none New Wavier

 

In the tradition of the Mr Jones song about worker drones commuting, having heart attacks, wasting away in an office cubicle etc ("Echo Beach", "Cardiac Arrest", "Solitary Confinement", "The British Way of Life", etc)

Despite a Top of the Pops appearance and the support of Radio 1 deejays who liked that sort of thing, "The Worker" was not quite a hit, loitering just outside the Top 50

But Fischer-Z enjoyed more success in Europe, apparently selling a couple of million albums over a long career

And they're still going, all ready to celebrate in 2026 the 50th anniversary of the band's formation 

Still plugging away into the Wide Brim Hat era 

Clever, perhaps even clever-clever -  but are they Clever Dick?

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. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

*  "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. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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

Quintessence of Old Wave (6 of ??) (Skunk versus Punk)

The three iterations of Skunk Baxter's guitar solo in Steely Dan's "My Old School" - but especially the second run-through at 2.27 -  distil Old Wave's quintessence in all its glory. There’s a blend of flash and feel, sophistication and funk, that's irrecoverable and out-of-reach for guitarists who came up through the New Wave. (Not that they’d even want to reach for this type and level of lickmanship, of course)

The full length studio version with the third solo at 4.45 included, Baxter wringing every last drop outta that riff

In the TV appearance, I like the way that during the second astonishing bit o' pickin'  Fagen seems so riveted he almost forgets to carry on playing the piano. I also enjoy the nonchalant nose wipe Skunk does when he’s finished showing off. (Of course it could be nasal drip, nudge nudge wink wink).

The only places this kind of flash/feel combo pops up its hairy head during the postpunk era is Old Wavers Disguised as New Wavers (John Turnbull in The Blockheads - check this for sheer flash-for-flash's-sake). Or just Old Wavers Carrying On being Old Wave Despite the New Wave and its Strictures and Edicts.  (In which category would fit Old Wavers At Heart Who Happen to Be New in the Marketplace – Mark Knopfler)

Rest of “My Old School” is fairly dispensable to me -  the hot horns, the chick backing singers, Fagen’s true-life tale of getting busted while at college thanks to some uptight female student grassing him to the cops. But I keep replaying that second solo. I’m surprised no one has isolated it and just looped it endlessly.

Getting into the nitty gritty of it with a guitar expert who asks, "Is this Steely Dan's’s greatest guitar solo?"

He points out that one of the reasons the solo is so exciting is that it is essentially rhythm-guitar-as-lead. 

Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter is ubiquitous in the Old Wave world – playing on records by sundry West Coast and elsewhere superstars (I did not know he appears on Hissing of Summer Lawns) but also leaving Steely Dan and joining The Doobie Brothers for their most sustained stretch of suckcess. 

Baxter was instrumental in the recruitment of Michael McDonald so we have him to thank indirectly for “What A Fool Believes”.

Via Phil in comments, a brand new Beato interview with Skunk Baxter on the Steely-Doobie years, off the back of that Yacht-Rock-doc

 He also facially looks Quintessentially Old Wave.

 

Skunk joined Spirit in the 1980s, which is about as Old Wave Will Never Die a thing to do as imaginable.

Goodness me, he played in Ultimate Spinach before any of the famous work.

 But here’s an interesting thing – while continuing to play with all sorts of legends to this day, he also opened up a second career front: as defense consultant,

“Baxter fell into his second profession almost by accident. In the mid-1980s, his interest in music recording technology led him to wonder about hardware and software originally developed for military use, specifically data compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices. His next-door neighbor was a retired engineer who had worked on the Sidewinder missile program. This neighbor bought Baxter a subscription to Aviation Week magazine, provoking his interest in additional military-oriented publications and missile defense systems in particular. He became self-taught in this area, and at one point wrote a five-page paper that proposed converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system. He gave the paper to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and his career as a defense consultant began. Baxter received a series of security clearances so he could work with classified information. “

He ends up on the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense, gets consulting contracts with  the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, serves similar sort of roles for the US Department of Defense, US intelligence,  the NASA Exploration Systems Advisory Committee,  and various military-industrial complex corporations in the aeronautics field.  “He is listed as "Senior Thinker and Raconteur" at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition”

Baxter is respected in the defense and intelligence community for his ability to think outside the box.

Baxter: "We thought turntables were for playing records until rappers began to use them as instruments, and we thought airplanes were for carrying passengers until terrorists realized they could be used as missiles. My big thing is to look at existing technologies and try to see other ways they can be used, which happens in music all the time and happens to be what terrorists are incredibly good at."

That’s a pretty wild tangent, for someone of that generation!

It’s also a good example of the opposite syndrome to Wiki Fizzle, which I have teased at various points and one day will unpack thoroughly, with numerous examples. The gist is that it's to do with the way that thanks to Wikipedia, nowadays you can find out about the career-peak aftermath of musicians, actors, entertainers, writers, film directors etc. Whereas pre-Wiki / internet, they would essentially disappear from view - unless you really tracked them through periodicals in the public library - and even then the spoor would get thinner and thinner as they grew less noteworthy, less noticed. As far as general public consciousness, their career profile would dip to near-invisibility. But thanks to Wiki etc, you can now see what they've been up to since they stopped having hits or being in the public eye. What you often find is that they have kept surprisingly busy - even immensely busy -  with all kinds of business ventures and artistic projects, attempts at reinvention, dabbles in unexpected fields e.g. writing a musical, career diversification, or just slogging away making record after record. But for all the persistence and productivity, the unmistakable bathos of decline hangs over the arc as detailed in the Wiki entry.  The career fizzles, fecundly (perhaps because if you ever had big success, people are more likely to indulge your reignite-career attempts, or fund your later pipe dreams?)

Conversely, Baxter's Act Two would represent Wiki Flourish if anything. 

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Tyler reminds, in Comments, that Skunk did the Astounding Lickmanship on Donna Summer's rock-ified "Hot Stuff"

Until  recently I have confused Skunk Baxter and Waddy Watchtel in my head as West Coast axeman-for-hire 

He looks quintessentially OW himself 

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

 the cusp of a changeover, dramatised in same-page juxtapositions in this June 4 1977 issue of Melody Maker

The band on the right is UFO

A cover of the Love song! 1967-in-1977!

Astonishingly faithful cover, in fact.

Interestingly. in the same issue, Caroline Coon, doing the singles, more or less says that punk is over already - it's become a cliche, something the industry will be churning out as product by the yard

Coon herself had been through several revolutions of the fashion cycle by this point... 

UFO, a few years earlier, put out a record, Force It, whose cover tangles up Old Wave and New Wave

The design is by Hipgnosis, which in this case probably means Peter Christopherson, because the naughty couple in the bathtub are Genesis P (ghastly ponytail!) and Cosey FT - this must be just as TG are getting started 

The Dropped Away

I have written before about the Drops Away Syndrome... that thing where artists seem supremely relevant and core-canonic at a particular moment, but then their reputations dip precipitously and never recover... such that no young person currently emerging into the condition of  informed, well-listened  fandom would bother to check 'em out, in some cases simply because they don't even know of that group's or artist's existence...  

So here's the New Musical Express's critics consensus of the 100 All-Time Greatest Albums from June 1st 1974. Let's look at the charting artists who've subsequently Dropped Away largely or utterly. 

 

12. Layla – Derek & The Dominoes

Debatable, but I think in terms of young listeners today, this would be the highest-placing album / artist in the list that is completely off the menu

Followed probably by this...

17. Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon & Garfunkel

And then (the curse of Clapton again)

20. Disraeli Gears – Cream

Debatable but I feel like your average becoming-hip youth would be more likely to have heard Les Rallizes Denudes than....

29. Back In The USA – MC5

Pretty certain that the eminence-with-critics held by this next chap during the early '70s (even more so in the States - where the likes of Marcus and Bangs thought he was some kind of saviour, a ruffian poet) is completely non-existent... not just with Gen Z but millennials and Gen X too 

32. Gasoline Alley – Rod Stewart

34. Every Picture Tells A Story – Rod Stewart

 

37. In The Court Of The Crimson King – King Crimson

Possibly pockets of interest in this lot among neo-prog and math-rock types, but generally dropped away I'd say

40. The Soft Machine – Soft Machine

Utterly voided

41. Hot Rats – Frank Zappa

I do have a student who is a Zappa nut.... but generally, off the table for anyone after punk

Now we get into the seriously gone-gone, dropped away zone ....

42. Traffic – Traffic

44. Music From A Dolls House – Family

50. Stand Up – Jethro Tull

54. Taylor, James – Sweet Baby James

Despite singer-songwriterism having returned with Lana D-R and Phoebe B et al 

Zappa again

58. Mothers Of Invention, The – We’re Only In It For The Money

60. Beck, Jeff, Group – Beck-Ola

Absolutely mystifying to anyone who came to consciousness after punk = the Great Stature of this axe-bore.

68. Mothers Of Invention, The – Freak Out

Zappa yet again. Apart from the Beatles, Stones, and Dylan, Frank & crew have the most placings on this chart, I think - and are the most annulled, whereas the Other Three are more impregnably canonic than ever.

70. Stills, Stephen – Stephen Stills

His daughter once took my photograph, on our porch, just feet from where I now type. Once tried to listen to Manassas but had to give up after 5 minutes. 

71. Winter, Johnny – Johnny Winter And

The whole blues-god, new prodigy of blues rock guitar thing... it's one of the most unreconstructable phenoms in rock history. Supposedly Johnny Winter's record deal was the biggest advance in history to that point, for a new act. 

72. Cocker, Joe – With A Little Help From My Friends

Alongside Joplin, surely the least-listened to Woodstock-era artist among all subsequent generations. 

75. Rundgren, Todd – A Wizard, A True Star

Despite influencing Prince and anticipating Ariel Pink in his recorded-it-all-on-his-Todd DIYness, Rundgren has not endured. I once spent an evening in the company of some Norwegians and Mr R and a succession of incredibly pricy vodka sours (this was during an Oslo music festival). He had bitter tales of recording with XTC and the intransigence of one Andrew Partridge. Did not respond well to my soused suggestion that he play Nazz's "Open My Eyes" at his concert the next night.

77. Jefferson Airplane, The – Crown Of Creation

Quite unrecoverable, I should think. I'm surprised this gets the nod and not After Bathing At Baxter's, my personal favorite in their most curious, trapped-in-time discograpy. Amazing how many albums they recorded after the famous hits...  they even had their own label, unhappily named Grunt.  Then the delta of solo albums, offshoots, Jefferson Starship...  almost a landfill in its own right.

81. Country Joe & The Fish – Electric Music For The Mind & Body

An absolutely forgotten group - for the longest while I myself had no idea they recorded this piercing psych rock mini-classic, having only ever heard the folksy protest ditty "Fixin-To-Die". I think the only reason I checked it out was I read that Tom Verlaine had been influenced. Psychedelia is obviously enduringly hip, if going through up-phases and relative dips, but this group - and acid rock generally, a different animal to psych  really - is not on the listening-list. See also Kaleidoscope (the US one not the Brit). 

85. Mayall’s, John, Bluesbreakers – Bluesbreakers

More Blues Boom boredom. Or so I assume. Wild horses couldn't drag me to the turntable  - or to Tidal - to give this a fair listen.

86. Traffic – Mr Fantasy

Traffic again. Very well respected once - their second album gets in Greil M's list at the back of Stranded, he says it's a British Music From Big Pink. I like the psych hit singles well enough. John Barleycorn is a particularly trapped-in-time listen.

90. Moby Grape – Moby Grape

Another one that makes the GM Stranded list (compiled around 1978 I should think so a post-New Wave lingering-on of Old Wave taste). I've tried but I can't find anything distinctive or memorable about the Grape. 

91. Big Brother & The Holding Co. – Cheap Thrills

San Francisco and all that made deep inroads into hip British taste - the magazine ZigZag was almost completely built around wistful West Coast longings among those just too young to have experienced it in real-time, let alone real-place.... Quicksilver Messenger Service epigones.... Hot Tuna hold-outs.... People who held their breath and waited and waited until the Grateful Dead would do their sporadic  live concerts in the U.K.  

(The first - and only, still - person of my own generation to suggest Big Brother might be worth listening to was J. Mascis...  in one of the several interviews I did with Dinosaur Jr, he was going on about a recent influence on his playing  being BB & THC's guitarist James Gurley. That gave me a right revisionist frisson, that did).

93. Doctor John – Gris-Gris

Dropped away utterly!

97. Newman, Randy – 12 Songs

I know a writer of the generation after mine who loves Newman (Mike Powell of Stylus / Pitchfork etc) but I would wager that His Gruffness's standing has plummeted precipitously. But in the early '70s he was the very definition of sophisticated and discerning rock taste, such that Marcus devoted an entire chapter of Mystery Train to his uuuurv, jostling alongside Sly Stone (!), The Band (!) and Elvis Presley (!!).

98. Spirit – The 12 Dreams Of Dr Sardonicus

More ZigZaggery.

I've tried with this group, this record, a bunch of times over the years but it's never stuck. My former MM colleague Paul Lester is a huge fan of Spirit even to the point of loving obscure Randy California solo albums. A fan of Rundgren too. (I think some of this may index to having grown up reading NME writer Max Bell, an Americanophile who wrote a riposte to Mick Farren's famous Titanic piece about the decadence of rock (the one that is said to have helped precipitate punk). Bell was - in early 1976 no less - like, "No, there's all this great music coming out of the U.S.A. Rock's getting every more sophisticated. It's just the UK scene that's a shithole. Start buying imports". )

99. Miller, Steve, Band – Sailor

Even more ZigZaggery. Children of the Future makes that back o' Stranded list. For those who know him only for "The Joker", "Abracadabra" and all those affably rockin' AM radio staples of the mid-70s, it's something of a head-swerve to learn that Miller was once revered as one of the finest blues-rock guitarists of his day and that the first couple of SMB albums are considered psych-era classics by some. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

So that's 30 albums that have Dropped Away - almost a third of the list. Which is not that bad, I suppose. It means that 70 percent of the music esteemed in 1974 still has some kind of standing in today's taste-schema - fifty years on. 

However I would wager that if there's an equivalent list that the NME did in 1979 or 1980 - and there may well be - the Dropped Away proportion would be larger, possibly considerably larger. And that subsequently there's been some canonic readmission, a bit of Dropped-Away-But-Steadily-Stealthily-Climbed-Back.  Revisionism and rehabilitation. Restoration.

For most of the Dropped Away here would have originally Dropped Away within four years of this list being compiled. It was the catastrophic Transvaluative Event of New Wave that caused all these artists to suddenly become utterly irrelevant, indeed in many cases actively repugnant to young ears. It happened almost overnight. 

Of course, many of the usurping upstarts have themselves suffered subsequently from the dreaded Drops Away Syndrome ... for who of the young generation listens to, or has even heard of, Eddie & the Hot Rods, the Motors, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Boomtown Rats, Eater, Mink Deville, Tom Robinson Band, the Vibrators, the Damned, the Adverts...?

New Wavest #2

When I first started getting into music, this chap was all over evening Radio 1. Particularly Peel, but all the homework-shift deejays. 

His gimmick, which doubled as shoot-your-own-career-in-the-foot gambit, is that each year he would change the group's name to a new variant involving the word "Spizz" 

Spizzenergi, Athletico Spizz 80, Spizzles, Spizzoil, I'm probably missing one or two.

Spizz being his own personal alter-ego. 

(Jim Thirlwell did the same thing with all the Foetus-based aliases, but it didn't seem to undermine his rise to renown to the same extent). 

What makes All That Spizz so archetypally New Wave - alongside the daft name + various musical attributes (choppy damped-strings rhythm guitar in some songs; the not-conventionally-good-voice-but-high-energy singing), is  this thing where the song-subject or song-scenario is absurd / inane / kitsch, but the urgency of the vocal delivery lends a certain intensity. Thinking of B-52s songs like "Planet Claire" or "Rock Lobster"... Lene Lovich...  

Moments in "Where's Captain Kirk?" remind me of Tenpole Tudor, another singer who threw himself into the rousing idiocy of his song-scenarios with a fanatical commitment. 

Perhaps Adam and the Ants in both pre-pop and smash hits phases fits here too. 

A not-bad-at-all stab at "Virginia Plain" finds the proto-punk in the original. 

interview with Spizz in Bongo News fanzine 1980

New Wavest of the New Wave

 

New Wave (premature sighting)

 

Melody Maker, November 1967

(via Peter Stanfield's post on Velvet Underground literature)

Old Waver turned New Waver

 

To celebrate Peelie's 40th Birthday in 1979, NME put him on the cover. They also printed a list of his 40 favorite tunes of all time, as played on his show the previous week. You can listen to John Peel's 40-at-40 faves here. 

What struck me about this list is the extent to which Peel's erased the music of the late 60s and the first half of the '70s. All the stuff on which he'd built his reputation - as broadcasting custodian of Underground  Rock - via his shows Perfumed Garden and Top Gear. The music on behalf of which he started his own record label, Dandelion.  

Almost the entire list consists of 

1/ early rock 'n' roll and blues

2/ punk and New Wave (three Undertones tunes in the Top 5! The godawful Quads)

3/ reggae and soul 

Okay, okay, there are two songs from the Dandelion catalogue, by Mike Hart and Medicine Head. And he does have a bona fide "heads" classic from Captain Beefheart.  There's a Faces tune and a Neil Young song. 

Still only 5 out of 40 to represent the whole 1966-1976 era - that's a bit of  personal history revisionism there.

Still, could have been worse - could have been Peel listing his 40 fave schoolgirls, eh? 

Instructive to compare this All Time Faves list with where Peelie's head was at in Christmas 1975 when he looked back at the year's offerings. This is his Top 15, counting down to the #1 which is the Be Bop Deluxe tune 

Peter Skellern - Hold On To Love (Decca)

Laurel And Hardy with The Avalon Boys - The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine (United Artists)

Mike Oldfield - In Dulci Jubilo (Virgin)

Joan Armatrading - Back To The Night (A and M)

10CC - I'm Not In Love (Mercury)

Bob Sargeant - First Starring Role (RCA)
Peter Frampton - Show Me The Way (A and M)
Bob Marley and The Wailers - No Woman No Cry (Island)
Joan Armatrading - Dry Land (A and M)
John Lennon - Imagine (Apple)
Rod Stewart - Sailing (Warner Bros)
Roy Harper - When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease (Harvest)
Jack The Lad - Gentleman Soldier (Charisma)
Millie Jackson - Loving Arms (Polydor)
Be Bop Deluxe - Maid In Heaven (Harvest)

You can hear the countdown of tracks with Peel's comments here




















Now you might think this is the absolute nadir of rock  music and the kind of climate that necessitated punk and its historical revisions, but immediately after playing Lennon's "Imagine" (not even properly from '75, a rerelease!), Peel actually says: "despite what other people say, I think this has been a great year for records, 1975 - and I think from this point on, all of the singles that I've chosen would actually get into my all-time Top 50" 

Unbelievably, the next one is

Well, he could have been correct in his prognosis about these glories getting into his all time Top 50, because the 1979 list is only a Top 40 - perhaps "Sailing", "When An Old Cricketer", "Gentleman Soldier", "Loving Arms" and "Made in Heaven" would have been tightly clustered in the 50 to 41 stretch. But I suspect not... I suspect they were all junked to make room for The Quads, Silicon Teens and SLF and more stuff like that. 

He did apparently insist to his dying day that The Quads was one of his all-time favorite singles. 

Here's his faves from the previous year, 1974

postscript 9/14/2023

 Michaelangelo Matos directs me to the famous Peel show in December 1976 which inaugurates the big switcheroo

https://www.mixcloud.com/karleldridge5/john-peel-10th-december-1976-the-famous-punk-rock-special/

And also points me to David Cavanagh's book Good Night and Good Riddance, "his history of John Peel on the radio through over 200 programs", which has good stuff on the Old Wave / New Wave transformation - MM helpfully directs readers to specific pages, suggesting starting "at p. 126 (Nuggets), jump to 188 (Ramones), then go from there"

I have the book and have dipped in here and there, but never read the stuff on the cusp-of-punk 

It's a great concept for a book. 

In fact, it struck me as a template that any number of writers could do and you would end up with a  largely different book each time. You could pick different shows than Cavanagh. Or you could pick some of the same shows he picked, but just focus on different records and artists. You could connect  the shows to different things going on in the wider music culture / society / politics. 

I even toyed with doing it as a blog series, and started gathering Peel shows. Not only did I not do the blog series, I have never listened to the Peel shows! 

One frustrating thing - something that frustrated Cavanagh -is  that the number of shows from the prepunk'70s that have survived through fan archiving is very spotty. For some reasons there's more from the late 60s, the Perfumed Garden, and early Top Gear - perhaps it was more of a big deal, or that was the only way to hear the music, so people got their reel-to-reel tape recorders out.  But some particular years in the early-mid '70s, there's only a handful of shows. Perhaps because Peel-type music you could get more easily from records shops... and it was prior to the cassette recorder becoming an integral part of music centers and transistor radio sets. 

Cavanagh, conscientious researcher that he was (RIP, BTW), actually journeyed out to some national library building on the periphery of London and went through the records of each show, in which Peel listed what had been played on forms, so that performing rights payments could be directed to the right parties. I believe a few of shows he writes about are ones where these documents are the only archival residue - he wasn't able to hear the show or Peel's patter between records. 

The prepunk '70s would be the ones I'd be most interested to hear. Because I didn't live through that era as a music fan - and the Old Wave gestalt is so fascinating. 

Whereas with postpunk, I was a regular and attentive Peel listener. Being of very limited funds, I'd taped tracks off it (although hardly ever sessions - back in the day I was never that excited by the whole Peel session thing. I'm now a little more interested, just because of things like the first Scritti session which contained tracks that would never be released or properly recorded. But back then, no... when he'd played a track from a session that was like an interruption in the flow of actual records as far as I was concerned.) 

Since Cavanagh did the book, some more Peel shows from the first half of the '70s have subsequently emerged. Often mutilated portions of a show, or of poor sound quality.  

But it's still very spotty.

But yeah I never did it.  

The whole later part of DC's project would not be tempting at all... meaning the last 25 years or so of his broadcasting. 

You see, my real-time impression of  Peel's show is that they got less enjoyable, essential or even useful in the post-postpunk era. 

New Pop he gave a wide  berth to (except for his cherished Altered Images) because it was getting played by the day time deejays on Radio One, so that meant he'd be stuck with (or perhaps simply preferred) postpunk's runty afterbirth, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, or actual punk records, from the Second Wave of Punk (I seem to remember a lot of Vice Squad). And there'd be roots reggae past its prime and the beginnings of his world-y interests. 

From that era I seem to recall taping an early Triffids session, when they were Birthday Party / Doors influenced. But it was a slim pickings sort of time. .

Then as we get into the mid-Eighties, the Peel Show became an increasingly dreary listen...  He did like the shambling bands, but which I mean the bogsheddy types, the rumbledythump bands as one fanzine tagged them, quite accurately. 

My memory is that from 1986 onwards I rarely listened to Peel  - partly because the show had got too eclectically disparate. But mainly - I just didn't need it anymore. As a music journo, I was getting sent so many of the new records, so I was able to be my own filter (Peel as filter seemed less and less reliable). And most evenings, I just wasn't in  - I was out seeing bands, seeing people, enjoying the other things London had to offer. 

As a journalist prone to excitation, I increasingly found Peel's gruff stolidity to be frustrating, deflating -  the chronic understatement of the patter seemed to have this levelling effect.

So I think I might have listened to Peel once in the entire 1990s. And then it was because it was playing in a car I was in. I seem to remember him playing quite an exciting techno record, a real juggernaut of a track. But you wouldn't habitually turn to Peel for guidance on that kind of music, would you?  Touching that he would continue to keep an interest (and later play his son's happy hardcore tunes), but yeah... there were other more reliable sources.