a Rolling Stones biography + a Bill Wyman autobiography reviewed in The Observer (1990)

When I wrote this snide review of the dirty old man's memoir I'd clean forgotten that if nothing else he had made the best Stone-involved record of the last  - well now it would 3 and a half decades - but in 1990 just a decade.  

This and "Start Me Up", the last great actual Rolling Stones record, were released the same year.

Nuggets x 2

Spin, October 1998

 

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond
Uncut, 2001

Lenny Kaye's 1972 anthology Nuggets was a rock archivist's masterstroke, a feat of canon rewriting that deposed the post-Sgt Pepper's aristocracy and elevated the forgotten garage punks of the mid-Sixties, from The Seeds to Chocolate Watchband. Rhino's 1998 four-CD update of Nuggets dramatically expanded the original double LP.

 Now this latest instalment extends the Nuggets premise beyond the USA to encompass the one-hit-wonders and never-wozzers of mid-Sixties Britain: that all-too-brief golden age of amphetamine-cranked R&B and mod-on-LSD that's roughly bookended by "My Generation" and Cream's Disraeli Gears. Just the names of these long-lost groups--Dantalion's Chariot, Wimple Winch, Rupert's People, The Idle Race--induces a contact high, before you even play the discs.

Back then, singles made their point and left. This short 'n' sweet succinctness allows the compilers to cram 109--that's one hundred and nine--tracks into four discs. Here's just a handful of gems.

Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner", with the saintly-sounding David MacTavish singing a proto-Spacemen 3 love-as-drug/drug-as-God lyric ("fix me up with your sweet dose/now I'm feeling like a ghost"), splashy cymbals, and a billowing solo of controlled feedback. 

Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything": Van in I'm-A-Man mode, awesomely surly and swaggering. 

The Sorrows's "Take A Heart": a Brit-Diddley locked groove of tumbling tribal toms and spaced-out-for-intensified-effect guitar-riffs. 

The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" takes that drastic use of silence and suspense even further: powerchords like Damocles Swords, caveman tub-thumping, tongues-of-flame harmonica, and an insolent you-done-me-wrong/go-my-own-way vocal. 

Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," a classic misunderstood teen anthem: society gets the blame and the kid surveys Squaresville from a lofty vantage, cries "I laugh at it all!"

One group stands out as a "why?-why?!?-were-they-never-MASSIVE?" mystery. 

Not The Creation, and not The Action--both had terrific songs but were a little characterless. 

No, I'm talking about John's Children's. Their two offerings here are astoundingly deranged, the monstrously engorged fuzzbass like staring into a furnace, the drums flailing and scything like Keith Moon at his most smashed-blocked. 

"Desdemona" features the then shocking chorus "lift up your skirt and fly", daft lines about Toulouse-Lautrec painting "some chick in the rude" plus the stutter-bleat of a young Bolan on backing vox. 

"A Midnight Summer's Scene" captures mod sulphate-mania on the cusp of mutating into flower power acid-bliss: it's a febrile fantasy of Dionysian mayhem in an after-dark park, maenad hippy-chicks with faces "disfigured by love", strewing "petals and flowers," prancing the rites of Pan.

John's Children's merger of cissy and psychotic highlights the major difference between American garage punk and British "freakbeat" (as reissue label Bam Caruso dubbed it for their illustrious Rubble compilation series). The Limey stuff is way fey compared with the Yanks. You can hear a proto-glam androgyny, a "soft boy" continuum that takes in Barrett and Bolan, obviously, but also the queeny-dandy aristocrat persona of Robert Plant. 

At the same time, because these bands were schooled in R&B and played live constantly, the music has a rhythmic urgency and aggressive thrust that gradually faded over subsequent decades from the psychedelic tradition (think of Spiritualized's drum-phobic ethereality). This, though, was music for dancing as much as wigging out.

Nuggets II isn't solid gold. There's a slight surfeit of boppy shindig-type rave-ups and sub-Yardbirds blues that just ain't bastardized enough. Personally I crave more tunes with truly over-the-top guitar effects, aberrant bass-heavy mixes, phased cymbals, drastic stereo separation, and other psych-era cliches. 

The "British Empire" part of the subtitle allows in Australia's The Easybeats (godstars for the duration of "Friday On My Mind") while the "Beyond" pulls in groovy Latin American acid-rockers Os Mutantes. 

But to be honest, a lot of the Commonwealth-and-beyond stuff just ain't that hot. And inevitably one could compile another 2-CDs out of heinous omissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Pointedly not reviewed: Nuggets 3, which was a selection of 80s-onwards garage revivalism. 

RIP Sly Stone

 

Belated RIP... there's been a lot going on...

You have to wonder about these two great Californians, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, dying the week that troops are sent into LA. "I've seen enough... I'm outta here". 

Today, it's the government that's rioting... 

At the bottom you will find my circa 1990 review of the first-time-on-CD reissue of There's A Riot Goin' On, rather in the shadow of the Greil Marcus reading in Mystery Train

It remains a fantastic album, but I must say the stuff that means the most to me these days is the classic run of uplifting smash singles: "Dance To the Music", "Everyday People", "Stand!", "Everybody Is a Star", "Hot Fun in the Summertime", "Thank You Falettinmebe Mice 'Elf Agin".... 

Sly and the Family figure in a class I teach on the cartoon continuum.

See, rather than Staggerlee, what I think of when I hear "Everyday People" is Sesame Street. 

I did some research into whether the "scooby dooby doo" in "Everyday People" predates Scooby-Doo the  kids cartoon show but it turns out the catchphrase goes back a decade-plus earlier (some say Sinatra came up with it). 

Given what's going on in this country (the Confederacy winning a stealth war),  it's really painful to listen to this stuff - the hopefulness hurts!

 

Then there is this  - an ecstasy of anguish, bitter but still reaching for a transcendence of division...  

Future blues (is he putting the guitar through a talk box)

This must be one of the most sonically radical Number 1 singles ever

Another favorite, wonderfully covered by S'Express

SLY & THE FAMILY STONE
There's A Riot Goin' On
(Edsel CD reissue)
Melody Maker, 1990?


The definitive reading of There's A Riot Goin' On is to be found in Greil Marcus' Mystery Train.  Marcus invokes the folkloric figure of Staggerlee as the prototype of the superfly guy for whom criminality signifies total possibility.  Breaking all the rules, Staggerlee escapes the fate (servitude, anonymity, death) assigned blacks by a white supremacist society, and wins it all -women, wealth, drugs, a court of sycophantic hangers-on.  Staggerlee is the cultural archetype that connects Robert Johnson to Jimi Hendrix to Sly to the gangster rappers of today.

Smashing racial boundaries with an image and sound that merged bad-ass funk and hippy freak-out, Sly Stone triumphed with a secular gospel of affirmation, expressed in songs like "Everybody Is A Star", "Stand!", "Thank You Falettinme Be Mice 'Elf Agin".  In 1970, like Staggerlee, Sly had it all. But suddenly, at the height of his fame, the euphoria soured; Sly disappeared into a miasma of drug
excess, unreliability and paranoia. It was from this mire that There's A Riot Goin' On emerged in late 1971.

 Although the title alluded to the bitter racial conflict of the time, Riot was really about an interior apocalypse. The utopian hunger that fired Sly's music ultimately had to choose between two options: insurrection or oblivion. As Marianne Faithful once put it: "drugs kept me from being a terrorist...  either I was going to have to explode out into violence or implode." Death or dope are ultimately Staggerlee's only destinations. According to Marcus, Riot defines "the world of the Staggerlee who does not get away...who has been trapped by limits whose existence he once would not even admit to, let alone respect".

Riot turns the Sly Stone persona inside out, inverts all the life-affirming properties of the Family's music. The sound of Riot is deathly dry, drained of all the joy and confidence that once fueled its fervour. This is funk-as-prison: locked grooves that simulate the impasses and dead ends faced by Afro-Americans. To get into this music requires, in Marcus' words "a preternatural sharpening of the senses". Submit to the sensory deprivation, and you come alive to the psychotic detail, the electrifying nuances of the playing and the vocal harmonies.

This totally wired sound has everything to do with the conditions under which "Riot" was recorded: a coked-out frightmare,with Sly and co staying up 4 nights at a time, the air thick with paranoia, everyone carrying guns. Being strung-out has a lot to do with Sly's vivid-yet-cryptic imagery and unearthly vocals: the sound of a soul in tatters, teetering on the edge of the void. The slurred, ragged rasp of "Africa Talks To You", the decrepit yodel of "Spaced Cowboy", are unnerving enough. But try the disintegrated death throes of "Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa" for a glimpse of someone at the threshold of the human condition.  A rewrite of "Thank You Falettinmebe Mice 'Elf Agin", this song turns the original's upful swagger into agonised intertia: the sound of going nowhere slow. Sly spits out the chorus with bitter, exhausted irony. The self-expression incarnated by Sly's persona is exposed as an act, a role he can no longer sustain, but a pantomime in which his audience would gladly cage Sly so that he might continue to live out their fantasies. The allusion to "Africa" hints that the fight for blacks to feel at home in America has succumbed to despair. Sly dreams of fleeing to the safe arms of the mother(land).

Riot set the agenda for early Seventies black pop, inspiring the ghetto-conscious soul of "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" et al. Sly, meanwhile, was all burnt-out, unable either to resurrect his pre-Riot poptimism or continue to dwell on the negative. For how can you turn eternal exile into a home? But Riot still burns, cold as ice.

Taking the cartoon continuum thing into consideration, I find this comical now rather than harrowing

On The Corner is surely a reply, a nod of the hat, almost imitation