WOEBOT

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.