tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:/rss/departments/musicSPLICETODAY.com2024-03-27T18:50:24Ztag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333702024-03-28T06:24:00-04:002024-03-27T14:50:24-04:00The Night Henry Rollins Was Almost Murdered<p>Henry Rollins is a hardcore music legend. As lead singer for Black Flag (1981–86) and the Rollins Band (1987–2006), he was a figurehead in the Los Angeles punk rock scene. He became a music radio host, an actor and columnist for <em>LA Weekly</em>. He was no stranger to violence, having engaged in fights with punk rock audience members for years. But in 1991, he nearly lost his life.</p>
<p>Rollins and his best friend Joseph Cole, a roadie for Black Flag, were making a documentary about homeless Vietnam veterans in Venice Beach. The two friends rented an apartment in the rough Oakwood section of Venice to facilitate filming. On December 19, 1991, they attended a Hole concert at Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. They returned to their neighborhood around midnight and walked a block to an all-night grocery store. Returning home, they were confronted by two twentysomething men armed with guns. (Likely members of a local gang.)</p>
<p>The assailants forced Rollins to his knees and made Cole lie face down on the sidewalk. They pointed guns at Rollins and Cole and told them if they screamed they’d die. They demanded money but Rollins and Cole only had $50 between them. The robbers ordered Rollins to go inside his apartment and retrieve more cash.</p>
<p>Rollins rose and walked toward the apartment. He heard a gun shot behind him. Not looking back, he ran as one of the robbers fired at him missing him by inches. He sprinted through his apartment and escaped out a back window. He jumped a fence into a nearby alley and ran several blocks to a liquor store with a payphone and called for help. By the time police arrived, Cole was dead, shot in the head. The robbers were long gone.</p>
<p>Cole was a beloved figure in the LA music community. Hole dedicated their album <em>Live Through This </em>to Cole’s memory. Cole was also memorialized in the Sonic Youth song “100%” where Kim Gordon sang, “I can never forget you the way you rock the girls… But now that you been shot dead, I got a new surprise.”</p>
<p>Rollins spoke about the incident in a 1992 interview with <em>The Los Angeles Times</em>. “I dug up all the earth where his head fell—he was shot in the face—and I’ve got all the dirt here, and so Joe Cole’s in the house. I say good morning to him every day. I got his phone, too, so I got a direct line to him. So that feels good.”</p>
<p>In a 2001 interview with Howard Stern, Rollins denied rumors he kept Cole’s brain in his house. He told Stern that several days before the incident, record producer Rick Rubin visited their apartment to listen to Rollins’ new album <em>The End of Silence</em>. Rubin parked his Rolls-Royce outside. Rollins feared this would bring unwanted attention from nefarious locals who’d think Rollins was a rich rock star. That night, Rollins wrote in his journal that his home “is going to get popped.”</p>
<p>In 2013, Rollins reflected on the incident in his <em>LA Weekly</em> column: “Joe Cole’s murder gave me a powerful tutorial on guns and America…The murder of my friend taught me that America is a 50-state-wide killing field. None of that red state/blue state bullshit means a damn thing to me. As soon as I leave my house, I am on the kill grid… In the weeks and months after his murder, I was inundated with letters of condolence and, sadly, stories from other Americans who had been through the American gun homicide experience… It was perhaps the pointlessness of the deaths that was the hardest part to deal with… Joe Cole was like thousands of other Americans. He was shot and killed by another American. This is who we are.”</p>
<p>The killers were never found.</p>
Loren Kantortag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333532024-03-26T00:01:00-04:002024-03-23T21:31:21-04:00Allan Holdsworth - <I>Hard Hat Area</I> (1993)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333502024-03-22T00:01:00-04:002024-03-23T03:09:16-04:00Allan Holdsworth - <I>Metal Fatigue</I> (1985)<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g_TxIBJ7T0M?si=JLqPTCDFgqHP4fFH" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333452024-03-21T06:28:00-04:002024-03-21T11:34:34-04:00Classic Songs: “The Mercy Seat”<p>In 1988, Australian rocker Nick Cave released the song “The Mercy Seat.” The five-minute dirge expresses the personal ruminations of a death-row inmate before going to the electric chair. The song has a double meaning. The mercy seat refers to both the electric chair and the <i>kaporet</i>, the cover of the Ark of the Covenant that holds the Ten Commandments (Exodus 25: 19–22).</p>
<p>Cave’s musical tale gets into the head of the soon-to-be-executed man on the last day of his life. He takes in the minute details of his final meal, “A ragged cup,” “a hooked bone rising from my food,” “the face of Jesus in my soup.” All the while “the Mercy Seat is waiting” and the inmate “is yearning to be done” with this life and the thoughts that have led to this moment.</p>
<p>In his 2020 book <i>Stranger Than Kindness</i>, Cave reflects on how he came to write the song. “In the early 80s I was fully engaged in the writing of my novel <i>And the Ass Saw the Angel</i>. I sat in a small room in Berlin, typing away, day and night, sleeping little. When I reached an impasse with the novel, I would scroll the odd lyric line on a scrap of paper beside me, ostensibly a song about a man going to the electric chair. The song was at best a distraction, a doodle, a song I never looked fully in the eye. But songs have their own journeys and in time assert their sovereignty. ‘The Mercy Seat’ was such a song.”</p>
<p>In the Bible, atonement for the tribes of Israel is possible only when a rabbi adorns the Ark’s lid (“the mercy seat”) with sacrificial blood. When Cave sings the story of the doomed inmate, he sings of death in this life and God’s judgment in the next. Cave juxtaposes the eye for an eye retribution of the Old Testament against the forgiveness offered in the New Testament. The inmate knows his hours are numbered and his thoughts turn to God.</p>
<p><i>In Heaven His throne is made of gold<br />
And the Ark of His Testament is stowed<br />
A throne from which I’m told all history does unfold<br />
Down here, it’s made of wood and wire<br />
And my body is on fire<br />
And God is never far away.</i></p>
<p>Cave was always fascinated with religious imagery. He grew up in the small town of Wangaratta, Australia. At nine, he joined the choir of the Holy Trinity Cathedral Church. He loved the music but rebelled against the religious teaching. His father, an English teacher, read him books like <i>Crime and Punishment </i>and <i>Lolita</i>. Cave was expelled from high school and then went to art school to study painting.</p>
<p>At 19, he attended his first rock concert, featuring Manfred Mann and Deep Purple. He felt the music “physically going through” him and left the venue “a different person.” Two years later, Cave’s father was killed in a car accident. Cave wrote, “the loss of my father created a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose.”</p>
<p>In 1973, he formed a band with friends called The Birthday Party. They moved to London and immersed themselves in the post-punk movement. The music was filled with screeching guitars, screaming vocals and angry lyrics. The band earned a reputation as “the most violent band in Britain” and often fought physically with fans.</p>
<p>Throughout this period, Cave never stopped going to church if only to find “reasons not to believe.” He related to Christ’s teachings “way before I had any notions of God… I couldn’t resist the ringing intensity of Christ.” He became fascinated with the Stations of the Cross and the story of the devil “as a character seeking forgiveness in some way.”</p>
<p>Cave went solo in 1983. His music merged blues, gospel and rock and his songs told stories about grim characters and a judgmental God. His first solo album <i>From Her To Eternity</i> includes the song “Well of Misery” where Cave sings “the same God that abandoned her has in turn abandoned me.”</p>
<p>By the time Cave was 30, he was obsessed with imagery about God and death. “The Mercy Seat” became a favorite among fans. Many were attracted to the refrain “I’m not afraid to die” repeated 15 times. Cave later acknowledged, “I don’t feel as cocky about death as I used to. I wake up in mad panics about death approaching.”</p>
<p>The protagonist of “The Mercy Seat” doesn’t panic about death. Yet his imminent death brings him no closer to knowing truth from falsehood. (“I’m hoping to be done with all these weighing up the truth.”) He still has questions. Is death an end? Is there an afterlife? Is a there a God to provide forgiveness and offer mercy for our sins?</p>
<p>“The Mercy Seat” was inspired by Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Cash’s inmate sang, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” (Cash later released a cover of “The Mercy Seat” in 2000, three years before his death.) Cash was moved by early-20th century blues songs like Bessie Smith’s “Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair” and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Lectric Chair Blues.”</p>
<p>In most murder-ballads, the convict confesses his sin. In “The Mercy Seat,” we’re not certain whether the convict committed murder. (“Anyway I told the truth, I’m afraid I told a lie.”) Cave told <i>The Sun</i>, “I think that’s why we can continue to play it at pretty much every concert. It remains mysterious and ambiguous but genuinely thoughtful.” In 2019, Cave told <i>Mojo</i> magazine, “I always thought it was clear the guy did it. What’s in question is the concept of guilt and innocence, in the sense that he may have done it but that doesn’t mean he’s a guilty person in a broader sense.”</p>
<p>Cave understands that killing a killer does nothing to resolve the man’s actions on earth. True judgment remains solely in the hands of God.</p>
<p>In 2015, Cave’s son Arthur died after falling off a cliff in England. Cave lost his mother in 2020 and then his other son Jethro in 2022. He went public with his torment and suffering. On his website The Red Hand Files, he responded to fan questions about God.</p>
<p>“I’ve been circling around the idea of God for decades. It’s been a slow creep around the periphery of His Majesty, pen in hand, trying to write God alive. Sometimes, I think, I have almost succeeded. The more I become willing to open my mind to the unknown, my imagination to the impossible and my heart to the notion of the divine, the more God becomes apparent.”</p>
<p>Like the character in “The Mercy Seat,” the presence of death has made Cave question God’s presence in his own life. His life has imitated his art.</p>
Loren Kantortag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333512024-03-20T00:01:00-04:002024-03-23T03:12:48-04:00Allan Holdsworth - <I>Velvet Darkness</I> (1976)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/333372024-03-18T00:01:00-04:002024-03-18T22:56:35-04:00Elliott Smith - Live in Columbus, OH (March 6, 1996)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/332712024-03-14T06:27:00-04:002024-03-12T20:12:58-04:00The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn<p>Music is a necessity for a well-rounded, balanced life. Mixed with sentimental emotions and the kind of good vibes energy that’ll make you want to get up and dance. Or at least tap your toes and play air guitar. Ben Vaughn’s a dancer and a player. He likes to make other people dance, too. Vaughn’s a man of many hats. As a recording artist, he's released 14 albums (including <em>Rambler '65</em>, recorded entirely in his car). In the world of TV and film, Vaughn created the musical identity for the sitcoms <em>That '70s Show</em> and <em>3rd Rock from the Sun</em>.</p>
<p>Tom DiVenti:<em> You started young, playing in bands. Was that mostly in Philly?</em></p>
<p>Ben Vaughn: I’m from Camden, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia, so my childhood was spent going in and out of Philly to all the record stores; you know, we had great Do Wop and soul music. It was a very vibrant and great place to grow up. American Bandstand was still going strong, so all the small-time label record hustlers and producers were working it, and radio at the time was phenomenal. We had two soul stations—two Top-40 stations—and we had the Geator [Philadelphia oldies DJ, Jerry Blavat]. When I discovered the Geator it was like being abducted by aliens. Because of his playlists, he never told you whether a song was old or new. He just played records that he loved and thought that his teenage audience would love.</p>
<p>TD:<em> Because they were timeless?</em></p>
<p>BV: Yes, I didn’t know, or I was too young to understand why the other radio stations weren’t playing these records. They were better, wilder, funkier and more primitive, and I couldn’t understand why the Top-40 stations weren’t playing these records because I didn’t understand the chronology of the history of rock ‘n’ roll. I was absorbed it all in an innocent way. I was 10 years old. I started playing in bands at 12, which was 1967; we still had to play all the old stuff. If you wanted to get hired back at a dance, you had to play music that teenagers would dance to. In Philadelphia and South Jersey, that meant oldies. That’s because of the Geator. We didn’t know they were oldies. He gave us this vocabulary of soulful music; it really is timeless.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Was the Geator a mentor to you?</em></p>
<p>BV: Yeah. I was a weird kid; nobody understood me. I was so into rock ‘n’ roll; I had these Tourette’s moments where I’d just start blurting out crazy stuff about records and music. I’d turn on the Geator show on, and he was weirder than me. I was drawn to him immediately because I thought he understood me.</p>
<p>TD: <em>He also set up his shows so they’d have themes, and I noticed listening to your show, “The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn,” you kind of do the same thing.</em></p>
<p>BV: Yeah, I got that from the Geator for sure.</p>
<p>TD: <em>How many bands did you go through in your youth before the Ben Vaughn Combo?</em></p>
<p>BV: For the dances, I’d join or form different bands constantly. We had a lot of fun making up names for the bands. They weren’t all the same players all the time but we’d change the name of our group for every gig.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Did you play the same set list?</em></p>
<p>BV: We did, which is a really bad game plan if you look for recognition or branding, but we had names like Johnny Cash & the Registers, Tomato, and my favorite one was Donna Esquanasi. She was a girl who sat in front of me in math class. So we just named the band after her. She was flattered. But by the time I graduated from high school, I wasn’t really playing in bands because of <em>Aqualung</em> and ELP. Edgar Winter, you know big arena rock, and I wasn’t that interested. I was always more interested in getting people to dance. You know, starting out as a drummer was great because you could see what’s working and what’s not by audience reaction. I started out as a dancer; I’d go to all the dances. I grew up in an Italian-American community, and dancing was big because of <em>American Bandstand</em>, and every disc jockey had record hops.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Did you play Baltimore in the past?</em></p>
<p>BV: I used to play at a place called the 8 ×10 Club. A guy named Dickie Gamerman. He was a character. He reminded me of Angel on <em>The Rockford Files</em>. There was this glint in his eye; you knew he was up to some trouble.</p>
<p>TD: <em>That was Dickie. We had the pleasure of seeing Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention every year on Mother's Day in Baltimore. He’d have guests like Flo & Eddie and Captain Beefheart. We were there every Mother's Day.</em></p>
<p>BV: I<b id="docs-internal-guid-2d6af1f1-7fff-427b-b616-63f19c19429a"> </b>met Zappa in 1970. He played a gig in Philly, and a friend convinced me we needed to hang by the stage door. Finally, Frank came out and gave us all the time in the world; he was just a nice guy. He sent his road manager away, telling him he’d find his way back to the hotel. He wanted to talk to us kids. We talked about do-wop; R & B, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_and_Dewey">Don & Dewey</a>. I recommended a record store that he should go to the next day. I was a do-wop kid. It was a great experience.</p>
<p>TD:<b id="docs-internal-guid-1d41e8ce-7fff-a335-955e-040411dd6659"> </b><em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruben_and_the_Jets">Ruben & the Jets</a>.</em></p>
<p>BV: Exactly. I was the socially awkward kid like we all were, and I’m meeting someone famous. The patience he had with me was a real example of how you should treat your public. And I’ve always thought of that, like, when I meet people, even in my stratosphere of recognition and throughout my career, meeting people that are into my music, I think of Frank Zappa right away, like, What would Frank do?</p>
<p>TD: <em>Do you have any music tours coming up?</em></p>
<p>BV: Not touring so much, but I go to Spain once a year and tour because my records were really big over there in the 1980s. I have this alternate career there where I’m famous; it’s pretty funny. I get recognized on the street and take selfies with people. But I just got back from Rhode Island, with the band Deer Tick. They recorded one of my songs on their last album, and I just went there to record a whole new album with them backing me up, and we’re getting ready to mix now.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Your radio show is getting syndicated all over the radio stations everywhere now.</em></p>
<p>BV: My radio show’s on 28 stations now. It’s coming along. You know, world domination is the goal, but I’m falling short of that.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Where do you see the future of modern music heading with all the AI technology happening now?</em></p>
<p>BV: I don’t know. I just feel lucky to be alive. I don’t think too much about the future. I think even though the world is insane right now, I’m lucky to be alive. I can’t even explain why. I guess I’m an optimist. Even though I’m from New Jersey, I have a really good feeling this is a consciousness-raising moment, even though it doesn’t feel like it. Something is shifting. Like with most things, they get worse before they get better. As far as music, I played a gig last night, and we had a packed house. I’m just so impressed that people will leave home, get in their cars, find a parking space, and go to a bar to hear me play. I’m grateful. Live music is still alive. As far as the record business, I have no idea what happened. I don’t really relate to or really care about it, either. I’m just happy to make music, and if there’s a handful of people who like what I do and respond to it, it makes them happier or makes them glad they came out that night. That's a big thing for me. I’m at that point in my life where I really see things for exactly what they are.</p>
<p>TD: <em>Life, death, heaven, hell, and where do you fit in?</em></p>
<p>BV: I believe in reincarnation because, what’s real? I like that it inspires me to lead a life of self-improvement, always trying to work on myself so the next person who inherits my soul has an easier go of it. Because I fixed some things in this carnation that will help whoever comes next, and it might be a dachshund. Who knows?</p>
Tom DiVentitag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/332642024-03-11T00:01:00-04:002024-03-11T21:35:27-04:00Icehouse - <I>Primitive Man</I> (1982)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/332452024-03-05T00:01:00-05:002024-03-07T23:49:20-05:00John Lennon Interviewed by Students in His Home (1968)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/332272024-03-04T06:29:00-05:002024-03-04T00:09:46-05:00Kurt and Elliott in the Lost and Found<p>Two video surfaced in the last 10 months on YouTube: Elliott Smith at the Echo in Los Angeles on October 1, 2002 (full set), and Nirvana at the King Theatre in Seattle for <a href="http://k80YAKBMoL4">the Mia Zapata Benefit</a> (incomplete). Smith’s show had an audience recording that’s circulated for years—likely before his 2003 death—but for hardcore Nirvana fans, the Mia Zapata benefit was the Holy Grail of lost or hidden live recordings. Nirvana didn’t play many shows in the first nine months of 1993: some big ones in South America, an incredible performance at the Cow Palace Bosnian Rape Victim Benefit in April 1993, and a sloppy but interesting set in Manhattan in July 1993 (that’s the one where Kurt’s wearing the oversized ripped red and black striped Freddy Kreuger sweater, the one and only time he wore it. He also nearly died before the show, overdosing and turning blue before being revived by Courtney Love).</p>
<p>The Mia Zapata benefit was in Seattle, so Cobain, who was never clean for any significant stretch of his short adult life, was likely more comfortable here than at any other American show that year. The fall tour that went into the winter and onto Europe likely accelerated his death, if not leading directly to it the following April; in all of those shows, the band is playing a fixed setlist, playing fast, not moving much. Kurt famously didn’t want to tour <i>In Utero</i>, and before his death he dropped out of Lollapalooza 1994, allowing the ascension of Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins to alternative rock Olympus. Love, Gold Mountain, Geffen, his bandmates, business associates needed Kurt on the road, and he was done being a monkey, at least on someone else’s terms. He played like he didn’t care on that tour, the biggest Nirvana ever undertook, because he didn’t care.</p>
<p>The band rushed through “Scentless Apprentice” every night on that tour.</p>
<p>Not at the Mia Zapata benefit. Here Dave Grohl maintains the proper thudding, sludgy tempo of the album version, and their performances at the Cow Palace and in New York. This is also likely the last show that Cobain moved like he used to; “dancing” doesn’t quite fit what he used to do with his body and his guitar during the intro to “School,” but it looks like Leatherface swinging in the sun at the end of <i>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i>. That life was gone by the time he put a cigarette out on his forehead right before the MTV VMA’s later that month (look at pictures of that day, pancake makeup covering his forehead).</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3it0E7fLMs">And then Elliott at the Echo</a>. Front row, a full show, a setlist full of rarities. He’s looking rough: long, oily black hair, cigarette burns dotting his mostly unseen left arm, the halting cadence of someone down or way too up. Elliott allegedly supplemented all of his live performances—aside from his last, in Salt Lake City in September 2003—with prescription Adderall, no different than his hero Beatles taking speed in Hamburg. What’s remarkable about this particular show is the performance of “Good to Go,” a real rarity considering it’s on his 1995 self-titled album, alongside live favorites like “The Biggest Lie,” “The White Lady Loves You More,” “St. Ides Heaven,” “Clementine,” “Southern Belle,” and “Needle in the Hay.” There are six known performances of the song, and only four extant recordings: two in 1998, one in 2002, and two in 2003.</p>
<p>As a guitarist, “Good to Go” is one of the easiest songs he ever wrote, and it’s as deceptively complex as all of his other masterpieces. Among the ciruclating live performances of the song, this is the only one where he plays a standard open C chord during the chorus instead of the mystery voicing that he played every other time. He quickly slides that C shape two frets up and then jumps into a standard open D chord, as opposed to hanging on that middle chord as in all other versions.</p>
<p>I spent hours thinking about this chord change this morning, trying to fall back asleep.</p>
<p>The show’s a gem, and like the Mia Zapata benefit, feels like it was recorded last year rather than 22 years ago, and the Nirvana show 31 years. These dead men are alive and well on YouTube. Kurt and Elliott—like John and Paul, no last names needed.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: <a href="http://twitter.com/nickyotissmith">@nickyotissmith</a></i></p>
Nicky Otis Smithtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/332262024-03-04T06:27:00-05:002024-03-10T00:19:08-05:00Why They Suck: Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson<p>Laurie<b id="docs-internal-guid-24d63fdf-7fff-ee8b-406b-99da3467de5b"> </b>Anderson's recent body of art involves writing collaboratively with an AI agent stocked up with the words of Lou Reed. It's a Lou Reed emulator, we might say, and it and Anderson have written a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/28/laurie-anderson-ai-chatbot-lou-reed-ill-be-your-mirror-exhibition-adelaide-festival">version of the Bible</a> together. In some ways this isn’t surprising, because many people regard the words of Lou Reed as the inspired words of God in scripture. I disagree.</p>
<p>Speaking of Lou Reed emulators, my younger brother Adam—a club DJ in DC—admired the man tremendously and modeled himself on him, achieving something of Reed's bristling hostility and inarticulate hyper-coolness. He particularly admired the song "Heroin," which takes a pro-heroin position. Also, in 1990 he died of a heroin overdose.</p>
<p>You<b id="docs-internal-guid-2d37cbbc-7fff-baa7-9611-2c2419b51898"> </b>may think this prejudices me irrationally against Reed's great aesthetic achievement. The death of your brother, you might insist, isn’t a direct reflection on the quality of those records. I've heard many people say that Reed is the most important artist of the rock period: more significant than the <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/pop-culture/why-they-suck-beat-the-meetles">Beatles</a>. Maybe they think we need to face the dark side of human existence. Okay. But well before the ODs started in my social set, I strongly disliked that monotonous, repulsive music.</p>
<p>I seem to remember that Legs McNeil, in his rather tendentious history of punk <em>Please Kill Me</em>, wrote admiringly about Reed taking a dump in someone's mouth at a party. A lot of people I know (I’m not kidding) took things like that as symbols of human liberation, and hoped to emulate them. I think my intense and immediate dislike for the records might’ve saved my life, or at least my mouth.</p>
<p>More<b id="docs-internal-guid-6a46d2a4-7fff-b777-46b6-a33e97727780"> r</b>ecently, McNeil has <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/xd5zzn/what-lou-reed-taught-me">continued</a>. "A lot of people who’ve read <em>Please Kill Me</em>, the history of punk I co-wrote with Gillian McCain, don’t realize the book begins with a question from Lou: 'Rock 'n’ roll is so great, people should start dying for it. You don’t understand. The music gave you back your beat so you could dream. A whole generation running with a Fender bass… The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music? Die for it. Isn’t it pretty? Wouldn’t you die for something pretty?'"</p>
<p>A couple of observations: this is the most superficial romanticization of death ever said. Second, there’s no reason to die for music. Try enjoying it instead; what the fuck are you talking about? And third: Lou, if you wanted to die and enjoyed dying and are glad you're dead, I am too! But your wife misses you. I think you died of liver disease, not music, though the music was toxic as fentanyl. But I speculate that the unvarying sound of Lou Reed will eventually extinguish all life on earth. Boredom kills, baby.</p>
<p>I’ll point out again that the music of the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed just drones on. It's not particularly well-played, and it's definitely not particularly well-sung. You could’ve been listening to... I don't know, Aretha Franklin or Junior Wells or George Jones, for example. Creedence Clearwater Revival and Janis Joplin were active, for God's sake. There were many artists of that moment who were great singers or virtuoso instrumentalists and who also had the urgency and momentum of great rock. And there were garage-rockers stripping the form to its bluesy essence, preparing the sound of punk.</p>
<p>But the Velvets and Lou just drone on. They’re opposed to melody in all its pernicious forms. They go verse chorus verse chorus verse chorus, but they never reach a bridge. The mediocrity of the playing and singing is palpable, but was perhaps part of the charm; they were anti-craft, which did connect them to the later punks. But the Ramones were so much better, more fun, more pointed, more charming, so much more slamdanceable. The Velvets leave you exactly where they found you, only a little more depressed and a little more corrupt.</p>
<p>We might consider the music of the Velvet Underground as aesthetically similar to the films that mentor Andy Warhol was making at the same time (<em>Mario Banana 2</em>, for example, not to mention <em>Andy Warhol's Frankenstein</em>). People regard them as extremely significant artifacts in cinematography history, and they may sort of be interesting in their total repudiation of craft and refusal of the artistic crutch of narrative coherence, as the records of the Velvet Underground are notable for their refusal of melody. (I kind of liked Nico, but what were they doing to her or with her?) But those films are completely incompetent and unwatchable.</p>
<p>I'm not linking a whole bunch of songs, and if you’re thinking that you’re going to get me to understand by taking me on a musical tour, I'll just say: my brothers tried this on me starting in 1972. I figure they were sincere, and I figure you are too. But I don't believe that you believe what you're saying. Can't you hear that?</p>
<p>I<b id="docs-internal-guid-520b69a4-7fff-0108-b87d-4f6b992dec06"> </b>saw Lou Reed in Charlottesville in the mid-1980s, and it was one of the worst shows I've attended. He hated his audience; he specifically despised us for admiring him. He cussed at the audience under his breath for no apparent reason, curated a persona of maximum lout, played for less than hour, and stalked off. Reed-worshipers came out just shaking their heads. But it wasn't only the performance style; it was the songs. His gross yet meaningless mutterings at that point consisted of items such as <a href="https://youtu.be/x_lZW09vbW0?si=Kqe8YX7LL8HZJ4BH">My Red Joystick</a>.</p>
<p>Maybe Laurie Anderson has a bot for that, too.</p>
<p>I saw her in concert at Constitution Hall in DC in the early-1980s. I was absorbing the pretentious pseudo-artistic hoo-hah indifferently, so as not to offend my girlfriend, who was a big fan. I was a big fan of Dolly Parton, about whom Laurie said this, about a half hour into the performance: </p>
<p>I turned on the radio and I heard a song by Dolly Parton.<br />
And she was singing:<br />
Oh! I feel so sad! I feel so bad!<br />
I left my mom and I left my dad.<br />
And I just want to go home now.<br />
I just want to go back in my Tennessee mountain home now.<br />
Well, you know she's not gonna go back home.<br />
And I know she's not gonna go back home.<br />
And she knows she's never gonna go back there.</p>
<p>That's the lyric for Anderson's song "Walk the Dog," as printed. Not satisfied with the lyrics as she's written and maybe looped them, Anderson in concert studded it with cuss words to make sure we didn't miss the point: "She knows she's never fucking going back to that god-forsaken place" (i.e. the Great Smoky Mountains).</p>
<p>This refers specifically to Dolly's lovely song "My Tennessee Mountain Home." And Dolly has returned, helping the place out in myriad ways for decades. She’s a beautiful person and a great artist (however, avoid the album <em>Rockstar</em> at all costs). I turned against Anderson right there, and spent the rest of the "concert" (or possibly "art installation") heckling. Rachael never forgave me. But I've managed to forgive myself. I didn't throw anything, after all.</p>
<p>Anyway, as Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson mutate from destructive yet pretentious fuckwads into harmless yet boring chatbots, we can let them go with a glad and grateful heart. May their memories be a blessing.</p>
<p>—<em>Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell</em></p>
Crispin Sartwelltag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/332142024-02-29T06:28:00-05:002024-02-29T10:02:11-05:00Rave On In Ecstasy<p>I’m one of those people. I’ve managed to miss out on every post-war youth movement there was.</p>
<p>I was born in 1953 and <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/music/rockets-over-blueberry-hill">witnessed</a> the rock ‘n’ roll explosion of the 1950s, but as a child, without any direct involvement. I was more aware of what was going on in the 1960s, as a teenager, but still too immature to participate. I was 14 in 1967 when the West Coast music scene began to infiltrate the British psyche, mainly through John Peel’s Sunday afternoon program on the BBC, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_(radio_programme)">Top Gear</a>. Listening to Top Gear on our old valve radio in the kitchen, while doing my homework, became something of a religion for me. I first heard <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/music/captain-obeah-man">Captain Beefheart</a> and the Mothers of Invention, along with British underground groups like the <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/music/soft-dreams-in-whitstable-and-canterbury">Soft Machine</a> and Pink Floyd, and recognized the evolutionary potential of such advanced musical forms.</p>
<p>I was in my mid-20s when <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/music/one-hit-wonders-of-the-punk-era">punk</a> hit. I was a belated hippie, just back from the obligatory journey to the East, having travelled to India in 1975-76. Punk was such a relief after the dreary seriousness of progressive rock, with its rock operas and classical pretensions. Punk brought everything back to basics, simple repetitive chord structures and down-to-earth lyrics. It was music that anyone could play and allowed aspiring artistic types such as myself the opportunity to dream, that we too could find our own form of expression one day.</p>
<p>I loved the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrfKiPmANG0">first Clash album</a>. I remember dancing to it with a girl I fancied. We invented a dance to go with it: the straitjacket. You had to wrap your arms around yourself as if trapped in a restraining garment, but leap around joyously to the music as if trying to escape. On reflection that seems a perfect metaphor for my life at the time: straitjacketed by convention, trying to release myself using punk energy. I liked punk music, but didn’t feel able to dress the part, being too old and staid by now.</p>
<p>Music tends to go in 10-year cycles. It was rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, psychedelia in the 60s, punk in the 70s and rave in the 80s. I was a single father by then, living in a shared house with a bunch of disgruntled freaks like myself, disengaged from the conventional world, still trying to find my role in life. I started going out with a woman a little younger than myself and, not long into our relationship, we discovered Ecstasy. That’s a wondrous drug, an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathogen%25E2%2580%2593entactogen">empathogen</a> that opens up the possibility of emotional and spiritual engagement with other human beings: a fellowship of being. I’d recommend it to anyone, assuming you can get nice clean, unadulterated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA">MDMA</a>, that is, and aren’t palmed off with an inferior or dangerous substitute. That’s the trouble with the drug laws. We hand over distribution of such potent and psychologically useful medicines to the criminal fraternity, who rip us off and sell us something that might cause us harm.</p>
<p>The reason Ecstasy’s illegal has nothing to do with any danger that it might pose to the user. Rather it’s dangerous to the status quo, to the sense we have that we’re isolated and powerless in a meaningless universe. Ecstasy makes it clear that none of this is true. We’re not isolated as long as we have our friends about, and every human being is a friend on Ecstasy. Likewise, we’re not powerless as long as we have allies and comrades, people with love in their hearts, which is also true of everyone on Ecstasy. Finally it reminds us that the universe is anything but meaningless: that it’s vibrant with the meaning we find in relationships, in the love we share with our fellow creatures, human and non-human, upon God’s good earth.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_house">Acid house</a> started in the late-1980s in Chicago. It was a development of <a href="https://www.splicetoday.com/music/a-life-in-love-and-music">disco</a>, music designed to dance to. It was cheaper to produce than disco, which depended upon orchestration and trained musicians able to read music. House is mainly computer-generated so can be shaped in the studio by anyone with a musical ear and a knowledge of computers. It shares one characteristic with disco, however, the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_on_the_floor_(music)">four-to-the-floor</a>” beat, where every thud of the bass drum is given equal emphasis: the difference is that in disco the four-to-the-floor is provided by a live musician, who may quickly grow tired. House music, on the other hand, uses drum machines that will never get tired and are always perfectly in time.</p>
<p>It’s that thud-thud-thud-thud electronic underpinning that defines house music and which makes it so powerful. It’s like the heartbeat of the Primal Mother. Combine that with Ecstasy, which opens up your heart, and synchronizes it with everyone else in the space, and you have a perfect medium for Ecstatic union on a cosmic scale. One of the early pioneers of house, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie_Knuckles">Frankie Knuckles</a>, said of the Warehouse club in Chicago, where the music was born, that it was like “church for people who have fallen from grace.” That describes the atmosphere at a rave or a free party: the gift of grace, a beckoning from the conscious universe to all us lost and isolated humans to embrace each other and return to our source.</p>
<p>I went to my first rave sometime in 1991. I wrote about it in the first chapter of my first book, <a href="https://christopherjamesstone.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/fierce-dancing-adventures-in-the-underground-by-cj-stone/">Fierce Dancing</a>. You can read that <a href="https://whitstableviews.com/2024/01/03/in-memory-of-paul-anderson/">here</a>. I used a quote from the I-Ching as an epigraph:</p>
<p><i>“The sacred music and the splendour of the ceremonies aroused a strong tide of emotion that was shared by all hearts in unison and that awakened a consciousness of the common origin of all creatures.”</i> I-Ching 59: Dispersion (Wilhelm/Baynes 1967).</p>
<p>After that I started going to raves on a regular basis. Only we didn’t call them “raves,” we called them free parties. I got involved with a group of people who I thought of as my tribe. <a href="https://whitstableviews.com/2024/01/28/paul-anderson-warrior-of-sound/">Paul Anderson</a>, Nicky Wilson, Jenny Pitt. Those were such expansive days. It felt like the whole world was about to change. And indeed it was, but not entirely for the better.</p>
<p>The free party scene began to get big in the UK in the early-1990s. Initially parties took place in private clubs or in urban venues such as warehouses and squats. Later they moved into the open air, absorbing the remnants of the hippie festivals that survived from the 70s. A number of colossal sound systems, called rigs, began to circulate around the British landscape, setting up free parties on squatted land in quarries, woods and fields. The most famous of these were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiY_Sound_System">DiY</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Tribe">Spiral Tribe</a>.</p>
<p>Inevitably this caught the attention of the establishment. One particularly large-scale free festival, on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlemorton_Common_Festival">Castlemorton Common</a> in Worcestershire, became the turning point. It lasted for five days, from May 22<sup>nd</sup>-29th 1992 and caused outrage in the press. All of the major sound systems turned up and the music was continuous, causing much annoyance in the sleepy English countryside.</p>
<p>Questions were asked in Parliament. The local MP at the time, Michael Spicer, made a speech: "New age travellers, ravers and drugs racketeers arrived at a strength of two motorised army divisions, complete with several massed bands and, above all, a highly sophisticated command and signals system. However, they failed to bring latrines. The numbers, speed and efficiency with which they arrived—amounting at one time to as many as 30,000 people—combined to terrorise the local community to the extent that some residents had to undergo psychiatric treatment in the days that followed. Such an incident must never happen again."</p>
<p>The establishment response was the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Order_Act_1994">Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994</a> with its provisions against squatters, ravers, road protesters and <a href="https://www.huntsabs.org.uk/">hunt saboteurs</a>. What all four groups had in common (aside from their youth) was they utilized ancient squatting rights as part of their lifestyle. Trespass had never been a criminal offense under British law. This is because there had always been a dispute over the ownership of land. How did the landed gentry acquire their property? By being descendants of the marauders and mercenaries who came over with William the Conqueror. They stole it.</p>
<p>So the Criminal Justice Act made trespass illegal for the first time in British history, under certain specific circumstances, as it applied to its targets. For example, there were provisions against so-called “trespassory assemblies”: assemblies of more than 20 people held on a piece of land that might cause “serious disruption to the life of the community,” a clear reference to Castlemorton. There was even a definition of rave music, almost certainly the first and only time that a musical form has been outlined in legal terms in an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom. Section 63(1)(b) defined “music” as “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”</p>
<p>A number of groups came together to oppose the Act. There were three marches. The first, called in the name of the Advance Party, took place on May Day 1994. I was one of three names registered with the Metropolitan Police as the official organizers of the march. The other two were Debby Staunton and Michelle Poole. It was a lovely sunny day as we set off on our way to Trafalgar Square from Hyde Park. About 20,000 people joined us. We had a mobile, bicycle-powered sound system with us, called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rCekwgMJd8">Rinky Dink</a>. Once we got to the square there was a party. People danced on the monuments and bathed in the fountains. A wonderful time was had by all.</p>
<p>I became an unofficial spokesman for the movement. I was writing for the <i>Guardian</i> by then, and used my column to promote the cause. There was a TV program, <i>Let’s Face The Music And Dance</i>, which aired on June 15<sup>th</sup>, 1994. It was written and narrated by me. You can see that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PfFVn03n2c">here</a>. After that there was front-page piece in the <i>New Statesman</i>, <a href="https://christopherjamesstone.wordpress.com/2015/07/17/party-politics/"><i>Party Politics</i></a><i>, </i>which came out in July 1994. I was, very briefly, famous.</p>
<p>There were two more marches, on July 24th and October 9th. The last one ended in a riot as some of the protesters attempted to get two sound systems into Hyde Park on the back of articulated lorries. They wanted to carry on partying, as they had in May, but with bigger rigs. The police blocked their way. People climbed up on top of bus shelters and police horses were brought in to disperse the crowd.</p>
<p>The marches failed to stop the Act, which passed into law on November 3<sup>rd</sup>, 1994. However, they created the beginnings of an anti-capitalist alliance that continued to hold demonstrations in the UK for much of the 1990s. New organizations arose, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclaim_the_Streets">Reclaim the Streets</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Mass_(cycling)">Critical Mass</a>. Protests continued, against road building and other desecrations of the countryside. Mass trespass and rave remained common tactics, often in combination. For instance there was one famous protest held on the M41 motorway in Shepherd’s Bush in London. Six thousand people took over the motorway for about eight hours on July 13<sup>th</sup>, 1996 and held a party. There was a banner which read, "The Society That Abolishes Every Adventure Makes Its Own Abolition the Only Possible Adventure," a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International">Situationist</a> slogan. There were dancers on stilts wearing huge, wire-supported dresses, strutting to the pounding beats of the sound systems. It was only after the motorway had been cleared that it was discovered that, hidden beneath the dresses they had placed pneumatic drills, with which they punched holes in the motorway and planted trees.</p>
<p>The movement became a global one. Environmental groups proliferated around the world, protesting against the globalist agenda, culminating in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests">WTO protests in Seattle</a> in 1999. Such protests often employed tactics first used in the UK by the rave-inspired organisations of the early-90s. Protests stopped being a serious business and became, temporarily, expressions of joyousness and liberation, often referred to as “festivals of resistance.” And underneath it all the thudding 4/4 beat of house music continued to sound, like the primal heartbeat of the universal mother.</p>
<p>—<i>Follow Chris Stone on X: </i><a href="https://twitter.com/ChrisJamesStone"><i>@ChrisJamesStone</i></a></p>
Christopher James Stonetag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/331962024-02-27T06:28:00-05:002024-02-27T07:37:50-05:00English as Tuppence<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Stanshall">Vivian Stanshall</a> was the lead singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist with the 1960s comedy outfit, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonzo_Dog_Doo-Dah_Band">the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band</a>. He favored strange instruments such as the euphonium and the ukulele. The Bonzos reached the height of fame when they were featured in the Beatles’ <i>Magical Mystery Tour</i> film (1967) playing a song called “Death Cab For Cutie.” You can watch that <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/beatles/comments/vasc2o/death_cab_for_cutie_1967_hd/?rdt=33536">here</a>. That’s Stanshall up front, all six foot two of him, lank and lean, with ginger hair, moustache and eyelashes, doing a credible impression of Elvis Presley.</p>
<p>They had one hit single in the UK, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1VWK1j2BwM">I’m the Urban Spaceman</a>” (produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym “Apollo C. Vermouth”) which came out in 1968 and reached number 5 in the charts. It was untypical of their output, an almost straight pop song, written and sung by Neil Innes, the other composer in the band. The B side, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hcZ4s9cvpw">Canyons of Your Mind</a><i>,” </i>featured Stanshall doing another of his patented impressions of Presley. It included the immortal lines: “In the wardrobe of my soul, in the section labelled shirts.”</p>
<p>They were also the house band on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Adjust_Your_Set"><i>Do Not Adjust Your Set</i></a>, a children’s TV program featuring several members of what would later become <i>Monty Python’s Flying Circus</i>. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Innes">Innes</a> went on to have a successful career working with <i>Monty Python. </i>You can watch the entire collection of <i>Do Not Adjust Your Set</i> appearances <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6IrxgzcW2k">here</a>.</p>
<p>The band was formed in 1962 after a meeting between Stanshall and fellow Royal College of Art student <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Slater_(musician)">Rodney Slater</a>. They were originally called The Bonzo Dog Dada Band, which gives you an idea of their artistic intent. They changed it to Doo-Dah, they claimed, because they got bored explaining what “Dada” meant. Doo-Dah is an English expression meaning something like Thingamabob or Whatsit, a word you use when you can’t think of the name of something. It’s also a common term for the male genitals. They started off playing Jazz parodies from the 1920s and 30s, which they learned from old 78s acquired from charity shops and flea markets. Later, with the success of similar acts, such as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Vaudeville_Band">New Vaudeville Band</a> and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temperance_Seven">Temperance Seven</a>, they expanded their repertoire to cover all musical forms.</p>
<p>They were often compared to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mothers_of_Invention">The Mothers of Invention</a>. Like the Mothers, they had a theatrical, at times anarchic, stage show. Like the Mothers they employed visual comedy and utilized the studio to great effect. Unlike the Mothers, however, they weren’t musical innovators, preferring to parody previously established forms. They were also—to this Englishman’s ear at least—much funnier, with an anarchic, insightful, occasionally visionary sense of humor. That was almost entirely down to Stanshall, who rates as one of the most original comic minds of the 20th century.</p>
<p>They made six albums of varying quality. The first, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ocoOdMq7cI"><i>Gorilla</i></a> (1967) is a showcase of everything they’d learned to date, a glorious concatenation of comedy, satire, rock ‘n’ roll, psychedelic absurdity, show-biz parody and jazz. It was one of the first LPs I ever bought, and remains a favorite to this day.</p>
<p>The next, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doughnut_in_Granny's_Greenhouse"><i>The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse</i></a> (1968), is more complex. It owes a lot to the Mothers’ <i>Freak Out! </i>The studio becomes a significant part of the process, with sound-effects, voice-overs and cut-aways. You can listen to the entire album by following the links <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpJsHPM1KbU&list=PLCIVQjOLLGl4PNDWGdx8q8jkb-9whT-B1">here</a>. A typical track is “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-daYplQj5CE">My Pink Half of the Drainpipe</a><i>,” </i>which includes lines that could be understood as an introduction to Stanshall’s personal philosophy: “So Norman if you’re normal, I intend to be a freak for the rest of my life, and I shall baffle you with cabbages and rhinoceroses in the kitchen, incessant quotations from Now We Are Six through the mouthpiece of Lord Snooty's giant, poisoned, electric head, so there…’ He continued to baffle us with such insanity until his death in an electrical fire in 1995. He was 52.</p>
<p>By the time of the band’s dissolution, Stanshall had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was addicted to tranquilizers and was an alcoholic. He spent much of the 1970s on a drink-fueled bender with <a href="https://ultimateclassicrock.com/keith-moon-craziest-antics/">Keith Moon</a> of the Who. You can hear Stanshall and Moon together <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xU-KpAb-i0">here</a>, playing the upper class Colonal Knutt and his sidekick, the loveable cockney-voiced Lemmy. The irony of this is that, despite his posh accent, Stanshall was from Walthamstow, a working-class part of London. His father had ideas above his station and beat that accent into him, which may account for some of Stanshall's problems in later life. He was always pretending to be something he wasn’t.</p>
<p>There are a number of solo albums, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Opening_Umbrellas_Ahead"><i>Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead</i></a> (1974), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Henry_at_Rawlinson_End_(recording)"><i>Sir Henry at Rawlinson End</i></a> (1978), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_Boys_Don't_Knit"><i>Teddy Boys Don't Knit</i></a> (1981) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Henry_at_N'didi%25E2%2580%2599s_Kraal"><i>Sir Henry at N'didi’s Kraal</i></a> (1984). There were collaborations with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mSlDpYDqrU">Steve Winwood</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIzSnOCyylY">Eric Clapton</a> and other luminaries of the day. He was the narrator on Mike Oldfield’s album, <i>Tubular Bells</i>. There’s also a complete comic opera, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinkfoot,_a_Comic_Opera"><i>Stinkfoot</i></a> (1985)<i>. </i>It has only been staged twice and never recorded.</p>
<p>Finally there’s a film, <i>Sir Henry at Rawlinson End</i> (1980) starring Trevor Howard. You can see that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6W5RB50fXk">here</a>. Based upon the LP of the same name, it doesn’t live up to the semantic promise of the audio version. The charm of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXdNUJBid5s">the album</a> is that the characters are all played by Stanshall himself, and the action is described in wonderfully florid, descriptive prose. The joy comes from listening to Stanshall as he brings to life these absurd figures, each with their unique voice, their unique tone. The film, on the other hand, takes them all too literally and has the look of madness, as the protagonists all shout over each other as if continuing an interminable internal monologue out loud. No one engages with anyone else.</p>
<p>Here are the opening lines of the album: “English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal water, nestling in green nowhere, armoured and effete, bold flag bearer, lotus-fed Miss Havershambling, opsimath and eremite, feudal still and reactionary Rawlinson End. The story so far...”</p>
<p>It’s that “story so far” that indicates how he intends to proceed. There’s no plot. It’s made up of snippets of introductions to an ongoing radio serial we’re never going to hear. He explained his process in an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjHdPvNJLMs">interview</a> with Toyah Wilcox in 1980:</p>
<p>“I would read the story so far: ‘Gwen and Maureen have become trampolining acupuncturists, and Bob is a gorilla and insists on wearing Dr Marten boots. Now read on.’ Now I never wanted to read on. I just liked the dot dot dot, and it was so provocative and exciting that I wanted to write things that were ‘the story so far.’ But the actual Sir Henry and the whole hierarchy, the whole family at Rawlinson End, were all parts of me talking to myself. I talk to myself all the time.”</p>
<p>The name “Rawlinson” preoccupied Stanshall throughout his recording career. It’s mentioned in passing on the Bonzos’ first album, on a track called “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMqdwtd8TrQ">The Intro and the Outro</a>” It comes up again on “The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse,” as Percy Rawlinson on “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmKPRRNBero">Rhinocratic Oaths</a><i>,” </i>before turning into <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3sTKtvclmc">something more substantial </a>on their post break up, contractual album, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Make_Up_and_Be_Friendly"><i>Let’s Make Up and Be Friendly</i></a><i> </i>(1972)<i>. </i>After that he continued to extend the saga in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=787LTWol8M4&t=1946s">regular contributions</a> to the <a href="https://peel.fandom.com/wiki/John_Peel_Show">John Peel Show</a>, from 1975 till its last outing in 1991. You can hear that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4CpHfQH9-U">here</a>.</p>
<p>It’s the essence of Englishness. It’s England made manifest in art. If you want to know what lies lurking, hidden, in the English psyche, listen to Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. The absurdity, the wistfulness, the sentimentality, the bombast, the pomp, the eccentricity, the ever-present class system: it's all there.</p>
<p>The music reflects this:</p>
<p><em>How nice to be in England,</em></p>
<p><em>Now that England's here.</em></p>
<p><em>I stand upright in my wheelbarrow</em></p>
<p><em>And pretend I'm Boadicea.</em></p>
<p>It's like an English version of <i>Under Milk Wood</i>, but with tunes: as if <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Opinions_of_Tristram_Shandy,_Gentleman">Tristram Shandy</a> had shacked up with Dudley Moore in a pub outside Gormenghast and drunk too much scrumpy. I think you have to be English to follow it all, but the characters stand out in all their eccentric isolation, each mannered voice clearly delineated by Stanshall's remarkable vocal talents. You can't help but wonder what it might’ve been like inside his head, so full of chattering narratives, all struggling for expression.</p>
<p>Sir Henry is the central figure: loud and bombastic, always drunk, a stentorian aristocrat full of his own sense of self-importance. “If I had all the money I'd spent on drink, I'd spend it on drink,” as he says. Next is his brother Hubert, “in his forties and still unusual.” Wistfully deranged, there's one episode where he does bird impressions by standing on one leg and eating live worms from his pocket. And on: Old Scrotum the wrinkled retainer. Reg Smeeton, the human encyclopedia. “Did you know there's no proper name for the back of the knee?” Aunt Florrie, living dreamily in the past. Mrs E, the servant and cook, complaining about her lumbago. “Fried or fried dear?” Seth One-Tooth and the other denizens of the Fool and Bladder pub in the village. Madcap games and English eccentricity. Further away, the town of Concreton, the incongruous 20<sup>th</sup>-century conurbation which houses the working class. All of English life is here, exaggerated but immediately recognizable.</p>
<p>Some people love it. Others can't make sense of it. I gave a copy to my brother-in-law for Christmas one year. He loved it, but my sister was nonplussed and made a face like she'd just taken a spoonful of vinegar. It can have that effect. I think you have to have a literary bent to appreciate it. It’s full of puns and mad conceits, of references to other works of art, to 1930s radio serials and Saturday morning matinees, a jumble of vibrant madness from the mind of one man.</p>
<p>Vivian Stanshall was a unique voice in English culture. England misses him. We’re a poorer nation without him.</p>
<p><i>—<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP987mljouI&t=960s">Canyons of His Mind: A BBC documentary about Stanshall</a></i></p>
Christopher James Stonetag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/331952024-02-27T00:01:00-05:002024-02-25T23:42:21-05:00Chris Robinson - <I>Club Random with Bill Maher</I>tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/331992024-02-26T06:29:00-05:002024-02-26T09:53:06-05:00Booked It<p>Something I’ve never grasped is how many people—pre- and post-internet—breathlessly exclaim how they couldn’t <i>live</i> without their collection of books. “If there was a fire in the house, first I’d grab the cat and then as many books as I could carry,” is a paraphrase—perhaps verbatim, come to think of it—of a typical book fetishist, though maybe that diminishes other fetishes. In the modern era, it’s not uncommon to see photos of lovingly categorized and arranged volumes, stacked in expensive bookcases or metal milk crates, all saying—and maybe this is snotty—look at how smart I am! And then there are those who can talk for 30 minutes about how it’s vital to own an OED: we have one (a Christmas present long ago), and never use it, the print’s too small, and even with a magnifying glass I’ll skip to a run-of-the-mill dictionary.</p>
<p>Too harsh? Too soon? Over-the-top? More of a “perfect storm’ than you can handle? Excessively mean to the cultural middlebrow class that never tires of saying, “quite literally,” which still… still drives me to distraction, probably needlessly so. You be the judge and verbal executioner.</p>
<p>My wife and I have around 2000 books in our North Baltimore home, some in bookcases, others waterlogged in basement boxes, still more forgotten about in the closets of this ghost-ridden (built in 1928, before blacks or Jews were allowed in the neighborhood, and certainly not gay couples, although I suspect a number of “confirmed bachelors,” professors at nearby Johns Hopkins University, were allowed. Thankfully, that’s all changed) house. Anyway, when Melissa and I joined forces in 1990 and lived in sin in Tribeca, we’d carted around books for years, mostly put in storage. Now, especially after our two sons, enthusiastic readers, added to the piles, there are so many books that you better watch your step. There’s no curation.</p>
<p>I do read a lot of books annually, and have since I was a young teenager, but so what? That used to be common, even for rudimentarily literate people. I’ll finish a novel, place it on a shelf, usually sloppily, and rarely think about it again. We probably have—I haven’t checked—duplicate or triplicate, copies of Anne Tyler’s <i>Accidental Tourist</i>, Dickens novels, the standard Hemingway, Didion, Mailer, James, Martin Amis (six copies of <i>Money</i>; an inside joke between my kids) Dreiser and Fitzgerald, Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Byron, Coleridge Keats, Yeats, Pound and so on. If, one day, in spring-cleaning mode (which has never hit me), I’d take a couple of days, root out the doubles or one-and-done political books, sports and rock star bios, and donate those in decent condition to a local bookstore. But that’s not so easy!</p>
<p>As a young man, I frequented used bookstores and traded in completed volumes for new titles, and it was a time-consuming process. I can’t imagine hauling 500 books to a local store and have the appreciative owner—I wouldn’t expect any compensation—hem and haw over which novel, book of collected comics or one of Theodore White’s <i>Making of the President</i> series would be acceptable. All friendly, mind you, but that’s an afternoon wiped out, and I don’t have the patience.</p>
<p>That brings me to another form of hoarding, at least for those who went to Sam Goody’s, Korvette’s or Tower, and bought records before CDs were invented (unexpectedly fattening the wallets of pop stars; I’ve owned <i>Blood on the Tracks</i> in LP, cassette and CD formats). When I was 18, off to college in a few weeks, I knew I wouldn’t have a record player, so I sold half of my 250 LPs and, before hawking them for a buck apiece, taped those I knew I’d still want to hear. It didn’t work out so well: the BASF cassettes, after a clean run for nine months, almost always got tangled up, and it was rare to save one or two with a very, very adept use of a Bic pen.</p>
<p>Turned out my roommate did have a cheapo hi-fi, and on a fall visit to my mom’s, after visiting friends in NYC, (and seeing Jerry Jeff Walker and Billy Swan) I brought two armloads of records back to Baltimore. And when I visited Berkeley some months later, I bought 15 very cool—green discs, crazy art—Dylan bootlegs and they were stacked on the floor of my tiny dorm room. But each time I moved in subsequent years, which was frequent, I shed some of the records in favor—stupidly!—of tapes for my tinny recorder. I remember one day in 1975, at my office at the Johns Hopkins <i>News-Letter</i>, when I spent an hour trying to make out the lyrics to Dylan’s “I’m Not There,” on tape, from a low-quality boot, and though I could decipher lines here and there it was, except for the mournful vocal, fruitless. By the mid-1980s, I was more mindful, and had a large collection of LPs—and a custom-made stereo system with mammoth speakers—and they traveled with me to New York. But once the initial shitty sound of CDs was improved, that’s the route I went, and so the LPs went into storage, some of which were dusted off by my son Nicky.</p>
<p>In the picture here, my brother Gary, 20 at the time, sits in our “playroom” in Huntington, another time capsule, punctuated by Joe Dalessandro’s dick (cover of <i>Sticky Fingers</i>) in the middle, my brother Doug’s art on the wall, a hideous lamp and two ashtrays. I don’t remember if this was a candid short, or choreographed like the cover of <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i>, and anyone who can decipher the paperback placed on that Super Girls LP, must have eyes the equal of Ted Williams.</p>
<p>Take a look at the clues for the year: Joe Frazier remains heavyweight champ of the world; Lee Trevino wins the British Open; John Lennon records and releases his signature song; Jon Hamm is born and Audie Murphy dies; Pass Catcher wins the Belmont Stakes; Gay Talese’s <i>Honor Thy Father</i> and Iris Murdoch’s <i>An Accidental Man </i>are published; Sam Peckinpah scandalizes the world with <em>Straw Dogs</em>; It Ain’t Fair, John Sinclair; great year for music, but Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” inexplicably is #1 Billboard song of the year; Jeremy Renner is born and Van Heflin dies; the Fillmore East in NYC closes; Joni Mitchell’s <i>Blue</i> is released, as is Carole King’s chick record <i>Tapestry</i>; and the first Hard Rock Café opens in London.</p>
<p><i>—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/mugger2023">@MUGGER2023</a></i></p>
Russ Smithtag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/331862024-02-20T00:01:00-05:002024-02-22T04:43:42-05:00Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue - Mobile, AL (April 29, 1976)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/331572024-02-16T00:01:00-05:002024-02-15T20:24:56-05:00Nirvana - Mia Zapata Benefit (August 6, 1993)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/331432024-02-13T00:01:00-05:002024-02-12T23:56:29-05:00Bob Dylan - Live in Barcelona (June 16, 1989)tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/331362024-02-12T06:24:00-05:002024-02-11T23:42:20-05:00The Artist's Artist<p>When Taylor Swift won her fourth Best Album Grammy for <em>Midnights</em>, she dragged collaborator Lana Del Rey onstage with her, and gushed about the latter’s impact: “Lana Del Rey... I think so many female artists would not be where they are and would not have the inspiration they have if it weren’t for the work that she’s done. I think she is a legacy artist, a legend and in her prime right now. I am so lucky to know you and to be your friend.”</p>
<p>It’s somewhat ironic that Swift, with 14 Grammy wins, was praising someone who has zero, but it’s probably a greater commentary on how weird the Grammys have always been, especially when it comes to honoring innovation. It’s easy to look at a correlation between record sales and a Grammy win, particularly with someone like Swift. Her Best Album award should be regarded as gratitude from an ailing industry. However, as an artist, no one’s accusing Swift of reinventing the wheel. She maintains a status quo of well-crafted pop music with a unique gift for building a personal connection with listeners.</p>
<p>When music historians look back on pop music trends of the 2010s, the story will be centered on the emergence of sad girl music, and Lana Del Rey will be seen as the cornerstone. At the end of the 2000s, pop music had become very dance-oriented in what was already a painfully shallow era. In the shadow of the 2008 economic crisis, the surge of dance music is reminiscent of the Depression- era Busby Berkeley musicals, where moments of escapism were desperately needed. With Del Rey’s 2011 debut album, <em>Born to Die</em>, a recalibration of both female artists and music fans was underway.</p>
<p>Del Rey’s emergence was greeted with a degree of suspicion, initially regarded as an industry plant due to her affluent background. As her output grew, it became clear that she was her own artist, a literate songwriter with a distinct take on the world around her. One aspect of controversy that dogged her for years was what was seen as an antiquated view of romance, particularly one that idealized toxic relationships. As more fans described her as an empowering listen, that narrative began to shift to one of relatability.</p>
<p>Many could relate to a song like “Video Games,” where a girl’s desperately in love with a guy who takes her for granted, while understanding that music can exist as a release valve of one’s most intimate emotions.</p>
<p>In addition to her distinctive lyrics, the overall production sound of Del Rey’s music was unlike anything else at the time. Largely helmed by Rick Nowels, who previously produced Stevie Nicks and Belinda Carlisle, the sound was slower than anything on radio at the time, swirling mercurial moods, at once familiar and alien. Borrowing elements of Smokey Robinson’s <em>Quiet Storm</em>, Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, Enya’s new age atmospherics, Angelo Badalamenti’s obtuse chord progressions, accented with Duane Eddy-inspired guitar licks, Nowels and Del Rey crafted instant nostalgia for a world much of her audience would’ve been too young to remember. Many of her early music videos had the look of Super-8 home movies, of Southern California from an Eve Babitz story. With romantic tales of woe delivered by Del Rey’s own uniquely sardonic vocals, the die was cast for a new era.</p>
<p>The impact of Del Rey’s work was a slow burn, and she initially appeared to have the makings of a cult artist. By 2013, with the release of Lorde’s “Royals” and Beyonce’s self-titled album, the tide in mainstream pop started to turn. As both a solo artist and a member of Destiny’s Child, Beyonce was no stranger to anthems of female empowerment, but the more introspective lyrics of songs like “Pretty Hurts” and “Flawless” yielded her most successful album to date. Lorde’s critique of conspicuous consumption was cathartic for music fans; especially stinging was the comparison of people struggling to afford public transportation while pop stars wax poetic about their luxuries.</p>
<p>Taylor Swift occupied an interesting place during this time, while she was making the transition from country to pop, she was also maturing into a more ambitious lyricist. In hindsight, it’s easy to see Del Rey’s influence on Swift’s budding self-deprecation in a song like “Blank Space,” as well as a common frustration at less-than-adequate romantic prospects. The popularity of dance-floor titans like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry would soon wane.</p>
<p>While it might still be too soon to gauge the Trump administration’s cultural impact, the growing presence of young women, as both fans and artists, is undeniable. In particular, the patience for thoughtless artists producing mindless fluff was largely gone. By decade’s end, newer artists like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo emerged with Del Rey’s and Swift’s fingerprints all over their work. At the same time, there was a new surge of female indie artists into the mainstream in a more substantial way than the Lilith Fair promised in the 1990s.</p>
<p>The subtle music trend shifts of the 2010s are somewhat reminiscent of the odd detours of the 1990s. While the main story is that the kids got bored with the pomposity of hair metal and craved the authenticity of Nirvana, there’s more to it. A generation of girls were fed up with only seeing female representation on MTV as trophy babes, and out of that Riot Grrl and Lilith Fair emerged to give women musicians more creative presence. But by the end of the 90s, a new generation of Mouseketeers arrived covered in body glitter in a prolonged attempt to out-naked each other because they clearly weren’t paid to think. It might be overly optimistic to think music trends won’t resume the more sexist circumstances that led to Britney Spears’ implosion. But seeing how Taylor Swift won the war against her detractors, and how Spears’ own fans emerged as her rescuers, there appears to be more respect of artists’ humanity.</p>
<p>The Grammys have received a lot of criticism for failing to honor Beyonce’s self-titled album and 2015’s <em>Lemonade</em> with Best Album wins. As streaming has made music more singles-oriented, those albums were among the few to become cultural events in their own right. Lana Del Rey is on track to acquire the most nominations without ever winning any Grammys. As I said, I suspect Swift remains an award show darling as long as she’s a walking license to print money, but there’s a point where it’s just ridiculous. While the credibility of entertainment awards is questionable, there are plenty of artists deserving of the sales and publicity boosts they can provide. Del Rey is likely to be a recipient of something like Steely Dan’s win, where they were finally recognized decades after it mattered. </p>
Tracy Q. Loxleytag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/331102024-02-06T00:01:00-05:002024-02-05T18:32:16-05:00Jimi Hendrix Stories Told on <I>The Howard Stern Show</I>