around and singing badly on ‘Light Up Or Leave Me Alone’ (an otherwise bracing tune) strikes me as money for old rope.
And it’s there that, weirdly, Traffic pointed to the future, for is not Capaldi the proto-Bez, the hippie Chas Smash, looning around on the stage with no apparent function? Is it not indisputable that Chris Wood patented the sort of flaccid, tuneless saxophone that was to later grace albums by Sade and Spandau Ballet?
That T.S. Eliot, what was he on about?
OK, so I’m watching the rather brilliant BBC4 Eliot doc, and I’m diverted from my usual “Eliot was an anti-semite so does that mean I can’t love his poetry” internal dialogue by the assertion that
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table”
is modern poetry ground zero.
The camera glimpses the printed page, and above the above is written
“S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.”
And I think, You know, I never found out what that meant. Was it important to know? If it wasn’t, why had he written that? And if it was, why did he write it in Italian? Was I supposed to know Italian? Is that fair?
So I thought I’d better find out. I popped it into Google Translator. This is what I found:
“S’io believed that my reply was a person who never returned to the world, This flame without more stara shock. Perciocche but never to this fund do not live around any, s’i'odo the truth, without fear of infamy I answer you.”
Well, I’m sorry but I can’t work out what the fuck he is on about. “This flame without more stara shock” is where it really starts to get unravelled. “My reply was a person who never returned to the world” does make some sense; the personification of his response was an apparition, possibly Syd Barrett. But then until he gets to the “without fear of infamy I answer you” bit, well, it’s cobblers innit.
Things and people I really despise #1
This will be the first in what may prove to be a continuous stream of pure bile, fingers crossed.
#1: Seasick Steve
This gormless bastard son of George Thorogood and Daisy Duke, this hapless redneck from the shallow end of the gene pool, has managed to somehow convince many people, some of whom I know and like.
You are in a bar or at an opening, depending on the social micro-strata that you inhabit, bellowing into some poor woman’s ear over the “funky house”, and you ask that deathless question: “So what music are you into?”
She says, “I really like the blues.”
Your heart leaps. The possibility of pungent sex to the strains of Howlin’ Wolf describing in some detail how he’s built for comfort and not for speed, swims before your eyes. You ask, “anyone in particular?”
She says, “Seasick Steve.”
Not so much crestfallen as eviscerated. Just as you attempt to reconstruct the heady, scented atmosphere of a mere ten seconds ago, she continues “I saw him at Glastonbury two years ago and he was really good.”
HE’S CRAP. He is just hopeless. Theme Park Americana writ pathetically small.
You shake your head disractedly, and ask why.
“He’s only got three strings! And he’s really good!” she yelps. He’s only got three strings. A circus act.
Why Bonus Tracks are usually No Bonus at all
This one’s been stewing for a while, but I’ve been nudged into action by a Gavin Martin post on F’Book.
Some (rare) albums are so unbelievably complete that they almost have their own micro-climates and ecosystems. One such is Bobby Charles’ Bearsville album, it’s sweaty, bayou atmosphere – all hanging moss and 90-in-the-shade – belying its upstate New York birthplace. And that was going to be one of a bunch of albums I love that prove the point, that adding bonus tracks to a CD can wreck a great record. But before posting I thought I’d check the most recent issue of The Band’s astounding second album. And this is what I found:
2. Rag Mama Rag (2000 Digital Remaster) 3:04$0.89 Buy Track
3. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (2000 Digital Remaster)3:33$0.99Buy Track
4. When You Awake (2000 Digital Remaster)3:13
5. Up On Cripple Creek (2000 Digital Remaster)4:34$0.99Buy Track
6. Whispering Pines (2000 Digital Remaster)3:58
7. Jemima Surrender (2000 Digital Remaster)3:31
8. Rockin’ Chair (2000 Digital Remaster)3:43
9. Look Out Cleveland (2000 Digital Remaster)3:09
10. Jawbone (2000 Digital Remaster)4:20
11. The Unfaithful Servant (2000 Digital Remaster)4:16
12. King Harvest (Has Surely Come) (2000 Digital Remaster)3:39
13. Get Up Jake (Outtake – Stereo Remix) (2000 Digital Remaster)2:17
14. Rag Mama Rag (Alternate Vocal Take – Rough Mix) (2000 Digital Remaster)3:04
15. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (Alternate Mix) (2000 Digital Remaster)4:16
16. Up On Cripple Creek (Alternate Take) (2000 Digital Remaster)4:54
17. Whispering Pines (Alternate Take) (2000 Digital Remaster)5:06
18. Jemima Surrender (Alternate Take)3:48
19. King Harvest (Has Surely Come)(Alternate Performance)4:28
This is near criminal. The Band is a perfect example of a wholly self-contained piece of work. It isn’t so much timeless as deeply rooted in specific passages of time. It provides a home for the most electric of guitars and the wheeziest of woodwinds. Tubas parp along to a southern backbeat. It is to America what the Shipping Forecast is to Britain.
No, I really did not want to listen to Rag Mama Rag (Alternate Vocal Take – Rough Mix) (2000 Digital Remaster). There’s a reason why this wasn’t on the original record: It wasn’t good enough. And I want the fly-blown rural complaint that is King Harvest (Has Surely Come) to end the album for me. They done bust the mood, and the mood is all.
And Bobby Charles should ride into the sunset on the back of Amos Garrett’s gleaming, tremulous guitar and Garth Hudson’s swirling accordion.
OK, so those two examples are a bit similar, so how about The Who Live At Leeds? The original is one of the great live albums. The reissue, clogged up with all the ghastly bits from A Quick One that we’ve conveniently forgotten, slows to a crawl.
Now, one doesn’t want to be too absolutist about this – the most recent Free reissues have added lashings of gorgeous live stuff, plus in the case of Fire and Water, remixes of the original 8-track masters that Blackwell deemed too underdeveloped, but when given a good, modern mix sound unbelieveable. Depending on the original album, it can work, especially if the original is to some degree flawed, as were Free’s.
But some records are sacrosanct. It’s enough to have to not get up and turn the album over (quiet, you vinyl obsessives at the back), but if the final architecture of a great album is then wrecked by a jerry-built extension you can find yourself barely able to listen to it again.
Turn it off after the “last” track, I hear you say. So instead of allowing that last smidgen of sound to hang in the air, I have to vault across the room to hit the stop button before the Mid-West Radio Alternate 7″ Single Edit kicks in…
At least have the decency to put the original on one CD and the detritus on another.
Let’s face it, Ronnie Wood F***ed up the Rolling Stones
I’m listening to a Wolfgang’s Vault™ Stones show from 1973. Now their records were about to start getting worse and worse, but the ’73 Stones could cut it live like a motherf***er. And the main reason is that you could actually hear what Keith Richards was doing.
Mick Taylor was a lead guitarist. Not a particularly interesting one. But what he did was give Keef room to breath, provide some spurious top end action. So what we have is Charlie Watts and the Most Elegantly Wasted Man playing flat-out rock’n'roll. Jesus they were good.
I had the misfortune to see them at Earl’s Court in 1976. I was there largely to see The Meters, relegated to playing on a postage-stamp stage with the house lights up and a pseudo-carnival going on. The Stones were dreadful, Jagger yelping with a camp desperation as messrs. Richards and Wood smeared gobbets of crap R&B guitar over anything that moved. After the last number, Charle Watts could be seen putting down his sticks like a clerk clocking off as the petals closed around the stage.
The big problem is Keef was blurred. All concision had deserted those monumental riffs that had carved the Mount Rushmore of Rock: Let It Bleed, Beggar’s Banquet, Sticky Fingers and Exile (with an honourable nod to Get Your Ya Ya’s Out). Wood and Richards essentially duplicate one another. Even if one is soloing (and Keef is a really dull lead player) they are so stuck in each other’s range that it’s just a mess.
If these old codgers really insist on flogging their grisly carcasses around the world’s stages, they could at least try the following:
1. Move Ron Wood to bass. It’s not as though the Stones need a good bass player – they didn’t have one for the first 20-odd years of their existence, and Ron did a passable job a million years ago with the Jeff Beck Group, and we don’t want to sack him do we? The poor poppet’s probably got some alimony coming up.
2. Get a lead player. Maybe make it a rotating scholarship, so you could have Johnny Marr, Visiting Professor of Keeping Out The Way Of Keefology. Or that prat from The Darkness. Whatever.
But what I really want is for them to just bloody retire.
Talking to Bobby Womack
Do you behave, or misbehave, differently to different music? ‘Course you do. Me, well, I’ll dance like your drunk uncle around my living room to Chaka Khan. In my socks. Nasty. I’ll also get morose to 2nd Division country starlet Matraca Berg, and that’s another deal. But what I do most is talk to Bobby Womack.
Picture this: there I am in my squalid W9 flat, washing up. OK, so this is a rare event, but bear with me. And Bobby’s talking to me. Patti LaBelle may think he’s talking to her, but the bitch is wrong; he’s talking to me, and I’m talking back.
“W-e-e-e-ll you kno-o-w what ah’m talkin’ about!”
Indeed I do Bobby.
“Don’t stay on that cloud too long, brother.”
I won’t Bobby, I won’t.
“But sometimes that feelin’ gets too darn good!”
Oh, I know, I know.
And that, in the end, despite the siren call of Al Green, or the sweet imprecations of James Carr, is why I will always hold a place in my heart for Bobby Womack.
He wrote some decent tunes too.
Recent posts
- Yo La Tengo Has the Field Covered
- All Hopped Up Music and Maps: Chapter 11
- Review: Sting’s Symphonic Tour in Cincinnati
- Barney Bubbles caught in action at work
- It Doesn’t Get Easier (But It Still Counts as Fun!)
- It Doesn’t Get Easier (But It Still Counts as Fun!)
- The Long Song – Andrea Levy
- WAYNE’S WORDS: TOTTENHAM TAMES THIERRY BULLS
- “Good eeeevening…”
- No Fracking Way
- ROBERT SANDALL R.I.P.
- HAGGARD & BALDRY
- British Remains: “We hate everything”
- JIM KWESKIN TURNS 70
- BOB UNLOADS HIS HEAD IN PARIS
- The Who To Tour “Quadrophenia” In 2011
- BEYONCE DOES NOT WRITE HER OWN SONGS. REALLY?
- Press releases
- “People say he’s a bit touched…”
- Valves gave rock’n’roll to you…
Authors
- Alex Ogg
- Archie Patterson
- Barney Hoskyns
- Beverley Glick
- Bruce Pollock
- Bud Scoppa
- Carol Cooper
- Charlie Bermant
- Chris Charlesworth
- Chris Welch
- Colin Irwin
- Dan Gennoe
- David Hughes
- David McKenna
- Don Snowden
- Francesco Calazzo
- Fred Dellar
- Gary Pig Gold
- Hank Bordowitz
- Harry Doherty
- Jeremy Gluck
- JoE Silva
- John Pidgeon
- Johnny Black
- Joss Hutton
- Kandia Crazy Horse
- Kris DiLorenzo
- Len Brown
- Leyla Sanai
- Lindsay Hutton
- Mark Leviton
- Mark Paytress
- Mark Pringle
- Mark Williams
- Martin Colyer
- Mat Snow
- Michael Azerrad
- Michael Gray
- Mick Middles
- Mike Jahn
- Mike Mettler
- Mitchell Cohen
- Noe Gold
- Paul Gorman
- Peter Makowski
- Peter Silverton
- Richard Riegel
- Rob Steen
- Robot A. Hull
- Roy Trakin
- Simon Warner
- Steven R. Rosen
- Terry Staunton
- Tim Clifford
- Tim Footman
- Tony Fletcher
- Wayne Robins
Subscribe
|
||||||
 |
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
Content Services | Magazine Archive | About Us | Press Room | Your Account | Home