chris morris's wasted space

[watusichris]

Merry Christmas your arse

Originally published on Facebook on this date in 2012. **********

As many of you know, I do a radio show. Every year I dutifully pull out my shopping bag of Christmas music, which I keep segregated in a corner of a closet, and attempt to compile a few sets of Yuletide music for my listeners who may go for that sort of thing. But there's only one song I spin every year: "Fairytale of New York," from the Pogues' 1988 album "If I Should Fall From Grace With God."

It's always seemed, to me, a perfect Christmas song, though it begins in an NYPD drunk tank. It manages an extraordinary feat: It is sentimental and unsentimental at the same time, romantic without ignoring the contusions that romance scores on us all (in what other Christmas tune can you hear someone call their loved one "a bum, a maggot...a cheap lousy faggot?"), celebrating the holiday while acknowledging the disorder and gloom that sometimes settles on celebrants at this time of year. As a composition, its melodic beauty never fails to captivate me. The performance is full of zest (especially in the lilt of its tin whistle), and the orchestral swell at the end always creates a palpable feeling of being uplifted.

The song was a lovely vocal collaboration between the Pogues' bibulous lead singer Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, daughter of the English folk icon Ewan MacColl and a U.K. star in her own right. So realistic and effective is their give-and-take on the song that if you didn't know it, you'd never believe the pair of them were not actually involved in a relationship. MacColl's turn, which plays in sweet counterpoint to MacGowan's drunken catarrh, is especially splendid, a poised mixture of affection and bile. ("Happy Christmas your arse.")

The song is probably best known visually from its original black-and-white video, but this live performance from 1988, filmed before a vocal audience, is the most winning version I've seen:

This wonderful 2006 BBC documentary about the song also serves as a hip-pocket history of the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, who was killed in a 2000 boating accident. It's very funny and revealing; it's in six parts, so follow the adjacent links: [video now unavailable; thanks Warner Music Group.]

The original video is linked in this recent story about "Fairytale" in the Guardian by the fine British writer Dorian Lynskey:

Fairytale of New York: the story behind the Pogues' classic Christmas anthem

Twenty-five years after its release, the duet about a couple who have fallen on hard times is still considered by many to be the greatest Ch

I never get tired of "Fairytale of New York." It's a part of the fabric of this maddening holiday, which calls up so many conflicting emotions in me -- sadness, longing, remembrances of drunken Christmases past, a kind of spiritual craving, and even sometimes a sort of disjointed joy. My mother died two days after Christmas a few years back; I never had the chance to play this song for her, and don't know if she was aware of it, but I think she probably would have appreciated it.

In October six years ago, my younger son Zane sat in with his brother-in-law's band the Filthy Thieving Bastards at a gig by the reunited Pogues at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I flew up to attend the show, and Zane and I sat in the VIP section when the Pogues performed.

They played "Fairytale of New York," with the young daughter of Jem Finer, who co-wrote the song with MacGowan, taking MacColl's part. During the song's climax, as fake snow drifted down from the ceiling, MacGowan soddenly swept her into his arms and slowly danced with her like a drunken bear. It was one of the greatest things I've ever seen on a stage. I was on verge of tears. [here's video of Shane and Ella Finer performing the song in 2012:] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIh6-aD-Cc0

"Fairytale of New York" perfectly defines my Christmas every year. Perhaps it does yours as well. Merry Christmas to all (especially to my boys Max and Zane). May the wind be always at your back, and hopefully you won't spend tonight in the drunk tank.

[watusichris]

Lou Reed (Variety, 10/27/13)

Lou Reed died on this date 10 years ago, and Variety asked me to write an appreciation, which I re-post here. **********

From the remove of 47 years, it is difficult to adequately calibrate the impact of “The Velvet Underground and Nico,” the debut album by the New York band fronted by Lou Reed, who died Sunday at 71. Bearing a cover by Andy Warhol that could literally denude itself (“peel slowly and see,” the legend read), the LP was a shock to popular music’s system. It addressed topics – heroin addiction, sexual aberration – that had hitherto been taboo in popular music, and mounted Reed’s literally stunning lyrics in a matrix of molecule-rearranging noise. It is one of those few records of which this can be said: Nothing like it had ever been heard before, and it permanently altered notions of what was possible, and permissible, in rock music.

While Reed was capable of shaking the foundations of propriety with compositions like “Heroin,” ‘I’m Waiting For the Man” and “Venus in Furs,” and would push the boundaries even further with subsequent outbursts like “White Light/White Heat,” “I Heard Her Call My Name” and the orgiastic “Sister Ray,” he proved he was no one-trick pony. He was capable of penning the most tender and empathetic ballads in the rock canon – “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “I’m Set Free,” the astonishing “Jesus.” He also proved that he was a rock classicist at heart with such much-covered standards as “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll,” the latter of which may be the definitive statement of the joy that lies at the heart of the music.

After Reed exited the Velvet Underground after years of infighting and discord in 1970, he embarked on a solo career that was characterized over its course by periods of extreme risk, infuriating sloth and intermittent brilliance. He wrested glam from the British with “Transformer”; took his own stab at rock opera with the lush, depressive “Berlin”; ground ears to pulp with his two-LP noise extravaganza “Metal Machine Music.” Using more conventional elements of rock music but seasoning them with his hectoring style, he forged such highly personal latter-day works as “Street Hassle,” “The Bells,” “The Blue Mask,” “New York” and “Magic and Loss.”

Because he was a thorny, restless and often reckless spirit who proceeded to the tattoo of his own drum, his work could succumb to abject failure: Witness his Edgar Allan Poe homage “The Raven,” his misbegotten collection of guitar pieces “Hudson River Wind Meditations” and his last release, 2011’s “Lulu,” a much-maligned collaboration with Metallica.

But such failures were ultimately understandable and could even be anticipated, since from the start of his career Reed’s rep, and ultimately his import, rested on his willingness to take chances. That was never a sure way to conquer the charts, but it was a route to change, and Lou Reed permanently altered the musical landscape. Seemingly answerable to no one and nothing other than himself and his own artistic impulses, he became, to his discomfort, an exemplary figure. His influence has long been a given; especially in the punk and post-punk era, dozens of bands embraced his sound and style. Watching early sets by such groups as L.A.’s Dream Syndicate was like watching young, half-formed performers groping towards their own essence, with Reed’s work as a road map.

As a personality, he could be prickly, harsh, forbidding; his confrontations with music journalists held the status of legend. The caricature is maintained in “CBGB,” the recent film about the New York punk club, in which a character called “Lou Reed” makes a cameo appearance, with fangs out. Reed played himself best. In Allan Arkush’s 1983 rock movie “Get Crazy,” he portrayed a rock star named Auden. It is not a great picture, but he elevated it with his presence. He gets the last word in the film, under the credits, singing, in his wobbling, drawling voice, a song called “Little Sister” – a heart-on-the-sleeve number with a corking, lyrical solo at its end.

It’s surprising, sweet, loving. But then, he was an artist of many dimensions, and surprise was so much of what Lou Reed was all about.

[watusichris]

DEVO, Los Angeles Reader, Oct. 20, 1978

Take it from a fairly recent refugee, there are some basic problems with the American Midwest. “Morning Devotions” heralds the TV sign-offs around 1:30 a.m.

You have to drive 10 miles in the middle of the night to pick up a six-pack at the nearest Stop-n-Go. The jukeboxes in the local saloons feature Carly Simon, Dan Hill and college fight songs. The women have thighs like telephone poles, butts like half-empty potato sacks and think that down jackets and air-force parkas are high fashion. Mostly, the Midwest just stinks. Literally. The air is perfumed by the belched exhalations of a million factories stoking the Dispoz-a-Culture. In Chicago, you strangle on bitter lungfuls of “ozone alert” air. In Gary, the sky shines orange with the filings of the local steel mills. And in Akron, you can smell the essence of the Rubber City’s tire factories standing in the atmosphere like a hundred wheelies.

Post industrial depression in the Midwest breed a certain kind of teenager and a certain kind of rock ‘n’ roll. Midwestern kids escape into rock with a sort of fervent desperation bred by the mind-dulling landscape. A Midwestern rock show is a combination concert, party and fire-fight. Anyone who has ever witnessed a show at Chicago’s Aragon, Cleveland’s Agora or Detroit’s Cobo Hall knows what I mean. It’s not surprising that Vietnam writer Michael Herr, in a recent issue of Crawdaddy magazine, used nothing but combat metaphors to describe a Ted Nugent show in Detroit.

Aggressive rockers demand aggressive music, and Midwestern rock has an impressive history. Midwestern punk-pop of the early and mid-sixties bred such bands as the Cryan’ Shames, the Buckinghams and the imoortal Shadows of Knight (of “Gloria” fame), who barnstormed their way through teen rock clubs with funny names like the Sugar Shack and the Wild Goose. In the late sixties, which had already spawned the classic soul music of the decade, gave birth to the heavy metal Motor City Madness of such groups as the MC5 and the Stooges. The impact of Midwestern rock is being felt in the commercial rock of the late seventies. Such current hot sellers as Bob Seger, Ted Nugent and REO Speedwagon have all been around for 10 years, hauling ass and equipment from Cedar Rapids to Urbana to East Lansing, playing 200-plugs gigs a year, thrilling hordes of drunk, luded-out kids with a uniquely plains-derived brand of no-nonsense thunderrock.

Although balls-out rock still reigns supreme in the heartlands, there is growing evidence that the seventies are breeding a potent new strain of mutant rock. Strange noises have begun to emanate from, of all place, Ohio, where an insular group of young intellectuals anr cok ‘n’ rollers are making music that could change the face of popular music in the eighties. The industrial centers of Cleveland and (more important) Akron have brought forth a small nucleus of crazed rockers influenced by such diverse sources as Captain Beefheart, musique concrete, and the Stooges.

Two bands stand out in Cleveland: the frantic, nihilistic agressorockers the Dead Boys, who seem intent on one-upping the death-enamored shenanigans of Iggy and the Stooges; and Pere Ubu, perhaps the most intense and radical band in America today, who combine gnarled vocals, synthesized blips and roars, and twisted saxophones into a frightening vision of the void. Pere Ubu’s first album The Modern Dance (Blank Records 001) and Datapanik in the Year Zero (Radar English import RDR 1) are unreservedly recommended to those with a taste for music played on the outside. The Dead Boys’ two records are uneven, but may be appreciated by lovers of the loud and stooped in rock ‘n’ roll.

But Akron is where the action is, it appears. Stiff Records recent sampler The Akron Compilation (Stiff import Get 3) demonstrates the energy and diversity present in the Rubber City. Influences range from Brenda Lee to Jeff Beck to Frank Zappa. We should thank Stiff for putting together these homegrown singles for posterity; if it weren’t for The Akron Compilation, interesting limited editions by such unusual talents as Jane Aire and the Belvederes, Rachel Sweet, Tin Huey, the Bizarros and the Rubber City Rebels would vanish without a bubble on the surface. That would be a pity, because the album is full of unusual songs, enticing hooks, contorted rhythms and odd vocals that advertise the true flowering of Middle American strangeness.

Oddly enough, the most esoteric, forbidding and demonic of all Akron bands is the same band that has attracted the most attention and garnered the greatest popularity. This is, of course, the De-evolution Band, better known as DEVO.

DEVO excited the cognoscenti last spring with their astounding first single “Jocko Homo” b/w “Mongoloid.” The single, home-made on the band’s own Boojie Boy label, laid out their entire concept, a kind of flip side of Darwin that dictates the reverse evolution of mankind back to apedom. “God mad man, but a monkey supplied the glue,” DEVO sang, implying that the glue is rapidly becoming the essence. In this world, DEVO said, a mongoloid can wear a suit, hold down a job, and nobody will give a good goddamn.

DEVO’s rather rarified ideology could have been boring, were it not powered by a rock ‘n’ roll rhythm full of exhilaration and humor. The descending chords and synthesized blurps of “Jocko Homo” offered up a band that, while they seemed deadly serious about their message, imbued it with a sense of warped humor.

The group’s second self-recorded release, “Satisfaction,” may prove to be a major recording of the seventies. In the Rolling Stones’ original version of that rock classic, Mick Jagger’s tough, pitiless voice belied his sung “I can’t get no satisfaction.” We all knew he was getting all the satisfaction he could handle; it was the audience of the song that identified with the message.

In DEVO’s “Satisfaction,” the disjointed rhythmic pulse and Mark Mothersbaugh’s quirky vocals turn Jagger’s hymn of self-reliance into a psalm of modern defeat. The group turns an archetype of macho-rock posing into a real expression of tension and impotence, leavened, as always, with a parodic twist. DEVO has remained silent for practically a year, straitjacketed by some confused record company dealings. The group finally burst out into the open recently, with television appearances, the release of their first album (Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!, Warner Bros. BSK 3239), and two evenings of shows at Hollywood’s Starwood last week.

Are We Not Men is a quintessential piece of seventies rock, full of angst, self-doubt, terror and distaste. It isn’t perfect: The production (by technocrat Brian Eno) is a little too thin at times, and one song, “Shrivel Up,” fails because of its simple-minded lyric and stiff musical construction, but it is an auspicious debut that gives a perfect delineation of the DEVO world. Like many of the new breed of Midwestern bands, DEVO are post-industrial reactionaries. They sing about the inadequacy of the much-vaunted orgasm (“I think I missed the whole-a-hole-a-hole,” they croon in “Sloppy”), the futility of religion (“OK, relax, and assume the position,” Mark Mothersbaugh screeches in “Praying Hands”), the inexorability of death (their “Come Back Jonee” is a play on the teenage death song syndrome of the fifties and sixties), and the replacement of romance with sexual frustration and aberration (the topic of “Uncontrollable Urge” and “Gut Feeling”).

Grim stuff, you might say, but DEVO animates their themes with Mark Mothersbaugh’s hilarious vocals and shrieks, cartoony capering rhythms and jittery, humorous playing. DEVO’s ape’s-eye view of manking comes a cross on record, but it is in concert that the forcefulness and originality of their concept may be fully perceived. Visually, DEVO are the complete embodiment of their themes. As they point out in their official bio, the band members are “almost uniform in height and weight.” The front line is made up of two sets of brothers – Jerry and Bob Casale and Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh.

When these five apparent clones make their first appearance, dressed in identical suits made of prophylactic rubber and cardboard industrial shades, one immediately makes the connection between the players and their obsessions with evolution, natural selection, recombinant DNA, brain-eating apes and other conceits dealing with sciences manipulation of our genes. DEVO plays the role of what they call the “Smart Patrol” – “suburban robots who monitor reality” – and their impersonation, complete with cybernetic movements, uniforms, and assembly line-derived time signatures, make for a show that is at once terrifying, deeply ironic, funny and plenty of fun.

DEVO is an important band because it is the first to deal with modern industrial and scientific society and its discontents on such an explicit and intellectual evel. Indeed, the band’s conception may be so smart that they risk leaving a good deal of their audience behind. It is already readily apparent that a large part of the DEVO audience appreciates the group merely for their novel musical and theatrical approach. I started doubting that the crowd was getting the picture when a large part of the Starwood audience began very earnestly aping Mark Mothersbaugh’s fascist salutes during “Praying Hands.”

DEVO divides their world up into “aliens” those who have an understanding of their “otherness” – and “spuds” – the vast majority of the dull, brain-damaged and ordinary. It was clear at the Starwood last week that there was a hefty number of spuds in the audience who were digging DEVO on the same level that they might enjoy such novelty acts of the past as the Hello People or the Crazy World of Arthur Brown.

DEVO is a band that is making the transition from a cult item to the property of a mass audience. Its current set is more conservative than the shows that brought them attention last year. Although they still perform unrecorded songs such as “Mr. DNA,” “Smart Patrol” and “Wiggly World,” they seem content to stick to album material; they perform all but two songs from Are We Not Men? Their symbol of infantilism, Booji Boy, without a doubt the most powerful and suggestive figure in the DEVO universe, failed to put in an appearance at last Tuesday’s show. It sobered me to find one of America’s most revolutionary bands already acquiescing to the demands of the music industry.

These reservations notwithstanding, DEVO appears to be ready to be the first of the Midwestern New Wave to break out nationally. Whether rock audiences will respond to the sheer novelty of the DEVO look and sound or to the band’s truly perverse socio-scientific ideas, only time will tell. For now, the only thing to say about DEVO’s coming-out is that their Janitor-in-a-Drum brand of industrial-strength post-nuclear rock ‘n’ roll is the most welcome new musical genus of the year.

[watusichris]

Poets of the Fess Hotel

Today, through a chain of associations called up by a book about alcoholic writers, and then by a volume of John Berryman’s best known work, I found myself ratcheted back to the year 1971, when I briefly entertained the delusion that I could write poetry. I was actively encouraged in this futile pursuit by a friend named John Tuschen, who cited Berryman as his favorite poet.

In ’71 I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and had recently dropped out of the university there, after experiencing a drug-induced breakdown in late 1970 that led to several weeks in a psychiatric ward at the campus hospital.

After a brief period spent licking my wounds at my mother’s apartment outside Chicago, I returned to “Madtown,” where I immediately returned, unburdened by school work, to doing what I had been doing: drinking and using drugs, enthusiastically. The psychiatric care recommended by the hospital did not seem like a particularly useful option, and potentially an endless one, so I dropped my shrink after three sessions.

My style of therapy took place in the warm confines of the 602 Club, the campus-adjacent bar on University Avenue that I had begun to frequent before my lockdown adventure. This saloon had become a main hangout for the local bohemians in training. I’d started going there when I was working in the acting company of Broom Street Theater, the local experimental stage. In the theater’s early days, John Tuschen had started up “The Camel, The Lion, and The Child,” its in-house literary magazine. We had gotten to be friends, and we both like to drink, so I’d roll down to the bar after a day’s work as a stock boy in the small corner market one block up the street. (My apartment, which I briefly continued to share with two college friends, was also nearby; we served as custodians in the building, and the rent was cheap.)

Tuschen looked like your average hippie, with a skinny frame and long, straight, lank hair. He looked at the world sharply through a pair of rheumy, often red eyes. He had the vestiges of a childhood speech impediment, and the slight hitch of a stutter gave his poetry readings a unique rhythm. We’d sit together in the 602 night after night, kibitzing, arguing, and people-watching in the narrow, overheated room over the joint’s trademark drinks, big cold glass schooners of beer, which washed down cheap bottom-shelf shots. Alcohol was our bond.

Invariably Tuschen would pull some new thing he’d written out of his pocket. He was a poet in the big Ginsberg style, and in the days we were closest he was hammering away at a long “Howl”-like jeremiad about America called “Your Muther’s Eye.” We would often be joined by another aspiring poet who called himself Hannibal Plath, a sweet, angelic-looking guy who broke the heart of just about every woman who crossed his path, and sometimes by my new flame Connie, a statuesque redhead from St. Petersburg, Florida, who had me utterly in her thrall.

These were heady times, and you wound up getting swept away by them. I went back to working sporadically at Broom Street, which was charitably housed in St. Francis House, the youth Episcopal center a few blocks up the street from the 602. The theater began to mount irregular “Bacchanals” — free-form evenings of theatrical vignettes, poetry readings, music, and what-have-you. (Into the latter category fell a premiere slideshow screening of Michael Lesy’s remarkable photo-essay “Wisconsin Death Trip,” later a famous book drawn from newspaper clippings and hellish photos shot in the late 19th century in upstate Black River Falls, which unspooled at the theater over a long, dark John Fahey guitar piece.) Tuschen and some of the other Mad City poets were invariable fixtures of the events. My theater mentor, director Joel Gersmann, also read; he had written his own volume of what he called “junk poetry,” titled “Deep Shit.”



It was an anything-goes time, and, inspired by the company I was keeping, I started writing some poetry of my own. My stuff was never burdened by the larger demands of the form — it was free verse, unambitious self-expression, post-adolescent soul searching and bouquet-tossing love songs for my muse Connie (who was essentially my principal audience, if truth be told). My sense of rhythm was fair enough to keep the work aloft. Though it was little better than doggerel, Tuschen agreed to throw down the few bucks it cost to type up, lay out, and photocopy a couple hundred copies of a small book of my work, which I titled “Red Boots” (after my girlfriend’s favorite footwear) under his Quest Publishing rubric.

By mid-1971, I was chafing at my then-current living situation in a hippie pad off campus, where I witnessed the dramatic meltdown of one of my three roommates, a young, drug-crazed heiress we called “Spacey Gracie,” whose family had the police swoop in and drag her off to a private loony bin. Tuschen proposed that I move into an open room down the hall from his at the Fess Hotel.



Located at 123 E. Doty St., a block and a half away from the state capitol that served as the city’s hub, the Fess was something of a local landmark. A residential hotel that had opened in 1854, it had been operated by the Fess family for four generations; 69-year-old Alice Fess, the wife of the current owner, was the building’s truculent manager.



The place was then on the downward slope of its existence; at that point downtown Madison had gotten a little seedy, and it was surrounded by a number of bars and strip joints that catered to the state office workers and political lobbyists. Ironically, considering the amount of drinking that went on around and in the hotel in those days, one of the most famous Fess patrons in earlier times was the axe-wielding temperance crusader Carrie Nation. (Abraham Lincoln was said to have stayed there, but no one was ever able to confirm that for sure.) The place had a lobby where most hours you could find one of the older tenants dozing in a soiled chair or zoned out in front of an ancient TV set. Both the day desk clerk and the night clerk were walleyed, so communicating with the staff, who always seemed to be staring at something to your left, was a disconcerting experience.

I don’t think I paid more than $150 a month for a second-floor single at the Fess. Accommodations were unspectacular: The room contained an uncomfortable bed, a stained sink, a small closet, and a tiny, scarred desk in front of a window that looked out onto the grey street, where I tapped out my work on a turquoise Olivetti portable. I used the communal bathroom just outside my door, which was occupied competitively by the other tenants. Tuschen had a suite down the hall — he was the Fess pathfinder, after all — and Hannibal also had a room on my floor. For obvious reasons, Tuschen’s spacious room became the focal point for a considerable amount of drinking among the three resident versifiers, all of us living out our Beat Generation fantasies.

A couple of times, the university’s visiting professor of creative writing entered into this fantastical den, and he made his presence forcefully known. His name was George Barker. Though he is little known or remembered in America today, Barker was one of England’s great poetry prodigies of the 1930s. He was T.S. Eliot’s protégé, and William Butler Yeats was an admirer.

At 58, he was gaunt and lined; he was suitably dressed in tweeds, and displayed the waspish, razor-tongued manner of the old-school British intelligentsia. He was accompanied by a smart, auburn-haired, very beautiful young woman he introduced as his wife. But we did not know that Elspeth Langlands was not yet George Barker’s wife — his spouse Jessica, a Roman Catholic, refused to grant him a divorce. Elspeth had been introduced to Barker, who was 27 years her senior, when she was 22 by Barker’s longtime mistress Elizabeth Smart, who had tired of the poet’s violent, alcohol-fueled behavior (which she, an alcoholic and drug addict herself, had chronicled in a 1945 novel in verse, “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept”) and happily handed him off to a new partner.

Barker would huddle with Elspeth on the floor of Tuschen’s flat with a gallon glass jug of Annie Green Springs, the sickeningly sweet, cheap party wine, at his side. He would get hammered on the foul stuff, which was manufactured purely for effect, all night long, as he diced up the manuscripts that Tuschen and Hannibal would read aloud for him. The work of these young writers could not have been further from the well-manicured “New Apocalyptic” writing that had won him kudos three decades ago, and he had little patience with it.



I never had the temerity, or the courage, to try out my jejune material on him, but one evening I made the mistake of reading Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” the New York poet’s shocked, moving reaction to Billie Holiday’s tragic demise.



After I finished, he paused for a beat and said, “Dear boy, that’s pure shit.”

That cold dismissal of a writer I love essentially ended my poetic aspirations for good.

“Red Boots” was published in early 1972, and sold tepidly at the Madison Book Co-op, the hip book outlet that became Bukowski’s local sponsor. While I was already re-enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, I managed to get a chance to live out a couple of my poetry fantasies before I hung up my spurs for good. The school actually hired me to give a reading on campus; I was paired with Bob Watt, the snaggle-toothed, lecherous pest exterminator/folk artist/“art” photographer who was a local legend in Milwaukee. Incredibly, Tuschen also convinced the university library to purchase copies of the entire Quest catalog, and so today “Red Boots” resides in the UW’s rare books collection. (I do not anticipate any scholarly interest — it’s truly dreadful.) After my father died in 2002, I learned with amazement that he kept a copy of the book — which contained a poem about our strained relationship — in his office desk.

Mrs. Fess learned from her clerks that Connie had been stretching herself across my narrow hotel bed, so I was politely asked to vacate the premises of her none too clean but nonetheless respectable establishment, and I moved into my girl’s pad on Fraternity Row. The Fess, which became a popular downtown restaurant for 20 years after the family sold it in 1975, is still operating today as a gastropub. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

We all went our separate ways. John Tuschen, who had titled one of his book “The Percodan Papers” after a favorite intoxicant, quit drugs and alcohol and became a drug rehabilitation counselor. In 1977, he was named the first poet laureate of Madison. He died in 2005; his longtime companion Suni asked me if she could reprint an honest but unflattering poem about him for a memorial volume, and of course I said yes, despite my misgivings about its quality. Hannibal left town, became a minister, and wrote a couple of spiritually themed self-help books. George Barker died at 78 in 1991, two years after he finally married Elspeth following the death of his wife. Elspeth Barker died at 81 in April of this year. A respected journalist, essayist, and novelist, she bore four of Barker’s 15 children.

Connie and I split up, then regrouped in Chicago, where we took root in a new bar on Lincoln Avenue. I began a protracted sidelong course to becoming a working journalist. I would learn that it was easier for me to write about what was in front of my eyes and ears than it was to chart the course of my heart. That great gift belongs to others.

[watusichris]

Betty Davis Was a Big Freak

Written for the late lamented Music Aficionado in 2016, and republished on the day of Ms. Davis’ death, 2/9/22. ********** To this day, the name Betty Davis – Betty with a “y,” that is – remains best known to connoisseurs of Miles Davis minutiae and ‘70s funk obsessives. While it’s true that Betty played an important off-stage role in the career of the jazz trumpeter, to whom she was married for just a year, and she undoubtedly made some of the best hardcore funk records of her era, she deserves to be recognized beyond the relatively narrow provinces of the jazzbo and the crate-digger.

Uncompromising, intelligent, brazen, aggressive, and not incidentally gorgeous, sexually provocative, and a fashion plate always ahead of the curve, Betty was a prophetic figure. Spawned by the explosion of music, fashion, and alternative culture of the late ‘60s, and by concurrent leaps in black consciousness and feminism, she was a take-no-prisoners singer and writer who presented herself as something new, rich, and strange with her self-titled debut album in 1973.

There were some badass contemporaries working the soul and funk trenches– gutter-tongued diva Millie Jackson and one-time James Brown paramour Yvonne Fair leap to mind immediately – but they seemed to be adapting tropes previously worked by male singers in the genres. Betty still sounds like something new: a tough, smart, demanding woman who reveled in pleasure and insisted on satisfaction, unafraid to claim what she wanted.

Despite the fact that she was associated with some high-profile male musician friends and lovers – beyond Davis, the roll call included Hugh Masekela, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Mike Carabello, Eric Clapton, and Robert Palmer – she was no groupie or bed-hopping climber. Possessed of her own self-defining vision, she was producing her own records and leading a tight, flexible little band by the end of her brief run.

In 1976, after completing four splendid albums (only three of which were released at the time), she disappeared, not only from the music business but from the public eye entirely. What happened? It’s an old story that many women in the industry will recognize: Her record company didn’t know what to do with her, and wanted her to tone down her act. Betty Davis wasn’t having any of that, thank you, and she hit the damn road.

She was born Betty Mabry in Durham, NC, in 1945. She grew up country, and was exposed to down-home, get-down music early. On the title track of her second album, They Say I’m Different, she runs down the artists who served as inspirations: Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, Albert King, Chuck Berry. The blues, in one form or another, is the backbone of her style.

Her family relocated to Pittsburgh when she was young, but at 16 she left home for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. There she was hurtled into the roiling cultural vortex of the Village. She took up modeling, working for the toney Wilhelmina agency, and began running with a posse of similarly disposed, equally beautiful women who called themselves the “Electric Ladies.” Sound familiar? One of her closest cohorts was Devon Wilson, for many years a notorious consort of Jimi Hendrix known for her freewheeling, outré sex- and drug-saturated lifestyle.

Mabry began to try her hand at singing, and cut a few self-penned singles. They were in an old-school mold in terms of structure, but her very first 45 hints at things to come. “Get Ready For Betty,” a 1964 track released by Don Costa (discoverer of Paul Anka and Trini Lopez and a key arranger for Frank Sinatra), is stodgy early-‘60s NYC R&B to its core, but its message is pointed: “Get out my way, girl, ‘cause I’m comin’ to take your man.”

She also made a stolid romantic duet ballad with singer Roy Arlington and, produced by cult soul man Lou Courtney, a homage to the Cellar, the New York club where she DJed. But she didn’t start reaching the upper echelon of the music biz until one of her songs, a hymn to Harlem called “Uptown,” was cut by the Chambers Brothers for their smash 1968 album The Time Has Come, which also included the psychedelic soul workout “Time Has Come Today.”

The Chambers association probably secured a singles deal for her at Columbia Records, and her first session for the major label was produced by her former live-in boyfriend, South African trumpeter Masekela, in October 1968. By that time, she had split with him: A month earlier, she had married a far more famous horn player, Miles Davis, whom she had met in 1967. Davis and his regular producer Teo Macero would head her second session for Columbia in May 1969.

Those two dates were released for the first time as The Columbia Years 1968-1969 earlier this month by Light in the Attic, the independent label that has restored Betty’s entire catalog to print over the last decade. While devoted fans can be grateful that the work is finally seeing the light of day, it does not make for easy listening, for it was clearly made by people groping in the dark.

Betty’s artistic persona was at that point completely unformed, and so her male Svengalis did their best to mold the clay in their hands, with feeble results. Masekela evidently completed just three tracks, two of which, “It’s My Life” and “Live, Love, Learn,” were issued as a flop single. The homiletic song titles give the game away; the music, straight-up commercial soul backed by a large group (which included Wilton Felder and Wayne Henderson of the Jazz Crusaders and Masekela), has nothing original to say.

The date with Miles is a bigger waste, if a more spectacular one. The personnel couldn’t have been more glittering: Hendrix sidemen Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell; ex-Detroit Wheels guitarist Jim McCarty; bassist Harvey Brooks, studio familiar of Bob Dylan and former member of the Electric Flag; and Davis’ then-current or future band mates Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, and Larry Young.

But nothing jells. The material is either weak (Betty’s directionless original “Hangin’ Out” is the best of a bad lot) or incongruous (lumbering covers of Cream’s “Politician” and Creedence’s “Born On the Bayou”). Worse, the jazzers are unable to lay down anything resembling a solid soul-rock foundation, and even reliable timekeeper Mitchell blows the groove on more than one occasion. Miles gets impatient with his spouse at one point, rasping over the talk-back, “Sing it just like that, with the gum in your mouth and all, bitch.”

Apparently intended as demos, the failed tracks were consigned to the tape library. By late ’69, Miles and Betty’s marriage was history. She left her mark on his music: She appeared on the cover of his cover of his 1968 album Filles de Kilimanjaro and inspired its extended track “Mademoiselle Mabry” (based on the chords that opens Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary”) and “Back Seat Betty” from his 1981 comeback album The Man With the Horn.

Moreover, she moved him toward the flash style that would dominate his music through the mid-‘70s, by exposing him to the slamming music of Hendrix and Sly and exchanging his continental suits for psychedelic pimp togs. Would we know Bitches Brew, On the Corner, and Agharta without Betty Davis? Maybe, maybe not.

For her part, Betty remained in the wings for a while. She collaborated on demos for the Commodores; in London, she modeled, worked on songs for Marc Bolan of T. Rex, and declined a production offer from her then-paramour Clapton. Drifting back to New York, she met Santana percussionist Carabello. They became involved romantically, and in 1972 she relocated to the San Francisco Bay area, where Carabello’s local connections led to the formation of a stellar band to back her on a debut album.

One reads the credits for Betty Davis in awe. The rhythm section was the Family Stone’s dissident, puissant rhythm section, bassist Larry Graham and drummer Greg Errico (who also produced). Original Santana guitarist Neal Schon, future Mandrill axe man Doug Rodrigues, founding Graham Central Station organist Hershall Kennedy, and keyboardist and ace Jerry Garcia collaborator Merl Saunders filled out the instrumentation. The Pointer Sisters, Sylvester, and Kathi McDonald were among a large platoon of backup vocalists.

Issued in 1973 by Just Sunshine Records, an independent label owned by Woodstock Festival promoter Michael Lang (who also released a set by another unique woman, folk singer-guitarist Karen Dalton), Betty Davis was one hell of a coming-out party. Since her abortive Columbia dates, she had developed a unique vocal attack that could leap from a velvety croon to a Tina Turner-like shriek in a nanosecond. The stomping funk of the studio band backed her up to the hilt.

Like Turner, she was one Bold Soul Sister. The lust-filled opening invitation “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up” announces that a new game was afoot. The statement of romantic/sexual independence “Anti Love Song,” the lovers’ chess match “Your Man My Man,” and the self-explanatory “Game is My Middle Name” offer up a startling, hard-edged new model of a hard-funking female vocalist.

The album’s most affecting track may be “Steppin in Her I. Miller Shoes,” Davis’ level-headed elegy for her sybaritic friend Devon Wilson, who sailed out a window at the Chelsea Hotel in 1971. “She coulda been anything that she wanted…Instead she chose to be nothing,” Davis sings, implying that route wouldn’t be one she would take herself.

“If I’m in Luck” grazed the lower reaches of the R&B singles chart and the album failed to reach the LP rolls at all, but Davis was undaunted. For 1974’s They Say I’m Different, she took the producer’s reins, which she would hold for the rest of her career. While the backup lineup is less glitzy (though Saunders, Pete Escovedo, and Buddy Miles, on guitar no less, appear), the support is still sizzling; crackling drums and burbling clavinet put over a set of songs that may have been even stronger than those heard on her debut.

No one who hears “He Was a Big Freak” is likely to ever forget it; it’s a startling dissection of a masochistic relationship -- inspired by Jimi Hendrix, and not, as many have assumed, by Miles Davis (“Everyone knows that Miles is a sadist,” Betty remarked later). Almost as notable are “Don’t Call Her No Tramp,” a prescient condemnation of what we now call slut-shaming, and the autobiographical title track, with slicing slide guitar work by Cordell Dudley.

Different and its attendant singles tanked, but Betty managed to maintain her profile with live gigs noteworthy for their uninhibited bawdiness, on-stage abandon, and the star’s Egyptian-princess-from-outer-space wardrobe sense. By early 1974 she had assembled a hot, lean road band that included her cousins Nickey Neal and Larry Johnson on drums and bass, respectively, plus keyboardist Fred Mills and guitarist Carlos Morales. This lineup would back her on her last two albums.

The end of Just Sunshine’s distribution deal liberated Davis, who, at the suggestion of then-boyfriend Robert Palmer, inked with Palmer’s label Island Records. The company released Nasty Gal in 1975, and it may be Davis’ best-executed work. The pared-down backing lets the songs shine, and there are good ones here: The shameless title song, the vituperative blast at the critics “Dedicated to the Press,” and the out-front ultimatum for sexual satisfaction “Feelins” get right up in the listener’s face. The most surprising track is the ballad “You and I,” an unexpected songwriting reunion with Miles, orchestrated by the trumpeter’s famed arranger Gil Evans.

It’s a tremendous album, and Betty supported it with live shows that ate the funk competition alive. A bootleg of an especially out-there set recorded at a festival on the French Riviera in 1976 literally climaxes with Nasty Gal’s “The Lone Ranger,” an in-the-saddle heavy breather that Davis wraps up by feigning a loud orgasm.

One should remember that at this particular juncture, Madonna was studying dance at the University of Michigan.

But Nasty Gal faded with hardly a trace, and Davis’ relationship with Island swiftly became fractious. It’s easy to see why the label declined to issue her final album, originally called Crashin’ From Passion and ultimately released, after years as a bootleg, by Light in the Attic in 2009 as Is It Love or Desire. The collection, which leans heavily on songs about sex, doping, and heavy drinking, includes “Stars Starve, You Know,” an outright condemnation of the games record companies play:

They said if I wanted to make some money I’d have to change my style Put a paper bag over my face Sing soft and wear tight fitting gowns

They don’t like the way I’m lookin’ So it’s hard for my agent to get me bookin’s Unless I cover up my legs and drop my pen And commit one of those commercial sins…

Oh hey hey Island

And that was all she wrote. Until writers began to seek her out in the new millennium as her records became available again, Betty Davis was an invisible woman, one who had blazed a trail that other talents, such as Prince and Madonna, would blaze more profitably after her. She was definitively ahead of her time.

Asked by one writer what she had done since leaving music, Davis, who turns 71 on July 26, responded with the most tragic thing one can imagine any artist saying: “Nothing really.”

[watusichris]

The movie legacy of “Red Harvest”

Strange but true: Dashiell Hammett’s fantastic 1929 hardboiled novel Red Harvest has spawned no less than four movie adaptations – including two certified genre classics – but has never been credited on the screen as the original source material.

The book was the debut full-length work by Hammett, who would go on to create such enduring screen characters as detectives Sam Spade (in The Maltese Falcon) and Nick and Nora Charles (in The Thin Man). However, screenwriting sleight-of-hand robbed the writer of full credit for his blood-soaked work, which spawned the samurai opus Yojimbo (1961), the spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and the gangster sagas Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Last Man Standing (1996).

Originally serialized in the tough-guy pulp magazine Black Mask, Red Harvest featured a protagonist/narrator already familiar to readers of Hammett’s short stories: the short, fat, hard-drinking, and clever operative of the Continental Detective Agency known only as the Continental Op. (Hammett never gave him a name.

The book was inspired by Hammett’s own early career at the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which was frequently hired by industrialists to break strikes, employing any means necessary. The writer’s biographer Diane Johnson suggests that he may have been involved in the 1917 murder of a union organizer named Frank Little in Butte, Montana.

In the novel, the lone wolf detective arrives in a corrupt, lawless Montana town named Personville (known as “Poisonville” by some) at the behest of a local mining magnate and newspaper publisher, whose empire is being threatened by the warring gangs of mobsters he hired to bust up a labor conflict and have now taken over the city’s rackets. The first corpse hits the pavement in the novel’s first few pages, and the bodies pile up so fast and so high that the Op himself loses count at 19 or so.

Amid the mounting carnage, the Op manages to stay alive by playing the murderous thugs and on-the-take cops against one another. Like Spade in The Maltese Falcon, the nameless detective, who is not afraid to ignore the letter of the law, uses the snares and tactics of his criminal adversaries to defeat them at their own game.

Hollywood made only one ill-fated attempt to translate Hammett’s book to the screen, in the little-seen early 1930 talkie Roadhouse Nights. The Op became a newspaperman played by comic actor Charlie Ruggles, and the film itself dispensed with most of the plot to become a vehicle for two singers, Helen Morgan (the star of Show Boat on Broadway) and vaudevillian Jimmy Durante.

It was left to Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and his co-screenwriter Ryuzo Kikushima to make the first, savage movie version of Red Harvest, 31 years later, as Yojimbo (The Bodyguard).

Transplanting the action to provincial Japan in 1860 and dramatically paring down Hammett’s byzantine plot, the movie follows the machinations of a lone ronin – a masterless samurai – who wanders into a nearly deserted town ravaged by violence and disorder. (Played by Kurosawa’s frequent star Toshiro Mifune, he assumes the moniker “Sanjuro,” though his true name is never known.) Deserted by its law-abiding citizens, the city is being torn apart by conflict between a pair of rival gangs in the service of two wealthy adversaries, a sake brewer and a silk merchant.

All the elements that would reappear in later versions of the story are in place here. A master swordsman, Sanjuro sells his services to both sides in the conflict, flip-flopping his loyalties from one minute to the next. His only ally is the town saloon keeper. He slyly rescues a married woman who has been taken as a hostage and concubine by one of the bosses and reunites her with her husband.

His deception is uncovered, and – in a sequence drawn from another serialized Hammett novel, The Glass Key (1931) – he is beaten nearly to death before making a dramatic escape, during which he witnesses the wholesale extermination of one of the gangs. Finally recovered from his wounds, he has a climactic duel with the other gang and its punk second-in-command Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), who owns the only pistol in the town.

Yojimbo was a great enough success that it spawned a sequel, the comedic Sanjuro, in 1962. Perhaps more importantly, a 1963 screening of Kurosawa’s original film at the Arlecchino cinema in Rome inspired a B-movie director to make a Western adaptation, which failed to credit its samurai derivation.

Sergio Leone’s low-budget 1964 feature A Fistful of Dollars – perhaps not the first “spaghetti Western,” but certainly the most famous – translated the elements of Kurosawa’s story to the fictitious Mexican border town of San Miguel. “Sanjuro” became a poncho-clad Western gun-for-hire played by Clint Eastwood, late of the American TV series Rawhide. (Though one character refers to Eastwood’s character as “Joe,” ads for the American release of the film pegged him as “The Man With No Name.”)

The battling factions of Kurosawa’s picture became two outlaw gangs tussling for control of the city, the Rojos (Mexicans) and the Baxters (Americans). The mercenary anti-hero’s main adversary, patterned after Unosuke, was the crazed Winchester rifle-wielding Ramon Rojo, played by the masterful Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte (incongruously billed as “Johnny Wels”). With one major plot addition – the massacre of a Mexican army detachment by the Rojos’ gang – the feature followed Kurosawa’s film point by point, with a uniquely gritty, sunbaked look and operatic approach that set the spaghetti Western style for all time.

Noting Red Harvest as the source of Yojimbo, Leone said in a 1971 interview, “What I wanted to do was to undress these [Japanese] puppets, and turn them into cowboys, to make them cross the ocean and to return to their place of origin.”

But Leone paid the price for his piracy. Sued for plagiarism by Kurosawa – who remarked in a letter to the Italian filmmaker, “[A Fistful of Dollars] is a very fine film, but it is my film” – he was forced to surrender 15% of the worldwide gross and turn over distribution rights of his film in Japan and the Far East to the Japanese director’s company. Undaunted, Leone brought back the Man With No Name in a pair of larger-scaled, more violent sequels, For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), with Eastwood returning in his career-making role.

Oddly enough, the slam-bang action of Red Harvest and the heady box office receipts of its two adaptations did not inspire an American rendering of the story for decades. And, when it finally reached the screen for the first time, the tale ended up as an original pastiche of two Hammett novels.

Written by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen – who had used a phrase borrowed from Red Harvest as the title of their 1984 debut feature Blood Simple – and directed by Joel Coen, Miller’s Crossing reinstated the Prohibition-era setting of Hammett’s stories. The gang war conflict of Red Harvest is staged in the Coens’ feature between Irish mobster Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) and his Italian rival Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), who come to blows over the activities of Jewish bookie Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro).

However, the film’s stormy central relationship, between O’Bannon and his fixer, friend, and confidant Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), replicates the alliance between mobbed-up political boss Paul Madvig and his faithful right-hand man Ned Beaumont, who fends off gangster Shad O’Rory’s power play in The Glass Key.

Despite its obvious derivations from Hammett’s books, Miller’s Crossing was a wholly original piece of work that transcended the uncredited glosses on its sources. The same could not be said for the other gangster-pic adaptation, Last Man Standing, which, while it more or less restored Hammett’s original setting, credited the Kurosawa-Kikushima script for Yojimbo as its inspiration.

Bruce Willis plays a freelance gunman calling himself “John Smith” – a name that draws cackles from his foes – who rolls into the Depression-era Texas border town of Jericho in a Model T Ford, packing two shoulder-holstered .45s and an immutably sullen expression. Dressing the ceaseless violence of the plot in a dusty neo-Leone palette, writer-director Walter Hill trots through Yojimbo’s original plot points, turning the warring factions into rival bootleggers (Irish and Italian, of course) and tacking on the massacre from A Fistful of Dollars to lift the body count.

Willis’ Smith is the putative hero of the piece, and, while he rescues the damsel in distress like his samurai and spaghetti Western predecessors, his relentless misogyny and utter humorlessness, and the actor’s silly, open-mouthed “shootout face,” make him a difficult figure to root for. The lone bright spot in the picture is the reliably weird Christopher Walken’s chilly turn as the scar-faced top gunman Hickey, a clone of his psycho precursors Unosuke and Ramon Rojo, who wields a Tommy gun instead of a pistol or a repeating rifle.

Last Man Standing is a poor excuse for an American rendering of Red Harvest, and it leaves one hoping that someday a truly gifted director will take up Hammett’s grimly funny, dark novel and its pudgy, boozy, cagey hero and give them the widescreen homegrown treatment they deserve. The book is an American classic, and it deserves a rendering in its own, long-buried name.

[watusichris]

Sex Pistols, SF, 1/14/78

This very bad piece of writing, which I wrote as the whey-faced “Los Angeles correspondent” for a Wisconsin music rag, is posted in the interest of music history. When last seen, the group’s lead vocalist was featured on “The Masked Singer.” **********

The Sex Pistols “Notes From New Babylon,” Emerald City Chronicle, Feb. 7-21. 1978

Los Angeles, January 17, 1978

In San Francisco on Saturday, the Sex Pistols proved that they don’t fire blanks. And the crowd shot back.

The last date on the Pistols’ eight-day American tour was held before 5,000 people in that bastion of hippiedom, Winterland. With the hall’s bright red floor and tiered seating conjuring up a high school gym, the concert resembled nothing so much as a junior high dance held on Mars.

The Faithful, the True Believers were out in force. With a couple of busy punk venues and a number of homegrown New Wave phenoms to its credit, San Francisco has learned over the last year to dress and act the punk part.

Although the majority of the audience consisted of curious booboisie ready to gawk at this year’s New Thing, there were large numbers of Real Fans decked out to the teeth. The “haute couture” came courtesy of Gillette, Johnson and Johnson, and Handy Trash Bags. They came in see-through plastic raincoats, t-shirts torn, stapled and safety-pinned, vertigo-inducing patterned shirts and blouses, berets, sunglasses of every configuration and color, and leathers of every persuasion. The hairdos were chopped and channeled and tinted red, pink, green, yellow, orange, spikey like the coiffures of electrocuted felons. Scott Mackenzie go home – flowers and beads have long been consigned to the trash, and Love City’s torn down. A New Wave has hit North Beach.

I grabbed a spot about 25 feet in front of the stage and waited out the opening acts, two local groups, the Nuns and the Avengers, both determined to outlast their welcome. The highlight of the first two hours was drunken rock critic/”musician” R. Meltzer’s attempt to incite the crowd with a string of addled and half-hearted obscenities. The crowd got some early target practice, and Meltzer was led from the scene by an impatient Bill Graham.

The Pistols arrived at 10:15.

Bassist Sid Vicious took the stage first. When Vicious finally doffed his knee-length greatcoat, he displayed a body covered with livid scars; a fresh bandage shielded a recent wound. What Vicious, self-styled “worst bass player in the world,” lacks in musical expertise, he makes up for with his winning personality.

During the set, he showered the audience with ropes of spittle, spat beer on the front row, verbally invited ringsiders to spar with him, and in general displayed manners that Amy Vanderbilt would consider sub-par. The security crew on his side of the stage stayed busy all night. He survived.

Steve Jones, the pudgy guitarist, took a stance of pugnacious cool. Looking the low-life toff in a cherry-red coat, he sneered, strutted, jumped and spat this way through the set, oblivious to the return fire. Spit hung from his face like a veil of Spanish lace. Through it all, his axe barked like a wounded creature.

Drummer Paul Cook bashed his way along, unaware of the barrage that rattled his cymbals and smacked his bass drum.

Last to join the fray was John Rotten.

Oh, Johnny Rotten, most scabrous of rock and rollers. Your heart goes out to this wretched soul with his Day-glo pallor and drawn, acned visage. He lurches out in Gestapo leather, leather pants festooned with chains, two vests, white shirt. But forget the fashion – the first thing you notice as he hunches over the mike are his brilliant blue eyes, freezing with malice, riveting you to the Winterland floor when they shoot your way.

He greets the crowd. “Welcome to London.”

Thus begins an hour-long salvo in which the audience shows their feverish affection by launching every object in their possession at the stage in a true love-hate gesture. You name it, beer cans, fruit both fresh and rotten, stink bombs, a box of Tampax, toilet paper, a dispenser of birth control pills, shoes, skirts, pieces of tattered clothing, loose change, chains, safety pins, a squirt gun, anything throwable, an unrelenting storm for 60 minutes. “The stuff yer throwin’ ain’t good enough,” complains John Rotten, and two umbrellas sail onto the stage. “‘At’s more like it, now throw some cameras, we can use some nice cameras.” Each object is scrupulously examined and sometimes pocketed by the singer.

Ignoring the bombardment of foreign matter and the thunderstorm of hockers from the first rows, the Pistols hammered through thirteen balls-to-the-wall rockers in their formal set – eleven songs from Never Mind the Bollocks, one B-side (“I Wanna Be Me,” the flip of “Anarchy in the U.K.”), and one new tune. Each note vibrated with anger. Rotten communicates it all. He may be the most visceral performer I’ve ever seen; his performance wracks his voice, body and spirit so, you’re afraid he’ll collapse right in front of you.

Each song as performed live was a new epiphany, animated by that paralyzing stare and crook-backed accusation that is uniquely John Rotten. Perhaps the finest hour came in “Pretty Vacant,” as the staccato opening lick, repeated and repeated, insinuated and finally exploded. Jone and Vicious jumping up, the crowd screaming, as the band plunged into the ultimate anthem of the True Lost Generation, the Blank Generation of the Seventies.

The group closed with “Anarchy in the U.K.,” retooled to read “Anarchy in the U.S.A.” After a pause, they returned, in a bow to their greatest American influence, they performed an exhausting workout on Iggy’s “No Fun.” Rock of Ages, let me hide myself in thee

Paul and Steve drag a groupie up from the crowd, Paul latches a hand onto her butt and leers back at the crowd, Sid trades last endearing words with the front row, Rotten pulls himself from the floor and beats an agonized retreat, and the Sex Pistols Tour of the Americas is over.

Verdicts? Delirium from the Acolytes, boredom, confusion and indifference from the Fleetwood Frampton clones. You know where I stand, and if you don’t have a place to stand, you might as well find a place to lie down. They might not be the new Beatles (thank god for that), but the Sex Pistols have revitalized rock and roll for me in the deathly Seventies. P.S. (1/25/78) From where I sit, it looks like the Sex Pistols may be finished. Daily Variety and the L.A. Times said, yes, it’s all over last Thursday. On Sunday, the Pistols’ U.S. rep was denying it all on local radio, but the denial had a kind of uninformed, hollow ring to it.

Mid-last week, John Rotten went before the press and said that the band was splitting, that he was tired of the “big band” hype the group received on its American tour. A couple of local observers here feel that this is just a ploy to remove Sid Vicious, whose behavior suggests that he might be a potentially dangerous psychopath, but I personally doubt it.

So what, you ask. The Pistols haven’t been around long enough to matter to a lot of people, but they have set the trend. With the wheels in motion, there is now a movement to continue without them. My feelings are that it’s too bad, a great band is going down prematurely, but John Rotten will still be around to be a star. A star IN SPITE OF HIMSELF.

Long live the Pistols.

[watusichris]

Rock Gunfight in the Antipodes

Listening today to the hot new Grown Up Wrong! comp by Sydney’s Lipstick Killers, whose lone officially released single was produced by Deniz Tek of Radio Birdman, it occurred to me that my old Music Aficionado faux faceoff between Australia’s pioneering bands of the ‘70s (all of which I dearly love) has disappeared into the online ether. It’s time to bring it back.

**********

By Chris Morris

The mid- to late ‘70s were fertile days for rock ‘n’ roll in Australia. Here and there across the vast but not terribly populous island continent, fires were started by several attitude-filled bands bent on doing things their own damn way. They all managed to make their way off the island, but if they hit the American consciousness, it was for little more than a nanosecond during their heyday.

Who were the truest Rock Wizards of Oz? For this Down Under face-off, I’ve selected three contenders: the Saints, Radio Birdman, and the Scientists. All of them had fairly slim discographies; ironically, the act probably least known in the U.S., the Scientists, recorded most prolifically, with their core line-up producing several magnificent albums and singles during a productive four-year stretch in the early ‘80s. But none of these bands ever stayed together long enough to make a deep impression among the Yanks.

So where’s the Birthday Party, you ask? There are a few things to consider. First of all, though the band and its precursor unit the Boys Next Door were in business from 1976 on, they didn’t release their first LP until 1980. Also, Nick Cave is well known enough that more (king) ink needn’t be spilled on him. Finally, I still resent the fact that Cave stole PJ Harvey away from me, so it’s personal.

On with the showdown…

HIT ME LIKE A DEATH RAY, BABY

The Saints, founded 1974 in Brisbane

The prime movers of the Saints were a pair of literal outsiders: vocalist Chris Bailey, born in Kenya to Irish parents, and guitarist Ed Kuepper, raised in Germany. Thus the otherness of their work is no surprise.

With schoolmate Ivor Hay – who over time would play drums, bass, and piano with them – the pair founded a combo originally known as Kid Galahad and the Eternals (borrowing their handle from a 1962 Elvis Presley picture), but they swiftly renamed themselves the Saints and began playing in their hometown on the northeast coast of Australia.

Listening to their records, which were made in something of a cultural vacuum, it’s difficult to get a handle on where the Saints’ distinctive, aggressive sound came from. To be sure they were aware of such homegrown precursors from the ‘60s as the Master’s Apprentices and the Missing Links (whose 1965 single they covered on their debut album). It’s safe to assume they were conversant with the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and Lenny Kaye’s 1972 garage rock compilation Nuggets. Yet they bred something utterly their own in the ocean air of Brisbane.

With Hay on drums and Kym Bradshaw on bass, Bailey and Kuepper mounted noisy local gigs that swiftly attracted the antipathy of the local constabulary; they wound up turning their own digs into a club to play shows. In 1976, they recorded and issued a self-financed single featuring two originals, “(I’m) Stranded” and “No Time.” These dire, ferocious songs were distinguished by venomous lyrics, unprecedented velocity, and guitar playing by Kuepper that sounded like a (literal) iron curtain being attacked with a chainsaw.

The record died locally, but a copy of its U.K. issue found its way into the hands of a critic at the English music weekly Sounds, which declared it the single of the week. This accolade got the attention of EMI Records, which signed the band and financed the recording of an album, also titled I’m Stranded, in a fast two-day Brisbane session.

The album, which was ultimately released in the U.S. by Sire Records, blew the ears off anyone who heard it, and it landed with a bang in England, where punk rock was lifting off in all its fury in early 1977. It was hurtling, powerful stuff that stood apart from punk in several crucial ways: While some of the songs were clipped and demonic in the standard manner, the Saints proved they could take their time on expansive numbers like the almost Dylanesque “Messin’ With the Kid” and the sprawling, hellriding “Nights in Venice.” And one has to wonder how British p-rockers took to their perverted take on Elvis’ squishy “Kissin’ Cousins.”

Made by musicians who never considered themselves “punks,” and who in fact abhorred the label, (I’m) Stranded is nevertheless one of the definitive statements in the genre, and it has maintained its force to this day.

Settling in England for the duration, the Saints decided to throw a curveball. One could not find a more profoundly alienated album than Eternally Yours (1978), a series of yowling protests, twisted prophecies, and savage put-downs, including the snarling second version of the single “This Perfect Day.” But, though the record was loud and for the most part swift, the group applied the brakes to their sound somewhat, and a couple of songs, including the caustic album opener “Know Your Product,” were dressed by a soul-styled horn section. Punk loyalists ran for cover.

By the time Prehistoric Sounds was issued in late ’78, the dejected Bailey and Kuepper were moving in different directions, and you can hear it in the grooves. The record is slow, almost listless at times, and its logy originals are complemented by incongruous Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin covers with none of the energy of earlier Saints soul-blasts. It is an album primarily for loyalists, and by then there were few in that number.

Kuepper exited the band on the heels of the third album’s release and returned to Australia, where he enjoyed a long career as leader of the Laughing Clowns; Bailey continued to perform under the Saints mantle with a shifting lineup that at last count numbered more than 30 players over the course of 37 years

Bailey and Kuepper reunited for one-off gigs in 2001 (at the ARIA awards ceremony) and 2007 (at Australia’s Queensland Music Festival).

THERE’S GONNA BE A NEW RACE

Radio Birdman, founded 1974 in Sydney

People who toss the “punk” handle around often throw Radio Birdman into the mix, but the sextet from Australia’s Southeast Coast may be best referred as the world’s youngest proto-punk band.

Its mastermind was guitarist, songwriter, and producer Deniz Tek, a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who emigrated to Sydney in 1971 to study medicine. As a teen, he got a chance to witness Detroit’s most explosive pre-punk bands – the MC5, the Stooges, and the Rationals; he would later wind up collaborating with important members of all those groups.

After apprenticing with and getting bounced from a Sydney band called TV Jones, Tek formed Radio Birdman (its name a corruption of a lyric from the Stooges’ “1970”) with singer Rob Younger; the lineup ultimately solidified with the addition of guitarist (and sometime keyboardist) Chris Masuak, bassist Warwick Gilbert, drummer Ron Keeley, and (on and off and then on again) keyboardist Pip Hoyle.

Rapidly acquiring a fan base made up of some of Sydney’s lowest elements, including members of the local Hell’s Angels, Radio Birdman ultimately took over a bar, re-dubbed (in honor of the Stooges, of course) the Oxford Funhouse, as their base of operations. The band’s severe Tek-designed band logo emanated fascist-style vibes for some; at a co-billed appearance in Sydney, the Saints’ Chris Bailey remarked from the stage, “We’d like to thank the local members of Hitler Youth for their stage props.”

Despite much antipathy and some attendant violence, the band maintained a loyal local following, and in 1976 it issued a strong four-song EP, Burn My Eye, via local studio-cum-independent label Trafalgar. This was succeeded the following year by a full-length debut album, Radios Appear.

Anyone looking for something resembling punk will likely be disappointed by that collection. The band wears its all-American hard rock/proto-punk influences on its dirty sleeve. Radios Appear is dedicated to the Stooges (whose “No Fun” was the lead-off track on the Aussie issue of the LP), and a song co-written by Tek and Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, “Hit Them Again,” was cut during sessions for the record. Tek pays deep homage to MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer with his playing, and blatantly cops a signature lick from the 5’s “Looking at You” at one juncture. The album title was lifted from a Blue Öyster Cult lyric, and the Tek-Masuak guitar-bashing bows to their multi-axe sound. Finally, in both Younger’s sometimes Morrisonian vocalizing and Hoyle’s Ray Manzarek-like ornamentation, homage to the Doors in paid in full. Given that Sydney is a beach town, there’s even a frisson of surf music in the mix.

Bursting with power-packed originals like the apocalyptic “Descent into the Maestrom,” youth-in-revolt anthem “New Race,” the cryptic, insinuating “Man with the Golden Helmet,” and Tek’s autobiographical “Murder City Nights,” Radios Appear was a power-packed set that established Radio Birdman as Oz’s leading rock light.

However, renown did not equal success in Antipodean terms. In 1978, the band cut its second album, Living Eyes, at Rockfield Studio in Wales; it was a solid effort that included remakes of three Burn My Eye numbers (including the wonderful Tek memoir “I-94,” about the Michigan interstate) and excellent new originals like “Hanging On,” “Crying Sun,” and “Alone in the End Zone.” But, with success seemingly within their grasp, Sire Records – their American label, and the Saints’ as well – switched distribution and cut their roster, leaving their new work without a home. Within months of this catastrophe, Radio Birdman disbanded.

The principals scattered, to Younger’s New Christs and Tek and Hoyle’s the Visitors; Tek, Younger, and Warwick Gilbert later joined MC5 drummer Dennis Thompson and the Stooges’ Ron Asheton in the one-off New Race. Tek also later recorded with Wayne Kramer and Scott Morgan of Ann Arbor’s Rationals in Dodge Main.

Radio Birdman’s original lineup reunited for a 1996 tour; in August 2006 – after four of the original sextet regrouped to record a potent new album, Zeno Beach – the band played its first American date ever, at Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theater. Your correspondent was there, and it was freakin’ incredible.

IN MY HEART THERE’S A PLACE CALLED SWAMPLAND

The Scientists, founded 1978 in Perth

Among the important Aussie bands of the ‘70s, the Scientists were among the first to be directly influenced by the punk explosion in New York.

As guitarist-singer-songwriter Kim Salmon – the lone constant in the Scientists’ lineup during their existence – wrote in 1975, “Reading about a far-off place called CBGB in NYC and its leather-clad denizens, all with names like Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell, and Joey Ramone, got me thinking…I immediately went searching for Punk Rock. What I found were The Modern Lovers and The New York Dolls albums.”

Salmon first dabbled in the new sound with a band bearing the delightfully punk name the Cheap Nasties. Cobbled together in Perth – the Western provincial capital of Australia – from members of such local acts as the Exterminators, the Victims, and Salmon’s the Invaders -- the early Scientists were as derivative as one might imagine. Their early songs, heard on their self-titled LP (the so-called “Pink Album”) and an early single and EP, sport original songs authored by Salmon and drummer-lyricist James Baker, the backbone of shifting Scientific crews through 1980. The tunes range from straight-up Dolls/Heartbreakers rips (“Frantic Romantic,” “Pissed On Another Planet,” “High Noon”) to buzzing romantic pop-punk in a Buzzcocks vein (“That Girl,” “She Said She Loves Me”).

Not terribly promising stuff, but, after the departure of Baker for the Hoodoo Gurus in 1981 and a brief stint in a trio called Louie Louie, Salmon assembled a new Scientists who would prevail for nearly four years. That outfit – Salmon, guitarist Tony Thewlis, bassist Boris Sujdovic, and drummer Brett Rixton – promptly relocated to Sydney and started making the noise they are noted for.

By that time, Salmon had begun cocking an ear to the Birthday Party (and no doubt paid careful attention to the sordid noise on the Melbourne group’s 1982 album Junkyard), had discovered the miasmic voodoo of the Cramps, and started grooving to the dissonant, slide guitar-dominated racket of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. In short order, he would also absorb the bluesy downhome assault of Los Angeles’ roots-punk outfit the Gun Club.

The Sydney-based Scientists hooked up with indie label Au Go Go, which issued a devastating run of careening, mossy records by the band in 1982-83 – the vertiginous singles “This is My Happy Hour”/“Swampland” and the corrosive “We Had Love” (backed by a faithful cover of Beefheart’s “Clear Spot”), and the heart-stopping mini-album Blood Red River, which bore the churning “Set It On Fire,” “Revhead,” and “Burnout.” Others were essaying a similar style, but the Aussie youngsters were beating their elders at their own game.

Eying the big time, the band moved to London in 1984. Some opportunities presented themselves initially: The band got European tour slots with the Gun Club and early Goth act Sisters of Mercy. But their deal with Au Go Go fell apart acrimoniously; while they made a pair of fog-bound albums, You Get What You Deserve (1985) and The Human Jukebox (1987) for Karbon Records (and a set of re-recorded songs, Weird Love, was issued in the U.S. by Big Time Records), they scraped by in Britain.

Defections from the ranks commenced in ’85, and by early 1987 the depleted Salmon used money from a housing settlement to move back to Australia, where he founded a new band, the Surrealists.

Still valued among the cognoscenti, Salmon, Thewlis, Sujdovic, and latter-day drummer Leanne Chock appeared, at the invitation of Seattle’s Mudhoney, at London’s All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival in 2006. Earlier this year, Chicago-based archival label the Numero Group issued a comprehensive four-disc box of the band’s original recordings.

So, at the end of the day, who is the all-time champeen of ‘70s Oz rock?

Scoring on points, the Saints are tops for Being Punk First with additional wins in the Pure Noise and Weltzschmerz categories, Radio Birdman takes the Technical Ability and Old-School Attitude slots, and the Scientists prevail in the Loud Young Snot and Grunge Thug division.

And the championship belt goes to…the Saints!

Of course, that could all change tomorrow, but that’s rock ‘n’ roll for ya.

[watusichris]

Moby Grape: Rock ‘n’ Roll Tragedy

Methinks it’s time to restore this old Music Aficionado post about the great SF band to the Interwebs. **********

In 1966, amid the ferment of San Francisco’s active music scene, five disparate musicians were brought together in a new band. Heavily laden with talent, the group cut a 1967 debut album that is still ranked among the finest, most assured bows in rock history. Almost instantly, they were tabbed as the act to beat.

Yet, if it’s recalled at all today, Moby Grape’s name is synonymous among rock connoisseurs with tragedy, failure, unfulfilled promise, and chaos. The story of how what appeared to be rock’s Perfect Beast became a rolling catastrophe is one of the all-time cautionary tales in the annals of music and the music business.

One looks back at Moby Grape and wonders, “How could they fail?” Among performing units of their era, they were seemingly rivaled solely by their Los Angeles contemporaries Buffalo Springfield, whose glittering lineup included the mighty singer-songwriter-guitarist triumvirate of Neil Young, Stephen Stills, and Richie Furay.

Moby Grape trumped the Springfield’s three-pronged attack. All five members of the group sang, and they forged a deftly blended choral attack unique among bands of the day. All five musicians also wrote, with consistent brilliance and economy. Their three-guitar front line could blow any outfit unlucky enough to share a stage with them right off the boards, and their powerful rhythm section was unmatched by any on the Haight-Ashbury scene.

So what the hell happened? How did Moby Grape, anointed upon arrival as possibly the best Frisco had to offer in that city’s glory days, run aground?

The seeds of the band’s disorder may have been sown in its founding. In late 1966, its five members were brought together by an ambitious manager seeking a new act to work, as major label A&R men began poking around for acts that were playing in San Francisco’s burgeoning rock ballroom scene. (More will be said about that manager in a while.)

The magnetic linchpin of the new band was singer-songwriter-guitarist Skip Spence. The Canadian musician had served as the drummer for Jefferson Airplane and had played on the group’s debut album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. However, feeling marginalized creatively in the Airplane, he abruptly quit the band for a sojourn in Mexico. On his return to the Bay Area, he linked up with the Airplane’s erstwhile manager to make a fresh start.

Spence’s band mates were all well-traveled journeyman rockers who landed in San Francisco to flex their considerable chops. One arrived with a Hollywood pedigree: singer-guitarist Peter Lewis was the son of movie star Loretta Young, and a veteran of the surf band the Cornells and his own outfit Peter and the Wolves. Bassist-vocalist Bob Mosley, a white soul man to the bone, had recorded with San Diego’s Misfits. Lead guitarist-singer Jerry Miller – who had served for a time in Texas’ Bobby Fuller Four – and drummer Don Stevenson had both performed in the Frantics, part of Seattle’s vibrant ’60s scene.

The resultant quintet, while it keyed off Spence’s formidable onstage energy, was the most cooperative unit imaginable, with each member contributing notable songs to the Moby Grape repertoire. Their layered singing and instrumental puissance immediately made them a force to be reckoned with in the SF ballrooms, and they were rewarded with a contract from Columbia Records in early 1967.

Helmed by staff producer David Rubinson, Moby Grape could scarcely have been bettered as a debut album. Released at the height of the Summer of Love in June 1967, it was everything one could ask for in a rock record. Its songs were exciting and tightly constructed, blending elements of hard rock, blues, soul, folk, and country into its alternately stormy and lilting mix. The playing, sparked by Miller’s fiery guitar work, was equally focused, and eschewed the indulgences that would soon overwhelm rock record-makers. Plus the band’s massed harmonies presented a sound matched only by the Byrds’ contemporaneous work.

And Moby Grape went off the rails right out of the station.

The remainder of the band’s story can be told through a series of horrific bullet points. What brought down this almost impossibly gifted and commercially alluring group? Well, for starters there was…

A highly publicized bust on record release day

On June 6, 1967, Moby Grape celebrated the release of their self-titled album with a splashy party and performance at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom (of which more momentarily). Early the next morning, Miller, Spence, and Lewis were popped in Marin County after police discovered them cavorting with three underage girls. The three men were charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors, and Miller was also charged with possession of marijuana.

All charges were later dropped, but the incident could not have added any luster to Moby Grape’s rep in the eyes of the Columbia executives who had just spent a small fortune launching their brand-new act. And that launch would itself become problematic for the band, who were instantly the victims of…

Massive record label over-hype, in spades

Moby Grape’s Avalon appearance was a record-company saturnalia of the first magnitude. Janis Joplin – with her own star on the rise as a member of Big Brother & the Holding Company -- made a guest appearance with the group; orchid petals were dropped from the ceiling of the venue during the band’s set; and invitees were presented with a velvet-covered box that included press materials, glossy photos of the band, and copies of Moby Grape’s first five singles.

That’s right: five singles. In their infinite wisdom, Columbia’s marketing executives had decided to issue 10 of the 13 tracks on Moby Grape simultaneously on 45s with identical picture sleeves. If there was ever a tactic guaranteed to put the noses of suspicious music critics, over-burdened radio programmers, and confused retailers out of joint, that was it.

Somewhat miraculously, Moby Grape performed decently in spite of Columbia’s miscalculations. The LP managed to reach No. 24 on Billboard’s album chart, where it spent six months; it reportedly sold 200,000 copies. The damage done by the label’s strategy at radio was apparently irreversible, however: Spence’s “Omaha” became the band’s only chart single, peaking at No. 88 during a two-week stay. The writing was on the wall, and the next step in Moby Grape’s career witnessed…

Sophomore slumpage and more gimmicks

By the time the band entered the studio with Rubinson in the fall of 1967 to begin work on a new record, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released, and every musician on the planet was cocking an ear to the Beatles’ opulently recorded collection. The members of Moby Grape were in that number, and they were demonstrably led astray by the Fab Four’s example during the making of their second album, Wow.

The band seemed to misunderstand its own strengths. In contrast to the lean, diamond-hard originals on Moby Grape, the second album bore amorphous, unfocused tunes – “The Place and the Time,” “Bitter Wind,” “He” – that were not enhanced by the overbearing and needless presence of strings and horns. Even a tuff little rocker like “Can’t Be So Bad” was dressed up with 20 reed and brass pieces. The album reached its nadir with “Just Like Gene Autry: A Fox Trot,” a trivial spoof of ‘20s crooning introduced by ex-vaudevillian Arthur Godfrey; that track was pressed at 78 rpm, and owners of the original LP will recall the annoyance of getting up to change turntable speeds to listen to the number – an event that likely occurred only once in most cases.

Compounding the irritation, Columbia marketed Wow with a “bonus album,” Grape Jam, which featured four listless improvisations with guest stars Mike Bloomfield (inexplicably abandoning his guitar for piano) and Al Kooper, both soon to ring up sales with their own similarly styled Super Session. Hawked at a two-for-one-price, the two-LP package rose to No. 20 nationally. For many, the bloom was off the rose, but the group was already being wracked by larger problems, including...

Big-time mental illness

Moby Grape is probably the only band to ever boast two diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics among its members. Skip Spence, never a stable character to begin with, became an early LSD casualty; by 1967 he was, in the words of writer Jeff Tamarkin, “gobbling tabs of acid like Pez.” During the band’s stay in New York to record Wow, Spence attempted to attack Don Stevenson with a fire axe, and was committed to Bellevue Hospital. On his release, he hopped on a motorcycle and rode to Nashville; there, without the assistance of sidemen, he recorded the self-penned, self-produced album Oar under his given name, Alexander Spence. This disquieting, sometimes beautiful record has become a cherished classic of underground psycho-rock.

Spence, whose material was later recorded by his erstwhile band in his absence, returned sporadically to the Grape fold during a long period of homelessness and institutionalization; thanks to medication, his life stabilized to some extent before his death from cancer in 1999.

With Spence’s precipitous exit, the Grape carried on, recording Moby Grape ‘69 as a foursome. The album was a solid return to form, and it was highlighted by three exceptionally strong Bob Mosley contributions, the ballad “It’s a Beautiful Day Today” and the hard rockers “Hoochie” and “Trucking Man.”

Despite good reviews in the rock press, ‘69 sustained a meager chart peak of No. 133. By the time the set was released, Mosley had one foot out the door: He suddenly bolted for a stint in the U.S. Marines, leaving Moby Grape to wrap its obligations to Columbia as a trio; late 1969’s thoroughly lackluster Truly Fine Citizen was cut with session man Bob Moore standing in for Mosley.

Mosley ultimately returned to Moby Grape for a lone effort for Reprise Records, 1971’s sadly overlooked and underrated 20 Granite Creek (which also featured an instrumental contribution from the largely sidelined Spence) and a well-written self-titled 1972 solo album that was marred by uncertain playing and production. But he was not a well man: He too was intermittently hospitalized and homeless through the ‘90s. He returned to play, quite magnificently, with latter-day incarnations of the band, but by that time they were hamstrung by the malfeasances of the…

Worst…manager…ever

Given the fondness of Moby Grape’s onetime manager for launching combative litigation, I will refer to him here as “K.,” in honor of Josef K., the central character in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, who faces incomprehensible, illogical, and endless persecution in court.

K. handled Moby Grape from its 1966 founding, which he midwifed, through August 1967, when he was dismissed by the band. Prior to that time, he had managed Jefferson Airplane; after he was fired in 1966, his dispute with the Airplane’s members over their contract dragged through the courts for nearly 20 years, tying up $2 million in royalties and interest, most of which were ultimately awarded to the band. A similar contract conflict with the San Francisco band It’s a Beautiful Day, of “White Bird” fame, effectively put the group in deep freeze for two decades.

In 1968, K. sued Moby Grape, claiming his contracts gave him ownership of the band’s name and music publishing. This action remained on the docket for 38 years. During that time, K. assembled various groups to perform under the Moby Grape handle, and released CD editions of Moby Grape and Wow on his own label, using needle-drops off vinyl pressings of the original LPs as his “masters.” In 2003, K. sued the band again after they issued an excellent album, first released on cassette in 1989 by “the Melvilles,” on CD under the handle Legendary Grape.

Finally, in 2006, a California appellate court ruled that the members of Moby Grape owned their name and their songs. For most litigants, this would be the end of things. However, in 2007, after an independent label licensed the band’s Columbia catalog from Sony for classily packaged and augmented editions, another suit landed at the band’s feet; this time, K. claimed he owned the artwork for Moby Grape, Wow, and Grape Jam.

Realizing that it would be pointless and impossibly expensive to fight this vindictive new action for miniscule returns, Sony asked that the albums be taken off the market. Thus, to date, nearly half of Moby Grape’s studio work, including its classic debut, is unavailable in fully authorized form. Unreal.

Few rock bands in history have been served a platter of misfortune piled as high as the one placed before Moby Grape. The group’s music – at its best the equal of any made in its time -- remains elusive to this day, but it’s worth hunting for.

[watusichris]

My Brilliant Career in Chicago Pro Wrestling: A True Story

Damn, I could have sworn I’d posted this 2015 Night Flight story, which remains the funniest thing I’ve ever written. Every word is true. ********** In the early 1970s, before Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation (today World Wrestling Entertainment) turned professional wrestling into a pay-per-view cash cow, pro grappling was a wide-open game run by maverick regional promoters and catering to lunatic fans. I got to experience this incredible world intimately: For two years, I served as “publicist” for the promoter in one of the biggest wrasslin’ towns in the country, Chicago.

I was fresh out of college back in 1972, and returned to my old room in my mother’s apartment in Evanston bearing a seemingly worthless bachelor’s degree in English and no immediate prospects for gainful employment. Fortunately, my father believed in nepotism.

After a long career as a TV executive that had garnered him two Peabody Awards, my dad was then the general manager of WSNS, a Chicago UHF station that broadcast on Channel 44. It was a low-rent operation that my old man helped legitimize by securing telecasts of White Sox games. (He loathed Sox announcer Harry Caray, who would get hammered out of his skull while working in the booth, and rightly thought major league screwball-turned-color man Jimmy Piersall was out of his mind.)

Though such questionable WSNS programming as a daily late-night weathercast delivered by a buxom negligee-clad blonde stretched out on a heart-shaped bed was a thing of the past, colorful holdovers from the old schedule remained. And thus my dad called me one day to say he could get me some part-time work doing PR for Bob Luce, the local pro wrestling promoter, who mounted the weekly show All Star Championship Wrestling on the station.

Naturally, I was hired on the spot at my first meeting with Luce, who was something of a legend in Chicago sports circles at the time. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bob Greene captured had him perfectly in a famous column in which every sentence ended with an exclamation point.

Stocky, florid of complexion, and as loud as his off-the-rack sport coats, the outsized Luce was the dictionary definition of the word “character.” You’d sit down with him in a restaurant, and the other diners would duck and cover. Constantly agitated and gesticulating wildly, his stentorian conversation was a manic torrent of hype and madness, punctuated by explosive laughter than sounded like a machine gun going off next to your ear.

Fittingly, before joining the wrestling biz, Luce had edited a tabloid, the National Tattler. Like the National Enquirer of that frontier era, the rag made its bones with totally fictitious “news” stories featuring lots of cleavage and outré bloodletting. At one lunch, to the very evident embarrassment of the neighboring clientele, Luce regaled me with the tale of one inspired Tattler cover story, which I will recount Greene-style. Imagine it at full volume: “I got this idea, see, for a story about a sex orgy! [He pronounced “orgy” with a hard “g,” as in “Porgy” of Porgy and Bess.] But it had to be a different kind of orgy! So I got my wife Sharon to take her clothes off and covered her with peanut butter! And we took some pictures, and the lights were HOT, and the peanut butter melted all over her! They were great pictures! We called it – ha ha HA! – ‘PEANUT BUTTER ORGY!’”

Luce had graduated to promoting pro wrestling events in Chicago and other Midwestern markets, in partnership with the American Wrestling Association’s star attractions, Verne Gagne and Dick the Bruiser, of whom more in a moment. (His sweet, funny, but definitely tough wife knew the business: She had wrestled under the name Sharon Lass.)

As the noisy host of All Star Championship Wrestling, Luce would interview the stars of his upcoming promotions, show footage of recent contests, and pump the next matches. Thrusting a finger at the camera in one of his windups, he would shriek, “BE THERE!!!” Ever the sales impresario, he also served as the show’s principal pitchman, appearing in tandem with some of his hulking charges -- and occasionally with special guest hucksters like former heavyweight champ Leon Spinks -- to spiel for a long line of sketchy local advertisers. They are among the greatest and most hilarious commercials ever made.

As Luce’s publicity rep, commanding a monthly paycheck of $200, I was charged with lightweight duty: writing and mailing press releases promoting the bi-weekly Friday night matches at the Chicago International Amphitheatre, assisting the WSNS camera crew at the gigs (sometimes by protecting their extra film magazines from flying bodies at ringside), and calling in the results of the matches to the local papers. (The last task proved to be the most onerous. I’d ring up the local sports desks late on the nights of the matches and harangue some half-drunk, bored assistant editor whose interest in the “sport” could not have been more infinitesimal. When I finally managed to get the Sun-Times to print the results of one match, I felt as if I’d qualified for a Publicists Guild award.) I also performed certain functions for Luce when he was out of town or too busy to handle them. One weekday afternoon I accompanied Superstar Billy Graham, later a big WWF name and a sort of proto-Hulk Hogan, to Wrigley Field, where he was interviewed by nonplussed announcer Jack Brickhouse between innings of a Chicago Cubs radio broadcast.

Every other week for nearly two years, I’d take the El down to the Amphitheatre, located on Halsted Street on the far South Side, adjacent to the old Chicago Stock Yards. (I held onto the job even after I secured a similarly nepotistic but full-time position – writing about cheap component stereo systems for Zenith Radio Corporation.) The antique, immense Amphitheatre had hosted big political conventions, auto shows, circuses, rodeos, and concerts by Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin, but Luce’s dates at the venue, as you will see, attracted a distinctly different class of customer.

The pre-match staging area, where I’d meet Luce and the crew, was the Sirloin Room of the adjacent Stock Yard Inn, not far from the site of the old South Side cattle slaughterhouses. This is where Luce’s employees and pals would also convene before the night’s entertainment began to swill a couple of cocktails and shoot the breeze. It was a cast worthy of a Damon Runyon story.

Luce employed a bodyguard, a towering ex-Chicago cop named Duke, who had reputedly shot six men before being relieved of duty by the PD. He stood about six-four and dressed exactly like John Shaft. He emanated an aura of extreme menace. Once, when I asked him what he would do if someone actually started any serious trouble, Duke wordlessly pulled back the lapel of his full-length leather coat to reveal a shoulder holster bulging with a .44 Magnum.

The promotion’s bagman, charged with collecting the night’s cash receipts, was a diminutive cat everyone called Bill the Barber. I never knew his last name, but he did in fact run a South Side barbershop. He’d invariably show up dressed in a sport coat that looked like a TV test pattern and a skinny-brim fedora, with watery eyes that sometimes flicked nervously above his pencil-thin mustache. He kept a .38 strapped to his belt.

Many nights, a mysterious character referred to only as “Carmie La Papa” would put in an appearance. This elderly Italian gentleman was always treated with great deference and ate on Luce’s tab. I never found out exactly what he did. But he looked a lot like the mobster played by Pasquale Cajano in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, and I thought it wise not to inquire about his line of work.

There were also bona fide wrestling groupies, well-stacked, slightly haggard old-school broads who draped themselves on the bar, sipping pink ladies. One night, Luce leaned over to me in the Sirloin Room and said, in a whisper that could be heard 20 feet away, “After the matches, these girls and the guys go to a motel up in Prospect Heights, and they have orgies.” (Again, pronounced with a hard “g.”) The most popular of these was reportedly Gloria, a tall, pneumatic redhead of uncertain but rapidly advancing age; Luce confided, “She will do anything.”

The matches themselves were something to behold. I’d usually watch them in the company of WSNS’s young, jaded camera crew, from the dilapidated press box high above the ring in the center of the Amphitheatre. The crowd – thousands of poorly dressed, myopic, malodorous, and steeply inebriated men – was a product of what may be called the pre-ironic era of pro wrestling. There was no such thing as a suspension of disbelief among these spectators. Disbelief did not exist. Though the matches were as closely stage-managed as a production of Richard III, these rubes accepted every feigned punch and bogus drop kick as the McCoy.

Pro wrestling is the eternal contest between virtue and evil, and the wrestlers were identified in equal number as good guys and heels. Most of the good guys on the undercard – there were usually half a dozen matches, with one main event – were young “scientific” wrestlers whose Greco-Roman moves were no match for the brazenly illegal play of the dirty heels, who almost invariably won their bouts with tactics that would not pass muster with an elementary school playground monitor, let alone a legitimate referee. About the only one of these “babyfaces” (or, alternatively, “chumps”) who was vouchsafed an occasional victory was Greg Gagne, son of the promotion’s star attraction and part owner.

By the early ‘70s, Verne Gagne had been wrestling professionally for more than two decades; drafted by the Chicago Bears and then rebelling against team owner George Halas’ prohibition of a sideline on the mat, he had chosen the ring over the gridiron. He was 46 years old when I started working for Luce; he was still in decent shape, and, unlike almost all of his opponents, he still had all of his teeth.

I only managed to spend time with him once. For some reason now lost in the dense fog of time, Luce dispatched me to meet Gagne at the elegant Pump Room of the Drake Hotel near Lake Michigan. There, as cabaret star Dorothy Donegan serenaded us on the piano, the 16-time world heavyweight wrestling champion of the world got me brain-dead drunk, and then poured me into a cab home. He was an excellent guy.

Many of the other good guys on Luce’s undercards were reliable patsies for the baddies. Pepper Gomez, one of the domestic game’s few Mexican stars, was a venerable attraction who was allowed the rare triumph; billed as “the Man with the Cast-Iron Stomach,” he once allowed a Volkswagen Bug to be driven over his gut on Luce’s TV show, where he was a frequent guest.

One of my favorites was Yukon Moose Cholak. Then a veteran of 20 years on the mat, Moose owned a bar not far from the Amphitheatre, but he still worked regularly for his close pal Luce in the AWA. Huge, pot-bellied, and benign, he boasted a ripe Sout’ Side accent rivaled only by Dennis Farina’s. He was hardly an exceptional combatant: He moved around the ring with the fleetness of a dazed sloth. He was a regular on Luce’s show, and often appeared with the host in his TV spots.

The only time I appeared as a guest on All Star Championship Wrestling, Moose was the victim of the on-camera carnage that was a requisite feature of the show. At the time, conflict of interest be damned, I was writing a column about wrestling for a short-lived local sports paper called Fans, and was brought in to lend something like legitimacy to the proceedings. Luce offered me a chair on his threadbare set to push a forthcoming match between Cholak, who appeared on camera next to me, and Handsome Jimmy Valiant, a new heel on the rise in the market.

I figured something ugly was going to happen, but I went about extolling the virtues of Moose’s nearly non-existent mat skills in the front of the camera. Suddenly, Valiant crept up from behind the black scrim behind us and whacked Cholak over the head with a metal folding chair. To this day, I believe my expression of outraged surprise was worthy of a local Emmy, but a nomination eluded me.

I was actually very fond of Valiant, whom I interviewed with his “brother” and tag team partner Luscious John Valiant for Fans. Jimmy was a peroxided, strutting egomaniac in the grand Gorgeous George manner, and he had some classic patter: “I’m da wimmen’s pet and da men’s regret! I got da body wimmen love and men fear! And you, you’re as useful as a screen door in a submarine, daddy!” A rock ‘n’ roll fan, he went on to a very successful solo career, appropriately enough in Memphis, the capital of all things Elvis.

After Gagne the elder, the AWA’s biggest attraction was the tag team of Dick the Bruiser and the Crusher. Bruiser had gotten his competitive start as a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers, but had been a top wrestling draw since 1955. Somewhere along the way, he had been converted from heel to hero, and the Chicago fans adored him. Among the merch sold at the Amphitheatre were Dick the Bruiser Fan Club buttons; measuring six inches in diameter, they could either be pinned on one’s chest or, with the aid of a built-in cardboard stand, be displayed as a plaque. I kept mine on my desk at my straight job to freak out my co-workers.

Early in my gig with Luce, I was taken to meet Bruiser in the locker room. He sat on a table smoking a huge cigar. When I was introduced to him, he exclaimed, “Hey, you’re Ed Morris’ kid? You got more hair than your old man!” My father, who was in fact almost completely bald, had been known to associate with winners of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes. I was a little surprised that he ran in Bruiser’s circle.

The Crusher’s career in the squared circle dated back to the late ‘40s. I was even more impressed by him than I was by the Bruiser, for he had been the inspiration of the Novas’ wrasslin’-themed single “The Crusher,” a huge 1965 radio hit in Chicago for the Minnesota garage band the Novas (and later eloquently covered by the Cramps). Bruiser and Crusher were a unique combo: They were “good guys,” but they earned their keep by being badder than the “bad guys” they gutter-stomped.

The villains in that era of pro wrestling were often the object of atavistic xenophobia and hatred. Long before the U.S.’s conflicts in the Middle East, the Sheik (né Ed Farhat in Lansing, Michigan), who took the ring wearing a burnoose, was among the most reviled of heels. Some of the older fans were World War II vets, and they lustily booed Baron von Raschke, who climbed through the ropes with a monocle in one eye, draped in a Nazi flag. He was actually a U.S. Army vet born Jim Raschke in Omaha, Nebraska. His fake German accent was utterly feeble.

The AWA’s all-purpose villain, who would go on to bigger things as one of McMahon’s first WWF stars, was “Pretty Boy” Bobby Heenan, dubbed “the Weasel” by the Bruiser. Heenan was featured in his own matches, but he was most reliably entertaining as a manager, of the most duplicitous and cowardly variety, in another villain’s corner. You didn’t need a script to know what was going to happen: Just as it looked like the good guy was going to triumph, Heenan would leap into the ring and smash the apparent victor’s head into a turnbuckle or hit him over the skull with a water bucket.

Heenan featured in the most outrageous story I heard during my brilliant career in wrestling. One night I was sitting with the film crew when Al Lerner, the mustachioed, shaggy-haired, bespectacled WSNS sports reporter, entered the press box with a portable tape machine on his shoulder and a stunned look on his face. “I’ve interviewed people in front of burning buildings,” Al said. “I’ve interviewed people as they were jumping out of airplanes. But I’ve never interviewed anyone while they were getting a blowjob.”

It seems that while Al was in the locker room recording some audio bites from Heenan, a voluptuous girl standing nearby walked over to the wrestler, kneeled down in front of him, pulled down his trunks, and began giving him the kind of pre-match service Mickey Rourke probably dreamed of but never received. As she went about her business, Heenan continued to spout invective to Al as if nothing extraordinary was transpiring. With that moment alone, Bobby Heenan earned his place in the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame.

I visited Heenan in the locker room on a somewhat less eventful evening, but that night I learned the secret of many pros’ mat success. As I was talking to him, I noticed that his forehead was crosshatched with tiny scars, some of them new and still livid. I later mentioned this to one of the crew, and was told that these wounds – referred to as “juicing”  -- were actually self-inflicted, so that the wrestlers could easily draw blood during critical moments of violence in their matches.

As Heenan said in a later interview, “If you want the green, you gotta bring the red.” Gore was a staple of pro wrestling, and there was nothing like sitting in an arena filled with 10,000 or 15,000 crazed spectators and hearing a drunken chant go up as a good guy pummeled a heel to the mat: “WE WANT BLOOD! WE WANT BLOOD! WE WANT BLOOD!”

My last hurrah in pro wrestling was one of Luce’s rare alfresco promotions, a multi-bout 1974 card at old Comiskey Park, the White Sox’s stadium, which climaxed with a 16-man battle royal. I don’t remember who triumphed in the main event, but I do remember that someone on the crew brought a bat and some softballs along, and we ended the evening shagging fly balls under the lights where Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio once played.

The outlaw era of regional pro wrestling is a dim memory for most. The racket would get wilder after I left it: In an interview with Nashville wrestling figure Jimmy Cornette, Heenan said that a fan at a 1975 Amphitheatre match pulled out a pistol and began firing at him, but the shooter only managed to wound four people in the rows in front of him.

McMahon’s WWF brought the regional promoters’ day to a close, pillaging most of the big names in the game in the process. Today, the WWE has been displaced in popularity by the even gaudier UFC contests. Most of the stars I met – including Bruiser, Crusher, and Cholak – are dead now. Heenan, a throat cancer survivor, has been in poor health for more than a decade. Verne Gagne died this April; in 2009, suffering from dementia, he accidentally killed a 97-year-old fellow resident in a Minnesota assisted living facility. Even the old stomping grounds are gone: The Chicago Amphitheatre was razed in 1999.

Bob Luce passed away in 2007, but his wild-ass legacy may live on via an unlikely champion. There are many analogs between pro wrestling and rock ‘n’ roll, and this April, mat mega-fan Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins announced on Twitter that he had bought Luce’s memorabilia and an archive of 9,000 vintage wrestling photos. Maybe he and former Hüsker Dü front man Bob Mould, a fellow wrasslin’ aficionado who once worked for McMahon as a writer, can make something of it. That would rock. 

[watusichris]

You Oughta “Get Carter”

Another old Night Flight piece, tied to a Turner Classic Movies airing, about a movie I never tire of watching. (Unfortunately, the Krays film “Legend” turned out to be not so good.) ********** The English gangster movie has proven an enduring genre to this day. The 1971 picture that jumpstarted the long-lived cycle, Get Carter, Mike Hodges’ bracing, brutal tale of a mobster’s revenge, screens late Thursday on TCM as part of a day-long tribute to Michael Caine, who stars as the film’s titular anti-hero.

We won’t have to wait long for the next high-profile Brit-mob saga: October will see the premiere of Brian Helgeland’s Legend, a new feature starring Tom Hardy (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Dark Knight Rises, Locke) in a tour de force dual role as Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the legendarily murderous identical twin gangleaders who terrorized London in the ‘60s. The violent exploits of the Krays mesmerized Fleet Street’s journalists and the British populace until the brothers and most of the top members of their “firm” were arrested in 1968.

The siblings both died in prison after receiving life sentences. They’ve been the subjects of several English TV documentaries and a 1990 feature starring Martin and Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet. However, the Krays and their seamy milieu may have had their greatest impact in fictional form, via the durable figure of Jack Carter, the creation of a shy, alcoholic graphic artist, animator, and fiction writer named Ted Lewis, the man now recognized by many as “the father of British noir.”

Born in 1940 in a Manchester suburb, Lewis was raised in the small town of Barton-upon-Humber in the dank English midlands. A sickly child, he became engrossed with art, the movies, and writing. The product of an English art school in nearby Hull, he wrote his first, unsuccessful novel, a semi-autobiographical piece of “kitchen sink” realism called All the Way Home and All the Night Through, in 1965.

He soon moved sideways into movie animation, serving as clean-up supervisor on George Dunning’s Beatles feature Yellow Submarine (1968). However, now married with a couple of children, he decided to return to writing with an eye to crafting a commercial hit, and in 1970 he published a startling, ultra-hardboiled novel titled Jack’s Return Home.

British fiction had never produced anything quite like the book’s protagonist Jack Carter. He is the enforcer for a pair of London gangsters, Gerald and Les Fletcher, who bear more than a passing resemblance to the Krays. At the outset of the book, recounted in the first person, Carter travels by train to an unnamed city in the British midlands (modeled after the city of Scunthorpe near Lewis’ hometown) to bury his brother Frank, who has died in an alleged drunk driving accident.

Carter instantly susses that his brother was murdered, and he sets about sorting out a hierarchy of low-end midlands criminals (all of whom he knew in his early days as a budding hoodlum) responsible for the crime, investigating the act with a gun in his hand and a heart filled with hate. He’s no Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe bound by a moral code – in fact, he once bedded Frank’s wife, and is now sleeping with his boss Gerald’s spouse. He’s a sociopathic career criminal and professional killer – a “villain,” in the English term -- who will use any means at his disposal to secure his revenge.

Carter’s pursuit of rough justice for his brother, and for a despoiled niece, attracts the attention of the Fletchers, whose business relationships with the Northern mob are being disrupted by their lieutenant’s campaign of vengeance. As Carter leaves behind a trail of corpses and homes in on the last of his quarry, the hunter has become the hunted, and Jack’s Return Home climaxes with scenes of bloodletting worthy of a Jacobean tragedy, or of Grand Guignol.

Before its publication, Lewis’ grimy, violent book attracted the attention of Michael Klinger, who had produced Roman Polanski’s stunning ‘60s features Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac. Klinger acquired film rights to the novel before its publication in 1970, and sent a galley copy to Mike Hodges, then a U.K. TV director with no feature credits.

Hodges, who immediately signed on as director and screenwriter of Klinger’s feature – which was retitled Get Carter -- was not only drawn to the taut, fierce action, but also by the opportunity to peel away the veneer of propriety that still lingered in British society and culture. As he noted in his 2000 commentary for the U.S. DVD release of the film, “You cannot deny that [in England], like anywhere else, corruption is endemic.”

Casting was key to the potential box office prospects of the feature, and Klinger and Hodges’ masterstroke was securing Michael Caine to play Jack Carter. By 1970, Caine had become an international star, portraying spy novelist Len Deighton’s agent Harry Palmer in three pictures and garnering raves as the eponymous philanderer in Alfie.

Caine had himself known some hard cases in his London neighborhood; in his own DVD commentary, he says that his dead-eyed, terrifyingly reserved Carter was “an amalgam of people I grew up with – I’d known them all my life.” Hodges notes of Caine’s Carter, “There’s a ruthlessness about him, and I would have been foolish not to use it to the advantage of the film.”

Playing what he knew, Caine gave the performance of a lifetime – a study in steely cool, punctuated by sudden outbursts of unfettered fury. The actor summarizes his character on the DVD: “Here was a dastardly man coming as the savior of a lady’s honor. It’s the knight saving the damsel in distress, except this knight is not a very noble or gallant one. It’s the villain as hero.”

The supporting players were cast with equal skill. Ian Hendry, who was originally considered for the role of Carter, ultimately portrayed the hit man’s principal nemesis and target Eric Paice. Caine and Hendry’s first faceoff in the film, an economical conversation at a local racetrack, seethes with unfeigned tension and unease – Caine was wary of Hendry, whose deep alcoholism made the production a difficult one, while Hendry was jealous of the leading man’s greater success.

For Northern mob kingpin Cyril Kinnear, Hodges recruited John Osborne, then best known in Great Britain as the writer of the hugely successfully 1956 play Look Back in Anger, Laurence Olivier’s screen and stage triumph The Entertainer, and Tony Richardson’s period comedy Tom Jones, for which he won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Osborne, a skilled actor before he found fame as a writer, brings subdued, purring menace to the part.

Though her part was far smaller than those of such other supporting actresses as Geraldine Moffat, Rosemarie Dunham, and Dorothy White, Brit sex bomb Britt Ekland received third billing as Anna, Gerald Fletcher’s wife and Carter’s mistress. Her marquee prominence is somewhat justified by an eye-popping sequence in which she engages in a few minutes of steamy phone sex with Caine.

Some small roles were populated by real British villains. George Sewell, who plays the Fletchers’ minion Con McCarty, was a familiar of the Krays’ older brother Charlie, and introduced the elder mobster to Carry On comedy series actress Barbara Windsor, who subsequently married another member of the Kray firm. John Bindon, who appears briefly as the younger Fletcher sibling, was a hood and racketeer who later stood trial for murder; a notorious womanizer, he romanced Princess Margaret, whose clandestine relationship with Bindon later became a key plot turn in the 2008 Jason Strathan gangster vehicle The Bank Job.

Verisimilitude was everything for Hodges, who shot nearly all of the film on grimly realistic locations in Newcastle, the down-at-the-heel coal-mining town on England’s northeastern coast. The director vibrantly employs interiors of the city’s seedy pubs, rooming houses, nightclubs and betting parlors. In one inspired bit of local color, he uses an appearance by a local girl’s marching band, the Pelaw Hussars, to drolly enliven a scene in which a nude, shotgun-toting Carter backs down the Fletchers’ gunmen.

The film’s relentless action was perfectly framed by director of photography Wolfgang Suchitzky, whose experience as a cameraman for documentarian Paul Rotha is put to excellent use. Some sequences are masterfully shot with available light; the movie’s most brutal murder plays out at night by a car’s headlights. The breathtakingly staged final showdown between Carter and Paice is shot under lowering skies against the grey backdrop of a North Sea coal slag dump.

Tough, uncompromising, and utterly unprecedented in English cinema, Get Carter was a hit in the U.K. It fared poorly in the U.S., where its distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer dumped it on the market as the lower half of a double bill with the Frank Sinatra Western spoof Dirty Dingus Magee. In his DVD commentary, Caine notes that it was only after Ted Turner acquired MGM’s catalog and broadcast the film on his cable networks that the movie developed a cult audience in the States.

Get Carter has received two American remakes. The first, George Armitage’s oft-risible 1972 blaxploitation adaptation Hit Man, starred Bernie Casey as Carter’s African-American counterpart Tyrone Tackett. It is notable for a spectacularly undraped appearance by Pam Grier, whose character meets a hilarious demise that is somewhat spoiled by the picture’s amusing trailer. (Casey and Keenan Ivory Wayans later lampooned the film in the 1988 blaxploitation parody I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.)

Hodges’ film was drearily Americanized and relocated to Seattle in Stephen Kay’s like-titled 2000 Sylvester Stallone vehicle. It’s a sluggish, misbegotten venture, about which the less that is said the better. Michael Caine’s presence in the cast as villain Cliff Brumby (played in the original by Brian Mosley) only serves to remind viewers that they are watching a vastly inferior rendering of a classic.

Ted Lewis wrote seven more novels after Jack’s Return Home, and returned to Jack Carter for two prequels. The first of them, Jack Carter’s Law (1970), an almost equally intense installment in which Carter ferrets out a “grass” – an informer – in the Fletchers’ organization, is a deep passage through the London underworld of the ‘60s, full of warring gangsters and venal, dishonest coppers.

The final episode in the trilogy, Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1977), was a sad swan song for British noir’s most memorable bad man. In it, Carter travels to the Mediterranean island of Majorca on a Fletchers-funded “holiday,” only to discover that he has actually been dispatched to guard a jittery American mobster hiding out at the gang’s villa. It’s a flabby, obvious, and needlessly discursive book; Lewis’ exhaustion is apparent in his desperate re-use of a plot point central to the action of the first Carter novel.

Curiously, the locale and setup of Mafia Pigeon appear to be derived from Pulp, the 1975 film that reunited director Hodges and actor Caine. In it, the actor plays a writer of sleazy paperback thrillers who travels to the Mediterranean isle of Malta to pen the memoirs of Preston Gilbert (Mickey Rooney), a Hollywood actor with gangland connections. Hilarity and mayhem ensue.

All of Lewis’ characters consume enough alcohol to put down an elephant, and Lewis himself succumbed to alcoholism in 1982, at the age of 42. Virtually unemployable, he had moved back home to Barton-upon-Humber, where lived with his parents.

He went out with a bang, however: In 1980, he published his final and finest book, the truly explosive mob thriller GBH (the British abbreviation for “grievous bodily harm”). The novel focuses on the last days of vice lord George Fowler, a sadist in the grand Krays manner, whose empire is being toppled by internal treachery. Using a unique time-shifting structure that darts back and forth between “the smoke” (London) and “the sea” (Fowler’s oceanside hideout), it reaches a finale of infernal, hallucinatory intensity.

After Lewis’ death, his work fell into obscurity, and his novels were unavailable in America for decades. Happily, Soho Press reissued the Carter trilogy in paperback in 2014 and republished GBH in hardback earlier this year. Now U.S. readers have the opportunity to read the books that influenced an entire school of English noir writers, including such Lewis disciples and venerators as Derek Raymond, David Peace, and Jake Arnott.

Echoes of GBH can be heard in The Long Good Friday, another esteemed English gangster film starring Bob Hoskins as the arrogant and impetuous chief of a collapsing London firm. Released the same year as Lewis’ last novel, the John Mackenzie-directed feature is only one of a succession of outstanding movies – The Limey, The Hit, Layer Cake, Sexy Beast, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels among them – that owe a debt to Get Carter, the daddy of them all.

[watusichris]

A Mile or Two in Joe South’s Shoes

My 2016 Joe South career retrospective, restored from Internet Purgatory.

**********

If you know anything about the true breadth of Joe South’s talents, it’s remarkable to consider that if he is known for anything at all today, it’s for just two songs.

For a hot minute in 1969-70, South looked like he was on the way to a major career. “Games People Play,” the tune that introduced him to the public at large, rose to No. 12 on the national singles chart; a radio ubiquity, it captured two Grammy Awards in 1970, as song of the year and best contemporary song. A year after that breakout hit, he rose to the same chart slot with the stomping, soulful “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” a number that would be covered in short order by Elvis Presley.

After those two signature songs, Joe South pretty much disappeared off the American pop landscape. It was an astonishing vanishing act, for, in terms of sheer reach and ability, he came as close to genius as a musician can get. He was one of those cats who could do it all.

He wrote almost all of his own material; before his late-‘60s emergence, he had already made his mark writing for others – most notably fellow Georgian Billy Joe Royal – and one of his songs, “Rose Garden,” became one of the biggest country hits of 1970-71 in Lynn Anderson’s hands.

South had all the chops to put across his material. He was a terrific, expressive baritone vocalist. Perhaps more importantly, he was a dynamite guitar player who had honed his craft as an A-list session man in New York and Nashville. And he knew his way around the studio booth, too. He produced nearly all of his own records, and they were big, opulent sides, dressed with strings, horns, and chorales (in the manner of Chet Atkins’ countrypolitan sessions, Atlantic Records’ castanet-snapping R&B outings, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound). Yet at the core of South’s early records was the gutbucket sound produced by his family band, the Believers.

Though you could broadly categorize South’s music as “pop,” there was nothing weak or watered-down about his stuff. Like any musician who grew up in the South, he was reared on country music, and all his singing and picking reflected those roots. His style also had a strong R&B backbone and backbeat – not surprising, since one of his early hits as a songwriter, “Untie Me,” was for the Atlanta beach music act the Tams. And he could rock hard, and was unafraid to use the studio tools at his disposal for up-to-the-minute effects: Many of South’s most interesting tracks are overtly psychedelic.

Joe South was primed to go places – almost anywhere he wanted to go, really – but a predisposed dislike for the necessities of the music business, the usual rock ‘n’ roll pitfalls of drugs and alcohol, and, most critically, a devastating family tragedy knocked him out of the game when a brilliant career appeared his for the taking.

He was born Joseph Souter in Atlanta in 1940. His family was attuned to music and the arts: His father played guitar and mandolin, and his mother wrote poetry. He began playing guitar at an early age, while his younger brother Tommy took up the drums. Like many Southern households, the Souters tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry on Nashville’s WSM, as well as the popular local DJ Uncle Eb Brown on WGST.

“Brown” was the air name of Bill Lowery, who had been a mover and shaker in Atlanta’s music community since the early ‘50s as a broadcaster, station executive, and music publisher. It’s said that in an attempt to advance his musical aspirations, young Joe Souter boldly went to visit Lowery during his radio shift. No doubt impressed by his spunk, Lowery took the wannabe performer under his wing. One of his first pieces of advice was that Souter should change his name to the regionally reflective Joe South.

Beginning a professional and personal relationship that would survive for nearly five decades, Lowery brought 18-year-old college dropout South on board at his new independent record label, National Recording Corporation. The young picker was at first employed as a member of NRC’s house band, which also included the future recording stars Jerry Reed and Ray Stevens.

South began cutting singles in his own right for NRC, in varying pop, rock ‘n’ roll, and rockabilly settings. His lone chart record for the company came in 1958: “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor,” a sort-of-sequel to two recent novelty smashes, Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater” and David Seville’s “Witch Doctor.” Bouncing onto the chart briefly at No. 47, it was the only bright spot during his time on the label, which went bankrupt in 1961.

He continued to work as a performer, cutting singles unprofitably for the indies Fairlane and AllWood and for MGM, the former home of Hank Williams. But he began to hone his chops as a behind-the scenes player with his writing, playing, and production. He made his first mark with “Untie Me,” which became a No. 12 entry on the U.S. R&B charts in 1962.

He made his biggest impact in 1965-67 as writer and producer of Marietta, Georgia-born Billy Joe Royal’s hits on Columbia Records. Their partnership was announced with the propulsive poor-boy-loves-rich-girl saga “Down in the Boondocks,” which climbed to No. 9 in 1965. Royal road-tested such other South compositions as “Leanin’ On You,” “Rose Garden,” “Yo-Yo,” and “Hush.” The latter track reached No. 52 on the Hot 100 in 1967, but became better known in a 1968 cover by British hard rockers Deep Purple.

South also left his imprint via several noteworthy sessions. He played guitar on Simon & Garfunkel’s first bona fide electric sessions, which became the bestselling 1966 folk-rock album Sounds of Silence. He contributed guitar and bass during the Nashville recording dates for Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking two-LP 1966 set Blonde On Blonde. And in 1967, in the company of FAME Studio’s crack Alabama rhythm section, he laid down the signature guitar licks on Aretha Franklin’s hit “Chain of Fools.”

By 1968, Joe South had little left to prove, and Bill Lowery helped midwife a deal for his protégé at Capitol Records, already the home of such progressive pop-country talent as Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry. South was given extraordinary latitude for his first album: He produced the collection, wrote all of the material, and played lead guitar, backed by the Believers, a group that included his brother Tommy on drums and his wife, Barbara, on keyboards.

The resultant LP, Introspect, is an impressive piece of work that didn’t sound quite like anything else on the market. It was a widescreen sound, immense and layered, but at bottom down-home and funky. It drew from several stylistic tributaries. Its lead-off track “All My Hard Times” was an updated rewrite of the old spiritual “All My Trials.” The mocking “Redneck” was a loping countrified lampoon that can be seen as an early anthem of the New South; “These Are Not My People” was an alienated piece of similarly styled, Dylanesque social commentary. The strikingly trippy “Mirror of Your Mind” bore a startling out-of-time passage in its middle, while the equally expansive “Gabriel” was a psychedelic parable cut straight out of the Old Testament.

As great and unique as it was, Introspect was a marketplace failure, and Capitol’s accountants yanked it off the market just as a single drawn from it was beginning to make some noise.

Sporting a unique lead guitar line -- fabricated by South on either, depending on which source you believe, a Coral electric sitar or a Gibson Bell guitar fed through an outboard Echorette echo unit -- and a lyrical hook derived from the title of Eric Berne’s 1964 pop-psychology bestseller, “Games People Play” became a slow-rolling hit. Realizing they may have deleted Introspect prematurely, Capitol decided to capitalize on the song with a hybrid new album.

The Games People Play album – essentially a second debut album for South – resuscitated the title track, “These Are Not My People,” and, in an expanded psyched-up version, the song “Birds of a Feather” (which would appear on three of South’s six Capitol collections). To these were added a couple of new originals (including “Hole in Your Soul,” a frenzied vocal version of the Believers’ two-sided psychedelic instrumental single “Soul Raga”), remakes of several early-‘60s compositions for the Tams and Royal, and a potent rendition of South’s Brill Building-styled 1963 single for MGM, “Concrete Jungle.”

This bizarrely reconfigured opus failed to make any waves, but South gained some name recognition with his “Games People Play” Grammys. Moreover, he made some longer commercial strides with 1969’s Don’t It Make You Want to Go Home? The LP, which ultimately reached No. 60, sported not one but two hit singles: the title cut, a poignant look at the toll wreaked by modern life upon the Southern landscape, and the visceral, gospel-styled “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.” It also contained the most hallucinogenic entry in the South catalog: “A Million Miles Away,” a dense instrumental overlaid with a recitation of the album’s personnel and an extract from a telephone call between South and some staffers at the Nixon White House.

These ambitious records might have suggested to some that South’s potential was unlimited. But there was a problem: He didn’t like to tour, and was at heart a studio animal. He also didn’t respond well to the intense pressure of coming up with material that wouldn’t just equal the sales of his chart records, but would better them.

Perhaps in a hope of shaking things up, the 1971 album Joe South was recorded on home turf at Atlanta’s Studio One, where the Atlanta Rhythm Section was the hot session band of the hour. But -- save for “Rose Garden” (included to cash in on Anderson’s enormous hit with the song) and the “Brown Eyed Girl”-like “Birds of a Feather” (it was the third time around for this belated single release) -- the material, a mix of tepid new tunes and recut warhorses, was scarcely South’s best. The disinterest seemed to carry over on the second LP South issued that year, So the Seeds Are Growing; only seven of the album’s 10 tracks were original compositions.

The disenchanted South’s drug use had begun to escalate, and his brother Tommy, who suffered from depression, was also self-medicating. A turning point came on Oct. 11, 1971, when the younger South took his own life.

The immediate result of this tragedy was South’s final Capitol album, A Look Inside, released in 1972. The LP jacket bore a cover photo of South with an open window in his skull, and the most confessional songs on this dark, unsettling record mirror the graphic perfectly. Its first two songs, “Coming Down All Alone” and “Imitation of Living,” are candid and frightening reflections on drug addiction, and they have lost none of their power. But the record’s true killer, which kicks off with a tart quote of the “Game People Play” melody, is the ironically titled “I’m a Star,” possibly the most blunt, world-weary, and self-reflective deflation of the music industry ever released.

It was a record made by an artist at the end of his tether. As South said frankly in the notes to what proved to be his final album, “I flipped out. I just went completely into the ether in the wake of my brother’s death. I just had to get away, so I went out to the islands, caught Polynesian paralysis and just lived in the jungles of Maui for a couple of years.”

He returned, briefly, in 1975, for his lone release for Island Records, Midnight Rainbows. Though it began promisingly with the fittingly introspective original medley of “Midnight Rainbows” and “It Got Away,” the album – again employing members of the Atlanta Rhythm Section – is disappointingly short on new original material; its strongest tracks are wrenching covers of Jerry Butler’s “For Your Precious Love” and Johnny Adams’ “You Can Make It If You Try.”

The last track on Midnight Rainbows is an instrumental titled “Cosmos,” and that’s exactly where Joe South headed. He was virtually invisible on the public stage from the release of that last LP until his death on Sept. 5, 2012, in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Before Bill Lowery’s death in 2004, he issued a couple of singles on his old sponsor’s independent labels: “Jack Daniels On the Line” for 1-2-3 Records in 1981, “Royal Blue” for Southern Tracks in 1986.

The last work he released during his lifetime arrived as a bonus track on the Australian label Raven’s 2010 repackaging of So the Seeds Are Growing and A Look Inside. Sung by South in a charred latter-day voice, “Oprah Cried” is an apparently faithful account of his appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, where his story of life’s hard knocks moves the hostess to tears. “Son, I thought I’d heard it all,” she tells him.

Considered in light of what might have been for Joe South, it’s one of the saddest damn songs ever written.

[watusichris]

Betty Davis: They Say She’s Different

It appears that everything anyone has written for the old Music Aficionado site has now disappeared from the web. A random Facebook post has prompted me to re-purpose this story, written in 2016, about my favorite funketress. **********

To this day, the name Betty Davis – Betty with a “y,” that is – remains best known to connoisseurs of Miles Davis minutiae and ‘70s funk obsessives. While it’s true that Betty played an important off-stage role in the career of the jazz trumpeter, to whom she was married for just a year, and she undoubtedly made some of the best hardcore funk records of her era, she deserves to be recognized beyond the relatively narrow provinces of the jazzbo and the crate-digger.

Uncompromising, intelligent, brazen, aggressive, and not incidentally gorgeous, sexually provocative, and a fashion plate always ahead of the curve, Betty was a prophetic figure. Spawned by the explosion of music, fashion, and alternative culture of the late ‘60s, and by concurrent leaps in black consciousness and feminism, she was a take-no-prisoners singer and writer who presented herself as something new, rich, and strange with her self-titled debut album in 1973.

There were some badass contemporaries working the soul and funk trenches– gutter-tongued diva Millie Jackson and one-time James Brown paramour Yvonne Fair leap to mind immediately – but they seemed to be adapting tropes previously worked by male singers in the genres. Betty still sounds like something new: a tough, smart, demanding woman who reveled in pleasure and insisted on satisfaction, unafraid to claim what she wanted.

Despite the fact that she was associated with some high-profile male musician friends and lovers – beyond Davis, the roll call included Hugh Masekela, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Mike Carabello, Eric Clapton, and Robert Palmer – she was no groupie or bed-hopping climber. Possessed of her own self-defining vision, she was producing her own records and leading a tight, flexible little band by the end of her brief run.

In 1976, after completing four splendid albums (only three of which were released at the time), she disappeared, not only from the music business but from the public eye entirely. What happened? It’s an old story that many women in the industry will recognize: Her record company didn’t know what to do with her, and wanted her to tone down her act. Betty Davis wasn’t having any of that, thank you, and she hit the damn road.

She was born Betty Mabry in Durham, NC, in 1945. She grew up country, and was exposed to down-home, get-down music early. On the title track of her second album, They Say I’m Different, she runs down the artists who served as inspirations: Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, Albert King, Chuck Berry. The blues, in one form or another, is the backbone of her style.

Her family relocated to Pittsburgh when she was young, but at 16 she left home for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. There she was hurtled into the roiling cultural vortex of the Village. She took up modeling, working for the toney Wilhelmina agency, and began running with a posse of similarly disposed, equally beautiful women who called themselves the “Electric Ladies.” Sound familiar? One of her closest cohorts was Devon Wilson, for many years a notorious consort of Jimi Hendrix known for her freewheeling, outré sex- and drug-saturated lifestyle.

Mabry began to try her hand at singing, and cut a few self-penned singles. They were in an old-school mold in terms of structure, but her very first 45 hints at things to come. “Get Ready For Betty,” a 1964 track released by Don Costa (discoverer of Paul Anka and Trini Lopez and a key arranger for Frank Sinatra), is stodgy early-‘60s NYC R&B to its core, but its message is pointed: “Get out my way, girl, ‘cause I’m comin’ to take your man.”

She also made a stolid romantic duet ballad with singer Roy Arlington and, produced by cult soul man Lou Courtney, a homage to the Cellar, the New York club where she DJed. But she didn’t start reaching the upper echelon of the music biz until one of her songs, a hymn to Harlem called “Uptown,” was cut by the Chambers Brothers for their smash 1968 album The Time Has Come, which also included the psychedelic soul workout “Time Has Come Today.”

The Chambers association probably secured a singles deal for her at Columbia Records, and her first session for the major label was produced by her former live-in boyfriend, South African trumpeter Masekela, in October 1968. By that time, she had split with him: A month earlier, she had married a far more famous horn player, Miles Davis, whom she had met in 1967. Davis and his regular producer Teo Macero would head her second session for Columbia in May 1969.

Those two dates were released for the first time as The Columbia Years 1968-1969 earlier this month by Light in the Attic, the independent label that has restored Betty’s entire catalog to print over the last decade. While devoted fans can be grateful that the work is finally seeing the light of day, it does not make for easy listening, for it was clearly made by people groping in the dark.

Betty’s artistic persona was at that point completely unformed, and so her male Svengalis did their best to mold the clay in their hands, with feeble results. Masekela evidently completed just three tracks, two of which, “It’s My Life” and “Live, Love, Learn,” were issued as a flop single. The homiletic song titles give the game away; the music, straight-up commercial soul backed by a large group (which included Wilton Felder and Wayne Henderson of the Jazz Crusaders and Masekela), has nothing original to say.

The date with Miles is a bigger waste, if a more spectacular one. The personnel couldn’t have been more glittering: Hendrix sidemen Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell; ex-Detroit Wheels guitarist Jim McCarty; bassist Harvey Brooks, studio familiar of Bob Dylan and former member of the Electric Flag; and Davis’ then-current or future band mates Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, and Larry Young.

But nothing jells. The material is either weak (Betty’s directionless original “Hangin’ Out” is the best of a bad lot) or incongruous (lumbering covers of Cream’s “Politician” and Creedence’s “Born On the Bayou”). Worse, the jazzers are unable to lay down anything resembling a solid soul-rock foundation, and even reliable timekeeper Mitchell blows the groove on more than one occasion. Miles gets impatient with his spouse at one point, rasping over the talk-back, “Sing it just like that, with the gum in your mouth and all, bitch.”

Apparently intended as demos, the failed tracks were consigned to the tape library. By late ’69, Miles and Betty’s marriage was history. She left her mark on his music: She appeared on the cover of his cover of his 1968 album Filles de Kilimanjaro and inspired its extended track “Mademoiselle Mabry” (based on the chords that opens Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary”) and “Back Seat Betty” from his 1981 comeback album The Man With the Horn.

Moreover, she moved him toward the flash style that would dominate his music through the mid-‘70s, by exposing him to the slamming music of Hendrix and Sly and exchanging his continental suits for psychedelic pimp togs. Would we know Bitches Brew, On the Corner, and Agharta without Betty Davis? Maybe, maybe not.

For her part, Betty remained in the wings for a while. She collaborated on demos for the Commodores; in London, she modeled, worked on songs for Marc Bolan of T. Rex, and declined a production offer from her then-paramour Clapton. Drifting back to New York, she met Santana percussionist Carabello. They became involved romantically, and in 1972 she relocated to the San Francisco Bay area, where Carabello’s local connections led to the formation of a stellar band to back her on a debut album.

One reads the credits for Betty Davis in awe. The rhythm section was the Family Stone’s dissident, puissant rhythm section, bassist Larry Graham and drummer Greg Errico (who also produced). Original Santana guitarist Neal Schon, future Mandrill axe man Doug Rodrigues, founding Graham Central Station organist Hershall Kennedy, and keyboardist and ace Jerry Garcia collaborator Merl Saunders filled out the instrumentation. The Pointer Sisters, Sylvester, and Kathi McDonald were among a large platoon of backup vocalists.

Issued in 1973 by Just Sunshine Records, an independent label owned by Woodstock Festival promoter Michael Lang (who also released a set by another unique woman, folk singer-guitarist Karen Dalton), Betty Davis was one hell of a coming-out party. Since her abortive Columbia dates, she had developed a unique vocal attack that could leap from a velvety croon to a Tina Turner-like shriek in a nanosecond. The stomping funk of the studio band backed her up to the hilt.

Like Turner, she was one Bold Soul Sister. The lust-filled opening invitation “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up” announces that a new game was afoot. The statement of romantic/sexual independence “Anti Love Song,” the lovers’ chess match “Your Man My Man,” and the self-explanatory “Game is My Middle Name” offer up a startling, hard-edged new model of a hard-funking female vocalist.

The album’s most affecting track may be “Steppin in Her I. Miller Shoes,” Davis’ level-headed elegy for her sybaritic friend Devon Wilson, who sailed out a window at the Chelsea Hotel in 1971. “She coulda been anything that she wanted…Instead she chose to be nothing,” Davis sings, implying that route wouldn’t be one she would take herself.

“If I’m in Luck” grazed the lower reaches of the R&B singles chart and the album failed to reach the LP rolls at all, but Davis was undaunted. For 1974’s They Say I’m Different, she took the producer’s reins, which she would hold for the rest of her career. While the backup lineup is less glitzy (though Saunders, Pete Escovedo, and Buddy Miles, on guitar no less, appear), the support is still sizzling; crackling drums and burbling clavinet put over a set of songs that may have been even stronger than those heard on her debut.

No one who hears “He Was a Big Freak” is likely to ever forget it; it’s a startling dissection of a masochistic relationship -- inspired by Jimi Hendrix, and not, as many have assumed, by Miles Davis (“Everyone knows that Miles is a sadist,” Betty remarked later). Almost as notable are “Don’t Call Her No Tramp,” a prescient condemnation of what we now call slut-shaming, and the autobiographical title track, with slicing slide guitar work by Cordell Dudley.

Different and its attendant singles tanked, but Betty managed to maintain her profile with live gigs noteworthy for their uninhibited bawdiness, on-stage abandon, and the star’s Egyptian-princess-from-outer-space wardrobe sense. By early 1974 she had assembled a hot, lean road band that included her cousins Nickey Neal and Larry Johnson on drums and bass, respectively, plus keyboardist Fred Mills and guitarist Carlos Morales. This lineup would back her on her last two albums.

The end of Just Sunshine’s distribution deal liberated Davis, who, at the suggestion of then-boyfriend Robert Palmer, inked with Palmer’s label Island Records. The company released Nasty Gal in 1975, and it may be Davis’ best-executed work. The pared-down backing lets the songs shine, and there are good ones here: The shameless title song, the vituperative blast at the critics “Dedicated to the Press,” and the out-front ultimatum for sexual satisfaction “Feelins” get right up in the listener’s face. The most surprising track is the ballad “You and I,” an unexpected songwriting reunion with Miles, orchestrated by the trumpeter’s famed arranger Gil Evans.

It’s a tremendous album, and Betty supported it with live shows that ate the funk competition alive. A bootleg of an especially out-there set recorded at a festival on the French Riviera in 1976 literally climaxes with Nasty Gal’s “The Lone Ranger,” an in-the-saddle heavy breather that Davis wraps up by feigning a loud orgasm.

One should remember that at this particular juncture, Madonna was studying dance at the University of Michigan.

But Nasty Gal faded with hardly a trace, and Davis’ relationship with Island swiftly became fractious. It’s easy to see why the label declined to issue her final album, originally called Crashin’ From Passion and ultimately released, after years as a bootleg, by Light in the Attic in 2009 as Is It Love or Desire. The collection, which leans heavily on songs about sex, doping, and heavy drinking, includes “Stars Starve, You Know,” an outright condemnation of the games record companies play:

They said if I wanted to make some money

I’d have to change my style

Put a paper bag over my face

Sing soft and wear tight fitting gowns

 They don’t like the way I’m lookin’

So it’s hard for my agent to get me bookin’s

Unless I cover up my legs and drop my pen

And commit one of those commercial sins…

 Oh hey hey Island

And that was all she wrote. Until writers began to seek her out in the new millennium as her records became available again, Betty Davis was an invisible woman, one who had blazed a trail that other talents, such as Prince and Madonna, would blaze more profitably after her. She was definitively ahead of her time.

Asked by one writer what she had done since leaving music, Davis, who turns 71 on July 26, responded with the most tragic thing one can imagine any artist saying: “Nothing really.”

[watusichris]

The Taj Mahal of L.A. noir

You may not live in Los Angeles, but if you’re a movie nut you’ve probably been inside the Bradbury Building dozens of times. Located downtown at the corner of Third and Broadway, the 123-year-old structure has been used in dozens of films, TV shows, and commercials – but most notably in some classic films noir and neo-noirs.

In 1892, the Bradbury was commissioned by its namesake, gold mining magnate Lewis L. Bradbury, who would not live to see its completion. Bradbury rejected a design by Sumner Hunt, but it was completed by one of the architect’s draftsmen, George Wyman. Hunt’s reluctant apprentice only took on the job after receiving approval from the spirit of his late brother, who was contacted via a planchette board, a precursor of the later Ouija board.

Opened in 1893, some months after Bradbury’s death, the edifice was one of the glories of its day. Inspired by Edward Bellamy’s futuristic utopian novel Looking Backward (19987), the five-story building sported a spacious atrium with a vast skylight, exposed brick walls, elegant tile floors, and spectacular iron work, employed on its angular staircases and parallel “birdcage” lobby elevators.

Naturally, as the local film industry developed, Hollywood came a-calling at the Bradbury. Some of its cinematic history is laid out in Thom Andersen’s sprawling, wonderful 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, which surveys the way the capital of the movie industry has surveyed itself through its indigenous locations over the years.

The Bradbury made its movie debut in the 1943 wartime melodrama China Girl, standing in for a hotel in Burma. It would see a variety of uses thereafter, representing buildings in a plethora of locations, in genre pictures ranging from sci-fi (The Indestructible Man, a 1956 Lon Chaney, Jr. vehicle) to modern rom-com (2009’s The 500 Days of Summer) and even a latter-day silent feature (the 2011 Oscar winner The Artist).

But since the late ‘40s the building has been used most creatively and integrally in a variety of noir features, which have employed the setting – one that required little or no dressing or alteration to look dramatic and somewhat menacing – to great creative effect.

Its first appearance in noir was likely in Shockproof, a wacky 1949 picture set in Los Angeles. The picture was directed by Douglas Sirk, who would go on to greater renown in the ‘50s as the director of such highly perverse CinemaScope romantic dramas as Tarnished Angels, Written On the Wind, and All That Heaven Allows, all vehicles for Rock Hudson. It was scripted by Samuel Fuller, later the director of such noir-tinged pictures as The Crimson Kimono, Shock Corridor, and The Naked Kiss.

German émigré Sirk knew his expressionism, and he brought the style’s deep shadows to bear in his tale of parole officer Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde) and his new charge Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight, Wilde’s real-life wife at the time), who become romantically and criminally entangled.

Marat and Marsh are introduced in a scene in which the newly paroled femme fatale visits the Bradbury Building parole office. The building’s atrium is later used effectively in a sequence in which two-time loser Joe Wilson (King Donovan) does a swan dive off one of the balconies to avert his return to prison.

Another European refugee, Rudolf Maté, was already an old hand at noir, of the most exotic variety, by the time he directed the B classic D.O.A. in 1950 – as a cinematographer, he had worked on Charles Vidor’s Gilda and Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai. He had also helmed the 1948 noir thriller The Dark Past.

As a director he is best remembered for his tense fourth feature, in which accountant Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) tracks the crooks who have dosed him with a slow-acting, lethal poison. Maté’s sharp location footage makes splendid use of the hallways and stairwells of the Bradbury Building in a climactic shootout, seen in this homemade “trailer.”

Possibly the most effective use of the Bradbury in classic noir came in M, Joseph Losey’s 1951 remake of Fritz Lang’s 1931 German feature. As in the original, the second version – little seen until its recent restoration – follows the hunt (relocated from an unnamed German city to L.A.) for a demented serial killer of children by the police and members of the local underworld, who are feeling the heat from the cops’ investigation.

 David Wayne takes the role of murderer Martin Harrow, originated (under the moniker Hans Beckert) by Peter Lorre in Lang’s film. The highlight of the Losey edition arrives in a stellar chase through downtown L.A., during which the killer, pursued by mob thugs, takes refuge in the Bradbury (identified by its address in the script) with a terrified girl he has kidnapped.

Harrow finds himself trapped in the office of a mannequin maker as the hoods search the building room by room. (One has to wonder if Stanley Kubrick saw the film before using a similar setting in his New York-set 1955 noir Killer’s Kiss.) The sequence climaxes with a stellar shot, taken from one of the lobby lifts, in which the mobsters, led by boss Martin Gabel, soar to the Bradbury’s top floor in one of the elevators.

Fittingly, the Bradbury was used in Marlowe (1969), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled, L.A.-set 1949 novel The Little Sister, as the office of private investigator Philip Marlowe, played by James “Rockford” Garner. The location plays hob with the original setting: Chandler scholars say that in the books, Marlowe’s digs were in the Taft Building at Hollywood and Vine, a visually less interesting Tinseltown site.

Marlowe is a little flat, and too bright to truly be considered noir, but its most entertaining scene (filmed on a set that stands in for a Bradbury office) marked the feature film debut of future kung fu star Bruce Lee. He portrays mob enforcer Winslow Wong, who pays a visit to Marlowe in an attempt to back him off an investigation.

Carroll O’Connor, playing police lieutenant Christy French, can be seen in the actual hallway of the Bradbury as Lee makes his exit in the final shot. (Appropriately, in real life the Bradbury has housed the Los Angeles Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division since 1996.)

The Bradbury was pretty played out as a location by the time Ridley Scott began filming his sci-fi noir classic Blade Runner (1982), an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The setting had become so familiar to moviegoers that screenwriter Hampton Fancher objected to its use, saying it had been done before. Scott replied, “It hasn’t been done the way I’m going to do it.”

And thus the Bradbury – swathed in smoke, swept by searchlights, sodden with rain water, with a spaceship advertising off-world living looming through its skylight -- stands in for the domicile of genetic engineer J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson). It is there that “blade runner” Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) has his showdown with the murderous fugitive replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and his “pleasure unit” consort Pris (Daryl Hannah).

It’s unlikely that the Bradbury will ever be used as originally as Scott did in his spectacular movie. But as long as the building stands – and stand it will, since it was declared a national historic landmark in 1977 – it will certainly be visited again and again by film crews seeking a visual je ne sais quoi. Historically, that elegant antiquity can be considered L.A.’s Taj Mahal of darkness.

[watusichris]

Get a Move On

In the great tradition of seemingly every music site I work for, Music Aficionado appears to have dumped my story about the Move from its virtual library. So, in honor of Roy Wood’s birthday, I’m posting it my own damn self. **********

Everyone knows the Electric Light Orchestra. From 1974-80, they ruled the charts in America, ringing up three multi-platinum albums, two million-sellers, and a trio of gold discs; four of their singles reached the U.S. top 10. Sadly, the band from which Jeff Lynne’s rock-orchestral hit factory morphed remains a relatively unknown commodity in the colonies: the Move.

Stateside, the Birmingham, England-bred Move couldn’t get arrested for loitering with intent. It was a different tale in Blighty, where during their 1966-1972 heyday the group toted up seven top-10 45s. Tearing several pages from the Who’s playbook, they were one of the most notorious live acts of their era, and their taste for outrage led to a successful libel suit filed by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Almost insanely eclectic and creative, they made some of the most exciting and exploratory music of the period.

Alas, they are probably best known among American listeners for covers of several of their songs – “Brontosaurus,” “Down On the Bay,” “California Man” -- by their ardent fanboys Cheap Trick. Their obscure, rambunctious legacy is worth a second look and listen.

The Move was cobbled together in the English Midlands in late 1965 by a group of local musical vets; it’s said that impetus for the new unit was provided by aspiring pop singer David Jones, who would go on to greater fame as David Bowie. The front man was plummy-voiced lead singer Carl Wayne, formerly leader of his own outfit the Vikings. Vocal and instrumental support was supplied by guitarists Trevor Burton and Roy Wood, the latter of whom swiftly became the group’s principal songwriter; thumping drummer Bev Bevan; and glamourpuss bassist Chris “Ace” Kefford, a charismatic but highly unstable character in the Brian Jones mold who was nicknamed “the Singing Skull.”

Like almost every English band of any import during that epoch, the Move took initial inspiration from R&B and soul music; their early sets included covers of the Marvelettes’ “Too Many Fish in the Sea,” the Isley Brothers’ “Respectable,” the Orlons’ “Don’t Hang Up,” and Betty Everett’s “I Can’t Hear You No More.”

They swiftly found their footing in the studio with a pair of Wood-penned singles that bubbled up from its author’s evidently bottomless well of paranoia: The debut “Night of Fear” topped out at No. 2 in the U.K., while its follow-up “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” peaked at No. 5.

By the time the second 45 was released in the spring of 1967, the Move – under the aegis of manager Tony Secunda, who also handled another top local attraction, the Moody Blues -- had attained a reputation as one of England’s most (literally!) dangerous concert attractions.

Since 1964, the Who had been alarming the populace by trashing their equipment onstage; taking a page from Stephen Potter’s books about oneupsmanship, the Move lifted the ante with freewheeling and potentially perilous gigs at which the gangster-suited act attacked TV sets with fire axes, set effigies of public figures ablaze, and, during one notorious date at London’s Roundhouse, undertook the riot-inducing onstage demolition of a car.

The band’s fortunes seemed assured with the September 1967 release of “Flowers in the Rain,” a trippy little slice of psychedelia ornamented with classically-derived production flourishes courtesy of Bowie’s future producer Tony Visconti.

However, the No. 2 chart triumph of the single was tarnished after Secunda concocted a promotional postcard depicting Harold Wilson in flagrante delicto with his secretary Marcia Williams. Wilson’s solicitors speedily slapped a libel suit on the band, and, after a verdict in his favor, all royalties from the song were directed to the coffers of Wilson’s favorite charities. (“Vote For Me,” a mocking song about politicians whose target couldn’t have been more obvious, was subsequently recorded but wisely left unreleased.)

Secunda was subsequently deposed in favor of iron-fisted manager Don Arden by the time the Move’s self-titled debut LP was tardily released in April 1968. Even for its time, it was a wildly eclectic opus. Strong, heartily psychedelic Wood compositions – “Flowers in the Rain,” “Yellow Rainbow,” “Walk Upon the Water,” “Fire Brigade,” “Cherry Blossom Clinic” – sat side-by-side with covers of material by Eddie Cochran (“Weekend”), Moby Grape (“Hey Grandma”), and the Coasters (“Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”). It became the group’s lone British long-player to reach the charts, hitting No. 15.

Incipient drug casualty Kefford had already been ejected from the band by the time they cut a live EP at London’s Marquee Club in February 1968. Hurriedly issued as Something Else From the Move on the heels of the debut album, the all-covers effort was a genre-encompassing set featuring tracks originally essayed by the Byrds, Love, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Spooky Tooth. It was a raucous affair, but it gave little hint of the more focused and highly personalized work that was to follow.

A pair of crunching singles released in late 1968 pointed towards the bottom-heavy sound that would characterize all the Move’s later work. The frenzied “Wild Tiger Woman” was the first of the band’s 45s that failed to chart in England: The BBC’s skittishness about its female protagonist’s sexual insatiability prompted a radio ban. It was succeeded by “Blackberry Way,” a string-inflected, Beatlesque tune – think “Penny Lane” – with a then-rare Wood lead vocal; it became the group’s only No. 1 entry.

Sometimes chaotic events during 1969 harbingered both the contorted latter-day history of the Move and the disinterested response that greeted their work on American shores. Trevor Burton, relegated to bass duties following Kefford’s expulsion, bridled at the pop orientation of “Blackberry Way.” Wood, previously a retiring figure within the band, was empowered by the song’s success and looked to take a higher profile in the group. And Carl Wayne, already studying an exit strategy, moved into music publishing and began pondering a solo career in cabaret-styled pop – and successfully dragged his band mates into incongruous dates whose repertoire reflected his aspirations.

After an on-stage punch-out between Burton and Bev Bevan at a Swedish concert, the unhappy bassist departed the band, and was replaced by Rick Price. The reconstituted quartet, some of whose earlier singles had been issued with a total lack of success by A&M in the U.S., undertook an American “tour” of four dates in October 1969; the trek was so chaotically managed that the band members had to book their own hotel rooms.

Out of this disorder came a remarkable album: Shazam, released in early 1970 in both the U.K. and the U.S. Loosely tied together by off-the-cuff “man on the street” interviews, it was a typically everywhere-at-once collection that managed to hang together thanks to its bottom-heavy sound.

Save for a string-flecked McCartneyesque ballad, “Beautiful Daughter,” which plays like a sop to Wayne’s pop ambitions, Shazam knocks a listener’s head against the wall. The LP was highlighted by the thunderous Wood original “Hello Suzie” and churning renderings of American art-rock act Ars Nova’s “Fields of People,” Frankie Laine’s antique pop hit “Don’t Make My Baby Blue,” and folkie Tom Paxton’s ballad “The Last Thing On My Mind.” “Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited” – an expanded remake of the debut album’s Wood original about life in a mental institution – pointed at things to come with its extended instrumental interpolations from Bach’s “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” and Tchaikovsky’s “Peter and the Wolf” and “The Nutcracker Suite.”

This stupendous slab of proto-metal heaviosity was greeted with roaring silence, and failed to chart on either side of the Atlantic. The couple thousand people who purchased Shazam in the U.S. were probably prompted to lay down their cash by a fey yet wildly enthusiastic review of the album in Rolling Stone by critic and aspiring rock star John Mendelsohn, who would become the band’s chief advocate on these shores. The Move’s small but vocal cult following in the States had its beginnings here.

Wayne put his other foot out the door before Shazam appeared in the stores, and the band was speedily reformulated with the addition of singer-guitarist-vocalist Jeff Lynne, late of Birmingham’s Idle Race. (Wood had himself played in an early edition of that group, Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders.)

The new alignment captured immediate traction in the U.K., where Wood’s “dance song” “Brontosaurus” tallied a No. 7 slot. A full-length album bearing that track, Looking On, followed in late 1970. Grindingly, profoundly bottom-heavy, it lacked any notable songs beyond its chart hit, but it showed Wood flexing his considerable instrumental muscles on cello, sitar, oboe, and saxophones, and the twinned lead vocals and production skills of Wood and Lynne hinted at a winning combination. However, issued by Capitol in both the U.K. and U.S., it died a quick and largely unmourned death.

At this juncture, Wood and Lynne began to envision a new Move offshoot, the Electric Light Orchestra, as a seamless melding of the mother band’s already extant pop and classical strains. Thus work began simultaneously on a new Move album and a debut ELO recording.

The Move’s final set was prefaced by the pummeling Lynne-penned 45 “Down On the Bay” and two fantastic pop-rock singles from Wood, “Tonight” (No. 11 in England) and “Chinatown,” which hinted at the sonic density that would feature in his later solo work.

Recorded after Price’s exit by the trio of Wood, Lynne, and Bevan, the LP Message From the Country landed in October 1971. Though flawed – thanks to Bevan’s silly Elvis homage “Don’t Mess Me Up,” the equally obvious Johnny Cash homage “Ben Crawley Steel Company,” and the “Honey Pie”-like ‘20s pop tidbit “My Marge” – it showed what Lynne and Wood were capable of together. Wood brought in the anvil-dropping “Until Your Mama’s Gone” and “It Wasn’t My Idea to Dance,” while Lynne contributed the titular rocker, the end-of-the-world ballad “No Time,” and a pair of expansive numbers, “The Minister” and “The Words of Aaron,” that pointed towards his later ELO hits in style and sound.

Message From the Country might as well have been released with a “No Sale” sticker attached to it, for the album left nary a trace on any international chart. The band had one last, magnificent single in it: in May 1972, the double-barreled blast of Lynne’s snarling, careening “Do Ya” and Wood’s metallic Jerry Lee Lewis tribute “California Man” landed like a bomb. This two-sided stick of dynamite was the Move’s only 45 to make an American dent, belatedly peaking at a meager No. 93, but became a valedictory No. 7 hit in Great Britain.

By that time, the Electric Light Orchestra’s first LP, No Answer, had seen release. An uncertain mixture of wide-screen rock and unfocused mock-classicism, it bemused listeners in England, where old Move fans took it to a modest No. 32 chart slot, and stultified audiences in America, where it clipped the chart at No. 196 during a two-week stay.

By the time work commenced on a follow-up ELO opus, Wood and Lynne were at loggerheads about the future direction of the band, and, after contributing to just two numbers for the sophomore album, Wood exited the group, with Lynne and Bevan carrying on under the ELO handle.

It was left to United Artists Records, ELO’s American label, to release a splendid parting gift that served as a kind of primer for late-blooming Move devotees. The late-1972 compilation Split Ends brought together the best tracks from Message From the Country, with its genre pastiches excised, and the stunning singles released before and after that album’s release. No doubt benefiting from loud tub-thumping in UA’s in-house music publication Phonograph Record Magazine, which was distributed free in American record stores, the posthumous collection became the Move’s only American chart LP, rising to No. 172 in early 1973.

With the dissolution of their partnership, the commercial fortunes of the Move’s prime movers diverged. Lynne of course perfected his rock/classical fusion and enjoyed a glittering run with ELO, taking a remake of “Do Ya” to No. 24 in 1977, and went on to become a big-name producer, rock star familiar, and Traveling Wilbury as his career burgeoned in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Roy Wood, always one Tommy short of a Pete Townshend-worthy career in the U.S., proceeded as a beloved eccentric and sometime hitmaker in his homeland. His 1973 all-solo opus Boulders contained the top-20 hit “Dear Elaine,” and was succeeded by the scrumptious Neal Sedaka-meets-the-Beach Boys hit “Forever” (No. 8). Regrouping with dissident Move bassist Rick Price, he founded the visually and sonically extravagant rock big band Wizzard, which issued such neo-Spectorian smashes as “Ball Park Incident” and “See My Baby Jive.”

Quite the saga. Now, if you haven’t heard the band, it’s time to get a Move on.

[watusichris]

Jajouka Rolling Stone

This piece about the Master Musicians of Jajouka, written for Night Flight a few years back, has been MIA on the web, but my friend Steve Krakow’s post on Facebook today has inspired an exhumation. ********** In August 1968, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones spent two days in a remote mountain village in Morocco, recording the ceremonial music of the musical clan who lived there. Three years later, the tapes would become Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, perhaps the first album of what came to be known as “world music” to enter the pop mainstream.

That entrance literally took centuries, and was spawned by the enthusiasm of a group of hip cognoscenti. The men who would be known as the Master Musicians of Jajouka – the malim, as they were known among their tribe – had probably been performing their music since around 800 A.D. Playing rhaita (indigenous reed instruments), wooden flutes, and handheld drums, they appeared at the pleasure of Morocco’s sultans; in later years, they were supported financially by other natives of their Rif Mountains community.

Though they were Muslims, the malim staged an annual festival, thought to be a vestige of the ancient Romans’ fertility ceremony of Lupercal. There, village boys portraying Bou Jeloud, a part-man/part-goat local divinity, would dance to their music, whipping the woman with branches to ensure that they could bear children.

“Bou Jeloud is Fear and Fucking,” Brion Gysin would write of the ceremony in his 1967 novel The Process. Author, artist, and psychic explorer Gysin was among the first Westerners to hear the music of the malim. He came to Tangier in 1950 at the behest of the American composer and writer Paul Bowles, one of the first notable postwar expatriates in North Africa. (In 1959, Bowles extensively documented Moroccan music for the Library of Congress; those recordings can be heard on a four-CD set issued in early 2016 by Dust-To-Digital Records.)

Gysin and Bowles first encountered the keening, ecstatic music of the malim at a 1951 festival. Via an entrée from Mohamed Hamri -- a Tangier artist and hustler (and lover of both Bowles and Gysin) who was a member of the mountain Attar clan, the village’s prime musical movers -- Gysin later re-encountered the musicians on their hillside home turf.

Gysin in turn introduced the music to another expat, American novelist William S. Burroughs, who settled in Tangier during the ‘50s; in his 1962 novel The Ticket That Exploded – which employed Gysin’s “cut-up” assembly techniques -- Burroughs wrote of “the Pan God of Panic piping blue notes through empty streets.”

Obsessed with the Master Musicians, Gysin established a restaurant, the 1001 Nights, in Tangier in 1954, and imported the players from Jajouka to perform there. Unfortunately, he also hired the erratic Hamri to manage the establishment, and the enterprise ultimately ran aground, with the malim returning to the Djebala foothills to play before their people again.

It is natural that Brian Jones would acquire his own taste for the malim a decade later. Co-founder of the Rolling Stones in 1962, he was the force who injected the most exotic elements into the band’s blues-based sound. He made his first trip to Morocco in 1966; upon his return in March 1967, he met Gysin for the first time, and was famously abandoned in a Tangier hospital by his band mate Keith Richards and his girlfriend, actress Anita Pallenberg, who quickly became lovers.

Nonetheless, Morocco continued to beckon Jones, who could resist neither the ancient, rapturous lure of the country’s music nor the hyper-potent kif (a hashish derivative) that powered its sound. And so in 1968 the rock star returned again, joined by recording engineer George Chkiantz, who brought a battery-powered tape machine.

Mohamed Hamri took Jones and Chkiantz up into the hillside where the Master Musicians resided, and the players recreated the music of the Jeloudia during a day-long session. At one juncture during their stay, a goat was paraded before Jones; gazing at the animal, he exclaimed in awe and fright, “That’s me!” The animal was then led off to slaughter for a communal meal.

Jones envisioned his recordings not as some form of documentation, but as the basis for a rock album. He did not approach the tracks with anything like purity: He slathered the sound with phasing and echo, and edited and cross-faded some selections. But he ultimately did not fulfill his vision of fusion.

Besieged by drug-related legal woes and hobbled by personal problems that made him a professional liability, he was himself led to slaughter: On June 8, 1969, Jones was confronted at home by Richards, Mick Jagger, and Charlie Watts, and fired from the Stones. Less than a month later, he was found dead in his own swimming pool. He was 27.

The Rolling Stones issued Jones’ tapes in 1971, with its location misspelled, as Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, on their own custom imprint. Not surprisingly, it did not sell well, but it prophesied a deep interest among rock musicians in world music sounds, and it enjoyed a long afterlife in the work of others.

Some with more folkloric interests in Jajouka’s music traveled to Morocco with their own tape machines. In 1972, American Joel Rubiner recorded the malim in their village; one of the selections, “Brian Jones,” was created in homage to the Master Musicians’ late, famous champion. (Rubiner later appeared as a character in Jajouka Rolling Stone, an astonishing fact-based 1993 “novel” by Stephen Davis, author of the Led Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods.)

Another pilgrim was musician and journalist Robert Palmer, who had been transfixed by Gysin’s The Process. In January 1973, Palmer brought avant garde saxophonist-composer Ornette Coleman to Jajouka, where the pair recorded for hours with the Master Musicians. A snippet of the work, the track “Midnight Sunrise,” was included on Coleman’s 1977 harmolodic jazz-rock album Dancing in Your Head. Two albums worth of material are said to remain unreleased.

Most ironically, in 1989 Jagger and Richards traveled to Morocco to record with the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Tangier. The sessions, and a joint interview with Jagger and a very unimpressed Paul Bowles, were filmed for a promotional documentary; even 20 years after Jones’ demise, his band mates seemed uneasy talking about him. The Moroccan tracks were used as the basis for “Continental Drift,” a standout track on the Rolling Stones’ 1989 album Steel Wheels, and as a concert fanfare.

For their own part, the Master Musicians of Jajouka endured, despite an internal schism that divided the older and younger players for years. They toured internationally, recorded several commercial releases (under the direction of Bachir Attar, scion of the musical family), and played regularly at Brian Jones memorial concerts in England and elsewhere.

For many years, a framed promotional photo of Brian Jones was prominently displayed on the wall of the musicians’ communal living quarters in the heart of the Rif.

[watusichris]

One For Toots

Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals died late Friday, Sept. 11, in a hospital in St. Andrew, Jamaica, after contracting COVID-19, according to reports in the Jamaica Gleaner and the Jamaica Observer. He was 78. Here is something I wrote about this brilliant singer and his great soul solo album for Trunkworthy a few years back.

********** If soul music is all about musical exuberance, deep feeling, and unfettered joy, then one of the most soulful records of all time was created by a genre outsider: Jamaican reggae vocalist Toots Hibbert.

Even listeners with just a cursory knowledge of reggae via Perry Henzell’s 1973 breakthrough movie The Harder They Come would be familiar with Toots. His trio the Maytals are the first to be seen performing in the film, miming their jubilant 1969 hit “Sweet and Dandy” in a Kingston recording studio. (Another Maytals song heard in the movie, “Pressure Drop,” would be famously covered by the Clash in 1979.) By ’73, Toots had been active professionally for more than a decade; veterans of the ska and rocksteady scenes, his group could lay claim to giving the music a name with their 1968 hit “Do the Reggay.” A string of gritty singles produced by Leslie Kong led to a high-profile contract with Island Records’ Mango subsidiary.

Classic albums like Funky Kingston and In the Dark followed, but by the end of the ‘70s the Maytals’ gutsy brand of roots reggae was displaced in Jamaica by the digitized sound of dancehall. The group broke up, but Toots remained under contract with Mango, with his talent unabated. In a bolt of inspiration, the label brought the singer to Memphis, Tennessee, for a genre-leaping session of classic soul interpretations.

Toots in Memphis, as the 1988 set was titled, was a natural all around. Jamaican musicians had been cocking their ears to American R&B since the early ‘60s, when ska developed as a turned-around island take on the driving hits aired on New Orleans radio stations and imported to Jamdown shops and sound systems. Like many American R&B and soul stars, several of the early Jamaican singers, including Toots, were reared on gospel. And reggae covers of U.S. soul hits were commonplace from the ‘60s on.

For Toots’ Bluff City session, maverick producer-keyboardist Jim Dickinson – the local iconoclast best known for his work with Big Star and Alex Chilton – surrounded Toots with skilled players from both the reggae and soul communities. The top reggae rhythm section of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare had played on nearly every major hit to emanate from Jamaica for a decade (including Peter Tosh’s cover of the Temptations’ “Don’t Look Back”). From the soul side, Teenie Hodges of Hi Records’ house band, Eddie Hinton of the Muscle Shoals studio group, and Andrew Love of the Memphis Horns contributed. To a man, the musicians understood the universal language of the Groove.

The repertoire for Toots in Memphis was tailored to the vocalist’s rough, forceful attack and freewheeling, improvisational interpretative approach. Two songs apiece were drawn from the catalogs of the late Stax Records star Otis Redding and his lesser-known but equally powerful contemporary James Carr. Hit material by Hi’s luminaries Al Green and Ann Peebles was essayed, as well as a Jackie Moore number unforgettably covered by Goldwax and Hi soul master O.V. Wright. Songs originated by Stax’s Eddie Floyd and West Coast soul man J.J. Malone and a lone original filled out the collection.

Toots rose to the occasion with in-the-pocket reggae-styled readings that equal and in some cases nearly surpass the originals. He makes Otis’ album-opening “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” completely his own, crushes Carr’s stormy “Love Attack,” works new wrinkles into Floyd’s “Knock On Wood,” and runs neck-and-neck with O.V. on “Precious, Precious.” For some Memphis soul connoisseurs, the highlight may be the nearly seven-minute version of Reverend Al’s “Love and Happiness”; many lesser covers of the tune have been cut, but the presence of co-writer Hodges on guitar, Sly and Robbie’s urgent bottom, and Toots’ stretched-out, probing reading refresh the Beale Street bar band standard. “Reggae got soul,” Toots declared in a 1976 song. If there was ever any doubt about that, he proved it definitively on Toots in Memphis.