A funny part of getting into the deep cuts of the disco era, as I've mentioned before, is how eventually everybody's doing it, everybody seems to get around to making their disco track. B.B. King. Little Feat. Camel. Barbara Streisand. The Beach Boys. Even the opening act at Woodstock!
"Going Back to My Roots," Richie Havens (1980): Havens covering Lamont Dozier's 1977 original, about going back to Detroit to see family. Black family. The Roots TV series chronicling the saga of an American family going back to Africa aired in '77. But Havens turns the song into a global multicult anthem and inspiring model blueprint of the spiritual side of House music. The deconstructed dancefloor parts give it that proto-House production feel and Haven's soulful voice an anthemic and universal pop heft that is indomitable. "I'm not talking about the roots in the land/I'm talking about the roots in the man/It's not red, it's not white, it's not yellow, it's not black, it's down to earth."
Richie Havens with Groove Armada live in Brixton (2002): Numerous other versions chart over the years, peaking in the US with NYC disco group Odyssey in '81, and then a founding Italo House version for the FPI Project in '89, and other chart appearances in South Africa and UK and other parts of Europe again in '89 and '94 and '99 and 2002. At this point Dozier's disco classic is practically a standard of House style dance music. Here's Havens still bridging disco's spiritual House music soul with EDM millennials.
"Going Back to My Roots," Lamont Dozier (1977): For Dozier, the great songwriter who co-wrote and produced 14 Billboard number one hits with Motown, living in LA at the time the song was about going back to his Black roots in Detroit. An intimate psychological (if epic) journey; the original clocks in at over 9 minutes long. But Hugh Masekela, South African trumpeter, producer, anti-apartheid artist, contributes to production and takes the song back to Africa. The final section moves explicitly into Afrobeat territory, chanting in Yoruba and carrying on with the collaborative energy of sizzling global funk music; so LA to Detroit to Soweto. It's a great track, if maybe a little disjointed by its Dozier and Masekela sides. But Havens' voice and the way his discofied version fully transforms the song into this multicultural global dance anthem really takes it to another level for me. Makes it a post-disco global disco classic.
My memory, spotty as it is, is that I first heard about The Fall from Carter Wood in 1979.
Carter went to my high school, although we never hanged out in high school. He wrote for the school newspaper, took college prep classes, and was on the Honor Roll. In high school, by contrast, I was busy going to keggers with my buddies and trying to find ways to be alone with my girlfriend; and playing a little sports, although I wasn't all that good at that either. School was an afterthought; I felt no pressure to get good grades at home and found it exceedingly easy to skate by. In short, we didn't travel in the same circles. But a couple years into college, Carter going to Reed, me Portland State, we ran into each other at a Wipers show in Portland and we saw some more shows together over the next couple years; The Rats, Sado-Nation, Gang of Four, like that. He knew lots of punk or especially post-punk stuff like The Fall and turned me on to them.
Grotesque ('80) was the first album, The Fall's third long player, that I fell for. Truth be told, my initial reactions to earlier albums, Live at the Witch Trials ('79) and Dragnet ('79) were much less enthusiastic; too shambolic, too dry and tuneless to my virgin Fall ears. But already by '81's '77-'79 Early Years, a cassette collection I ended up playing to death before losing, I was already reevaluating and thrilling to a handful of early classic Fall numbers: "Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow," "Industrial Estate," "Repetition," "Psychic Mafia," and "Rowche Rumble," etc. Listening to this early stuff again recently I can't get "Bingo Master's Breakout," their debut single, out of my head.
The Fall were always on the surface forbidding, noisy, often sounding as if on the verge of collapse. They found some difficulty getting recorded in those earliest years, like other longstanding post-punk survivors The Mekons, because even independent record labels, like Rough Trade, thought they were too incompetent as musicians to sell records, or enough records to justify production and distribution costs anyway.
Mark E. Smith (MES), the band leader, always center of attention on the mic, talk-singer, poet or wordy crank, take your pick, was the initial draw and, as it has turned out nearly forty years later, the only lasting figure in The Fall. MES was a punk! Not the cliche punk stereotype but as if you had found a real one in the wilds of England (read: outside London). He came off like an update of one of those 17th century English ranters depicted in Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Angry, inscrutable, disjointed but unflappably cocky in his right to speak for himself. Whatever he was yammering on about he was a "Hip Priest," a "Slang King," and crucial to his staying power, he had a uncanny knack for writing catchy, impossible to escape earworm hooks.
Again, not that I ever had much of an idea of what was really going on in MES's lyrics or ever studied them too closely. I've learned later he was into the books of Philip K. Dick, John le Carre, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, and other weird fiction authors. I knew The Fall name came from an Albert Camus novel. But his earworms, for me, were never more than a hook, a fragment of the lyrics, and often as earwormy for the catchy way his vocal played off and against the music, his sneering slurs and chants set against angular, cut-up, bass-drum-driven (equally catchy) tempos; in short, as catchy for the music as for his actual words or anything they added up to. I've learned only much later that the words in one of my favorite earworms by The Fall were not even MES's original lyrics.
A longstanding early favorite of mine was "Lie Dream of the Casino Soul" (1981). It lived in my brain for years as an impossible to escape earworm; specifically, a dramatic bridge that is repeated twice in the track. The music drops out, a simple circus-y keyboard figure and a chunky guitar riff strike a spare groove, before MES intones dramatically, "Meanwhile in the States/Proles retch/Dancing in the streets." It took the internet age for me to finally learn that the actual MES lyric in "Lie Dream" goes: "Meanwhile in the sticks/Proles rich/Dance in cardboard pants"?! Obviously, I was projecting. But, also, it just goes to show that often MES/The Fall's knack for hooks was as much about the music, the sonic punch of a musical passage, as about MES's words.
Still, MES definitely had a way with hooks made out of trigger words and provocatively conspiratorial language; "Hail the new puritan," "Jew on a motorbike," "What About Us?" etc. This was his earworm superpower. "LEAVE THE CAPITOL! EXIT THIS ROMAN SHELL!" off the Slates EP,* also '81, maybe my first wave Fall peak, was another MES hook stuck in my head for eons. But I really had little idea what he was actually going on about, other than he hated London and wanted to blame it on Rome. I never looked into it too much. More recently, I thought I'd maybe ran into the source of "Exit This Roman Shell" in this history book I ran into recently, Escape From Rome, before I realized the book came out in 2019. Still, a rich historical allusion is what MES's image of London or Britain trapped in dead Roman traditions tapped into.
"New Face in Hell," another early fave, sported lines that went: "Wireless enthusiast intercepts government secret radio band and uncovers secrets and scandals of deceitful type proportions." He appeared to be mocking communications snoops while confessing his avid curiosity in scuttlebutt. Like he's swapping shop talk with his conspiracy theory buddies at the pub. MES was also often satirizing the pop music process; the hype machines at NME and elsewhere in the music press. Or bragging about how legendary he was and is to the bitter end; or bitching about how unappreciated he remains. He was funny, caustic, obscure, over half the time I experienced his vocals mostly as gruff barks, yowls, cleverly accenting the tempos, that varied between circus funereal melodrama and Bo Diddley on drugs.
The title of "NFIH" refers to a movie from 1968, the paranoid conspiracy theory vibe "of deceitful type proportions" is vintage MES.
Original postpunk sublimity. The Fall's music in the early 1980s was called "Mancabilly," for Manchester rockabilly; or MES called it "Country 'n' Northern," as in northern England. MES sums up his favorite things as: "Scottish people, cats, Coronation Street [British soap opera set in Manchester], and Can." Like Can, OG German Krautrockers, already legends by the late '70s, the Fall were a mixture of high and low, progressive primitivists, if you will; MES going all in for the spoken word as performance art but always set to shambolic tribal postpunk sounds. He asserts "I am Damo Suzuki," former Can vocalist, notorious for his improvised free-associative lyrics, in one Fall song. In sum, The Fall, 1980 to 1984, that lineup, MES, Marc Riley (keyboards, guitar, banjo), Craig Scanlon (guitar, piano), Steve Hanley (bass, guitar), Paul Stanley (drums, keyboards), Karl Burns (drums, guitar), and Brix Smith (guitar), were the Fall peak in my first wave experience of the band.
I know some people think the Fall were over after Hex Enduction Hour ('82), when Marc Riley left the band and Brix joined. I'm less partisan about Riley or Brix on guitar; I love both Grotesque ('80) and Hex Enduction Hour, Riley's albums, and Perverted By Language and Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall ('84), (more or less) Brix's albums, for different reasons but more or less equally. During this classic period the band could do the slow Sturm und Drang, darkening MES's working class crank poetry (like Suzuki, like Pere Ubu, like Nick Cave), but were best for my money at uptempo, polyrhythmic, heavy melodic bass rumble and clatter (including often two drummers and always some pounding extras, plinky keyboards, kazoos, etc). The thick bass center of that now classic Fall sound is as signature post-punk Manchester as New Order's Peter Hook or anybody else. This was peak postpunk Fall for me.
I remained on board through Wonderful and Frightening World (WAFW). I mean, I listened to each of their studio releases from Grotesque to WAFW pretty soon after they came out and played them many times. But I started to drift after that, turning to other music, other records, giving only glancing attention to The Frenz Experiment ('88), and then nothing for years after I am Kurious Oranj ('88). I even saw them a couple of times in this period, good shows. I liked the title track "I am Kurious Oranj. Another bass-centered guitar jangle, reggae inflected, flourishes of atonality, MES rocking his claptrap about being the unappreciated hitmaker. The sound is there but, and this had maybe been coming on for me for a bit, maybe "Slang King," which I liked, but maybe sealed the deal for me in 1984. It felt like MES was already settling into a schtick, too much repeating himself, the cut-up poetry of a self-aggrandizing crank from working class Manchester, England.
Cool but I drifted away. To be sure, some of it was what I was doing with many of my punk/new wave/postpunk favorites in the late '80s. They quit or fizzled or I lost interest and moved on to something else: Husker Du, Public Enemy, MJ, Madonna, New Zealand's Flying Nun Records, etc. Really, too much music, too little time for listening to music. But maybe some of it was I ran into a wall with the MES persona? It had grown stale.
Rip It Up and Start Again
I returned to The Fall recently while reading Simon Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again (2005).
Reynold's avowedly "personal history" of postpunk music between 1978 and 1984. I've gathered since reading the book it has its critics. I will paraphrase: Too British, too much Green Gartside/Scritti Politti, a whole section devoted to the tenuously postpunk, "The New Pop and New Rock" (from Human League to Frankie Goes to Hollywood)." I have some sympathy here for both sides (more Talking Heads/Eno in the next edition, please) but I liked the angle Reynolds takes: postpunk was any music that was essentially created as inspiration or reaction to the Sex Pistols hostile takeover of the British charts at the end of 1977 and beginning of 1978. This covers the conventional postpunk canon, PIL to Throbbing Gristle. But also 2-Tone to Duran Duran, the latter of whom early on explicitly cite the Sex Pistols commando assault on the charts as a model (even if they were equally committed to not sounding anything like ugly punk rock, which they snarked in the music press at the time).
Anyway, Reynold's write-up of The Fall tweaked my interest. He makes a compelling case for recognizing Hex Enduction Hour ('82) as their best album. I feel like I toggle between HEH and Perverted by Language ('83). But what I realized most in Reynold's informative review of The Fall's long career was how much more Fall there was after I tuned out. MES died in 2018 at the age of sixty; he was a alcoholic and struggled with his health for years. Still, the most lasting legacy of The Fall might be how long they lasted. Between 1988, when I tuned out, and 2018, MES's death, The Fall put out twenty more albums. They've put out over fifty live albums, only a couple of which I've heard. And a bunch of singles; most I'd heard up to "Free Range" from 1992 but I don't think anything after that.
At any rate, ready to acquaint myself with more of the Fall catalog I poked around and decided I'd also read long-time Fall bassist Steve Hanley's book The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall (2014) while digging into some more Fall. I always like doing this: reading about some music while listening to it. But it used to be magazines and music zines; now it's books. In this instance, this turned out limiting in that Hanley's account of the Fall's records stops in 1998 in a fiery breakup. So nothing really on The Fall's last two decades of records but good background on the longest-tenured Fall operation from 1980 to 1998.
The Fall have gone through many lineup changes since their beginning. The only mainstay 1977 to 2017 is MES. But Steve Hanley, bassist, is the longest running Fall member besides MES, lasting in the band from 1979 to 1998. Moreover, his resonant bass sound is considered, and this take has been endorsed by MES, foundational to the original blueprint of The Fall sound. Riley and Hanley were roadies, hauling the band's equipment before being asked to join the band as teenagers in '79. Once up and running Hanley's bass became the axel around which The Fall's sound evolved.
Not sure if I've ever read a book about touring musicians who actually loved touring. Living on the road is hard. In the best circumstances the musicians enjoy some intensely strong performances and, hopefully, maybe some groupie party action, notably none in Hanley's account for The Fall, but life on the road generally sucks. In short, the corrosive grind of touring with an erratic, endlessly combative MES for eighteen years is the prevailing theme of Hanley's book.
And the final straw for the original lineup, or what was left of it, Hanley and Burns, was MES messing with their instruments on stage during a performance in 1998. They fought, stormed off stage, and finally once and for all any remnant of the early Fall band broke-up. That was that. But, must say, I actually remember seeing MES doing something like that on stage, messing with other band member's equipment and them visibly not enjoying it, at least ten years earlier. The last straw was likely a long time coming.
Another limitation of Hanley's book is as a source for greater insights into MES's lyrics. Hanley doesn't offer much. You'd like a phrase or two but then nowhere, he opines. And undeniable. MES at least some if not most the time, reportedly, used a cut-up style, remixing randomly a bag of lyrics; like Dadaists, William S. Burroughs. In Hanley's account the guys in the band paid most attention to MES's lyrics when they thought they heard lines insulting them. Otherwise, not much to offer.
(I don't know if I'll ever get to it but I see now there is a book about MES called Messing Up the Paintwork: The Wit and Wisdom of Mark E Smith from 2018 that might answer any remaining questions about MES's wordsmithing.)
Some of MES's irritating ticks were funny, though. Hanley complains that on early tours he was constantly making the band watch The Producers (1967) or Zulu (1964), so making fun of Nazis and Britain's Alamo last stand against native Africans. While in the tour van Hanley and his bandmates got into listening to The Clash, or especially other Manchester groups of the day, Joy Division, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, Smiths, and MES would invariably grouch about what shit they all were and force the band to listen to Frank Zappa.
If Hanley has an axe to grind it's that MES doesn't give the band or him enough credit for The Fall's music. As Hanley tells it, from 1980 to '98, some music was composed with the band all together, collaboratively, but most of it was MES writing the lyrics on his own, or early on with Riley or Scanlon, and the band, led by Hanley, coming up with the music on their own, without MES, and then going back and forth with MES editing songs via cassette copies and then finally rehearsals all together.
There is also a scene in Hanley's book when some reputable studio producer is having a final meltdown, fed up with MES's methods, lamenting his efforts to make the instruments and recording sound good in the studio, only to have MES take the recording home and alter it with a home cassette recorder and then ask the producer to turn his cassette recorded version into the record they put out! MES, not much of a musician, was instrumental to the Fall sound, from beginning to end; for better or worse.
And Hanley's bass sound was totally essential to the original blueprint of The Fall sound. Both these things, MES and Hanley being crucial to the original, peak or classic, Fall sound, regardless of Hanley's grousing, are still true.
More stuff I've learned reading about and listening to The Fall again recently:
1) There is this Complete Peel Sessions box set of The Fall doing 15-20 minute live set recordings with DJ John Peel at the BBC studios that came out in 2005. The box compiles 24 sessions the band recorded for Peel's radio show between 1978 and 2004. The uncanny part is how Peel seems to get the best out of The Fall, many live in the BBC versions besting LP versions of Fall songs.
Sample classic session from 1980:
I'm not saying there are no duds in the Peel Sessions-- again, late '90s was obviously a very rough period, MES going through some kind of substance abuse breakdown-- but with Peel the strong sets stretch into the '90s easy, even the early '00s, after MES's breakdown. If there needs to be a one-stop- shop record with The Fall this would have to be my recommendation. It's very expensive but free all over youtube.
2) So, again, keeping in mind I knew almost nothing about The Fall's recorded output after '88, so Hanley's second and last decade, and then the next two decades this century, when MES put out 12 more albums. Maybe a song here or there but no albums. But I've been dabbling enough around these last three decades of The Fall lately to suggest it appears clearly that the breakup with Hanley and the old lineup in 1998, actually, artistically rejuvenates MES some. The Unutterable (2000), especially Fall Heads Roll ('05), and Your Future Our Clutter ('10), for examples of his post-breakup output, sound stronger again to me. Like MES learned how to rock out with his band again, even if this likely meant bossing them around, nearly all his post-'98 bandmates are a generation younger; and meant bossing them around in a way Hanley and the long list of other bandmate casualties could no longer endure. At any rate, in my best rock critic voice, if haphazard and terribly incomplete survey, MES's post-'98 records show MES was still integral to the composition of The Fall sound and could reproduce that sound, or exhilarating facsimiles, with other groups of musicians.
For instance, immersing myself again in The Fall for the past few months, what's striking to me is how much I've returned to this 27 minute master-mix of various versions of a song called "Blindness" or "(Deaf And) Blindness" that MES recorded with a Fall lineup in the '00s, after his breakup with the Hanley unit. A version appears on the last Peel Session in '04 and a studio version appears on the Fall Heads Roll LP* released in 2005. In addition to his knack for the verbal hook, MES retained a remarkable knack for recreating the classic Fall sound: Shambolic bass tunes, dirty metal guitar riffing, some twisted pop keyboards; the band loose but tight with MES. "Blindness" locks into this thick hypnotic groove, riffing guitar, heavy bass swagger, and a perfect minimalist keyboard melody. An intoxicating rocker you want to go on forever and it almost does clocking in at over 26 minutes of drone rock madness. MES barks out stuff, name drops some dead celebrities, a hook he repeats only the way he can,"Hey Blindman, Have Mercy On me," is about all of any story I pickup but there is again, all these years later, MES and his way with the hook. Also, this is very late postpunk mind you, even towards the end of the early '00s neo-postpunk thing, Interpol, The Killers, and near 30 minutes of a postpunk superjam bliss by The Fall to my ears.
At any rate, I'm not saying there are not times, before and after '98, when MES doesn't sound like the indecipherable crank street drunk calling out everybody; barking, slurring, semi-coherently at best. Again, I rarely pick up more than a phrase here and there without looking at a lyric sheet. But it must be said, what Fall albums and records I've sampled before and after the big breakup he never sounds again quite as sick and bad as he did in those final few years with the original lineup, and he remains to the end the inscrutable and hostile postpunk wordsmith; "Your Future Our Clutter," "Sub-Lingual Tablet," and, ending in 2018 with, "New Facts Emerge." Indeed they do.
3) Going way back to This Nation's Saving Grace ('85), regarded by the faithful as The Fall's best, or according to allmusic.com anyway, and Bend Sinister ('86), both of which I shamefully missed when I dropped out with The Fall in the mid-'80s, I would now add to their classic period, stretching that period from 1980 to 1986. TNSG burnishes MES's northern Mancunian nativist schtick while adding electro beats and proving again his mastery with the long edgy jams. "Bend Sinister," again, absolutely no memory beyond maybe "Mr. Pharmacist" via college radio, which stood out to me as a cover I knew, doubles down on "LA" from TNSG, and might be Brix's biggest Fall album. It appears to have more Brix song credits than ever. And there's this California surf-noir guitar/bass sound, not unheard of in the earlier Fall, but never more prevalent than on Bend Sinister that could be attributable to Brix. Anyway, both albums still focused in a way that starts to unravel and/or lose steam with The Frenz Experiment and I'm Curious Oranj, or that's my case anyway and I'm sticking to it for now.
Also, still notable that their only proper Mancunian anthem, "Hit the North," doesn't appear before The Frenz Experiment ('88), when it appears they were losing sufficient steam as a band to produce engaging albums and were becoming preoccupied with turning into a non-hit singles band. They maybe couldn't figure their way out of that stuck-place for awhile. Another tension in Hanley's book is he and Brix really wanted to see The Fall get big hits. MES wanted that too but only on his incorrigible terms, which were way too weird and tuneless and hostile for Top 40.
4) So how big of asshole and creep was MES really?
In Hanley's telling, basically, MES was a drunk, so was Hanley eventually, but MES was drunk most the time, and an even bigger asshole when he wasn't drunk; according to Hanley throughout several parts of the 1980 to 1998 period you could measure how long MES had gone without a drink by his temper. At about 45 minutes it was always time to duck and cover.
MES was also proudly nativist. He acted like he was a local polka king, and fancied he had connections with the local mafia, according to Hanley. He was incessantly oppositional, hated most everything that wasn't Scottish or from Manchester. Right from the get-go, in "Bingo Master's Breakout," it's like he imagines he's MC at a local bingo night, a mouthy nutcase breaking from the script and ranting to the local hangers on in a language he imagines only fellow Mancunians can understand.
This gives MES and The Fall a certain rooted charm but also had its limits. When asked about Brexit shortly before his death he is reported to have expressed support for Brexit and insisted that next England should immediately go to war again with France.
MES drops N-words in songs. I know of a couple instances. Once as "obligatory N-word plural," qualifying it as a scorned social role, not necessarily Black. And another time in relation to the Irish, I think. So I've never caught him using it in direct reference to a Black person but the N-word metaphor as a trigger word is part of MES's vocabulary, for sure. And maybe the school teacher in me but I can't hear it without cringing defensively. On the other hand, The Fall played in several Rock Against Racism benefit concerts back in the day, even though MES became a total crank about the music benefit concert scene once it blew up in the '80s. And MES relates with pride, true or not, that Bo Diddley once told him that The Fall were his favorite English group.
MES was also a serial homophobe in his lyrics, as I've alluded before, but nothing, thankfully, more insulting or criminal comes out in Hanley's long account. You get the impression early on he felt menaced by the aggressive interests of gay men, which as long as no one got hurt strikes me as funny. MES fleeing his gay fans. Another group to disdain with his petty hatreds.
As for women, Brix looks like a post-punk trophy wife to be sure, and MES was from the early '80s on mostly aloof and imperious with his bands, but he was also always bringing his girlfriends into the band, often to the chagrin of the rest of the old hands. Also then perhaps reflecting a small check on his tyrannical tendencies.
In Hanley's account MES is frequently throwing stuff in fits of rage, acting like a "Little Hitler" around shows, bossing people around, spitting invective. He throws pipsqueak publicists out of The Fall's backstage tour space on the regular. But MES's victims were typically, as the saying goes, and as it goes with most misanthropes, the people closest to him.
5) Finally, feeling more generous this time around with The Fall, here's their late classic phase again. (The Brix years, basically.) When they're scoring theatrical productions and going on TV. They still look awkward, then and now. It's their glammy pop phase, Smith in purple, Hanley looking like he's dressed for church, and Brix adding the LA glam punk Blondie wannabe look to our awkwardly turned out provincial northern lads.
But what an impossibly insider-baseball catchy post-punk doomed bid at a pop record. "Big New Prinz" ('88) is so preposterously not a Top 40 record and so undeniably a Fall record that you imagine maybe it was a big hit record. But, not quite, peaking at 59; "There's a Ghost in My House" was their actual chart peak reaching 30 in 1987. This was the best The Fall could do when they were actually trying to sell out. A triumph of style and personality. The tune has got that clap and stomp along Fall tempo, the choppy repetition, the compellingly postpunk tribal rumble of bass and drums. The noir guitar riffing is pro forma but encases the snotty attitude of a combustible pop song concoction. And then MES on the mic:
Check the record
Check the record
Check the guy's track record
Check the record
Check the guy's rock record
Then the band chanting in the background:
He is not appreciated
And then follows a salute to the legend, Slang King, The Big New Prinz:
Drink the long draught down
Drink the long draught
Drink the long draught down for the Big Priest!
He, apparently, drink too many long draughts down but is now a marvel for how long he actually did last as a postpunk Hip Priest, a proto-postpunk rapper, as if he were barking and shrieking into a bullhorn on a street corner, an oppositional crank and earworm artist to the very end!
Very rough video from 1977. Devo still working out their costumes; going for a Robin Williams look circa Mork & Mindy. But rocking out like twisted punk rockers. They're feeling each other out, locking in, winding up the tension and rocking out like they invented a new robotronic punk superdrug. Very confident. Tweakers tight. Hailing from Akron, Ohio, once upon a time Rubber Capital of the World, Devo go from Kent State to "Rust Belt" ur-text New Wave '80s chart champions. Here they are on the verge of breaking out. Also fine example of the robotic, herky-jerky, neurotic nerd spazzing dance style characteristic of New Wave, especially the stuff with any kind of electronic sci-fi art school performative theatrical keyboards slant.
Or this one, again, very early and crude but at Max's Kansas City in NYC the summer of 1977. Landmark event on the rock era timeline: Devo performing for Eno and Bowie and industry flak before recording their stone cold classic debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo?, at some local NYC studio. Devo had been together since '73 and were seasoned enough but still what stands out here is their moxie and tightness. Charging into NYC and Max's with such nerdy swagger.
I saw them on their 1980 Freedom of Choice tour, at the old Paramount in Portland. It was rock 'em sock 'em electro dance music with jarring, colorful, pop culture montages on the big screen behind the band. Fun show. But maybe the end of their peak, as their albums seemed to drop off in quality thereafter. They began as a midwest nerd response to punk rock and end up as essential an ingredient to New Wave music as you're going to find, with Blondie and B-52's and Talking Heads and XTC and Human League and acts like that.
Devo belongs in a big salad of the best New Wave music circa 1977 to 1983.
"The public gets what the public wants/you made your bed you have to lie in it/I don't want what society's got"
The Jam actually might have been the NewWave-iest band to come out of class of '77 British punk rock. "Going Underground" debuted number one on the UK Singles Chart. It was working class hero songster Paul Weller's first number one as well. Between 1977 and 1982 The Jam scored 18 Top 40 singles and were pop stars. Their reputation rests mostly on their first four Mod revival albums, in the style of "Going Underground," Beatlesque, "And Your Bird Can Sing," snappy power pop but, really, they start racking up the Top Ten records and Number Ones when they begin working Motown into their New Wave sound. And although I do like several more of those early singles, "In The City," "All Around The World," "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight," Sound Affects, from '80, with "Start!" and "That's Entertainment," is ultimately I think my favorite Jam album.
"Angry Inch," Hedwig & the Angry Inch: In theatrical form as pure a piece of punk rock as you're likely to find in the 21st century. The sound is rooted in early '70s glam rock, T-Rex, Bowie, so it's transgender glam rock punk rock. Intense, funny, and brutally poignant. This is the DIY punk aesthetic in the 21st century, tightly scripted and catchy as hell. Cinematic punk rock.
"Old Guy," Wimps (2015): Kill Rock Stars. House party in a rec room bar; mustachioed and non-mustachioed peoples strutting their stuff. Old time rock&roll as in Amerindie cross-dressing punk rock thriftshop nerds. Also, the Wimps are "The mountains are out today" true-blue Seattleites. Making the most of your frustrations; post-punk power pop.
"Yes I'm the old guy at the party, alright All the stuff you have done I've seen one thousand times before No, I'm not your dad No, I'm not the landlord shutting you down No, I'm just a man with no plans
trying to spend some time at night getting out of the house"
Liberatory Zambian 1970s interpretation of American R&B, 1950s-1970s, vocal groups, hard rock, and electric garage jam band soulfulness. WITCH stands for "We Intend To Cause Havoc." Makes me think of Eddy Grant's '60s group, The Equals ("Baby Come Back," "Police On My Back) or The Wailers doing "Simmer Down" (1963). Original Zamrock.
"It Happens Everyday," The Lemon Drops (1966): From Chicago, formed in high school. Hard-edged sunshine pop. The fuzztone guitars are exquisite. The vocal group next door Nuggets attitude another psychedelic pop ideal in single form. They don't want to hear about it anymore but bash it out with punk style nonetheless.
"STOP," B.W.H. (1983): Also known as Blackway and Helene; a Dj-producer and his film actress wife. The groove is impossibly tight but it's the spare woozy vocal chorus that throws everything off kilter and gives it that trippy psychedelic feel. Minimalist electro funk masterpiece. Some of the best of Italo-Disco.
Extra weird when your peer age group, or big brother age group anyway, start passing. All the Walton highlights I saw on ESPN this evening were late in his career when he played a supporting role for the Celtics. Before that, when he was still just a big hippie kid, he led the Portland Trail Blazers to their first and only NBA Championship in 1977.
I wanted to attend the deciding game that year. I'd already been to an earlier playoff game, where the crowd energy was incredible, a first for me and not like anything I'd experienced before. But the final game landed on my high school graduation day. I actually remember wavering about going to the game instead but tradition, or my parents, more like it, won out. At our grad ceremony many of us were packing radios and a cheer broke out as we were marching into the stadium. The Blazers beat the 76ers! It remains about the only thing I remember from that day.
Walton played like an all-time great NBA big man his first four seasons in Portland before injuries seriously limited his career. He came out of UCLA, which was dominant in college hoops in those days. He had one of those John Wooden bank shots. Textbook footwork. And, above all, he was a great team player and a special passer. Watching Walton snare a rebound and whip an outlet pass to a streaking Blazer, Lionel Hollins, Bobby Gross, Johnny Davis, etc, already near or past half court was a thing of beauty. Showtime before the '80s Lakers.
My closest brush with Walton, though, had come a couple years before, maybe 1975, one of my very first concerts, Commander Cody and the His Lost Planet Airmen and New Riders of the Purple Sage, at the old Paramount Theater in Portland. It was in the basement bathroom, the reefer smoke thick as fog, but there he was in all his long bushy red hair and headband Grateful Dead hippie glory, two or three urinals down, no one else around. I gushed "Big Bill Walton!" or something like that because I was startled, and excitable like that, and probably high as a kite. Walton chuckled, issued me a friendly 'hey,' and sauntered out, like a giant wizard amongst us silly Hobbits of the Shire.
"Lift Off," Patrick Cowley (1981): Disco did not die in 1979 but had a big litter of hyphenated disco babies. And should countdowns to Lift Off and exploding rocket engines count as Space Rock?
"Hills of Katmandu (Disco Mix)," Tantra (1979): Italo Disco legend Celso Valli's late-classic era disco project; electro-disco w/ exotic and cheesy Eurasian melodies.
"Magic Fly," Space (1977): I think Space also might figure somehow in the Italo Disco story that gets crazy big popular in Europe in the 1980s. I don't really know but I know there are scads of CD compilations of Italo Disco from the '80s with scores of acts doing something a little closer to Eurythmics Brit New Pop than Tantra or Space's proto-Eurodisco. But the Space Disco thing remains such a big thing all the way through the Italo Disco early 1980s; so big I've seen a best-of Italo Space Disco collection. I've read a couple of books I liked about Spaghetti Westerns but none yet about Italo Disco or Italo House; or maybe it should be 1980s Eurodisco? Like the Spaghetti's nickname leaves out Spanish, German, and other contributions from other parts of Europe in the making of Euro-Westerns. Presumably, the Italian designation means a lot of the production happens in Italy but this record is from France. I do remember reading somewhere (probably Wikipedia) that the production of Italo Disco records really doesn't take off in the early '80s until after the music industry in America abandons disco in 1979 (b/c, remember, some classic rock longhairs burn some disco records in effigy at a Chicago White Sox game in the late summer of that year). When the American disco imports dried up young people into disco in Europe had to make their own records, the story goes, but "Magic Fly," No. 1 in France, proves they were already making their very own disco, Space Disco, even before American disco imports had stopped. Another one for Team Disco.
Johnny Green's favorite Clash song. Probably not least of all because Joe calls him out in the coda, "Johnny, Johnny!" Perhaps honoring Johnny's dedication to condoms. Green, all-around chauffeur, stage-hand, personal assistant, drug & alcohol supplier, and horny groupie hound dog; basically, one-half the production team that kept The Clash running in their Death & Glory years ("like being on a commando raid with the Bash Street Kids," said photographer Pennie Smith of those times), and co-author of A Riot of Our Own (1999). "Protex Blue" is, arguably, as influential a Punk Rock prototype in form, in style, as anything on the first album. There's Chuck Berry guitar and it covers a lot of early X territory, for instance.
They'd soon enough grow more interested in what the rich were doing but "Garageland" is my lumpen Clash sentimental fave. Paul's sexually explicit bass. Topper in peak rat-a-tat-tat attack form. Joe's gruff bark and Mick's "Ahh-ahh-ahhs" chorus. A mic-drop classic punk rock instrumental coda. The whole shebang a drunken rampage of gleeful intensity and laddish pride.
The droning riff-ology of late-classic, stoner-boogie, proto-punk missing link, Hawkwind Space rock.
Robert Calvert can't really sing but he can do a mock-cabaret Bowie-esque sneer w/ diverting, apocalyptic charm: "Uncle Sam's on Mars," while people around here can't find enough to eat.
"Where's the action, where's the light"?! The kids are NOT alright but they want to know!
It's 1977. (Budding punk rockers taking notes.) Survivors of the counter culture driven to riotous interstellar overdrive; the religion of rocking out as its own reward. Boldly go where you were "born to go"; outta here (outta your inner space), into outer space, centered by a compulsively throbbing bass charging straight into the sun, chant, chant, into the "Spirit of the Age."
"Quark, Strangeness, & Charm & Uncle Sam's on Mars"--
"Spirit of the Age"--
Denouement: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 No. 7"--