Todd-talk led me to this Old Grey Whistle Test excursion to Bearsville, New York, in 1977 - for the Bearsville Picnic, an annual festival convened by Albert Grossman and his Bearsville label. Performances by Foghat, Jesse Winchester, Paul Butterfield, Corky Laing, Todd Rundgren and Utopia.
A year earlier, Bob Harris and the OGTW camera crew made a similar jaunt to Georgia for the Macon Whoopee Festival, instigated by the Southern Rock label Capricorn. Performers include Wet Willie, The Marshall Tucker Band, Bonnie Bramlett, Sea Level. There's an all-star jam featuring Dickey Betts, Elvin Bishop, Dan Toler, Bramlett, and Stillwater. Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter - who'd just announced his run for President - talks about the importance of rock music for youth consciousness today.
Thinking about what "Old Wave" means - and it's not a term anyone used at the time - it occurred to me that it's not something you would apply to anything and everything pre-punk. It doesn't make sense to tag Leo Sayer or Lynsey de Paul "Old Wave" - or most of the contents of the pop charts, for that matter. (Obviously, it's not a distinction that works at all with black music - soul, reggae, funk, disco, all of that stands completely outside this schema).
"Old Wave" describes specifically what until that point been a new wave of a kind in itself: the proggily expansive (but also sophisto / rootsy) movement in rock from about '67 onwards, plus attendant values, assumptions, attitudes, mannerisms, argot, sartorial-tonsorial trappings, graphic design conventions etc etc.
Growing a beard (Beardsville would work just as well as Bearsville). Getting better and better at playing your instrument. Songs getting longer. Solos stretching out. The growing-up of rock.
(In that sense, "Old Wave" kinda does fit, in so far as this was rock'n'roll growing older, embracing grown-up seriousness - leaving rock 'n 'roll and its teenage outlook behind).
People didn't say Old Wave at the time (i.e. 76-77), but they did say "Boring Old Fart" - that was the antonym of New Wave.
B.O.F. - a hurtful, heartless designation for artists you once admired.... former heroes in many cases... and by extension, a set of aesthetic values you most likely subscribed to until very recently (Mark Perry with his Zappa albums, Keith Levene with his Yes groupiedom).
The sort of people who embraced punk included a lot of people who had been listening to Little Feat and Hawkwind right up until Horses and the debut Ramones.
(I have mentioned before the lovely, lovely touch in 24 Hour Party People: Tony Wilson - shoulder length hair all through this period - and his chums go back to their pad after seeing the Pistols at the Lesser Free Hall, but what they put on to play while skinning up is John Martyn's Solid Air).
"Boring Old Fart" was wielded against people who were then in their early thirties, sometimes even late twenties. People once loved, now ruthlessly shoved behind a temporal line - in effect, told "you're useless... go away and die".
And of course a lot of the New Wavers were at least as old as the Old Wavers.
ReplyDeleteThink there was a bit of revenge built in there - those who had had to wait years for their opportunity were suddenly able to punish those they had previously envied. Not just being able to surpass them, but also to annihilate them, render their previous work void. I suspect this is an overlooked dynamic.
It's a rhetorical putsch. Not so much patricidal as older-fratricidal. That rejecting the music of your older sibling is part of the dynamic too.
DeleteQuite a few of the New Waves had literally been Old Wave - the Police. The drummer was in Curved Air and the guitarist had been in Spooky Tooth and before that John Baldry's band, I think. And Sting was in some kind of jazz-fusion type outfit called Last Exit, I believe.
There's quite a few other examples - my favorite is the Ruts. Some of them had been in a hippy band called Aslan. If I recall right they were living in a commune in Wales when they caught wind of punk and rushed back to Lewisham for a rethink of what they doing.
Zoot Money's Big Roll Band, that's what Andy Summers was in. Which evolved into the psychedelic band Dantalian's Chariot.
DeleteI'm not sure where I got the idea he was in Spooky Tooth (and I've actually watched a whole doc on Summers, he comes over quite sympathetic - almost bullied by Sting). No, it was Soft Machine he was in for a while.
Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello and The Only Ones were other examples I think. But although all these gentlemen were in Old Wave bands, they were fortunate in not having acquired enough visibility and recognition during that period.
DeleteFor example if Costello had made it big in 1974 as Declan Costello in Flip City, then he would himself have been a redundant old fart by 1977. Reduced to standing on the sidelines cursing youthful upstarts like Jet Black.
This isn't exactly Old Wave, because they never recorded, but the anarcho-punk band Zounds started out as a hippie jam group.
DeleteCrass were total hippies, living in a commune. Some of them had been in a freeform noise group pre-punk, played at experimental / arts happening type festivals.
DeleteAs you say, this discourse was almost entirely outside of Black music, although there is one fun counter-example in Bob Marley’s Punky Reggae Party. There’s a section in one of the verses that I had never been able to make out, but just the other day I happened to see from the lyrics. He sings the repeated line: “No Boring Old Farts, No Boring Old Farts, No Boring Old Farts.”
ReplyDeleteFeels like a inadvertent admission of anxiety there from Marley. He had embraced the Old Wave of rock more effectively than any other reggae star, and was himself on the wrong side of 30 by the time of punk.
Yes that's really funny that he picked up on the phrase. But he was totally embraced by the long-hair audience. He was on Island, the progressive label. Clapton covered 'I Shot the Sheriff". Etc.
DeleteAren't you (and quite a few music critics, by the by) sneering far too much over the class of '77 having bought a few copies of Brain Salad Surgery (or at least, reading too much significance into it)? Wasn't it the first full example of 18-yr-olds growing shamefaced over their naïve tastes when 14? That doesn't make them hypocrites; it makes them teenagers. The coolest album to own in my comp ca. 1997? The Fat of the Land. I can't recall anyone playing it five years later, when I started uni (the cool Prodigy track then was Out of Space, but our gang wasn't that big into dance, so perhaps not the most discerning of judges).
ReplyDeleteWould you want your musical opinions judged on what you listened to before you lost your virginity? I'm guessing no.
I'm not sneering at anyone - I'm just marveling at how swiftly one set of music values was exchanged for another. The speed of the transvaluation never ceases to blow my mind.
DeleteIf anything, I feel sorry for the Old Wavers, who abruptly found themselves decreed retrogressive, decadent and irrelevant. At an age that nowadays nobody would consider to be "old" - early thirties.
Then again, that sort of "all change" was a tremendous burst of cultural energy, a sort of enforced amnesia almost about the recent past.
I mean, it is funny that people literally hid some of their LPs because it was suddenly embarrassing and shameful to have once liked prog or whatever....
My pre-virginity listening? Well, that's what the Rock Songs I Loved Before My Taste Formed series is all about. Which I do intend to resume, probably starting with ELO.
The first thing I heard after I lost my virginity was "Now then, now then, would you like a Jim'll Fix It medal?"
DeleteOooh...
DeleteYes it was while I was watching early Saturday evening telly.
DeleteWhat's funny from our perspective is that it was a tremendous burst of cultural energy that almost had to will, violently force itself into being, which in turned signaled how it was in some respects a cap on the previous half-century of energy - lots of things that would be explored in the next few decades were born in those years, but they would play out at a progressively slower rate. The conditions were already feeling less welcoming, which explains the vehemence to a certain degree
Delete(something I've heard from multiple writers of an age and position to say so - Lucy Sante, the feminist/sex activist Susie Bright - is that for them, it felt like the 20th century ended in the late 70s/early 80s, when AIDS and Reagan closed it out. Which is something you might expect a boomer mourning their youth to say, but also seems undeniably true)
I agree Tyler, and I think that is a very profound insight. The strange mixture of energy and nihilism of the New Wave was simultaneously an attempt to revivify the counter-culture and also a bitter acknowledgement of its waning.
DeleteThat ambivalent feeling runs throughout Punk and New Wave. It was like ECT on a heart attack victim - it might revive them, it might kill them, or it may have no effect either way. In the end, it kind of kept the patient alive, but in a much reduced capacity.
There's a probably apocryphal Miles Davis quote about the definition of jazz: 'you could sum it up in about four words - Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker'. There's obviously all sorts of ways you could pick that apart, both in terms of its reductionist approach to jazz and its comparability to other genres, but it shows that a old wave/new wave binary is a feature in non-rock
ReplyDelete(Garry Giddins once noted that bebop and first-wave rock n roll were respectively the most complex and simplest musics to gain immediate popular acceptance, but that they inevitably progressed in the opposite direction - bop got slower, simpler and either funkier or icier; rock got more self-consciously sophisticated and serious, in one way or another)
The problem with the New Wave in rock, as far as I see it, was that it was a furiously brilliant fratricidal spasm of a movement that found itself frozen in place - after the rush of activity and exploring the available terrain from the late 70s to the early/mid 80s, all involved seem to realize on some level that there was no successor movement coming up in front of them, so they just sort of retreated back under the punk umbrella and stayed there - no more free from aging retrenchment than the hippie farts five to ten years older than them were
Hmmm, yes there are phases and new sounds and directions in jazz - but I don't think there's the same patricidal / repudiate-your-elders dynamic with bebop. They all revered Armstrong and Ellington, surely? (Miles would do the extraordinarily haunted and mournful Ellington elegy "He Loved Him Madly")
DeleteIf there was a reactive drive with bebop, it was more against swing and the big band white-ificaiton of jazz, I should have thought.
Trad jazz, in the UK, actually is like the punk of jazz - a "back to basic", return to the Origin movement, back to New Orleans and "hot". There's an interview with Humphrey Lyttleton where he says we are restoring the idea of jazz as dance music. (But not swing - jazz-as-dance with guts, music for ravers). In Littleton's schema, bebop is something like prog rock - too cerebral, too inward, too complex - it's lost touch with the go-crazy, wild-party spirit of the original jazz.
'patricidal / repudiate-your-elders dynamic with bebop' - not to the same extent, but it was there to a degree; mostly in response to big band and swing but also the nascent New Orleans revival ('moldy figs') that later spawned the UK trad revival - which had a similar dynamic to the mods, in fact
Delete'bebop is something like prog rock' - yes, which is an interesting example of how value judgments (and class associations - supposedly middle-class trad/prog, upwardly mobile working class mod/punk) could get reversed in jazz and rock
That is an interesting distinction: as you say, jazz players of later generations tended to revere the old masters, rather than writing them off. They embraced their status as innovators - “the New Thing”, “Tomorrow is the Question”, etc - but made clear they were innovating within a tradition. You were never going to see Ornette Coleman wearing an “I hate Charlie Parker” t-shirt. If you read accounts of the jazz scene in Harlem in the 1940s, for example, it’s clear that it was ferociously competitive. Everyone was trying to go further than everyone else. But that seems like a contest at the level of the individual, like a rap battle, rather than a clash of movements and ideologies.
DeleteIt was the critics who drew the battle-lines, not the artists. Philip Larkin was a great advocate for Trad - the Nik Cohn of jazz - and the language he uses could be transposed directly across to hardcore or a lot of the Mew Wave. What he likes is energy, dance beats and catchy melodic hooks. What he hates - which he finds in Bebop and just about everything that came after it - is seriousness, complexity, conceptual ambition.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that it is the more European collectivist sensibilities of UK music culture - and the UK music press in particular - that incline it towards those narratives about waves and movements, while the US has generally been more focused on individual bands or local / regional music scenes.
Apologies for double posting. I can’t work out how to delete the first one
ReplyDeleteFixed it!
DeleteThanks!
DeleteRe: the Boring Old Fart syndrome, I'm reminded of reading about Neil Young appearing on stage with Devo in the late '70s and receiving a torrent of age-related abuse from their (presumably punkoid) crowd: lots of "fuck off granddad", "dozy old hippie" etc.
ReplyDeleteNeil Young's age in 1979 = 34.
Always amazes me to compare this to the total non-reaction & lack of generational angst likely to be generated by, say, someone who had a hit record in 2017 guesting on stage with a new(ly fashionable) band in 2024.