Old Grey Wave / Don't Go Back to Beardsville

 

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". 

Hey looky here - I am rereading Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (so unbelievably great) and here he is, in spring 1968, identifying the dynamic and actually using the term B.O.F., in reference to the Rolling Stones.

"That's how fast pop is: the anarchists of one year are the boring old farts of the next"

Early 1968 - the very dawn of what-would-be Old Wave but at that moment of dawning was a new tendency.

A development  Cohn detested of course -  Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom is elegaic, it ends with a "so that was Superpop, now it's all gone" coda, in which he mourns the emergence of an adult and arty rock. 

The two-and-a-bit greatest pages of writing about rock and pop ever, still. 

Although funnily enough for the paperback version a year or so later, Cohn adds a very very brief update on the state of rock - less than two pages - and the only bands he mentions as positive developments could not be more beardy, ZigZaggy, Old-Wave-to-be: Bonnie & Delaney & Friends, The Band, Flying Burrito Brothers.

Old Wave / New Wave cusp

It's the 50th anniversary of the founding of Trouser Press, celebrated by the publication of an anthology. 

In my mind, I always think of Trouser Press as archetypally New Wave, in part because of the graphic look of its famous record guides.... 

 

.... but also because all the issues I've ever seen have had New Wave (in all its senses - punk... skinny-tie power pop... and the MTV Brit Invasion era groups that we in the UK call New Pop) artists on the front cover. 

So I was surprised to learn that the magazine actually predates punk. It was founded in 1974. 

What defined its orientation, in fact, was not championing the New Wave, since that  didn't exist then... 

It was  Anglophilia. 

It was initially called Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press - hungry hands reaching across the Atlantic, to where the Good Music was - Great Britain.

Anglophilia so pronounced for a while it billed itself as 

"America's Only British Rock Magazine" !

Which sounds like a play on, and deliberate definition against, Creem's self-billing as "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine" (itself self-definition against Rolling Stone).

So originally Trouser Press was Old Wave, simply because there was no other Wave.  

Instead it believed that the Britannia ruled the (air)Waves. 

I suppose even the word "trouser" is Anglophiliac, given that Yanks say "pants"

Although looking into it, seems they say "trouser press" over here as often as "pants press"

If like me you've always thought of  Trouser Press as Noo Wave throo and throo, it's quite the surprise to see all these   

soon-to-be-decreed "Boring Old Farts" featured so heavily - the Queens and the Whos. 

Even outright proggers like Camel! Ex-Procol guitarman Robin Trower!

The first time an American artist gets the front cover treatment is Todd Rundgren - a chronic Anglophile himself - in July 1978, which is the thirtieth issue of Trouser Press.

I was surprised how long the coverage of Old Wave dominated. Deep into 1978, the B.O.F.'s are still getting nearly all the front covers - and the majority of the features inside too. 

Groups like Gentle Giant! The Strawbs! 

Endless appearances for Petes Townsend and Frampton. 

For Jeff bloody Beck. 

"Reviews A-Plenty" - what is this, the Mayor of Casterbridge?

Sparks featured - a group that some Britcrit or other quipped was "the best British band in America" or words to that effect

That cover looks like a beer mat. 

New Wave versus Old Wave

 

x

Old Wave As Can Be

 

December 4, 1976 - talk about epistemic transition cusp points! 

Also trailed on the cover -  Dylan, Clapton, Joni,Neil Young,Ringo, Ron Wood, The Band "on stage together" - is an "amazing report" on The Band's farewell concert in San Francisco. A.k.a. The Last Waltz - the event that more than any other pulled down the curtain on the Old Wave.

But The Damned have a single out, Sex Pistols too. And witness this tour ad inside the same issue