Quintessence of New Wave (1 of ??) (Rockstars in the Nuddy - slight unsightly return's return)

It wasn't just an Old Wave thing, clearly - getting the kit off - it was  a New Wave thing too

Or perhaps just a Sounds  thing. 

I don't remember NME or Melody Maker ever going in for this. 

Jape continued on the inside spread with this Two Virgins parody I'm assuming.

 

The Damned's career is quintessentially New Wave through and through -  entertaining second-rank punk, utterly unthreatening 

This one's my favorite (not the lyrical first bit so much as the single version proper, the jolly punk-it-up part) (although the lyrical first section is wonderfully unexpected)

Harmless fun innit. 

Rebranded as Sixties-epigones

Vanian's look - which comes out of Rocky Horror Show - is said by some to be antecedent to Goth.

Meanwhile Captain Sensible dwarfs the parent band's success

Allied with the mimsy Dolly Mixtures.

Capn Sensi should have formed his own political party, a la Monster Raving Loony and Screaming Lord Sutch. Stood as an MP. 

Maybe he did? 

Altern-8  - who belong in this lineage assuredly - did.  A platform of free raves for the under-10s, subsidized Vicks - something along those lines. It's in E-Flash, I can't be bothered to look it up.

He looks a bit like Harpo Marx. 

I should do Max Splodge next. (Bushell placed them at the head of a phenom he called La Punk Pathetique).

Then Tenpole Tudor.

Old Wavers in the Nuddy (slight unsightly return) (unidentified flashing object)

 

Phil Mogg, frontman of space rockers turned metal outfit UFO

From Sounds, 1979.

Is that his hand  on the other side of his lower torso, or his actual knob, or side-ball? Anatomical experts adjudicate!

This is a photo that Sounds would recycle whenever the opportunity arose. 

Reference in the blurb to UFO being on Old Grey Whistle Test last week

Sounds really did seem to have a thing about displayhing Phil Mogg in the near-buff

UFO - a band whose early records I would like to have liked more than I actually did. 

Bit like with Hawkwind. But with a less of a toothsome framing. 

I have the first couple of albums, when they were UK space rock festival stalwarts. Cool logo. 

"One Hour Space Rock"

The title track "Flying" is nearly 27 minutes long.

The thematics are very Hawkwindy

As they drifted towards hard rock, UFO became a classic fourth from the top of the bill, Knebworth, Reading, sort of band. 

From the later metal-tending phase this is reputedly their stone classic. 

Are they a bit like the Hawkwind / Motorhead branch-off/de-evolution, except it all occurs in the same band and under the same name? 

Actually the evolution is exactly the same as The Scorpions, whose first few albums, I'm told, are actually pretty good space-rock. 

Indeed Michael Schenker left Scorpions and joined UFO for a while

When they were no longer post-psychedelic, UFO started having album titles combining puns and sexism. Hipgnosis covers. Songs with titles like "Highway Lady"

More nuddy business for ya - a New Waver's arse akimbo this time.. 

Force It / Faucet, geddit. "New Wavers' arse akimbo"? See the cover models are Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti earning a bit of dosh on the side. Sleazy Christopherson worked at Hipgnosis, you see. Yet another case of Old Wave / New Wave blurring / secret continuity.

Kept slogging away and then Mechanix was their biggest success, got to #8 in the UK albums chart. 

Kept slogging on and on - original members dropping like flies - and then the farewell tour, set for 2022, was cancelled, on doctor's orders (Mogg had had a heart attack).

There had been plans for the final show to be a "rock legends cruise, a five-day event in early 2020".

I wonder what Mogg's arse looks like now. 

Married to a page 3 girl!

Nephew Nigel Mogg played bass in The Quireboys, staples of The Intrepid Fox and favorites of Melody Maker's hard rockin' Carol Clerk. 

 

Quintessence of Old Wave - (10 of ??) (Mike Oldwavefield)

The overlay here of one kind of Old Wave (Free's raunchy bluesy hardrock strut) with another completely ill-suited Old Wave (Mike Oldfield's whatever-it-is-you'd-call it) makes for a magnificently quintessential Old Wave moment, even more so for happening deep into the New Wave era, in 1980

Bonus points for the presence of Bill Oddie for added beardy Old Waviness (does he fit that syndrome of the folkie turned comic - Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott? Seemingly not - but he was certainly the driving force in the Goodies music).

A supporter of the Green Party. 

Talking of Old Wave bucolicism, I do find this both touching and pleasing to the ear 

It's sort of anti-cosmic rock, space rock renounced - he'd rather be riding on his horse through rolling English countryside than "flying through space"

A kind of decelerationist anthem

His singing sister is Old Wavey, but also seeping towards M.O.R. / New Age / Euroshlock - Nana Mouskori / Enya.

Flutes, ahoy

What a clean tone he has.

Voted Guitarist of the Year in 1975 by Melody Maker readers, I believe. (Actually - astonishingly - it was 1980 that he got that accolade from MM readers.)

But not a reference for guitarists today I shouldn't think. Although he was great playing with Kevin Ayers. 

I wonder what stung him so much about NME 's coverage? (This is from 1982). Probably ALL of it. I should imagine (unlike the Maker) they made fun of him from the start, not just after punk. 

Fuck me, my memory is terrible - I already did Mike Oldfield in this series, #2 Quintessence of Old Wave, back in early December!

Worth dredging these images up again, though

And then this later front cover where he's in the nuddy.

I seem to remember rather liking Hergest Ridge, and parts of Ommadawn. 

Not at the time of course - this is much, much later, in the 21st Century. Tentative probings into the forbidden prog zone. Growing fascination for Virgin Records in its pre-Sex Pistols identity, and the role of Simon Draper. One of my "nearly books" - twice!

I do love the cover of this

I fear that Oldfield might have turned in a Brexity direction and possibly gets exercised on the question of farmers's inheritance tax and similar issues. Yes indeed he has complained about the UK becoming a "nanny state" and expressed a desire to play at Trump's inauguration. 

Jonathan Coe, who named a wonderful novel after a Hatfield and the North album, and who includes in its storyline the Virgin Crisis tour of '75 (ultracheap admittance for the young citizens of a failing economy - to see the likes of Henry Cow), confesses in the New Statesmen, as part of their 'roads not taken' series, that once he dearly wanted to be the next Mike Oldfield. 

The paradox is that, back in the 1970s when I desperately wanted to be Mike Oldfield, I didn’t even like Mike Oldfield.

Or rather, I did, but I wasn’t prepared to admit it. At our elite, direct-grant school in the centre of Birmingham, the cool thing to do was to champion music that was off the beaten track. If I had been really cool I’d probably would have been into reggae or northern soul, but my preferred bands were white, nerdy and esoteric. Many of them (such as Henry Cow, and Hatfield and the North) were signed to Richard Branson’s Virgin Records, a label whose profitability was founded entirely upon one album: Tubular Bells, by Mike Oldfield. Its tinkly, complex instrumentalism wasn’t at all far removed from the bands I adored, but I distanced myself from it: too commercial, too well known, too popular.

And yet, when I started to write my own music a few years later, I sounded pretty much like Mike Oldfield. I used two cassette decks, bouncing tracks back and forth so that there could be three or four of me, playing guitar and keyboards with myself and building up layers of harmony and counterpoint.

Unfortunately, by the time I started getting any good at it, it was the middle of the 1980s and this kind of music was completely out of fashion. Even Mike Oldfield didn’t have much luck being Mike Oldfield in the 1980s. Meanwhile, I formed a band and had a stab at conquering the music world that way, but never stopped writing and recording my own, more introspective, more personal tunes on the side.

But I realised my ambition in the end. Nowadays anyone can release an album, of course, and the distillation of all those years of effort, a 50-minute oeuvre called Unnecessary Music, sits quietly on Spotify under my own name. Every year, my royalties from streaming come to a less-than-Oldfieldesque £1.50 or so. Better than nothing, you say? Yes, maybe. But I have a strong suspicion that the person doing most of the streaming is me.

His lead character Benjamin Rotter, who makes this kind of instrumental rock-as-classical composition, is clearly based on himself, then. 

Here in fact is Coe's "Unnecessary Music" for your delectation

https://sparoad.bandcamp.com/album/unnecessary-music

Crikey, there's more - a band performed it at jazz festival in Italy. 

https://britprogjazz.bandcamp.com/album/suspended-moment-the-music-of-jonathan-coe-live-at-jazzmi-festival-milan-2021

Talking of Canterbury-ish things, I recently participated, remotely, in a NYC event celebrating Robert Wyatt's 80th birthday. This was my text,  in which bloggy elements may be recognized by regular readers, recited and recorded for disembodied playback: 

Good evening, glad to be with you, albeit it remotely, for this celebration of the great Robert Wyatt. 

Another great Englishman Mark E. Smith once said “I hated The Soft Machine and that kind of thing. Rock and roll was ruined when the students took it over”.

Having been a student once, and middle class through and through, it falls to me to mount a defence of the bourgeois contribution to rock 

Let’s start with Canterbury, in the south of England – where Soft Machine formed and where other groups directly related to them or influenced by them also hailed from, resulting what was known as the Canterbury Scene or the Canterbury Sound - an incestuous cluster of post-psychedelic jazz rock outfits who were sometimes endearingly whimsical and sometimes forbiddingly abstruse and often both at the same time

With its superfluity of universities and colleges, Canterbury has the highest ratio of students to native residents of any town in the UK. Think of all the academia-related jobs and ancillary work that institutions like that support (book shops, theatres, cafes, etc) and how that changes the make-up and vibe of a place.

Now in talking of the middle class contribution to rock, I’m not really talking about bank managers or entrepreneurs, but a particular kind of non-business oriented bourgeoisie - the professions, public servants, non profits. People like Robert Wyatt's tolerant, encouraging mother, Honor Wyatt, a journalist and radio presenter - a free thinker sort - who made her home an open house for Wyatt and his friends. Later on, when she moved to South London, her small house was home to the entire Soft Machine and their girlfriends. “I don’t how we all fitted in there,” Wyatt told me. “But we did and we made our racket and my mum was fine about it.”

What’s striking about Soft Machine and the other Canterbury groups like Caravan and Hatfield and the North is their relationship to American black music. Unlike other British groups of the Sixties such as the Stones or Yardbirds, they’re not trying to swagger like Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf. Although Soft Machine were obsessed with jazz, they don’t attempt to be supercool like  Miles Davis.

Almost alone in the British sixties scene, they don’t even sing in a fake American accent

Wyatt was one of the very first British singers of the rock era to sound English.

The other main ones are Kevin Ayers, also in Soft Machine, and Syd Barrett, from Pink Floyd, the band that Soft Machine played alongside at psychedelic clubs like UFO, and a band also spawned from formed at another genteel university town, Cambridge.

Wyatt has described his style as “it sounded like me talking, only with notes.”

So one thing I find endearing about the Canterbury groups is that they not pretending to be anything other than what they are:  nice middle-class South of England boys, educated and well-brought-up.  They fit a new archetype of masculinity that I call  "soft male" – this is the first generation of British boys to be molded by permissive child-rearing practices (picking up the baby when it's crying rather letting the infant cry out). The first generation to grow up without the stiff upper lip implanted at birth – nor did they experience being toughened up by national service in the Army, that ended around 1961.

Their backgrounds might be genteel but they themselves tend to sound socially indeterminate  - a syndrome I call middleclasslessness – if you listen to Robert Wyatt speak, it’s mumbly and slightly faltering, softened by self-deprecation.  In other words, it’s evacuated of the confidence and entitlement that rings out clearly in the voices of the truly posh.  

This late Sixties, early Seventies breed of English musician are not without faults, a self-indulgence, a reluctance to grow up – there might be the odd bit of sexism in the mix.

But these young men are finding ways to play the music they love (jazz, rhythm and blues, rock) but also be themselves. Hence the urge to complicate things with time signatures shifts and distorted textures ... but also the puerile humor, the Anglo-surrealist whimsy, elements that parallel Monty Python.  An odd combo of sophistication and regression.

Take a song by Hatfield and the North in which Robert Wyatt does guest vocals. It’s called "Big Jobs No. 2 (By Poo and The Wee Wees)". You hear the singing and you think, ah there’s Wyatt – but actually it’s one of Hatfield singing, Richard Sinclair singing. But he sounds like a dead ringer for Robert – I call it Wyatt-ese. That is the natural singing and speaking tone of  many of these groups. Although further into "Big Jobs" Wyatt does appear - but doing a little bit of guest scat. No pun intended. He’s scat singing, sublimely.

This is one of Wyatt’s great inventions – an instrumentalization of the voice. In Matching Mole, the group he formed after his acrimonious expulsion from Soft Machine, he does the songs “Instant Kitty” and “Instant Pussy” – the titles are whimsical, perhaps even lewd, but the  abstract vocalese is astonishing, comparable to things that singers like Tim Buckley was doing on Starsailor. Wyatt told me that he was inspired by Roland Kirk’s playing. On his solo tune “Muddy Mouse” Wyatt vocally mimics the sound of a muted trumpet to exquisite effect. On the later song “Born Again Cretin” – a hilarious satire of right-wing thinking – the main Wyatt vocal is backed by a sort of bullfrog barbershop quartet of multi-tracked Wyatt wordlessly wheezing and gasping in rhythmic accompaniment.  Like so much Wyatt music, it is simultaneously whimsically absurd yet utterly ecstatic.

For his regular singing, when he had a lyric, the model was Dionne Warwick – a very un-rock’n’roll model to have. He has said that he generally found women singers to be inspiring, what he wanted to emulate.

Both modes are heard on what might be his great single work, “Sea Song”, the opening track of his 1974 masterpiece Rock Bottom – which starts as an eerie serenade to a mermaid, then spirals off into mystical flights of wordless falsetto

Rock Bottom came out after the break-up of Matching Mole.  Wyatt had started to form a new group involving Francis Monkman of Curved Air and various Canterbury-aligned musicians, and Virgin Record wanted to sign the group.  But then, during a party at the mansion-block flat of socialite and Virgin recording artist Lady June, Wyatt tumbled out of the window of the bathroom. The accident left him paralyzed below the waist, unable to play drums again or participate in a touring rock band. So instead of signing the planned Canterbury supergroup, Virgin released a solo album by Wyatt  - Rock Bottom, a heartbreakingly poignant allegory of Wyatt’s emotional regression and gradual self-rebuilding during his recovery from the accident, couched in a blurry oceanic sound that recalls Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way and Jimi Hendrix’s “1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be).”

Rock Bottom is dealing with some heavy, heavy stuff but it still has the trademark Wyatt whimsy.

Even Wyatt's lovesongs are skewered by irony. In the wonderfully sentimental 'O Caroline', Wyatt warns his sweetheart "if you call this sentimental crap you'll make me mad", while 'Calyx' is full of oddly phrased praise: "close inspection reveals you're in perfect nick". The follow up to Rock Bottom, titled Ruth is Stranger Than Richard 'Soup Song'   is sung from the point of view of one of its reluctant ingredients, a slice of bacon.

Another Canterbury Scene hallmark that Wyatt might have invented is the meta-song, a song that addresses its own circumstances of recording or composition, or talk about the lifestyle of the musician.

A version of Soft Machine’s 'Moon In June', Wyatt extemporises about the joys of doing a radio session for the BCC

The opening line of the first verse of Matching Mole’s “Signed Curtain”  is

 “This is the first verse”

And in fact it’s also the second, third, fourth and fifth line of that first verse.

 The next line?

 “This is the chorus / Or perhaps it’s a bridge”

 It closes with the lines “It only means that I lost faith in this song / 'Cause it won't help me reach you”

 “O Caroline” similarly starts not with the lover but with the action in the studio – David on piano, Robert on the drums, “we  try to make the music /We'll try to have some fun”. Then it gets romantic “But I just can't help thinking that if you were / Here with me /I'd get all my thoughts in focus and play /More excitingly”

 There is the story of how Robert Wyatt had a small pop hit with a cover of “I’m A Believer” by the Monkees and appeared on Top of the Pops. Apparently the idea originated with Richard Branson and after its success it became an obsession for him, an idee fixe – he would ask other groups, later on, over the years, to cover "I'm A Believer".

But after that unexpected hit, there was a lull, Wyatt stopped making music for several years. And a strange thing happened – his earlier music had resolutely apolitical but strangely he did become a believer – a born again Communist, a dedicated reader of the Morning Star newspaper. Even tuning to Radio Moscow to hear the non-Western Bloc viewpoint.

When he was coaxed back into the studio to record a series of singles for the label Rough Trade, many of them expressed his newly militant beliefs. He did the song “Trade Union” with Dishari Shilpee Gosth, a Bangladeshi band of musicians from the East End of London; he covered the World War 2 pro-Soviet song “Stalin Wasn’t Stalling”; he brought out a political subtext to the Chic ballad “At Last I Am Free”. He sang “Strange Fruit” and “Guantanamera” and Violeta Parra’s “Arauco”. 

Best of all though was his version of the black humorously anti-authoritarian ditty by his friend Ivor Cutler, “Grass”, plays the role of guru imparting wisdom to an acolyte, the power relation underlined by lines like "While we talk I’ll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me". It ends "And when I’m gone you can feel the lumps upon your head / and think about what I said"

Around this time Wyatt also composed a moody instrumental soundtrack to The Animals Film, a documentary about human exploitation and cruelty towards animals, with narration by his friend Julie Christie.

Not long after the Rough Trade singles series ended, Clive Langer and Elvis Costello wrote the song “Shipbuilding”, an oblique protest against the Falkland War, and invited Wyatt to record it.  That gave him his second hit single.

Wyatt has said that his attraction to Communism was its internationalism  - which is why he found the imperialist nostalgia of the Falklands War aggravating.

He describes himself as a xenophile – someone who resists the kneejerk British suspicion of Johnny Foreigner.

I’m sure he was aghast at Brexit and is horrified about the nativism and authoritarian nationalism resurgent all across the globe.

He’s the kind of singer that people in the UK call a national treasure – but he’d probably hate that .

Partly because he’d rather be an international treasure. But also because he is self-effacing and genuinely humble.  

New Wave Eyecandy - a brief intense burst

Quintessence of Old Wave (fluteation device) (9 of ??)

Did you see what I did there?

"mantras which we use which are word combinations, we get the audience to participate and speak back to us and this elevates consciousness and what we try is to actually raise up the vibrations of the audience and ourselves to a more God-intoxicated state"

I lump Quintessence mentally with Jade Warrior  - and not just because both were on Island. 

I am surprised Jade Warrior have not been rediscovered during this whole rehabilitation of New Age and edge-of-ambient Fourth World-ism that is ongoing. Perhaps the musicianship is just too obtrusive. 

Ah well, looky here

".... Floating World (1974), a complex concept set themed around the Japanese philosophy of Ukiyo, with the songs revolving around two interrelated and interlaced series of compositions. According to AllMusic, ts "sheer diversity of sounds and moods, the constant clash or gentle intermingling of Eastern and Western styles, and the set's glittering atmospheres made Floating World an undeniable masterpiece". The band's foray into what would later be labelled world and ambient music came parallel to that of Brian Eno, who described Floating World as an "important album"

Mind you, it's not all floaty flutey stuff - "Snake", on Last Autumn's Dream, is fierce and raw with a really gnarly guitar texture. 

I was thinking there was something affinitive in Jade Warrior's all-gates-open worldy-influenced sound / approach to the Traffic-and-solo-members diaspora of the '70s (one of  the non-original members of Traffic, Rebop Kwaku Baah, would join twilight Can in fact). 

Well, it seems that Steve Winwood played some role in with Jade Warrior's getting picked up by Island, after their Vertigo run of albums came to an end. Winwood also contributed moog and piano to Waves.

Somewhere I have an Antilles sampler from mid-decade, full of this sort of drawing-on-influences-beyond-rock-beyond-the-West-even vibe - the drift + discovery post-psychedelic thing that punk abruptly brought to a rude terminus. 

It's this one -  actually from 1977, so already slipped behind the times

This kind of thing - very flutey actually. Winwoodwindy.  

Jade Warrior are still going on and in fact put out an album last year. 

I also vaguely associate Quintessence and Jade Warrior with Osibisa  - perhaps more for the record artwork than the music itself. 

Jade Warrior did have a production company association with a different Afro-rock band, Assegai

I suppose the common thread here is looking outside the West for musical and spiritual nourishment (albeit in the case of Osibisa, it's musicians from outside the West bringing their vibes into  Anglophonospheric rock).

The kind of traffic - and Traffic - abruptly ended by punk, which recentered the flux around a purist core of rock.

Only for similarly sort of pangloba impulses to creep back just a few years later in post-punk and industrial - Pop Group, 23 Skidoo, The Slits to an extent.... Poly Styrene and Lora Logic after X Ray Spex .....   mostly inflected in a mock-tribal way. 

Another common thread (meaning the Old Wavey horizon-widening music) is the flute (flute nowhere to be heard in the postpunk versions of same, I don't think).

Which reminds me: I've been hatching as counterfactual in which the flute supplants the electric guitar as rock's dominant instrument. 

The gist of it starts with the fact that Kraftwerk was initially a Florian Schneider-led venture, and the focal instrument was Florian's flute. The line-up was fluctuating, with Schneider the only constant. Not long after the first album came out Ralf Hutter left the band for eight months. For a moment there, Kraftwerk was Schneider plus Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, but no Hutter. 

The turning point in my alternative history is that Giorgio Moroder somehow gets to hear ‘Ruckzuck’, a tune on the first album that's propelled by a raspingly percussive flute-riff, with Schneider's overblowing creating a gritty, distorted, rock-like feel. He is blown away by this and goes to meet them, and manages to persuade Schneider and co to simplify and restructure the tune so that it works as a dance track for the discotheque crowd. During this process, the motorik beat that Neu! developed in our world becomes integrated with the Giorgio-sculpted Kraftwerk sound. The combination is electrifying.

Released as a single, "Ruckzuck" becomes a smash hit worldwide - a bit like a flute-powered "Spirit in the Sky". Teenyboppers are stomping to the maddening flute-riffage down the discotheque.

Moroder formally joins Kraftwerk and with his pop instincts merged with the Neu!-that-never-was's rhythm drive, the group score a series of follow-up hit singles. A craze erupts across the world for the flute as riff-rhythm engine rather than wafty sophisto-texture. Kids drop the electric guitar and pick up flutes -  also clarinets and oboes and bassoons and piccolos. 

On the second Kraftwerk album, Florian & Giorgio, the first side is taken up with six tautly focused and hooky songss. But side two is taken up with a  23 minute side-long expansion of "Rucksuck" -  sort of  "In A Gadda Da Vidda’ meets “Love To Love You Baby”.  Moroder has experimental, ambient-leaning tendencies latent within the hit-chasing commercialism, as can be seen by our timeline's Moroder solo album Einzelgänger, which is not far off things Cluster were doing, or indeed side 2 of Autobahn.

This allows flute-rock to become more just a teenybop novelty craze - it wins over the heads too. John Peel plays the album's second side 3 times in a row on Top Gear. 

There is a reorientation amongst various existing groups.

Jethro Tull are already working along these lines but get pulled in a more populist direction, jumping into the chart fray with a series of hits. 

The balance of power in Hawkwind tilts in flavor of the flute. The band rename themselves Hawkwoodwind.  ‘Silver Machine’ becomes an electric flute / bassoon monster and actually does even better in the charts, hitting #1 and staying there for four weeks. 

A bitter power struggle takes place within the fledgling Roxy Music, causing Bryan Ferry to quit in a fit of pique. Andy Mackay becomes the dominant figure and the group are reoriented around an oboe and clarinet frontline, with Eno processing the instruments.  In tribute to the inspiration from Kraftwerk, Mackay renames the group Ruckzuck Musik. 

Mike Oldfield recasts Tubular Bells as a woodwinds dominated project.

Pete Frampton abandons guitar and learns the flute and oboe, combining them with talk box, with huge commercial success. 

Meanwhile Bob Moog rethinks his instrument and instead of a keyboard interface devises a blow-through-a-tube interface.

Does this mean that the Old Wave, bolstered by the electrification of classical-music instruments (violin, cello, etc as well as woodwinds) and the consequent necessary premium placed on virtuosity and technique, lasts forever? Or would New Wave, focused around the reclamation of the electric guitar, happen anyway? 

Perhaps Andre 3000 and his record somehow leaked through from the parallel universe where popular music went down the flute path? 

Quintessence of Old Wave (8 of ??) (let's get lit)

There's a bunch of strands to the Old Wave.

Proggy (more of a Brit or Euro thing)

Sophisto / West Coast / singer-songwriters with expansive jazz-leaning tendencies (Steely Dan, Little Feat, Joni.) 

Bluesy-rootsy (tasteful division) (Southern-inspired - Ry Cooder, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - and sometimes from the South - Allmans) (also country rock - Poco etc)

Bluesy-raunchy (lumpen division) (cock rock, boogie, hard 'n' heavy).

And then there's Dylanism.

i.e. songwriting that is literary, often history-informed, allusive, bookish.

Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Tom Waits, The Band .... song as story, poem, parable, mini-play

That in turn prompts an oozing-with-erudition critical response *

Under which you would file this fellow...

If a passing mention of Woodrow Wilson is your kind of tipple...

Now this here tune is reckoned to be Warren Zevon's supreme masterpiece

Everybody's restless and they've got no place to go

Someone's always trying to tell them

Something they already know

So their anger and resentment flow

But don't it make you want to rock and roll

All night long

Mohammed's Radio

I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful

On the radio, Mohammed's Radio

You know, the Sheriff's got his problems too

He will surely take them out on you

In walked the village idiot and his face was all aglow

He's been up all night listening to Mohammed's Radio

Don't it make you want to rock and roll

All night long

Mohammed's Radio

I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful

On the radio, Mohammed's Radio

Everybody's desperate trying to make ends meet

Work all day, still can't pay the price of gasoline and meat

Alas, their lives are incomplete

Don't it make you want to rock and roll

All night long Mohammed's Radio

I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful

On the radio, Mohammed's Radio

You've been up all night listening for his drum

Hoping that the righteous might just might just might just come

I heard the General whisper to his aide-de-camp

"Be watchful for Mohammed's lamp"

Don't it make you want to rock and roll

All night long Mohammed's Radio

The appeal bypasses me, as does the promised profundity.

Admittedly the tune has been going round and round and round in my head for days - but this is not something I  have enjoyed.  Actually reminds me in mood and tone of  "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen, another unwelcome brain worm. 

Apparently a lot of Zevon-supporting critics kvetched about the effrontery of  Linda Ronstadt taking on such a subtle piece of writing - complaints galore that she bulldozed through its multi-levelled ironies. 

In Stranded, Linda-admirer John Rockwell mounts an impassioned defense of her skills as an interpretive singer. Defiantly asserts that Ronstadt does a fine job with her similarly contested and deplored take on Elvis Costello's "Alison" (like the Zevon tune also on Living in the U.S.A.) and insists that her rendering of "Mohammed's Radio" surpasses Warren's original through the power and clarity of her pipes and her richer emotionalism. 

Having listened to the first two, best-regarded albums, my assessment of Warren Z is:

The voice is a fairly unwieldy instrument, which is not necessarily a problem (indeed a voice can be too wieldy). But the timbre edges on unpleasant. At any rate, nuthin' special. 

The melodies are samey and often a tad hokey

The rock is clean and punchy but again nothing to write home about

So that leaves the lyrics

(And the biography  - a man at war with his own demons  )

Reboiled hardboiled, echoes of Day of the Locust and Raymond Chandler.... plenty of that Angelenos-critique-their-own-decadence thing...

I heard the General whisper to his aide-de-camp

"Be watchful for Mohammed's lamp"

Don't it make you want to rock and roll

All night long Mohammed's Radio

This stuff about the General and the aide-de-camp puts me in mind of the Captain in "Hotel California".... Is allegorical the right word?  

As the New Wave raged all over the U.K. in 1977-78, Old Wave - and specifically the LA sound - was never more ascendant in America.  Fleetwood Mac, Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Eagles, Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan... all selling astronomical numbers of albums.... Andrew Gold... Joe Walsh... Bob Welch...  Zevon getting plaudits if not hits and stats....  ditto Tom Waits... Rickie Lee Jones is round the corner and perhaps the last gasp of that sound. 

The records all seem to have the same players on them. 

So Zevon, as much favored writer of songs with this set, protege-pal of Jackson Browne, employing the same musicians, backing harmony vocals from Nicks & Buckingham & Bonnie Raitt & Glenn Frey... couldn't be more Old Wave

But some critics saw Zevon as New Wave in spirit  - acerbic words,  "toughest rocker" on the West Coast. 

By "tough" they seem to refer both to his lyrical eye and this sort of clumpy heavy-booted sound... 

Clearly the work of session musicians and famous friends.... it doesn't have that distinctive band-voice, the sound of a true gang.  

You could imagine almost anyone in LA at that time fronting these records. 

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*  "a similarly literary, erudition-soaked form of critical response"

An example of the kind of appreciations WZ got back then: a Washington Post piece from 1978 by a music critic I'd never heard of before: William C. Woods. Like the Stephen Holden review of Hissing of Summer Lawns, what's immediately noticeable to the modern eye is that the records are treated entirely as literary creations, with barely a single mention of the music:

THE GUN is on the food, nested like meat against the potatoes: naked lunch.

This is the notorious liner art on "Excitable Boy," War-comic if you can take it, and compelling even if it takes you away - an announcement that the songs inside will be slugs, both hollow-point and nickle-plated.

"Slugs," of course, is a word that leads a nice parade of meanings: a belt of whiskey, a fist in the face, a bullet, a false coin and the thing that crawls on your roses. All of these metaphors vibrate hotly here, stirring the excitement that has turned Zevon, in the last few months, from a minor cult figure into a major one. And if the mass audience still eludes him, despite the success of his "Werewolves of London" single, this glossy supper of murder suggests some reasons why.

The picture is a crib. It shows Zevon's students (and he'll have those even after he's exhausted his fans) how they are to parse his verse. In good modernist fashion, the poet has even made the job harder, telling one interviewer that the snapshot is "suggestive in various ways on various levels . . . a satire of the album or an embodiment of it."

Or both. But it's mainly as the latter that the image takes on real interest, since most satire is cheap business, and being against violence is as boring as being for it is vile. Zevon is aware of this tension, and his wish to be seen as occupying neither stand has prompted him to raise the issue even more often than his critics do. He told New Times that while he might like to think of "Excitable Boy" as satire, "it may be just a violent album," and repeated the notion more fully for a reporter from Ampersand: "It would be easy to say that 'Excitable Boy' is just a big satire on the fact that violence has become the greatest escape entertainment in America . . . But it may be that there is a violent strain in this album that is more real than satire."

It may be. But there's a literary tone, more pronounced than either of these possibilities, that locates Warren Zevon's work well within the mainstream of American popular prose. Such a claim sounds unfounded if we note only his subjects, but it can be substantiated with a look at how his dialectic plays itself out on every level.

Zevon's sense of history, in particular, is special; it is a sense announced in a song about Jesse James on the album "Warren Zevon" and enlarged by the viciously enchanting "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" on "Excitable Boy."

"Roland" is awesome. Its sound is that of an IRA or border ballad; its story comes from an ex-mercenary friend of Zevon's; its theme is genuinely mythic in scale, its subject is appalling and its conclusions are ambiguous.

Roland, a Christian prince in the medieval chanson, is in this update a Danish mercenary killed in Africa by a one-time colleague in pay of the CIA. Headless, his ghost kills his killer and then becomes eternal, showing up 10 years later "in Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine and Berkeley" where it makes a psychic contract with Patty Hearst, who "heard the burst of Roland's Thompson gun and bought it." What saves this conclusion from the taint of guerrilla chic is the double meaning of the last line; "bought it" can mean either to agree to the gun or to die by it. Or both.

Zevon has said that the song's co-author tells him the story is "true," but it clearly has literary antecedents, including A.E. Housman's mercenaries who "saved the sum of things for pay," and Hugh MacDairmid's retort, "It is a God-damned lie to say that these/Saved . . . anything."

For in his songs full of memory and firearms, of drink, drugs and so-sad-to-see-good-love-go-bad, Zevon is after an art so rich that, to be seen whole, it has to be heard as a play of opposites. "Roland" advances this art of opposites, transfiguring both the Housman and MacDairmid poems and offers as well the understanding that history is no less a product of imagination than fiction, and that, like art's, its performances tend to be repeated.

As form, Zevon says his work intends to "unify the realms of classical music and popular song." As content, it sets stories of the perils of family life and erotic attachment against legends of violence in the unconscious and a history of it in the American past. And as total structure, it puts visual images into narrative sequence and often opposes perverse lyrics to palliative tunes. So - although he's a heavy-voiced rocker with a band that can burn out the wires - it's these literary qualities that have made a good many critics turn greedily toward him. He's what they can recognize: a writer, and a dammed good one.

He can do in two lines a novel of family life that Walker Percy would admire ("Well, he went down to dinner in his Sunday best . . . And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest"), and, in one more, another story of love in the ruins (" . . . he raped her and killed her, then he took her home"). Zevon even falls prey to the writer's common vice of role consciousness (his narrators wield Smith-Coronas as well as Smith & Wessons), and he knows that the hardest part of his job is "being miserable between songs." It was getting the words right that kept "Excitable Boy" so long in the can. "If I have a strong instinctual feeling that the writing's not there," Zevon told critic John Rockwell, "I stall." He also seeks co-authors, offering friends fragments he's fond of but can't finish, like a Renaissance painter handing the background over to an apprentice.

In this light, the comparisons to Sam Peckinpah, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer and Nathanael West that keep cropping up in discussions of Zevon's work are not surprising. What's really impressive is that they may soon be unnecessary.

He is on the edge of being a writer whose immediate output need be compared only to the earlier stages of its own development. Song after song offers evidence that Zevon is working very close to his unconscious, his "dream protocols," his reptile brain. He has a strong perspective on history, a deep sense of myth and a will to mind his madness.

Take a look at a single technical element of fiction - point of view. While most writers of rock can't get beyond solipsism, Zevon is rarely identical to his narrator. His songs are sung not only about but by Western outlaws, African mercenaries, junkies, farm boys, failed suicides, urban psychopaths, Mexican aristocrats, men who see werewolves where vampires belong and the oversoul of rock 'n' roll itself. The interplay between these personae and their imagined audiences structures the fantasies that feed the imaginations of Zevon's following, who in turn feed themselves into the songs: At his concerts, there are always a few fans wearing werewolf masks.

It can be an alarming picture. Contrasting his brushes with physical danger in Spain with the sense of psychic dread that dogs him in his native land, Zevon has suggested that " . . . America, there may be a greater idea of violence than there is a reality of violence in other places that don't inspire as much paranoia. And that's what ends up being my expression in laying the largest handgun made right on the dinner plate."

It's home cooking, too, Zevon's wife's, from whom he was recently separated. And if the parsley potatoes look good enough to eat, the gun looks real enough to fire.

By physically casing his visual songs within so graphic an image, the poet uses the package itself to insist that his audience match his complexity of vision with their ambiguity of response: The point is not to wreck the listener's appetite, but to make him wonder just what it is he's really hungry for.

Upping the ante between artist and audience is a classic ploy of serious American popular art. Writers and rock stars, filmmakers, court fools and poets who want it all - honor, fame, and cash - must seek a mass audience via familiar forms while simultaneously undercutting their chances of success with unfamiliar and socially dangerous content, thus risking not the anger of the audience, which certifies the artist's power, but its indifferences, which confirms to him his lack of special worth. Critic Greil Marcus, who convincingly explores popular art on the basis of that notion, has shown this particular artist's relationship to it:

"To attempt to reach a popular audience - which is what good rock 'n' roll singers like Zevon do for a living with songs about headless African mercenaries, nice boys who do in their girl friends and the like - is no easy thing, nor any sort of trivial act. To attempt to unsettle a popular audience, which is what artists like Zevon do for their own peace of mind is much harder: You may put out the strongest stuff you know, and it may bounce right off the audience or be absorbed without a shudder."

As if in confirmation, Zevon offers a number of songs on other subjects altogether - lost love, rock itself - that seem also loaded with lines about the risks and rewards of the author/audience relationship. In "Johnny Strikes Up the Band," the hero is "guaranteed to please/back by popular demand"; in "Mohammed's Radio," a voice is trying to tell an audience "Something they already know/So their anger and resentment flow/But don't it make you want to rock and roll?"

And in "Accidentally Like a Martyr," the narrator puts two kinds of sorrow and separation together:

"Never thought I'd have to pay so dearly

For what was already mine . . ."

Appropriately, Warren Zevon's personal history contains what must be a mix of fact and legend.

A native Californian once befriended by Igor Stravinski, Zevon had a nomadic youth all over the West before settling in Los Angeles as a self-taught classical composer. He later wrote commercials for Gallo wine, toured as musical director and pianist for the Everly Brothers, played clubs in San Francisco and Colorado, and in 1975 spent a year in a bar in Spain before being brought back to Los Angeles by songwriter Jackson Browne, who urged Zevon to record and toured with him in 1976. The same year, Zevon's first "official" album, with his name as its title, was released to some acclaim but small sales. (There is a mysterious earlier album, never mentioned except as being "never mentioned.")

These connections to the high council of southern California rock (Linda Ronstadt has also recorded his songs and sung on his albums) cut a trail for a better reception for "Excitable Boy"; ironically, there are very few songs on the record that aren't far superior to the work of its sponsors. The only insipid tune in the collection, "Tenderness on the Block," is one co-written with Jackson Browne.

Elsewhere, Zevon's words are so concretely chosen that it's an insult to call them symbols, though they invariably structure meanings that take a fierce delight in self-concealment. The best work is close to minimal: in "Lawyers, Guns and Money," the stanzas are only footnotes to the title, which has already told listeners what they need to talk their way out of what they can't shoot their way out of or buy their way out of.

Formal explication of "Ronald," minimalist theories of "Lawyers, Guns and Money," and hints of biographical criticism would seem to put us at some distance from the wop-bop-a-lop of primordial rock 'n' roll.

But the majority of Warren Zevon's songs take fixes on more usual pop topics, like young love or death from an overdose, and the best of them tend to memorialize the peaks and gutters of pop culture: While not New Wave in sound, "Execitable Boy" mocks punk rock in story; "Night-time in the Switching Yard" dismembers disco; "Werewolves of London" remembers Carnaby Street as a source of fashion in clothing, fantasy and song.

"Werewolves" also contains a diet of metaphor so rich as to demonstrate the recklessness with his talents that has signaled Zevon's admirers to be careful in their praise. And there are other songs whose elusive nature doesn't always win through the caution their charm arouses. It's not clear whether a line like," "Your face looked like something/Death brought with him in his suitcase," gets, or gets in, its own way.

Moreover, Zevon as a stage performer hasn't yet devised a style to match his singing, and a powerful public presence is still prerequisite to pop stardom.

But this is quibbling. With rock seemingly split between tired Texas traumata on one hand and disco bohos suited up like preschoolers in plasticine on the other, Warren Zevon has arrived in the nick of time - not to be the long-awaited Next Big Thing in rock, but to dispel the illusion that we need one. 

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You know what, though? If I wanted to read a book, I'd read a book.