Interesting rhetorical maneuver here: a defense of a retro band you like even though you know retro is "wrong" - on the grounds that their sheer fanatical commitment to a long-dead past style takes it all to another level. There's a degree of fidelity-in-recreativity at work that amounts to a form of time travel. So here, in early '92, Steve Sutherland, then deputy editor of Melody Maker, writes about the Stairs and invokes the Tardis. (There's also echoes of earlier time-travel exponents, specifically The Flamin' Groovies, with talk of action being shaken and so forth).
Here in his ensuing album review, Sutherland goes for the "beyond retro" trope - they go through retro and out the other side
This sort of rhetorical move feel like stuff I've resorted to myself at various points over the years, when caught between my liking for something and its indefensibility according to my "official" ideology. Casting my mind back, I thought of a couple of earlier examples - in 1989 describing The Stone Roses as a "resurrection insurrection" (rhyming as word-magic ploy as please overlook my inconsistency ruse). And that same year, in this otherwise mostly dismissive review of a Sub Pop compilation from 1989, I use the "time travel" metaphor to single out Beat Happening as exceptional.
The full review here, notable for its lack of clairvoyance re. the Pacific North West sound aka grunge's quite soon to be proven ability to shake some action on the mass culture stage.
As well as "time travel", another rhetorical ploy is "timeless" versus "dated". If I'd ever been in a position to review The La's "There She Goes", I might have tried wheeling "timeless" out.
Here, in another 1992 review - this time of the second album by The Black Crowes - Steve Sutherland wrestles with his own nostalgia and experienced-in-real-time knowledge of pre-punk rock. Around this time in MM he'd be reviewing reissues of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Free, Grateful Dead, records he'd have listened to when they originally came out or read about in ZigZag. (Unless memory fails me, he'd once been in a long-hair band called Merryweather, who played some festivals). Here with Black Crowes it's not so much "Retro with Attitude" as "Traditionalist with Pride" or "The Campaign for Real Rock 'n' Roll" - and the review is a kind of defiant apologia.
In some ways, they are only a successful version of Royal Trux, with residual avant-isms bevelled off.
I also appreciated the way that Black Crowes took the piss out of Metallica's drummer, saying he couldn't swing for shit. Because it's true.
At exactly the same time Steve was exploring the music of his past through the reissues column at MM - which was, now I remember, titled Retro-Active - I was exploring much the same zone but from a different angle: their new-to-me unfamiliarity. The hard 'n ' heavy early '70s tantalized as a forbidden and cordoned-off region, an era that as as good postpunker I'd been indoctrinated against, told I didn't even need to bother checking out. There's was a liberation - even a revelation - in listening to music that could swing for shit.
The staff took the piss out of me for a good month or two, bylining every piece I did as SIMON 'BORN TO BOOGIE' REYNOLDS.
This season of taking an interest in bygone boogie, raunch, and Southern Rock is recalled in this blogpost, which pins part of it on the influence of reading Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic and Chuck Eddy's Stairway To Hell. The other factors were grunge and the sheer cheapness of the original vinyl for heavy rock of the early '70s.
Another of my BORN TO BOOGIE era reviews - for contemporary retro-ists Raging Slab and Masters of Reality starts like this:
"So many bands today like to pretend that punk never died; I can't see how this stance is somehow less regressive than bands who pretend punk never happened."
Of course, the ideologically consistent response (especially given that I was at this very moment a convert to rave) would have been that both punk revivalism and pre-punk revivalism ought to be equally anathematized. The week after the ZZ Skynyrd review, I wrote this:
Here the argument is that Hardcore Techno is the Rock of the Future - the real Resurrection Insurrection.
Early '92: musicians across the North-West of England are experimenting frantically, searching for the formula that will propel a trad guitar band onto Top of the Pops. The Stairs had some of the recipe right, but the references to Zappa and Beefheart show they were never going to make it. Just a couple of years later, Noel Gallagher dropped the freak-rock and mixed in the Pistols, Stone Roses and Slade, and achieved criticality.
ReplyDeleteThere's a nice six-degrees connection from Ian McCulloch to Liam Gallagher: the North-Western Anglo-Irish gobshite continuum. Edgar of the Stairs played in Mac's backing band during his ill-fated solo venture, and the Stairs used to play on the same bills as Cast, led by John Power, formerly of the La's. Cast in turn used to support Oasis; Noel Gallagher described watching them as a "religious experience", as unlikely as that may seem.
Lennon is the archetype in Rock, of course, but in entertainment more generally you could see Cilla Black and Jimmy Tarbuck as working in the same territory, where charisma and the gift of the gab are as important as musical ability, and often more so.
And I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see that tradition continuing to this day, in the shape of Cheshire-raised Harry Styles.
Reading this, I'm reminded of taking my son to a fair a few years back, where someone starting cranking out Foghat's "Slow Ride" on a gigantic speaker - I was shocked by how unstoppable and utterly **MAGNIFICENT** this song - which I'd heard and ignored dozens of times on the radio - sounded when given its proper volume. There really is something to the stoned, sludgy, untouched-by-irony power of early 70s hard rock.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the general issue, I'm reminded of someone (pretty sure it was in the Maker) dismissing Lenny Kravitz as "zombie music" - neither truly dead nor alive, neither really past nor present- and that can properly be applied to a lot of the boogie revivalists. There's a difference between say, Portishead marrying recontextualised John Barry riffs to trip hop beats to make something new and fresh on the one hand, and slavishly recreating 1972 Faces/Skynyrd on the other (right down to production techniques and on-stage fashion). The latter strikes me as an admission of cultural defeat - a negation of the future, **any** future - exerting an enormous effort to construct a dead end for yourself.
My attitude towards this, as always, is based neither in resurrection nor insurrection but in evolution - figuring out where you think your influences might be or might've been heading in an ideal universe is a good place to start.
ReplyDeleteOn early 70s hard rock - your Meltzer quote on the other blog reminded me of his lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult, which is probably the exception that proves the rule of it being 'unironic'. He later claimed to have been at the band meeting where, having recorded a rejected album for Elektra and on the verge of breakup, they decided to remake themselves as 'fake heavy metal'. This was recalled in the late 90s, when he was in a bitter state of mind (as indicated by that 'no excuses' quote), but that description (euphemized by contemporary critics as 'the thinking man's heavy metal') was not only not uncalled for, but key to what made them interestingly unique. If you listen to that Elektra album, which was finally released decades later under the original band name of Stalk-Forrest Group, you can see their roots aren't in Cream or Zeppelin or Sabbath or even Grand Funk, but in Love and Jefferson Airplane and the Doors and Dead - eccentric folk-rock-psych. They simply painted it in black leather and Marshall amps for BOC, which (to return to my original point in a needlessly roundabout way) is as good an example of fruitful left-field evolution as you're likely to find
Coming at this at a tangent, one of the things I've become quite a fan of is reaction videos, and although they consist of people basically stealing a living, it is quite enjoyable watching younger peoples' reaction to music that you might be over-familiar with yourself. This one is good fun:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWma6Ep6zc4
So is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw7n4aG0wcw
And this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCKRaqYxZjE
The interest I suppose is in watching people who are relatively unselfconscious, and who don't have the ideological taste frameworks that we were inculcated into, approach the music of the past as a sheer repository of enjoyment, and who consequently tend to take a simple pass/fail judgemental approach.
Foghat's "Slow Ride" is immense - and interestingly amid the blues boogie chug, it has this very up to the minute element, a slap bass solo probably inspired by Larry Graham in Sly and the Family Stone
ReplyDeleteit might have been me saying that about Lenny K as I reviewed singles by him on at least two occasions, and made that sort of argument each time, while also conceding that on a craft level it was untouchable, as a recreation, and had a certain appeal. "Are You Gonna Go My Way" is one where the time travel defense might be squeezed out of me - musically it's so immaculate (that Nazz-like phased breakdown)!and then you have the video with the supercool female drummer and the rhythm guitarist with Noel Redding style frizzed out hair.
"The interest I suppose is in watching people who are relatively unselfconscious, and who don't have the ideological taste frameworks that we were inculcated into, approach the music of the past as a sheer repository of enjoyment, and who consequently tend to take a simple pass/fail judgemental approach."
ReplyDeletejudging by my students (mostly in their early '20s) and my youngest son and his friends, I would hazard that this mindset you're describing applies to 95% of young people today. They live with music in an almost completely atemporal and dehistoricized way, with a minimal sense of chronology or who came first and who came second... the idea that some people were innovators and others imitators is largely irrelevant... they make playlists and Nick Drake will be shoved right alongside Alex G or Declan whatshisname as contemporary indie-ish soft-voiced singer-songwriterism.
I myself am slipping into that mode of listening, practically speaking, i.e. where most of normal people live, "civilians"... which is why I opted do Atemporal Faves of "2022", actually capture (as much as I could remember) what the listening of last year had been, rather little of which involved 2022
obviously I haven't lost the ingrained reflexes of years of history-minded reception and processing of music... I still distinguish between innovators and renovators, the once-new thing and the secondary pastiche... but I can feel that weakening, eroding
the radio here in the US had already started that atemporalizing work on me some years ago, classic rock stations and "old middle aged bloke" stations like Jack FM ("playing what we want"), i have mentioned this before, but suddenly hearing ZZ Top next to the Cars and feeling like Old Wave / New Wave boundary is dissolving in front of my ears... it's all just great old rock music (and after all Ric Ocazek and the other guy had been involved in music from the late '60s, were probably more or less the same age / generation as the Top)
Gibbons and co were not only younger than Ocasek, but actually were the age Ocasek claimed or insinuated he was - 1944 vs 49. Historicity is needed to keep things under some kind of general linear progress, but one reason you can't rely on it too much is that the artists themselves are often slippery enough to mess strict chronological evolution up. Alan Vega, who cut even more off the top of his age but didn't keep it up till the end like Ocasek, was two years younger than Buddy Holly and one year older than Grace Slick. Simply adding back those ten years back alters the whole arc of his career - it's one thing to start an act like Suicide at 22 in 1970 and keep it up till you finally break through around 77 - it's another to start it at 32 and persevere till you're 40.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention that both Ocasek's and Vega's rockabilly inflections read as much less 'retro' in this context - they weren't summoning musical shadows they hadn't been around for, but reflecting an era they had very much experienced. (In an NY Times piece investigating Ocasek's real age after his passing, there's a photo from his 1963 graduating high school yearbook that shows him in full greaser quiff: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/reader-center/ric-ocasek-age.html)
ReplyDeleteI tend to think that part of the historicist/purist approach is also another way that the old Anglo Puritanism sneaks in. I mean a lot of popular music is just terrifically good fun, and so those deeply ingrained guilt/denial mechanisms start to twitch. This is what punk with its imprecations against "rockism" and prog etc. was really making opportunistic use of. Instead of denying ourselves for the Lord, we should deny ourselves for The Future or The Authentic or whatever.
ReplyDeleteBut I think that is also a clue as to why a lot of 80's music was so terrible - all those bands with a limited palate of approved influences. A lot of the music from that era, especially indie music, literally sounds starved. Also notable that the approved "tasteful" influences (Velvets, Stooges, Suicide etc.) tended themselves to be joyless bands, because nothing life-enhancing could possibly be cool. So you ended up with lots of bands with very little life force who were either dull (e.g. The Triffids), soon fizzled out (e.g. The House of Love) or were monomaniacal (e.g. Spacemen 3).
So in a funny sort of way, the dedication to the imagined future was a part of what negated a viable future.