INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE STOOGES, FUN HOUSE

Recorded 50 years ago (May, 1970), The Stooges sophomore LP was not my introduction to Iggy Pop, but it was the album that got me to turn my gaze to the past for challenging music and not just look forward. I'd read about Iggy and his antics in various music magazines like CREEM and Hit Parader a couple of years before I bought any of his records, but it was his 1979 appearance on The Midnight Special that got me ready to pull out my wallet in a record store. I think it was the episode hosted and curated by The Cars where they played two of his latest promo videos for his recently released New Values LP. Both Five Foot One and I'm Bored were aired that night and that was all I needed to become a fan of Mr. Pop.

At the time I bought New Values, my attention and interests were firmly forward facing in terms of looking for new music. I wasn't at all interested in what had come before. The zeitgeist of the times, with "punk" and "new wave", was to blast away the past and focus on the future. That said, when I kept reading references to The Stooges and how they were the "first punk band", my obsessive collector nature kicked in and I decided to roll back the clock 9 years and dip my toe in with The Stooges second album, Fun House. I decided to start there because I wasn't quite ready to abandon the current decade and step into the 1960s with their debut, though that would come to my collection soon enough.

Fun House appealed to me, at least superficially, thanks to the insane looking album cover. Iggy looked like he was on a slide, heading into the bowels of hell. The fiery color pallet and posterized graphic style gave the album a look of intensity and the contents didn't disappoint. Within its grooves was a kind of raw rock & roll which was nastier than any heavy metal, and sleazier than what I'd found to that point within the punk/new wave sphere. This was pretty scary music made by disreputable people who probably did questionable things in seedy places. Definitely not the kind of fellows the parents would invite over for dinner. It was stripped down and bare and edgy and way ahead of its time. It also took chances, like the manic finale freak-out of LA Blues, a song that felt like it left your turntable in ruins.

Once I heard this music, my mind was opened up to the reality that challenging music wasn't only happening in the present, but that there were precedents for it in the past and that it was worthwhile for me to turn at least some of my attention in that direction and understand some of the roots of the music with which I was obsessed. From this vantage point, bands like The Velvet Underground, CAN, Silver Apples and many others became fair game for exploration and helped expand my understanding of the way the past influenced the present. It helped me understand that these new bands I was falling in love with were standing atop some pretty impressive shoulders and those needed to be appreciated as well.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - DAVID BOWIE, LODGER

David Bowie first caught my attention in November of 1977 when he appeared on the now legendary final Bing Crosby Christmas special, recorded only weeks before Crosby's passing. Along with singing counterpoint with Bing on Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy, the special also aired the newly released video for Bowie's single, Heroes, from the album of the same name. To say the inclusion of this video in a Christmas special was incongruous and anachronistic would be an understatement. That didn't hurt its appeal to me, however. It only made me pay closer attention and I immediately fell in love with the song.

One would think that would have been all I needed to grab the album, and indeed, I picked it up and pondered it in the record shops over and over, but it wasn't until well over a year later that I finally took the plunge into the world of Bowie with the release of the album, Lodger, in the spring of 1979. While I was just starting to get curious about "new" music in 1977, by 1979 I was fully engulfed in anything that was on the cutting edge and everything about Lodger seemed sharp and ready to slice.

While Bowie's Berlin triptych of Low / "Heroes" / Lodger is now frequently looked upon as the apex period of his career, creatively if not commercially, I find that Lodger is often overlooked among these three and not really given the kind of acknowledgement I believe it deserves. Perhaps this is due to the perversely obtuse sense of violence that underpins so much of the album, from the shocking cover image, where Bowie looks like he's been smashed up against a wall like a squashed bug, to the admonition to "Johnny" in Repetition, "Don't hit her". The album flirts with these kinds of themes throughout.

One of the things that sold me on it was the two videos which were produced for DJ and Boys Keep Swinging, both of which were aired on the NBC late night music program, The Midnight Special. The latter video, in particular, offered up a pretty disturbing yet humorous sort of drag fashion show, decades before drag culture would be embraced by the masses thanks to the likes of RuPaul. In Bowie's hands, the implied violence appears again as each of his three characterizations ends the video by ripping off their wig and smearing their lipstick. It's this sort of edge that pervades the entire album.

But song by song, the album is built out of stones of perfect proportion and purpose without a weak track among them. From start to finish, it races forward with an urgency that leaves you feeling a bit outpaced as it rushes ahead of you. It's music that doesn't wait for the listener to catch up with it and perhaps that's why it's a bit alienating. Regardless of that, it has remained my favorite Bowie album from the day I brought it home and only surprises me all over again every time I listen to it.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - BOB LOG III, LOG BOMB

It must have been some time in the early 2000s when I was introduced to the music of Bob Log III. Though I'm focusing on his third CD, Log Bomb, for this, mostly because it's got some of my favorite songs, his first three albums hit me pretty much at the same time and I didn't really differentiate them until I'd managed to pick up actual copies for myself. What I found with Bob's music was something I'd been thinking was due for a post-modernist updated for quite some time, the blues.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of the "one man band". Nash the Slash had worked that vein with his one man shows and I loved the idea of someone working it all in one go. Bob struck a decidedly idiosyncratic figure with his motorcycle suit, helmet and old-style telephone receiver fused into his visor and used as a distorted, tinny sounding microphone for singing. Coupled with his manic slide guitar playing, some foot percussion and a cheap drum machine, Bob managed to fill up the sound in a way that had urgency and presence. He had succeeded in bringing the "blues man" into the 21st century in a way that sounded completely modern, but also fully authentic to the source material. So much of what tries to pass itself off as "blues", to my ears, only sounds like a white bread imitation, lacking any true feeling or spirit. It mimics the form without comprehending the feeling. Bob wrote songs that came from someplace more original and more believable. It wasn't just a rehash of broken heart sob stories. He was singing about drunk strippers and ragging hard-ons.

His range could go from sickeningly groovy funkiness to this sort of wild mayhem that made me feel like pounding back hard liquor and busting up a bar. I mean, this stuff really did make you feel like becoming a juvenile delinquent! It's music that got me thinking about the blues in a modern context and with a contemporary edge. He managed to capture that in songs like Boob Scotch, an entirely ludicrous concept which he managed to turn into a crowd pleasing ritual while somehow managing to not come off as sexist.

I got a chance to see Bob twice, but it was the first time when he played Richards on Richards here in Vancouver, on Sept 13, 2006, that will always stand out in my memory as one of the best live shows I've ever seen. He played a double bill with the late, great blue-funk superhero, Blowfly, who put on an incredible show himself. Between the two acts, I literally danced my ass off to ever single song they played. That's not an exaggeration. That's a fact. It was a night where I was possessed by the boogie bug from start to finish, and was mesmerized watching Bob do his thing. Between the Boob Scotch audience participation to his crowd surfing in an inflatable raft to simply marveling at the furious intensity of his playing, he blew my mind. And seeing him off stage was so bizarre because, out of uniform, he was such an unassuming, slight, diminutive man. You'd never put the two personas together.

Bob Log III is very much responsible for influencing me into exploring some new directions with my own music, specifically when I went into looking for ways to bring blues sensibilities into contemporary experimental music making, but not just as an academic exercise, but as an expression of FUN and MISCHIEF!

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE INDUSTRIAL RECORDS STORY

1984 was the year that I became deeply infatuated with all things Throbbing Gristle. Thanks to a few all night "altered states" listening sessions, my perception of their music and how it was created was completely reconfigured. With this neural rewiring in place, I was able to appreciate aspects of their sound and techniques I was never able to perceive before. But TG were more than just a band, they were the architects of a movement and used their independently operated corporate identity, Industrial Records, to help give other artists exposure and a leg up on getting their products out in the market as well. I wasn't really aware of the full extent of this aspect of their activities until Illuminated Records issued the retrospective compilation album, The Industrial Records Story, in 1984.

The album collected together several singles and a selection of album tracks from the various artists who had been released by Industrial Records in the last few years of its initial phase of activity, ending in 1981. As well as a couple of TG singles, the LP featured Monte Cazazza, The Leather Nun, Robert Rental & Thomas Leer, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire, Elisabeth Welch, Clock DVA, Dorothy & William S. Burroughs. With the exception of Cabaret Voltaire, this album was my initial exposure to pretty much everyone else present. And it was much more than just a collection of "industrial" noise. There was an astonishing variety of music and sound on the album, demonstrating quite clearly the range of interests within the label and the people behind it.

Though the LP kicks off with TG at their most abrasive, blaring forth with the infamous, We Hate You (Little Girls) and then serves up a nightmarish junkie fever dream for Mother's Day from Monte Cazazza, things start to diversify with the dirge of burn victim post-punk from The Leather Nun. Next up is the synth-pop dreaminess of Rental & Leer, but the biggest shifts are saved for the arrival of Elisabeth Welch and her heartbreaking version of Stormy Weather. The single was released because it was used by experimental film maker, Derek Jarman, in his film, The Tempest. Recorded in 1933, the song is a stark contrast to the rest of the album, yet still manages to work in context with its mood of gloom and loss.

The album concludes with a section from William S. Burroughs' album, Nothing Here Now but the Recordings. On its own, this track became my introduction to his works and represented a sample of something which had never been given serious consideration before. It was a concrete example of the "cut-up" theory in its earliest incarnation. The story behind the manifestation of this album is worth an entire book on its own as Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson were the first to be given access to this material by Burroughs, who considered the experiments of no real consequence until he was convinced otherwise by Gen & Sleazy. It was a critical introduction to a vital and expansive technique, easily adaptable to nearly any medium.

The album has never been reissued since its initial release, though all the material contained on it has been reissued separately.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE BOLLOCK BROTHERS, NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS 1983

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.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE SHAGGS, PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD

I first heard about The Shaggs reading a little article about them in a 1980 issue of CREEM magazine. The article, written by Robot A. Hull, described...

"...Betty, Helen and Dorothy Wiggin, lonely sisters losing their minds in Squaresville in the limbo years of 1969-72. Sheltered by their parents as if they were porcelain figurines, the Wiggin sisters never had a chance to date, never were allowed to taste of the delicious sins down at the local Tastee-Freeze. So they went up to their rooms, cried their eyes out, and formed a rock band, the self-destructive and chaotic Shaggs."

The article left an impression, but it wouldn't be until some dozen or so years later that I'd actually get a chance to hear them while going through my partner's CD collection after we moved in together. He had a copy of a CD reissue of The Shaggs, Philosophy of the World, but it was coupled with bonus material from a 1982 album of unreleased early 1970s recordings (released then as "Shaggs Own Thing") and the CD was simply called The Shaggs.

In the interim between reading that article and discovering that CD, I'd come across numerous other references to them, all falling somewhere between ridicule and reverence. By the early 1990s, I was more than a little acquainted with "difficult" music, but nothing in my musical vocabulary could have prepared me for what I heard from these three sisters. At first, I reacted as I'm sure most people do, by contextualizing it as a joke, some kind of prank or simply the product of such profound musical ignorance that it was merely laughable. Over the years since that first listening, however, I've come to appreciate it's idiosyncrasies as far more than an accident of ineptitude.

Yes, ignorance does play a critical role in this music because it sounds like these girls were raised in utter isolation from the world and had to invent the very concept of music all on their own without any points of reference to guide them. That means that this music exists with its own internal logic and rationale. It's not like they're incompetent at playing regular music. They're actually quite precise about how they play THEIR music THEIR way. In that regard, one simply has to acknowledge that these sounds are not the result of stupidity or incompetence. They're the result of resourcefulness and ingenuity forced to function in a vacuum.

The proof of the above proposition rests in the fact that Dot (Dorothy) Wiggin has continued to tour and perform this music with a backing band of professional musicians who have been able to replicate the nuances of the original recordings with the guidance of Dot. They have personally verified that she is completely cognizant of the intricacies of the arrangements and their function. In the same way that Don Van Vliet was able to transcribe his abstract, angular vision into the music of Captain Beefheart, the Wiggin sisters were able to do the exact same thing for the music of The Shaggs.

If there's a lesson to be learnt here, it's that "music" can be defined as any organized sound provided that there is an organizer. The structure, method and techniques of this organization are, however, completely up to the individual doing the organizing.

FORGOTTEN FILM - PORTRAIT OF JENNIE

Sometime around the late 2000s, probably 2007 or 2008, I was watching TV late one night, channel surfing after having smoked a bit of good weed and looking for something chill for nighttime viewing. At the time, I was a big fan of TCM (Turner Classic Movies) and was partial to exploring the classics of the golden age of Hollywood. This particular evening, I happened to land on TCM just as this odd, haunting movie was starting. Something about it immediately transfixed me and I couldn't take my eyes off its dreamy, strange interplay of light and shadows. All the way through, I kept wondering what it was I was watching, but it was only at the end ,when the title and credits played, that I found it was called Portrait of Jennie.

I immediately looked it up online and found it was available on DVD and ordered a copy. Once I got it, I watched it again (and again a while later) and just gave it another viewing last night to share it with my partner, who'd never seen it before. I still find it holds its charms quite firmly, as much as it did that first viewing.

Portrait of Jennie was released in 1948 and stars Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotton. It tells the tale of a lonely painter who meets this charming yet ghostly young girl. She seems to be from another time and another life and each time they meet, she has aged much more than the span of time which has marked the space between their meeting. Cotton's character is not sure if she's real and the whole relationship unfolds like a Twilight Zone episode. In essence, it's a love story, but it's also an allegory about life and death and eternity. Time and space twist and enfold around each other as their star-crossed paths entwine through spans of years or days, depending on your perspective.

Technically, the film is notable for some rather innovative and novel production techniques, utilizing scenes where fabric has been placed over the lens to give the image the texture of a painting canvas and mixing black & white film stock with splashes of scenes in tinted monochrome and full color. The film's cinematographer, who tragically died after the film's completion, was posthumously nominated for an Academy Award. The score of the film also uses a Theremin in the soundtrack during the segments with Jennie, to lend an air of dreamlike ambience. There are times when Jennie is shot to look like she's almost transparent, nearly fading into the background. There are also several striking exterior shots, done on location, such as those done in New York City's Central Park. among other places, which utilize natural lighting of sunrises and sunsets to magnificent and striking effect with the surrounding architecture.

The film also supplies an excellent supporting cast, most notably the legendary Ethel Barrymore as the owner of an art gallery who takes Cotton's struggling painter character under her wing to help nurture his talent. Veteran character actor, David Wayne, also turns in a lively performance as the best friend of the struggling artist.

Portrait of Jennie is a film which may be a bit old fashioned in its idealism and a bit naive in its belief in "true love", but it more than transcends these issues by its sheer commitment to its vision. It believes in itself so much, you just can't refuse its persuasions. And that's really the key theme as it shows an artist finding that the most powerful inspiration there is when creating is love.