Stephen Stills's verdict on the New Wave
"A rock opera based on Shakespeare's Coriolanus..."
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Okay, let's see how things had shifted, in terms of the canon, slightly more than a decade after the 1974 appraisal by the critics of t... -
Onto the third installment of this series - the NME 's list of the Greatest Albums of All Time, published on October 2 1993. Here, it... -
I have written before about the Drops Away Syndrome... that thing where artists seem supremely relevant and core-canonic at a particular mo...
Re: Stills - I'm sure that his animus is at least partially sincere, but there's also a little consciously taking the bait. His modus operandi in interviews and many personal interactions around that time seemed to be deliberate trolling and being the biggest asshole he possibly could to whoever he was speaking to - Graham Nash had two stories about mid-70s meetings with 1) McCartney, where he spent the entire time ridiculing his choice of a Hofner bass; 2) Dylan, who performed the songs for Blood On The Tracks for them solo, to which Stills made a big show of fake-yawning and giving so-so hand gestures after every single one.
ReplyDeleteThis is also around the time he had a psychotic break from reality (somewhere around the 74 CSNY tour), bought a secondhand Army uniform, and started talking to people about his combat tours in Nam, if that paints even more of a picture
I knew that you liked CSNY but not that you were such a goldmine of info on Stills! He does seem a bit dick-ish, you just get that vibe from his face somehow.
DeleteThese comments reminded me a bit of that phase at the height of glam when the Eagles wore "Song Power" T-Shirts and did a press conference in NYC where they made a point of slagging off New York Dolls, the local critic's pets.
I do enjoy them, but most of the above actually comes from Jimmy Mcdonough's Neil biography Shakey, which is itself a goldmine of from-the-source gossip (I have no idea how he got half the interview subjects to go on record with their comments)
DeleteWhat's funny about Stills is how often he seems to silently backtrack one way or the other - he auditioned for, then hung out with, the Monkees, then went around mocking them to interviewers later; he went on the above tirade about punk, then recorded (at the latter's request) a cover of 'Search and Destroy' with the younger guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepard in the early 10s (no, I have not listened to it - I get the feeling I would open the seventh seal if I did)
Going back over this post in detail - what jumps out at me going through the post-75 stuff is how immediately punk made itself known, and how conscious the changeover was - the boilerplate retrospective was that punk came out of nowhere and nobody expected it, but whether they approve or not (I love the Pistols/Grundy responses - an outraged Zeppelin fan, an outraged Roxy fan, and an 'I agree, but why'd you take the bait when swearing isn't that shocking anymore?') everybody seems ready for some kind of sea change, and everyone seems to automatically expect these kinds of shifts, that they happen on a regular cycle - which would not be true for much longer, for all sorts of reasons
ReplyDeleteYes! What I found most interesting was the debate in Sounds in November 1976, when someone writes in trying to establish a Before and After divide with plenty of “wrong” opinions: Rainbow lined up alongside the Stooges, Rush alongside Lee Perry. That feels authentic to my memories of taste in the suburbs - ie well away from any centers of fashion or political division - in the 1970s, when it was perfectly possible to like the Stranglers and Hawkwind, the Pistols and Foreigner. But then someone else immediately writes in to challenge that view, defining the canon and the exclusions along the more “correct” lines that came to dominate the discourse.
DeleteReally fascinating to see history being made in real time like that
It reminds me of China Mieville’s book on the Russian Revolution. After the old order has fallen, but before it has become clear what is going to replace it, a window of absolute possibility opens up. It feels as though history could go in many different potential directions. And although that sense is to some extent an illusion - there are vast impersonal forces that work to confirm some possibilities and close off others - there is also some space for real human agency. People can choose the future they want. And the ones who have enough ambition, ability and luck can make it a reality.
DeleteWho played that role in the Punk revolution? Lydon and Strummer, among the performers. Mclaren, along with Julien Temple and Jamie Reid. Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons. Who else?
What fascinates me though with music is how much the older order persists. You have all these A&R decisions from the years before immediately before the All Change. Bands signed up - contracted to put out second or third albums. It's a contractual obligation on the record companies just as much the group. They have put out and promote all this stuff that is completely out of fashion, even as they are signing up new groups on the new template (and embarrassingly changing their own hair and clothing, wearing things with zips and leather). The cusp years are fascinating because you'll have ads in the music papers that are still on the Roger Dean or Hipgnosis line or the appallingly-sexist-visual-joke approach, juxtaposed with these thrilling new style of marketing like the ads for releases on Radar, or for a group like Devo. Even with the articles in the paper, you'll have the new groups with their hair and the punky shapes they're throwing, but then some bearded instant-relic whose look would have been sexy only a year earlier. But proggy-looking stuff lingers for quite a while into the postpunk phase, and often sells quite well. Well Pink Floyd and Yes and Genesis were never more commercially successfully than at the end of '70s and early '80s.
DeleteThe subject of musicians who are totally sideswiped off by punk and left for dead is another topic - Steve Harley for example was absolutely embittered and paranoid about it.
Right - record executives are chasers by definition, but they have to do their best to prognosticate by default, so there's always a bunch of poor bastards left holding the bag after having been promised the world by the label just before the epoch shift.
DeleteBig established artists aren't often treated like acceptable losses - usually they get quietly slotted into the patronizing category of 'legacy artist', which is code for 'sells well, but nobody outside their established fanbase gives a shit' - but if you're a cult or marginal figure to begin with, it very quickly turns into a zero-sum game.
There's a story about David Blue, the peer-respected but weak-selling ex-Greenwich Village singer-songwriter, going to see his manager Elliot Roberts and being asked to meet Roberts' new clients, Devo. And as Casale gives him the de-evolution spiel, Blue sinks further and further into his chair, because he knows that when this is what his own manager is signing up (at the urging of his other clients - and Blue's friends - Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, no less), there's not going to be room in the future for somebody like him. (Ironically, Blue later co-starred with Devo in Young's Human Highway, though it was released after he had passed in 81 from a heart attack.)
That is true. And yet some of the Old Wave managed to adapt to the new era remarkably well, not just in commercial but in artistic terms. Rush listened to Talking Heads and The Police and had their glory years in the early 80s. Neil Young’s electro album is great. The Yes album with Buggles in the band is not great, exactly, but certainly the most interesting music they had made for many years. Robert Fripp also had a new lease of life, solo and with a new incarnation of King Crimson, and made himself useful to Blondie and Bowie. (Bowie is of course the great survivor of the Punk cataclysm, like one of those particularly skilled functionaries who can make themselves as invaluable to the new regime as they were to the old. Or maybe like Werner von Braun, who helped develop rockets both for the Nazi war machine in WW2 and for the arsenal of democracy in the Cold War.)
DeleteThe other great example of Prog evolution is Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which is largely post-punk ideologically if not musically. The lyrics for Another Brick in the Wall could have been written by Jimmy Pursey. Setting them to a 4/4 beat, explicitly influenced by disco, was a sure-fire recipe for a hit. It was an acutely contemporary record!
The orchestrations are by Bob Ezrin, string arranger for Alice Cooper, who while clearly pre-Punk had also managed to retain some of his cachet.
The construction of post-punk Pink Floyd extended to the film of The Wall, casting archetypal New Waver Bob Geldof as Roger Waters’ avatar.
Yes some Old Wavers adapted really adroitly (and in fact the Police fit that description - they were proggers before, unsuccessful ones in Sting's case with his fusion band, whereas Summers was successful in a journeyman, frequently employed sense, Copeland had been in Curved Air I think). It's also the case that yer actual archetypal New Wavers had only just been Old Wave - Costello was a fan of Joni, James Taylor, Leon Russell et al. It's not like many of the punks or New Wavers sprung into existence out of nowhere, punctually, in the first weeks of 1977. In most cases, they'd been doing something, having a go, entertaining hopes, for some years already.
DeleteRush is a good example of a band being improved by a little bit of New Waviness. Another is ZZ Top - starts with Deguello, gets really quite New Wavey with El Loco ("Pearl Necklace" - the only thing that doesn't make it New Wave is the raunchy lyric - New Wave didn't do sex very well, on the whole - sexual failure, frustration, bitterness, yes but not actual grown-up nookie)). Fripp is the total transformation man - out goes the long hair, in comes very short barnet, tight jacket, and an extremely thin tie.
DeletePink Floyd - a girlfriend of mine who was totally New Wave / postpunk in her tastes, huge fan of Killing Joke, was a huge fan of The Wall - the movie in particular. The sombreness and the message-mongering is what made it so New Wave.
Fripp always seemed like a pretty buttoned-up character. You get the impression he was delighted to have an excuse to get his hair cut and ditch the wide collars and loon pants.
DeleteBy the way talking about Mieville, I am reading The City and The City - although a tiny bit disappointed it takes the "dead body" / detective route (a frequent narrative in alt-history, I guess it allows the story to transect social strata and give a wide view of the different reality) it is amazing stuff.
ReplyDeleteI am glad you are enjoying it! There is a sad but touching story about his choice of narrative structure. Mieville’s mother was dying, so he wanted to write something that she would enjoy, and she was a huge fan of police procedurals. He spent a long time reading into the genre as preparation for writing it.
DeleteAnd as you say, the genre does fit the concept very well. It’s hard to think a a better real-world analogue for the idea of “two separate but physically co-located cities” than the distinction between being inside and outside the law.
DeleteThat's a very good excuse for having their approach to plot - did it for me mum. It's a good story too. I find that imaginatively I'm casting many of the scenes in that "cold green light" that graders use in detective series on TV - light redolent of morgues and the unhealthy light in institutional spaces.
DeleteThe whole concept of unseeing, crosshatched areas, the Breach etc is awesomely imagined.
"Taking the bait" -- Stills on punk, Pistols on Grundy, Costello re. Ray Charles...
ReplyDelete