TEN YEARS AFTER - ANOTHER DECADE IN THE CAN

As we come to the close of another decade, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how we use this particular factor of time to define out social evolution.  The decade is often used as a platform for nostalgia and reminiscing.  Depending on your age, you might look back on a particular decade as a "golden age" or base your generational identity on the events and products of that time.  We think of fashion and music and movies within a classification system which relies on this arbitrary 10 year span to create a sense of progression.  Our identities as individuals and groups conform to these cycles and stamp us with signifiers which link us to the times of our youth, adulthood and old age. Overall, the use of this segmentation helps to give us a sense of forward momentum, the feeling like we are traveling along a continuum and heading towards some kind of accomplishment. 

It seems to me that Western civilization began delimiting decades as cultural and generational eras beginning with the 20th century, or perhaps just before it.  I suspect it is closely tied to the industrial revolution and remains linked to technological advancements to this day.  Prior to that, things didn't change much except in terms of centuries where you might get an enlightened period or a dark age or ongoing wars between nations and ethnic groups, but for the most part, the way people lived didn't change too dramatically until machines and electricity came into the picture.  Then you get an exponentially accelerating process of social upheaval as successive new technologies emerge.  Within that, the decade became a convenient marker by which to retrospectively assess and assimilate the primary social shifts which occurred in the past.  

From what I've observed, the means and methods of consuming media have been of particular importance in defining these shifts.  Perhaps the advent of written texts and then the printing press would be the first major propellants of cultural evolution.  Then we have the telephone, radio, recorded media (photography, film, audio and video tapes and discs), Television, computers, the internet and, finally, wireless broadband among the key communication revolutions.  The advent of each of these and the process of them becoming ubiquitous within our civilization has carried with it a unique set of social adaptations which changed the way we relate to one another.  Ideas could be shared with increasing speed, spreading the assimilation of new concepts and changing the way we perceive and comprehend reality.  The very act of recording is, in effect, a sort of "time machine",  allowing us to venture into the past and project ourselves into the future. 

Economic circumstances were also a key factor, particularly in the first half of the 20th century with the "roaring twenties" defining an era of abundance and economic boom, while the "dirty thirties" was a decade of financial ruin with the social upheaval which resulted ultimately culminating in a decade marked by a world war and the prospect of literal planetary extermination coming within the grasp of our species for the first time.  But in spite of the looming specter of nuclear annihilation, the 1950s dawned as a decade of prosperity and plenty.  Post war, birth rates soured, income increased and the new technologies were making themselves known as the cultural concepts of modernism & futurism became embedded into the psyche of the mainstream.   Technological advancements could be experienced directly as new machines and appliances entered the homes of large numbers of people in a mostly egalitarian way. 

Popular culture became critical as a social glue in the mid-century decades.  TV brought entertainment into every home and youth culture became an economic factor as manufacturers and  service industries realized that teens and preteens had access to wealth and resources never before available to so many.  The "middle class" came into its own in the West.  Things like rock and roll music could motivate millions of young people to purchase all sorts of products from clothes to cars to cans of Coke.  The sales pitch became an art form and began to develop a sophistication capable of manipulating susceptible minds.  Propaganda was turned towards selling goods instead of pushing ideology.  Capitalism became the ideology and its success was measured in profit margins.  

The 1960s ushered in the "space age" as the move to put people among the stars took hold and drove the science of the day, but other sorts of travel were also in the cards thanks to the advent of psychedelic drugs, a technology which came into prominence at the beginning of the decade as  clandestine experiments by the military and government leaked into the streets.  Thanks to the subversive efforts of certain intellectuals in the universities, these substances became widely available to the youth of the day, with the result being a realization that they had a voice and could take to the streets to demand change, as opposed to being no more than pawns in the capitalistic cat and mouse games of product peddling.  

This was all expertly crushed down in the 1970s when the youth were diverted away from activism as the "me decade" offered up self-indulgent fashion trends like disco and punk to provide a sense of self expression while simultaneously feeding the cash registers of the corporations creating all the clothes and music being consumed.  But this only worked to a certain extent as some valuable lessons were learned in the previous decade and actual social change did manage to start to creep into the cultural fabric.  Race relations, gender politics and sexual orientation all found their feet during this decade and began the process of fighting for rights and recognition which had been denied up to this point.  The world also began to recognize the environmental toll being exacted on the planet as pollution, in its various forms, started to show that it wasn't just nuclear destruction which offered an existential threat to humanity.  Our day to day abuses of our natural resources  could also upset the balance enough to trigger potentially catastrophic consequences.  

The 1980s saw the advent of the "computer world" as the first personal computers began to enter the home, though it wouldn't be until the next decade that these would truly make their mark.  However, culturally, the electronics boom drove society into it's first dalliances with cell phones and satellite TV opened up the possibilities of specialized programming and niche markets.  Above all, the capitalist money machine kicked into high gear as "greed is good" became the mantra of the mainstream.  Wealth and decadence were the hallmarks of this neon day-glo, big hair, broad shouldered decade.  It seemed as though money was all you needed to buy your happiness and your social standing.  

This culture of prosperity and technology carried over into the 1990s as the personal computer truly found its home on the desktops of middle class homes throughout the west.  Digital became the watchword as CDs and DVDs brought crystal clear, pixel perfect reproductions of content to consumers.  The skeleton of the internet established itself during this time and the potential of unlimited connectivity loomed.  Cell phones transformed from awkward bricks into something that more closely resembled the fantasy sci-fi communicators of Star Trek, small and palm sized, easy to pocket, making communication possible virtually anywhere at any time.  

The new millennium dawned amid paranoia about "Y2K" disasters as people began to realized how much they'd become dependent on technology and its computing power.  The prospect of a simple miscalculation sending global infrastructures and economies into chaos drove crisis culture into realms of conspiracies.  The build-out of the World Wide Web broke business models for media distribution and monetization as file sharing and rampant pirating of content meant that the container was no longer king in the world of data distribution.  Ones and zeros could be transmitted effortlessly from any one location to another, so artifacts like CDs and their physical counterparts became irrelevant and lost their value.  

Cable TV exploded in the 2000s and brought with it a host of product, both good and bad.  Sophisticated dramas on HBO were balanced against trashy reality TV on other specialty channels.  Being famous became an end in itself as Warhol's "15 minutes" prediction turned into nightmarish reality.  Economically, the house of cards was collapsing as born out by the 2008 crisis when banks and other financial institutions worked their way into disaster through speculation, unsustainable lending and sheer fraud on a scale never before imagined.  Politically, the uncoupling of reality from expediency set the stage for a kind of delusional governance which would fully bare fruit in the decade to come.  

This brings us to the 2010s as we close out this most recent decade and look forward to the 2020s.  Looking forward is something I say with a bit of hesitancy as we sit now on the precipice of some  disturbing realities.  With hindsight being what it is, looking back on this last decade reveals some rather unsettling chickens coming home to roost.  That sense of perpetual progression seems to be hitting the brakes now as the true cost of our follies begins to be calculated and the sums start hitting into zones of danger which had originally been projected for times much further into the future than our present.  

I think if there's anything that defines the past ten years, it has to be the proliferation of social media  in our culture.  Though the technology to support it first came into being in 2007, the effect of it has truly been felt since the beginning of this decade as platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken root and created this environment where facts have become optional.  People are now free to create their own reality based on any old bias or prejudice they wish to indulge.  Things are true because people want them to be true.  "Fake" is a meaningless term now because everything is fake.  One media source is just as good as another.  It's only a matter of personal preference.  

Environmentally, the alarm bells have been going off throughout the decade as severe weather anomalies and climate change become more and more difficult to dismiss.  People looking back on this decade, if there are any to do so in the future, may likely pinpoint it as the tipping point for climate collapse and irreversible damage to our ability to sustain life.  There is every chance we have already gone too far in terms of damaging ecological systems for us to effect repairs or stop the rest of the dominoes from falling.  

Politically, we're living through something that would have only been imagined in a Batman movie plot in previous decades.  Now, blatant criminals have stolen control of governments away from the electorate and prop themselves up with deluded masses of ignorant lackeys who follow because they've been bred to see selfishness and cruelty as virtues to be celebrated.  People protected by their social media bubbles of self deceit rally around a buffoon like Trump and cheer as he spits insults and abuse, thinking this is a display of authority when, in fact, it's nothing more than a perversion of power.  There is no level of debasement he is capable of which would dissuade them from their support.

Socially, this decade has seen the complete abandonment of the concept of a "middle class" as a small percentage of the mega-wealthy horde resources beyond any practical need and deny basic sustenance to the rest of the planet by preventing wages from growing with productivity and lobbying to repeal fundamental social gains made by unionization and labor movements in previous decades.  They've convinced themselves that their money will buy them protection from the social collapse they're actively engaged in promoting as they undermine every social institution which used to help advance civilization.  Profit motives have corrupted the courts, healthcare, education, policing, the military and spirituality.  There isn't a single sanctuary remaining where the obsession with profit at any costs hasn't desecrated the concept of empathy, community and caring.  We're all merely swirling around the toilet for the final flush, grasping at any piece of shit we can get our hands on before we get sucked down the drain, once and for all.

Where generations have previously followed the procession of advancement, always with a sense of optimism of working towards a better future, we are now at a precipice where more and more people are convinced there's no turning back and that there's no hope for salvation.  We can't pretend anymore that these are just tough times, struggles we've gone through before and that we'll work our way through.  That delusion has lost its usefulness as a salve to ease the pain of the wounds that keep being inflicted upon us.  We're worn raw from the abuse and know there's no plan to relent or show mercy.  The master is on the whip and any pretense at accommodation has been abandoned as an economic burden, too costly to justify.   This last decade has sucked the wind from our sails, particularly the latter half of it.  When blatant criminals can hold power in what is called "the land of the free", then the world has gone mad, even if that nation has always been something of a fraud in terms of being a proponent of "truth and justice". 

My own personal journey through this decade as been one of disconnection and loss, right from its onset.  Where the 1990s & 2000s saw me find footing in the technology sector, establishing a 16 year long successful career in software development, I started off 2010 by being unceremoniously ejected from that position and have not been able to secure any stable employment since.  As I come up to my 10th anniversary of unemployment, I find myself in a kind of netherworld limbo, the "50 plus dead zone", where I'm too old to be considered for any regular employment (50 being the arbitrary cutoff currently in vogue), but not old enough to retire and collect a pension.  In fact, the same people who won't hire people over 50 are also now pushing for holding off retirement until after 70, though they don't seem to see any issue with that 20 year purgatory they're creating in the process.  Though I subsist in a state of disenfranchisement from the main economic engine, I'm still somehow allowed to exist in this position where I have a roof over my head and food on my table, ostensibly because I must still serve some meager economic purpose.  The frightening thing is that I'm actually one of the lucky ones.  By some anomaly of mathematics, I'm still considered in the upper percentile of affluence on this planet.  Go figure.  

Now, we're on the threshold of the 2020's.  It's a nice looking number, to be sure, but what of the humans which will be defining this coming decade?  Are they going to double down on disaster or turnabout into a rebound?  Personally, my money's on the former as all signs point to a continuation of the madness which has stamped this past decade with its obscenities and inexcusable delusions.  I suspect humanity needs a lesson in humility and survival before the idiots start to consider that you can't defy nature and reality indefinitely.  Eventually the check is gonna come due and we're going to have to pay up for our hubris and wanton disregard for the limitations of our existence.   The big question is going to be whether it's too late to right the wrongs and chance course.  If there are historians to look back on what we did this past decade, let's hope we at least serve as an object lesson in mismanagement rather than an epitaph for the planet. 

40 YEARS BEING QUIET - THE LIFE OF JAPAN

December 20th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Japan’s third LP, Quiet Life, issued on this date in 1979.

If I remember correctly, it must have been very early in 1980 when I came across it in my local record shop back in Thunder Bay, ON.  I’m not sure if I’d ever heard of the band before seeing the record.  I don’t recall them being mentioned in the music press before that album.  Maybe a stray ad for one of their first two albums might have crossed my sight line without garnering much notice.  

The cover of Quiet Life, however, made an immediate impact.  David Sylvian looked so cool.  Goddamn he was one suave fucker, to paraphrase Frank Booth!  That Andy Warhol bleach blonde hair, the “talk to the hand” gesture, the porcelain skin and those lipstick red lips, all soft-focused in overexposed white light, like he was walking past heaven, but couldn’t be bothered.  Mick Karn was on the back cover looking almost as pretty and, inside the gate-fold sleeve, the remaining three band members were similarly posed in their fashionable finery.  They still had this hint of their glam roots showing, but they’d cleaned it up with some “new wave” hipness which kept the androgyny in tact without it seeming sleazy.   

Japan were the forbears of the “New Romantic” look, which would explode soon after with bands like Duran Duran, who shamelessly pilfered Japan’s look, in my opinion.  But what would soon become apparent upon listening to the record was that these were not just a bunch of glamour boys with a fashion fetish.  These guys could actually play and compose some amazing music.  They were all self taught and, after their initial dalliances with crass exploitation, their 3rd album found a balance between image and substance and a certain legitimacy took hold in their sound and subject matter that didn’t feel forced or put on.  

Prior to this album, Japan had been heavily laden with a "New York Dolls" kind of trashiness.  It came across as slightly vulgar and excessive, though not quite as crude as Johansen & company.  David’s singing style on Japan's first two LPs was a sort of whine, like a spoiled brat and there was this swagger to their approach that came off as vaguely pretentious.  The songs, however, weren’t total trash.  In fact, they had some decent hooks, though the lyrics were occasionally naive and juvenile.  Technically, they were accomplished musicians, but it was all painted and powdered up with so much foundation, lip-gloss and neon hair that it was often laughable as a total package.

Then came the single, Life In Tokyo, and working with producer Giorgio Moroder, which set the band suddenly deflecting into another trajectory.  Though David’s voice still had its bratty snarl, the music clicked into a cool Euro-disco pulse thanks to Georgio and he handed them the keys to reshaping their identity.  Life In Tokyo was issued in April of 1979 and, by the time Quiet Life came out in December, the transformation from slutty rock prostitutes to cool handed romantics was complete.  Now, they were more late stage Roxy Music than New York Dolls, but with some Berlin Bowie iciness added to their sound to sculpt them into a sleek techno-new-wave machine.  

The title track for the album kicks it off with echoes of that Moroder-style synth pulse from Richard Barbieri.  Mick’s fretless bass slips into it’s undercurrent and gives the tight, metronome perfect disco beat from Steve Jansen something rubbery to bounce against.  Rob Dean’s guitar slices in with minimal, clean rhythmic slashes that make the whole thing glint with a sheen like a well polished luxury car. Then David debuts his new crooner baritone voice and sings a song about detachment and departing, leaving the old behind and looking forward.  It’s a perfect way to display this shiny new version of Japan as they propel into an album that cruises effortlessly from one pristine track to the next.

In spite of the impeccable perfectionism displayed in the production of this LP, it never comes across as overwrought, contrived or lacking spontaneity.  The balance within the arrangements always retains a sense of proportion and things like solos and fills are delivered with a meticulous restraint that is strictly dedicated to serving the greater good of the song as a whole.  As glamorous and glowing as it all appears, it doesn’t feel showy or ostentatious. It’s tasteful and constrained, but driven by a taut energy that keeps the momentum going forward at all times. At a mere 8 songs, the album is a concise expression of their newfound oeuvre.  All the tracks are Sylvian compositions save for a cover of Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground classic, All Tomorrow’s Parties, which is rendered like a spectral dream.  The track begins and ends with an asynchronous looping synth refrain that creates the sense of entering into another dimension.  

Japan would go on to do 2 more stunning studio albums after this, each one pushing their creative potential to new heights.  But creative differences would take their tole by the time Tin Drum made them a household name (at least in the UK) and their final tour in support of that album would become their epitaph with the release of the live LP, Oil on Canvas.  Post breakup, solo careers would deliver many more albums of exceptional music with varying degrees of success, but nothing near the popularity of the band at its peak.  A short-lived reunion as Rain Tree Crow in the early 1990s delivered one more stellar album of original material before they went back to their solo careers.  The death of Mick Karn in 2011 was a tragic blow to fans of the band as his presence was a key ingredient in giving them their distinctive sound.  Japan has since managed to establish a legacy that shows every sign of lasting along with other greats from the era.  All of it truly started to come into focus with the Quiet Life LP.

DROP THE BASS - MY FAVORITE PLAYERS

I was going to do a “Top 10” list of my favorite bass players, but I came up with 11 names, so in the spirit of Nigel Tufnel, I’m going that extra digit for sheer intensity’s sake!  These are all people who have made me appreciate the instrument in a special way and whom I personally feel have contributed something unique to the way the instrument is used.  The order is somewhat arbitrary, though some names do have more significance to me than others and I’ll make note of that as I go along and talk about each. 

The bass guitar, in my mind, was initially a rather mysterious presence and lacked the glitz and glamour of its more easily identifiable six stringed cousins.  When I first started seriously listening to music, I didn’t quite comprehend what it was, but gradually, I discovered bands and players who brought my attention to it and made me realize that the bass had a special power all its own. This is something which has become more and more apparent as “bass music” (funk, dub, drum & bass, downtempo, dub-step, etc) has gained prominence since the 1970s. 

It was really funk and reggae music which first gave the instrument a place at the front of the pack, making it a tool for driving song structures from the ground up.  Where it was traditionally used as merely a means to fill out the lower end of the frequency range and give an arrangement a sense of presence, it was also neglected for a long time because most people didn’t listen to music on stereo systems capable of reproducing those frequencies.  It was only in the late 1960s when “high fidelity” sound systems became more ubiquitous that you start to hear producers going for full stereo mixes as a default instead of focusing on radio friendly mono productions.  FM radio also made it possible to broadcast in hi-fi and the album came into its own as an art form rather than as a medium for hosting a hit single and a bunch of filler tracks.  When all these factors came together, you started to hear the instrument take on a new roll as a critical component rather than merely a sonic spectrum filler. 

With that in mind, let’s get into some specific individuals who are responsible for bringing the bass into prominence.  

Carol Kaye

I’ll begin with this lady though my appreciation of her has only surfaced in recent years with the release of the documentary film, The Wrecking Crew.  Though I’m old enough to have grown up with many of the 1960s hits she played on, I had no idea who the musicians on so many of those records were until seeing this film.  It was a true moment of revelation to witness this unmasking of these incredibly talented and significant music makers.  Finding out she was responsible for the bass line in Sony & Cher’s hit, The Beat Goes On, blew my mind as it was one of the very first songs I can recall where a bass line was integral to the essence of the song.  She may not have a writing credit for it, but that hook is EVERYTHING to me when I remember it.  And then there’s that descending step bass at the beginning of Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman, another example of the instrument being used to provide an immediately recognizable musical motif, one which identifies the song the instant it saunters out of the speakers.  Those are only a couple of examples in a career spanning decades and hundreds, if not thousands, of recordings.

John Deacon

As a teen in 1977, Queen was the first band I got into in a BIG way.  They were the first group I delved into in order to pick apart what they were doing and try to figure out what was going on structurally.  Before them, I’d listen to music and only hear a totality of sound and not be able to identify individual elements and instruments.  With Queen, however, I was so fascinated by what they were creating, the palette of sounds they were using and the variety of styles they encompassed, that I was compelled to analyze it and decipher what was the source of each sound.  Though there was more than enough to digest with the voices and Brian May’s guitar parts, John’s bass playing still managed to come through and distinguish itself.  Deacon was the quintessential rock bass player in many regards, often seeming stoic and quiet, but there was a lot going on under the surface.  He impressed me to such an extent that I decided to switch instruments I was learning at the time.  I had taken up guitar lessons that year and, after getting into Queen, I felt driven to bug my parents to buy me a cheap Fender bass copy (as close to the one John played as possible) and start taking lessons on that instead.  John proved himself again and again as a song writer and, on Under Pressure and Another One Bites the Dusk, he showed precisely how a bass line could become a hook that could sell a million copes of a record.

Jah Wobble

John Wardle, Christened “Jah Wobble” by a drunk, slurring Sid Vicious, was a buddy of Johnny Rotten’s during the Sex Pistols days.  He was one of the "gang of Johns", which included John Beverly (Sid), Johnny Rotten and a fellow named John Gray.  He was a rough and tumble punk with a reputation for putting the booze back.  When the Sex Pistols fell apart, Rotten became Lydon again and recruited Wobble, who had no real experience, to play bass in his new band.  It was a stroke of luck and possibly divine intervention that put the bass guitar in this man’s hands because it became an instant appendage for him and he took to it like the proverbial duck to water.  Right out of the gate, he guided the instrument into a new zone of significance in Public Image Ltd.  This is apparent from the first notes of the first single from their “First Issue” debut LP.  That bass line kicks off the song, Public Image, and announces the arrival of the band with a thrust and vigor that left no question as to their intent.  From there, Wobble would provide the foundations of their sound throughout two seminal LPs, the second of which, Metal Box, cementing his position in music history as a true innovator.  Borrowing from reggae and “Krautrock” and combining the two elements into a fusion of low frequency omnipotence, Wobble set the controls for the heart of the sub and never looked back.  Since leaving PiL, he’s secured himself as the ever prolific and consistent producer of quality bass music spanning over 4 decades now.  His influence on my own creative direction has been immeasurable and unparalleled.

Mick Karn

Japan first came to my attention in early 1980 with the purchase of their 3rd album, Quiet Life.  Beneath all the makeup and pretty clothes, they turned out to be a rather talented collective of self taught musicians and Mick Karn easily stood out with his slippery fretless bass work.  The way it slid around underneath Steve Jansen’s syncopated percussion, such as on songs like The Art of Parties, created a a sinuous, fluid motion that gave the foundations of the music a kind of elasticity that I’d never heard in other bands.  Karn’s solo work continued to explore the range of his instrument until his tragic, untimely death in 2011.

Holger Czukay

Far more than simply a bass player, Czukay nevertheless established a distinctive presence for the instrument in CAN and in his solo works.  The primal, muted thud of his playing technique meshed with Jaki Liebezeit’s drums in a way that fused them into a single entity, accenting the bottom end of the rhythm section.  It was an understated approach, but hid a powerful propellant which was crucial to the interplay of grooves that was CAN’s hallmark in the best of their songs such as Halleluhwah.  You can see this in some of the live footage of their performances, where Holger’s bass and Jaki’s drums push the energy levels of the music and build up tension as they strain against each other while remaining seamless. 

Tina Weymouth

Talking Heads stood out from the pack of CBGBs bands for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which was their petite little powerhouse of a bass player.  At a time when rock music was largely dominated by men, she was a precious anomaly - this diminutive mouse of a girl busting out the funkiest grooves on that beast of an instrument.  Her most notable moment with it came with the infectious dance hit from her side project, Tom Tom Club, and their funk masterpiece, Genius of Love.  Here was a bass line that would get sampled and recycled again and again, for generations of hip-hop music fans.  On Talking Heads transcendental afro-fuck classic, Remain In Light, her playing took on dimensions heretofore unheard in alternative rock.  

Peter Hook

Joy Division took the sound of the bass in a completely different direction than most other bands, particularly within the post punk scene.  Developed primarily for practical reasons, so that it could be heard more clearly on stage, Peter Hook decided to emphasize the top end frequencies of the instrument and inject a melodic, riff-centric approach that became Joy Divisions calling card.  His riff for She’s Lost Control is a perfect example of this technique being used to stamp a song with an unmistakable trademark, something that is recognizable within seconds of it sounding out.  

Bootsy Collins

William Earl Collins may have got his big break with James Brown, but he was never suited to Brown’s micromanaging, regimented band leading style.  Thankfully, George Clinton unharnessed Willy’s wings and let him fly.  "Bootsy" was born in Clinton’s open format freak-fest within the P-Funk family and soon brought the gospel of “the one” to the dance floors of the era with unstoppable riffs like on Mothership Connection.  R&B, soul and, ultimately, funk music in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s truly ushered in the age of bass as it was used as a central structural element in arrangements for the first time.  A funky bass line could send a crowd into a frenzy and no one was funkier and fresher than Bootsy, baby!

Robbie Shakespeare

Coming close on the heels of funk, reggae music also recognized the potential of the bass guitar and, in the heat of the Jamaican sun, slow cooked that smooth, deep resonance which would become a hallmark of psychedelic bass music for decades to come.  That deep throb was more than just a backup for the other instruments.  It drove the melody in a way that was completely new in music.  Within that scene, Robbie Shakespeare became one of it’s most accomplished and prolific practitioners, playing on some of the greatest tracks to come from the island such as Bunny Wailer's Blackheart Man. 

Jean-Jacques Burnel

The Stranglers were initially swept up in the surge of “punk” bands in the UK in 1977.  Though they were labelled as “punk”, they were actually a bit too old and accomplished as musicians to truly merit the label.  Frankly, they outclassed the average punk band by a few miles and part of the reason for that was the distinctive snarling bass of “JJ”, Jean-Jacques Burnel.  JJ had stumbled on his sound by accident while trying to work with a blown speaker cabinet.  Listen to Peaches and you can hear that stamp of authenticity in the roar that comes from his instrument. That raunchy buzz drove the band through their first three albums before he decided to tone it down a bit before it became too much of a limitation on his style.  But even with a cleaner, more subtle approach, JJ’s playing retained it’s distinction and swagger.

Bill Laswell

The New York “No Wave” scene is where I first encountered Bill Laswell as part of the group, Material.  It was their Temporary Music EPs which initially caught my ear, especially tracks like Reduction.  His frequent use of a strange filter effect, which gave his bass a kind of “talking” auto-wah sound, became a signature and point of reference when trying to identify him in any mix. Soon, I started to see Laswell’s name crop up over and over again in one production after another.  Eventually, it was clear that this man had his hand in an endless number of pies in the alternative scene and this activity only grew exponentially throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium.  Work with artists as diverse as Public Image Ltd and Yoko Ono and innumerable solo and side projects established a landscape of music driven by a love of atmosphere and low frequencies.  It’s impossible to comprehend the full scope of Bill’s work over the years because he’s simply done too much to be able to fully capture it all.  Stylistically, he’s traversed the realms of jazz, funk, dub, reggae, folk, techno, ambient, metal and nearly every other contemporary genre he could find his way into.

There are certainly other names I could and should check here, but I’ll let you, dear reader, come up with those on your own.  I’m sure I’ve missed one or two of your personal favorites, but I had to draw the line somewhere and these were the names that came to my mind the most readily. Bass guitar has dominated my musical explorations now for almost half a century and it still has the seductive allure to get my heart beating, my head bobbing, my toe tapping and my soul soaring. 

THE PAPER AGE - MUSIC BEFORE THE INTERNET

I’ve been contemplating life before the internet lately, specifically how I acquired information about music when I first started collecting it.  Long before there was a Google or Discogs or YouTube, one had to do a bit of reading the old fashioned way, in printed media, in order to learn about things that were happening in certain corners of the world.  Of course, there was radio and TV available to expose some of what was going on, but by and large, those media outlets focused on the mainstream  in a fairly superficial way and you had to go to other sources if you wanted to discover anything off the beaten track or more in-depth.  You might see the odd new wave act on Midnight Special or Saturday Night Live, but the music press was where you got to know these artists in detail and discover what they were doing and when.

I first started to collect records when I was 13, back in 1976.  Soon after that started to develop into a serious interest, I also discovered there was a variety of magazines on the shelves of my neighborhood corner shops with all sorts of fascinating stories of my favorite performers and their adventures, interviews with the them and reviews of their work.  It didn’t take long for me to get just as hooked on these as I was on the records.  So much so, in fact, that I got to the point where I’d use my lunch money to buy magazines instead of eating.  I’m thinking now that this may have been part of the reason I got so svelte in my last year of high school.  Oh well, food is over rated! 

The first publications I came across were rags like Hit Parader, Circus and, occasionally, Rolling Stone.  I never got into RS much because there were a lot of non-music articles and that stuff just didn’t interest me.  I only wanted to read about rock stars.  The other two were pretty light weight, however, and I found them to be a bit sycophantic, even at my young, naive age.  But then I came across CREEM and that one really caught my fancy.  It was not so concerned with stroking rock star egos or cheap gossip.  I didn’t understand it at the time, but it was more akin to magazines like National Lampoon and harbored a kind of “gonzo” style which often took great delight in ridiculing some of the subjects covered in its pages.  The captions to the pictures were a clear case in point.  Every one of them was a joke, often at the artist’s expense.  You never got a serious comment in the photo captions.  And they had writers like  Robert Christgau and the notorious Lester Bangs, who made an art of taking the piss out of the folks they covered.  Bangs’ LP reviews were some of my favorites.  I recall one he did for Queen’s Day at the Races that read like a bad trip and I’d never even done drugs yet.  

Eventually I discovered a used book shop downtown and it’s shelf full of old magazine back-issues.  This became a regular haunt for me and I was able to find many of the older issues of CREEM going back to the early 1970s.  This became a priceless resource to me and gave me a lot of background on my favorite bands and their history.  On the other end of this spectrum, the new issues of CREEM that were coming out at the time were starting to clue me in to a lot of new music that was coming out of places like New York and London.  They began to feature bands like the Sex Pistols, Ramones, Devo and Elvis Costello.  I remember seeing an issue with Johnny Rotten on the cover and, at the time, I thought he just looked stupid and weird and found it all rather annoying.  It wasn’t until I began to get dissatisfied with the tedium of top 40 rock music that I started to wonder what all the fuss was with these new groups and why they were getting so much press.  

Like a damn bursting, my curiosity soon got the better of me and I went out and started buying records by these people.  I can actually remember a day, flipping through the pages of a magazine in my bedroom, where I made a conscious decision to go out and buy some of these records.  It started small, with The Cars, then The Clash, Ramones, Costello, Devo and, finally, the most naughty band of all, The Sex Pistols.  I remember putting on the first Clash album and feeling like someone had blown the dust off my mind to reveal it's bright, shining surface.  I remember pulling out the lyric sheet for the Ramones' Road to Ruin and being gobsmacked that there were so many songs with just four or five lines of lyrics.  And they were fucking hilarious!   It was a few days of complete revelation that would trigger a lifetime of exploration and it all came from some ratty little music magazines.

Soon, I was on the hunt for even more magazines that featured these bands.  This is when I came across rags like Rock Scene and Punk magazine.  They were both very New York centric and featured all the CBGBs bands.  Rock Scene had a LOT of press for Patti Smith, thanks to her hubby, Lenny Kaye, being the editor.  I must admit I kinda got turned off a bit to Patti for a bit because her features in the magazine became so gratuitous and obviously so.  But still it was a valuable reference, though pretty light weight in terms of coverage of these bands.  It was mostly a scenester, “who’s with who”, kinda vibe.  Punk Magazine seemed to be the most underground and hardcore at the time.  I’m actually pretty surprised, looking back, that it ever landed in a middle of nowhere town like Thunder Bay, ON.  But it somehow managed to find its way into my hands and gave me another perspective into the alternative music scene.   

In 1979, the ultimate underground magazine started hitting the local stands, Trouser Press.  This was the most out there publication I’d managed to come across and it was in its pages that I first read of names like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, The Residents and others who were truly foraging on the fringes of experimental music.  I became obsessed with snapping this one up as soon as it hit the stands.  It was coolness in print.  And it wasn’t easy to find as only a couple of places carried it, so I’d be on the lookout for each new issue with hawk-eyed determination.  It wasn’t a fancy looking magazine either.  It was plainly designed in terms of the graphics.  But it had the best written articles and most thoughtful reviews I’d come across.  Though the irreverence of CREEM was entertaining, it was nice to have something that really dug into the new music with a more serious tone. 

Sometime in 1980, the next phenomenon to hit my collecting obsession arrived in the form of the “import”.  The little record shop I favored, Records on Wheels, introduced a small bin of LPs labeled “Imports”.  The concept was utterly new to me, but I soon realized there was a whole world of music being released in other parts of the world than never got released in Canada.  Now, most of these ended up being imported from the UK, but that was enough as all the strangest stuff seemed to get released there.  Along side these import records, the shop also started getting UK music papers.  Things like NME and Sounds started showing up and these were a whole new world of music journalism. 

I even discovered I could purchase records directly from these papers.  They had classified ads in the back pages.  This is where I found I could actually get a copy of the holy grail of albums for me at that time, Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box.  I’d read about it in some publications and it had a sort of mythical allure about it because it was so exotic sounding.  The standard double LP version had been released in Canada and I'd fallen in love with it, so there was no question that I needed it in its original format.  Finding out it was just a matter of calculating the currency exchange and sending off a money order was thrilling to me, but also nerve-wracking.  This was, of course, long before internet or cheap international phone calling, so putting money in the post and having to wait three months in the blind hope that something would come back was a bit daunting.  But it worked and, after duly and patiently waiting, I had my hands on my treasure, greedily drooling over it like Gollum with his “precious” ring!  

When I moved to Vancouver in 1982, I continued to buy the UK papers as much as I could afford to, though I would often just read them in the import record shop that got them in.  In Vancouver, it wasn’t just a bin in the shop that sold imports, it was an entire store dedicated to them.  I swear, the first time I walked into Odyssey Imports, I was like Dorothy prancing through the gates of the Emerald City.

As I got settled in a new city, I found I was buying fewer and fewer magazines.  Trouser Press ceased publication in 1984 and CREEM in 1989 (though it kinda lost its edge a few years before that and I stopped collecting it).  The UK papers still had some attraction, but by the early 90s, I wasn’t buying records much anymore because I was so poor.  There was also the transition to CD going on and CDs, particularly imports, were going for stupid prices like $40 a pop!  It’s funny now that’s the average price for a domestic piece of new vinyl these days, but you practically can't give a CD away. 

It wasn’t until the dawn of the new millennium that I was set up with a proper computer, a high speed internet connection and a functioning credit card so that my collecting bug could lurch back to life and i dove head first into the world of online shopping.  I was working a decent job with a reasonable bit of disposable income at hand, so no limited edition collectible was out of reach for me and I had the tools to track who was releasing what and also follow recommendations for new artists.  I had automated “sniper” tools for buying on Ebay so I could snap up rarities at the last second.  I went a bit nuts, I must confess.

These days, I’m poor again, but the internet and YouTube have offered me a new way to indulge my music mania and I’m swimming in an ocean of music, both old and new.  While I love the convenience, I do still have fond memories of those bygone days of picking up a magazine and reading about some strange new artist.  I was thinking the other day about the old ads from Ralph Records for The Residents and that got me inspired to write this piece.  I recall the strangeness and mysterious infatuation with their mystique that drove my imagination.  That sense of wonder is so much harder to find or create these days. 

These days, I don't read much about music, particularly reviews of albums.  I find I don't rely on them to discover new music anymore.  I use my own judgment as to whether I want to investigate something because I can always preview it, usually on YouTube.  I use Discogs "Explore" feature to play with search filters to find interesting combinations of genres and styles.  I still read the occasional interview or analytical article, perhaps on an old release being re-appraised or celebrating an anniversary.  But I look at magazine racks in the stores and there's nothing there anymore for me to pick up.  All the music magazines have pretty much vanished or you have to go to some out of the way specialty store to find them and I can't be bothered. 

I used to have a huge box of all my old rags I'd kept for many years.  I think I may have held onto them until the end of the 1990s before I finally dumped it all.  I wish I still had them now.  Some are available online, but it's not quite the same as holding it in your hands.  Kids don’t understand it now, but I remember it and I’m glad I got to bridge both worlds.

ONE AND DONE

ARTISTS WHO RELEASED ONE LP

I recently posted a daily series for a week on "One LP Wonders".  This involved digging up some bizarre, obscure albums by bands/artists who released one album and that was it, there was nothing else from that configuration of people. This means one completed studio album, not live albums nor compilations of unrelated or previously unreleased tracks. I aimed to dig up stuff that didn't get much attention, but deserves it. The following are arranged chronologically. 

The United States of America (1968) 

In 1963, aspiring avant-garde composer and musician, Joseph Byrd, was in New York, studying music and participating in the Fluxus experimental music movement along with contemporaries such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, LaMonte Young, David Tudor & Yoko Ono.  While there, he met vocalist and fellow music student, Dorothy Moskowitz.  The two began a personal and professional partnership which would see them relocate to LA later that year. 

After a time, Byrd, who was rather politically motivated and had joined the Communist party, decided that popular music, specifically the more psychedelic rock of the late 1960s, would be a suitable vehicle for him to express his musical visions while also communicating his radical political views.  To this end, he recruited 3 additional band members to augment his various electronic keyboards and Dorothy’s vocals.  The band coalesced with the addition of Gordon Marron (electric violin, ring modulator), Rand Forbes (electric bass) and Craig Woodson (electric drums, percussion).  Together, this quintet would create their one and only self titled 1968 debut. 

Byrd chose the name of the band for deliberately provocative purposes, reasoning that it was similar to hanging the flag upside-down, as a symbol of distress and to  draw attention to the problems facing the country.  The band’s structure was unusual for the time not only for the emphasis on the then emerging new electronic instruments (synths and ring modulators, etc), but also for its lack of guitars.  With no real experience creating “rock” music, Byrd went into composing and arranging the album with the sensibilities of a contemporary, experimental classical composer, something he later regretted due to his naivety.  However, the resulting recordings were striking in their strangeness and unique approach to the medium. 

At the time of its release, the album gained little traction and the group quickly disintegrated in a frazzle of personality clashes and musical differences as they each pulled in different directions.  This even went as far as petty instances of “volume wars” between musicians on stage and fisticuffs after shows.  The group duly disbanded and it’s members pretty much all went on to more rewarding careers.  Byrd went on to do film and TV scores and teaching, Moskowitz also took up teaching and making children’s music while the others had mostly successful session musician careers. 

It would be years later that the album would be recognized for its truly pioneering approach and incorporation of cutting edge electronic instrumentation along with the likes of groups like Silver Apples.  Personally, I discovered the LP in 1983, shortly after moving to Vancouver.  I was sharing a rental house main floor with some band mates and the manager of the property had a small garage in the backyard which was filled with his massive record collection.  It was wall to wall, floor to ceiling, packed with shelves full of thousands of records.  He took a liking to us being musicians and gave us free access to search through and borrow records.  The United States of America stood out for me immediately when I looked at the cover and saw pictures of the electronics.  I was not disappointed by what I heard.  I recorded a few samples from it on reel to reel, but it wasn’t until 2004 that I finally got a CD copy and had a chance to enjoy the album in all its remastered glory. 

Today, it persists as a distinct product of a strange time. For it to stand out against the backdrop of so many other musical achievements is truly remarkable. 

Cromagnon (1969)

Cromagnon’s eponymous 1969 release (alternately titled “Orgasm” or “Cave Rock”, depending on the re-issue) stands as a singular outlier artifact of 1960s psychedelic rock. Calling it “rock music” is even a bit of a stretch. In so many regards, this album exists well outside just about any convenient classification and even this fact seems anomalous. The core group founders, Austin Grasmere & Brian Elliot, were primarily known for their group, Boss Blues, who released a couple of very conventional and unremarkable psyche-pop singles in 1967 & 1968. By 1969 however, Grasmere and Elliot were possessed by some sort of very strange, inexplicable muse when they embarked on this pastiche of noise, tribalism and altered states. There are moments on this album that could have dropped in from the future by groups like Nurse With Wound. Indeed, there’s much about this album that is completely anachronistic to the times and belongs in another era that wouldn’t become defined for another decade or two. 

The album is something of a hodgepodge of styles and techniques with mad experimentation the only unifying thread. Sometimes things work better than others, but there’s always a sense of wonder in the attempt. What they were trying here is simply so unprecedented that the results of it still don’t quite jive with anything else that was going on at the time nor since. From the opening, Caledonia, with it’s thundering drums, screeching bagpipes and whispered vocals, the stage is set for something completely different. And you get it with the abrupt shift into the next track. It’s built around incoherent grunting and torturous screaming and a sparse percussion with some unknown noises going on in the back. The madness continues with a percussive free-for-all (courtesy of random people plucked from the street outside the studio) on the third track, which also incorporates a myriad of voices intoning “sleep”, while you know you’re not getting any with this racket. The weirdness continues along until we get a bit of a respite on the 5th track with something almost musical, in the spaghetti western vein, with the fifth track, Crow of the Black Tree. This one wouldn’t have been out of place on the first Psychic TV album or as something by Current 93. The rest I’ll leave for you to discover on your own.

Obviously, at the time of its release, it garnered little in terms of audience appreciation or attention, but it eventually became infamous for its idiosyncrasy. It’s creators, on the other hand, seem to have sunk into obscurity after its release. As a result of its snowball effect in terms of its notoriety, it has seen numerous re-issues, both on LP and CD, over the intervening years since its original release. I came across it sometime in the 2000s when I spotted a CD reissue listed in the Forced Exposure online catalogue and couldn’t resist checking it out. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it rewards those who appreciate true, bold experimentation.

Mustafa Özkent Ve Orkestrası - Gençlik İle Elele (1973)

Beginning his career in 1960, Turkish guitarist, Mustafa Özkent, quickly became an in-demand session musician, arranger and producer, but it was a unique group effort which has transported his name outside of his native country and given him his reputation as a musical “Dr. Frankenstein” beyond his Middle Eastern roots.  After spending his career in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s doing session work in Turkey, he secured a recording contract with Evren Records, a company renown for their high fidelity recordings.  In 1973, he set about assembling an “orchestra” of hand picked instrumentalists.  With this band assembled, they began working on a collection of Mustafa’s original compositions which would be released that year under the title, Gençlik İle Elele, Turkish for “Holding Hands with Youth”.

The album offered up a veritable “Güveç” (Turkish stew) of cross cultural references, combining elements of traditional Anatolian folk music with western pop influences of funk, psychedelic rock and jazz. The album cover featured a chimp mischievously manipulating a reel to reel tape recorder, securing the album’s perception as the oddball concoction of a mastermind of sonic non sequiturs.  Though it’s initial release in 1973 failed to generate significant attention, over the years, it began to lurk within the nether regions of cultish collectibles until it was eventually reissued in 2006.  This reissue brought the LP to a whole new audience and widespread, long overdue, acclaim.  I came across it only recently as I was spelunking through Discogs’ database, looking for unusual lost gems to add to my library.  This one caught my attention because it cut across so many disparate musical categories.  It has since become one of my favorites in the realm of vintage instrumental grooviness.

This was Özkent’s first release under his own name (and the only one as a “group”) and, while his subsequent solo albums have sustained his reputation for musicianship, stylistically, he never again managed to capture the sense of kitschy “Middle East meets West” funky fresh goodness which reverberates from every groove of this album.

Wolfgang Riechmann - Wunderbar (1978)

Wolfgang Riechmann began his musical career in 1966, lingering around the Düsseldorf music scene. His early projects included the group, Spirits Of Sound, founded by Wolfgang Flür, who would go on to join the “classic” Kraftwerk lineup from 1975-1986, and Michael Rother, who would also spend some time in an earlier incarnation of Kraftwerk as well as founding the bands Neu! and Harmonia. In 1977, Riechmann joined the progressive rock group, Streetmark, essentially taking over for their 2nd LP, Eileen. He then decided to go solo for his next recording project, recording the 1978 LP, Wunderbar. Here, he wrote and performed everything except the drums. Tragically, before the LP’s release on Sky Records, Wolfgang was randomly assaulted and stabbed to death by a couple of drunken thugs on the streets of Düsseldorf. His one and only solo LP stands the test of time as a classic example of German synthesizer music on the cutting edge of the genre. We can only imagine what more he could have done had he survived, but at least we have one solid collection of his brilliant works.

Masstishaddhu - Shekinah (1988)

Masstishaddhu was a one-off collaboration between Mike Watson, Richard Rupenus & Sean Breadin.  All three were associated with John Mylotte’s ritualistic improve collective, Metgumbnerbone and there are also connections to other experimental projects such as The New Blockaders, Bladder Flask & Nihilist Assault Group.  In 1988, this trio recorded the two side-long drone pieces for the LP, Shekinah.  It was released on Steven Stapleton’s label, United Dairies, in an edition of 1000 copies.  Stapleton also provided the cover graphics.  The album would eventually get a small CD re-issue in 2000 on Psychedelic Pig, a small mail order label which only released a handful of rare experimental titles before folding in 2005. As such, it has remained an obscurity among most fans of dark, occult-inspired ambient and drone music. 

I came across the release when it originally showed up as an import in Vancouver, shortly after its release.  As an avid Nurse With Wound fan, its being released by UD was something that caught my attention as potentially interesting and I wasn’t disappointed.  The two side long drone pieces feature moaning voices, guttural groans (reminiscent of Tibetan religious music), sinuous strings and primitive percussion.  It’s all beautifully recorded and mixed in high-fidelity, which is uncommon given the production values of most of the other projects tangentially connected to this.  Most of those were recorded on primitive cassette formats with little in the way of studio polish.  The addition of proper recording quality makes this a particularly enjoyable listen as it captures all the nuances of the voices and instruments being used.  If you’ve got any sacrifices or special magical moments requiring a suitable soundtrack, this is a fine option for summoning a serpent or some other denizen of the deep.

Trancendental Anarchists - Cluster Zone (1994)

In the 1990s, Kim Cascone’s Silent Records was something of a hotbed of electronic music, especially stuff on the more ambient end of the spectrum. At the time, being the pre-internet days of having to go and buy books to get knowledge, I was very deep into my esoteric and occult literature. Kabbalah and Crowley were dominant in my library and I was looking for music which reflected that. Bands like Ambient Temple of Imagination had caught my ear and it was through their association with Silent Records that I came across Trancendental Anarchists and their 1994 CD, Cluster Zone. Created by Australians, Pam Thompson & Paul Bambury, my research on them has turned up very little beyond a few guest credits here and there on a smattering of not-so-notable projects. As such, this one CD stands as their primary contribution to the world of music, but what a wonderful contribution it is! The album offers up 8 longish pieces, soaking in the thick atmospheres of ancient mysteries and melding in hypnotic, techno-tribal rhythms to send you into your inner-space journeys. It’s perfect chill room material and really lets the listener lose themselves in the mood of each piece. It’s a collection of moods and movements that was fairly neglected then and now. I’ve come across little indication that this has garnered any real following over the years, but it does deserve some attention as one of the more nuanced and intricate tapestries of sound out there for the “coming down” set. Thankfully, the re-activated version of Silent Records has reissued the album in digital form for a new generation of tweakers and travelers to discover.

Daiquiri Fantomas - MHz Invasion (2013)

Founded in 2010 by Sicilians, Marco Barrano and Dario Sanguedolce. Daiquiri Fantomas released their one and only LP to date, MHz Invasion, in 2013.  Aside from a couple of Cdr singles from the album, the duo has yet to realize a follow up.  Since it’s been 6 years waiting, I decided these guys qualified for the “One and Done” category, as it seems like they’re pretty much over and out at this point. Other than this album, only Dario has any other releases to his credit that I can find, which consists of one solo track on a 1993 compilation album.  So, for all practical purposes, this is the beginning and end of the line for this duo, which is a shame because this album offers a truly inspired collection of retro sci-fi progressive-rock, electro-acoustic excursions into the outer realms.  With one foot in the past and one in the future, the duo combine a spectacular array of acoustic and electronic instruments in order to engineer their distinctive brand of post-modernist music.  This is another release I discovered while rummaging through the Discogs database, playing their genre and style filters off against each other until I narrowed my results down to this unique combination of influences and styles.  These include modern classical, progressive rock, jazz, psychedelic rock, electronica and pop music.  If science fiction, Italian style and 70s fetishism are your thing, then this is the album for you!

METAL BOX AT 40

METAL 1

Forty years ago, on November 23rd, 1979, Public Image Ltd unleashed their second "album".  Its initial release was in the UK, coming a year after their debut LP.

That "First Issue" had come at the tail end of 1978, a year which had begun with the infamous Sex Pistols disintegrating while wrapping up their one and only US tour.  In the wake of that chaos and all the recriminations surrounding their demise, Johnny Rotten, now back to being John Lydon, went on vacation to Jamaica where he scouted reggae acts for Richard Branson before returning to the UK to get back to the business of making music himself.  Once home, he recruited a couple of friends for his new venture; a bass player who didn't know how to play bass plus an ex-Clash guitarist.  A quartet was completed with a Canadian drummer found via a music press classified ad.  Together they knocked up an album which was greeted with a mixture of suspicion, contempt and occasional praise.  It was an uneven affair, offering glimpses of genius when they'd been able to pay for proper studios and production, but it lagged in spots once the money ran out and they had to tack on rushed pieces recorded in budget studios.  In at least one self declared case, they "only wanted to finish the album with a minimum amount of effort".  It was a contentiously auspicious debut that demanded an unequivocal follow up for this entity to be taken seriously.  So during the beginning months of 1979, PiL set about assembling new tracks while churning through drummers like toilet tissue. 

Prior to it's release, Metal Box was buffered by two singles, Death Disco (issued in June) and Memories (in October).    Both of these set the stage for what was to come, but no one was really prepared for the full force of the post-punk monolith which was about to descend.  Recorded in fragmented sessions at various studios throughout the year, Metal Box rolled out of the gate while smashing it to pieces along the way.  It was unlike anything anyone had seen or heard before, both in structure and content.  Housed in a logo embossed circular metal canister, it contained three 12" 45rpm "singles" with a dozen tracks spread across them and a  running time of about an hour.  It posed questions on every level, from how to get the records out (they were so tightly housed, you'd have to shake the container and try not to scratch or drop them as they tumbled out), to what order to play them (play order was meant to be flexible) to what kind of stereo system was capable of reproducing the sound in the grooves (I personally know people who bought whole new audio systems in order to handle the extremes of bass and treble contained on those records).  

Where their first LP had indicated movement into new musical directions, such as the nine minute dirge of Theme, it still retained remnants of what could legitimately be called "rock & roll" on songs like its title track and Annalisa.  This new product, however, left those conventions behind on all fronts.  There were elements of disco, dub, German "motorik", martial music, funk and some unidentified strains in the mix.  That "mix", itself, was another thing all together.  The bass was front and center, pushing the capacity of the medium to reproduce it.  Guitars & synths buzzed, scraped and squalled in thin ribbons across the top.  Drums were generally utilitarian, minimal and repetitive, providing support for the bass, but never offering too much flash.  Kick drums were EQ'd with enough thud to pop needles out of the grooves and hi-hats sizzled with enough top end to fry bacon. Occasionally, a drum track was no more than a tape loop of a simple beat.  Lydon's voice moaned and squeaked or screamed in vacant hallways, always sounding lost or distant.  Even the editing of the tracks was fair game for mischief.  Some tracks would abruptly cut off and bump into the next.  Sometimes it sounded like the tape player was shut off or switched on as the music did a sharp pitch drop into a halt or lurched to a start.  A song might trail off into the locked groove at the end of the record and either loop there indefinitely or be roughly snatched away by the auto-return kicking in on the tone arm.  It all felt inside-out, like a building with the plumbing and wiring deliberately showing on the outside.

SECOND EDITION

It wouldn't be until early in 1980 that the album would find its way into my 16 year old hands in Canada.  By then, it had been reissued in a more conventional double LP format, in a standard gate-fold cardboard sleeve, as "Second Edition".  I remember going into Records on Wheels, which had opened up recently in a little strip mall next door to the Burger King where I worked, after my shift on a cold April day in Thunder Bay, ON.  I spotted it instantly as I entered the shop and saw it on the wall in the new releases section by the entrance.  I'd heard of PiL by then, but never heard them.  The first LP was never released in Canada, so I had no idea what they sounded like.  I didn't even know if this was a different album from the one I'd read a review of in CREEM magazine the year before.  I knew I had to check it out, so I plunked my hard earned burger flipping money down and then had to wait until later that evening to hear it.  The whole family went out that night to visit friends, so I spent most of the evening staring at the cover graphics while the adults talked and drank.  

I was fascinated by the photos on the front and inside the gate-fold.  I didn't know who was who yet.  I knew what John Lydon used to look like, but not the rest of the band and the distortion of the warped image effect used made it nearly impossible to tell which one was him.  The cover also had all the lyrics printed on the back.  They weren't originally included with the Metal Box edition due to cost, so PiL had run an ad in one of the UK music papers with the lyrics printed in it so people could take that and fold it up to stick inside the tin.  They were in the same hand written style in both cases, I'm assuming in Lydon's writing.  They weren't in the same order as the songs on the LPs, so when I did finally get to hear the records, it took a bit of sorting to figure out which song was which.
 

When I finally did get home that evening, I went to the big old wooden console stereo system in the living room, grabbed the headphones, set myself up in a comfy chair and dropped the needle on the first track.  It wasn't a great system, so I didn't have the best first listening experience, but it was good enough for me to be able to appreciate how different this all was.  Looking at the labels on the records, I noticed the run times for the track listings.  Side one started with Albatross, which clocked in at an intimidating 10 minutes!  I wasn't used to songs being much longer than 3 or 4 minutes.  Maybe 6 was long when you're talking about something like Bohemian Rhapsody or a Zeppelin track and, in those cases, they were intricately orchestrated with major changes in structure and arrangements as the track progressed.
 

YOU ARE UNBEARABLE

Albatross kicked in and I was immediately anxious and anticipating when it was going to start changing.  After a few minutes in, it became apparent it wouldn't.  Jah Wobble's bass line comes in first and it sounds lazy, like it can barely stand to differentiate the three notes it keeps repeating.  It doesn't even want to try to do anything but lumber along.  And it's so deep!  It's just this rumble under the floorboards.  It sounds scary and maybe a little pissed off about something. Brooding?  Yeah, that's the feel.  Then the drums start plodding along and this scraping, screeching noise from Keith Levene's guitar comes in like a carrion bird way up in the sky, circling and waiting for something to die so it can swoop down and gorge itself.  The ghost of Johnny Rotten then looms up from his grave and starts moaning about something he can't get rid of.  His thoughts are fragments, piecemeal musings you might extract from a cadaver's brain.  "Frying rear blinds"?  What does that even mean?  It's bits and pieces of ideas and images, but there's a sense of exasperation  and boredom.  What's he on about?  Is it his career and fame?  Is it the carcass of rock & roll being flogged like that dead horse?   "Slow motion... slow motion..."  The whole thing fucks with your sense of time.  It goes on so long and is so ruthlessly repetitive, that you lose any sense of time passing.  Everything stands still.  Then it's over and the last thing you hear is that squalling vulture flying off into the distance.

IT SHOULD BE CLEAR BY NOW

Next up, Memories kicks off with some pep as the tempo picks up.  Now, the bass is hollow sounding and bouncy while a disco beat pops along, encouraging some toe tapping.  A curtain of vibrato guitars starts shimmering in the background.  There's something vaguely Latin about it, like flamenco or something, but it's not even certain what instrument you're listening to.  It sounds a bit like an organ too.  There's a flurry of notes that dance around, but they never quite create a melody.  It's merely a suggestion of conventional structure.  Lydon's voice comes in with a sneer and declares he's "had enough of useless memories" and proceeds to tear into the concepts of sentimentality and nostalgia.  Then, just when you think you've got a handle on things, the entire mix suddenly cuts to something completely different.  The bass is back to booming again.  The drums are heavier now too, with the kick threatening to bounce the stylus right out of the grooves.  It's all compressed so that the loudness of the track hits the maximum and you can imagine any VU meter pinned to the top when the mix cuts over.  That curtain of Spanish moss is now a wall made of steel and it's pushing that voice as it bellows and snarls about being "used" and "dragging on and on and on and on and on AND ON AND ON!"  Back and forth, the song snaps between the two mixes until it goes careening out of sight.  As previously mentioned, this song was released as a single, but that version only used the bottom heavy mix throughout and did not have the abrupt edits between mixes.  Personally, I can never really decide which is more effective, though I tend to favor the single most of the time, but the juxtaposition of the two mixes on the LP was a fresh, jarring concept and executed flawlessly. 

FLOWERS ROTTING DEAD

By the time I'd finished the first side, I was feeling like I'd been punched in the head in the best way possible.  My initial apprehension was replaced by an exuberance as I could feel the sense that something new was taking hold in my brain.  Flipping the record over, the next track up was Swan Lake.  This had been released in a more stripped down, rough mix as Death Disco in the summer of that year.  This finished mix would take the rawness of the single and refine it into a truly heartbreaking exploration of loss and death.  The song was written by Lydon about watching his dear mother pass due to the ravages of cancer.  His delivery during the song is nothing short of agonizing.  There's no measuring or muting his suffering and he lets it out with every excruciating wail of "words cannot express!!!".   Again, a disco beat provides the bedrock while Wobble's bass thunders with the tension and anxiety of an anxiously racing heartbeat.  Levene's repeating guitar and synth motif, borrowed from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, creates the sense of mourning and lamenting the loss of a loved one.  The emotion in the song is so raw and uninhibited, it's very strange to see the promo video made for it as the band seem to be mugging it up during their miming of the track for the camera. On Second Edition, the track spins into a frenzy before before being abruptly cut off by the next track while, on Metal Box, it bleeds into the run-out locked groove to find its terminus.

THE SMELL OF RUBBER ON COUNTRY TAR

Things abruptly switch to the next track, Poptones.  The song tells the tale of kidnapping and murder, snatched straight out of the headlines of the tabloids.  It's almost beautiful, musically.  Keith spins a delicate spiderweb of guitar notes, cascading down upon each other and churning like a glittering Ferris wheel.  I say "almost" because it's all a bit like a bouquet of flowers that has died on the dressing table.  The tale being told is past tense, so there's no sense of urgency or threat.  There's only the aftermath as the deceased in question relates its own demise, the sound of music playing on a cassette in the car communicating the dispassionate telling of this sordid true crime story.   A walking bass loops around along with the guitar, meandering through a cycle of notes while the drums tumble along for the ride.  It's a dizzying swirl of sound as we feel the chill of a car boot in the country air and the "wet" of the dirt while we lose our "body heat".  Lydon intones the vocals in a cracked, reedy tone that reinforces the detachment from any direct experience.  Faintly in the background, his voice echoes down into the vortex, barely audible amid the distortion. 

MANGLED MACHINERY

Cut to the battle field for the completion of the trifecta on side two of the 2nd-E track listing.  The tape machine kicks into gear with a sweep of the pitch and we're marching.  The drums pat out a militant trundle while the bass, deep as usual, pushes underneath,  an insistent drill sergeant, counting out steps as the troops move forward.  All around, synthesizers swirl, discordant and droning, swooping through as teargas lingers on the horizon.  We're going to war, but it's corpses for cash in this modern military industrial complex.  The big money is meticulous and well organized as it poisons the landscape.  Lydon's voice searches for "meaning behind the moaning", but all he finds is dollar signs.  This is not conflict over ideals or beliefs or even traditional material concerns such as land rights.  This is military for money, as a mechanism for generating financial profit.  PiL were predicting the future here and, 40 years on, it's horrifying how precisely accurate their prediction was.  Synthetic gunshots ring out in jarring bursts.  When they hit rapid-fire, it makes you jump in your seat.  It's frightening and relentless and it all ends in a crescendo barrage.

IT IS YOUR NATURE

The next set of tracks gives the listener a bit of a breather.  I'm going by the double LP track listing here for this article as this is the ordering I was ingrained to follow until I finally got a proper copy of Metal Box a good year after first getting Second Edition.  First up are a couple of instrumentals.  Socialist comes staggering out of the speakers like some sort of short-circuiting robot.  The drums are weirdly syncopated with the bass and the whole thing is sprinkled with nothing more than some random synth bleeps and bloops.  This is followed by Graveyard, a track which previously appeared in a different mix with vocals on the B-Side of the Memories single as Another.  It was also recycled by Wobble for the track Not Another, reverting back to an instrumental, on his first solo LP.  It's a rhythmic, atmospheric piece with a decidedly morbid mood, most suitable for some midnight forays to the land of tombstones.  It would make a good soundtrack for waiting for The Great Pumpkin in the pumpkin patch.  This moody, brief trio is rounded off with The Suit, also recycled by Wobble for his solo album as Blueberry Hill.  Here, it's little more than a lonely bass line playing against a tape looped kick & snare with Lydon doing some of his infamous piano tinkling in the background (he often did this in the studio simply to annoy everyone).  Keith is nowhere to be found here.  Lydon's lyrics sneer and snigger at those who live off the ideas of others, never originating anything themselves.  Their look, their attitude, their manners, all borrowed from others and sold cheap to anyone stupid enough to buy into their fake personas.  It eventually  disappears down an echoing corridor to end this set.

ONE MORE SOB STORY

The final quartet of tracks brings us to some of the most harrowing moments of the album.  First up is another story torn from the morning papers, Bad Baby.  This was the audition piece for drummer Martin Atkins, who knocked it out in a single take, thus clinching his hiring by the band.  Here, he drops a minimalist funky beat while Wobble saunters along on bass.  Keith ads no more than the occasional car horn inspired atonal synth stab, but that's enough.  The track doesn't need any more.  Lydon fills in the rest with his recounting of a story of an infant being left alone in a parked car.  It's a story you hear every year, at least a dozen times, still to this day.  Lydon relates it rather offhand and almost distracted, like he's busy looking for gum in his pockets or something.  It's a song about thoughtlessness and that's the feeling that comes across in the delivery.

DON'T KNOW WHY I BOTHER, THERE'S NOTHING IN IT FOR ME

Things start to get harrier with No Birds, the post-punk equivalent to The Monkees' Pleasant Valley Sunday.  In this case, it's suburban malaise taken into discordant abandon.  The drums ripple with tribal toms while the bass pushes them along.  Once more, Lydon's piano is plinking in the background while Keith shaves off sheets of searing guitar.  Lydon's vocals paint a picture of disaffection, "a layered mass of subtle props."  He keeps insisting "this could be Heaven", but you know it's a long way from that.  The song trots along until it's suddenly struck down by the most manic piece on the album, Chant.  The drums are primal and thudding, like a mob stomping in rage.  The bass grumbles underneath and, like Albatross, there's barely any distinction between the notes, only an uneasy minor variation.  Keith's guitar thrashes and spits in all directions.  There doesn't seem to be any pattern to it, it's chaotic flailing imitating the mob mentality being evoked.  There's a "chant" building in the background.  "Love, war, fear, hate"!  At lease, that's what it sounds like.  It's not really possible to say for sure.  The chanting is so incessant, the words lose their meaning from repetition.  Then the lead vocals charge in, scouring the air with condemnation.  "Voice moaning in a speaker, never really get too close".  Riots, protests, demonstrations, a futility of empty gestures accomplishing nothing.  Meaningless slogans, unfulfilled promises, empty threats.  It's the anger of the world stewing away with no target, no hope of success and no objective to accomplish.  The song riots along until the channel gets abruptly changed because it's too miserable to take any more. 

It's all been a pretty bleak affair up to this point with the music and lyrics and even the packaging painting a grey, metallic picture of death, despair and hopelessness.  So how come I felt so good listening to it?  The final track in this assault, Radio 4, finally lifts us out of the bleakness for a brief glimpse of beauty.  It's the third instrumental and it's pretty much all Keith (though I've heard rumors that Ken Lockie, of Cowboys International, had a hand in it).  It's essentially no more than a wandering bass line and washes of synth chords moving in like waves crashing on the shore while a lonely lead line drifts over top.  Occasional cymbal splashes are the only accents.  It's peaceful, serine, contemplative and brings you back down to earth after the rest of the album's jarring, hypnotic melee.  It's waking up from the nightmare and realizing you're still okay... for now. 

WE'RE NOT A BAND, WE'RE A CORPORATION

After my first listen, I was stunned.  I went to high school the next day and tried to explain that I'd heard something beyond anything I'd heard before, but I didn't have the words and no one took note of me.  For the next 6 months or more, Second Edition was played at least once, start to finish, every single day.  I obsessed over it. I played it for anyone who would listen. It made most of the other records in my meager collection irrelevant.  Verses and choruses?  How quaint and old fashioned.  Melody and harmonies?  Passé.  It had thrown itself so far ahead of the pack, listening to most other music seemed pointless.  It also inspired.

Before hearing PiL, I'd had ideas of wanting to make my own music and had even taken guitar and bass lessons.  As a result, I had instruments sitting in my room and a cheap amp, which were mostly ignored for the prior two years.  I never seriously felt like I could do music myself.  I never thought I had the ability to make anything anyone would want to listen to.  I didn't think I was good enough and I didn't know where to start.  But Second Edition was like an instruction manual and it was a tool kit and a pile of building blocks, all in one.  It wasn't something to merely listen to.  It was something to study and learn from.  Its structures were primary and easy to comprehend.  Throw down a simple beat, add a few notes on bass, jam some guitar on top or just make weird noises and blather on about whatever you wanted to finish it off.  That was it.  That was all you needed to make your own music.  Within a year, I'd managed to buy a synth and a drum machine and a cheap cassette recorder.  I'd met a few friends who were also interested in fucking around with music, so we'd hang out in someone's basement or bedroom and crank out some noise.  I wouldn't have felt like I could do it if it weren't for PiL and this album, in particular.

PiL made you question every structure around music and understand that the rules were not fixed and that every aspect could be played with.  The way you play an instrument, the way to make a record, the way you package it, the way you structure your band.  You could have an accountant and a publicist be part of the band.  They did.   It was all up for grabs and you only needed to have the nerve to throw caution to the wind to try to make shit happen.  That was an important lesson and one I will always be grateful for learning. 

Eventually, as I mentioned, I got my hands on a sanctified original pressing of an actual Metal Box.  Back in 1980, living in Canada, that wasn't easy to do.  The Records on Wheels shop was getting in copies of NME and Sounds music papers on import, so I was buying them and checking out the classified ads at the back.  I found one selling copies of Metal Box plus the 12" of Memories and Death Disco.  I got my calculator out, went to the bank and managed to figure out the exchange between British Pounds and Canadian Dollars, bought a money order and sent it off in the mail.  With no internet or cheap overseas phones, it was a huge risk to send so much off like that.  It cost about $60 all total, which was a lot back then.  I had to wait about 3 months and often wondered if it would ever arrive, but one day, it finally did and at last, I had my hands on an actual copy of Metal Box.  I still have all those records today, prominently displayed on my CD shelf.

Over the years, I've purchased this album more times than any other.  There was my original Second Edition Canadian release in 1980, the above noted original Metal Box edition in 1981, a UK pressing of Second Edition in 1983  (still have that one),  my first CD copy of Second Edition circa 1989,  a CD replica of Metal Box sometime around 2002, the 2006 4 Men With Beards vinyl Metal Box reissue and, finally, the 2009 Virgin 30th anniversary 3 CD Metal Box replica (which I also still have).  That makes 7 different versions.  I couldn't get the expanded edition from 2016, sadly, because I'm poor now and can't afford such things.  At least I was able to hear the bonus material thanks to YouTube.  Anyway, the point is that no other piece of music in my life has demanded my attention and collecting obsessiveness like Metal Box.

Since its release, it has gone on to secure its position in popular music history as one of the most significant and influential albums of all time.  It rehabilitated dance music, allowing it to move into more experimental realms in the 1980s, after "disco" had made the 4x4 beat a cocaine dusted disgrace.  It can credibly be sited as the seed that grew into the bass music culture that spread throughout the 1990s and 2000s via downtempo, drum & bass and dubstep.  It may not have had the sales figures of a Sgt. Pepper, but it was no less revolutionary in terms of the effect it had on people who make music and art.

Where the Sex Pistols had been an attempt, at least for Mr. Rotten, to blast apart the ramparts of "rock 'n' roll", Metal Box showed you what could be built in its place, once you'd cleared away the rubble.  It was the next step beyond the nihilism of punk and actually a positive statement about the nature of creativity, which is why it had the odd effect of making me feel good even when the themes of the songs were so bleak and unsettling.  It made you feel like something was possible, in spite of all the horror.  And it also told you the truth about how fucked up things were.  You felt like it was honest about the world.  There was no fake optimism or plaster over the horrors "feel good" bullshit.  And it concealed a wickedly dark sense of humor, if you knew where to find it (just ask Dick Clark or Tom Snyder). 

In the end, it has proven itself more than capable of "sowing the seed of discontent".