INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - KISS, DESTROYER

I know they've become the poster boys for cultural capitalism and I suppose they always were, but I do have to still acknowledge their influence on my musical journey considering Kiss' 1976 LP, Destroyer, was the foundation stone of my record collection. Not that I didn't have a couple of records in my possession before this, but this was the first one I bought with my own money of my own volition. The few I had prior to this were childhood gifts of one sort or another and were mostly novelty records like Super Bloopers or Goofy Greats.

It was pretty hard not to be exposed to Kiss in 1975/1976 as they had become THEE teen band of the era thanks to their Alive double live album from 1975. My cousin had that album, which I thought was great. My record collection began after a somewhat tense negotiation with my parents to get a raise in the monthly allowance my brother and I were granted. It started as a mere pittance and barely enough to buy some candy and a pop or two. I was desperate to start buying records and you needed at least $7 for one of those back in those days. Dad was incensed that we wanted more money and put up a tough resistance towards any increase, but we finally managed to get an agreement to something like, I think, $20 a month, enough to buy 2 or 3 records at least. It was my first experience with collective bargaining.

With that in place, the next order of business was to put that hard won chore money down on some vinyl. Weirdly enough, my first choice was not this record, but the LP, More More More, by The Andrea True Connection. I just liked that song and went to Zellers to buy it and brought it home to give it a spin on my shit box record player. It was just one of those things that was a box with a turntable and speakers built into the back. Total garbage. So much so that the heavy thump of the disco beat was too much for it and, when I went to play the record, it just skipped all over the place. Infuriated by this skipping damn record, I figured it was defective and took it back the next day for an exchange. I wasn't going to take a chance on another copy of the disco record, so my backup choice was the Kiss album.

Back then, Kiss seemed like a dangerous band. Reading the letters to the fans on the inside gate-fold off the Alive album, Gene's letter came off real evil and demonic, so he was pretty cool for us kids. It all felt like something we should not be listening to. Putting on the Destroyer album, that sense was reinforced by songs like God of Thunder. For a 12-13 year old, just discovering the world of adult preoccupations, it was very alluring and definitely gave you some street-cred in the playground at junior high.

Of course, it wasn't long until I started to pick up on the commercialization going on with it and how it was getting more and more "kid friendly" as time went on. By the time Love Gun and the comic came out, my suspicions of the latent "uncoolness" of Kiss started to mount. Then that horrible movie, Kiss Meets the Phantom, hit the TV screen and it was game over for my interest in the band. There was also the emergence of the punk & new wave scenes starting in 1978 which soon knocked my attention completely off mainstream bands like Kiss and onto far more interesting paths. I should also say that Queen came along in 1977 and blew Kiss off the map in terms of style, versatility, talent and sophistication.

I should conclude, however, by saying that Kiss did, ultimately, leave a key impression which informed my own musical path going forward. If there's one thing I took away from them, it was the importance of showmanship! The idea that a band should put on a bit of a show if they're going to be on stage remained with me from then on. I never liked going on stage in street clothes. I never liked a lot of bands that did that either. I always appreciated a band who gave me something to look at while they were up there, whether it was in the staging, visuals or simply having personality and attitude enough to be interesting to watch. This, I have to put down to Kiss setting the standard in terms of offering some stagecraft while playing music.

REVIEW - CATCH-22 (HULU SERIES)

I just finished watching Hulu's recent adaptation of the Joseph Heller novel, Catch-22. I have never read the book and am only familiar with the 1970 film adaptation. Now, from what I've gathered after checking out a few reviews online after finishing the mini-series, I think your enjoyment of this is going to be heavily dependent on what you're familiar with. Fans of the book seem pretty universally harsh on both the film and this 2019 mini-series. However, without that background, I'm only comparing this to the film, which I saw on several occasions in my youth. Despite the critics, I'll also note that on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, this series still gets very high average scores all round.

I've always liked the film and found that this six part TV adaptation worked even better for me in terms of fleshing out the story. If you're not too familiar with it, this is NOT a story about WWII, even though that is the setting. What it's really about is the incompetence of bureaucracies and the sociopathy of capitalistic systems, using the war as an allegorical device to explore these themes. It's a straddling of satire and trauma illustrating how these systems create irreconcilable personal conflicts when social structures are engineered such that expectations are untenable, where the goalposts of success are constantly being pushed further away, just out of reach. It shows how power and authority often end up in the hands of those least capable of coping with them, engendering sadism and cruelty as tools to protect those in authority from being exposed for the frauds that they are. It's a story which, while originally published in 1961, deals with themes that are strikingly relevant to the present day.

The issues, if you have any, may come with the degree to which the series is faithful to the book. Critics who are fans of the book complain that its message has been diluted or "dumbed down" for mainstream entertainment. That may well be true, but from my own subjective standpoint and judging it solely on how engaging I found it, I'd say it's rather an excellent series.

To begin with, the overall production values are top notch. It looks authentic and period accurate. The cinematography looks great and the action scenes are rendered very believably while avoiding gratuitous flamboyance and gore. The cast all worked very well for me and delivered what I found to be poignant and appropriately humorous characterizations, because this is driven by satire, wicked at its best.

Now, I may very well one day read the book and then look back on these interpretations as faint and feeble, but on their own, judged on their own merits, they still have something valid to say. Having the time delve into it over the course of six 45 minute episodes gives it a lot of room to breath and I found myself very much engrossed in the story and moved by both its highs and lows.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - MUSLIMGAUZE, BUDDHIST ON FIRE

Influence, in music, isn't always about the music itself. Sometimes, artists inspire influence for other reasons and get you to think about certain things a little differently or to look more closely at a particular subject. Being "political" doesn't always require writing protest songs with one's stances spelled out in the lyrics. Sometimes, artists can cleverly coax listeners to question things simply through a few careful signifiers.

I remember hearing Muslimgauze's 1984 LP, Buddhist on Fire, probably late in 1985 when my room mate at the time bought the album. The cover, of course, was very provocative, showing the aftermath of a Tibetan monk's protest after self-immolation. Right there I was educated by the fact that I didn't even know about this practice at the time. The second clue was in the "band" name, Muslimgauze. Again, I assumed there was some religious significance, but I didn't know much about it at the time. At that point, I was only interested in the music and what I heard on the album was pretty interesting.

Muslimgauze began in the early 1980s as simply a guy with a drum machine. His first releases were stark and minimal with nothing more than rhythm. Created solely by a British fellow, Bryn Jones, his approach was fairly blocky and crude at first, but by the time of Buddhist On Fire, his 3rd LP, he'd started to evolve a certain flair and sophistication. There were only 5 longish tracks on the album, but their rhythmic insistence was mesmerizing and song titles like Soviet Occupied Territories, Turkish Falaka & Dissidents In Exile gave the proceedings a subversively militant aura. It was all enough that, within my music collecting circles, Muslimgauze LPs, whenever they'd show up in the shop, were immediately snapped up.

I wasn't always able to buy them myself, but I'd always manage to record them on cassette from my friends. As each one came around, we'd get familiarized with the various terms of revolution used in the middle eastern conflicts. Without preaching or proselytizing, these records began to expose the hypocrisy of the situation and the injustices being committed against these people. It was a strange process whereby the use of the terms and the images on the album covers became an invitation to empathize and investigate.

The odd thing is that Jones never traveled to the area, had no relation, racially, to the culture and did not even consider himself religious, let alone a "Muslim". Yet he spent nearly two decades, until his tragic, sudden death in 1999, spewing forth a deluge of releases promoting the cause of these people. If he'd become rich from this endeavor, it might have been tempting to accuse him of cultural appropriation, but this was not in any way "mainstream" music. He did very small runs of these records on little indie labels. But he was prolific. He released dozens of albums over the course of his career and left enough unreleased material in the vault to keep providing new content for another two decades since his passing.

Over the years, his works evolved from their primitive drum machine roots into richly intricate compositions in the late 1980s and early 1990s and then shifted into deliberately crude, yet fluid excursions into extremes of tribal downtempo dub, pushing distortion and bass frequencies to levels as radical as the politics which inspired his works. Today, the Muslimgauze catalogue spans some 200 or so releases with more miraculously surfacing each year. Sure, there's a good chunk that's a bit dubious in terms of it's quality, but there's a surprising amount which holds up and still sounds cutting edge. If it doesn't get your head bobbing, it should at least get it nodding in recognition that he's clued you into a real struggle which persists to this day.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - NANCY SINATRA, BOOTS

Since it's Mother's Day, I wanted to feature an album that reminds me of my mom. Hands down, this was my favorite LP in her respectable collection of vinyl. It was the coolest LP in the stack and has one of the best songs ever written on it. The album is worthwhile for that song alone. If they'd just repeated These Boots are Made for Walking 12 times on the record, it would still be an amazing album by any standard. When I moved out on my own, this was the first album I pilfered from mom's collection to add to my own.

Let's start by talking about that song. This was the one that made Nancy a star. Of course, she had a leg up, what with being the progeny of no less than the "chairman of the board", ol' blue eyes, Frank Sinatra. Her career was pretty well guaranteed in some ways. No one's gonna mess with Frankie's little princess, capisce? So she could've farted out garlic and pepperoni and radio stations would have played it for a bit, just to make Frank happy. And yeah, she wasn't a great voice. There wasn't a lot of range there, but she had something much more valuable than technical skills. She had presence and A.T.T.I.T.U.D.E!

Lee Hazlewood, the album's producer and the author of the song, had been planning on saving the song for his own album, but Nancy heard it and said is was wrong for a male vocalist. She thought it came off as abusive in the hands of a man, but she insisted she could give it the right read. Reluctantly, Lee conceded and they recorded the song. In her hands, it became a symbol of female empowerment. At a time when women were just starting to find their voice in pop culture, Nancy came out of the gate as this fierce little firecracker who wasn't going to take shit from anyone. When she intoned that she was gonna "walk all over you", it had better send chills down your spine because she meant business and carried it off with every word.

The rest of the album, while vastly overshadowed by its hit single, is no less loaded with great songs, many courtesy of Hazlewood. They may not reach the same heights as Boots, but that's only a relativity as on their own, they still tower above a lot of the pop music of the day. It's all music which has earned the term "timeless" and deserves to be heard for generations to come.

40 YEARS LATER - THE LEGEND LIVES ON... JAH WOBBLE IN "BETRAYAL"

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! 

 

PLAYLIST - THE LEGEND LIVES ON... JAH WOBBLE IN "BETRAYAL" 

FORGOTTEN FILM - CABIN BOY

I think the first time I noticed Chris Elliott was on his short lived FOX sitcom, Get a Life (1990-1992). I'm sure I'd seen him pop up on Letterman's old NBC show here and there before that (he was a writer and regular cast member), but this series put a name to his face and was just weird enough to appeal to me. I started watching it because his character's name was the same as someone I knew, which we all found rather funny, but then the show turned out to be actually rather funny, so I kept watching until it got cancelled.

A couple of years later, I spotted the VHS of his 1994 film, Cabin Boy, for rent when it hit the shelves and the premise seemed interesting enough to take a chance, so home it came. What I wasn't really prepared for was the flat out assault on my sensibilities that I was going to endure for the next 80 minutes. The thing is, this film should have made me very angry, and I know it made some critics feel that way, but despite the continuous intellectual kicks to the head, I found myself turning into a complete masochist for this movie's abuse. The more ridiculous and irritating it got, the more I loved it and I just couldn't get enough. It simply takes absurdity to a level of Zen transcendence and becomes something quite unique unto itself.

Elliott plays Nathanial Mayweather, an entitled, arrogant, foulmouthed finishing school graduate. He's the kind of guy you want to punch the instant you lay eyes on him and that feeling only intensifies when he starts opening his mouth, which he does far more than is necessary or wise. You see, he's one of them "fancy lads", as is so quaintly put by the stuffed monkey selling street hustler played by David Letterman in a classic cameo. After graduating from finishing school, he's on the lookout for his ship to take him on a luxury ocean cruise, only to end up stowing away on a filthy pirate ship. From there, the film becomes an inexplicable homage to Ray Harryhausen films like The 7th Voyages of Sinbad or Clash of the Titans, as Nathan inadvertently embarks on a quest to discover his manhood while encountering all manner of creatures and characters along the way.

This is one of those flicks that really benefits from psychoactive stimulants of the psychedelic variety as the surrealism of each situation escalates towards the film's climax. Elliott manages to perform something of a minor miracle in terms of creating such a reprehensible protagonist while still giving him enough pathos to make him sympathetic enough to follow through his adventures. I'd still punch him in the face if I met him, but I'd do it with a smile. I hate them fancy lads.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - AMON TOBIN, BRICOLAGE

For a long time, electronic music was beaten down by the cudgel that it lacked "feeling' and was too "stiff" and "rigid".  This was something that was even embraced by groups like Kraftwerk, who integrated the rigidity of electronics into their aesthetic, to brilliant effect, i might add.  But still, for the first two decades as the technology worked its way from novelty to necessity in the creation of popular music, there were restrictions on its flexibility.  It took time for keyboards to develop sensitivity to velocity and after-touch and rhythmic devices like drum machines and sequencers were generally slavishly tied to quantization. 

It wasn't until the 1990s that the tech began to truly develop the abilities to incorporate more organic feeling attributes into its compositions.  One of the most preeminent pioneers in terms of breaking electronics free from the shackles of perfection and repetition was Amon Tobin, who debuted with his first album, Bricolage, in 1997. 

I recall this album being something of a revelation in my social circles as we'd never heard anything that sounded quite so loose and spontaneous before.  I remember listening to this with fellow musicians who were well up on the latest tools and techniques and being aghast at the fluidity of the percussion and the arrangements.  So much was going on and no two bars of music seemed to be the same.  There were constant shifts and variations happening and it all felt like someone was really playing this stuff, even though we knew it was mostly done by sampling and editing.  We couldn't figure out how the hell he was doing this stuff.

The style of the music also broke free of genre pigeonholes.  Tobin would effortlessly glide from devastating drum & bass to downtempo coolness to jazzy chill without breaking a sweat.  The title, Bricolage, which is an arts term for "the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media", fit the contents perfectly as it was a diverse assemblage of sounds and styles that created its own unique vision for both the dance floor and the living room in equal measure.