Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
7 Days 24 November 1971
Special six page Rock Feature
The dream is over, what can we say?
The biggest noise on the Rock scene at the moment is the sound of people asking what's wrong with it. Everyone has a theory. One of the most considerable attempts to provide a diagnosis appeared in a recent issue of the American rock magazine Creem. The June issue carried an enormous (20,000 word) essay by Greil Marcus. His article, "Rock-a- hula Clarified", was an attempt to find out what rock can mean at its best, and why, at the moment, it is not realising its full potential.
We think the article is sufficiently interesting to rate some extended comment. Here Peter Fowler criticises Marcus' position, and offers an alternative suggestion, that the stagnation of rock is due to the collapse of the youth culture of the late sixties. Some of Peter Fowler's notions will not be enthusiastically accepted. Here, however, some of the preliminary battle lines are drawn up. In future issues of 7 DAYS we will be returning to the contest.
Central to Marcus’ position was a notion conveyed in Peter Guralnick’s celebrated remark: “We took Little Richard’s outlandish screams for a welcome relief and the nonsense lyrics of Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins seemed to express an implicit view of the world each of us secretly shared.” The “secret” was conveyed through rock, the sound of our time. “We began,” notes Marcus, “to understand it as a kind of culturally secret parallel history for a community that had recognized itself as such only through rock.”
The Secret’s OutThis “community” is now torn to
shreds. The main reason for this, according to Marcus, is the “assimilation of rock into the general mass culture”. The secret, then, is out — thus “our connection with the music is dissolving because to a good degree rock was a buffer against what it has become, and it cannot very well act as a buffer against itself”.
Because of this, the audience “has fragmented into a whole set of cults” , relating to each other only as consumers. Marcus concedes that much “great rock” is still being made (he gives a list of dozens of such records made over the past year), but none of these
John Lennon " . . the only rock star big enough both in terms of the market he commands and the affection we feel for him, to divide the rock audience instead of merely fragmenting it . " G. Marcus
are making any kind of total impact. “We are all rock” he points out “but there is no all rock and roll music”.
He defines an “all rock and roll record” as one that brings us all together, one that defines the moment for us. One like “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” or “Do You Believe in Magic” . The times are now so confused
by Pete Fowlerthat even the best records are only doing this for some o f us: the “each of us” of the Guralnick formula is crucially missing.
Dissolving CommunityAttempts have been made to put the
pieces back together — the “search for superstars” in particular. But these (such as Joe Cocker, Elton John and Melanie) “remain private tastes like everyone else”. “A dissolving community” Greil complains, “we no longer want to listen to each other’s records”.
There are, however, the potential saviours of rock. Maybe it will be Grand Funk Railroad, the only group according to Marcus that understands the sense of POP that is missing everywhere else — thogh Marcus himself doesn’t particularly like them. Maybe it’ll be saved by some of the established Sixties Heroes. The second half of the article is a detailed look at John Lennon and the Band, trying to find out what is “missing” from their records. Marcus does a thorough going Lit Crit treatment of “The Shape I’m In”, which, if it had only had odd lines from “Just Another Whistle Stop” included in it, would have been an all-time rock classic. Anyhow, Marcus concludes unconvincingly, Rock and Roll will stand.
So much for the account. If it comes over confused, it’s because the essay itself is confused, the conclusions more or less non-existent. But, it is an important contribution to a growing debate, and if Greil Marcus is groping in the dark, so are we all.
One point that should be accepted without reservation — there is a widespread feeling that something is wrong with Rock. Trevor Fisher listed the prophets of doom in Peace News (12 November ’71) and the list is growing quite impressively: Richard Neville is calling it “the end of an era” (OZ 31), Jon Landau has noted “the lack of excitment in the air” (Rolling Stone, 2 December 1970) and John Peel
put it more emotionally (and more aptly):
“1967 was to me an incredibly optimistic time. I really felt things were changing . .. now it’s incredibly pessimistic. Everything in Britain is such a downer. I get so upset I could cry” (Rolling Stone 4 February, 1971)There is, then, a sense of malaise: and
it is not just felt amongst Rock critics. Eric Clapton has referred to the “necessary lull” and Roger Daltry thinks it’s time “to say rock’s shit again”. No doubt about it, the rock culture is going through an uncertain period — Greil Marcus is right.
Nevertheless, his reasons for the malaise do need questioning. It isn’t so much what he says as what he implies that is ultimately important, for the whole essay is riddled with hidden assumptions and concealed value judgments. What, to start with, does Marcus mean by “community”? “We” apparently were all brought together by “Satisfaction”, “we” could all share in the secret — it was “our” music.
Clearly, the terms aren’t all-inclusive. I’ve no doubt that “we” wouldn’t include all the Townies who are out buying “Johnny Reggae” by the thousand, or the Mums and Dads who watch Cilia on a Saturday night. By “our community” Marcus obviously means the predominantly middle class, student (or ex-student) Underground sub-culture. The same with John Peel — when he says “everything in Britain is a downer” he means the Sixties “counter culture” is going under.
The malaise then, is defined — to use Jon Landau’s phrase — as a “lack of excitement” and a “lack in the sense of community” in comparison with the excitement and the growing sense of community of an earlier time. To be more precise, things have been on the downgrade ever since beautiful old 1967 — the year everybody discovered acid, the year when Rolling Stone was founded, the year when John Peel became famous, the year of Sergeant Pepper.
The reason for the decline, according to Marcus, lies in “ the assimilation of rock into the mass culture”. Also,
certain key figures sold out (“Dylan’s refusal of his own status undermined our urge to reflect off his vision”). This all sounds much too much like a conspiracy theory of rock — isn’t it time to admit that the failure of the dream lies within the culture itself? Might not the whole project have been misconceived?
1967 was, to be sure, all very nice. Most of us were affected to some extent by the general air of optimism — some of us, no doubt, swallowed the whole lot. It did seem possible that some
Marcus on Grand Funk Railroad: "not the only rock group that says it is a part of its audience, but the only big group who can say that and get people to believe them." on Dylan: " . . . since he was always ahead of us by a year or so, that simple time-lapse of experience sustained the direct impact of his music months and years after we first encountered it."
world-shaking apocalypse was just around the corner, and nowhere was this mood better defined than in the rock of that period — the rock of Jimi Hendrix, The Cream, Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison. “Your ballroom days are over” screamed Morrison as he ri pped his flies open — “we want the world and we want it now!”
The false consciousness that pervaded that period is now all too obvious, and the current state of rock is a consequence of that fantasy — for the legacy of the crystal-clear acid dream is the “Progressive Rock” of the 70’s, with its absurd pretensions and glaring lack of sensibility. The rise of Black Sabbath, of Deep Purple, of Grand Funk Railroad and the other mutants might well be the logical conclusion of Satisfaction and The Times they are a changing — in other words it’s not just the easy assimilation that Marcus talks of that started the rot: much of the rot was there all the time.
It comes back to Marcus and his “community”. The idea of a “youth culture” was, no doubt, dreamed up by
18
Annette G
reen D
avid Redfern
7 Days 24 November 1971
Nevis Cameron
Big Business — with teenagers getting more affluent, it was a very good new market to exploit. But, in the Sixties certain sections within the so-called “youth culture” began believing it all. Thus, the editors of International Times would proudly proclaim “We are the people your parents warned you against” : Dylan warned the “mothers and fathers” that their children were “beyond their command” and Morrison put it quite simply and crudely — “Come on girl, we’re taking over”.
Youth, then, boosted itself still higher — not only was it a subculture, it was a class in itself, the revolutionary class to boot. “The revolution” said the adman “is on CBS.”
The working classes were despised — Frank Zappa lumped the rest of mankind together as “vegetable people” and George Harrison just called them “Piggies” (“What they need’s a damn good whacking”). A patronising sneer was the order of the day.
Images of Counter-CultureIt was the manifest absurdity of this
position that ensured its failure, more than any amount of assimilation from the dominant culture: but something was achieved. An image of a counter-culture was created, and this image has, to a certain extent, stuck. This has been especially true in this country, where the “alternative culture” has never even had a geographical base (unless you count Notting Hill). All that remains of the grandiose phrases are the clothes, the sounds, and dope — the all-important link.
The failure of Rock in the Seventies is a result of this hangover from the Sixties. At least those who made some sort of break with their past in the Sixties were aware that they were making some sort of radical gesture (or, at least, thought they were) — but those now being attracted by the remnants of the image are blissfully unaware of any past. “Progressive” Rock, the music they listen to, is created for the present, and the present only: it is the description, purely and simply, of the stoned moment.
(This “stoned moment” is an essentially passive state of mind, and might well be diminishing the number
of active musical performers, though this is a debatable point — but it’s always seemed odd to me that rock was dominated for so long by a relatively narrow age-range.)
There has, of course, been a reaction — and this brings me back to the second half of the Greil Marcus piece. Marcus sees the saviours of rock as being possibly Grand Funk, possibly John Lennon and possibly the Band. He would, no doubt, willingly add Bob Dylan to this list if his praise of New Morning and Watching the River Flow are taken into account.
Apart ’from Grand Funk — who I’d equate with Fabian, Frankie Avalon and the Monkees rather than with the Beatles and the Stones — I’d agree with his choices.
Rock RearguardBut what is interesting about all of
these other three is that they have come down heavily against the tenets of the Youth Sub-culture of the Sixties. Marcus’ “community” won’t be saved
by any of them, because none of them believe in it anyway. They constitute nothing less than a rock rearguard — and, as such, have produced between them the best rock of the Seventies.
Dylan started it off, as I suppose he was bound to. Dylan, always one move ahead, made the Basement Tapes in 1967: These were already his farewell
pieces to the Underground. On these songs, Dylan began, again, to acknowledge the existence of those outside the Youth Culture. “Tears of Rage” (“What dear daughter beneath the sun could treat her father so?” is a song that was diametrically opposed to his earlier “Times they are a changing”. He began to turn from his surrealist visions of the present to an ever increasing awareness of his past — many of the 1967/68 songs revolve around the theme of “memory” (such as “Wheels on Fire” and “Open the Door, Richard”), and the general advice he was offering himself as well as others was contained in “You Ain’t Goin' Nowhere” — “Strap yourself to the tree with roots”.
D ylan s Mum Liked ItThe fantasy revolution could offer no
roots — Dylan saw his roots as being elsewhere. If Nashville Skyline lost Dylan a” lot of fans, it seemed like a deliberate move on his part as it brought him into contact with a much broader audience — it was, apparently, the first Dylan album that his mother was proud of. If Dylan had forsaken the “revolution”, it was partly because the “revolution” had forsaken reality. It must be clear to anyone who sits down and listens to The Basement Tapes that Dylan had been driven nearly completely mad by his earlier experiences — is there any wonder that he grasped at the nearest “roots” he could find? And, isn’t it even more of an achievement that, in doing so, he came up with such beautiful albums as Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait?
As Dylan was becoming concerned with the past, the Band were becoming obsessed by it. They not only lived for the past — they seemed to want to live in the past: and yet Robbie Robertson’s awareness of the schism between the Band’s music and much of the newer rock has become crucial to an understanding of their later work, Stage Fright and Cahoots. They constantly lampoon the “jockstrap and feedback” generation — “You can shout and you can scream” they sing on Just Another Whistle Stop “but they'll only call you crazy fool”. Levon Helm, their leader in the old pre-Dylan days, and th e .
Southerner of the group, is still the starting point for many of Robbie’s songs — “I wrote The Night they drove Old Dixie Down for Levon” Robbie said (quoted in Look, August 1970) “He feels real strong about what happened back in 1865. And when he sings “You can take what you need and leave the rest/But they should never have taken the very best” it doesn’t really matter what side you’re on”.
It’s no. use at this juncture to point to the Band as being a collection of old fogeys and reactionaries: the answer lies in their music, which is a brilliant synthesis of each of the fundamental strands of rock and roll. Whatever Levon sings on Dixie can’t wipe this out — he’s been brought up on the Blues and on Country and Western, and has managed to retain both of them. What marks them out as being “against” the “jockstrap-and — feedbackers” is their awareness of the past, both in their lyrics and, more importantly, in their sound. The Band are strapped to the roots. That’s why Dylan loved them so much.
And Now for LennonAnd then there’s John Lennon.
Though politically, Lennon is at this point in time miles apart from Dylan and the Band, in the division within rock he stands very much with them. The release of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band about this time last year was, in all likelihood, the highspot of the whole
"The sound never had power over the events that invade our lives, no matter what was claimed for it; at best, it gave us a common sense of how to deal with them." Greil Marcus.
rearguard rock movement: “God” and “Isolation” in particular were phenomenal songs, though it’s easier from the point of view of this essay to quote from “I Found Out” where Lennon swipes at the trendies with: “The freaks on the phone won't leave me alone/Don't give me that brother brother brother”. It’s easier, but it doesn’t make the point: again, it’s the sound that matters. Lennon moves right
away from the orgies of over-produced noise that characterise so much of progressive rock, and reaches in his memory for the earlier, simpler times of pre-1967. Just John, an odd riff pinched from “Love Letters” and some beautiful songs, with easily remembered melody lines. It’s Lennon’s concentration on songs and his remembrance of the past that links him with Dylan and Robbie Robertson, and distinguishes them all from “Progressive” Rock.
For Greil Marcus to pick out Lennon and the Band as being somehow relevant to the earlier part of his piece is incredible. They have both turned their backs, on the “community” though in different ways. John Lennon in particular, daily makes nonsense of the Guralnick formula — the last thing John wants is for us to “secretly share” anything. The secret is out — so why cover it up?
Basically, Marcus still seems to yearn for the elitism that characterised the 1967 period. It was this false elitism, based on false premises, that led Rock up the wrong road in the late Sixties.
What’s at stake in the current dichotomy of Rock is the position and status of rock itself — which is why I’m pleased at the schism. Lennon, Dylan, Robertson and Helm are bringing rock back home — they want to restore it to the people where it belongs.
What happened in the Sixties was that Rock very nearly choked itself by becoming too closely identified with a phony youth culture, which is now killing itself with stoned garbage. (It’s no accident that most of the heralds of the rock revolution are now either dead or Junkies — or, like the Stones, in a musical blind alley).
Rock should be capable of crossing generation lines, of crossing colour lines and national lines. Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shaking Going On” topped the C&W charts, the R&B charts and the Billboard Top 100 simultaneously — that, Greil Marcus, is what I’d call an “all rock and roll record”. This is where the strength of rock lies — and this is why Lennon and the others are so important. If rock and roll is the sound of the city, it’s the sound of the whole city not just the University Campus out in the suburbs somewhere.
19
7 Days 24 November 1971
Dave Laing writes on this month's new releases
Classified Advertisements
MARRIAGE & ADVICE BUREAU. Katharine Allen (ex-Welfare Officer, Ministry of Labour, War Office, Foreign Office). Personal Introductions. 7 Sedley Place, Woodstock Street, London W.1. 499 2556. Hours 10-4.
Decor. Co-op. House painters and decorators co-operative offers anytime, anywhere service at competitive rates. Free estimates. Call Isobel 589 0233.
Fed-up with your own company? Make new friends through COM-PAT TWO — the computer dating experts. Phone: 437 4025 213 Piccadilly, W1V ODX.
Jet flights. Charter centre. 229 9255 anytime
Wanted. Desk and telephone in central London. Any reasonable offers considered. Phone Mary: 226 5881
Most economical flights to and from India, USA, Canada, Pakistan, East Africa and most parts of the world. 187 Tufnell Park Road, London N7 607 5639______________________________
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mandel, Women's Liberation, Third World Struggles, Labour history, Socialism — all the books of the Left. Mail order. New catalogue in preparation. Send large SAE to:
RED BOOKS,182 Pentonville Rd N .1 .01-837 9987
FLYING K light removals, transport, deliveries. 01-348 0944:
Maison Helen gives the quickest, least expensive, most lasting hairdos in Hampstead. 34 Heath St., N.W.3. 435 3869.
VAN AND DRIVER, 24 HOURS. 348 Small 6516
Bitmobile — 15cwt BIT van. Call Tony: 229 8219
World Wide Charters. Lowest ever air fares 229 9255
LAUDER'S has the best designed, most
Comprehensive international and European economy jet travel over 60 world wide cities. 229 4368.
removals done, evenings or weekends. Metrovans 267 1253
PKK POLITKINO KLUB Opens Fri. 3 Dec. with premiere of Jean-Luc Godard's East Wind (Vent d'Est). script by Daniel Cohn-Bendit A ll seates 60p. Ring 584 2735 for details. Send £1 for assoc, membership or
for free illustrated programme Skolimowski, Straub,
Widerberg, Romm) to Politkino, 5 Beaufort Gdns, London SW3 1PU.
GENTLE GHOST REMOVALS, ANY SIZE, CHEAPLY, ANYWHERE. 01-603 8581.
S.A.E.interesting clothes of good taste in (Rocha Hampstead. 8 Perrin's Court, NW3
Every client is satisfied
Subscribe now to 7 DAYSSubscribe now to 7 DAYS
and get your copy by post every Wednesday morning. Rates: U.K., and World (surface mail).£4 fo r six months (26 issues), £7.50 fo r a year (52 issues). A ir Mail: Europe £11, M iddle East £14, America, Asia,
Africa £17, Far East £20, fo r a yearSpecial student rate: (UK only) - £3 fo r six months,
£6 for a year.
I want to subscribe to 7 DAYS
I enclose £ ..................... for................... issues.
Name................................................................
Address.............................................................
Town................................................Postcode
Country.................................
Complete this form and return it with a cheque or postal order to:
The Subscription Department, 7 DAYS,3 Shavers Place, London SW1Y 4HE.
Please allow two weeks to process your subscription.
Since the Beatles, it has become obligatory for rock musicians with artistic aspirations to write their own material. And it is ironic that Paul McCartney’s influence is strong among newer British singer/songwriters, whereas it is John Lennon who is producing some of the best current rock music.
Perhaps Lennon is difficult to take as a model for song-making because his style is always linked closely with what his songs are about. The title track from his latest album Imagine (Apple PAS 10004) is a case in point. Based on a simple and memorable melody line, it transforms a utopian visionary message into something stronger by anticipating the “it sounds fine b u t . . . ” objections of a “common sense” audience.
“You may think that I ’m a dreamer” sings John, “But I ’m not the only one”. And then, “I hope someday that you ’ll join us”. The typical protest or utopian song preaches to the audience. Imagine is revolutionary because it draws the listener inside by showing that the utopia will not be achieved by day-dreaming, but through a movement of which the singer is already a part.
Superficial McCartneySince the break with Lennon, Paul
McCartney’s music has become superficial; its dazzling stylistic tricks have stripped it of meaning and feeling. But those tricks seem to provide a way for British musicians to create a style neither American or folky, as new records by Gerry Rafferty (Can I Have My Money Back, Transatlantic (TRA 241), Paul Kent (B&B CAS 1044) and Colin Blunstone (One Year Epic 64557) show.
On each album, smooth intonation and neat chord changes tend to obscure rather than animate the words. This wouldn’t matter if the singers were in the Vince Hill rather than the Bob Dylan mould, but they have all taken care to put meaning into their lyrics. When they manage to get away from the Abbey Road influence, an original voice emerges: wit on Rafferty’s One Drink Down; sensitivity to how people see and mispercieve each other on Kent’s Don' t Seduce Your Best Friend’s Wife.White Soul
A style with more potential than McCartney-baroque is the white soul of Eric Burdon and Joe Cocker. Brian Short (Anything For A Laugh Transatlantic TRA 245) and Bell & Arc (Charisma CAS 1053) work in this area, with rolling piano cadences and gritty, shouting vocals.
Both Short and Graham Bell (Bell & Arc’s lead singer) sound better interpreting Randy Newman and Dylan than putting across their own songs. Still, Brian Short’s one fine song, Ring That Bell, indicates that he’s made good use of The Band’s work. The Bell & Arc album is more satisfying because the band are good musicians whose playing can make something of a song with indifferent lyrics.
Bring back the E.P.Nearly all new singers and groups
don’t have enough good material to fill a whole album. That they are forced to start by recording 30-40 minutes of music is one way in which the pressures of the music industry can produce a distorted impression of the work of singer/songwriters. The good tracks are often buried beneath the poor ones, so the albums don’t sell, and worthwhile singers are not asked to record again. The answer might be for the record companies to bring back the four-track EP, but then the profit margins are much lower than on albums.
In the meantime, a group like Fuschia are unlikely to reach a much larger audience through their album (Pegasus PEG 8) than they do in live appearances. Their style draws on that mix of Beardsley, Keats, Tolkien and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which inspired “Psychedelic” musicians in 1967. An Anglicised version of the Haight-Ashbury sound, it is best described as Toadstool Rock.
Mainline ToadstoolFuschia have a novel literary guru —
Mervyn Peake, who wrote the Ghormenghast Trilogy — but their sound is mainline Toadstool. Bits of folk-rock and classical music, lots of violin and cello cadences, guitar strumming and girl singers with angelic choir-boy voices. But compared to the bland high-priests of the genre, the Moody Blues and Cat Stevens, their music has an appealing freshness.
As a whole, Toadstool Rock is played out as a creative force. Its best exponents (Donovan, T. Rex, the Pink Floyd) have moved on, and the Gandalf’s Garden philosophy, which linked it to an audience, has become a withered flower in the era of Long Kesh and UCS.
Women's PlaceOn the evidence of recent records,
the best songs being written out of British experience are coming from people schooled in the folk-song tradition. Shelagh McDonald’s Stargazer (B&C CAS 1043) makes good use of the space created for women singer/ songwriters by Joni Mitchell, who destroyed the assumption that the only role for women in rock was as hip torch singers.Shelagh McDonald writes thoughtful
songs about metropolitan life, its surprises and uncertainties. “Haven’t changed so much since I followed the city’s cry” is the chorus line from one of the best of them. And even more than Sandy Denny, she has got away from the vocal conventions of traditional folk music, achieving a flexibility that means she can express subtle shifts of feeling. An impressive album.
Gillian McPherson’s record (Poets And Painters And Singers Of Blues RCA SF 8220) doesn’t m ake t he same impact, because the poetry in the lyrics is too self-conscious and her voice has a narrower range. But the arrangements are good (the album’s producer is Pentangle bassist Danny Thompson), with some imaginative organ playing by Tommy Eyre.
More sure and sustained is Ralph McTell’s album (You Well Meaning Brought Me Here. Famous SFMA 5753). He writes in the Seeger and Paxton manner, where the care taken over the words gives them a moral solidity, though sometimes at the expense of melodic content.
Unlike so many songwriters, who choose words for their evocative power, McTell explores a situation in his songs. Particularly outstanding is Claudia, concerned with the white singer’s inability to comprehend the feelings of a black militant girl.
Dead SceneThe way in which McTell and Shelagh
McDonald stand out is a comment on the poverty of rock music in Britain at the moment. There are no apparent successors to the Kinks, the Stones that made Satisfaction and The Who that made S u b s t i t u t e :- musicians who can communicate sharp reflections on our common situations in a style accessible to a mass audience.
There are signs of promise in Pete Dello, whose solo album (Nepentha 6437001) shows he hasn’t lost the ability to combine a catchy melody with sensitive perceptions that was evident in his I Can’t Let Maggie Go, and in Raymond Froggatt, who has as good a grasp of the particularities of English experience as the Kinks’ Ray Davies. But the crucial need for rock music in Britain is to understand and use Lennon s approach to his music. To see him singing Imagine on Top Of The Pops would make a good start.
20
7 Days 24 November 1971
Jack Bruce came to fame with the purest of the supergroups. The Cream. Coming from the same cluster that produced The Rolling Stones, Baker, Bruce and Clapton disbanded the Cream in 1969 when it ceased to develop. Their decision to break up stirred the morbid roots of the rock world, which always tries to create a "great past" for itself. It also clinched their popularity.
Still trying to recover from the effects of stardom, Bruce has recently made a new album. Harmony Row, and given a benefit concert for the men on Clydeside.
Out of a working class. Communist background, Bruce's musical allegiance is exceptional. He is profoundly suspicious of the mass character of rock music and its harrowing effect on the psyche of its stars, and deeply hostile to all commercialisation. His position on quality and audience, while actually traditional, appears for the first time from within rock music.
Opposing jazz, with its complex rhythms, to Rock 'n Roll's hall of fame, Bruce argues adamantly for pure musical excellence as the pre-eminent criteria for judging sounds.
Rock and roll, with its enormous technical sophistication, deploys millions of pounds worth of capital and promotion between musician and audience. Yet paradoxically the cultural relationship between
players and listeners is very close. This poses new and exciting problems for artisic theory which 7 DAYS will continue to cover.
Bruce is one of the few popular musicians who has evolved a position on these questions. David Fernbach and John Hoyland went and talked to him at his home.
Let's start with the acid summer, of 1967.
Being in the Cream, we all went through a psychedelic period. It was a mindblower. A good time to be involved in and to look back on with relief that it’s over. As far as I was concerned Cream was important at that San Francisco time, and then suddenly became the big business bit. You started doing things like Madison Square Gardens, which to me was just a big hype. The music was basically good, but what can you do in Madison Square Garden.. . Then. It might be different now, but then the sound and things were bad. It wasn’t even a hip audience. It was half teeny-bop, Mums and Dads, and sort of Long Island people coming to see the pet freaks.
I thought it was silly, and funny, to be responsible for traffic-jams. It made me feel like a prize fighter. I stopped feeling like a musician.
How did it happen?
It started in Los Angeles. 20,000 people, huge for those days, we did the gig as we always did, and then went back to the dressing room to cool off for a bit. Then we wanted leave, and we couldn’t. We were caught totally unawares. But you learn very quickly. Throw your instruments away and run out, with thousands of people chasing you. You get good at it, but I didn’t like it.
We could all have been multi-millionaires, if we’d been dishonest enough. But the music got stale. We stopped digging it and each other.
I’m just a bass player who sings. Then I suddenly realised that I’m the Dirk Bogarde of the double-bass. Everywhere I go if I don’t play ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ . . .
There's another thing which ties up with that, the business o f groupies.
Yes.. . That was an interesting time.
We would like to see rock breaking with sexism, with the situation o f the man “fucking the audience ”.
I feel strongly about it because there is a certain sexual feeling now that I don’t like. Maybe I’m too old, but I think I was in at the beginning and therefore slightly responsible for it.
Has it ever struck you as peculiar that both rock music and jazz are almost exclusively male occupations?
Have you ever seen a chick drummer? It looks wrong. The present scene is just not ready for it. Lots of chicks have got a lot of things but chicks are chicks still. A group made of ladies is not going to be just a group.
Women are still not equal to men. It’s not that women haven’t got as much balls as men. They’ve got more in certain cases. I’ve been involved with this chick Carla Bley. I say chick, but I don’t like that word. This woman Carla Bley, who’s a fantastic musician. She can make it because of that. I think that it’s just society, and the guys in it, who aren’t ready yet.
Music does seem to have a particularly strong kind21
O n e B i g H y p e
7 Days 24 November 1971
“When the revolution
comes,gunsand riflés
will be taking the place of
poems and essays”
The black poets of America chant their invectives and admonitions with words that shock the world, words that rip right through the grooves of a unique new album called 'This Is Madness’And the Douglas label has arrived in Britain. Douglas bring a new philosophy ; the record medium is used for the first time for real communication, with Douglas producing only albums which are relevant social statements.So now you’ve got to go out and ask for Douglas records at your record store — because you’re not going to find them on the counter!Douglas
of male domination.
It grew out of the market which was very young girls. Hendrix was an amazing breakthrough. He was the first black pop-star who appealed to little girls . . . big bang people, everybody. Before, they put up with the black guys if they were fat enough to laugh at, but they weren’t accepted at that sexual level. And that’s what rock-pop superstar bit is about.
What about Janis Joplin, who did make it?
It destroyed her. That superstar bit must. That’s why I jumped out of it. I knew it would destroy me being sucked dry by thousands of people every night. I’m not over it y e t . . . the bit about chicks though . . . it’s funny, I’ve never really thought about it.
Following on from Hendrix, what is the relationship now between white music and black music?
I can only say the way it’s been for me. The first thing I listened to was black music, jazz. Then I went though the problem of being a white musician. It’s a question of “time”, people don’t talk about “swinging” now, but that’s how I judge good or bad music. If it swings or if it doesn’t swing, which people in rock don’t seem to know anymore. They judge it if it drives, or if it’s loud enough, or if it effects them in the gut. But to me, I can hear someone playing on a cymbal, just a cymbal, and I can tell if it swings. That’s the difference. Not that some white musicians don’t have it, some do.
Is there still any disqualification in being white?
It obviously helps to be black and to have been brought up in Harlem or some ghetto for certain kinds of music. But because it’s so easy to travel, and you hear things from all over the world now, it doesn’t matter. You hear white musicians who really do have whatever it is we’re talking about. Bands should be inter-racial, because then it really works. Like Lifetime, which was the best band I’ve ever been in. Take Tony Williams, who’s a black cat, and fairly middle-class. His old man was a reasonably successful tenor-player. He was brought up much more comfortably than I was. When I took him to Glasgow, he couldn’t believe it. You know, he lived in Boston.
You obviously relate to politics.
Well, it comes from my father and my mother. They were always very active politically — like in the thirties, when there was that bit. Politics were always talked about in the house. Joe Stalin was big hero. I still remember the Hungarian thing as a shattering scene, tears and everything. Stalin wasn’t what he was supposed to have been.
Yet there aren't many working class musicians.
No, there aren’t. Jagger, even the Beatles are not really working class. Lulu has got a working class background!
Does your family background and politics cross over into your music?
It just crosses into my life. I’m not very articulate about politics. Not knowing anything about the theories. Just having the feelings. The only way I can express them is in music — which is very abstract. I don’t write the words as such. They’re vehicles for other things. But I think that music, in being as abstract as it is, is capable of more expression than things that aren’t as abstract. Like words, where you have to state something.
I think freedom in music is very important.
How did it begin for you?
I was born in Lanarkshire, a mining town that became part of Glasgow. Then the family emigrated to Canada, and my father was blacklisted, political trouble, and couldn’t get any work. So we came back to Glasgow.
I used to sing a lot. There were no musical instruments in the house, except my father played a cross between a banjo and a mandolin, a banjolele, or something terrible like that.
Folk song stuff, or George Formby?
No, no, the pop songs of the time, the sort of songs that people still sing when they get together in the pub. . . But my mother was a singer. There was a choir, a sort of Socialist Sunday School Choir, started by a bloke called Tom Care. She
used to sing a lot of folk songs, and I started singing Scottish songs. Then there was a double bass lying around at school which I started to play.
Tony Palmer said that you had a classical music training.
Well, he has said that - he grabs hold of things and inflates them. I just went to the local music college for part-time lessons, and started off trying to go full-time when I left school. It didn’t work. They had some strange rule. You were allowed to earn enough bread to get by, so long as it wasn’t anything to do with music. I was playing in Palais Bands, and they didn’t dig that.
I started to do some gigs locally. I met some pretty good Jazz musicians.
You were playing jazz?
Yes, I was doing these gigs to live. It was great. It was bad music, but it was music. There was a breakaway from this Palais band which went to Italy. We got stranded there, which was terrible. You try and find somewhere to park a double bass!
I went to the continent again, and I played a lot in American Bases - sort of cocktail jazz. A couple of nights a week the spades would come in, and that was the first time I had an inkling that I was any good. These black American cats would say “Wow, man, you really play incredible bass”. After that I ended up in London, when I was about 18.
I was doing this thing with a Trad band, and when we weren’t playing I went down to this cellar in the college where there was a modern jazz group. Ginger Baker on drums, Dick Heckstall Smith and Kathy Stobart, and a bass player called Maurice. I asked them if I could sit in. They thought I was a student, so they gave me the usual hard-time musician bit like “Go away”. So I insisted and went back again: “I want to sit in”, and they said “Well, we’re only doing ballads”, and I said “look, I can play ballads too.” So I sat in, and I played incredibly, and I blew everybody off the stage, and just left. Then Dick spent a couple of weeks looking for me. He found me in a terrible asthmatic pad in Willesden, and hauled me
away to do an audition for Alexis Komer. That was how I joined Alexis, the one with the Charlie Watts — a very good band.And from there you ended up in Graham Bond, did you?
I played with a lot of other bands at the same time. A great band called the Jonny Birch Octet. Nobody ever recorded it or anything. We only played in a pub in Ilford. Ginger was in it, Graham Bond, a trumpet player called Mike Palana from Africa. Then Graham, Ginger and me left to form this trio, which was the first mad organ trio — really mad . . We lived in an ambulance. I had to spend most of the year in this lying on top of a Lesley Speaker in the back. Then Johnny McLoughlin joined it was phenomenal.
How did your interest in jazz shade into rock?
We became interested in playing rhythm and blues. I was on the Alexis one, the Stones grew out of that, and the Graham one, a lot of things grew out of that, gradually these scenes came together. The obvious change is from acoustic bass to bass guitar, which happened with Graham. I still love the acoustic bass, I think in almost every way it’s a superior instrument, but it’s just not loud enough.
With this change people started writing their own22
music, were you involved in that?
I’ve always written a lot from very early on. I wrote a sort of Mozart string quartet when I was thirteen. . . Without any modulations - all in B Minor, forever. I wrote some things for Jonny Birch. They were pretty far out, just using blocks of sound. I wrote a couple of songs with Graham, on the first album I did with him, — very bad songs, but a beginning.
Are we getting anywhere near Cream again?
First I was kicked out of Graham’s band. I was almost shattered. I lost direction. I joined John Mayall for six weeks, and met Eric Clapton, but I couldn’t live on Mayall’s bread, so I joined Manfred Mann, which payed the rent. That was when the Cream happened.
And the basic reason for the Cream?
To play with people that I dug. There was Eric, who I obviously dug from the first time I heard him. He really stood out then. There’s a lot of guitar players now, but then there was Eric. And he dug me. Ginger wanted to form a band, so he asked Eric, and Eric said yes, if I would. So Ginger had to swallow his pride and drive round to ask me to join.
You don’t seem to like the term "rock".
don’t think it’s the progressive side of music, That’s jazz. All the other things come from that.
But while rock's very simple musically, nothing at happened in the 60’s would have happened Without it. Your musical background seems un- typical, you seemed to be unaffected by the
f i f ties.
but I was very selective. I didn’t like Elvis Presley. I liked Fats Domino. I’m against the label
"rock” because it’s used to sell. There are so many good people who are totally ignored because
they don’t fall into that commercial category.
But precisely because it’s commercial, because it reaches a huge number of people who have fantastic enthusiasm for it, rock and roll has a
terrific vitality.
Rock is such an exploitable commodity, and all social things they say are happening because of
re manufactured. They’re just being allowed to happen, by the system. Like, let the kids have their rock and roll, they’ll soon grow up. Once
they get to thirty they’ll start listening to mood music.
Isn’t there a democratic influence? Masses of people come together and participate in musicalfestivals
accept that as being true. But the huge mass of people getting together are just being exploited. People might look freakier, but it’s still a market. The same as it was ten years ago, when it was a different market.
You operate in that scene.
We can’t turn our backs on it, unless everybody else does at exactly the same instant.
There’s a danger of being very purist, to the extent of making music that only appeals to a sophisticated elite.
No, it’s the other way round. If you lower the musical value, which is what happens in most rock music — then you begin to kill it. Although obviously there is a danger that people will make it into the arty bit.
The kind of music that people have a gut response to, isn’t it liberating?
If you can afford to buy enough stacks of amps you can get people in the guts with bad music. I accept it as a force . . . But you still can’t do that unless you have someone behind you that’s going to come up with six thousand quid for a good P.A. system. It just isn’t liberated, it’s all talk.
The people controlling the record companies are trying to make a profit, but what they can make a profit out of depends on what people are prepared to pay money to listen to, and taste has changed.
It’s got better.
I t ’s got better. So even though the motive is the same there is a better product, and it is easier for people to get recording time.
It’s still just as hard for people in other spheres to get recording time. The standards have got a bit better. I thought they were going to get a lot better around ’68, ’6 9 , I thought it was going to be very big but because of the capitalist bit it just festered.
What about Sergeant Pepper?
Musically it seemed to have tremendous significance, but so did other things. Pet Sounds, of the Beach Boys, to me, was just as important.
There was a musical breakthrough.People learnt to be at home in the studios.
Unfortunately I never had the time, I was always on the road. Cream records were made incredibly quickly, they could have been a helluva lot better. Disraeli Gears was made in four days. The studio part of the double album only took six days.
About drugs
The only drug you can play on is a smoke. Not that you play better but you enjoy what you are doing more. That’s very important if you’ve been on the road for several months and you hate your own playing and need a rest. I believe through personal experiences that drugs lead onto each other and that they are inevitably destructive. If that hasn’t been learnt by now, it should have been.
You’ve seen people destroying themselves?
Oh yeah. Certain drugs used by certain people are fine. I don’t think there is ever an excuse for even trying Heroin. That is a bad one. It is just such a nice feeling, such a nice effect, that it gets you in the end.
A lot o f music is suffused with drug mysticism.
Not the best music. The most honest music is just music as far as I’m concerned.
But doesn’t Harmony Row seem disengaged? Don’t you ever feel that music is or should be a weapon?
The only way I could be of any use is to make bread, for other purposes. I couldn’t change people’s ideas because I don’t respect my own ideas in that kind of way.
I got the impression that you think that music can only communicate ideas through the lyrics.
I don’t think that at all. Music is so abstract that you can’t really talk about it except on other levels. So the only way we can relate to it is through lyrics. At the moment I write songs with Pete Brown, the lyrics are part of both of us.
How do you get to write a song about a particular subject?
When I write music it always starts off by being just intervals, a series of spaces between one note and another. It’s as far away from the end as that. We don’t decide to write a song about a subject, the music suggests images to us.
So the music always comes first.
In this album it did, because of practical reasons, I happened to write most of the music in one day.
"Harmony Row ” is not very forward looking.
O.K. you can say I’m a pessimist. My feeling about the world is that it’s been too late for too long, and I still see no way out. I can’t change that in my music. I think it’s probably interesting to see someone like me playing because you’re seeing somebody who is possessed. When you get good enough on your instrument, that’s what happens. You don’t have to think. You actually leave your body. The idea of the album is not “let’s do this”, it’s a reflection of both Pete and my adolescence. It doesn’t do any harm to remember those times. Or the “Morning Story” one about Clydeside, how fucked up it is. It’s the most filthy area there is. People go on about New York, but until you see Glasgow with no wind about, you’ve never seen filth. And people aren’t even aware of it in Glasgow.
Lennon thinks that through his music he can turn people onto various ideas and help to change things.
The intention is great. I think the reason why it can’t succeed is that he’s not changing the methods of doing it. It all amounts to the same thing, making a product and having it produced.
What happens in the middle may be nice, but what happens at the end is still the same. It’s like, say, suddenly in America there was a new President who went in with a lot of good ideals, but just tried to do good things using the old, fucked-up set-up. It would have to fail. I would like to see something different, a way of avoiding the record companies. In America there is the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Association, it seems to be working.
Doesn't it have the dangers o f another minority cult?
I don’t think it’s important. In the Past I was shoved up in front of thousands of people. The thing now is to shove down the ideas, which will filter through.
Outside the whole commercial set-up?
I’ve learnt a lot from the Jazz Composers. They did one very far out record, I thought, which was made and bought, and was never in a record shop in the States.
How was it distributed then?
Mailing lists. This was in America. I t’s got to Dobells here. I know this sound sounds the wrong way to do it, but it keeps it out of the grasp of people who ruin things.
It’s difficult for me because if I was perfect I would give everything up and go away and play for nothing. But I’m as naused-up by the situation as anybody else. I haven’t managed yet to get out of record companies and contracts and mortgages. The thing to do is to get away from them. It would be easier the more people who did it. The Apple venture was a lost chance. They had the power.
With a paper, for instance, you can succeed, because initially it doesn’t cost quite as much bread. But for one person to make a record costs a lot of money. To get the record made, to get it distributed and promoted it’s frightening. But it can be done.
What about the music papers?
They’re comics, they exist to sell records, or groups, and make money. One of them well it’s amazing, it makes £200,000 a year, when I found out it blew my mind. They rarely print anything worth printing. They don’t treat music seriously. Whatever it is, if you can hear it, given it a listen. If you want to talk about it, do so seriously but not that it’s turned into something else. Rolling Stone get into this big pitfall of covering themselves by putting everything down. If something moves you, then obviously be moved by it. I’ve actually had reviews which talk about what I was wearing. This was with Lifetime, when we were playing some of the most heavy, important, good music that there was, and we’d get something like “clean-cut John McLoughlin with his short hair c u t . . .” Yeah, just treat music seriously. Listen to it.
23
7 Days 24 November 1971
