Of the three, Arthur Brown is perhaps the least hokey
It must have been genuinely alarming for parents and middle-of-the-roaders to see this witch-doctor prancing in the Top of the Pop studio, fringed with flames.
Taunting the squares in their sitting rooms:
"You fought hard and you saved and earned
But all of it's going to burn...
You've been living like a little girl
In the middle of your little world
Also, this is 1968 - riots and sit-ins and disorder in the streets. "Burn baby burn!"
It's like a frightfully English mummer show / Medieval carny type version of the Doors's Dionysianism (keyboard-dominant sound too)
That strange, hip-dislocating jive Arthur B does at one point! The demonic laughter!
Of course those three do not exhaust the rock thematics of Hell, the Devil, Satan, etc
Huge amounts more in the metal area
Hmmm, doing the Stones or Sabbath seems too obvious
What else?
I was about to say Killing Joke were an genuinely infernal band (before they shlocked out)
And then saw that actually have a song on this topic, or near it
Revelations is the ungodly peak
I assume "pandys" is some kind of reference to pandemonium in its original / literal meaning
Probably crops up a lot in soul and country and reggae and such
Ah, how could I forget? Not hokey at all this, absolutely terrifying. I tried to listen to this album in the dark when I first got it, but had to turn the lights back on.
Had a very pleasant conversation with La Galas in, I think, late '86, interviewing her in cafe in Queensway.
That Arthur Brown performance must have been quite the treat to see for anyone growing up back in 1968. Although not glam rock musically, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown definitely anticipated the performance art and theatrics of glam rock. I'm amazed that Arthur didn't try to capitalize on glam when it became a thing just a few years later.
ReplyDeleteIt also exemplifies why this lifelong Anglophile has always preferred British psychedelia to its American counterpart. I'Il always take the more varied/experimental sounds and tighter musicianship of the Brits over the stodgy rhythms and sloppy sounds of the Yanks (though some U.S. outliers, like Silver Apples rate highly for me). I believe you wrote on one of your blogs where you spelled out the differences between the two quite well.
I'm anticipating your eventual Purely Personal Wholly Subjective Dropped Away List for the Birthday Party entry. Though they were quite the transgressive and violent group in their day, most of their output just strikes me as ridiculous, proto-edgelord posturing and cartoonish to be taken seriously. It's like if one of the Cramps (Boy, there's a band that should be more disdained) split away to do a side project that took itself more "seriously" and incorporated a bunch of southern gothic/blues cliches. All that said, I do like their work up through Prayers on Fire, when they retained some elements of quirkiness and experimentation. Mutiny in Heaven (the song in your post), is one of the few post-PoF BP songs I can stomach, probably because I like the percussion and little else about it.
Yes I have a bit in Shock and Awe about Crazy World of Arthur Brown anticipating Alice Cooper. Although before either, there was Screamin' Jay Hawkins (and Anglo copy thereof Screamin' Lord Sutch).
DeletePsychedelia > acid rock is the way I see it. There was some proper American psychedelia - Beacon Street Union, Electric Prunes - but it was considered bandwagon-jumping, almost bubblegum. The Byrds when they really used the studio also got in the vicinity of the British way of going about it.
I do really enjoy the Birthday Party's music - the early singles, Prayers on Fire, the final two EPs ... Junkyard I find a bit hard-going maybe... but I can't quite take it as seriously as I once did. Which was insanely seriously, so perhaps a drop-off would be inevitable and natural.
Yes I must get back to the Purely Personal thing... I keep thinking of new ones... Another concept I thought of doing is "reversals" - where you feeling / estimation for an artist starts high, drops dramatically, and then comes back... or variations thereof. Fluctuations in one's internal Stock Exchange over a long span.
"Mutiny In Heaven" reminds me a bit of the passage in Maldoror where the protagonist has a visit with God and finds the Deity sitting on a throne of excrement, munching on the brains of humans, senile and corrupt. It seems like the kind of book Cave would have been devouring at one poin t- and then he junked the French fin de siecle stuff in for Faulkner and the King James Bible.
See, to me as an American, 'acid rock' connotes bands like Iron Butterfly and Steppenwolf - numbskull (in the most positive sense) garage bands from the outer suburbs getting hold of recent advances in both pharmaceuticals and amplification from the city and running hog wild with them - the prefigurement of Hawkwind's 'cavemen with spaceships' ethos and close kin to both the proto-punk (Stooges) and proto-arena (Grand Funk) ends of US hard rock
DeleteYes I guess that is part of it - the greaser / 'heavy' end of it - but I think it also refers to the San Francisco bands... various oddballs like Mad River, Autosalvage, HP Lovecraft, Kak... Clear Light... Kaleidoscope... the Bosstown Sound (more like the UK idea of psych perhaps)... then there's the Texas stuff
DeleteThis immediately made me think of the opening of Locust Abortion Technician with the quiet build, the corny father-son chat and then "SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!" And there is 'Graveyard' on the same album.
ReplyDeleteBut, of course, there is layer of irony or goofing around with the Buttholes.
Ah that is a good one.
DeleteAlso sampled memorably by Orbital for 'Satan'. I always wondered about that dialogue. Did it originate with the Buttholes? Or did they borrow it from somewhere?
DeleteI suspected this and a quick Google seems to confirm my intuition: there isn't a single Hell song in all Black Sabbath's albums with Ozzy. The closest they get is After Forever, from Master of Reality, where Geezer Butler writes about how "I've seen the light and I've changed my ways" so he can stay out of Hell. But even then, as is usually the case with Butler's lyrics, the Hell being evoked is pretty clearly meant to be metaphorical, not literal.
ReplyDeleteAnd then on their first time out with Ronnie James Dio they actually titled the album 'Heaven and Hell', so clearly they couldn't keep out of it forever.
And of course, Satan / Lucifer does show up a lot. Including in the magnificent NIB, which has some of the greatest lyrics in the history of rock.
DeleteGoing way back, surely the musical figure most associated with Satan is Robert Johnson. Aside from the crossroad legend, his work is full of infernal imagery (Me and My Devil Blues, Hell Hound on my Trail, etc.).
ReplyDeleteTartini's Violin Sonata in G minor (published in 1799, 29 years after Tartini's death), aka the Devil's Trill Sonata, was allegedly based on a dream where the devil visited Tartini and played the most virtuosic violin. Paganini also suffered rumours that he'd sold his soul to Satan. Is that the earliest example of such a rumour in music?
There is something called the tritone, an interval or something like that, which according to metal lore was associated with satan centuries ago, and was prohibited in the middle ages. And Tommy Iommi on his last shift working at a steel mill in Birmigham, cause he was going full time as Sabbaths guitarist, was told by his boss to please, do just one more shift the next day, he would be in big trouble if he didn´t go, so Tommy accepted. And on that cursed last day at the mill a piece of molten metal cut the tip of one of Tommy´s fingers. Furious by his bad luck, which he thought would not let him be a professional guitarrist anymore he started playing angrily, now his missing fingertip making natural to him to play the tritone. And thus heavy metal guitar was born. It´s a nice story and nobody can deny it.
ReplyDelete"Black One" by Sunn 0))) is the most beautiful piece of guitar music dedicated to the devil I've ever heard.
ReplyDelete