Released
on February 26th, 1979, the soundtrack to the Sex Pistols movie, The
Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, turns 45 years old today. While it's hard
to call this a proper album by the group, among the clutter and
confusion, there are some genuinely amusing punk gags and a few nasty
bits of ephemera worth the price of admission.
Before the group
imploded at the end of their chaotic 1978 US mini-tour, Malcolm McLaren
had been working on the idea of a feature film for the band, initially
titled, "Who Killed Bambi?". With Johnny Rotten unceremoniously dumped
after their San Francisco gig in January of 1978, the prospect of
putting together a feature film, let along the film's soundtrack, seemed
rather slim. Yet McLaren was determined to push this project past the
finish line, even if he had to run it on fumes, including resorting to
hiding cameras in bushes to try to film Lydon while on vacation in
Jamaica & scouting reggae bands for Richard Branson. It was
fortunate then that Malcolm managed to come across a forgotten 1976 tape
of the band rehearsing.
The demo contained recordings of the
band performing a number of cover songs, many of which were part of
their live set at the time. These included The Monkees' Stepping Stone,
The Modern Lovers' Roadrunner, Chuck Berry's Johnny B Goode and The
Who's Substitute. An early demo version of Anarchy in the UK was also
uncovered. None of these recordings had ever been released before, so
Malcolm came up with the idea of doing a bit of recycling in order to
have a few building blocks upon which to structure some sort of
soundtrack. Unfortunately, the demos were not of the best recording
quality, being only 4 track roughs, but the vocal and bass parts were
salvageable, or rather had to be as both Johnny and Glen were no longer
in the band. At minimum, he could re-record Steve's guitar and Paul's
drum parts again, to help freshen up the sound and allow him to claim
the album contained actual Sex Pistols songs that were not previously
released.
To fill out the rest of the double LP capacity,
McLaren assembled a pastiche of odds and ends, firstly by having the
remaining band members record some new material with lead vocals either
being provided by them or by guest vocalists. Sid recorded cover
versions of My Way, Something Else and C'mon Everybody, artifacts that
would become his only proper studio appearances before his tragic death.
Paul & Steve each provided lead vocals on a couple of tracks which
were essentially prototypes for their post-Pistols project, The
Professionals. Edward Tudor-Pole provided vocals for several tracks as
well, but the most controversial guest was exiled "Great Train Robber",
Ronnie Biggs, who provided vocals for Belsen Was a Gas and No One Is
Innocent. That inclusion drew a lot of criticism because of Biggs'
violent history and the impression that the appearance celebrated those
heinous crimes.
The rest of the album is patched together with a
handful of novelty songs, such as the disco medley by a fake studio
band, The Black Arabs, and some French street performers were used on a
parody of Anarchy in the UK. Malcolm took the task of crooning the
saccharine, sentimental, You Need Hands. Other than the salvaged demos
from 1976, Johnny Rotten had nothing whatsoever to do with the
production of the album, completely disavowing it and the film upon
their release and asserting they were NOT legitimate Sex Pistols
products, but merely another of Malcolm's cons.
Taken as a
whole, the album is a hodgepodge of occasionally amusing relics and
random moments of ecstatic excess. Sid's rendition of My Way, for
example, has gone on to become his signature statement of nihilistic
self-destruction. The Pistols demos capture the band in a state of raw
good humour, having a laugh before it all became too fucking crazy.
Even the disco song is an amusing poke in the eye to the punks who clung
to pretensions about what the movement was. In the end, the record
does what it says on the tin. It's a total "swindle", but fun enough if
you're in on the joke.
Marking
its 45th anniversary today is the debut album from the Sex Pistols,
Never Mind the Bollocks, which was released on October 27th, 1977.
After spending the previous year creating havoc within the British youth
scene and terrorizing government authorities with their bad behavior on
the TV screen and stage, the Sex Pistols finally got themselves in a
studio and created one of the most influential LPs in rock & roll
history, albeit with Johnny Rotten intending it to be the end of rock
& roll, full stop!
I believe that rock & roll music
essentially has 3 epochs and they are hinged upon the appearances of its
“holy trinity”: Elvis Presley, The Beatles and the Sex Pistols. When
you look back across the history of the genre, it’s those tent-poles
which most define the major shifts in its nature and cultural potential.
Elvis introduced it to the mainstream, The Beatles turned it into a
fine art and the Sex Pistols weaponized it. I say that because the
Pistols were the last rock band to wield any legitimate sense of threat
to the status quo. Sure, there have been controversial trends and
popular movements, but the Pistols were the last band to seem dangerous
and to make the establishment quake in their boots. Anyone who’s come
along since then has been no more than an irritant to the powers that
be. The Pistols were actually debated in Parliament and the government
sought to crush them and stop them from spreading their message of
revolt, going so far as to actively ban them from performing. It’s an
unprecedented reaction which simply hasn’t happened since then.
Their
one and only proper studio album now stands as a memorial to a scant
few years when outrage seemed to have some import in the world. It’s
also a damn good set of songs, well written both musically and
lyrically. It says something about its time and the society that tried
to silence it. Those messages remain relevant today, perhaps even more
so than at the time they were penned. The fact it’s been co-opted into
crass commercialism since then still doesn’t take away from the fact
that it drew a line in the sand and we still look back at that time as a
moment of epiphany and realization. Perhaps it was all a "swindle" as
Malcolm retroactively postulated, but it changed the way people thought
and that change keeps resonating around the world to this day.
As
trite as kids thrashing out a few chords and bellowing their angst can
be, you can still see when a culture is coming of age by the point at
which its youth twig to the methodology and iconography of “punk”. You
can observe these scenes happen in places like the middle east, Asia or
Russia and see that there’s still a spirit of rebellion struggling to
find a voice. It may often fail to create a distinction from Ramones
style thrash, but it does show a desire to expose the energy pent up
during that time when a new generation demands to be heard.
A lot
of people want to push the flashpoint for punk to New York with the
Ramones & New York Dolls or Detroit with the Stooges & MC5 and,
while the structural elements may have been coming together in those
places, they were only so much fuel without a spark. Those bands and
scenes, as legitimate and eventually influential as they became, were
only known to a tiny clique of hipsters until the Sex Pistols came along
and put a match to all that kindling. It wasn’t until Johnny Rotten
snarled that he was an “antichrist” that the world perked up and took
notice of that generation and its rage. Others may have come sooner,
but no one else struck the spark that would ignite the world. There is
most certainly an undeniable “BP - before Pistols” and “AP - after
Pistols” demarcation within the lineage of rock ’n’ roll.
I
remember being intimidated to even buy Bollocks at the time I was first
crossing the threshold from mainstream music into the looming
underground. I was just starting to delve into the punk and new wave
scenes and had a mere handful of records by bands like The Clash,
Ramones, Elvis Costello & DEVO. I thought it was the nastiest thing
in the world to pick up a Sex Pistols record and almost felt like I had
to smuggle it into the house without my mom spotting it. When I heard a
song like Bodies with it’s litany of “fuck this and fuck that” in a
lyric about abortion, well I felt it was about as controversial a record
as I could possibly bring home. 45 years on and it still sounds as
ferocious and confrontational as it did back then. Of course it’s all
paper tigers now and nobody’s gonna be threatened by a rock star again,
but for a special, precious moment, the danger did seem rather real.
Most musical artists take a bit of time to get up to speed. It usually takes an album or two before they really hit their stride. Sometimes, like Kraftwerk, they may travel some strange roads before the epiphany hits and they finally find their “Autobahn”, in their case, their 4th LP. But some groups come out of the gate with debut albums so iconic and well defined, they spend the rest of their careers trying to surpass them. Some groups never quite manage that feat and some groups simply stop after their moment of glory and never put out another record.
Top 10 lists are a bit trite and overdone, but I’m doing one more for purely personal amusement. It started as a meme in social media to list outstanding debuts, but I wanted to focus it a bit more. This list is very personal in terms of the records all having deep meaning and significance for me and they certainly show my age given they were all released within a few years of each other. They also adhere to certain other criteria. Mostly, they represent groups who hit it out of the park with their first album and never surpassed it with any subsequent release, at least as far as my estimation is concerned. Some may have come damn close, but for all practical purposes, if you have this album and none other, you’ll pretty much get the full picture of what they had to offer. In many cases, they have major cultural significance in that they were the cornerstone of a particular musical movement. In other cases, they simply represent the group’s own peak of performance and cohesion. Whatever the case, for me personally, each title listed here stands alone and introduces the artist without any sense of vagueness or tentativeness. It comes at you with clear confidence in its merits and meanings.
With that, let’s dive in. The ordering here is not particularly critical, but I have somewhat sorted them in terms of at least personal significance.
FM - Black Noise (1977)
In late 1976, Toronto based keyboardist and bassist, Cameron Hawkins, and violinist, mandolin player, Nash the Slash, formed an unlikely duo as FM. Through whatever connections, happenstance or serendipity within the local arts community, they managed to land a spot on TV Ontario’s Nightmusic program, where they played their debut live public performance, initially broadcast on November 3rd of that year. I happened to catch it, by chance, and it knocked my 13 year old brain sideways. I knew little of music or how to make it at that time and was just starting to get curious, but seeing space-hippie Cameron with his stacks of synthesizers on the one side and proto-steampunk Nash, with his electric violin and mandolin on the other, was definitely like something out of some strange hallucination. It stuck with me and dug it’s hooks in deeper when I happened to catch the show when it was repeated a few months later.
In 1978, I finally spotted the Black Noise album in one of my local record shops and, recognizing the band from the program, snapped it up. By then, the group had added drummer Martin Deller to the mix, something I was initially suspicious of because I thought this band without a drummer, using one of the earliest drum machines I’d ever heard, was such a novelty and I thought that adding a drummer might make them a bit more conventional. But the album still showcased their idiosyncrasies. As a progressive rock album, it had the unique distinction of having NO GUITARS on it. Nash’s use of violin and mandolin instead guaranteed that FM would always have a stamp of the atypical, even as Nash moved on and others replaced him.
Nash’s departure, however, also ensured that the debut album would possess a certain nuance and charm that no other player would be able to fully duplicate. His replacement for the next two albums, Ben Mink, was clearly a talented musician, someone who would more than prove his talents with his work with K.D. Lang in later years, but there was no replacing Hash’s style and personality, something he took with him when he became an iconic solo performer. The albums that came after Black Noise are not without their charms, but the depth and breadth of this debut remains unassailable to this day. Even when Nash returned to the fold for a couple of albums in the mid 1980s, the material veered too much into commercial mainstream territory to threaten the primacy of Black Noise.
It may be an album that only Canadians properly appreciate. Phasers On Stun still gets regular rotation on Canadian oldies radio. Personally, however, it holds a special place in my musical heart. Nash was a major inspiration for me both with FM and as a solo performer and Black Noise and it’s presaging TV special are the root of that influence.
Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth (1980)
Moxham brothers, Stuart and Phillip, along with vocalist Alison Statton, came together long enough to put out one album in 1980. On the surface, it’s a modest little collection of modest little songs by a trio of modest musicians from Wales. It’s quiet and introspective and doesn’t make a lot of fuss about itself, but it somehow still manages to loom on the horizon like a great monolith. Colossal Youth by Young Marble Giants has held up remarkably well over the years, retaining every ounce of it’s persuasiveness while refusing to give in to the ravages of time and trends. Driven by a chintzy little drum machine and supported by Phil’s sonorous bass, Stuart delicately crafts deftly minimalist guitar and organ riffs around which Alison flits about like a precious little bird with her vocals. The economy of the music here is positively neurotic in its precision. There’s not a single sound or note more than absolutely necessary to contain the essence of each piece.
Cowboys International - The Original Sin (1979)
In 1979, Ken Lockie put together an album of modern alternative rock that fused first-rate song writing with arrangements that leaned heavily into the emerging synth-wave being pioneered by the likes of Ultravox and Gary Numan. While most people were pushing things into the colder Kraftwerk styled aesthetic of dystopian mechanization, Lockie took his sound into a more romantic, emotive direction, presaging the “New Romantic” movement which would peak with bands like Duran Duran. Lockie’s outfit, which featured the likes of Clash drummer, Terry Chimes, and guest appearances by PiL guitarist, Keith Levene, crafted a seamless collection of memorable songs which rode the edge of the new music coming from the UK. The PiL connection would actually have deeper roots beyond this album with Ken having a hand in the Radio Four track on Metal Box and him nearly becoming a fifth member of the band during the ill fated Commercial Zone sessions a few year later. All this only indicates how much Lockie was on the forefront of what was truly progressive pop music, both in terms of style and content. Yet Cowboys International would only issue this one album before fading into the discount bins. A travesty considering the exceptional quality of this album.
Specials (1979)
If you were to only have one ska album in your collection, it might as well be this one because it’s simply so concise and thorough that it captures every important aspect of the genre, at least as far as it manifested in its revived form at the end of the 1970s. Following in the wake of punk, it took the anger and social outrage of that scene and channeled it into a racially diverse commentary on cultural fusion. The “2 Tone” ideology of black and white working together in balance and unity was a forward thinking approach that seems so sadly distant in the “Brexit” era of UK bigotry.
Though there were many vital artists who also came out of this scene, the Specials remain the most memorable and this album captures all the best of their essence across 14 compact and infectious songs. With Jerry Dammers as the principal songwriter and Terry Hall taking most of the lead vocals, the group nailed it on every essential social issue they tackled and did so with both humor and a kind of morose mockery that gave them their edge. This careful balance didn’t last long, however, as Hall, along with Neville Staple and Lynval Golding split off to form Fun Boy Three, who themselves created a debut album that deserves honorable mention here. Though they wouldn’t create another album of this strength, they would at least drop a mammoth statement of a single with Ghost Town in 1981. On its own, it could be one of the greatest singles of all time.
Killing Joke (1980)
Following in the wake of groups like Public Image Ltd, Joy Division & Gang of Four, Killing Joke’s eponymous debut formed the bridge between the rawness of punk and the terror of industrial music. For better or worse, Killing Joke were the ones who laid the foundations for the kind of industrial rock which would become mainstream with bands like Nine Inch Nails. For me, Killing Joke’s debut is the quintessence of what that kind of music can be when it’s done right. The use of synthesizer with the grinding guitars and chugging drums is a prototype for dozens of bands who followed in their footsteps. But where most of the bands who came after relied on little more than grind and swagger, Killing Joke excelled with solid song writing or, at the very least, infectious hooks to secure each track a notable spot on the album.
The B-52’s (1979)
Though their biggest hit would come a few years later with Love Shack, overall, the 1979 debut from The B-52’s simply can’t be surpassed in terms of it’s encapsulation of vintage kitsch culture. Retro fetishism can be pretty much traced back to land squarely on the doorstep of these Athens, GA natives and every track on their first album oozes with lava lamp science fiction dance party deliciousness.
Right from the first twang of Ricky’s Peter Gunn inspired riff for Planet Clair, the controls are set for the heart of the stunning as things just get more fabulous with each Shu-ga-loo, Hippie Shake and Camel Walk. The showcase hit, Rock Lobster, offers up an absurdist horror movie teen freakout the likes of which hasn’t been heard since The Horror of Party Beach offered up its radioactive sea monster stuffed with hotdogs.
Suicide (1977)
If you want to deal with it semantically, Suicide were the first “punk” band. They were the first to use the term to describe their music. The term appears on a flyer for a 1972 gig by the group, predating any other group’s use of the term by a good 3-4 years. Their debut LP in 1977 still stands as one of the starkest, most intense statements of electronic music ever put to vinyl. Taking the core DNA strands of rock-a-billy shuddering and shaking, They shot them through a time tunnel into a dystopian future and demanded the world look upon the horror they had seen. No other band could conjure as antagonistic an audience response while daring anyone to have the nerve to try and stop them, and some did. That sense of menace and street toughness permeates every note on their debut. It’s attitude with a capital “FUCK YOU”. Side one shivers and bleats along like a tweaking speed freak until the epic and harrowing Frankie Teardrop gobbles up most of the second side of the album, offering one of the most terrifying vocal performances to ever appear on a rock record.
It’s simply impossible to top that, though their second LP was a damn good try by upping the ante on songwriting and production, but the rawness of the debut and the perfection of its songs guarantee that it remained the group’s definitive statement throughout their career. Even Alan Vega’s impressive solo career was never quite able to reach this plateau of perfection, though some titles come damn close.
DEVO - Are We Not Men? We Are DEVO! (1978)
DEVO not only made amazing music, they created their own sociological theory. Inspired by the May 4, 1970 events at Kent State University, where 4 students were killed by National Guard troops, Gerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh conceived the idea that human civilization had reached its zenith and was now inexorably heading in reverse, like a tide withdrawing from the shore, as entropy took hold and began to dissemble all that had been created in the preceding millennia. Indeed, since their emergence with their 1978 debut album, the events of contemporary human history have done little to disprove their thesis.
DEVO put out a number of impressive albums over the years, and their first three offer up a pretty convincing trifecta of creative inspiration to sustain their legacy, but their first album still remains the quintessential DEVO fix for anyone looking to understand their potato. Every facet of their philosophy is present in finely crafted, mechanically deboned perfection. Like The B-52’s, DEVO traded in a lot of nostalgia in order to establish their premise, but framed it in language hoisted directly from the world of advertising, chosen for it’s persuasiveness and proven appeal. At times sounding like a Roadrunner cartoon theme crossed with a carwash, DEVO dismantled the myth of corporate supremacy and capitalistic exceptionalism, exposing it’s vacuous failure to secure the welfare of humanity and, instead, enslave its people with meaningless “McJobs”, shoving poles in holes, to satisfy the oligarchic masters. Shrouded in absurdist humour, the thrust of their critical blade was no less dulled when it sliced open the carcass of post-industrial culture.
The Cars (1978)
While punk rock was causing a musical revolution, The Cars were paving the way for its inroads into popular culture. The Cars debut album was the essential bridge that straddled with world of accessible top 40 rock with the veins of experimentalism and revitalization which were bubbling up from the underground. They were the gateway drug for many a young music fan, myself included. It was thanks to them that I started to consider seriously listening to bands like the Ramones, DEVO, Suicide and many others.
Their debut album came off the assembly line like a shining new muscle car, loaded with features and gleaming with chrome. It was meticulously crafted on every level, from the songwriting, to the performances to the production. Like Ric Ocasek’s perfectly coifed ducktail, every hair was exactly in place. It embraced the simplicity of the modern aesthetic while maintaining professional production values from the bottom of the tires to the tip of the antenna. There’s no waste anywhere on the record, not a weak song or superfluous note. Like the B-52’s, the Cars would also go on to have bigger hits in terms of singles, but this debut album always remained their most consistent and authentic release.
Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks (1977)
I believe that rock & roll music essentially has 3 epochs and they are hinged upon the appearances of its “holy trinity”: Elvis Presley, The Beatles and The Sex Pistols. When you look back across the history of the genre, it’s those tentpoles which most define the major shifts in its nature and potential. Elvis introduced it to the mainstream, The Beatles turned it into a fine art and the Sex Pistols weaponized it. I say that because the Pistols were really the last rock band to have any significant cultural influence. Sure, there have been trends and popular movements, but they were the last band to seem dangerous and to make the establishment quake in their boots. Anyone who’s come along since then has been no more than a nuisance to the powers that be. The Pistols were actually debated in Parliament and the government sought to crush them to stop them from spreading their message of revolt. That just doesn’t happen anymore.
Their one and only proper studio album now stands as a memorial to a precious couple of years when outrage seemed to have some influence in the world. It’s a damn good set of songs, well written both musically and lyrically. It says something about its time and the society that tried to silence it. The fact it’s been commodified since then still doesn’t take away from the fact that it drew a line in the sand and we still look back at that time as a moment of epiphany and realization. It changed the way people thought and that change keeps resonating around the world to this day.
As trite as kids thrashing out a few chords and bellowing their angst can be, you can still see when a culture is coming of age by the point at which its youth twig to this methodology. You can observe “punk” scenes happen in places like the middle east or Asia or Russia and see that there’s still a spirit of freedom struggling to find its voice. It may often fail to create a distinction from Ramones style blockiness, but it does show a desire to expose the energy pent up during that time when a generation demands to be heard.
A lot of people want to push the flashpoint for punk to New York with the Ramones or Detroit with the Stooges and, while the structural elements may have been coming together in those places, they were only so much fuel without a spark. Those bands and those scenes were only known to a tiny clique of hipsters until the Sex Pistols came along and put a match to all that kindling. It wasn’t until Johnny Rotten snarled that he was an “antichrist” that the world perked up and took notice of that generation and it’s rage. Others may have come sooner, but no one else struck the spark that would ignite the world.
The scene surrounding the Sex Pistols was a complex patchwork of different crews and a lot of them ended up spawning their own bands, whether it was Siouxsie and the Banshees form the "Bromley Contingent" or The Slits or any of the dozen bands that popped up from Manchester. Closest to home, the scene behind Johnny Rotten was primarily John's close friends and his brothers and their mates. First to emerge from this crew was 4" Be 2", fronted by Jimmy Lydon and featuring occasional contributions from Martin "Youth" Glover and alleged production assistance from Rotten himself. The other main character involved in this was Jock McDonald, a somewhat disreputable scallywag of a character who would go on to form The Bollock Brothers as a side project, which eventually became his main outlet.
I'd previously come across some singles by both 4" Be 2" and The Bollock Brothers based on this supposed production involvement of John Lydon. As it turned out, slapping his name on the records as producer was little more than a sales ploy. Some of it was pretty good, however, but in 1983, McDonald concocted his best "swindle" of all, his 1983 complete reinterpretation of the entire Sex Pistols debut LP, Never Mind the Bollocks. Titled, Never Mind the Bollocks 1983, this was one of the first times I'd ever encountered a complete cover of an entire album, so my curiosity was immediately piqued as soon as I spotted it in the new releases bin at my local import records shop.
What Jock had done with the Pistols music was tantamount to sacrilege by using very early digital sampling technology to electronically recreate the album in a kind of robot-punk style with snappy, machine-like drum machines and digitally deconstructed guitars. He even took the liberty of reworking some of the lyrics as another level of disrespect. The thing was, this utter and complete disregard for the sanctity of the source material turned out to be the best way to approach it as the album still screamed with a legitimate "punk" attitude because of this stance. In truth, punk should never be treated with too much reverence as so much of it was about blasting away those edifices of rock hero worship.
When I put on the record for the first time, I was immediately displaced by the cheap sounding fake digital stomping signalling the intro to Holidays in the sun. It was like a shoddy computer version, a pathetic imitation. As it went on, however, the consistency of the production and it's singularity and commitment to its vision drove home its secret power. It was the ultimate subversion of the subversive, making a comment on the commodification of the movement while recasting it as rebel robot music.
McDonald and the Bollock Brothers never managed to hit this height again on subsequent albums of his own original material, but the fact that this desecration of punk's sacred cow exists at all is good enough to remind us not to be too precious about what we put on pedestals.
May 9th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Jah Wobble's debut solo LP, The Legend Lives On - Jah Wobble In 'Betrayal', which was unleashed on this day in 1980.
Let's start by reminding people of the career of another bass player for Johnny Rotten and its tragic end. After the Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious went on to self destruct rather quickly and spectacularly within a very short time after the demise of the band that made him famous. As such, Jah Wobble stepping out from behind John Lydon to kick off a solo career, being not entirely dis-similarly reputed for his indulgences (though with booze instead of smack), cast this release with its own level of suspicion. One could not be blamed for expecting this career move to potentially be as short lived and disastrous.
Indeed, Wobble pushed out the boat with a good deal of levity and frivolity for his initial outing. Frankly, the whole endeavor came off as something of a joke and, in fact, proved to be a fatal coffin nail for his relationship with the band that made HIM famous, Public Image Ltd. Surreptitiously pilfering PiL backing tracks to recycle for his solo album didn't sit well with Mr. Lydon and, once the band had completed it's US tour, Wobble found himself out of the enterprise with little fanfare. The band would go on to prove that they didn't need his bass or anyone else's on the virtually bass-less Flowers of Romance.
However, Wobble's career would prove to be no "flash in the pan" as he soon found his feet, connecting with the likes of Holger Czukay (CAN) and The Edge (U2) and ultimately forging a solo career which has spanned decades and dozens of acclaimed releases and shows no signs of faltering to this day. Within that context, it is possible to look back on this album and discover that, while it was possessed of a certain irreverence and sense of mischief, it still managed to deliver some innovation and a jolly good time, once you twigged that it was meant for a "larf"!
Personally, as a devout, fanatical aficionado of all things PiL, the thought of a solo album by Wobble was a no-brain'r. This was to be acquired, forthwith. Fortunately, I was able to special order the album through one of my local record shops. Upon its arrival, I was pretty instantly swept up in its craziness. Though the ideas weren't without precedent, this was the first record I'd come across which utilized the concept of the "remix" as it featured alternate versions of two songs from the PiL canon; The Suit, reworked and augmented to become Blueberry Hill, and Graveyard/Another, dub mixed as an instrumental, Not Another. As silly as it all seems, the album explores a lot of dub production techniques, in some ways even more extremely than what PiL had done on Metal Box. The touches of reggae were also more apparent as some songs went directly into the genre rather than offering glancing blows like Metal Box.
I loved it and still love it, though it baffles my mind that Virgin Records were willing to give Wobble money and studio time to create what was very much an indulgence and a private joke at the expense of the label. This is one of the reasons it stands out as it's a rare example where a musician has been able to get backing to go into a studio and just piss about for the hell of it and actually have the results pressed on vinyl and sold to the world. As a musician, that willingness to throw caution to the wind and try something silly has been a guiding principal ever since hearing this album. I've done a lot of crazy experiments because I was emboldened by the brevity of this LP. Yes, it was a swindle in the best "punk" tradition, but a fun and delightful listen in the end, proving that you don't have to be so goddamned serious all the time in the studio!
When I was in grade 11 high school (1979-1980), I became friends with this guy who was also getting into some of the new music that was coming out. He'd twigged that I was listening to The Clash and asked if I had heard the Sex Pistols and we got chatting about these bands, which were not at all popular with the rest of the teens in our isolated Northern Ontario school. He mentioned that he had a cousin who lived in the UK and would send him tapes of the latest bands. We started to hang out after that and he was the first person to play me any music by The Stranglers, who fast became his favorite band.
I wasn't quite so into them at first. I liked them well enough, but it wasn't until I heard The Raven that I started to find them really interesting, particularly the Meninblack song with it's half speed drums and evil Munchkin voices. When they put out the Meninblack album in 1981, an entire LP dedicated to exposing the conspiracy of aliens farming humans for food, I was all in. The Gospel According to the Meninblack became the first album I'd buy from The Stranglers. I wasn't put off by the middling reviews for the album as I found the combination of the mechanical percussion and Dave Grenfield's synths highlights of the album and the whole concept was super cool to me. I had no idea at the time that the endeavor would turn out to be something of a "curse" for the band, who endured a year of terrible misfortune while they attempted to record, promote and tour the album.
With the sudden, unexpected passing of keyboardist, Dave Greenfield, I wanted to highlight what was my "gateway" into appreciating this band, who were so significantly stamped with their identity thanks to Dave's inimitable musical prowess.
The following reviews were originally posted on my Facebook timeline, but I figure they're a significant enough bit of writing to warrant a more permanent placement here on this blog. As I've been editing and reading through these, I've done a bit of work to fill things out and fix up some things that may have been fine for social media, but don't really cut it for this context.
I recently watched the new Iggy Pop produced 4 part docu-series, PUNK. Watching it brought me back through a lot of the music of my youth, which inspired me to write down a few thoughts.
The first episode starts things off by covering the genre's American roots in Detroit with bands like The MC5 and The Stooges before moving over to the east coast to The New York Dolls. These bands set the stage in the late '60s & early '70s by breaking away from the fuzzy freakishness of the hippie era and delving into something much more dark and primal. Among the three of them, you have the Stooges bringing the rawness and simplicity that would be the foundation of the sound, the MC5 laying down some political awareness and the Dolls bringing in a warped sense of fashion and outrage. Pretty much the perfect building blocks of what was to come.
From there, we move into the CBGB's scene with artists like Ramones, Blondie, Wayne/Jane County and Richard Hell. There's a few references to The Dead Boys and Dictators as well, but, disappointingly, no mention of Suicide, Talking Heads or Patti Smith. This, unfortunately, leaves a few noticeable holes in the narrative, but what they do cover is dealt with well enough. The interviews are generally very informative and give a solid sense of the evolution of the scene.
This first part culminates with the failed attempt to revitalize The New York Dolls by Malcolm McLaren and ends with him hightailing it back to London to try to put a band together utilizing the scruffy boys hanging about in front of his clothes shop. Obviously, they're building the bridge to the second episode by showing the migration of influence from New York to London. I suspect the producers are trying to show a chain of causality from one scene to another and, indeed, there is some lingering controversy in terms of who influenced who and who originated "punk". And though it can be said that NY/US scenes came first, there's something else I got from all of this laying of groundwork.
You can see how the scene in NY was so much a case of a lot of fuel piling up, but no spark to ignite it all. All this stuff was going nowhere by the mid 70s and this is stated as much in the first episode. It was only known by a small group of local hipsters and had no national presence. If it had ended there, if there had been nothing happening in London, I suspect we would never have heard of bands like Ramones or many of their contemporaries and people like Pop and the Dolls would have been no more than mere footnotes in the history of rock & roll. There just wasn't any "buzz" to drive a national, let alone global, awakening towards this music. It's not until the Sex Pistols come along and capture the attention of the global mass media that the match is put to the woodpile and the flames really go up.
This brings us to the second episode, which puts the focus pretty heavily on the Sex Pistols, as expected. However before that, there is a wonderful bit that deals with the role of women in punk and that was a real treat. The Slits were the main focus, which featured interviews with founding members Palmolive and Viv Albertine, who both offered unique insights into their involvement and evolution within the scene.
As an aside, I must add that it's surprising how many people didn't get interviewed for this, but I suppose you get who you can in this sort of production. The Damned and the Clash also feature significantly with Dave Vanian offering some perceptive contributions, but only having Terry Chimes representing The Clash was a bit disappointing. He was never a particularly significant member and didn't frankly care much about the politics or the deeper themes the band were known for. Either Paul Simonon or Mick Jones would have had a much better understanding of the band and their impact.
However, as I said, this second installment was very much the Sex Pistols show and with good reason. It's hard to comprehend how weird it was for a band like the Pistols to create such a media frenzy. Not that we aren't saturated with sensationalism now, but to have it driven by a bunch of guys with guitars is nothing short of surreal. Nobody really cares about musicians these days. Sure, you've got people like Kanye driving tabloid sales, but it's all no more than a trash fashion fixation and not that sense that the world has been seized by the "anti-Christ", which was a very real perception of Johnny Rotten in some circles. The fact that this little band could spend a week in America at the beginning of 1978 and upend the music industry in the process is rather inexplicable and unprecedented. That crazy little tour made "punk" a household word. John Lydon does most of the talking for this particular piece of the punk puzzle and, while he can come off as rather arrogant in some instances, more often than not, the points he's making are quite valid, if you take the time to look at things objectively. And while this second episode didn't have quite the narrative cohesion of the first, it did eventually work its way into the death throws that were the Pistols breakup and Sid's self destruction, which wrapped it up with a tidy, though bloody, bow.
Episode three shifts the focus back across the Atlantic and to the US scenes again, starting in NY, moving to DC and finally LA, with a welcome aside to good ol' VANCOUVER! I was very happy to see DOA feature so prominently and deservedly for their pioneering work establishing touring resources and routes for many other bands to put to use in those days. We also have representation from groups like Bad Brains, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys and a few others. However, this is the part of the story where my interest drops away pretty steeply as the emphasis on violent male aggression becomes the primary calling card of the day and leads far too quickly into the whole "skinhead" and white supremacy cultures.
This is the slippery slope you slide down when you are perceived as an excuse to kick heads instead of kicking ass. It is clear to me that people like Henry Rollins and Jello Biafra are true intellectuals who are capable of understanding and insight and I love hearing their perspectives, but I can't help but express some kind of frustration and disparagement for the way that what they did paved the way for Doc Martin wearing racist thugs to give voice to their hatred. I don't want to put this all at their feet, but some of it has to land there given the types of crowds they attracted.
But I also can't point the finger only at the punks for allowing this faction into the fold. The Industrial and Neo Folk scenes are just as guilty of inviting this sort of rubbish along for the ride as anyone else. Shock tactics, violence and extremism offer ways to jolt people out of their complacency, but they're a double edged sword and people are often too seduced by their sadistic impulses into treating these things as sensational ends in themselves rather than a means to alerting people of the dangers of herd conformity and ignorance.
It becomes destruction for its own sake, but the true spirit that started this movement was about breaking down walls and restrictions in order to move forward. This is why the majority of the originators of the sound moved on to more experimental and investigative approaches after the initial rush of nihilism had blasted a path clear into something new. But those who chose to stay in the rubble and keep smashing at the fragments only managed to dig themselves into a hole of brutish self destruction. You can't simply be content with that one act of rebellion. You have to be able, and willing, to build once you've knocked something down.
The fourth and final episode brings things home by starting in the early 90s with the shift from "hardcore" to "grunge" and then examines its infiltration into the mainstream music industry and finally wraps up with the decimation of the industry caused by the internet and pirating. Again, we have a much welcome section at the start which looks at the significant role of women as the grunge scene counteracted against their seeming exclusion by the often misogynistic hardcore culture. These forays into the feminine contribution, while welcome, also serve to highlight how desperately we need a documentary series that focuses on the ladies and their contributions to alternative music. I'll put it out there to the universe that someone like Patti Smith needs to do a take on this.
The overarching theme to this finale, however, comes down to that fine line between art and commerce, for as much as "punk" wants to be rebellious, it also wants to succeed. If the Ramones had been able to crack the marketplace the way Green Day did, they would have been thrilled for it. They ALWAYS fancied their songs as hit singles. You can't tell me they wouldn't have been on cloud 9 if they'd had a hit like Dookie. The fact that their songs eventually became iconic, finding eternal life as sports anthems and the like, only means they were right about the accessibility of what they were doing. Their timing was simply off.
Success can also be a curse, however. Fame is often poison for the soul. Popularity creates a kind of insulation around a person where they're suddenly surrounded by parasitic "yes men". Once that happens, reality warps into some distorted fantasy supported by people who will never tell you the truth or say "no" to whatever you ask for. As is pointed out, when "cool" things become popular, they lose their "coolness". It's a challenging balancing act to be progressive without being trendy. It's the difference between those who are true seekers on the edge of experience vs those who merely seek validation for the act of being ahead of the curve when they really have no understanding of why that has any value in the first place. Are you cutting a new path or just sweeping up the discards of those who have trodden one that's already well worn?
Beyond this, there is this essence of wanting to break free. I've seen it repeat itself the past 50 years, over and over again. Whenever there's an awakening to the realities of oppression and restraint and a desire to break free, this spirit crops up again. Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, is a wonderful documentary that gives an excellent example of this process happening in the Arab/Islamic world and shows how intrinsic it is to human nature. I think, as long as there's someone trying to keep a lid on the human spirit, there's gonna be some kids somewhere who are going to pick up a guitar or a synth or a microphone and say "fuck your bullshit". It'll take new forms, but that desire to smash through the walls will always find some expression somehow.
All together, I think this series does a pretty commendable job of showing the origins, evolution, history and future potential of what has become (sometimes regretfully) labeled as "Punk" rock. It gives us a clear insight into an elemental aspect of human nature unique to the 20th and 21st centuries. It's something which is a response to our industrialized, technological civilization which, on the one hand, seeks to advance humanity while, simultaneously and conversely, trying to stifle it and force it to conform to a kind of artificial homo-geniality which is contrary to its basic nature and therefore inspires rebellion and protest.
