NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, HERE'S THE SEX PISTOLS @ 45

 

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.

BILL NELSON'S RED NOISE - ART/EMPIRE/INDUSTRY (THE COMPLETE RED NOISE)

 

I finally got the opportunity to explore the recently released box set, Art/Empire/Industry (The Complete Red Noise). This set takes the “one and done” Bill Nelson’s Red Noise album from 1979, Sound On Sound, and gives it the deluxe reissue treatment, which has previously been done with all the Be Bop Deluxe albums. Though I can’t afford a physical copy and therefore cannot comment on the packaging of this set, I can at lease enjoy the music and all the bonus material that’s been made available. In exploring this set, it has highlighted the singular creative spark which Nelson harnessed for this project and which still strikes up a flame over four decades after its release.

When this album was originally issued in February of 1979, it became my gateway into the world of Bill Nelson. I’d seen BBD performing Panic In the World from their final LP, Drastic Plastic, in 1978 when they appeared on The Midnight Special. That performance caught my attention with the band appearing in very conservative business suits, though with Bill having dark eye-shadow under his eyes to give him a slightly deadened appearance. It was the subtle subversion of that appearance which piqued my curiosity. However, it took a somewhat middling review of the Red Noise LP in CREEM magazine to inspire me to want to buy that record. Even though the reviewer was dismissive of the album, something about the way it was described made me feel like this album needed to be in my collection.

When I managed to snag a copy, it instantly became the dominant presence within my meager, yet burgeoning record collection. There was certainly a strong influence from DEVO in the music, but there was a poetry and humor apparent in the album that was decidedly all down to Nelson’s hand. What struck me about the album was the laser precision focus of the songs and the style of the music. Its single-mindedness and coherence all felt seamless and impenetrable. The songs were precision crafted and presented in a manner which was relentless and supercharged with electricity. This is perfectly encapsulated by the album’s opener, Don’t Touch Me (I’m Electric). One felt like you might catch a spark from the turntable if you attempted to touch it while the album was playing. And then there was Furniture Music, a song which became my anthem of teenage angst, perfectly reflecting that feeling of being an object in my own life. Every song had something to connect with and put me in a state of mind where I was saying internally, “Okay, 1984 is on the way, so bring it on!” I was ready to end the ‘70s and start the future, no matter how bleak it might be.

Thematically, the album bounced furiously from one vision of dystopian alienation to another. Each song touched on themes of political fascism, machine conformity, intellectual dysfunction, emotional dysphoria and more. Bill’s evocative lyrics were layered atop a relentless onslaught of rapid fire tempos and song arrangements which felt like they’d been bolted together by assembly line robots rather than composed by human hands. This was all perfectly encapsulated by the LP’s cover photo, a brilliant work of found object assemblage by Japanese photographer, Bishin Jumonji, which depicted a bed ridden robot about to phone in sick. It’s an absolutely iconic symbolic representation of futurist failure.

The road to this album began before Be Bop Deluxe were formally disbanded, when Bill was beginning the process of creating what would be their final LP, Drastic Plastic. In fact, Bill was ready to pull the plug on the band at that time, but was persuaded to give it another go by the band’s management. As such, you can hear Nelson striving for Red Noise throughout the songs on DP, which were intended to be for RN’s first album, but it’s all a bit muted in the context of that band and the razor sharp angularity of Sound On Sound is only hinted at by Drastic Plastic. After DP’s completion, Bill was determined that the only way to realize his vision was to do so in an entirely rebuilt form with clear authority for the composer from top to bottom. So Red Noise would be a band, but only to facilitate Nelson’s vision as exactly as he demanded. He’d retain BBD keyboardist, Andy Clark, and brought in brother Ian on sax & additional keyboards and bassist Rick Ford. Drums would be handled by Bill himself, in the studio for most tracks, and Dave Mattacks on stage and for whatever Bill didn’t do in the studio. While Bill was the creative head, he’d relegate his guitar to a more supporting role, rather than making it the lead instrument. It would work in concert with the synthesizers to create what one critic described as “DEVO given Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound treatment”.

At the time of its release, while it performed well in the UK, reaching #33 on the album charts, it left zero impression on the US market. Critically, opinions were split with some marveling at its visionary departure from Nelson’s prior work, and others lamenting it as a contrived attempt to get in on the “new wave” trend. Music fans were equally baffled as Bill sped off into the future, leaving the “guitar hero” prog-rock of his past in the dust. The band embarked on a tour to support the album, presenting themselves in Neo-fascist grey uniforms as a tongue-in-cheek joke, positioning themselves, not as victims of this dystopia, but as harbingers and agents-provocateurs. The conflict of it all with Nelson's past work and mixed responses were enough to cause both Bill’s US and UK record labels to ditch him. This put the realization of a second Red Noise album into shambles. Bill had already begun work on the album, but the contract termination left those master tapes in the ownership of EMI, preventing him from doing anything for nearly two years until he could rework that material and release it as his first fully solo album, Quit Dreaming and Get On the Beam. By that point, Bill had given up on trying to retain a position as “band leader” and, instead, he set on his path as a solo artist, a position he’s retained for the rest of his career.

Red Noise and its attendant idiosyncratic sound would ultimately end up constrained to the Sound On Sound album. Quit Dreaming…, while possessing echoes of SoS, would end up ever so slightly returning Bill to the more romantic disposition he’d established with BBD. Indeed, the stark, angry futurism of SoS remains isolated within Nelson’s musical canon to this day. While Nelson always maintained a sense of modernity coupled with vintage science fiction nostalgia, nothing he’d create before or since would strike so fiercely or with such manic intensity as Sound On Sound.

The new box set includes discs featuring non-album bonus tracks, live performances and home demo recordings of songs from the SoS album. Those serve to highlight how pure and imperturbable Nelson’s vision was throughout the project. Its sheer monomaniacal consistency is apparent throughout the process, from conception to realization to presentation on stage. The new mix of the album, as was the case with the BBD box sets, offers up a wonderful refresher for the songs, allowing the listener to see through some of the density of the original mix and into the details of the arrangements. As a set, these recordings all reinforce and highlight the purity of the creative execution which went into producing Sound on Sound. It certainly renewed my disposition in terms of considering it one of the most important LPs to ever come into my musical life.

DAVID BOWIE - "HEROES" @ 45

 

October 14th marks the 45th anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s 12th studio album, “Heroes”, which was issued on this date in 1977. It was the second in what would become known as the “Berlin trilogy”, but the only one of the three recorded entirely at Hansa Studios in Berlin. Whereas Low, the first of the trilogy, released earlier in the year, had received little promotion from Bowie or his label, “Heroes” would merit their full attention and became a major commercial and critical success because of it.

After completing Low, Bowie felt the album was too noncommercial and, rather than tour to support it, went on the road to play keyboards with Iggy Pop when not in the studio working with him to launch his solo career, co-producing two definitive LPs, The Idiot and Lust For Life. After that, Bowie got together with Brian Eno and producer, Tony Visconti to begin work on his next album in July of 1977, with sessions ongoing until the end of August. The band were essential the same as for Low, with Carlos Alomar on guitar, George Murray on bass and Dennis Davis on drums. Initially, there were discussions of bringing in NEU! guitarist, Michael Rother, to augment the band, but somehow that inclination got lost in the shuffle.

Ultimately it came down to a frustrating night in the studio working on the title track to determine the missing ingredient for these sessions. While struggling to figure out what was lacking in the arrangement, Eno suggested phoning friend and collaborator, Robert Fripp, in New York. Bowie spoke to him and Robert initially expressed reservations, stating that he hadn’t really done anything for the last three years, but would give it a go if Bowie was willing to take a chance. With a first class ticket couriered to Fripp, he was on a plane and spent three days in the studio, knocking out his guitar parts. Bowie and Eno were bowled over by his virtuosity as he nailed each take, never having heard the songs before arriving to record on them.

The bed tracks for the album came together quickly over the course of a few days, but the overdubbing process would take slightly longer. Sometimes this would leave them struggling to resolve creative blocks, a situation which Eno would frequently remedy by the use of his Oblique Strategy Cards, a deck of vague “suggestions”, which could be randomly drawn from to illicit unexpected ideas and approaches.

The vocals would all come last, after the music was completely in place and there was no one left in the studio except Bowie and Tony. Bowie had become enamored with Iggy Pop’s uncanny ability to improvise lyrics in the studio, often laying down complete songs off the top of his head in one take. Bowie determined to pursue this approach with “Heroes” and did so with the exception of one song being written in advance. Visconti was amazed at the passion which Bowie delivered while singing in this method. A prime example of that is the title track, which begins with Bowie offering a soft croon, but eventually peaks with him belting out at a shout that was powerful enough to crumble the Berlin Wall which inspired the lyrics.

Like Low, the first side of the album was given over to a mostly mainstream pop song format while the B-side featured more adventurous instrumentals like the Kraftwerk tribute V-2 Schneider. However, where Low had come across as more disturbed and dour, “Heroes” took on a much more optimistic and upbeat disposition. Something about doing it all at Hansa, a former concert hall used as a ballroom by Gestapo officers during World War II, which was within 500 yards of the Berlin Wall so soldiers from the other side were able to peer through their windows with binoculars, gave the musicians and producers a sense of defiant vitality while working in this potential powder-keg of an environment.

The cover for the album followed along the design aesthetic which had been used on the two Iggy Pop albums with a black & white photo of Bowie on the front. The look would be carried over for the video of the title track, which became one of the early harbingers of the video revolution lurking around the corner. I can recall seeing it on Bing Crosby’s Christmas special that year and being beguiled by Bowie’s presence. It was the first time he’d really made an impression on my 14 year old teen brain. It would be an impression which would stick with me and lead me to soon getting onboard with his final installment in the trilogy, Lodger.

While the label and Bowie had eschewed promoting Low, they weren’t so reluctant with “Heroes” and Bowie set about on a major touring schedule to promote the album and bring the material from Low into his live repertoire as well. The result was that the album was a success on both sides of the Atlantic, garnering a 3rd place peak on the UK charts and 35 in the US. The single, while a modest success at the time of its release has since gone on to become one of Bowie’s most frequently referenced songs. Of the three Berlin albums, it remains the most commercially successful.

APHEX TWIN - COME TO DADDY @ 25

 

Marking its quarter century anniversary today is the infamous EP/single from Aphex Twin, Come To Daddy, which was released on vinyl and extended CD edition on October 6th, 1997. Along with its mind bending video, courtesy of Chris Cunningham, it would go on to become one of Richard D. James’ most iconic songs.

The title track began as something of a drunken joke when James was at home messing about with some death-metal riffs fused with furious break-beat rhythms. Some say it was a piss-take parody of Prodigy’s Firestarter hit. James went ahead and released it, but then withdrew it shortly thereafter for a week in order to prevent it from going to the #1 spot on the charts. It ended up peaking at #33.

The video for the single is a primary reason for the song’s longevity and lasting impact. It was shot in the same area as many of the exterior scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and offers a dismal, apocalyptic scenario where an old lady is terrorized by a gang of rampaging children, all with Richard D. James’ sinister grinning face, a motif that would be repeated with various record covers and videos. Grandma is eventually confronted by a screeching TV summoned demon who gathers the kids around him in a manner which seems intended to be a parody of a similarly framed scene in one of Michael Jackson’s videos. The oblique references to Jackson would continue in the Windowlicker video, which was the followup from AFX and Cunningham.

Reissues of the CD have expanded it to 11 tracks and a pretty much full LP runtime of 45 minutes. What may have started off as a bit of a laugh turned out to be one of Aphex Twins most enduring and memorable releases. 

 

NICO - CHELSEA GIRL @ 55

 

Released in October of 1967, the debut solo LP by Nico, Chelsea Girl, is marking its 55th anniversary this month. Coming on after her involvement with the debut Velvet Underground album & Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour, Chelsea Girl is a rather skewed representation of the chanteuse as an artist, offering her little creative input for the album while obscuring her presence with distracting and unwanted musical elements.

After recording and touring with the VU in 1966 and early 1967, Nico moved to New York City and took up residence in a coffeehouse as a solo folk performer, often accompanied by Jackson Brown or various rotating VU members on guitar. When the proposition of a solo album for the German native loomed, her accompanists set about contributing songs for her to sing, with Brown, Lou Reed, John Cale and even Bob Dylan offering material. Nico only got a single writing credit for It Was A Pleasure Then. Production was handled by Tom Wilson, who despite Nico’s assertions, refused to use any drums or bass on the album and, without her knowledge or consent, added overdubs of strings and flute, much to the singer’s dismay. She is quoted as saying,

“I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away. I asked for drums, they said no. I asked for more guitars, they said no. And I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes! ... They added strings and – I didn't like them, but I could live with them. But the flute! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute.”

Stylistically, the album ended up landing somewhere between chamber folk and baroque pop. Critics have, in turn, praised it as a “masterpiece”, on one hand, and as having been “sabotaged”, as Trouser Press would eventually decry. Personally, I find it mostly enjoyable and listenable, but not particularly representative of what she’d eventually create with such monolithic & somber albums as The Marble Index, Desertshore & The End.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & THE MAGIC BAND - CLEAR SPOT @ 50

 

Marking half a century on the shelves this month, it’s Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band with their seventh studio LP, Clear Spot, released in October, 1972. While Beefheart had established himself as the owner of the outfields when it came to extreme music, with classics like Trout Mask Replica, bills had to be paid and pushing boundaries wasn’t bringing home the bacon.

This desire to align more to the mainstream had been a driving force with the Spotlight Kid LP from earlier in the year and it continued to push priorities for Clear Spot. However, while Spotlight Kid felt strained and left many in the band and their fans feeling less than satisfied, the recruitment of Doobie Bros producer, Ted Templeman, seemed to bring the balance between avant-garde and accessibility into an alignment which felt far more rewarding and far less like a compromise. The clarity of his production allowed the eccentricities of Beefheart’s music to mellow out enough to create an accessibility which had been elusive on previous albums.

Some of the ranks of the band were being shuffled around at this time with longtime drummer, John “Drumbo” French, departing and being replaced by Art Tripp. Zappa bassist, Roy Estrada, also joined along with regulars, Bill Harkleroad (Zoot Horn Rollo) and Mark Boston (Rockette Morton) on guitars. Much of the music had been developing since the Spotlight Kid sessions, but once it got into fully produced form, was certainly not anything that could be considered “leftovers”. Ultimately, the album proved to be the pinnacle of Beefheart's attempts at more mainstream, commercial variations on their angular, challenging aesthetic.

Unfortunately, the attempts to break into bigger sales figures still never materialized with the album barely charting in the US and flying completely below the radar in the UK. Though the effort may not have resulted in the popularity they’d wanted, the album still holds up as one of their most professionally realized productions, held aloft by solid songwriting and inventive musicianship. The edges were still there, but wielded with more restraint and intent. For those looking for a gateway album into the world of the Captain, Clear Spot might just be the ticket.

DONAL FAGEN - THE NIGHTFLY @ 40

 

Released 40 years ago today, it’s the debut solo LP from Steely Dan co-founder, Donald Fagen. The Nightfly was issued on October 1st, 1982 and immediately established Fagen both critically and commercially as a force to be reckoned with.

After working with Walter Becker for 14 years, first as a staff songwriting team for ABC Records and then founding Steely Dan in 1972, the duo were finding their relationship strained by the grueling experience of recording Gaucho, the 1980 album which would become the studio swansong for Steely Dan until some 20 years later with the 2000 release of their reunion album, Two Against Nature. Gaucho sessions were so difficult that the atmosphere was reported to be downright “depressing”, a situation aggravated the mutual perfectionism of the two and by Becker’s reported substance abuse issues at the time. Though the album ended up being another massive success, its aftermath fostered a mutual understanding that some creative space was needed, with Fagen already contemplating solo projects. Though it would be two decades between Dan LPs, the duo weren’t completely estranged from each other through those years as they would eventually contribute to each other’s subsequent solo albums and engage in some tours as Steely Dan in the interim. However, Becker wasn’t involved at all with Nightfly.

Creatively, Fagen decided to delve into very personal territory for song inspirations on his solo debut, dipping back into his youth and childhood memories. That ended up making the album more optimistic and nostalgic that cynical & ironic, as he was often prone to be. The opener is very much inspired by mid-century modernist & futurist conceptions of the “world of tomorrow”, with that “wheel in space” and “spandex jackets, one for everyone”. It all sounds very naive and overtly innocent, though you can still lightly sense the cynic lurking beneath the star gazing breezy melodies. The move away from irony and into pure “fun” was intentional, as was the shift to a jazzier style. Memories of late nigh jazz radio as a child are reflected in the album's music as well as on the cover, which shows Fagen as a DJ, spinning obscure records for a meager twilight audience, enraptured by his muse while feeling the loneliness of the booth. It may not have the bite of Steely Dan’s work, but it certainly had the ability to be evocative.

Technically, it was something of a groundbreaking record, being one of the first fully digitally produced albums. Much of the production team and many of the musicians were from the Steely Dan stable of producers, engineers and players, having worked on the group’s albums throughout the previous decade, but many had to take special courses with 3M on how to work with the brand new, state-of-the-art digital recording equipment. The challenge of dealing with the tech was only compounded by also having to continue to cater to Fagen’s meticulous perfectionism.

The album was recorded at studios in LA and NYC throughout 1981/82 and Fagen, rather than doing any “live in studio” recording with the band to get bed tracks established, opted to record each component individually, a process that was doubly painstaking as the techs struggled to develop an affinity for the digital tools. At times, recording was derailed by external distractions like a large magnet outside the studio, which was part of the NY subway system, causing a persistent hum in the guitar amp, and then there was the instance where a strange smell drove the staff to gut the studio, removing its air conditioning, carpeting, and recording console until they discovered the cause of the smell: a deceased rat in a drainpipe!

Hurdles surmounted, the album was finally released and its reception was decidedly positive on all fronts, gaining near universal accolades from critics and spawning two major hit singles. Like the preceding Dan LPs, audiophiles have made it a favorite demonstration record for their expensive hi-fi systems, though the initially CD version should be avoided due to having been mastered from a 3rd generation copy of the album. It was actually Stevie Wonder who helped identify that issue by reporting its compromised sound to Fagen. This issue has been, one would assume, remedied by later remastered editions.