WOEBOT

I'm not exactly certain how I ended up checking out so much Italian Prog this year, and at moments putting together this piece I wondered what the hell I was doing listening to this often difficult music. I suppose I was fascinated with how such an intensely creative, individual music came into ascendence in such a short time-frame (1973 and 1974 if one's being harsh), I also have a missionary desire to redress the disproportionate celebrity Krautrock enjoys in the UK and US but in the process of immersing myself in it I came to really dig it and its nuances.

I wish I knew more about the background to the music, about the "anni di piombo", the Red Brigade, the radicalised campuses, the power of the unions. I suspect that youth made a concerted effort to channel violence in more constructive ways, but I'm afraid (like my German) my Italian is non-existent. I do know from reading interviews with musicians that these years were marked by an incredible degree of cooperation and "healthy competition" between groups. On the other hand with the context melting away, and as a foreigner both in time and geography, one is free to enjoy the music on its own merits. After a good deal of research I cherry-picked these records as being, perhaps, the absolutely best examples of the genre.

Alphataurus: Alphataurus

Alphataurus were either from Genova or Milan. No-one seems to be able to agree. This stunning one-off LP came out in 1973 in a triple gate-fold sleeve. I dig the absurdly portentous imagery but then my taste has been corroded by exposure to all things Prog. Part Black Sabbath with a dash of early King Crimson like a lot of Italian Prog it's probably better to describe it as, get your pen's ready, Symphonic Hard Rock. Amazing crescendos full of bravura, extraneous gamma-ray synths and some of the crispest, most satisfying drum-fills ever committed to tape.

Area: Crac!

A NWW record. Area must be the most typically "Prog" of all the Italian groups, on Crac! they even bought into the classic Prog "egg" motif. That they were theoretically "an international pop group" like wot it says on the cover, with members from Greece, Belgium and France, may have something to do with this. Their self-conscious focus on instrumental prowess (singer Demetrio Statos had a voice which spanned four octaves) and a dalliance with Jazz (later collaborating with Steve Lacy and Paul Lytton) make them appear somewhat like Henry Cow. However, unlike Henry Cow, as well as noodling with the best of them, Area could also write cracking tunes like on this record the insane vampire-funk of "La Mela di Odessa" and "Gioria e rivoluzione".

Balletto Di Bronzo: Ys

Which came up recently in reference to the Joanna Newsom LP of the same name. I first laid ears on BDiB in a double pack of delights which my friend Francesco sent me. The track "Eh eh ah ah" pretty much blew me away. Like a semi-acoustic Slade with floral pretensions there's a mascara'd moonboot stomp to their music which is exquisitely dread, traces as well of Canned Heat's "On the road again" churned into a tremulous fuzz-bass riff. That track isn't actually on this their classic LP. From Naples, "Ys" was released in 1972, my favorite here is the superbly depressed sounding "Introduzione", Gianni Leone having a unplaceably eldritch quality to his desperate vocals. This record is on the famous NWW list.

Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso: Darwin!

Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso: Io Sono Nato Libero

The giants of Italo Prog. I prefer the gentler sounds of "Io Sono Nato Libero" their third LP above "Darwin!", particularly "Non Mi Rompete", though all of their first three records are very good. Banco are still together, still touring and releasing records.

Franco Battiato: Sulle corde di Aries

One can half imagine at Progressive rock meets they have heated discussions about which of Battiato's LPs are the most superior. It's probably a toss-up between this from 1973 and Clic (1974) which garnered a reissue on Island records, one of the very few feats of cross-over that Italo Prog achieved. Clic is a little too anti-septic for my now hoary tastes, and I'm suspicious of anything like Bill Bruford, Peter Gabriel or Robert Fripp's work which dons a smart suit, tidies up the synth parts and saunters into the post-punk vanguard pretending it was now trendy.

Like those mass classroom scraps you had when you were a kid, the lame thing to do when the teacher showed up was to tuck your shirt in, loiter at the back pretending you were just examining the poster with the frog-spawn on it, that in no way were you involved in any kind of debacle. The stupid kids on the other hand didn't notice the teacher had come in, might have still been brawling, perhaps one holding a dustbin in his hand. Clic is a little bit too clean and thus, even though ten years ago we might have applauded it for being presciently new-wave, now I sort of despise it for its sleek textures.

My friend, the scholar Jon Dale gets plenty of props from me, so he can field the occasional catty swipe; he loves it! Jon is something of an authority on Battiato, indeed he was the first person to play me any, but in some way I suspect this may in some way be to do with the fact that FB survived the blood-letting that was punk and went on to do records such as "Cafe-Table-Musik", which Dale incidentally loves. Dale veers away from the unacceptable horror that these Italo Prog records represent and indeed some of the stuff he recommended I check out was rather too tasteful for me. Stuff like Prima Materia recordings and the Die Schnatel label. Ah, the meta-critical, nitty-gritty, bitch-fest that is music blogging! Doncha just love it.....

This record is one I'd dearly love to have an original vinyl copy of, I have instead a 1980s reissue of it bundled with Clic- both LPs tonsured to fit- the cover of which I'm too embarrassed to upload here. I saw a copy recently for $250 and baulked. Of these records I only have the Area, the two Banco Mutuo Del Soccorso, the PFM and the Goblin on vinyl. All the rest are CD reissues. You just couldn't afford to buy this stuff otherwise, but it's also fantastic that they are still available.

"Sulle corde di Aries" is a masterpiece and an essential purchase. Franco's singing is almost in the style of a Franciscan monk layered over these harpsichord and hand-drum grooves which are drenched in echo, hand-triggered bass pulses reverberating over freely-plucked mbira. In many ways it follows the original hairy impulse of minimal music as manifested in Terry Riley records like "Persian Surgery Dervishes" but Battiato's feel for melody and harmony is infinitely superior, one finding oneself adrift on these organic, divinely lyrical tracks is as though one was drifting down-river on a makeshift raft encircled by swallows.

Campo Di Marte: Campo Di Marte

This is a pleasantly gentle record of essentially instrumental, folky suites. Bedecked with flute and coloured with Faust-ian bier-keller scat, CdM's never hard-rocking use of electric guitar reminded me of Television in the way it's even-handed, groove-addicted and textural. Another Italo Prog one-off, by the time UA got round to releasing it in 1973, the band had split up.

Goblin: Suspiria

Nastay. Though occasionally lumped in with the rest of the Italian Prog rock of this era, Goblin are a different creature, though with "Roller" and "Il fantastico viaggio del "bagarozzo" Mark" they made a couple of good Prog LPs, they're not regarded as a Prog act in Italy but rather are associated with Dario Argento's films. What's more Goblin are obviously a studio band, their super-slick grotesquely synth-laden sound wouldn't be possible to execute any other way, while the rest of these bands are almost like live-music vehicles who assembled in the studio to transcribe their performance, a classical music trope that's broadly in keeping with their influences. Still "Suspiria" (1977, way outside of our 1973-74 timeframe) is a great record, and if I didn't include it, about the only record in here that's well-known, everyone would bleat at me.

Le Orme: Felona E Serona

Le Orme whose "Uomo di pezza" is also supposed to be very good, enjoyed something of a profile. Unlike many of these one-shot wonders they had a career. Like PFM they flirted with the US/UK rock machine, for instance "Felona E Serona" was translated into english by Peter Hammill and released on Charisma. There's this very fascinating fetish the Italian bands (and indeed practically every European nation apart from Germany) have with Genesis and Van Der Graf Generator. Someone I'm sure will pull me up on this, but I don't think Genesis circa "Tresspass/Foxtrot/Nursery Cryme/Selling England" were that huge a commercial proposition. It was Zep and Floyd who were the real behemoths. Looking at old interviews with them in the NME they appear to be quite like an aggrandised indie band in stature, nothing like your proverbial Arctic Monkeys though. Equally as regards to VDG, realistically how large an audience could there have been for a band like that, one so deliberately obscure? Yet certainly in Italy VDG were absolutely massive, an export on the magnitude of The Beatles. A recent interview I read with Hammill attests to the ferocity of their adoption. Genesis's reputation on the continent seems undinted too. I believe the Italian bands mapped their image of these groups onto their own expectations. Many tried to crack this market, thinking perhaps they were knocking on the gates of filthy lucre, and the story of what happened to these bands, how they succumbed to disillusion is at once pathetic and sobering.

"Felona E Serona" is a lovely contemplative rock record with a moving ecclesiastical bent. The singing, akin to the Battiato is like a canticle, the organ very often haunting and church-ical, the guitars usually acoustic, the bells on Felona too implying a connection to religious music. Again Prog, in the sense that it denotes the obfuscated ornate sound of bands like Henry Cow and Van Der Graf is a misleading classification. There's no getting away from the influence of Classical music on this record, most probably 19th century Romantic music like Puccini, Rossini and Verdi. That's dead Spinal Tap on the one hand, but there's so little here derived from the blues that there's nowhere else these sounds could have originated from. Actually it's the same nationally-determined musical sensibility which makes Krautrock so fascinating.

Metamorfosi: Inferno

I found this suite themed on a trip into Dante's Inferno quite hard work. Not dissimilar at times to Goblin but less slick. A lot of these Italian CDs have been made available via Japan, often in box-xets of mini-LP CDs (never came across this format before-square card cases with CDs in them) and the similarity of this very noir-ish heavy rock to Japanese things like Lost Araaf and Acid Mothers Temple is unmistakable. More than Sabbath, the Italian Symphonic Hard Rock (titters love those words) is the font of that sound.

Museo Rosenbach: Zarathusa

"Zarathusa" is the definitive Italian Prog album. Correspondent Francesco amused me by saying he absolutely hates it, and in many ways it's truly appalling. Portentous, flashy, emotionally over-wrought, the first time you hear it you're struck by Stefao Galifi's ridiculously over-the-top vocals which conjure up package-holiday nightmares of Joe Cocker sound-a-likes fronting bands rocking Italian bars. But given time, and having fully absorbed the context of Italian Symphonic Hard Rock, you find yourself grokking on it. Driving around town with this blaring out of my van I'll confess to feeling like a righteous dude.

Palepoli: Osanna

A furry, long-form freak-out with medieval trappings like Metamorfosi's "Inferno". Terrible flat sound slightly ruins it, even so I reckon Kid Shirt would like this.

Premiata Forneria Marconi: Storia di un minuto

PFM went on to have the largest international profile of all these bands with a brace of records with the most appalling covers imaginable. I think they must have connected with the Italian diaspora. Their early "Storia di un minuto" may be my favorite of all these LPs listed, it's a very lyrical, accessible record with lovely harmonies and melodies, each side put together like a suite. If I told you it reminded me of ELO and Wizzard would that put you off dreadfully? It would. OK.

Quella Vecchia Locanda: Quella Vecchia Locanda

The maxim goes that Germany was filled with bands copying Black Sabbath then Italy was full of bands copying Jethro Tull. Translating as "that old inn", QVL were from Rome and their flute passages apparently give lie to the influence of Jethro Tull upon them. I have a very scratchy copy of Tull's "Aqualung" which I bought for two pounds in the process of researching this piece and I was quite appalled by how conventional it is, like a gruesomely leaden pub-rock band with the most pedestrian third-hand folk flavors. Conversely QVL's "Un Villaggio, un'Illusione" is a masterpiece of prodigious mind-fucking hard-rock with one of thee "ur" churning guitar riffs and fabulous heroic impassioned vocals.

Semiramis: Dedicato A Frazz

Another one-off. Apparently Semiramis were teenagers, a fact which blows my mind given the degree of co-operation necessary to make this music. It's one thing to dole out "Louie Louie"-style 4/4 rawk, quite another to work up a music which ebbs and flows like this, though perhaps I'm being unfair to teenagers? I suppose the Michele Zarrillo's fruity vocals must be a chief attraction, and it looks like he's still got something of a sophisticated, Euro-Pop career going on. To describe the record: plangent acoustic guitar, hard-riffing electric guitar, almost junglistic revolving drum patterns (!), bells and an occasionally off-putting cheap "ballroom" synthesiser.

Tilt: Arti E Mestieri

Thanks to the be-shirted kid for sending this my way via his West Country Progressive alliance. It was on my shortlist, but unavailable to buy. I showed our kid the sleeve which I googled and he quipped: "It's the jazz museli funnel...!" I thought that was very funny. Almost entirely instrumental in a Jean Luc Ponty (here be violins!) and Zappa/Duke fusion-y vein it's not exactly my cup of tea. The drumming is super-human though, birds-wing flurries like Billy Cobham's stuff with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, who would also be an obvious reference point. The synthesiser with the grand piano pre-set a particular low-light, but you have to admire the artistic consistency of this stuff. I think appreciating a sustained palette of sound is probably the key to digging Prog. It often sounds like turd, but if you cut that turd in two and there are no hazlenuts secreted within it, then you've just got to stand back, stroke your chin and admire it.

Un Biglietto Per L'Inferno: Un Biglietto Per L'Inferno

Another NWW record. I never went through that list until recently and was surprised to find how much stuff I recognised in there. Un Biglietto Per L'Inferno is yet another one-off release and it's a super LP, not finicky at all, just righteous rocking grooves assembled fluidly and not with one ear on creating deliberately jarring contrasts (that famous prog cliche). Highly recommended.

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In the course of exploring Italian Prog I found Augusto Croce's excellent Italian Prog site completely invaluable. Also crucial was the peerless Gnosis database. Queerly and synchronously some time in the middle of my investigations I noticed this excellent ilm thread started I believe by the critic Mark Prindle. I came across the dealer Doug Larson through eBay where I made some purchases, and he was very helpful in sorting me out with CDs of this music, and bursting with recommendations.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Walking up Whitecross Street I saw this record in the gutter. I didn't pick it up.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:03 AM | Permalink

This is a very crude mock-up of a record I dreamt I found in the back of a rack upstairs in the collectors bit of the Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill. It's by Liquid Liquid's Dennis Young. There were three in the set but I only picked up the first one.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:01 AM | Permalink

If there's one record that'll be huge this year it's this 'un. It's already got something of a history attached to it without having been released. At first Pitchfork made a cock-up and left their promotional copy up on a easily-reachable part of their server. Lots of people downloaded it. Then some online outlets made the CD available before its official release which is in November. It was then subsequently made "unavailable" but some of the released copies have found their way onto eBay. I found a dealer offering up a copy but then found the sale terminated before the auction had run its course. I approached the dealer and he told me the record company had asked him to remove it from sale. Yikes. I wonder who in the hierarchy gets the job of net snoop? Is it the office boy or is there a new category of employee to deal with these situations?

As is very well-known, the record has arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, is engineered by Steve Albini and produced by Jim O'Rourke. Er, talk about over-egging the production talent. Presumably Jack Nitszche would have been asked to contribute were he alive and they couldn't get Phil Spector cos he was tied up in legal proceedings. They don't ruin it though. Simon and Carl have had a few words to say about its five, lyrical, symphonic suites. My feeling is that it's dead proggy, which is certified in triplicate and then rubber-stamped by the cover. Kind of like an ever-so-slightly more melodic version of peak-period Genesis.....yet acoustic. The problem with that being that it's a bit long on mewl and thin on hooks. The LP even shares a title with a classic Italo Prog LP by Balletto Di Bronzo. Ys was a mythical city in the Douarnenez Bay in Brittany which was built below sea-level and protected by a dam but which was subsequently flooded. There are clearly resonances here with the levee breaking on New Orleans.

I did prefer single tracks off "The Milk-Eyed Mender" and I miss her sounding like a demented eight-year old (alas we get older) but the suites are growing on me like moss and even though it won't necessarily be my record of the year, it stands an excellent chance. In fact although I have reservations about Devandra, the twin-pronged assault of this and "Cripple Crow" put their nexus at the critical fore-front, in front of Dubstep, in front of Grime, in front of Minimal Techno. Who'd have thunk it?

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Visual post-script:

Have a quick butchers at these two earlier Newsom CDs (not mine I hasten to add), "Walnut Whales" and "Yarn and Glue" which she sold at her early shows.....

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Scholarship goes out the window I'm afraid now (cue horror-film hysterical laughter), we've entered the realm of divine conjecture. My argument is that all of the below records in one way or another were a reaction to the hi-falutin, white-bred, folk'n'country vibes of the Laurel Canyon sound of the 1970s.

Black Music

Bobby was always hanging out in LA. He appeared un-named on Sly Stone's "There's a Riot Goin On", in fact Sly's "Stand" would be amongst this line-up, hip as Stone was to the white groups of the day being a radio DJ'n'all, but "There's a Riot Going On" was about turning away from his carefully-engineered cross-over appeal. Womack on the other hand was probably up for having cross-over hits, and in the 1980s he eventually got them. I'm sure it's for quite uncynical reasons that there's a hefty dose of country to this lovely record, after all right there were other black singers like Stoney Edwards working within country (see Peter Guralnick's "Lost Highway").

There's something about the folky mellifluousness of singer-songwriter Withers's work that marks it as Canyon-esque to me. That and the temper of his artistic ambition, and this especially on +Justments: arty, conscious and self-consciously individual. Added to which, of course, he worked out of LA.

David Axelrod's LSD-inspired suites based around William Blake's writings are maybe more correctly seen as the natural extension of the late sixities psychedelic impulse as perfectly embodied in the LA music of "Eight Miles High" and "Smile". His Electric Prunes record "Release of an Oath" must have hipped him to the potential of the rock cross-over. Perhaps it's fairer to say that these classic records are simply "in-tune" with Laurel Canyon. Lush and mellow.

Nina covers Randy Newman's "Baltimore" on this Creed Taylor production, surely a pretty remarkably strange choice for a cover? The weirdness is further compounded by her choice of clipped reggae styings in which to render it. Such I guess was the magnetic power emanating from the insular Canyon folk. It's a standard reality effect isn't it? Ignore other people and they're bound to concentrate on you. I reckon the end of Laurel Canyon's near-autistic ignorance of outside music comes symbolically with Joni's "Mingus" LP (though Kirk Degiorgio tells me Joni and David Crosby appeared on a Paul Horn LP five years earlier...) I always think the absurd cod reggae and funk on Led Zepellin's "Houses of the Holy" is the equivalent moment, it's as though the artists somehow lose their nerve.

The Meter's 'Cabbage Alley"(1972) isn't one of their greatest records but was the fruit of their signing to the peerless Reprise, the greatest LA records of the era couched in the "Burbank" sound. It sports a pretty unlikey Neil Young cover "Birds" that marks it out as trying to cash-in in. Eventually Warners got their own black music division, this according to Hoskyns was set up in 1975 who hired Blue Thumb's Bob Krasnow to run it.

"Stillness" is a self-consciously mellow, rural record, check out the cover! It also features a version of Buffalo Springfield's "For What it's worth".

Charles Wright, whose widow once emailed me at WOEBOT, had the same sort of mellowly progressive thing going that Bill Withers did on +Justments. Again on Warners. Before we leave this section I'd like to remark that you just can't imagine a Hip-Hop act today openly being influenced by contemporary Rock music can you? (cue about a thousand dissenting emails) On the other hand Urban music has such a hold over the music scene that even Indie Ghetto scenesters like The Arctic Monkeys claim Kanye West as an inspiration (I believe Mark K-punk had a well-founded spiel about this a while back)

Odyshape

Proto New-waver Zevon never quite fitted the mould. Too edgy. I suspect his life would have been simpler if he'd done mellow properly like his mentor Jackson Browne. There must have been lots of records that didn't quite make it to the attention of David Geffen, by people a pehaps a little too freaky, Linda Perhacs springs to mind, when it would have suited them fine to be superstars like The Eagles.

Zappa obviously relished not fitting the mould and I'm afraid that's one of the reasons why I will always eventually despise him. The idea in life isn't to deliberately do the opposite of what other people do, that just preserves the status quo doesn't it? The idea is do your own thing. The root of Zappa's anti- stance could be traced back to "We're only in it for the money", one of the most wretched records ever. I reckon if all the other people in Laurel Canyon where he lived were making long-form, groovy, jazz-rock then Zappa would have been making easy-listening, folky, confessional records. That said "Hot Rats" is often very excellent.

McGarrigle sisters. One of these ladies is Rufus Wainwright's mum. I love this record but it's not dour enough to be a Laurel Canyon female confessional, the band swings to hard and (horrible to say) the girls are too buck teethed to be Carly Si-men.

Steely Dan are practically the exception to the rule when it comes to LA rock absorbing the music around it. There's apparently a Horace Silver riff on "Rikki" and the record features crack Jazz-funk session musicians Wilton Felder, Jerome Richardson and Chuck Rainey (even if as Kirk DeG points out they feature "on almost every rock/pop album recorded in LA in that period anyway") There's an excellent book about the History of Los Angeles's music which takes in everything from its hot 1940s Jazz scene to The Germs and Fear, but I'm buggered if I can remember what it's called.

Freaks

Bosh. Well if he was perhaps afraid to really cut loose himself at least Zappa knew what truly distinctive music sounded like. There three records form some kind of unholy triumvirate and you could write a book on each of them. My conjecture is that all of these artists hammed it up a bit to distinguish themselves from the popular kids. Beefheart had a troubled relationship with commercial music didn't he, quite often pandering to the market in a really brazen way, and I don't think one can subtract that from the man? Buckley I reckon fell in with the freaks because he thought he'd stretch his career out a bit (holds up hands) not that I'm denying the music ya get me. As for Wild Man Fischer, and this is from 1968 while the other two are from 1970, well maybe he was nuts actually.....

Thousands of miles away unbeknownst to them...

Brazil's Novos Baianos were desperate to be hanging out in a little commune in Topanga I reckon.

Ijahman Levy? Devout Rastafarian music? Close your eyes and it's yummy AM soft-rock.

Perhaps Klaus and the boys were deliberately trying to make some kind of nihilistic version of the Cali sound with "Flowers must Die" ? On the other hand they may have just been unable to muster the sunshine vibes.

Whales

Not all the casualties of 1960s counter-culture ended up in the music business. Some ran ice cream parlours, some became the first wave of organic farmers and some became marine biologists. These two records are in the very image of the Laurel Canyon sound. Think about it. As bloated as Mama Cass or pudgy David Crosby, as larger than life as Joni and Neil, moaning their own songs of loneliness into the deepest blue, hanging in communes, cruising up and down the Big Sur coastline; these whales even had their own record deal for two whole elpees.

Limeys

If California represents the geographical conclusion of the American dream of the west, then the Moon must be the theoretical extension of the frontier myth. By using Daniel Lanois's steel guitar playing on Apollo, resulting in tracks which resemble nothing so much as David Crosby's "Laughing", Eno was making that thought explicit. I always remember seeing a documentary with one astronaut taking his copy of CSN's "Wooden Ships" into orbit and playing it as they circled the earth.

Going to California.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This is my second pass through the music of LA in the 1970s. I got to the level of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Randy Newman, CSN, Gram Parsons, Little Feat The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Buffalo Springfield just before Acid House rewrote the map. I subsequently went wandering off to the nether-regions of Krautrock and Jamaican music and it's taken me a long time to find my way back here, to a place I'd always wanted to linger a little longer.

The spur to reinvestigate came from Barney Hoskyns's excellent "Hotel California" book. This is truly a must-read. Two sevenths of its contents concern groups like The Eagles; leaving you with rich anecdotal evidence but no desire to investigate further musically. Around three sevenths concerns music you know and love already but were a little thin on the context. Finally a very satisfying seventh details stuff you've never heard before (unless that is you're Jon Dale).

Here are ten records which push the envelope of one's knowledge just a little deeper than before.

I'll make no apologies for the gigantic bias in favor of Gene Clark's records here. Did you know that Gene co-wrote "Eight Miles High"? He wrote "Feel a whole lot better" as well. "Eight Miles High" is surely the most important record that came of America in the sixties? I mean, what is there to equal it in its explosive prescience? One of its continuing legacies is that, though it is a "studio" record, it is fundamentally an odyssey of instrumental interplay. It manages to augur futures while remaining conspicuously non-synth and un-synthesised. One can imagine Joe Carducci approving of it but at the same time it sows the seeds for a band like Sonic Youth's dissonant forays. Even a band like Can could be seen as a post-EMH group. The Beatles were wonderful weren't they? But one way or another their influence on Pop music amounted to diddly-squat. Even the swirling phantasmagoria of Prog, moving swiftly away from Pop as it does, doesn't owe much to them. Recently critics have criticised the idea that the degree of influence a music has had on other music unquestionably equates with its significance. That seems largely a subjective quarrel; naff as it's supposed to be I'm often happy to trade five-star seminal props. In a round-about way I'm trying to puzzle out how a character as central as your proverbial John Lennon (Gene Clark) could fuck his career up so badly.

The legend goes that Gene Clark was afraid of flight (the Byrd who stayed in the nest, boom boom) and thus was unable to keep pace with the rest of his group. Poking around I've discovered some authorities who hint that this was some kind of publicity metaphor, for what I can only speculate, even though quite famously Gene abused Drugs and Alcohol and suffered from an undiagnosed Bi-polar disorder. The other reason given that he split from The Byrds so early was that the huge amount of money he made from owning the song-writing rights to lots of their material pissed the rest of the band off immensely. Either which-way he left only to find his lacklustre "Gene Clark with the Godsin Brothers" (1967) hugely over-shadowed by The Byrds superior "Younger than Yesterday". Right from the beginning it seemed his career was doomed.

The Early LA Sessions was Clark's 1972 re-make of that record. Again it's messy, never quite gels and is only distinguished (hence the reissue) by its burgeoning Country flavors. Growing up on Hank Williams, Clark was miles ahead of the rest of the pack when it came to what would be the dominant trend in 1970s LA Rock.

If there's one sure proof of the strength of that country legacy on him, evidence too of the immaculate, wholly distinctive mastery he had of the genre, never once losing his distinctive voice within it, it's the absolutely stunning beauty that is "Fantastic Expedition" (1968). This is truly a magnificent record, tangentially reminding me more of the desert space-rock of The Meat Puppets circa "II" and "Up On The Sun". Dillard's crisp banjo may superficially mark it as hick but the playing is always too under-stated and linear for it ever to descend into cliches. Tracks like "Train leaves here this morning" almost seem to posit a new way of constructing songs, the melodic progression is so undeniable, so protracted that when the hook comes one's wafting on a wave of displaced chakras. Clark's lyrics are, almost shockingly within the context, keyed into cosmic majesty:

"Someone is speaking of time now to gain,
a voice crying beyond bounds.
Life is undying yet somebody weeps,
a season declares its own sound.
Encircling my mind,
these worlds that I find.

Now as the waters of morning will fall,
the wind is set free to demand.
An orbit of distance inclusive of all,
to know there is space to expand.
These things that I see,
these things that are me."

(transcribed poorly by me)

I'm not usually a lyrics guy, maybe it's just a case of their stark juxtaposition atop natty mandolin finger-picking. Forget Gram Parsons immediately. I've always been left completely cold by "Grievous Angel", by Parson's hoary maudlin self-pity, by his cartoon eight-foot high country cliches. Check this out instead.

Clark made another less strong record with Doug Dillard "Through the Morning, Through the Night" (1969) then got entirely fed-up with his failure in the music business. He sold up, bought a cliff-top house in Mendocino where he moved with his wife, stopped drinking, had two children and lived comfortably off his still substantial Byrds royalties. Lured back to work by one Jesse Davis of American Natural (just spouting the historical doxy now) Gene "did it again" and cut the amazing "White Light" (1971). I was really surprised to see this is available on iTunes, so buy it at once. The only copy I could find came from Argentina.

This is a record which, quite rightly, Hoskyns descends upon. Something he does with specific recordings only very rarely in "Hotel California". Legend has it that Bob Dylan, a perennial Gene Clark supporter (right up until Gene very publicly slagged him off) claimed that "Spanish Guitar" was a song he wished he'd written. My favorite is the just lovely title track, a tune of the stature of something like The Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane". Sooner or later some creepy-bunch-of-no-hopers-of-groop will rediscover it, send it rocketing into the charts and it'll join La Vashti in the advert breaks. Again the lyrics are jaw-droppingly splendid:

"Oh, the village of the hill
Sitting silently at will
Like some prophecy forgotten by an age
With no guns before its gate
The mysterious estate
Lies waiting for its history's dawning page
With the raging of the sea before its height
And the strength of those whom see beyond their sight

Oh, the smithies anvil rings
And the symphony it sings
No voice nor poet's pen can put to tune
And electric lines of force
Ring around the humble lives
Of the souls that hear the master saying soon"

"White Light" sunk without trace except in Holland where it was voted LP-of-the-year by a whole raft of critics. Subsequently "Roadmaster" only got a release in the Netherlands. This copy is the original dutch cover, the Edsel 1980s reissue has a shot of Gene sitting in a car. "Roadmaster" is a bit of a shambles, a hodge-podge of previously unreleased material. However one gets a queer sense of deja-vu listening to it, many of the songs have an eerie epic quality which gives one the feeling that one must have heard them before. Maybe that's the hallmark of a masterpiece? My favorite track on it is actually a cover version "Rough and Rocky" and that gives me the lead into my next pet theory which is that I suspect Gene, left to his own devices, his ego running wild, could have been a bit of an asshole.

If there's bona fide evidence for this it's "No Other". I think "Fantastic Expedition" and "White Light" succeed because Clark is by turns not the centre of things (equally-billed) and if not actually depressed, then down-pressed. Come 1973 Clark's stock had risen spectacularly high. With all things soft country ruling the day he becomes feted by the music press. Signed by the very hottest label of the day, David Geffen's Asylum, he moves back to LA, hits the bottle again, breaks up with his wife, and runs amok. Cut adrift in that shiny sycophantic cocaine culture he must loved lapping-up all the affection, attention he felt he sorely deserved. Listening to "No Other" I very often hear that kinda wretched unfettered ego. The LP does have its moments but quite often it's meandering and portentous. Strangely, I think, it has gained this reputation as being a lost classic, Barney Hoskyns seems to love it.

Gene apparently spent over $100,000 in the studio and Geffen was horrified; horrified too to only find it contained eight songs, famously tossing the acetates in the bin when he was delivered them. That was typically mean-spirited and quixotic of Geffen, who loved the power of building up people's egos, that is until he had to rub shoulders with his over-inflated creations or had to foot the bill for their whims, but actually I kinda sympathise with him at this point. Bar the matchless "Silver Raven", "No Other" is the curate's egg.

It's at this point I stop with Gene. He's definitely a tragic character, but almost certainly his fate was determined by his own hands, leaving one slightly confused how to react to him, unsure as to whether he deserves pity or respect. I know his legacy had something of a revival at the hands of The Dream Syndicate (eugh), Teenage Fanclab (eugh) and REM, but I think there's more there still to be discovered. I wish his catalogue wasn't such a shambles and that it was again more widely available.

Interest in this lady has been picking up recently. My reissue came emblazoned with a sticker with a quote by avant-garde poster-boy Jim O'Rourke singing her praises. This eponymous debut, the first of her only two records and was the first record out on Asylum. Judee was clearly being groomed for superstar status, but I have a nagging suspicion that like the Joe-Boyd-produced, lush, easy-listening-come-cocktail jazz tones of Nick Drake's "Bryter Layter" which had clearly influenced it (Geffen's ears apparently pricking up when he first heard Drake's stuff) it was too sickly sweet for hippies. They probably felt "market-targeted" in extremis. The first time I heard the LP I practically vomited all over the cor anglais on the first track; this was just too awful I thought. But slowly over the past year it's become probably the record I've listened to more than any other.

The production is feather-cushioned, every oompah-pah so deliciously puffed with air as to be almost garishly luxurious. The sound reminds me of those super-soft-edged, peak-period Lee Perry productions; of De La Soul's gaussian-blurred edits on "Three feet high and rising". It's obviously a hugely drugged-out sound, and that drug, make no mistake is smack. I'm no protagonist of drugs (as I tirelessly reiterate I haven't touched any for 10 years) but there's no denying the way a sonic like this, shaped to the emotional cravings of the profoundly-damaged, the equivalent aural-crutch to that ecstatically comforting drug experience, narcotically hooks one in just the same manner. Sill's other big thing is, surprise surprise, God.

There's an infinite well of things to adore about this record, almost all near-curdlingly suffocatingly sweet: the way Judee curls her phrases like a leg round a cafe table; her curious trailer-park turns of phrase ("don't fer-get", "battle gr-ou-and"); her desperate, harrowing, craving mix of wanton-ness and tenderness; the way her perverse tunings threaten to be crass, one minute smearing between the hymnal and the bordello before jack-knifing to the sublime. No other bit of music has brought me closer to the brink of tears as "The Lamb ran away with the crown"- when she volunteers, just so drop-dead casually "Once a demon lived in my brow, I screamed and wailed and I cried out loud", gah it just gets me, cos she bloody well knows what's she's talking about. A little background might help here, before bi-sexual Sill hooked up with Geffen, between stints of working as a prostitute, all the while in the thick of heroin addiction, she actually spent time holding up drug-stores with guns- it's insane, she looks like a primary school history teacher.

I wonder if Karen Carpenter took her cues from Judee Sill? There's some kind of shared turf, I mean I'm not a Carpenters fan, but wtf. Suffice to say I can't recommend this record highly enough, the best of this particular batch. Don't get the Sill compilation, you need to hear this on its own.

The second record is also very good, but right from the slightly hastily-assembled art-work you can tell Geffen has realised that no way is this woman going to break big, accordingly the attention to production isn't there any more. Maybe he thought of her as a Laura Nyro (his first protege) with good tunes? Then The Eagles came along. Judee was clearly too much of a nut-case, a liability even, she started slagging Geffen off in public, calling him a fat pig at a London gig. Abandoned by Asylum, a few years afterwards she died of a drugs overdose.

This is one of Bobby Gillespie's favourites. John Phillips of the Mama's and Papa's finally gets his shit together and makes a good record. Famous for being the cover Dylan copped for Desire. In 1995 I taped Pulp guitarist Mark Webber playing "Malibu People" on the first season of Resonance FM.

A record Hoskyns singles out for praise, a charming "little" record. I quote: "In Nashville at the same time was John Stewart, working on an album called "California Bloodlines." Employing the same Music Row session players that Dylan used, producer Nick Venet wanted to cross the Nashville sound with LA country rock. The resulting record- an Americana classic flecked with the influences of John Steinbeck and Andrew Wyeth- sounded like some missing link between Johnny Cash and Gene Clark." Cash meets Dylan certainly.

Finally, David Crosby's masterpiece "If I could only remember my name" (1971). I do like CSN, but I've always thought their work is like a patchwork quilt of wholly different materials. Saying you like CSN almost doesn't make sense as a statement, it's like saying you like roast beef, corn-flakes and sushi. And I'm not just talking on a track-by-track basis, even their suite "Judy Blue Eyes" (written, fact fans, for Judee Sill when they clearly thought she was going to be big) barely hangs together. Somehow the idea grew, probably at David Geffen's hands, that they were "The American Beatles"- what a totally absurd, preposterous suggestion! There's no comparison whatsoever to be made, most fundamentally from the perspective of cosmic power.

Anyway CSN are alright, and for a long time I used to wonder which of their many gene-pool collaboration solo LPs was worth checking out. Stills and Young, Nash and Crosby, Crosby and Young, Nash and Stills, Crosby, Stills and Young, Stills, Young and Nash, Nash and Young, Young and Young or Manassas? The answer, indubitably is this LP. Crosby used to bomb up and down the Big Sur coastline in his VW Type 2 van (the one he had fitted with a Porsche engine- the hippie with power) and hang out with the San Francisco crew. Indeed lots of members of the Dead and the Airplane people this record along with the cream of LA's musicians. That's the key to understanding the laid-back acid-fried grooves on this brilliant record. More than anything it sounds like the Quicksilver Messenger Service record you really wanted to hear. Mercilessly funky and awesomely drawn-out some of the guitar work, most notably the shiver-down-the-spine slide on "Cowboy Movie" is, well I'm running out of superlatives.....

By way of a little round-up I'm going to hi-jack one of Simon Reynolds's off-the-cuff remarks to me when we discussed LA Rock. It's always a bad idea to do this, because one robs him of a juicy quote to direct in one's favour, but Simon remarked that like the British Prog this period, Californian music is remarkable for its self-entitlement. I couldn't have put it better. What I also find fascinating about it, again a result of the ridiculous (but yunnuh, amazing) arrogance these musicians had is its total insularity. This music seems totally oblvious to everything around it, is bizarrely in-bred. My next post on Los Angeles music of this era is going to look at the Yin to this lots Yang- that's to say the music that struggled to define itself in its shadows and the strategies it adopted.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Steve Wright can't resist making a total prat of himself on the introduction, and what's the weird voice-over in the middle of Bartos and Flur's exquisitely funky drumming? It's as though both voices are embarassed by the stark emptiness of the music. By-the-by, just like you, I've always loved the eddying trans-lingual puns of "Fahren, fahren, fahren" in relationship to The Beach Boys (Kraftwerk's avowed adoration) "Fun, fun, fun". Kraftwerk, sighs.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"The Edit"

When did the remix become the "edit"?

"Er yeah man, we just did an "edit" of weird-disco-staple/improbably-funky-krautrock-track/post-punk-frug-oddity (delete as appropriate)..."

Why this horrible new form? Why does every reissue have to come attached with Such'n'Such DJs "edit"?

The logic is that they're supposed to be inherently more respectful to the original; edits are flushed with neo-rockist sanctity. The DJs seem to suggest they're doing a reel-to-reel-style cut-and-paste of the source material (deprived as they are of the spearate tracks) yunnuh in an "old skool style". Shades of Ron Hardy/Grandmaster Flash. Even when often they're coercing rough old tunes into the 4/4 Ableton Live grid. Yawn.

It's all so pointless, pious and un-inventive.

On DJ Screw

A client asked me to slow down some audio today and upon doing it it really brought home some of the, perhaps under-acknowledged, aspects of what Screw was doing. Within the digital realm, in which I was editing the sound, the waveforms immediately became steppy, the sound taking on the hollow corrupted quality of machine noise. We're all familiar with the occasionally ugly, cheap sound of digital processing. Jungle quite often managed to make a merit of it: "Ba-by-lon-a-fa-all" but usually rubbing it against mountainous drums.

Screw of course, made all his messes in the analogue realm. If you slow a record down, or a tape, or a reel-to-reel, even as the sound becomes weirder and weirder the waveforms still maintain their integrity. You might think I'm pimping some audiophile purism here, but can you imagine wanting to listen to a Screw-tape that was made out of aiffs/wavs/mp3s slowed-down? Gah, it's sound horrific!

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)