RIP Frank Beard

Would you believe, I have actually written about ZZ Top? I reviewed their Greatest Hits along with a Lynyrd Skynyrd box set. 

ZZ TOP, Greatest Hits
Melody Maker, 1993

Like 'funk', like 'raunch', boogie is one of those rock'n'roll concepts that are elemental and un-analysable. There's probably some Rockschool equations that could enable you to go through the motions, but musicology can't endow or explain "feel", or account for the continuum that links such disparate instances as Led Zep's "Black Dog", T. Rex' "Get It On", Budgie's "Whisky River", MBV's "Slow", the Stones' "Can Ya Hear Me Knocking", Soundgarden's "Outshined".

Anyways, there ain't a lot of it about these days, least of all this side of the Atlantic. Brit-rock today emits an astounding dearth of rhythmic heat. The drums in most Anglo-indie merely mark time, nobody knows how to groove. For all the calls in these pages for a return to Seventies perversity and caprice (nice rhetoric, I'll prick up when somebody makes a record as freaky and regal as Ritual de Lo Habitual) let's not forget that half of what made T.Rex was the bottom end. Without the love-muscle-quaking slip'n'slide, Bolan was mere tinsel and glitterdust.

When it comes to smokin' rhythmic interplay, Brit-rock whippersnappers could learn a few tricks and licks from ZZ Top: arch-conservatives maybe, but there's little they don't know about the science of friction. The best tracks on this variable compilation come from that period (1979's Deguello, 1981's El Loco) just before the Texans' commercial breakthrough with Eliminator. "Cheap Sunglasses" is just so doggone funky; these old farts are survivors of an era when heavy rock had more in common with James Brown and The Meters than it does with the frigid frenzy of today's metal. Cutting between a low-down, dirty bass-shuffle and eerie, fractured bridge passages that are almost Oriental, "Sunglasses" is dada-boogie worthy of Beefheart's Clear Spot). Filtered through New Wave minimalism, "Pearl Necklace" has an almost Zen geometrical perfection. And with "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide", an ode to the pimp-rollin' pleasures of low-rider driving, ZZ lumber so limber.

The Eliminator stuff's just fine: is there anyone possessed of a booty who can resist the honeyed bludgeon of "Gimme All Your Lovin'"? Thereafter, with the lame Afterburner and Recycler, ZZ's bluesy raunch sat uneasily on top of programmed beats more appropriate to Janet Jackson. And even the deftest programmer can't get drum machines to elasticate time like a seasoned rhythm section....

Because I was reviewing the Greatest Hits, I wasn't able to squeeze in a mention of my absolute favorite ZZ Top track: Deguello's "Manic Mechanic". Which was a good showcase of Frank Beard's  supple stickmanship...

Although it was the Eliminator hits that got me buying Deguello and El Loco, my ears had already pricked up a few years earlier when Tommy Vance played "Cheap Sunglasses" on his Radio One show. I was like, hmmm, this is pretty darn funky...  like maybe they are better at this than Delta 5 and Gang of Four.

Strangely, although I bought "Gimme All Your Lovin'" as a single, I never got Eliminator and I'm not sure if I've ever listened to it all the way through. 

Deguello is a stone classic, all killer no filler. 

El Loco doesn't really stick in my memory except for "Pearl Necklace".

Being an innocent, pure-minded sort in those days, I had no idea how astonishingly dirty the song is. 

"Pearl Necklace" is a classic Old Wavers go New Wave move... and a presentiment of what happened next. 

Somewhere or other I read the fascinating story behind Eliminator.  The impetus came from their studio engineer Joe Hardy. He made a scientific study of the radio, what hit and what didn't. And he discovered that there was an optimum tempo that could damn near guarantee commercial success and persuaded the band to record the whole album at that bpm. He regularized the rhythm with sequencing and did a sort of Butch Vig type job of burnishing the sound.

Which was already a wonderful combo of grit and slickness on Deguello. 

I remember my old Melody Maker colleague Frank Owen, who later worked at Spin as an editor (we collaborated on some things there like we had at MM  - a cover story on Jimi Hendrix, for instance)... despite being him your archetypal anti-rockist / only-into-black music tasseled-loafer wearing type, Frank found himself at a ZZ Top arena show in the early '90s. He came back blown away by the physical impact of the noise, the astonishing loudness.  But probably being a lover of funk and hip hop,  the groove aspect must have reached him subliminally too. 

From the pre-Deguello era, this one stands out and is another Frank Beard skills showcase. 

Used to hear it often on LA classic rock radio when we first moved here - but then that thing happened, the demographic centre of the classic rock listenership started to move forward through historical time. You stopped hearing ZZ Top and The Guess Who...  more and more it was things like The Offspring and Sublime... and the last time I checked in it seemed like the centre was now in the early 2000s, The Killers and that kind of thing. 

Hearing a ZZ Top song go into a Cars song on a classic rock station was a revelatory moment for me.... ah, the gap between Old Wave and New Wave starts to lose definition.... it's all rooted in the same kind of musicianship...  just a slightly differently inflected idea of "tightness"

And then ZZ Top decided to go "New Wave" themselves, with the more mechanistic rhythm base but also with the videos - cleverly turning their fugliness into a visual brand. 

Here are some quotes (via Andrew Parker) about the ZZ Top as hit machine era, including one from the guy who literally engineered this metamorph with a hybrid of real and unreal rhythm. Beard’s adaption to the new pop regime is rather like Stephen Morris from New Order shift from being a great, original drummer to a skilful programmer of drum machines. 

"That's why Eliminator can sound like Frank Beard playing drums inside a drum machine rather than either “real drums” or “a drum machine.”

And the historical sources actually support this hybrid interpretation. One account says most of Beard's drumming was replaced by drum machine/Simmons electronic drums while retaining his acoustic tom fills and cymbal accents." 

Engineer Joe Hardy later described recording the rhythm and bass tracks [of Afterburner] in Houston using a Fairlight CMI. He specifically said that the rhythm tracks and bass tracks were done on the Fairlight." - Gemini

mixed by Jellybean Benitez

Texas guitar hero Joe Knight of Rangers writes to say that ZZ Top's "experimental album" is Tejas, from 1976 - the record before Deguello, and recommends we wrap our ears around this choice cut featuring Frank B shuffling it like "a southern fried Jaki Leibezeit"

RIP Kenny Morris

One intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay had not quit Siouxsie and the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP  signing session in an Aberdeen record shop...

McKay & Morris broke their silence about their seemingly impulsive decision to leave a few months later, in December '79

In the counterfactual scenario, Morris & McKay stick around - and Budgie and John McGeoch do not join as their replacements...

And while you wouldn't want to have missed all the amazing music that the new line-up created - "Happy House", "Christine", all of Juju, all of A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, "Fireworks" etc - I wouldn't have minded an album or two more in the Scream / Join Hands mode.

The difference is like the switch between monochrome and Technicolor. 

In  "Concrete Pop", a 1986 piece written for Monitor, Chris Scott - who vastly preferred the first-phase Banshees - argued for the higher powers of the non-virtuoso and the untrained: 

"Now: the archetypal goth band, drone drone drone, texture texture texture, the sound of the sea. Then: the sound of people doing things to objects. Being a punk Siouxsie treated even her voice as an object, and more spectacularly than Rotten or Poly Styrene. The music was not just an atmosphere: it kept us aware of the presence of the instrument, the object and of the presence of the people manipulating the objects, communicating with us because we were kept aware that someone had made these noises for us. Each sound itself was like an object put there for our consideration. Buying that first LP was like finding a huge rusting metal thing in the street, bringing it home and putting it in the middle of your bedroom just because it looked so good. Buying a Banshees album today is like buying a settee. Or a carpet."

He also made an invidious contrast between the two drummers: Kenny Morris's "epochal battering" versus Budgie getting "his drumsticks specially made 200 at a time - rockstars are dead, eh""

When I interviewed Steve Severin he made some points compatible with the Chris Scott viewpoint: 

“When you listen to The Scream, you can hear the fingers on the strings, the effort that’s actually going into it. You get to the end of a track and you can hear Kenny breathing.” 

The sound-style emerged out of the combo of the performer's limitations and their active aversions. Severin again:

“It was a case of us knowing what we didn’t want, throwing out every cliché. Never having a guitar solo, never ending a song with a loud drum smash. At one point, Siouxsie just took away the hi-hat from Kenny Morris’s drum kit.” 

Here's a bit on Morris's approach to drumming from an interview done only a few years ago by Ellie O'Byrne:

His unorthodox, self-taught drumming style used almost no cymbals: he would turn his sticks round the better to belt his drum kit as hard as he possibly could. Siouxsie said he was like a marionette seated at his kit.

“I was really physical on the drums,” he says. “When I eventually got my own kit, it had to be practically specially built. I think it was ’78 before I even got that.”

“I had a Pearl Drum Kit with a special indestructible pedal. When most drummers use a ride cymbal, I didn’t want a ride. I’d have my high hat and a crash and an upside down Chinese cymbal. I would play time on the side drum, not the ride. When I got a riser, I made chalk marks where they had to drill holes and attach metal clasps to secure the cymbal stands.”

Still, as severe as the first-phase Banshees could be, the single were pop punchy. 

Things like this flange-ferocious beauty - a medium-size hit single

The earlier Banshees also had a better, more coherent look as a band - McKay's beauty, Kenny Morris's pallor, contributed as much as Siouxsie and Severin. 

High-contrast black-and-white - the look mirrors the sound of The Scream and Join Hands. 

One wonders if the first-phase was selected as much for appearance as ability (since none of them had it or sought it, then). 

Whereas the second-phase new recruits were picked for their musical accomplishment and the way that would enable the Banshees to expand and evolve. 

I pose that counterfactual query about John and Kenny not leaving at the end of this review of a Deluxe Reissue of The Scream

Siouxsie and the Banshees

The Scream

Uncut, 2005

Knowing Siouxsie as Godmother of Goth, it’s easy to forget that the Banshees were originally regarded as exemplary postpunk vanguardists. Laceratingly angular, The Scream reminds you what an inclement listen the group was at the start.  Sure, there’s a couple of Scream tunes as catchy as “Hong Kong Garden” (which appears twice here on the alternate-versions-crammed second disc of BBC session and demos). “Mirage” is a cousin to “Public Image,” while the buzzsaw chord-drive of “Nicotine Stain” faintly resembles The Undertones, of all people. 

But one’s first and lasting impression of Scream is shaped by the album’s being book-ended by its least conventional tunes. Glinting and fractured, the opener “Pure” is an “instrumental” in the sense that Siouxsie’s voice is just an abstract, sculpted texture swooping across the stereo-field. Switching between serrated starkness and sax-laced grandeur, the final track “Switch” is closer to a song  but as structurally unorthodox as Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something”.

Glam’s an obvious reference point for the Banshees, but The Scream also draws from the moment when psychedelia turned dark: “Helter Skelter” is covered (surely as much for the Manson connection as for Beatles-love), guitarist John McKay’s flange resembles a Cold Wave update of  1967-style phasing, and the stringent stridency of Siouxsie’s singing channels Grace Slick. In songs like the autism-inspired “Jigsaw Feeling,” there’s even a vibe of mental disintegration that recalls bad trippy Jefferson Airplane tunes like “Two Heads.” 

Another crack-up song, “Suburban Relapse” always makes me think of that middle-aged housewife in every neighbourhood with badly applied make-up and a scary lost look in her eyes. Siouxsie’s suspicion not just of domesticity but of that other female cage, the body, comes through in the fear-of-flesh anthem “Metal Postcard,” whose exaltation of the inorganic and indestructible (“metal is tough, metal will sheen… metal will rule in my master-scheme”) seems at odds with the song’s inspiration, the anti-fascist collage artist John Heartfield.

Scream is another Banshees altogether from the lush seductions of Kaleidoscope and Dreamhouse.  McKay and drummer Kenny Morris infamously quit the group on the eve of the band’s first headlining tour, and their replacements--John McGeoch and Budgie--were far more musically proficient. Yet The Scream, along with early singles such as  ‘Staircase Mystery” and the best bits of Join Hands, does momentarily make you wonder about the alternate-universe path the original Banshees might have pursued if they’d stayed together and stayed monochrome ‘n’ minimal.

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

From the O'Byrne interview, Morris's account of the breakup at the Aberdeen record shop LP signing session: 

“When we left the record shop, we went outside and went, ‘what are we going to do?’ So we went back to the hotel. Margaret Thatcher was staying there too, so security was everywhere: guys talking into their sleeves.”

They booked a taxi but, fearful of the rest of the band catching up with them, lied to the receptionist and said they were going to the train station when in fact they were headed to the airport.

The band did arrive, just as they were leaving.

“[Banshees manager] Nils came up to the taxi and reached in through the window, and started trying to strangle me,” Kenny says. “So I wound the window up on his arm. He fell to the floor and he was going, ‘I’ll see you never work again. I’ve invested 45,000 in this tour!’ and John was going, ‘have you? Whose money? Is that our money, Polydor’s money?’  Things had gotten that bad that we didn’t know.”

A film made by Kenny Morris, said to be an allegorical account of the break-up 

Kenny Morris interviewed by John Robb, who - nothing if not direct and to the point - immediately, bluntly, asks him, "so, what have you been doing for the last 30 years?"  

Ooh, a weird loop - in Chris Scott's "Concrete Pop" article, Robb's group the Membranes are considered exemplars (as was The Rox, Robb's zine, in Chris's earlier Monitor article celebrating fanzines for their aesthetic of anti-professionalism). 

Of course, I'm a big fan of atmosphere, "the sound of the sea". A nice-looking settee, an attractive carpet - what's the problem? 

I also like a nicely laid out page.

RIP Ken Downie a.k.a. The Black Dog

Big shout to Matthew Ingram the Mighty Woebot whose tape of the early Black Dog EPs introduced me to their most magickal musik phase.

Here is Matt's lovely tribute to the Black Dog from a few years ago

Here's my own writing about the group:

THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma

emusic, 2007


A legend in techno circles, The Black Dog’s music is like the missing link between Coil’s eldritch electronica and Carl Craig’s exquisitely-textured elegance. Although the British group--originally the trio of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner--became widely heard as part of Warp Records’ “electronic listening music” initiative of the early 90s, the bedrock of their cult is their hard-to-find first three EPs, 

Did I say hard? Damn near impossible actually, when it comes to The Virtual EP, Age of Slack EP, and The Black Dog EP, vinyl-only 1989-90 releases long out-of-print and each worth a small fortune. Now at long overdue last they are available in their entirety as the first disc of this double-CD retrospective. 

Tracks like “Virtual,” “The Weight” and “Tactile” distil the essence of Detroit techno into an etherealized machine-funk so translucent and refined it feels like you should store it in crystal vials rather than a lowly CD case or hard drive. "Age of Slack” and “Ambience with Teeth” use hip hop breakbeats in ways that parallel early jungle, but there’s a balletic poise and delicacy to the way Black Dog deploy their crisp and rattling drum loops. 

This is rave sublimated into a mind-dance, the shimmying-and-sashaying thought-shapes of some advanced alien species who get together and party via telepathy. 

This set’s second disc, consisting of tracks from three EPS recorded for the GPR label in the early 90s, is also excellent, looking ahead to the Warp-era albums Bytes and Spanners. 

But it’s disc one that captures The Black Dog at their magickal and mysterious best.

[from the liner notes to Artificial Intelligence]

The Black Dog's contribution, done as an alter-ego, for AI

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

The Black Dog (and Balil and Plaid)  from Energy Flash

The Black Dog – the trio of Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie – were almost as hermetic as Autechre, but more committed to traditional art notions of ‘expression’. They once defined their 

project as the quest for ‘a computer soul’, while Ken Downie told Eternity that The Black Dog started in order to fill ‘a hole in music. Acid house had been “squashed” by the police and rinky-dinky 

Italian house music was getting played everywhere. Emotion had left via the window.’ 

The musical emotions in The Black Dog (and alter egos Plaid and Balil) aren’t the straightforward, run-of-the-mill, everyday sort, but rather more elusive: subtle, indefinable shades of mood, 

ambiguous and evanescent feelings for which even an oxymoron like ‘bittersweet’ seems rather crude. Eschewing live appearances and seldom doing interviews, The Black Dog nonetheless created a 

cult aura around their often hard-to-find discography. One of their chosen mediums was cyberspace: long before the current craze for  techno websites, The Black Dog established a computer bulletin 

board called Black Dog Towers. Visitors could gawp at artwork and learn more about the Dog’s interest in arcane knowledges, such as paganism, out-of-body experiences, UFOs, Kabbalah and ‘aeonics’ 

(mass shifts in consciousness). Ken Downie – the principal esoterrorist in the band – has described himself as a magician. One of The Black Dog’s earliest tracks, ‘Virtual (Gods in Space)’, features 

a sample – ‘make the events occur that you want to occur’ – which gives a magickal spin to the punk DIY ethos. 

Although far from the euphoric fervour of rave, The Black Dog’s early 1990–2 material is remarkably similar to the breakbeat hardcore of the day. Like Hyper-On Experience, DJ Trax, et al., the 

mode of construction is basically the Mantronix collage aesthetic updated for the rave era: incongruous samples + looped breakbeats + oscillator riffs. But the mood of ‘Seers + Sages’, ‘Apt’, ‘Chiba’ and 

‘Age of Slack’ is quirky Dada absurdism rather than Loony Toons zany. The crisp, echoed breakbeat and keyboard vamp on ‘Seers + Sages’ recalls 2 Bad Mice classics like ‘Waremouse’, except that the 

riff sounds like it’s played on a church organ, so the effect is eldritch rather than E-lated. On 1991’s ‘Chiba’, the Morse-code riff has a glancing lightness of inflection that anticipates the Detroit break

beat of Innerzone Orchestra’s ‘Bug in the Bassbin’. 

Carl Craig, the producer behind Innerzone Orchestra, clearly recognized The Black Dog as kindred spirits in sonic watercolours; in  1992, his Planet E label released their classic Balil track ‘Nort Route’. 

Strangely redolent of the early eighties – the Sinophile phunk of Sylvian and Sakomoto’s ‘Bamboo Music’, the phuturistic panache of Thomas Leer – ‘Nort Route’ daubs synth-goo into an exquisite 

calligraphic melody-shape over an off-kilter breakbeat. The track trembles and brims with a peculiar emotion, a euphoric melancholy that David Toop came closest to capturing with the phrase ‘nostalgia for the future’. 

What The Black Dog/Balil/Plaid tracks most resembled was a sort of digital update of fifties exotica. But instead of imitating remote alien cultures, as the original exotica did, it was like The Black Dog were somehow giving us advance glimpses of the hybrid musics of the next millennium: the Hispanic-Polynesian dance crazes of the Pacific Rim, or music for discotheques and wine bars in Chiba City and The Sprawl (the megalopolises in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero). 

While some of the Dog’s later work – on albums like Bytes, Parallel, The Temple of Transparent Balls and Spanners – crosses the thin line between mood-music and muzak, it’s still marked by a rhythmic inventiveness that’s unusual in the electronic listening field. With its percussive density and discombobulated time signatures, The Black Dog’s music often feels like it’s designed for the asymmetrical dancing of creatures with an odd number of limbs – not bipeds, but quintupeds or nonopeds. 

The Black Dog's mix of bleep n bass for FACT

Stuff on The Black Dog in this Redbull story about London Techno 

Here's a  January 1995 iD piece by the great Tony Marcus, which is at this excellent repository of old Face iD Jockey Slut Mixmag etc etc pieces known as Test Pressing. And whatdyaknow, the person wot sent it in them ... is Matt Ingram!

 

 

RIP Danny Thompson

Danny Thompson worked with a host of people, including a stint in Pentangle, but for many of us he is inseparable from the name John Martyn  - and revered as the co-author of "Go Down Easy", "I'd Rather Be The Devil", "Solid Air", "Couldn't Love You More", "Glistening Glyndebourne"....

Here by way of indirect tribute are three pieces about Martyn in which Thompson flits into view here and there. Most prominently in the first one, a Blissblog recollection about about the only time I ever saw Martyn live - in New York, just months before he died, with Thompson by his side, the only other person on the small stage with him - which doubled as an obituary. The fond bond between the two was very evident that night.

There is also a short piece about "I'd Rather Be The Devil" and a longer piece about Solid Air as a Desert Island Disc written for the 2007 book Marooned (Phil Freeman's unofficial sequel to Stranded). 

John Martyn RIP

Blissblog, January 31st 2009

RIPs appear here quite regularly. Rock is long in the tooth; musicians you admire, whose music you've grown up with, seem to be popping their clogs with mounting frequency. Usually I feel sad for a bit, in a fairly removed sort of way... then life's petty urgencies resume. But this week's big one, I must admit, has hit me quite hard. It's cast a shadow over the last few days. It feels a lot more personal somehow.

It struck me that I might possibly have listened to John Martyn more than any but a handful of other musicians. Actually I can't think of who else I'd have listened to more, over such a sustained period. The Smiths? Love? But if you broke it down, it would be Solid Air and One World that accounted for 95 percent of that lifetime of Martyn listening. Those two albums have been such a large and constant presence. They keep coming back, or rather, they don't go away, whereas there's other central artists, deep deep favourites, where there are long periods of mutual leave-taking (Can, for instance--I seem to be taking a breather from them, for some reason just don't feel the urge, but I know the time will come again.) (Another example: postpunk, which dipped away for much of the Eighties and almost all of the Nineties). But John Martyn… it barely took me a minute to settle on Solid Air as my desert island disc when asked to contribute to Marooned. It was my first choice, and then to do it proper I thought up some other candidates (closest contender being Rock Bottom). But it was always going to be Solid Air, partly because the "desert island" scenario suggested it somehow, but also because of its inexhaustibility as a record.

Strangely, though, when I think of John Martyn's music, I don't think of personal memories particularly. Some records evoke times of your life: Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind, the debut Smiths album, those records remind me with incredible vividness of a student bedsit in north Oxford, the yearnings and miseries of that time; "Thieves Like Us" carries with it the flush of romance remembered; there's plenty more examples. But with most music, the memories carried are memories of the music itself, if that makes sense. When you're a music fiend, that function of commemoration or life-soundtracking or "our song" that perhaps remains prominent for the more casual listener, it really fades away. You might say that music's life eclipses your own, or it becomes one with it, or it fills in the holes. Music doesn't serve as a mirror for narcissistic identification so much as a means of leaving one's self behind. A favourite record, then, might be more like gazing at a landscape, the kind of place you'd revisit at different stages of your life. A perennial source of wonder. (This is why I'm not a huge fan of memoiristic criticism: oh, it can be done well, but even at its best it doesn't really tell you anything about the music; that one individual's memories adhere to a piece of music in a particular fashion doesn't have any relation to what I or anybody else might get out of the record or glom onto it, experientially. Although it's also true that the narcissistic projection towards a song/album/group that music arouses so potently can make it feel like those life-experiences somehow inhere to the music).

But back to John Martyn--another strange thing is that I'd never gone to see him perform live. This despite being a fan since 1985 (when I'd taped Solid Air off David Stubbs--cheers David!--having been intrigued by this Barney Hoskyns interview with Martyn that compared Solid Air to Astral Weeks--cheers Barney!). The opportunity just never presented itself , and I'd never felt tempted to seek it out. I guess the sense you got was that after the 1970s heyday Martyn onstage was likely to be... variable. He'd be playing with bands composed of younger musicians, a modern soft-rock/AOR-ish sound like on those post-Grace and Danger Eighties albums, you heard tell of the keyboard sound being thin and digital-synth nasty. It seemed to promise disappointment. Anyway, I've always been more of a records man; I just don't have that compulsion to witness everybody whose music I love perform live at least once.

But late last year I heard that John Martyn was playing in New York. (I have to thank Rob Tannenbaum for the tip off, I'd have completely missed it otherwise--cheers Rob!). October the 9th, at Joe's Pub--less than ten minutes away. And not only playing in New York, virtually round the corner, but playing with Danny Thompson. So I had to go, even though this was the night before we flew off to London for the annual see-the-folks-and-friends vacation, there was packing to be done that night, an early rise the next day.

I got there and found quite a long line to get in, which surprised me, as I'd always had the impression Martyn wasn't really known in this country. And nor was it the case that the line was entirely composed of British expats. I ran into a friend-of-a-friend, an experimental musician (of the academic kind) who I'd not have particularly expected to be a John Martyn fan. We positioned ourselves near the bar with good sight-lines of the stage.

Joe's Pub is not a pub at all, but a sort of nightclub/performance space attached to The Public Theater on Lafayette. It's the sort of place where you'd expect, oh, Norah Jones to play; it's got a bit of an acid jazz/downtempo/Giant Steps type vibe to it. The last thing I saw there was ages ago: Herbert and Dani Siciliano doing the full chanteusy-meets-clickhouse thing. Anyway, there was this small, scarlet curtain at the back of the stage, which just seemed like part of Joe's plush cabaret-ish décor. All of a sudden there's a ruffling with the curtain, the suggestion of struggle and kerfuffle behind it, almost a Tommy Cooper/Morecambe & Wise-esque effect. And then, with evident difficulty Big John and his wheelchair were maneuvered through the red fabric and onto the tiny stage. I might be misremembering it but I think they actually had to wheel him on backwards. At any rate, it wasn't a dignified entrance.

First impression was of a ruin of a man. Magnificent, maybe, but definitely a ruin. In fact what I couldn't help thinking of was the sketch in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life ... the monstrously obese diner who eats so much he explodes. Martyn's face had this sagging quality, it seemed to droop and merge into the sprawl of his torso.

They opened, I think, with "Big Muff". It was great, totally different from the One World recording naturally (no drummer, just John and Danny), loose and swinging. I can't remember the exact sequence of songs, but at some point early in the set, they did "Sweet Little Mystery", Martyn's voice this immense blubbery ache of sound, a beached whale of bluesiness, bedraggled and beseeching. But apart from "Mystery" from Grace and Danger and "Muff" from One World, everything else was from Solid Air: "Jelly Roll Blues", "May You Never" (which got a cheer), the shatteringly tender imploring of "Don't Want To Know", "Solid Air" itself, maybe another one or two I'm forgetting. It was almost a Don't Look Back, except the order was scrambled and they didn't do "Go Down Easy", to my chagrin. The friend-of-a-friend pointed out how different the guitar tunings on each song were from the recorded versions.

Indeed between the songs there was some tuning-tweaking going on. There was also banter. But Martyn's speaking voice was so slurred, plus he was sat slightly far back from the mic (fine for singing but not for stage patter) that it was all completely indecipherable. He told jokes but through his bleary, sodden mumble they became abstract jokes. You could pick up the cadence and the timing of joke-as-pure-form, almost to the point of getting the comedic pay-off when the punchline came. But the actual content was lost. I picked up one or two lines: one involved a man going into a bar, another one was about penguins. I think he might also have cracked his post-amputation standard about having promised the promoter not to get legless, boom boom.

But I did manage to catch it clear when he apologized for the set being below par--"that's just the way it goes sometimes". At which Danny Thompson leaned over and gave him a kiss on the top of his balding head, affectionate yet reverent. I also just about made out what Martyn said before they launched into what turned out to be the final song: something like "this is by a gentleman called Skip James, who doesn't deserve to have his song murdered." It was "I'd Rather Be the Devil" of course and it made me wonder what other examples there are of a great artist--a writer and performer of brilliant original material--whose absolute greatest recording and signature song in live performance is a cover of someone else's song. (From the rock era obviously; there's loads of examples from the era when singers did standards, didn't write their own songs, etc). Of course to call it a "cover" is to underplay the amount of reinvention imposed on the original (which must be why John changed the title from "Devil Got My Woman", a bit of justified arrogance there: took your song, made it my song, whatchu gauna dee aboot it, eh?). So "Devil", live at Joe's Pub: not as torrential and tectonic as Live At Leeds, not quite the exquisitely wrought aquamiasma of Solid Air. But I wasn't disappointed. Oh no. Stole my breath away it did.

And then they were off, John wheeled backwards through the red curtain with the same awkward strenuosity it had taken to get him onstage in the first place (apparently he'd reached 20 stone in his last year). Semi-apologising for the brevity of the set as they shuffled off, Danny Thompson explained that the gig was kind of impromptu: John was coming to New York to visit a hospital to get a new prosthesis fitted, and they thought "why not?".

So, my first and only John Martyn Live Experience. I walked home aglow, much earlier than I'd expected (just as well with the flight) but not dissatisfied, not in the least. I meant to blog it after we got back from London but the moment passed. Now the man has passed and the moment seems right.

^^^^^^^^

John Martyn

Solid Air 

Island, 1973

By Simon Reynolds

(for Marooned, ed. Phil Freeman, 2007)

Picking my favorite record of all time, identifying the album that means the most to me, singling out the one I could least bear to never, ever hear again – such a task would surely make my head explode. But the desert island scenario (and I’m curious: who came up with this conceit first, historically?) actually makes narrowing things down much easier. Something with a very particular bundle of attributes would be required, a tricky-to-find combination of consoling familiarity and resilient strangeness. You’d need a record that could retain the capacity to surprise and stimulate, to keep on revealing new details and depths despite endless repetition. But it couldn’t be too out-there, too much of an avant-challenge, because solace would after all be its primary purpose. Which in turn would mean that the selection would have to feature the human voice, as a source of comfort and surrogate company – a criterion that sifts out many all-time favorites that happen to be all-instrumental (Aphex Twin’s two Selected Ambient Works albums, Eno records like On Land and his collaboration with Harold Budd The Plateaux of Mirror). But, equally, songs alone couldn’t sustain me on the island – I’d need some element of the soundscape, the synesthetically textured...food for the mind’s eye...something to take me out and away. 

Four albums sprang to mind based around a framework of songs-plus-space (or songs-in-space, or maybe even songs versus space). (Actually, there’s a fifth album in this vicinity, but Lester Bangs bagged it last time around: Astral Weeks). All are from roughly the same period in rock history – the early Seventies – and all can be characterized as post-psychedelic music in some sense. Tim Buckley’s Starsailor is just too wild, too derangingly strange; its restlessness would stir me to rage against the limits of confinement, rather than adopt a sensible stoicism, and its eroticism would be no help at all. Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom is rich and lovely, but the album’s emotionally harrowing arc (it was made shortly after the fall that left him paralyzed from the waist down) might be too wearing for someone in such dire straits; even its ecstasy is on the shattering side. Stormcock is brilliant and beautiful, but Roy Harper’s diatribes wouldn’t warm my lonely soul, and besides, it only consists of four long tracks, all pretty much chipped from the same block of sound.

So my choice is John Martyn’s Solid Air. There’s something about this album that suggests “island music.” And I don’t just mean that it came out on Island – probably the most highly-regarded record label on Earth at that point, a haven for the visionary, the esoteric, the not-obviously-commercial. The other day I was searching through my stuff for a review I wrote a long time ago of the reissue of another John Martyn record (1977’s One World, which is hard on the heels of Solid Air as much-loved album/potential D.I.D.), only to be pleasantly ambushed by the opening lines:

John Martyn was a castaway on the same hazy archipelago of jazzy-folky-funky-blues as other burnt-out hippy visionaries of the Seventies (V. Morrison, J. Mitchell, etc.)

Ha! That list should have included T. Buckley, R. Wyatt, N. Drake (a close friend of Martyn’s and the inspiration/addressee of Solid Air’s title track), and probably quite a few others too. “Archipelago” still seems like the right metaphor. These artists didn’t belong to a genre, each of them had their own distinct sound, but there’s enough proximity in terms of their sources, approaches, and vibe, to warrant thinking of them as separate-but-adjacent, a necklace of maverick visionaries sharing a common climate.

The cover of Solid Air invites aqueous reverie. A hand passing through sea-green water leaving an after-trail of iridescent purple ripples, the effect is idyllic on first glance. But then you notice that the image is a circle of color on a black background, introducing the possibility that we’re inside a submarine looking through a porthole, and the hand’s owner is outside, drowning. Solid Air’s title track, we’ll see, is about someone who’s figuratively drowning, unable to resist the downward currents of terminal depression. One of the best songs is called “Dreams By The Sea,” which might resonate for a homesick castaway, except these are “bad dreams by the sea.” 

Water flows through the entire John Martyn songbook, from “The Ocean” to his delightful cover of “Singin’ in the Rain,” while two of his post-Solid Air album covers feature images of the sea. 1975’s Sunday’s Child shows the bearded bard standing in front of crashing surf, while One World’s cover is a painting of a mermaid diving up out of the waves and curving back into the ocean, her arched body trailing a glittering arc of sea-spray and flying fish. In that review, I dubbed the album “a Let’s Get it On for the Great Barrier Reef,” a comparison inspired mainly by the reverb-rippling aquafunk of “Big Muff” and “Dealer,” two songs that mingle the language of sex and drugs such that you’re not sure what brand of addiction they’re really about. One World’s final track, the nearly nine minutes of almost-ambient entitled “Small Hours,” was recorded outdoors beside a lake. 

Solid Air, though, has just one song that actively sounds aquatic, “I’d Rather Be The Devil,” a cover of Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman.” After almost 15 years of loving Martyn’s version, I finally heard the original “Devil” in the movie Ghost World, where this out-of-time specter of a song harrows the teenage soul of heroine Enid. Most songwriters would have flinched from attempting such an unheimlich tune, but Martyn’s cover is so drastic it fleshes this skeletal blues into virtually a brand-new composition: imagine the clavinet-driven funk of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” if it actually sounded superstitious, witless and twitchy with dread. “I’d Rather Be The Devil” starts as a sickening plunge, a dive into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the glutinously thick groove rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or Parliament-Funkadelic. Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come in and out of focus: “my mind starts a-rambling like a wild geese from the west,” “stole her from my best friend...know he’ll get lucky, steal her back.” But mostly Martyn’s murky rasp fills your head like a black gas of amorphous malevolence. The song part of “Devil” gives way to a descent-into-the-maelstrom churn, a deadly undertow of bitches-brew turbulence. Then that too abruptly dissipates, as though we’ve made it through the ocean’s killing floor and reached a coral-cocooned haven. Danny Thompson’s alternately bowed and plucked double bass injects pure intravenous calm; John Bundrick’s keys flicker and undulate like anemones and starfish; Martyn’s needlepoint fingerpicking, refracted through a delay device, spirals around your head in repeat-echoed loops of rising rapture. This oceanic arcadia is something music had touched previously only on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland with the proto-ambient sound-painting of  “1983...(A Merman I Should Turn To Be)/Moon, Turn The Tides...Gently Gently Away.” 

Listening to this split-personality song – glowering storm-sky of dark-blue(s) funk/shimmering aquamarine utopia – it’s hard to believe that only a few years earlier John Martyn had been a beardless naïf with an acoustic guitar, plucking out Donovan-esque ditties like “Fairytale Lullaby” and “Sing a Song of Summer.” What the hell – more precisely, what kind of hell – happened in between? 

Arriving in London from his native Scotland in the mid-Sixties, John Martyn hung out at the city’s folk cellars, learning guitar technique by sitting near the front and closely watching the fingers of Davy Graham and Bert Jansch. Soon he was performing at spaces like Les Cousins and Bunjie’s himself. He signed to Island (one of the first non-Jamaicans on the label) and in October 1967, aged nineteen, released his debut album London Conversation – fetching but jejune Brit-folk. Like many of his contemporaries, he gradually fell under the spell of jazz, especially John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. He later described Impulse as the only truly pure label in the world. The Tumbler, from 1968, featured the flautist and saxophonist Harold McNair, while The Road To Ruin, his second collaboration with wife Beverley, involved jazz players Ray Warleigh, Lyn Dobson and Dudu Pukwana. But neither of these records really transcended an additive, this-plus-that approach; they fell short of a true amalgam of folk and jazz. 

 

It’s not known if Martyn learned and drew encouragement from, or even heard at all, the voyages of Tim Buckley, who was on a very similar trajectory from pure-toned folk troubadour to zero-gravity vocal acrobat deploying the voice-as-instrument. But Martyn did talk in interviews about digging Weather Report (particularly the colorized electronic keyboards of band leader Joe Zawinul) and Alice Coltrane (he called her “my desert island disc” but didn’t specify which particular disc of hers he had in mind!). A less-likely influence was The Band’s Music From Big Pink, especially the Hammond organ sound, which he mistook for electric guitar, and described as “the first time I heard electric music using very soft textures, panels of sound, pastel sounds”. He and Beverley Martyn made one album, Stormbringer, in Woodstock and New York City, with some members of The Band playing. But that was something of an aberration in the general drift of his music towards a jazzed fluidity. The ideal of a “one world” music possessed the imagination of many at this time – Can and Traffic, Miles Davis and Don Cherry – and throughout this period, at the cusp between the Sixties and the Seventies, Martyn was also listening to Indian classical, high-life, and Celtic music. (He would later record an electric version of the Gaelic air “Eibhli Ghail Chiun Chearbhail.”) This all-gates-open receptivity was part of Martyn’s refusal, or more likely inability to tolerate divisions, his compulsive attraction to thresholds and in-between states. And it would culminate in the untaggable and indivisible alloy of folk and jazz, acoustic and electric, live and studio, songform and space, achieved on Solid Air. "I think that what's going to happen is that there are going to be basically songs with a lot of looseness behind them," he told Melody Maker at the end of 1971, less than a year before recording the album.

As jazz entered Martyn’s musical bloodstream, it affected not just his songwriting and approach to instrumentation, but his singing too. The clear diction of folk gave way to slurring that turned his voice into a fog bank of sensuality tinged with menace. Folk privileged words because of the importance it placed on messages and story-telling, but Martyn had come to believe that “there’s a place between words and music, and my voice lives right there.” One characteristic Martyn mannerism – intense sibilance – can be heard emerging in his cover of “Singin’ In the Rain” (on 1971’s Bless the Weather, the immediate precursor to Solid Air), where “clouds” comes out as “cloudzzzzzzz,” a drunken bumble bee bumping against your earhole. 

If Martyn’s music grew woozy “under the influence” of jazz, during this period he was equally intoxicated by...well, intoxicants. The ever more smeared haziness of his voice and sound owed as much to the drugs and drink entering his biological bloodstream; dissolution and the dissolving of song-form went hand in hand. Martyn had always felt the bohemian impulse (he’d gone to art school in Glasgow looking for that lifestyle, only to leave after a few months, disappointed) and on his debut album he sang the traditional folk tune “Cocain.” But with its jaunty lyrics about “Cocaine Lill and Morphine Sue,” the song sounds like it was recorded under the effect of nothing more potent than cups of tea.  Bless the Weather, again, is the moment at which the music first really seems to come from inside the drug experience. “Go Easy” depicts Martyn’s lifestyle – “raving all night, sleeping away the day...spending my time, making it shine...look at the ways to vent and amaze my mind” – but it’s “Glistening Glyndebourne” that hurls you into the psychedelic tumult of sense impressions. The title sounds like it’s about a river, and the music scintillates with dashes and dots of dancing light just like a moving body of water, but it’s actually inspired, bizarrely, by an opera festival in a stately home near where Martyn then lived; the suited formality of the upper class crowds provoked him to reimagine the scene. 

“Glistening Glyndebourne” was also the track that first captured what had become the signature of Martyn’s live performances, his guitar playing through an Echoplex. It seems likely that he was, unconsciously or not, looking for a method of recreating sonically the sense of the dilated “now” granted by drugs. Martyn initially turned to the machine thinking it could provide sustain (a quest that had previously and briefly led him to attempt to learn to play a jazz horn). He quickly realized that the Echoplex wasn’t particularly suited to that task, but that he could apply it to even more impressive and fertile ends. Set to variable degrees of repeat-echo, the machine fed the guitar signal onto a tape loop that recorded sound-on-sound; the resulting wake of sonic after-images enabled Martyn to play with and against a cascading recession of ghosts-of-himself, chopping cross-rhythms in and out of the rippling flow. The Echoplex appeared in discreet, barely-discernible form on Stormbringer’s ““Would You Believe Me,” but “Glistening Glyndbourne” was something else altogether. Its juddering rush of tumbling drums and Echoplexed rhythm guitar was the dry run for “I’d Rather Be The Devil.” 

Solid Air starts with “Solid Air,” twinkles of electric piano and vibes winding around Martyn’s close-miked acoustic guitar and bleary fug of voice. For most of my years of loving this album I never knew the song was about, and for, Nick Drake, and I almost wish I could un-know that fact (especially as I’ve always secretly felt that Martyn deserved the mega-cult following that his friend and Island label-mate has, as opposed to his own loyal but medium-sized cult). But the phrase “solid air” still retains its mystery. Listening to it just now it suddenly flashed on me that “solid air” sounds like “solitaire,” raising the possibility that it’s a punning image of the lonely planet inhabited by the melancholy Drake, cut-off from human fellowship as surely as any desert island castaway. More likely, though, is that lines like “moving through solid air” attempt to evoke what depression feels like, suggesting both the character in Talking Heads’ “Air” who’s so sensitive he can’t even handle contact with the atmosphere, and someone trying to make their way through a world that seems to have turned viscous. The song, written over a year before Drake committed suicide, is at once an offer of help, an entreaty, and a benediction: “I know you, I love you...I could follow you – anywhere/Even through solid air.” Sung with a sublime mixture of maudlin heaviness and honeyed grace, it’s a huge bear-hug to someone in terrible pain. But, with the advantage of hindsight, it also feels like a lullaby – rest in peace, friend.

There’s a symmetry to the way Solid Air is constructed. Side Two starts like the first side, with a soft, slow whisper of a tune gently propelled by Danny Thompson's languid but huge-sounding double-bass pulse. In texture, tone and tempo, “Go Down Easy” is very much a sister-song to “Solid Air,” but this time the air is thick not with melancholy but with a humid sexuality that’s oddly narcotic and ever so slightly oppressive. It’s a kind of erotic lullaby: the title/chorus seems logical enough, the kind of thing lovers might say, until you actually contemplate it, and then it sounds more appropriate to an agitated animal being quelled or a child being calmed down at bed time. “You curl around me like a fern in the spring/Lie down here and let me sing the things that you bring,” croons Martyn, drawing out the chorus “go down easy” into a kind of yawn of yearning, as he draws his lover into a space where breath becomes tactile and intimacy almost asphyxiating. 

On Solid Air, John Martyn is a hippie with a heart of dark, equally prone to brawling and balladeering, his voice constantly hovering between sweet croon and belligerent growl. In an interview, he talked about wanting to be “a scholar-gentleman...I'm interested in spiritual grace,” and this side of Martyn – the idealist, albeit one whose ideals his all-too-human self tended to fail – comes through in songs like “May You Never” and “Don’t Want to Know.” The former (his most well-known song, widely covered, mostly famously by Eric Clapton) is a good will message or blessing to a friend; that empty social formality (“best wishes”) fleshed out with specifics, bad things to be warded off (“may you never lay your head down without a hand to hold,” “may you never lose your woman overnight”). An anti-hex, if you will. Lines like “you’re just like a great big sister to me” and “you’re just like a great big brother to me” show that this song’s domain is agape as opposed to the eros of “Go Down Easy.” Eros, in Martyn’s world, is the danger emotion, the destabiliser, source of addiction and division (stealing your best friend’s woman in “I’d Rather Be The Devil”). 

If Martyn had only ever recorded delicately pretty, heartfelt songs like “May You Never” and “Don’t Want To Know”, he might have been as big as, oh, Cat Stevens or James Taylor (although his thumpingly physical and rhythmic acoustic guitar playing always put him several cuts above the singer-songwriter norm). “Don’t Want to Know” is an even more desperate attempt to ward off malevolent forces with a willed withdrawal into blissful ignorance: Martyn says he doesn’t “want to know one thing about evil/I only want to know about love.” It’s a kind of shout-down-Babylon song (even though his voice is at its softest), with a strange apocalyptic verse about how he’s waiting for planes to fall out of the sky and cities to crumble, and lines about how the glimmer of gold has got us all “hypnotized”. Martyn often talked about wanting to leave “the paper chase” behind, move out to the country, live a purer lifestyle. But if this song envisages corruption as an external contaminant that you can escape by putting distance between yourself and it, “I’d Rather Be The Devil” and its own sister-song “Dreams By The Sea” treat evil as an intimate. In “Devil,” it’s inside his lover, his best friend, and most of all himself (“so much evil,” moans Martyn midway through the song), while in “Dreams”, a song fetid with sexual paranoia, he goes from imagining there’s “a killer in your eyes” to a “killer in my eyes.” The track is tight, strutting funk, Martyn’s "Shaft"-like wah-wah coiling like a rattlesnake. At the end, it’s like the fever of jealousy and doubt (“Nah no nah no/It can’t be true...Nah no nah no/It’s not the way you are”) breaks, and the track unwinds into a lovely, forgiving coda of calm and reconciliation, laced with trickling raindrops of electric piano. 

 

There’s one more pair of songs on Solid Air, and in these Martyn figures as incorrigible rogue rather than demon-lover. Side One’s “Over The Hill” is deceptively spring-heeled and joyous, its fluttery prettiness (mandolin solo courtesy Richard Thompson) disguising the fact that Martyn here appears as a prodigal rolling-stone returning in disgrace. “Got nothing in my favor,” he blithely admits, while flashing back to Cocain Lil with a line that confesses “can’t get enough of sweet cocaine.” Babylon’s own powder, coke is a drug that stimulates desire for all the other vices, from sex to booze. “The Man In The Station,” on the opposite side of the album, catches the roving minstrel once again wending his way back to the family hearth, but this time he seems less cocksure and more foot-sore, ready to catch “the next train home.” These two coming-home songs would sound especially right on the island, where I’d need music that both acknowledged the fact of isolation while offering consolation for it. The album ends with “The Easy Blues,” really two songs in one: “Jellyroll Baker,” a cover of a tune by acoustic blues great Lonnie Johnson and a Martyn concert favorite whose blackface bawling is the only bit of Solid Air I could happily dispense with, and then the light cantering “My Gentle Blues” which almost instantly flips into a sweetly aching slow fade, draped with a poignant (if dated) synth solo played by Martyn himself.  

I’ve sometimes argued in the past that rock’s true essence is juvenile, a teenage rampage or energy flash of the spirit that burns brightest in seemingly artless sounds like ‘60s garage punk or ‘90s rave. Solid Air, though, is definitely adult music. Crucially, it’s made by an adult who hasn’t settled down, who’s still figuring stuff out; his music shows that growing pains never stop. 

This aspect of Solid Air also owes a lot to its historical moment: Martyn as open-hearted hippie emerging from the Sixties adventure to confront the costs of freedom (the problem of being in a couple but remaining fancy-free; drugs as life-quickening versus drugs as “false energy” or numbing tranquiliser). 

Solid Air is post-psychedelic also in the sense I mentioned earlier. These are songs, like the self that sings them, blurring at the edges and melting into something larger. This expanse was designated “space” by the cosmic rock bands of the era, but Martyn’s utopian image of healing boundlessness was “the ocean.” In “Don’t Want To Know,” the vengeful verse about cities a-crumbling ends with the wistful yet mysterious line “waiting till the sea a-grow”: a mystical image of world destruction as world salvation, perhaps, as though unity will only come when the continents (gigantic islands, if you think about it) drown in the sea of love.

The oceanic, “only connect” impulses of Sixties rock were political and musical at the same time. In the Seventies, these twin dreams collided with political reality and with a music industry that was becoming more market-segmented, and less of an anything-goes possibility space. By the end of the Seventies, Island’s Chris Blackwell would inform Martyn that his meandering muse had driven him into a niche marked “jazz,” a pigeonhole that every fiber in the singer’s artistic being revolted against. 

Only a few years earlier, in happier times, Blackwell produced Martyn’s #2 masterpiece, One World, its title track a disillusioned hippie’s plea as plaintively poignant and ardently apolitical (because seeking to abolish politics?) as Lennon’s “Imagine” or “One Love” by Martyn’s labelmate  Bob Marley. But the track’s sentiment is also a musical ideal, the call for a “one world” music being made by many at the time (see Miles Davis’ Pangaea, named after the original supercontinent that existed some 300 million year ago).

Martyn had already reached it on Solid Air: a body music that feeds the head, a sound woven from the becoming-jazz of folk, the becoming-electric of jazz, the becoming-acoustic of funk (not that Martyn, an earthy fellow, would ever use such Deleuzian jargon). The schizo-song of “I’d Rather Be The Devil” is where it all comes together, while coming apart. Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the young Skip James toiled to Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, “Devil” captures the ambivalence of “blue”: the color of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb bliss. The two halves of “Devil”, like the play of shadow and light across the whole of Solid Air, correspond to a battle in John Martyn’s soul – between sea monster and water baby,

danger and grace. 

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

"I'd Rather Be The Devil" for The Wire's cover story on cover versions, November 2005

“Devil Got My Woman” (Skip James, rec. 1931)

Blues might be the most worn-out (through over-use and abuse), hard-to-hear-fresh music on the planet, but James’ original “Devil” --just his piteous keening voice and acoustic guitar--still cuts right through to chill your marrow. The lyric surpasses “Love Like Anthrax” with its anti-romantic imagery of love as toxic affliction, a  dis-ease of the spirit (James tries to rest, to switch off his lovesick thoughts for a while,  but “my mind starts a-rambling like a wild geese from the west”). Most singers would flinch from taking on this unheimlich tune. But John Martyn, reworking (and renaming) it as “I’d Rather Be The Devil” on Solid Air (Island, 1973) not only equals the original’s intensity but enriches and expands the song, stretching its form to the limit. It starts as a sickening plunge, a dive into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the band’s surging aquafunk rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or P-Funk; Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come into focus now and then--“so much evil”, “stole her from my best friend… know he’ll get lucky, steal her back”--but mostly Martyn’s murky rasp fills your head like this black gas of amorphous malevolence. Then suddenly the bitches-brew  turbulence dissipates; ocean-as-killing-floor transforms into a barrier reef-cocooned idyll. Danny Thompson’s bass injects pure intravenous calm, keyboards flicker and undulate like anemones, Martyn’s needlepoint fingerpicking spirals in Echoplexed loops of rising rapture. Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the young James toiled to Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, “I’d Rather Be The Devil” captures the ambivalence of “blue”: the colour of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb bliss. The two halves of Martyn’s drastic remake also correspond to a battle in the singer’s soul--between monster and water baby, danger and grace.

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

                                                        

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!'"