RIP Shel Talmy

One of the odd things about the social media era is becoming "friends" with musical legends and cult figures that you've never met. Musicians you've interviewed and interacted with in real life - that's one thing, that makes sense.  But I get a little shiver when I see a name like Annette Peacock, Michael Rother, or Andy Ellison (of John's Children renown) pop up in my feed.  

One such Facebook friend that for the life of me I can't work out how I acquired was Shel Talmy, producer of a great number of classic singles of the 1960s, including works that I find impossibly exciting: the obvious anthems by The Kinks and The Who, stuff by The Creation, and above all The Easybeats's "Friday On My Mind".

 I think of the sound Talmy shaped as quintessentially English, even though he was himself an American living in  Britain. (Much the same applies to Joe Boyd).  Most of the groups Talmy produced were British, I believe (or Australian, as with the Easybeats). Somehow Shel was able to tap into, activate, direct, and realise a uniquely English form of musical violence.  

I never actually interacted with Shel, which now seems like a shame. But I did enjoy the detailed accounts of producing particular tracks that he posted on Facebook, always titled "The Blueprint Of...". Over the years I have written about a bunch of things he worked on, but I don't think his name ever got mentioned therein - remiss of me perhaps - but at any rate here they are gathered below: a sort of belated reparations, or salute. 

Talmy is one of the prime architects of this syndrome I broach below (extracted from this longer piece on British Rock Greatness). Again, somewhat ironic given that he was a Yank

... by the early ’60s, a difference had become audible — a contoured clarity to the riff structures hitherto only heard in Eddie Cochran (who produced his own records, and was much bigger in the U.K. than in America). “Shakin’ All Over,” by Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, is the first British rock ’n’ roll record to match America while also sounding different. This stark, almost diagrammatic quality carries on through the Kinks and mod groups like the Eyes, on to Led Zeppelin, Free and the Groundhogs, and beyond them to Wire and Gang of Four. It almost feels like you see the music as much as hear it; compare this lucidity with the organic, live-sounding quality of so much American rock — the marauding murk of the Stooges on Fun House, for instance.  

Perhaps British rock feels less “organic” because we’ve never had an organic relationship with the music or its sources in blues and country. These sounds arrived like invasive visitations, and bear connections to indigenous forms like traditional folk or music hall that are chiefly musicological and twice-removed. It’s as if this inherently distanced perspective on rock gave British artists a unique vantage point, and an advantage. Hearing rock ’n’ roll primarily as recordings first and foremost, rather than as live music, made a difference. As their precursors had with jazz and blues imports, British rock ’n’ roll fans studied the records, playing them over and over and isolating specific bits of performance. (This studious approach no doubt contributed to the remarkable lineage of British guitar heroism.) In the U.K., the record is the primary text, what a live performance is trying to realize and replicate; in America, it’s the other way around. 

Thoughts on "Friday On My Mind" and "the blow out":

With the rave as working class blowout idea, I always come back to this 1966 song by The Easybeats, "Friday On My Mind",  a thrilling anatomy of the working-class weekender life cycle of drudgery, anticipation and explosive release. It's written from a Sixties mod perspective, the 60-hour weekend, but it foreshadows Northern Soul’s speedfreak stylists, to disco’s Saturday-night fever-dreams and jazz-funk’s All Dayers and Soul Weekends, and onto rave and EDM. Every kind of dance culture in which pills are used to intensify leisure time to the utmost, but then it's back to the 9 to 5. 

 This is the key verse --

Do the five day grind once more

I know of nothin' else that bugs me

More than workin' for the rich man

Hey! I'll change that scene one day

Today I might be mad, tomorrow I'll be glad

'Cause I'll have Friday on my mind

And then there's the chorus 

Tonight I'll spend my bread, tonight

I'll lose my head, tonight

I've got to get to night

Monday I'll have Friday on my mind

Musically the verses have this sort of tick-tocking tension, like the treadmill of workaday time, as he waits for the big blowout of the weekend (the euphoric chorus). It's two different kinds of time:  chronos versus kairos

Lyrically the key line is "hey! I'll change that scene one day"  - I find it incredibly poignant - it could just mean "one day I'll get started on my career / start a business and I'll be the rich man / boss" or it could mean "one day me and the rest of the proletariat will organise at the site of the means of production and there'll be a revolutionary transformation in political economy, no more rich men, no more bosses"

But it's clear that he's so caught up in this nightlifestyle that he'll never get around to either the individual or collective escape route

I tend to see the essence of rave (and its precursors) as dissipatory 

But (like a lot of music in different ways) it points towards an unalienated life - one that it can't actually make real  in the outside world, but can only institute in the small areas of space and time it can command

Of course, the troubling thought is that the momentary release of the ecstatic all night dance is actively working against the total and permanent change he and everyone else should be working for (and which would necessarily involve more drudgery and deferment of gratification in favor of the long term goal - duty for the future being the essence of political involvement) 

The here-and-now utopia / TAZ is taking away the possibility of a soon-to-come PAZ (permanent autonomous zone)

Almost sixty years after "Friday On My Mind",  we’re no nearer to overhauling the work/leisure structures of industrial society. Instead, all that rage and frustration is vented through going mental at the weekend (‘Tonight, I’ll spend my bread / Tonight, I’ll lose my head’), helped along by a capsule or three of instant unearned euphoria.

Flowered Up's "Weekender" film is an update of this notion of the  blow out cycle as counter-revolutionary. It's totally mod - indeed directly influenced by Quadrophenia, the mod revival movie of 1979 - indeed there's a sample of the Phil Daniels character's rant about how they can take his office drone job and stick it up their arseholes. In Quadrophrenia, the key scene of disillusionment for the mod protagonist as played by Phil Daniels,  is when he comes across the scene's leading Face - the coolest of the cool  - in his civilian life, where he is a porter in a posh hotel, a flunky ordered around by rich men... 

Another song about the blow out - there's a verse about "going to the disco" in this otherwise gritty funk-blues song about how tough life is economically by the great Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, the king of "proletarian funk"

Got to go to a disco

Throw your troubles away

Dance to the music

That the DJ's play

And then the lights come on

Like you knew they would

Go home and face the music

That don't sound to good

Stuff on The Who and mod from an essay entitled "Buttoned Up" - about buttoned up shirt style, wouldyabelieve?

The violence of the Mods as they rampaged against the Rockers was on one level  simply righteous disgust for their abject opposite.  But mod style itself could be seen as having an inherent undercurrent of violence. First, there was the symbolic violence of dressing sharper than your social superiors (“powerful people -- businessmen in suits, take their clothes, retain your identity” as Ian Page of mod revival band Secret Affair put it). But also a kind of imploded violence: the neurotic fastidiousness of dress and grooming was a sort of voluntarily worn strait-jacket, a near-masochistic set of constraints and rules.   

This stringent regime, stoked and sharpened by amphetamines, virtually demanded some kind of release, a breaking free. That could take the form of mayhem (as with the war with the rockers) or through theatricalized disorder. Which is where the Who came in: a band designed by mod philosopher Pete Meaden, the group’s manager in their early days.  Meaden deliberately shaped the Who to appeal to  the existing Mod subculture, which until then had been based not around following bands but dancing to records, imported soul and R&B.

Rock ‘n’ roll had triggered violence before (with the cinema seat slashing done by Teddy Boys driven into a frenzy of excitement by the first rock’n’roll movies to arrive in Britain). But it had never really represented violence musically or enacted it onstage.   The Who’s sound was white R&B so amped-up and amphetamine-uptight it came apart at the seams: Keith Moon’s free-flailing cymbal crashes and tom rolls, Pete Townshend’s slashed and scything powerchords, John Entwhistle’s bass-lunges.  A sound expressive not of sexual desire but of an unrest at once social and existential.  Mod was fundamentally asexual: as Pearce notes, mods “simply were not interested. They were.... too self-absorbed....  Mods were free, clear of emotional ties. They rejected peer pressure to pair off.”  The boys dressed and danced to impress other boys, not to attract girls. Amphetamines  also had something to do with it, suppressing sex drive along with the other needs and appetites of the organism (such as food and sleep). Speed creating a sexless intensity, a plateau state of arrested orgasm that the mods, revealingly, called “blocked”.

The pent-up pressure had to blow somehow, though, and mod’s latent violence was dramatized by Moon and Townshend in their climactic orgies of instrument-smashing : supposedly inspired by art-school student Townsend’s  encounter with Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art, but really the orgasmic release that mod music, mod psychology, mod neurology urgently required. In the immediate aftermath of “My Generation”, “I Can't Explain", "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere", and the other early Who singles,  young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John’s Children picked up on the band’s loudness and distortion and recorded a  a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors subsequently have come to call “freakbeat”:  mod tipping into a jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy under the influence of speed and LSD.  The strange blend of menace and feyness in songs like The Eyes’s “When The Night Falls” and “My Degeneration”,  John’s Children’s “A Midsummer Night’s Scene”  and “Desdemona” simmered with a spontaneous combustibility that was uniquely English, rooted in the characteristic native psychology of neurotic uptightness and lashing-out rage. 

John Entwistle / The Who, “My Generation” (Brunswick single, 1965)

Rock ‘n’ roll had triggered violence before, but up until The Who it had never really represented violence musically* or enacted it onstage.  Think of words like “mayhem” and “destruction” in connection with that band and the first things that spring to mind are Keith Moon’s free-flailing drums and Pete Townshend’s scything powerchords.  (Not forgetting those climactic orgies of instrument-smashing).  But on “My Generation” John Entwistle supplies more than his fair share of the savagery. Often described as lead bassist to Townshend’s  rhythm guitarist, on this late 1965 single, his is the loudest instrument (with the possible exception of Moon’s cymbals). 

For the first minute “Thunderfingers”, as his bandmates nicknamed him,  churns and grinds as relentlessly and remorselessly as a gigantic tunnel-boring drill. Then, outrageously, he takes the solo and slashes a rent in the song’s fabric with a down-diving flurry of notes at once fluidly elegant and brutishly in-your-face.  This is generally regarded as the first bass solo in recorded rock, and as such, it’s a mixed portent.  Entwistle would immediately attempt to reprise the shock effect on the Who’s debut album with the bass-dominated instrumental “The Ox” and over the years he became an increasingly ostentatious player, peaking with the verging-on-Pastorius floridity of Quadrophenia’s “The Real Me” (much admired in the technical guitar magazines). 

But in the immediate aftermath of “My Generation”, young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John’s Children picked up not on the sophistication (beyond their capabilities, anyway) but the loudness, distortion, and menace.  Amping up the jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy, they recorded a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors today know as “freakbeat”.  Mod, as a musical form as opposed to a subcultural style, represented a uniquely English contribution to rock: the sound of frustration and neurosis, tension and explosive release.  In their own way, for a moment there in the mid-Sixties the Who were as radical as the Velvet Underground. Certainly, as far as Britain is concerned, punk starts here. Entwistle can even be seen as a forefather of postpunk’s  “lead bassists”, or at least the  aggressive hard-rocking sort, such as Jean-Jacques Burnel and Peter Hook. Indeed Hooky actually bought some of the Ox’s bass guitars in the estate sale after his 2002 death.

* Actually I would semi-retract that - Bo Diddley's sound, all rhythm and noise, is joyously violent. 

VARIOUS ARTISTS, Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond

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 ommissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.

THE WHO

3O YEARS MAXIMUM R&B

 For a while there, it seemed that The Who had dipped out of rock memory, become a band that virtually no one even thought about. They seemed to have the same relation vis-a-vis the eternally cool and current Beatles & Stones that, say, Deep Purple have to Sabbath & Zep: massive then, monstrously uninfluential thereafter. In recent years, though, The Who have slowly seeped back as a reference point, what with Urge Overkill's "Live At Leeds" sharp-dressed rifferama and the mod iconography of groups at diverse as Flowered Up, These Animal Men, Blur, D-Generation, and Primal Scream (that ad for 'Rocks' featuring Keith Moon). 

     Personally, I find there's something resolutely unloveable about The Who, although why I'm not sure.  Pete Townshend's mid-life crisis and endless maudlin' musings on lost youth?  Roger Daltrey's voice, face, and fish-farm? Just the FACT (I haven't heard 'em) that John Entwhistle released FIVE solo LP's?  Perhaps the real reason is the boy-ness of The Who cult (and of their legacy, The Jam, Secret Affair etc).  Somehow it's obvious that way fewer women cared about The Who than The Stones, Beatles or even Led Zep. 

     Still, I love the mod-psych bands who never made it--The Eyes, John's Children, The Creation--so I can't logically refute the thrill of "I Can't Explain", "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere", "Substitute". At their 1965/66 height, The Who's white R&B is so amped-up and amphetamine-uptight it's coming apart at the seams.  "My Generation" remains as naffly irresistible as Steppenwolf's equally naive "Born To Be Wild"; Moon's ramshackle surf-drums, exploding everywhichway like Mitch Mitchell of the Experience, Townshend's slash-and-scald rhythm guitar, Entwhistle's bass-lunges and Daltrey's speed-freak stutter, all add up to an immaculately chaotic enactment of mod's "smashed, blocked" aggression, its rage-to-live and hunger for action.

     With the arrival of psychedelia, The Who toyed with the era's fashionable tropes of androgyny ("I'm A Boy"'s Frank Spencer scenario, where mummy won't admit he's not a girl), and regression (the fey "creepy-crawly" terrors of "Boris The Spider").  There were gems here (the effete all-wanked-out vocals of the masturbation ode "Pictures Of Lily"), but mostly The Who's acid-phase is unusually unappetising.  "I Can See For Miles" turns mod misogny into visionary paranoia, and the swooping phased guitars of "Armenia" thrill, but the pallid, fey vocals of this period are pretty pukey.

     Then the bombast begins in earnest.  Daltrey quickly swells into the least likeable white R&B singer this side of Joe Cocker, while Townshend's songs bloat up like houses with too many extensions. The Who's progressive aspirations are all on the level of structure rather than playing or texture (which remained coarse R&B); the result is a horrid fusion of prog-rock and pub rock.  So, apart from "Tommy"'s one genuinely hymnal aria ("See Me Feel Me") and the just-about-takeable epic-ness of their post-counterculture allegory "Won't Get Fooled Again", a long blank void ensues--one whose continuance seemed increasingly mercenary as the Seventies proceed.  Even at their most haggard, The Stones could re- ignite with the lubricious raunch of a "Start Me Up".  The Who's equivalent twilight hit is "You Better You Bet", a song with only one fan in the entire world, Taylor Parkes, and only then for the most perverse, "it's so bad, it's.... really MINDBOGGLINGLY bad" of reasons.

     "30 Years Maximum R & B"? Break that down, and it works out at roughly 4 and a half years of adolescent intensity and two and a half decades of graceless middle-age.