RIP David Thomas

 

Melody Maker, June 18 1986

David Thomas at the first Carrot Festival, Warsaw, Poland - Melody Maker April 18 1987

Pere Ubu at the second Carrot festival in Budapest, Hungary

Melody Maker, April 2 1988 

Melody Maker, June 24 1989

Finally, in 2002, I got to meet the great man. I was in the U.K.  for the summer to research Rip It Up and Start Again - after various unsuccessful efforts, I got a call rather peremptorily summoning me to Brighton the next day. Bird in hand, I thought - I hastened down there with some hastily prepared questions. The encounter was one of the more cantankerous interviews I've done - but in some ways that made it more interesting than a straightforward "here's how we formed, then we made our first record" type data-dollop. We got into debating the history and philosophy of rock - class dynamics - America versus England. A rather bristly, frictional dialogue. We were in a pub near the sea front and at a certain point, Thomas said, "I'm going to talk to my friends" and went over to a barstool and chatted to an old geezer with a dog. Rude! I sat there for a bit and then packed up my tape recorder. Went for a slash and on the way back, I thought, "Shall I say goodbye? Nah!". Caught the train back. 

So not the most cordial of encounters, but I'm glad I did it. And whoever said visionary geniuses had to be sufferable? 

Below is the tided-up Q and A of our chat. 

I read this memoiristic essay by Charlotte Presler about Cleveland in the Seventies and she said that everybody in the scene was from an upper middle class background. Or even upper class.

 "I’m not sure who was from upper class, but certainly we’re all from very strong middle class families. My dad was a professor.  I had an academic upbringing and certainly an academic path was indicated. I was extremely bright, in the top one percent in my class."

 Presler also said that most of the people weren't actually musicians primarily, that they came to it from other areas, like art or writing. Did you ever toy with other art forms apart from music?

 "Nothing else particularly interested me. I was always interested in sound, and then shortly after that I became interested in rock music, and ever since I haven’t been interested in doing anything else. Everything else is an inferior byproduct along the evolutionary path to rock music, which is the only true artform. We were all taken with the expressive capabilities of sound and rock music was the form that was making the most inventive and expressive use of that medium.

 Is it true that the first album you bought was Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart?

 "No--the first album I bought was Zappa's Uncle Meat, then I bought Hot Rats.  Then Trout Mask and Strictly Personal. All this was within about three weeks. The gang I hung around with in high school was really into Uncle Meat. "

 Beefheart was a protégé of Zappa's at that point?

 "In Zappa’s version of history, yeah!  We liked Uncle Meat because we were in high school and in high school you’re into Surrealism and Dadaism. Uncle Meat was making use of interesting sounds. Zappa never moved beyond that, his appeal was always directed at high school students. Absolutely Free was all that hippy stuff--we weren’t particularly taken by that. Hippy was pretty passé even then. We were two or three years post-hippy, and that two or three years was pretty significant. We felt hippies were pretty useless as any sort of social happening."

 Zappa's always struck me as kinda cynical and sneery, whereas Beefheart seems more…  humanist, maybe. Not a misanthrope.

"Beefheart was certainly much more angular. We liked hard music. Or at least I did. I was more Midwestern oriented--I liked MC5, Stooges, and all that Sixties garage stuff like Question Mark and The Music Machine. Beefheart is very close to that sort of approach.. At that time if you were looking for electronic sounds there was Terry Riley, Beaver & Krause, Silver Apples, and all the German stuff. All of that was a component of bands like MC5. There's always been a relationship between hard Midwest groove rock and pure sound. So it was natural for us to do that."

So is that the genesis of "avant-garage" as a concept? The Stooges started out doing abstract noise stuff with a Fluxus/Dada edge, using vacuum cleaners and the like. Then they turned into a primal hard rock band. They got less experimental as they went along.

"Avant garage was much later. We got tired of not having a pigeonhole so in 1979, one of our friends was doing an art exhibition at Cleveland Stadium of garages--literally a collection of fronts of garages. I don’t know how he got them. He might have even called it the Avant-Garage Exhibition.  . We thought that was a good name so we stole it, but only because we got tired of all the silly labels. This thing of pigeonholing and calling things by generic names is in rock terms a fairly recent event. In our formative years nobody did that, which is why nobody thought it was that weird that Jimmy Hendrix opened for the Monkees.  The last time I saw the Stooges they were opening for Slade. This notion of the latest trend was always a fabrication of the English punk movement. When our parents or friends would ask what kind of music we played we’d say, 'we're kind of underground'. Which mean only that we couldn’t play and nobody came to see us. And then everybody was also into film, so in early 1977 somebody started talking about it as New Wave. But we always saw ourselves in the mainstream tradition of rock music."

 So you didn't particularly like the term "New Wave"?

 "It’s an Anglo-European obsession with being new. We knew we were different."

 Oh, so Ubu weren't motivated particularly by that proto-punk sort of disgust with what rock had degenerated into during the early Seventies?

 "Not at all. This is more or less an invention of the punk music press. The early Seventies was one of the highlight periods in rock music. There was more innovation between 1970 and 1974 than ever before. There wasn’t this narrow vision that has come to characterize things since. The only frustration was that we couldn’t get gigs. Only the copy bands were getting any jobs, the cover bands. But then after we stopped whining and moaning, we figured there are tons of bars, so there must be somewhere we could play. Then we got off our butts and found this wretched little sailor’s dive in an industrial part of town, the Pirate’s Cove. And started playing there.

 So what makes the early Seventies the peak of rock creativity as far as you're concerned?

 "Eno. Amon Duul and Neu!. Kevin Ayers, The Soft Machine. The Incredible String Band. The Stooges' Funhouse. John Cale. Things were beginning to move and accelerate. Maybe people didn't notice it underneath all the other stuff, but it was moving. Sabbath was too derivative of the blues. There’s a real difference between Midwestern rock and that kind of heavy rock. It’s really night and day. Midwestern rock is all based on a flowing riff pattern, not a ba-domp-ba-domp. We liked groove rock that had the minimum of changes in it. Tom Herman’s famous defining line was that he judges guitar parts by how little he has to move his fingers. That’s a pretty Midwestern concept.

 If the first half of the Seventies was so great, though, why was there a need for punk?

 "I may exaggerate because so many people dump on it."

 Cleveland was supposed to have extremely progressive taste--to have the largest concentration of adventurous listeners in between the East Coast and the West Coast. How come?

 "Marc Bolan was considered in Cleveland to be conceptual art, because of the sickness of his world view and the weird envelope of sound he was working with. All his teen girlie stuff seemed to be very conceptual because nobody in his right kind would do it seriously. There’s always been a struggle in Cleveland, a dynamic between the Midwestern oriented people and the Anglophile people. West Siders are always Anglophile. They're all Eastern European immigrants, Lithuanian and Hungarian and Polish.  Cleveland was the largest Hungarian-speaking city outside of Budapest for decades. These Eastern European immigrants were, working class, white socks, accordions and so on, and that was of course considered to be the uncool side of town. And we were on the East Side where all the liberals and the blacks were. East Side was considered to be the coolest part of town, but of course as time went on I discovered that in fact the West Side was cooler!  I don’t know what made them Anglophiles. It’s not my problem! But the Kinks and Syd Barrett were just massive on the west side of Cleveland, and the Bowie stuff. The East Side tended to be more black people and English people. The black people were into black music and the whites tended toward Velvet Underground, MC5, and Zappa. The thing that bound the two sides of the city was The Velvet Underground--that was the current, the universal language. Everybody understood the Velvets, and we on the East Side were particularly Velvets orientated. The East Side was much harder.”

 Was Cleveland as grim and industrial in those days as the legend has it?

 "I suppose so, but we didn’t sit there saying, 'Gee, this is grim'. The river caught fire once--so?  It’s a heavy industrial town. The mayor’s hair caught fire in the Seventies but nobody ever tells you about that."

 So where did the bohemian, or nonconformist, or unusual people gather?

 "Cleveland was a town of record stores. That’s why it was the birthplace of rock music in 1951. Alan Freed was in a record shop, the same shop that everyone in Ubu ended up working in at one time or another: Record Rendezvous. He noticed all these white kids getting off on 'race records' so he started doing hops. Everybody who was in a band worked at a record store and all the record stores competed against each other to have the most complete catalogues. To have everything of everything. There was a lot of specialized interest. That's why the worldwide  Syd Barrett Appreciation Society was in Cleveland. There were these strong cliques of people. It was a real hothouse environment. There was only 100 people—musicians, girlfriends, sound guys who were your friends—and everybody knew what you were doing. Everybody was competing to be the best. There weren’t any places to play, so your reputation would be based on the five shows a year you could play somewhere. Which meant that everyone was very well-rehearsed. The Electric Eels, who everyone thought were totally anarchistic—well, they were indeed totally anarchistic, but they rehearsed too. Way more than any similar band would have. Everyone took it pretty seriously."

 The Drome--that was the hippest record store of all of them, right?

 "It was the store that picked up on the beginnings of the English punk stuff and the weird American stuff like the Residents and MX-80. John Thompson, who owned it, was extremely supportive of local bands. He'd have bands play in his store.. The other stores were owned by fifty year old men, so none of them had the same focus, or they were stuck in the hippy thing. Johnny was really into used car commercials and he’d build these television  gameshow sets—he was totally nuts. We lived together for a long time and the whole house was violent pink and festooned with gameshow sets and cut-out characters.. He had a very modern, American vision of things—that’s where the concept of Datapanik came from. Johnny and I came up with that in 1976, this doctrine about Data Panic where all information had become a drug-like substance, in and of itself meaningless, and the only thing that mattered was data flow. I have to admit immodestly these ideas were far ahead of their time."

 So he was one of those catalyst figures, who don't make music themselves but they foster and direct the energy.

 "Robert Wheeler, who's our current synthesizer player, and is a generation younger than me, told me he went into Drome when he didn't know about anything and he picked up our single "30 Seconds Over Tokyo". This is just when it had first come out. And Johnny said, 'you can buy that for $1.50 but instead you could take that $1.50 and go see the band play tonight at the Pirate’s Cove.' This was his attitude—and this bad commercial vision was the reason for the Drome’s downfall a few years later. Johnny would rent this radio theater, the WHK auditorium--an old radio theater from the 1930s that had been abandoned and was on the edge of the ghetto. And this was where the first Disasterdromes took places--shows he'd put on with Ubu, Devo, Suicide, and other bands from other towns. He said the motto is, 'We call it disaster so nothing can go wrong'. Bums and winos would be coming in and lurking in the shadows. Somebody lit fire to the sofa. Stuff was always going wrong and people were always complaining to him. After the first one like that he decided to call it Disasterdrome, so you won’t be disappointed. Free the consumer from the burden of anticipation. 'No, it’s not going to be any good, it’s going to be a disaster'. They were extremely popular."

 You were one of the few members of Pere Ubu who never lived in the Plaza, the building co-owned by Allen Ravenstine?

 "I lived with a girlfriend there--it was her place. Everybody who lived there was a writer, an artist or a musician. It was the red light street on the edge of the ghetto. The ghetto started one street over. It wasn’t scary, but you had to be careful, you couldn’t wander around blithely at night."

 Early on you went by the name of Crocus Behemoth!

 "I had a girlfriend who was in the Weathermen or the White Panthers or something. She was very much taken with the Detroit MC5 thing. All the people on the fringe of the political underground always had pseudonyms. At the time I was writing for a local paper, Scene, and I was writing a whole lot, so I had a bunch of pseudonyms., The way they’d come up with pseudonyms was they’d just open up a dictionary and put their finger on a word, so she opened a dictionary and put her finger on Crocus and then on Behemoth. That was the name for the writing I did that was most popular so I was sort of known by that."

 What kind of writing was it?

 "I was a rock critic. Endless bands, endless reviews. I didn’t have any theories--some things I liked and some things I didn’t like. Eventually I got to be thinking, if I’m so smart I can do this--music--better. And I did. I didn’t have any dreams of being a rock critic--I became a writer because I’d dropped out of college and I knew this guy who’d been at the college paper who was the editor of Scene, so I got a job doing art layout. Then they needed somebody to copyedit. Soon I was rewriting so much of the stuff they said we can all save ourselves some time if you just review the stuff yourself. I had no particular desire. It was just a job I could get."

 Calling the band Pere Ubu… you were a big fan of Alfred Jarry?

 "Not a big fan. I’m aware of what he did. All that Dada and surrealist stuff is the stuff you do in high school. After high school it doesn’t have much relevance to anything. Jarry’s theatrical ideas and narrative devices interested me."

Didn't you have this thing called  the Theory of Spontaneous Similitude that was related to Pataphysics?

"Maybe. Spontaneous Similitude just grew out of a joke, although I suppose it has a serious core. You could complete the phrase, "I am like…" with the first thing that comes into your head and it still makes sense. Which is not much of an idea but it has a certain relationship to the Surrealists and Dadaists. For human beings there's no alternative to meaning. That’s the serious point of it: there is no such thing as non-meaning for humans, so if you say "I am like…" and fill it in with anything, a listener will make some sense out of it because there is no alternative. That’s clearly the foundational element of sound as an artistic force. Any sound you hear, there is no alternative but to figure it out."

 Wasn't there a kind of split down the middle of Ubu between the weirdo "head" elements (your voice and Ravenstine's synth), which were kind of un-rock, and the more straight-slamming physicality of what the guitar, bass and drums were doing, which rocked hard?

 "Why is there a split? You want there to be a split but there isn’t one. How many minutes ago did we talk about the genesis of the Midwestern sound? That it’s a combination of pure sound elements and hard rock. We don’t see that they’re separate. This is a corollary of the inability of most foreigners to understand the nature of rock music. You want this separation of what you would call pop versus what you would call serious art. There wasn’t a separation as far as we were concerned. We liked Marc Bolan as much as we liked Lou Reed,. One wasn’t intrinsically more serious than the other.  This idea of pop versus art was alien to us."

 So you thought what you did would be embraced and you'd end up on Top Forty radio?

 "We thought we were the mainstream. That’s not the same as being popular. What we were doing was mainstream, what the Rolling Stones and Toto were doing was weird and experimental—40 or 50 year old men going on about teenage girls. That’s weird. What we were doing was aspiring to a mature fully-realized artistic form that spoke for ordinary people and their lives."

 Oh, so the idea of being deliberately esoteric or avant-garde had no interest, was redundant, as far as you were concerned?

 "We were making popular music. That’s why we did singles. Whether people liked it or not was not our problem. In the pure, platonic meaning of the word, we were pop."

 Well, Ubu were pretty popular at one point, I guess.

 "Nah, nobody’s ever liked us."

 But in the UK, around the first couple of albums and tours, you had droves of people coming to the shows. There was a big buzz about Ubu in 1978.

 "Only because of herd mentality. That’s not cynical, it’s realistic. We were on the edge of being popular but we were fundamentally incapable of being popular, because we were fundamentally perverse and uninterested. This is the strength of our upbringing. This is why all adventurous art is done by middle class people. Because middle class people don’t care. 'I’m going to do what I want, because I can do anything else better and make more money than this'. If you sit down and make a list of the people you consider to be adventurous in pop music, I’d bet you lots that the vast majority of them are middle class."

 What about the Beatles? 

"Do you really think The Beatles were working class? Really? The Beatles were not working class. The Rolling Stones…. Sit down and make a list."

 Well I agree with you to the extent that the traditional slant of looking at rock as an essentially  working class thing… it's not total bunk, but it has been woefully exaggerated thing. Art students and university students have always played a big part in rock history. At least from 1963 onwards.

 "The notion of street credibility is a recent aberration. It's all designed to create commercial niche markets. Since punk this compartmentalization has been designed to aid advertising executives to target their products at the market. That’s not what music and art is about."

 So presumably you had no time for the Clash going on about tower blocks and kids on the street.  

 "That’s alien stuff. That’s your problem. All this is nothing to do with rock music. It has to do with the aberrations of European social structures. To do with a guy wanting to sell clothes. From the beginning punk rock was designed as a commercial exercise to create a market. This is the reason why it’s weird when it came to America, because what was going on in America was things like Television, Pere Ubu, The Residents, MX-80. It was operating  on a totally different level than the Sex Pistols. Our ambitions were considerably different than the Sex Pistols. Our ambitions were to take the art form and move it forward into ever more expressive and mature fields, with the goal of creating the true language of human consciousness. To create something worthy of William Faulkner and Herman Melville. What was the damn ambition of the Sex Pistols?"

 But don't you think a lot of rock music is about baseness and vulgarity?

 "It’s about vulgarity if you think ordinary people are vulgar. I don’t think so. I think the poetry of the ordinary man is great. If you believe that art forms or social progress must be frozen in aspic and maintained at its adolescent, easily manipulated stage, then sure you’re right. But there are a lot of us who feel folk music should aspire and evolve to greater things. The best way of keeping something manipulable is keeping it at its adolescent stage. Because adolescents are the most gullible sons of bitches on the entire planet. You can get a kid to do anything.  So if you want marketing, yeah, let’s keep it all about how blue jeans and spiky hair is going to make you different. If you want that kind of world—that’s the world you got. Punk music won. But that’s not what we were trying to do. We exist in a different place. One of us lives in a real world and one of us lives in a fantasy world. Well maybe you live in the real world and we live in a fantasy world, or maybe we live in the real world. It’s a question of what you want and what you get.

 "There’s all sorts of kinds of music and ways people appreciate music. To some people it’s nothing more than a soundtrack to a mating ritual. To others it’s a language of poetry and vision. Not everybody has to pursue poetry and vision through the same medium. Some understand things visually or conceptually. The world would be an unpleasant place if Pere Ubu was the only kind of music you could listen to, because frankly it’s hard work sometimes and that’s the way we make it, so that it’s hard. I don’t sit around listening to our music, it’s impossible. Because it requires you to sit there and listen submit to it, and to be engaged in it. It doesn’t make good background music." 

 I get the distinct sense that you don't much care for the English approach to rock, but at the same time Pere Ubu were much better received in the UK.

 "Only because of the size of the country. I think the English are the most civilized of all the Europeans. They’re responsible for most good stuff.  But you wouldn’t have this confusion if we were talking about reggae or Chinese folk music. Nobody would in their right mind argue an English band could play African tribal music as well as African tribal people. So where do you get this idea that English people can play rock music--the folk music of America-- in any authentic way? Some years ago a magazine paid me to go to Siberia to see what was going on and I met [Russian rock critic] Artemis Trotsky. He said, 'The most ordinary amateur garage band in America has more authenticity and fire and soul than the most adventurous band from England because they’re playing the music of their blood.'"

 Hmmm, do you really think rock music is folk music? It's so heavily filtered through the mass media. Bands learn from recordings much more than from their geographical neighbours. It's mass culture, not community music. Folk music doesn't change that much or that fast, whereas look how insanely rapidly rock mutated and diversified in just a couple of decades.

 "Both your points are baloney. Folk music is passed from one generation to another. It doesn’t matter if the medium of its passing is a record, the nature of it is that it’s a passage. And involved in any folk music is a series of common themes and obsessions. Well that's certainly true of rock music, where people write songs that are continuations of other people’s themes. Images are created---seminal things like Heartbreak Hotel. That image has possessed writers endlessly from the moment it was heard. I’ve written probably a dozen songs based on Heartbreak Hotel. Read Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, it’s all about this passing on of communal images. The notion of being down by the river, the railroad, the worried man. The worried man stretches back hundreds of years. 'Worried Man Blues' by the Carter Family from  1920 probably has roots back in Babylonia. You’re confused by the commercial exploitation of the medium, which has nothing to do with the reality of the its function. Because a folk music is of the people. In any bar you can find ordinary musicians playing rock music of such high quality that it puts to shame stuff  from other countries. That's because it’s in their blood."

 Americans don't have a "blood"! The USA is an unsuccessfully melted melting pot. 

 "Yes we do. Only recently since Oprah Winfrey and the doogooders have taken over has it been less successfully melted. I would argue that, compared to everybody else, it’s totally melted. It has to do with the New World versus the Old World, disposing of the Old World’s nationalistic and socialistic prejudices. This notion that you reject the past and throw yourself into the modern, into the future, is at the same time the strength and the weakness of America. Once Edison invented the phonograph, Elvis was only a matter of time. Edison invented rock music, he created the magnetic age in which we still live.   Robert Johnson wouldn’t have been anything without a microphone--music became intimate, you could create quiet songs, the singer could be perceived as a mortal individual with hopes and dreams. All this is fundamental to the creation of rock music. Also fundamental is the American landscape. It's a music of perspective and space. That’s why all rock has to do with the car. In Europe they had iambic pentameter, in America they had the automobile. All of sudden the ordinary man had a poetic vehicle."

 But wasn't there a period when Pere Ubu itself tried to break with rock'n'roll? Starting with New Picnic Time and intensifying with the Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man, it got pretty abstruse and un-rock.

 "We got abstract, but you’re assuming that everything has to say exactly the same all the time. The road has no end. The road is a Moebius strip. We’re obsessed with not repeating ourselves. One of our abstract albums might have been us looking at a glass from the bottom, but if you’re going to know what a glass is then at some point you’re going to have to look at it from that perspective. One album that everyone considers abstract —Art of Walking—was to create an image of water going down a drain. The idea was to define the meaning of the song by coloring in everything but the thing you’re talking about. We’re obsessed with always pushing it, looking at the bottom of the glass. But you don’t want to look at the bottom of the glass if you want a pop career. Well we don’t care. We’re middle class. We don’t care. We’re free."

 There was a point in the later Pere Ubu where you imagery shifted from "industrial" to pastoral.

 "That's not Pere Ubu, that’s my solo work. That was because people came along and said you write songs about cars. I’m a perverse sort of person so I’ll say, 'Okay, I’ll write a bunch of songs about pedestrians and call my band The Pedestrians'. I’m going to do whatever I want. I always look for the other side of the coin. Whatever everybody is saying is true is probably not. It's never let me down."

 On the Art of Walking, you have that line about "the birds are saying what I want to say". Have you ever listened to Oliver Messaien? He did all these symphonies based on his transcriptions of bird songs.

 "I don’t pay attention to instrumental music. Music exists for the singer. The only exception is the instrumental in the middle of a show where the singer can get a drink and go to the bathroom. That's the sole purpose of instrumentals."

 That's bit of a limited view--I mean, oops, there goes most of jazz, nearly all classical, a fair bit of African music…

 "Yeah. Because those were inferior evolutionary forms. Since Thomas Edison invented rock the whole point of music is the singer…. I’m a contrarian, I’m going to stick to my own silly path."

 Have you never been interested in doing abstract stuff with your voice?  

 "I did that a lot in the beginning—that’s why you can’t hear anything I’m singing because I was totally obsessed with the abstract. I had all sorts of rules I would follow because I was obsessed with not ripping off black music. Like Brian Wilson, I wanted to create a white soul music. I had rules where I would refuse to bend a note or extend a syllable past one beat. Until I realized I’d made my point, and it was limiting to keep going. I like there to be words and meaning."

 I think you once said that Pere Ubu became obsessed with not repeating Dub Housing, the second album?

 "No, we’re obsessed with not repeating ourselves in general. But this particular incident occurred after Dub Housing. Our manager was very successful, he had just signed up Def Leppard. And he said to us, 'All you have to do is repeat the same album two or three times and you'll be stars.'  And I said, 'What if we can’t repeat it? What if we don’t know what we did? What if we don’t want to?'. And our big time manager said, 'As long as you make good albums you’ll get signed. But you’ll never be successful'. Our eyes all lit up and we said, 'That sounds pretty good!'"

Not Feeliesing It Really

The Feelies / Died Pretty

ULU, London

Melody Maker, November 29 1986

 

The Feelies

The Good Earth

Melody Maker, September 27 1986

And the answer is.... no.

Until today, in fact. 

Crazy Rhythms, I like rather more. But it's a pretty pared-down pleasure. 

The self-effacing austerity of this kind of thing - its un-Iggyness - is why I never really got with the college rock program. 

Songs from Crazy Rhythms are used well in this cool cult film Smithereens though

In particular, the tentative, slowly-accelerating intro instrumental part of "Loveless Love" becomes a recurring mood-setting leitmotif of the whole picture

Heard in this context, I'm Feelies-ing it more and more... 

RIP Geoff Nicholson

Well, if the last few weeks in LA have not been traumatizing enough - and then we've had the  hideousness of the inauguration and unfolding horror of the first few days of Trump: The Return...  on top of all that, there's also been a flurry of sad-making deaths. 

Saddest for me was learning that the writer Geoff Nicholson had gone. I didn't know Geoff well - but he was a fellow Brit expat in Los Angeles and on the occasions we ran into each other socially, I really enjoyed talking with him. I have been meaning to pick up his tomes on walking and on suburbia - and now have the spur. 

The book of Geoff's I have read and returned to repeatedly over the years is Big Noises. One of his earliest books - his first non-fiction effort -  and I believe the only one he wrote about music. It's a celebration of the electric guitar, in the form of short essays about inventive electric guitarists. 

Here's something short I wrote about Big Noises for a side-bar to an interview I'd done for some magazine  or other (can't remember which, can't recall when). They asked me to enthuse about three music books  I loved but which were a bit  forgotten. Below that blurb is a longer piece in which Geoff and Big Noises pops up in the context of guitar solo excess.  

BIG NOISES by GEOFF NICHOLSON

Big Noises (1991) is a really enjoyable book about guitarists by the novelist Geoff Nicholson. It consists of 36 short “appreciations” of axemen (and they’re all men; indeed, it’s quite a male book but quite unembarrassed about that). These range from obvious greats/grates like Clapton/Beck/Page/Knopfler to quirkier choices like Adrian Belew, Henry Kaiser, and Derek Bailey. Nicholson writes in a breezy, deceptively down-to-earth style that nonetheless packs in a goodly number of penetrating insights. I just dug this out of my storage unit in London a couple of months ago and have been really enjoying dipping into it.

Flash of the Axe: Guitar Solos
from Excess All Areas issue on musical maximalism, The Wire, September 2019.

I can distinctly remember the first time I let myself enjoy a guitar solo.  1983, I’m at a party, “Purple Haze” comes on - I just went with Jimi, surrendered to the voluptuous excess.  There was a sense of crossing a boundary within myself, like sexual experimentation, or trying a food that normally disgusts you.

You see, growing up in the postpunk era, we were all indoctrinated with less-is-more. Exhibitions of virtuosity were frowned upon. Folklore told us of a time before punk, a wasteland of 12-minute drum solos and other feats of “technoflash” applauded by arenas full of peons grateful to be in the presence of their idols.  Minimalism wasn’t just an aesthetic preference but a moral and ideological stance: an egalitarian levelling of rock’s playing field, letting in amateurs with something urgent to say but barely any chops. Gang of Four went so far as to have anti-solos, gaps where the lead break would have been. Postpunk was an era of amazingly inventive guitarwork, but even the most striking players, like Keith Levene, were not guitar-heroes in the “Clapton Is God” sense. The guitar was conceived as primarily a rhythmic or textural instrument.  An example of how the taboo worked for punk-reared ears: David Byrne’s unhinged guitar on “Drugs” sounded fabulous, but Adrian Belew’s extended screech on “The Great Curve” made me flinch. 

There was a sexual politics aspect to postpunk’s solo aversion: the guitar, handled incautiously, could be a phallic symbol.  Willy-waving nonsense was resurging with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Bands like Iron Maiden were competing for the hearts and minds of youth. So if you supported the DIY feminist-rock revolution represented by the likes of Delta 5 (tough-girls and non-thrusting males united), you made a stand against masturbatory displays of mastery. Solos were, if not outright fascist, then certainly reactionary throwbacks to guitar-as-weapon machismo.   

In those days, on the rare occasions I liked anything Old Wave -  Blue Oyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” say – the solo would be something to grimly wait through until the good stuff resumed (the Byrdsy verses). Then came Jimi, triggering a rethink. Another key moment in  punk deconditioning came ironically courtesy of one of the class of 1977: Television, who I also heard for the first time in 1983. Where Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” solo lasts just 20 seconds, Tom Verlaine’s in “Marquee Moon” is a four-minute-long countdown to ecstasy. Its arc is unmistakably a spiritualized version of arousal and ejaculation, building and building, climbing and climbing  until the shattering climax: an extraordinary passage of silvery tingles and flutters, the space of orgasm itself painted in sound. 

The mid-Eighties was coincidentally when the idea of the guitar-hero began to be tentatively rehabilitated within post-postpunk culture, from the Edge’s self-effacing majesty to underground figures like Meat Puppets’s Curt Kirkwood, who channeled the spectacular vistas and blinding light of the desert into his playing.  Then came Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis and his phalanx of foot-pedals, churning up – on songs like “Don’t”– not just an awesome racket, but solos that were sustained emotional and melodic explorations.  In interviews, Mascis namedropped long-forgotten axe icons like James Gurley of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Paul Leary and his band Buttholes Surfers signposted their influences more blatantly: even if Hairway to Steven’s opener hadn’t been titled “Jimi”, its blazing blimps of guitar-noise would’ve reminded you of “Third Stone From the Sun”.

This kind of winking, irony-clad return to pre-punk grandiosity was the rage in underground rock as the Eighties turned to Nineties. But where Pussy Galore covered (with noise-graffiti) the entirety of Exile on Main Street, that band’s Neil Hagerty, in  new venture Royal Trux, stepped beyond parody towards something more reverent and revenant. The pantheon of guitar gods – Neil Young, Keith Richards, Hendrix – inhabited ghost-towns-of-sound like “Turn of the Century” and “The United States Vs. One 1974 Cadillac El Dorado Sedan”.  But the effect was more like time travel than channeling – the abolition of a rock present that Trux found unheroic.

As a young critic during this period, I tried to stage my own abolition, a transvaluation that erased the now stale and hampering postpunk values I’d grown up with and ushered in a new vocabulary of praise:  a maximalist lexicon of overload and obesity. Revisionist expeditions through the past were part of this campaign.  When Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” had been inexplicably reissued as a single in 1982 and became a UK hit, I could not have imagined anything more abject. But reviewing a Lynyrd box in 1993, I thrilled to the swashbuckling derring-do of that song’s endless solo, a Dixie “Marquee Moon” whose slow-fade chased glory to the horizon. 

This was the final stage of depunking: the enjoyment of lead guitar as pure flash. At a certain point in rock history, solos ceased to have an expressive function and became a self-sustaining fixture, existing only because expected.  Soon I found myself taking pleasure in such excrescences of empty swagger as John Turnbull’s solo in Ian Dury’s “Reasons To Be Cheerful.” I even started looking forward to Buck Dharma’s spotlight turn in “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”.

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Apart from a few academic studies of heavy metal, a surprising dearth of serious critical attention has been paid to the guitar solo. The exception that springs to my mind is the novelist’s Geoff Nicholson’s Big Noises, a collection of pithy appreciations of thirty-six notable guitarists, ranging from obvious eminences like Jimmy Page to cult figures like Allan Holdsworth and Henry Kaiser. But although Nicholson is insightful and evocative when it comes to a particular player’s style or sound, and generally revels in loudness and in-yer-face guitar-heroics, he rarely dissects specific solos.   Perhaps it is simply very hard to do without recourse to technical terms. At the same time, the mechanics of “how” do not actually convey the crucial  “what”—the exhilarating sensations stirred in the unschooled listener. 

Why does the discrete spectacular display of instrumental prowess get such short shrift from rock critics? Partly it’s because of the profession’s bias towards the idea of communication—seeing music as primarily about the transmission of an emotion, a narrative, a message or statement. Prolonged detours into consideration of sheer musicality is seen as a digression, or even as decadent. I think another factor behind this disinterest in or distrust of the guitar solo is a lingering current of anti-theatricality – the belief that rock is not a form of showbiz, that it has higher purposes than razzle-dazzle or acrobatics. A guitar solo is like a soliloquy, but one that is all sound and fury, signifying nothing (or nothing articulable, anyway). It’s also similar to an aria, that single-voice showcase in opera, the most theatrical of music forms. Adding to the distaste is the way that guitar soloing is typically accompanied by ritualized forms of acting-out: stage moves, axe-thrusting stances, “guitar-face.”  This makes the whole business seem histrionic and hammy, an insincere pantomime of intensity that’s rehearsed down to every last grimacing inflection rather than spontaneously felt; an exteriorized code rather than an innermost eruption.  

How would you start to formulate a critical lexicon to defend, or at least, understand, this neglected aspect of rock? In the past, I’ve ransacked Bataille’s concept of “expenditure-without-return”, seeing a potlatch spirit of extravagance at work in the sheer gratuitousness of sound-in-itself. That in turn might connect the soloist’s showing-off to an abjection at the heart of performance itself – the strangeness of exposing one’s emotions and sexuality in front of strangers. Another resource might be queer theory and camp studies, especially where they converge with music itself, as in Wayne Koestenbaum’s book about opera, The Queen’s Throat. The guitar hero could be seen, subversively, as a diva, a maestro of melodramatics.

The ultimate convergence of these ideas would be Queen - the royal marriage of Freddie Mercury’s prima donna preening and Brian May’s pageant of layered and lacquered guitars.  Queen’s baroque ‘n’ roll made my flesh crawl as a good post-punker, but as a no-longer solo-phobe, I’ve succumbed to their vulgar exquisiteness. From the phased filigree of “Killer Queen” to the kitsch military strut of “We Will Rock You”, May’s playing is splendour for splendour’s sake – a peasant’s, or dictator’s, idea of beauty. Anti-punk to the core, and perhaps the true and final relapse of rebel rock into show business.