replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
"He didn't have much of a voice either, he was all nose and tonsil, a poor man's Buddy Holly. What he did have, though was... a certain persistent oddity, a real individuality. His first number one, What Do You Want?, was one continuous hiccough, a dying fit, agonized and agonizing, the words contorted almost beyond recognition. He spewed up the word 'baby' as 'biybe', choking horribly on each vowel, and that was the major hook... it was catching; it made him. One word mispronounced and he had his whole career going for him"
- Nik Cohn, AwopBopaLooBopLopBamBoom.
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Arrangement by John Barry!
Adam Faith's singing style - seemingly composed out of multiple speech impediments - is the ancestor for both Steve Harley and D Double E.
"Natch, he flogged it hard, spluttering and expiring like a man inspired, and he did very nicely. In retrospect, his big hits - Poor Me, Someone Else's Baby, How About That? - stand up as the best, most inventive British records of that time, the only truly POP music we were producing then."
- Nik Cohn, AwopBopaLooBopLopBamBoom.
"But the most important thing he did was to introduce the concept of Pop Singer as Thinker, now so popular in documentaries and the Sunday Papers"
- Nik Cohn, AwopBopaLooBopLopBamBoom
Sitting in the hot seat - still warm from Carl Jung and Edith Sitwell - Adam Faith, interviewed by John Freeman for Face to Face, wowed parents across the land: what a thoughtful, well-spoken, courteous and candid young man. No hooligan he: reads books, listens to classical music.
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.
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.
