BURNING SPEAR - GARVEY'S GHOST @45

 

April 23rd marks the 45th anniversary of the release of Burning Spear's fourth album, Garvey's Ghost, issued on this day in 1976. It is a "dub" remix collection of the songs originally released on the band's third album, Marcus Garvey. The album was fashioned by Island Record engineers, John Burns and Dick Cuthell, in their Hammersmith studio and, as such, is often disparaged for not involving the participation of the group members themselves, stamping it with the reputation as a callous cash-grab. Yet it remains one of my all-time favorite dub albums!

I didn't discover this album until sometime in 1981, approximately. It was my entry into the world of dub music. I'd developed an interest in exploring the genre after becoming beguiled by the sub-bass seduction of PiL's Metal Box/Second Edition a year before. I had read in the music press how much of that album's sound had been inspired by dub music, so I wanted to dive in for some more bass goodness. However, isolated as I was in the north-western miasma of Thunder Bay, ON, the selection of reggae music in the shops was meager to say the least. You might find a thin slip of a handful of records in any given shop at the time. Most were mainstays like Bob Marley or Peter Tosh. Finding anything that was an actual dub mix was next to impossible. Yet one day I chanced upon this album with the term "dub" emblazoned on its cover and I was on that shit like a thirsty man in a desert.

Though it may have lacked the creative inspiration of the more reputable dub albums of the era, the sheer perfection of the source material meant that it was bound to be a solid listen, no matter how rote the production efforts might be. The DNA of this music can't be disrupted and I still go back to this album regularly when I need a fix. It has a curious sense of space and absence that may even be enhanced by the half-assedness of the producers. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I just know there's a magic in these grooves that I can't deny.

RAMONES @ 45

 

On April 23, 1976, the debut LP of the Ramones was released, 45 years ago today. While, at the time of its release, it would seem to have little impact, at least in the pop charts, the undercurrent the band had unleashed would turn out to be one of the most impactful in rock music history.

The album was recorded in a mere 7 days with a puny budget of less than $6,500.00. Even the cover, which would become one of the most iconic images the band ever produced, cost only $125. But these meager investments proved to be more than worthwhile as this album became the stone dropped into the ocean who's ripples would send wave after wave of influence throughout the music world for decades to come.

The formula of the Ramones was deceptively simple on every facet, from sound to image. And yes, it was completely contrived, but didn't come across as forced or artificial. It felt all too legitimate and as real as an invading army. On stage, they were all ripped jeans, black leather jackets and bowl-cut hair. It was a remarkably effective visual and gave them a sense of unity and purpose. That focus was even more evident in the music, built out of blocky three-chord riffs played at breakneck speed, propelled by machine gun rapid drumming. As hard-edged as it sounded, sharp as a buzz-saw blade, every song rested on a melodic framework which was as optimized and efficient as anything the classically trained Kraftwerk could muster. And the hooks were inescapable, topped off by Joey's minimalist lyrics, often requiring no more than a handful of lines to communicate their theme as clearly as a perfectly cut diamond. They captured the zeitgeist of the bored teenager with precision and nuance in a subtly brutalist manner.

The Ramones were my gateway into what was called "punk" at that time. I was a little late to the party, not picking up my first album by them until Road To Ruin in 1978. I remember crossing that threshold so distinctly. I'd been collecting rock magazines like CREEM for a couple of years and kept seeing articles on these new bands like the Ramones all the time. At first, I was suspicious about this stuff, but then The Cars came out and nudged me into the "new wave" lane, and I became curious enough to want to take the next step into something harder edged.

I recall being so bored and disappointed with the mainstream rock music of the day. I'd buy an album and only like one or two songs on it and the rest was just "blech" - tedious blues based boogie-woogie rehash cliche crap. I was desperate for something fresh and vital and NEW! So I decided that the Ramones were going to be my first experiment in this direction and I was not disappointed. I remember pulling out the inner sleeve of the LP, which had a lyric sheet on it and I was baffled by how short all the songs were. Maybe only one 4 line stanza for some songs and that was IT! Putting the record on my parent's behemoth console stereo, the speakers burst with these frantic guitar riffs, speed-demon drumming and Joey's nasal yet inescapably melodic whine. He was like some kind of giant insect, like someone had crossed Gilligan/Bob Denver with a praying mantis. Alien but enchanting.

Four and a half decades later and this music still holds its own and has become soaked into western popular culture. Some of their songs are even used for sports chants, a sure sign that you've become a social icon. Sadly, all four of the faces on this first album have now slipped their mortal bonds and moved off of this material plain, yet their contribution will resonate on for generations and this album will continue to stand as ground zero for that explosion.

FUNKADELIC - THE ELECTRIC SPANKING OF WAR BABIES @ 40

 

April 14th marks the 40th anniversary for the album, The Electric Spanking of War Babies by Funkadelic, released on this day in 1981. It was their 13th studio album and the last album to be officially released under this imprint until 2007’s By Way of the Drum.

By 1981, George Clinton’s “Mothership” was looking pretty disconnected. Dissatisfied factions of the P-Funk gang were splitting off to form rival projects, like a competing version of “Funkadelic” and the aptly titled “Mutiny”. These creative woes were only symptoms of the legal ones as the web of side projects and contracts began to ensnare the entire operation in a morass of constraints and conflicts. All this business of trying to keep so many creative plates spinning was taking its tole on Clinton and his crew, resulting in some antagonistic attitudes towards him and his leadership. As these conflicts began to fester, the effect on the products released by the P-Funk organization began to show in the form of less than stellar albums that lacked the focus and consistency of what they’d put out at their peak. Yet with all this chaos and confusion going on, somehow War Babies turned out to be one of the strongest P-Funk releases in years.

By the time this album was recorded, the original 1970 Funkadelic lineup had dwindled down to only Clinton, Ray Davis and Eddie Hazel. But they did have the benefit of Zapp main man, Roger Troutman chipping in for these sessions, his only appearance on a Fundadelic album. Babies would also be the last album to feature P-Funk mainstays Garry Shider, Junie Morrison, Mallia Franklin, and Jessica Cleaves. The album also features numerous contributions from Sly Stone & Bootsy Collins. Although a lot of the old guard were soon to depart, the album did include numerous new faces who would become regular contributors throughout the coming years.

War Babies was originally conceived as a double album, so there was a lot of material recorded for the release, but Warner Bros balked at the idea and insisted it be trimmed down to a single disc. This resulted in a number of recordings being shelved, though some, like Atomic Dog, would find their way onto Clinton’s first “solo” release the following year, Computer Games, which would become a major hit. But it wasn’t only the size of the LP that the label took issue with. The cover by Pedro Bell, longtime artist for the P-Funk bands, set the executives into panic mode with it’s obviously phallic spaceship housing a barely clad, bare bottomed lady being paddled by robotic armaments. They refused to release it and the album ended up using a heavily censored version where all the “naughty bits” were covered over with concealing graphics. The title was an allusion to the Vietnam war and the “boomer” generation who were victimized by it.

Though this LP represented a kind of end point for the Funkadelic manifestation of the P-Funk crew, it was by no means the end of the line overall as they would morph into George’s backing band as well as transition into the P-Funk All-Stars for other releases. The mercurial nature of this collection of players always meant that they were too big to fit under one hat or even an oversized umbrella and the world would always have to pay attention to keep up with their next guise. This album marks the end of one era and does so by bringing things back up from the slump they’d been in and sets them on course for the decade to come.

FALLING IN LOVE WITH FARGO

 

Fargo, the series, languished on My List on Netflix for at least two years or longer, un-watched and repeatedly bumped by other series. I added it to that list as soon as it came out, but something always seemed to demand my attention ahead of buckling down to watch this series. It finally got some sense of urgency for me after season 4 came out and I kept hearing all this chatter about how good it was. So with the new year underway, I finally decided that 2021 was gonna be the time to get my ass in gear and get into this show. After finishing the last episode of season 4 this week, man, am I ever glad I finally took the time to get into this! I won't get into any plot spoilers here, so don't worry if you've not got started or haven't seen it all yet. I just wanna make some generalized comments.

If you're not familiar, the series is loosely connected to the 1996 feature film from the Cohen bros of the same name and is an anthology series where each season tells a different story with a different cast, for the most part. There is connective tissue that runs throughout the series, creating a singular universe where all these stories take place and all these people live, but you gotta pay close attention to spot all these connections because they aren't always obvious and that's part of the fun of it all.

But the biggest draw has to be the craft that goes into creating all of these incredibly well rendered characters. The complexity and "layering", a term I use with particular gravitas, are spectacular and their stories play out like watching a pinball get shot into the game field, bouncing off all these seemingly random events and happenstance. It's thrilling and unexpected and the consequences of each reaction spawn their own set of responses, exponentially increasing the complexity of the interacting plots weaving around each other. It's all gloriously choreographed and punctuated with some dazzling violence, all the while couching it in the politeness and amiability of the mid-western culture it uses as its foundational context. It's an example of some first class, grade A writing for the screen.

The other half of the equation for all these characters after the writing is, of course, the casting and their performances and all four seasons are chocked full of wonderful players doing some of their best work. A consistent trait in all of this is how so many of these performers manage to find completely fresh ways to play these roles that, in many cases, show a versatility beyond what you might expect from that actor. For example, the big revelation in terms of performances in season 4 comes from Chris Rock, who I've never seen do a dramatic role like this and he pulls it off brilliantly. In season 3, Ewan McGregor is virtually unrecognizable and it took me a few episodes to realize he was actually playing two parts! In season 2, Jesse Plemons steals the show as the affable, but daring "butcher" and season 1 belongs to Billy Bob Thornton, who makes the best hair style choice since Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men!

There are recurring themes throughout the series that stylistically tie it all together. There's the "good person" who gets caught up in a bad situation. There's the vagaries of chance undermining the best laid plans of corrupt schemers. There's the intersection of the ordinary and the extraordinary. There's the surprising connections that span decades and miles of distance that flow through all of this storytelling like subterranean river systems. All of it is so meticulously balanced and threaded through each season that you can only stand back and marvel at the wonderful tapestry of it all.

So, if you're like me and you've been procrastinating on this show for a while, STOP! Get on this shit and enjoy the wild ride!

NOTE: Don't let Netflix push you into watching the newest season first. I fucking HATE how they default to this. Start with season 1 and watch the damn thing in its proper order. Season 4 isn't on there just yet, so you may have to resort to other sources if you're impatient like me.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - FLOWERS OF ROMANCE @40

 

April 10th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Public Image Ltd’s third studio album, Flowers of Romance, issued on this day in 1981. It followed on the heels of the release of the single of the same name a couple of weeks prior.

After PiL returned to the UK from their short tour of the US in May of 1980, things quickly fell apart for the band. Bassist, Jah Wobble, was ousted or split, depending on who you talk to, and went out the door with a box of the band’s money as payment for his services. Wobble’s penchant for recycling PiL backing tracks for his solo albums had bent Johnny’s nose out of shape enough that a working relationship was no longer possible between the two. Drummer, Martin Atkins, was kinda out of a job too, though amicably, for no other apparent reason than the band going into a state of inactivity. PiL essentially went dormant for a few months, only releasing the live Paris Au Printemps album as a stopgap against the bootleg market and to give fans something to tide them over as there seemed to be no new music on the horizon for 1980.

The remnants of the band wouldn’t venture into the studio to begin work on a new LP until early October and they would do so with an arrest and court case looming for Lydon thanks to a trumped up assault charge incurred while on a trip to Ireland. It was an incident which would have him spending time in the notorious Mountjoy Prison, an experience which would contribute directly to one song and color John’s mood for the entire album. Add to that the near constant police and overbearing fan harassment at his Gunter Grove home and you’ve got the perfectly oppressive, paranoid and claustrophobic aura necessary to create some uncompromising, confrontational music.

However, once Lydon and Levene found themselves in Virgin’s Manor Studio, inspiration wasn’t exactly forthcoming. At first they seemed to be lost and directionless. Keith was often distracted with his “habit” while Lydon languished in front of the TV, though not without spotting the odd “ghost” in the old mansion, a specter which, though destined to become subject matter for a song, had more substance than the yet to manifest album. The Manor unsettled John enough that he took to sleeping in the coal shed because the main house creeped him out so much. The presence of a new studio toy did end up helping a bit though. Virgin head, Richard Branson, had managed to score some Balinese bamboo drums while traveling, which Keith put to use for Hymies Him, an instrumental track that was intended to be a soundtrack component for a feature film project (Wolfen by Michael Wadleigh), but that offer ended up falling through. Hymies Him was the only track to come from those first two weeks of studio time before they relocated to the brand new Townhouse studios in London, which were still receiving some finishing touches in its construction.

After Steve Lillywhite was dropped, engineer Nick Launey came onboard as co-producer. Since they no longer had a bass player, rather than try to bring someone new into the band, their intuitive decision was to shift the focus to the drums and ignore the bass guitar almost entirely. At the Townhouse, its drum kit had been set up on a wooden frame in this unfinished stone room over-top a somewhat large open pit. The acoustics in the room lent the drums a massive natural reverb effect and recording experiments found them to have a walloping great sound with little post processing required beyond pinning the levels to the absolute maximum volume. The sound they got was so impressive, after hearing it, Phil Collins would hire Launey to engineer the same sound for his solo album he’d started work on. What was missing from this equation, however, was a drummer. At the time, Martin was about to go on tour with his band, Brian Brain, but had a few days off and, after popping into the studio for a visit, agreed to come in as a hired gun to lay down some tracks. He ended up recording three credited, finished songs for the album: Four Enclosed Walls, Under the House & Banging the Door. In recent years, other tracks with Atkins such as the original version of 1981 and the unfinished track, Vampire, have surfaced from these sessions on retrospective box sets.

Atkins also did a lot of experimenting on other sounds with Launey while he was there, like the strange ticking sound that provides the background ambience on Four Enclosed Walls, achieved by placing his Micky Mouse pocket watch on a drum head for additional resonance and amplifying it with a dual stereo harmonizer effect. They also had access to an an AMS digital sampler, one of the first digital devices ever available. One day Martin played a drum groove and Nick pushed 'Loop Lock' and tried to make a perfect loop, but the device was too primitive for precision fine-tuning, so you couldn't actually edit it to get it in time. Working within its limitations, Launey randomly kept locking in different beats as Martin played them, until he got one that sounded interesting. That limping, off-kilter loop became the basis for the song Track 8.

With Nick’s help, Martin Atkins would turn out to be the “hero” during this production as his contributions ended up galvanizing the project into something that was starting to have a sense of direction and purpose. His drumming was so much more than mere timekeeping as he came up with these unusual, distinctive patterns that sounded like nothing else and contained their own musical structure, something which allowed songs to stand with minimal arrangements. With these foundations, Lydon and Levene were able to start to piece together the remaining elements, often chaotically and with a kind of mad abandon. Tracks would be left sparse in most cases with odd crazy bits thrown into the mix, like the out-of-tune banjo missing three strings that John beat with a drum stick on Phenagen. Even the TV, a fixture in the studio, became a sound source for such elements as the bits of random opera singing seeping into Under the House, the song which commemorates Lydon’s ghostly encounter at the Manor. Levene found little use for his guitar most of the time, favoring his modular Roland System 100 setup. Only Go Back featured him laying down one of his characteristically searing guitar riffs against a funky drum track, which he also played. When guitar infrequently appeared in other tracks, it was more incidental and was often heavily treated or backwards. As previously mentioned, bass was nearly entirely forsaken on the album with the exception of a bit on Track 8 and Banging the Door, where it throbbed heavy beneath swirls of droning synth ambience and Martin’s martial drum patterns, coming closest to anything done on Metal Box.

Lydon’s vocals were the cherry that would land on the top of the cake when he managed to pull his lyrics together and felt there was enough of a musical bed for them to rest upon. For this album, his lyrics were some of his most esoteric and ambiguous, like the howling call to prayer that opens the album on Four Enclosed Walls, conjuring up images of deserts and holy warriors on the prowl. Yet more concrete subject matter was also dealt with, from sexual inadequacy (Track 8), to annoying obsessive fans (Banging the Door) to right-wing fascism (Go Back) to life in prison (Francis Massacre), Lydon delivered some of the most harrowing and personal performances of his career.

Eventually, emerging from a process that seemed like some kind of barely organized chaos, PiL had an album, albeit a brief one. Clocking in at a lean 34 minutes, just over half the runtime of the monolithic Metal Box, Flowers of Romance offered a tight bouquet of nine songs with none of the sprawling 9-10 minute dirges that had kicked off the previous two albums. Three to five minutes each was plenty for everything on this record. The overall sound was expansive and spacious, highlighting the air between the instruments and the vocals. This made the elements that were there stand out in sharp relief. The emphasis on percussion was actually quite coincidentally contemporary with the trend of the time with bands like Bow Wow Wow and Adam and the Ants going tribal with their double drummers, though the end result with PiL was entirely non-commercial. In fact, it could be argued that what they delivered to Virgin Records was one of the LEAST commercial albums a major label artist ever handed to their label, at least since Lou Reed dropped Metal Machine Music on the heads of RCA.

The album’s title is a reference to the short lived punk band that Sid Vicious had prior to joining the Sex Pistols. It’s not clear why Lydon was drawn back to this name for this album, but it somehow seemed to make sense. For the packaging, which returned to the more conventional cardboard sleeve after the financially prohibitive metal canister of the previous album, both the single and LP used Jeanette Lee’s Polaroid photos, with the album opting for a photo of Jeanette herself up front with no text, simply bordered by black. She’s shown in mid frenzy, with a rose in her teeth, in what appears to be the throws of some debauchery. The rear and inner sleeve contain all the text in an archaic Middle Eastern flavored font and lyrics printed in a run-on religious script style with no separation between the songs, like a transcript from some cloistered illuminated holy book.

I remember distinctly when the album came out. I was heartbroken when I heard that Wobble had left and was concerned PiL were finished. In Thunder Bay, ON, I got very meager press regarding UK bands, so I had no idea they had a new album due when I spotted it on the racks. I was in a hi-fi stereo store I never usually bought records from as they only had a small selection of mostly top 40 releases, but this day in April, I spotted this strange looking record. I didn’t know it was PiL at first since there was no text on the front, but it looked so different from the rest of what was on the shelves, my instincts told me to pick it up. When I saw the text on the back, I felt my heart skip and rushed to the checkout. I immediately called my friend who had a good hi-fi system at his house and went over for a first listen.

When we played it, cranking up the volume for maximum effect, it was pretty obvious from the beginning this wasn’t going to be more of what had been done on Metal Box. The bass was gone and it was all drums and weird incidental sounds. It was so completely different from anything they’d done before. It was a shock and I have to admit I didn’t know quite what I felt about it at first, but it would grow on me quickly and, over the years, I’ve come to appreciate its distinctiveness as the completion of a triptych along with the prior two PiL studio albums. But it would also mark the outer limits of their experimentation and become a barrier past which they’d not be able to extend.

After this and the disastrous New York Ritz multimedia performance in May of 1981, they’d regroup and head back into more conventional rock band territory and they’d never venture this far out into the avant-garde again. They’d effectively painted themselves into a creative corner and the only direction left was irony and faux commercialism, as exemplified by the unfinished Commercial Zone LP that followed and This Is Not A Love Song, their most successful chart single. 1984’s This Is What You Want.. LP had the last dying embers of that provocative fire flickering. These efforts were not without their charms, but once Keith left, that sense of boldness and innovation pretty much evaporated from PiL’s DNA and never returned.

ROGER TAYLOR - FUN IN SPACE @40

 

April 6th marks the 40th anniversary of Roger Taylor’s first solo LP, Fun In Space, which was released on this day in 1981. As well as being his first solo album, it was also the first solo release from any member of Queen. Roger had previously only released a solo single, I Wanna Testify b/w Turn on the TV, back in 1977.

The album was recorded during downtime between Queen recording and touring beginning in 1978. For this album, in addition to writing all the songs and co-producing, Roger handled nearly all the performance duties including drums, guitars, bass, vocals and the majority of the keyboards. The remainder of keyboard contributions came from co-producer, David Richards, who would become a frequent collaborator with Queen on several of their albums throughout the 1980s. Though Queen were notorious for their “NO SYNTHESIZERS” proclamations on all their albums in the 1970s, up until The Game, Fun In Space counters with the tongue-in-cheek joke, "P.P.S. 157 synthesizers”.

The front cover design was inspired by a Jim Laurier cover of Creepy from the July 1980 issue. In that respect, it shares a similar origin story with the cover of Queen’s News of the World (1977), which was based on a 1953 cover of Astounding Science Fiction. The alien font shown on the front is mostly upside-down Hebrew, though it does not actually spell anything. On the rear, the artwork is reversed to show Taylor holding the original Creepy cover. The cover design was handled by Hipgnosis with photography by Peter Christopherson.

While the album just managed to scrape the lower reaches of the UK top 20 album charts, it went largely unnoticed across the pond in the North American markets. Even though I was a massive Queen fan throughout the latter half of the 1970s, by the time this came out, I was very much onto more progressive avenues and didn’t bother to check out this album at all until some 30 years after its release. That’s kind of a shame as I suspect I’d have enjoyed it if I’d given it a chance earlier. Roger’s songs with Queen have often been my favorites with tracks like Drowse, Tenement Funster, Loser In the End and Sheer Heart Attack being only a few of the standouts he contributed to the band. There are good songs to be found on this solo album, but I do have to say they never quite reach the heights of his Queen classics. Still, it’s an LP that is worth a listen.

Taylor would eventually compliment this album in 2013 with a sequel solo album, Fun on Earth, which was the album that reminded me that I should backtrack and spend some time with its 1981 companion. The two albums taken together offer a wonderful set of “then and now” music showcasing Roger Taylor outside the often overshadowing sphere of Queen.

RUSH - 2112 @ 45

 

April 1st marks the 45th anniversary of the release of Rush’s fourth studio LP, 2112 (Twenty-one Twelve), issued on this day in 1976.

After the release of their previous album, Caress of Steel (1975), Rush were at a breaking point. The album had failed to connect with fans or critics, album sales were low and concert attendance was dropping off. The group were at a loss as they could feel the audience weren’t connecting with their latest music when they played it live. Their instincts were telling them this was the path they were meant to follow, but the commercial failure of their efforts left them shaken and losing confidence. They were also financially on the precipice of collapse and their international record label had their hand on the plug and were ready to pull. It was only through the intervention of their manager, Ray Danniels, that they were able to hang onto their contract. He flew down to the US offices and desperately pitched to the label heads that the band would refocus and deliver something much more commercially accessible and move away from the “progressive” tendencies they’d indulged in for Caress of Steel.

The band, however, had other intentions. They knew they were on the block and the ax was ready to chop, so they figured, fuck it! If they were going to go down, why not go down doing what they believed in. To this end, while touring throughout the latter part of 1975 and early 1976, they set about putting together the material which would go into their next album. They were careful not to let Danniels hear any of it until they’d worked it all out in detail and had what they felt was a solid, fully realized concept. They’d doubled down on the progressive approach and concocted a concept album inspired by the writings of controversial Russian philosopher and fiction author, Ayn Rand.

Drummer Neil Peart had come up with a science fiction story involving a dystopian fascist religious society where rationality had been outlawed along with music in favor of strict theocratic collectivism. Their story would tell the tale of a lone hero who would rediscover the magic of music by finding an abandoned electric guitar among some ancient ruins and bring the power of rock ’n’ roll back to the people. The cover would symbolize this via what would become the bands trademark icon, the nude man assailing against the red star. The symbolism references the red star commonly used in collectivist governments such as China and the USSR while the nude male represents the purity of intent of the individual fighting against the state.

The band spent two weeks recording in Toronto in early 1976. Once the LP was completed, they threw their “hail Marry” pass at the record buying public and hoped for the best. Much to their relief, the album was an immediate hit with both fans and critics, helping to break them commercially, not only in the US, but also the overseas markets in the UK and Europe as they toured there for the first time. On the road, the band were reinvigorated. The audiences came back in bigger numbers than ever before and people “got it” at last. It became proof positive of their belief in the value of staying true to their principals and served to buttress their determination to maintain that approach for the remainder of their very long and very successful career. It remains one of their most artistically lauded and highest selling LPs, only coming in second behind Moving Pictures.