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.
