Do you maybe have a friend who might be a musician and won’t stop talking about Led Zeppelin? Or maybe you like to read, like magazines or books or whatever about music and there’s always an article or a section or a chapter about Led Zeppelin. And you want to be like “Shut up about Led Zeppelin!” But then you hear Led Zeppelin and it blows your socks off all over again, and there’s nothing you can say or do about it except admit that your friend is right and those books are right and those guys just rocked the earth. And speaking of Led Zeppelin, I just got a bulletin from a coworker about a confirmed Robert Plant sighting at an Austin record store. Rumor’s been having it Planty has bought a house in the hills and sounds like it’s true. If that’s the case, stalking might be in order.
My complaint against the Grateful Dead, case in point. On record Friend of the Devil is three minutes twenty-six seconds of bluegrass tinted outlaw blues. (In disclaimer; I can’t understate how I love American Beauty.) Then they get on stage and it’s ten minutes. No arguing, it’s an impeccable performance, beautiful even. Yet it feels as though they’re playing from under the sea or some dimension where time moves more slowly. Makes you feel what the punks were so mad about (you know, besides Margaret Thatcher); it’s the essence of soft-bellied seventies artistic self-indulgence. Taking a song that was utterly perfect at 3:26, wiping it clean of all urgency and playing it for ten minutes just to show how good you play – no wonder there was a backlash of dirty punks out to prove how badly they couldn’t play in just under three minutes. That’s my opinion; I know lots of people who worship the ground Jerry Garcia used to walk on and they eat this stuff up. They point out that it was the genius of the Dead that they never played exactly the same way twice and made every show a unique exploration of wherever their muses lead them. That’s a good point and there’s something to be said for allowing your material to evolve and mutate in the moment. If it weren’t so damn boring I’d agree.
The Easybeats were a pop group from Australia who momentarily caught the world’s attention with their single Friday On My Mind, a typical example of a silly British Invasion-era pop hit. They were, to judge by the video below, deliriously happy to find themselves on television. Their Wikipedia page garners them as the greatest Australian pop group of the sixties, which just means they were the only Australian pop group of the sixties to be allowed out of Australia. Who thinks that I’m not sure, but in 1998 the proud Australian postal service put them on a stamp. Since they didn’t follow up Friday On My Mind with anything nearly as delightful, they were promptly and roundly forgotten by most of the world’s population. Except by one David Bowie, who decided that Friday On My Mind was one of his favorite songs and would be included on his album Pin Ups alongside classics by Pink Floyd, The Who and The Yardbirds. Realizing that it was already a very silly song that would in no way benefit from any kind of serious treatment, he did the right thing and made it even sillier. Bowie somewhere along the way developed an image as a quite darkish character, what with his penchant for writing about insanity and the end of the world, but that is a one-sided image and Pin Ups was just the ticket for expressing his humorous side. While some songs he did more-or-less straight faced, Friday (and The Yardbirds’ Shapes Of Things) was taken to the farthest reaches of campy hilarity. Just listen to the way he intones “Even my old man looks … good.” Fans of gloom-and-doom Leper Messiah Bowie like to brush Pin Ups aside with a brusque “Stop that! It’s silly.” But I love it. It’s the sound of the stressed out superstar just letting his hair down, subverting expectations and having a good time just singing songs not about suicide.
“I go out on Friday night, I come home on Saturday morning”
I think this sums it up quite nicely for most of us. Besides topical references to a chip shop and Terry Hall’s accent to mark the story geographically, it’s so universal. Everybody (nearly) goes through a phase when their life revolves around the same dull debauchery. The drinking and dancing, the girl-watching, the late night snack attack and the inevitable end of the night; dodging puddles of spew on your early morning trek home, alone. Hall’s disaffected tone says more than his words do. It’s that ennui that settles in when things that used to be fun become routine, when the night out is a chore, when you go through the motions just because that’s what you bloody well do on a Friday night. Nobody’s celebrating anything. It’s an ode to party fatigue. And yet, dammit, someway, somehow the song’s wafting on some sad glamour. It’s not the cult of personality; I never thought The Specials were especially glamorous blokes. It’s just my own perversity at work that I find drunk, lonely boys appealing; and sad, lonely drinking romantic. I’m just attracted to broken-wing types, I guess. If you’re not on the same page after hearing the original, then I challenge you to listen to Nouvelle Vague’s cover. If anybody can convince you that wading through piss in the taxi queue is the height of romance and squalor, it’s those dreamy French gals.
Here’s somebody who looks like she might believe in alien abductions. Nina Hagen believes everything, sometimes with dubious moral results, like her belief that antiretroviral drugs are a scam. She’s highly outspoken but not always entirely coherent, so it’s best not to take her too seriously. I think she’s taking a stand against media mind control or something here. I’d understand better if I spoke German. But understanding German or not isn’t the point. The point is to sit back and be amazed that any human can produce sounds like Nina does.
I’ll admit I like this song entirely on the strength of the distorted backing vocals. Otherwise I think it’s a pretty generic effort from Cat Stevens. Not exactly bad, but not as catchy as could be. On the other hand it does appear to be about an alien abduction. He wasn’t entirely off his rocker either; in the 70′s alien/supernatural/occult theories were hot stuff and about as mainstream as they’d ever be. This was when Erich von Daniken was almost taken seriously. Chariots of the Gods? made a pretty convincing case for alien influences on Earth, at least wishfully. Science and archaeology hadn’t quite caught up to debunking exactly why outer space beings didn’t build the pyramids, and imagining that they had is undeniably fun. So of course UFO landings and abductions were something lots of people thought and wrote songs about. It was a simpler time.
You can tell this song is old because they’re agitating for the freedom of Nelson Mandela. Black Uhuru’s highly political album Now! came out in 1990, the same year Mandela was released from prison. The fight against apartheid was a hot-button issue, and Duckie Simpson was understating it when he sang “the world is displeased.” Now Mandela has become something akin to a secular Dalai Lama, but in 1990 it was far from a sure thing that he would be free or even survive to carry on his mission. In the hindsight of history it’s easy to think that of course the good guys won. But the good guys winning is never a certainty (and sometimes one of the good guys turns out to be Josef Stalin). Protest songs might seem like an inconsequential part of historical struggle, but they reflect people’s passionate feelings better than dry textbook accounts do. Sometimes the passion and desire to communicate a point gets in the way of making a good song, but Black Uhuru can protest the situation in South Africa without resorting to bombast. And sometimes rock stars with good intentions can make themselves look like self-righteous dipsticks when they start talking about serious world issues. But reggae, misleadingly relaxing as it is, has always been inherently political. It’s a musical culture of which standing up and speaking out is the backbone. Sure, there’s reggae songs about love and sinsemilla and chilling out, but reggae is a vehicle of political expression before all that.
Subtitled A Hallucination of the Christmas Skeleton Pleading With a Suicide Bomber. Which makes all kinds of sense. This is about as politically topical as the Lips can bring themselves to be. Not for them to knock other people; it’s Wayne Coyne’s way to gently remind the radical that he’s making a mistake. Well, they didn’t title their documentary Fearless Freaks for nothing. They’ve gotten downright dippy with age. Not so long ago they went on tour playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon cover-to-cover. Now they’ve gotten into innovative packaging. Their last offer came encased in a gummi-skull, to be eaten through, presumably. Next up, they’re planning to release their new song tastefully presented inside a genuine human skull. (Less tasty but more permanent.) Just one song? Oh yeah, it’s 24 hours long. Cheers to them for finding a way around the whole downloading issue. When the package is half the main attraction, torrent and files are woefully inadequate.
Patti Smith has an image as a scary, no-bullshit, hellraising ‘godmother of punk’, an honorary one-of-the-boys, a poet and an intellectual who wears black boots and doesn’t comb her hair because she’s above caring about such superficial aspects of appearance. That’s a great image, an influential and inspiring one. But just listen to how girlish she sounds singing the first lines of Frederick, a song she wrote for her future husband (coyly referred to in liner notes as ‘my clarinet teacher’). She’s the godmother of punk, and she’s the little girl who stole an encyclopedia from the general store. Like any girl would, she spent her first substantial paycheck on a fur coat. She’s been known to contribute essays to Vogue about the charm of matching hats and purses. She’s the godmother of punk who chose to leave the open road to get married and live in the suburbs. She didn’t resume her career until widowhood left her broke and stranded in suburbia without a driver’s license. As usual, the person is more interesting than the icon.
hi hello wake from thy sleep
God has given your soul to keep
all of the power that burns in the flame
ignites the light in a single name
Frederick name of care
fast asleep in a room somewhere
guardian angels [line a bed]
shed their light on my sleepy head
I am a threshold yearning to sing
down with the the dancers having one last fling
here’s to the moment when you said hello
come on my spirit are you ready let’s go
hi hi hey hey
maybe I will come back some day now
but tonight on the wings of a dove
up above to the land of love
……….
now I lay me down to sleep
pray the Lord my soul to keep
kiss to kiss breath to breath
my soul surrenders astonished to death
night of wonder for us to keep
set our sails channel [out] deep
after the rapture two hearts meet
mine entwined in a single beat
Frederick you’re the one
as we journey from sun to sun
all the dreams I waited so long for
fly tonight so long so long
bye bye hey hey
maybe we will come back some day now
but tonight on the wings of a dove
up above to the land of love
Frederick name of care
high above in sky that’s clear
all the things I’ve been dreamin’ of
are expressed in this name of love
bye bye hey hey
maybe we will come back some day now
but tonight on the wings of a dove
up above . . .
This is dedicated to my clarinet teacher
Fred Sonic Smith
Ripton Hylton aka Eek-a-Mouse has made over a dozen album dabbling in a variety of styles (not always with the same degrees of success). He’s an icon of reggae and a cult figure outside the Jamaican scene. His comic musical persona belies his imposing physical stature, and vice versa. If there was one song we could take as his mission statement, this would be it. No matter if a song is about something political, sexy or just falling off his bike, Mouse wants music to be fun first. Even when he goes all hip-hop (which I deplore) it’s hard not to warm to his exuberant freak-ness.
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