Tag: Rock

Gilberto Gil – Gilberto Gil [Cérebro eletrônico]

Gilberto Gil [Cérebro eletrônico]

Gilberto Gil – Gilberto Gil [Cérebro eletrônico] Philips R 765.087 L (1969)

With vocals recorded while Gil was under house arrest by the Brazilian military junta (using a metronome — audible in places), and later orchestrated by Rogério Duprat, Gilberto Gil’s second self-titled album (sometimes referred to by the first song “Cérebro eletrônico” to distinguish it) is more intensely rocking and more overtly filled with electronic effects and musings than its immediate predecessor.  Duprat may have had a freer hand here given Gil’s jailing, which is fine — Duprat was a genius, so who is to complain?  The music also veers more toward private musings and existential concerns.  Eclecticism remains, but the album also somehow manages to feel more cohesive that its predecessor, with sustained emphasis on rock and experimental composition.  This remains one of the best offerings from a very fertile time in the Brazilian music counterculture.

Television – Marquee Moon

Marquee Moon

Television – Marquee Moon Elektra 7E-1098 (1977)

Marquee Moon is Television’s greatest studio album (The album cover is a color photocopy of a Robert Mapplethorpe photo framed in black), and edges out the live The Blow-Up as their best release. Even though more pop-ish versions (like R.E.M.) have grabbed most public attention, Television remains a definitive rock band.

Television helped make raw performance — without regard to traditional rock skill — an asset. The sound is an alternative to the blues. They are never aggressive. Tom Verlaine sings with a decidedly untrained voice, yet helped define a new style. Punk’s do-it-yourself feeling is probably its greatest contribution to twentieth-century music. The natural sound is an urban equivalent of the country-western yodel. These are unique cultural treasures.

Below the surface Television is intellectual and cerebral. The result on Marquee Moon is something new but more accomplished than similar works. The band’s “city” attitude suggests the arrival at a final destination (an interesting side note to punk is how few artists were born or raised in the city, which isn’t obvious given the music’s urban values).

This album captures the turmoil of urban life perfectly. “See No Evil” and “Venus” start the album off right. Every other track is sensational, and minor borrowings (“Guiding Light” takes a riff from John Cale’s “Graham Greene”) are actually stokes of genius. In a world of disillusionment, fragments of life only gain meaning through reassembly. Each moment of Marquee Moon is a glorious attempt to unsettle destiny.

Television has a surprisingly clean sound, never using the distortion of their ancestors or offspring. A bass player will make-or-break a punk band, and replacement bassist Fred Smith handles the job of guiding the band well. Original bassist Richard Hell, who is credited with originating the mussed hair, safety pinned clothing, and visual nihilism of punk, had left the group to form The Heartbreakers (and then The Voidoids) before this album. Guitarist Tom Verlaine had played with Patti Smith but refined his brash style by Marquee Moon. Richard Lloyd burns on guitar as well. While Verlaine was an improviser who didn’t repeat himself, Lloyd could meticulously recreate his riffs, allowing him to overdub and double-track his guitar parts to give Marquee Moon a unique layered guitar sound.  Even with those studio effects, the dual guitars launch into frequent bouts of madness. Crashing guitar rhythms pulse, and shake the band.  Drummer Billy Ficca, especially on the magnificent title track, gives the music a loose, almost jazzy beat.

These guys came along at precisely the right time and place. Malcolm McLaren pleaded to be Television’s manager, but when they declined he headed back to England and adopted the Sex Pistols (who tend to distance themselves from Television out of fear it might ruin their dubious claim as punk’s sole originators). Television released another good studio album, Adventure, before breaking up, only to re-form sporadically. Marquee Moon still sounds great today and will remain a classic indefinitely.

Moby Grape – Moby Grape

Moby Grape

Moby Grape – Moby Grape Columbia CL-2698 (1967)

“How” and “why” are two very big questions. Moby Grape doesn’t claim to prove either, but it puts a finger on the pulse of the times. Nothing is missing. Whether countrified frat-rock, folky soul, booglarized blues, groovy psychedelia, or all of the above, every song is a unique experience. Moby Grape embodied something bigger than themselves. The many tensions inside and outside the group proved no obstacle. Intuition is bound by no master. This music just puts a smile on your face.

It’s easy to lose track of all the San Francisco bay-area legends that came out of the late Sixties. There were just so many. Was it something in the water or something in the orange juice? Even among giants Moby Grape is an album that stands out. It comes close to sounding dopey, but that makes it uplifting. The ragtag charm balances out the hippie wit.

The band’s lineup looked good on paper (they were sort-of a minor supergroup). That only makes their debut more improbable. Moby Grape’s three brilliant guitarists, Jerry Miller, Jr., Alexander “Skip” Spence, and Peter Lewis, take each solo a step beyond all expectations. Don Stevenson and Bob Mosley round out a rhythm section that kept the eclectic brew rumbling forward. It’s hard to believe the band only had three guitarists. Nothing is the same twice. “Fall On You,” “8:05,” “Someday,” and “Indifference” are unlikely efforts to fit seamlessly on one album. The reason the album is seamless that there isn’t even a thread holding it together. Everything just aligns. Each musician brought something different to the table. They seem to find a way to use every idea, while certain independence remains with each contribution. You can understand it differently every time you listen.

Moby Grape is most amazing for what it fits into thirteen songs. The songwriting is every bit a great as the musicianship. Miller’s “Naked, If I Want To” is a short and sweet statement of individuality. Miller and Stevenson’s “Hey Grandma” is one of the up-tempo rockers with plenty of time for dazzling guitar work. Songs like those and “Omaha” deserve revisionist status as classics. That squeaky drum pedal on “Indifference” is the clincher.

The band hardly survived, but this album did. It was a short, strange trip indeed. Moby Grape is a great example of how the “we can all get along” peace & love thing was certainly attainable. If you can grasp the way this album keeps from falling apart, you’ve got the bigger ideal figured out.

Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night

Tonight's the Night

Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night Reprise MS 2221 (1975)

Neil Young was among the most interesting rock artists of the 1970s.  Aside from his landmark After the Gold Rush, and the commercially successful Harvest, he made his so-called “ditch trilogy” (or “doom trilogy” or “gloom trilogy”) of albums: Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night.  Unlike the other two albums, though, Tonight’s the Night is not melancholic or rancorous but ominously morose.  Yet it is also cathartic.  It isn’t music for a sunny day or a party with friends.  It is for solitary, late night introspection.

Young had fired Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten in late 1972 just before a tour, due to drug abuse limiting Whitten’s performance.  Shortly after, Whitten died of an overdose.  Then a few months later former Crosby, Stills Nash & Young roadie Bruce Berry died of an overdose too.  The standard narrative is that Young’s “ditch trilogy” was his reaction to Whitten and Berry’s deaths, and his feelings of responsibility and complicity.  That seems fair enough.  Yet Young’s music of this period is lasting because it captures more than just coping with Whitten and Berry’s deaths.  This music is also about the death of the countercultural project of the 1960s.

Tonight’s the Night has some resemblances to John Lennon and Harry Nilsson‘s infamous “Lost Weekend” escapades.  It has the feel of being caught at daybreak after a full night of partying.  The album stumbles about, a bit angry, disenchanted, heartbroken, unsure, drugged-out.  It is about coming to terms with the “loss” of Whitten and the 60s project, but also getting out all the feelings that engenders and then getting past it all to get ready for something else.  In this way, Young’s reaction to the situation of the early/mid 70s was to not give up on what had happened before, coast into comfortable (and forgettable) soft rock that sort of fit commercial expectations from the sorts of institutions that really crushed the 60s experiment.  Promoter Bill Graham lamented how the old rock scene died when acts became more interested in money than music.  Young cut against all that.

Young has better individual songs elsewhere, but for pure mood Tonight’s the Night is a a killer.  This is a “warts and all” sort of affair.  The songs are sloppy, because Young didn’t want his band to be too familiar with the material prior to recording, and that is a drawback for some.  Still, the reason this matters is that Young stubbornly stuck with 60s idealism even after those forces had, by late 1973 (when most of the album was recorded), conclusively lost, and the era of the Powell Memorandum had begun.  Young didn’t pretend that the 60s project was still alive and well, nor did he capitulate and join the reactionary counter-revolution.  He affirmed what was good all along in the 60s project — and the spirit of what Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry’s lives represented — that sought something outside the established, rigid and oppressive rules of the early post-war period, while grimly accepting its limitations and failures.  William Davies wrote that

“from the Enlightenment through to the present . . . unhappiness becomes a basis to challenge the status quo. Understanding the strains and pains that work, hierarchy, financial pressures and inequality place upon human well-being is a first step to challenging those things. This emancipatory spirit flips swiftly into a conservative one, once the same body of evidence is used as a basis to judge the behavior and mentality of people, rather than the structure of power.”

Neil Young is one of rock music’s shining examples of somebody who resisted the “flip” to the conservative side of all this. He kept tilting against the establishment.  “Roll Another Number (For the Road)” encapsulates that feeling best, with a calm acceptance and determination, soildering on, moving past the escapism of “Mellow My Mind” with a buddy stoner charm, only to have the hopes that “Roll Another Number” implies evaporate with the existential road trip narrative “Albuquerque.”

As reviewer BradL wrote, echoing Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone, “there’s not a touch of self-indulgence on the record because Young is as honest and hard on himself as anyone else. He doesn’t want your pity, nor even your forgiveness[.]”  On “Speakin’ Out” he calls himself a fool, on “World on a String” and “Borrowed Tune” he finds no meaning or significance in being at the top of the music business.  So let’s appreciate Young’s unhappy, depressing music like Tonight’s the Night for all it stands for: an attempt at something better than the status quo.

There are plenty of bluesy classic rock riffs.  The second half has more conventionally catchy classic rock.  But, hell, even the archival live performance from 1970 with Whitten (adding vocals) on side one, “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” manages to be a rousing affirmation of what the entire album sets out to do.  Still, in spite of the anthemic charge of many of the melodies, the band is loose, imprecise.

“Tonight’s the night [duh-da–dah—duh___]

Tonight’s the night”

The significance of chanting these vacant lines on the first version of the title song, traded against some briefly tinkling piano and a bass line that rises and then suddenly falls, are a challenge: to figure out what tonight is the night for.  It is the struggle for meaning that gives this music its power.  If the 60s project failed, and Whitten and Berry died, how can Young, or anybody else, carry on the core ideals of what it and they proposed without failing, without being snuffed out?  What makes Tonight’s the Night one of Young’s finest moments, is that it denies any sort of assurance that there is an answer to that question.  No one knows — sure as hell not Young.  But he rattles the cage of his own mind, and puts that on record for the world to hear, trying to take some kind of step forward on terms that he himself sets.

The Rolling Stones – It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll

It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

The Rolling Stones – It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Rolling Stones Records COC 59103 (1974)

A step up from Goats Head Soup, but still well short of the best Stones albums.  The title track is great, and some of the later throwaway songs (“Time Waits for No One,” “Luxury,” “Dance Little Sister”) still have a catchy quality to them.  But on the minus side, some forced and vapid songwriting (“Till the Next Goodbye,” “If You Really Want to Be My Friend,” “Fingerprint File”) can really drag.  There is a dull cover of a great Temptations song (“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”).  In a way, this could be seen as the Stones following the pattern of their early-60s albums just updated with mid-70s studio gimmickry.

The Red Krayola – God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It

God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It

The Red Krayola – God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It International Artists IA LP 7 (1968)

Of all the inventive rock music of the tail end of the 1960s, God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It has the distinction of being one that still sounds revolutionary almost 50 years later.  The songs (some can barely be called “songs” as such) mock contemporary rock and pop trends.  Sometimes typical 1960s vocal pop choruses are presented, but a cappella (“Music,” “Sherlock Holmes”).  The drums occasionally react to the other instruments rather than provide a propulsive, syncopated beat (“Say Hello to Jamie Jones”).  Other songs are self-consciously disorganized, with the musicians playing at different tempos, completely out of sync (“Save the House,” “Sheriff Jack,” “The Jewels of the Madonna”).  “Listen to This” consists of the spoken announcement, “Listen to this,” followed by a staccato plunking of a single key on the piano, totaling all of eight seconds.  The shameless insolence of Diogenes does come to mind.  There are some vaguely catchy, if abstract and angular, riffs and melodies here and there (“Dairarymaid’s Lament,” “Leejol,” “Dirth of Tilth,” “Tina’s Gone to Have a Baby”).  They end up being yet another unpredictable facet of the album, confounding expectations that can’t even categorically deny “conventional” rock.  None of the varied, strange devices dominates the album.  While that factor might explain while opinions are mixed, and why this has never really been assimilated into mainstream rock aside from a few punk and post-rock outfits, it also suggests why the movement of the late 1960s counterculture as a whole failed, because stuff like this never caught on.  People tended to cling to the stuff that was more salable, collapsing the movement back into those discrete aspects that fit best within the pre-existing paradigm.  But God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It didn’t fit that paradigm.  It still is a remarkably fresh and inventive album.  While the power centers of society may have pushed back against the 1960s counterculture, trying to prove that consumerism and nuclear families are the only viable options, The Red Krayola left behind artifacts like this, a surviving rebuttal that couldn’t quite be absorbed and co-opted.  Texan acts like labelmates The 13th Floor Elevators, but also the likes of Jandek and Ornette Coleman, seemed to have a way of not just taking chances, but trying to casually either make the Earth move or take leave of it entirely.  They reframed the concept of what a safe and secure life meant, placing within a collaborative dialog the possibility of chance, variation, and individuality.  But few were as irreverently funny as The Red Krayola.

Sonic Youth – Rather Ripped

Rather Ripped

Sonic Youth – Rather Ripped Geffen B0006757-02 (2006)

A rather average album.  It’s only slightly better than Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, which isn’t saying much.  The Youth seem disinterested here.  It all sounds like a concerted effort to sound “straight”, or at least “marketable”, by reigning in the songs to shorter lengths and having more well-defined beginning/middle/end song structures.  But it all is too forced and self-referential.  The first two tracks are nice though.

The intriguing but often unsatisfying thing about Sonic Youth was that they evolved over their long existence, at a pace that is frustrating in hindsight.  So many of their albums kept one foot in whatever style they had recently found success with while tentatively stepping into all sorts of other areas.  This had the effect of feeling like they clung to what they had done before out of force of habit — or maybe for commercial reasons? — while taking their sweet time to sort out their next move.  Their peaks, of which they had many, tended to appear on record when they locked into a particular style and stuck with it.  So, their debut, then EVOL–Sister–Daydream Nation, then *maybe* Dirty, and then Murray Street, all of those locked into something more specific.  Some of the transitional material is good, but also doggedly varied in a way that prompts a listener looking back to say, “Ah, but they did that part better on the next album.”  Yet, on the other hand, Sonic Youth were always trying new things, and so there always were new parts to consider.  At least, there were new parts until Rather Ripped, which along with The Eternal had them stagnating if not looking backward for the first time in their career.

Did I mention that I miss Jim O’Rourke already?  If not, I am now.  This was the band’s first album without him after his brief tenure in the band, and his creativity and good humor seems conspicuously absent.

Sonic Youth – Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star

Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star

Sonic Youth – Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star DGC DGCD-24632 (1994)

U.S. President Bill Clinton adopted a strategy called “triangulation” for his 1996 re-election campaign.  It was a “third way” approach that, so it was claimed, merged elements of both sides of the Republican/Democrat mainstream political spectrum (an absurdly narrow spectrum, as it was) to synthesize them into a “triangulated” middle ground that was not beholden to either — when from the outside it looked like complete capitulation to the political right for narrow personal gain.  In a way, this is a useful lens with which to look at Sonic Youth’s 1994 album Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.  The album too often seems calculated to leaven the band’s late-1980s noise rock sound with a steady backbeat and various rock styles of the day, if for no other reason that to ride the wave of popularity those other sounds enjoyed at the time.  The band caters to all the trends in contemporary “alternative rock,” from “Winner’s Blues” a lo-fi indie blues in the mold of Sebadoh, to plenty of sleek grunge rock like Smashing Pumpkins, to cracked rock balladry like Hole.  There are hints of the sort of mellow, moody noisy grooves the band would explore at length later in the decade.  But those are completely subordinated to everything else.  Some of the songs take a good idea and run it into the ground through repetition, stretching a small (yet inadequate) amount of good ideas to album length.  Overall, the real problem is that the album is terribly uneven, and most of the second half is complete garbage.  While sometimes considered Sonic Youth’s very worst album, this isn’t as entirely bad as that suggests, but it is an awkward jumble of pandering and timid experiments in new directions.  That was the thing with Sonic Youth, though.  They adopted different styles over their long career.  It just took them time to develop each one, and there were lulls during the transitions.  Consider this such a lull.