Zapp and Roger Troutman - concert review / interview

ZAPP, live at the Hammersmith Odeon, London
Melody Maker, July 12th 1986

by Simon Reynolds

Zapp live were perhaps the most extreme spectacle I have ever witnessed, with both band and audience abandoning inhibitions more extensively than at any rock gig I've attended, for all rock's Dionysiac rhetoric. And yet the SHOW! was clearly rehearsed with military precision, as it was performed exact in every deranged detail the very next night.

What's fascinating is how this kind of excess has an everyday currency. Soul takes straight values, traditional gender protocol, and inflates them to epic, surreal dimensions – as in the Battle of the Sexes duet between Shirley Murdoch and Roger Troutman tonight. The SHOW! is all monstrously exaggerated sexuality, seriously saucy – full of ludicrous arse-shaking, mimed cunnilingus, Roger stripping to his briefs... Roger is an incredible SHOW!person – one minute goosestepping across the stage plucking blues guitar, the next reappearing on top of a stack of amps, then dragging a luckeee ladeee out of the audience for a cartoon clinch, or impersonating Presley, or venturing way out into the crowd on a bodyguard's back while playing a harmonica. Every so often he asks, rhetorically, "London, Englaaaand! Can I do anything I wanna do! Can I go crazeee?"

The music's fab, a fat, freaky, juddering funkquake. Zapp's unique ingredient is those dexterously vocoderised vocals, that extra ultra-tremulousness that simulates a meta-ecstasy, a bliss beyond imagination, let alone realisation. This is the dangerous utopianism of soul.

Best night out for years.

Roger Troutman of Zapp - interview

Melody Maker, May 14th 1988

by Simon Reynolds

Somewhere between George Clinton's scrambled egghead funkadelia and Prince's squirmstrutting hypersexuality, lies the funkquake nirvana that is Zapp. A family affair from Dayton, Ohio, but definitively the brainchild of chief clansman Roger Troutman, Zapp are funk turned on so deep it's turned almost inside out.

Over the last decade, Zapp and satellite projects like Roger have delivered a series of dancefloor classics like 'More Bounce To The Ounce' (funk as tantric mantra, with Roger's multi-tracked vocoderised vocal spiralling off towards the peaks of the mystic East, reminiscent of the involuted acrobatics of Tim Buckley's Starsailor, while remaining cartoon absurdist). Then there was 1986's delectable brace of 'It Doesn't Really Matter' and the impossibly luscious 'Computer Love'. And last week Zapp brought the high unreality and serious sauce of their live show to London.

Zapp's unique element is Troutman's talk-box treatment of his own voice, which (like their sound in general) is simultaneously a distillation of funk's essence and an exaggeration of its mannerisms: it conjures an ultra-tremulous meta-ecstasy. Where did he dream that up?

"I kept hearing Peter Frampton and Stevie Wonder using this talk-box, and I got intrigued. So I got one and soon saw why they weren't more popular. It's really hard to use, to manipulate it and to sing at the same time. So I spent hundreds of hours in my garage teaching myself to talk with it, like a child learning the alphabet and all the vowels. When I had that down pat, I studied real powerful black singers, so I could do anything a singer could do. When I put it on records, I had no idea it would be so hypnotic to people."

It makes you sound superhuman, extraterrestrial even.

"Fans, they want you to be BIGGER than life," he replies.

The only comparison I can think of is what Prince did with his voice on the Sign 'O' The Timesalbum. Another similarity is the way you and Prince pile it all on, saturate and overload your records with elements from all over black pop history (like funky Butthole Surfers), and from white rock history too.

"I'm a fan of all kinds of stuff. Led Zep, Hendrix, Steve Howe and Jon Anderson from Yes. And if I can present some of that in a black context it makes me seem a little koo-koo, different, y'know."

The Zapp live show exhibits the stunning span of Roger's versatility, encompassing comedy, guitar heroics, blues, George Benson-style virtuoso jazz languor, impersonations of Elvis, stunts and japes at the audience's expense. Does the idea of mixing it up stem from the days of hanging out with Clinton and Bootsy?

"Ah no, it's from the days of being a regional, nightclub band, 1965-79, having to play a lot of places to make a living. Some were all-black, some all-white, and often you'd get clubs with guys shouting, 'Rock'n'roll! Play some fuckin' rock 'n' roll'. So I had to beef up the repertoire with Top 40 rock 'n' roll tracks. Only way to keep 'em quiet, only way to succeed. Give the customer what he wants, give it to him and he'll make you rich. Look at me," he gestures at rings. "This stuff is real, y'know!"

^^^^^^^^^^^

As Roger, he's just had his biggest hit with 'I Want To Be Your Man', Top Three in the States, Top 40 over here. If he wants, the door to white America and couples-oriented soft radio is open now. He's a workaholic though, with numerous projects on the boil at once: the fifth Zapp album, the new Shirley Murdock LP, his son Roger Jnr (age 17) who's just signed to Capitol, and the possibility of producing a couple of tracks for Joe Cocker. He's also recently helped Green on a couple of tracks for the new Scritti platter.

"I love their stuff, I liked them even before the last album. Michael Jackson told me about them, in fact. They asked me to do stuff with the talk-box and I was tickled to do it. See, a lot of groups act like I don't exist. So when Green rang up, it was a sign of acceptance, respect."

Green described you as "a man who really suffers from the funk", permanently itchin' and twitchin' with polyrhythmic ideas.

"Yeah, they noticed they just had to start off the track and I was off, I didn't even need to know what key it was, I knew it instantly, I could just dazzle around Green's vocal and spruce it up. And that's how I do my own music — I just go in the studio and record. Throw down loads of stuff, then sift through this mountain and use only a small part of it. I'm spontaneous, that's just how I am."

These days, that groove approach to funk seems in the descendant. Tracks seem assembled. What do you make of house music and the post-electro stuff?

"Ah, well — it's great. If it sells. I'm not smart enough to know what I like about anything, I just know if it sells. If 10 people like something, I wanna figure it out and use it, cos then those 10 people will like me, ha ha! Makes sense to me. If it sells, it's great. If more than 10 people like it, I like it. I have to like it. Forced to. To hell with what I like. I can deal with what I like later... after I've collected."

The chicken-in-a-basket reflexes are still deeply ingrained, but for once pandering has led to SENSUAL PANDEMONIUM rather than pallid dilution.

^^^^^^^^^^^

Troutman's very keen to present Zapp as family entertainment, with himself as positive role model — no drink, no drugs — while in his home town Dayton, he's a local hero for ploughing Zapp profits into community-enriching projects. But against the grain of this upstanding temperance, the show is ultra-raunchy, all ass wiggle, surreally suggestive grimaces and kinky undercurrents: at one point, he drops his trousers to reveal black tights...

"Yeah, but if you're gonna do a show, you gotta have something to keep the fans interested."

So do you see sex as healthy fun, whereas drink and drugs just cause damage?

"No question about it. Sure, there's AIDS, but when I say sex is healthy, I mean, if you have a special lady, you should..." A near-epileptic flurry of levitating eyebrows and corner-of-mouth twitches indicate exactly what lewd extremes one should go to with that special lady.

Another side to the positive role model aspect of Zapp is Troutman's business acumen: profits have been reinvested into making Zapp self-sufficient, with three studios of their own, a construction company, a limo hire firm and a small school, plus a community housing scheme of some 200 once-squalid houses that the Troutmans modernised and then re-let to the original tenants at low rents. The clan also look out for themselves too.

"Everyone in the group — all my brothers, Jennifer my secretary — all live in houses that I built, elaborate, beautiful houses. I wanted to do that for them. I reckon if I can provide Jennifer with a new car and a new house, then her loyalty will be 101 per cent, even more than if I gave her the money and she had to give it to someone else to get the things she needs. You see, 'He who owns the lands, owns the man'," he says, launching into a maniacal, Vincent Price laugh.

How am I going to transcribe that, I ask? "It's the laughter of the man with control," he replies.

Well, it is all a bit feudal, giving land to vassals who have to swear fealty in return. So there's this Zapp business empire?

"Maybe. There's areas where we all live. I just built and bought my son and my nephew a house. Wow, 17 and he has a new house, a big house with loads of rooms! And he brings girls over, and..." (More suggestive gurning.) "What would YOU have done if you could have had your own place aged 17. You'd kill for that. You would have had a WILD time. And they don't pay any rent, all they have to do is play music and follow me, and do what I say. How easy!"

So you're like a good king, a generous ruler.

Troutman shows the first glimmer of wary tetchiness in an otherwise consummately charming interview.

"No, I'm just Roger, y'know. I don't know what you're trying to say there. No man is an island. I can't win on my own. I don't know any other way to encourage people to follow me than giving them whatever they need. Not a king, no, no. I just wanna win. Winning's important."

I've heard you're a bit of a disciplinarian in the James Brown style when it comes to the band being tight. The show is certainly superslick, almost military.

"Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a concept to the show," he says with suspicion. "If a person understands the concept I tend to let him be, but if he doesn't understand, I'm constantly telling him to go here, go there, get with it. Entertainment is 50 per cent art, 50 per cent discipline.

"I watch TV cos it's organised, it starts and it ends and there's a climax. There's not a lot of fucking around. Musicians love to fuck around. Even when we're soundtracking, we're tight, everybody knows what they got to do and when. All other shit is bullshit, it's money shit. Musicians have their own little book of horseshit..." (he picks up my note pad) "...and somewhere right at the back..." (he rifles through) "...it says ENTERTAIN. But it should be all the way through it. Seriously, don't you think I could have done the interview in my slacks and jacket? But I made an effort, and it makes a difference."

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

Troutman PUSHES himself as hard as his cohorts, and there's a muso side to him that he won't indulge too much, because it's uncommercial. It causes him some chagrin that he can't play guitar as much as he'd like.

"I'm just a fuckin' great guitar player. But how can you market that? I don't know how to do it. I play jazz stuff like George Benson, I play blues, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin. I like to take songs that no guitar player could ever play and learn it note for note so I can make other guitar players' jaws drop."

During the soundcheck, he adlibbed an hysterical C&W pastiche: "ah betcha thought ah wuz a nigra".

"I've hung around with country players, broke the ice with them, so they'd teach me to play. Cos there's a real race problem between black people and country people. So I would approach country players…" (he drops into ridiculous hillbilly drawl) "...and ah talked to 'em lahk this, to make 'em feel comfortable, an' ah'd play 'em a coupla country licks, an' that would intrigue 'em, make 'em curious to show off to me, and ah'd watch, keep a tape 'corder real close, an' ah'd tape it, and then ah'd have two licks. So next time they'd be even more intrigued, and play me another lick."

Troutman may be a bit of a patriarch and a commercialist, but his obsessive desire to please as many people as possible, to have all shots covered and no market neglected has led to one of the most supersaturated, OTT sounds in funk.

Name it on the 'boogie' - the genealogy of a word and a feel

BOOGIE

The Guardian, May 3rd 2011

by Simon Reynolds

When I saw the cover of Delta Swamp Rock, my first thought was: "Has Soul Jazz run out of black music then?"   Putting out a compilation of early 70s Southern rock seemed like an unlikely move for the label famous for its Dynamite! reggae anthologies and deluxe box sets like Can You Dig It ? The Music and Politics of Black Action Films 1968-75.

A little reflection cleared up the mystery: Southern rock as a style was born at the confluence of blues, country, and soul, so in many ways it's exactly the sort of white-on-black musical miscegenation that fits the Soul Jazz worldview.  Like Blood and Fire and Honest Jon's, the label belongs to a tradition of British connoisseurs who venerate black American music, a lineage that stretches back through Nineties house headz, Eighties soul boys, Seventies roots 'n' dub fiends, Sixties blues-rockers, all the way to Fifties trad jazz. 

This is one long continuum of white Brits who strove to master black musical idioms and also dedicated themselves to being custodians of black musical heritage through their parallel activities as deejays, discographers, and archivists. The only difference between the Brits and their white Southern counterparts was that the former  had to consummate their passion largely through recordings whereas the latter grew up surrounded by the music and could draw directly from the well-spring. 

Emerging from the Deep South in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement, at a time when some politicians still openly supported segregation, naturally meant that the politics of Southern Rock were complex and cloudy.  

There's no better example of this than what may well be the genre's defining anthem, "Sweet Home Alabama". The statement being made by Lynyrd Skynyrd on their 1974 breakthrough hit is confusing, to put it mildly.  The first verse gives the finger to Neil Young (not even a damn Yankee but Canadian) for his recent hit "Southern Man" and equally rebuking "Alabama". Okay, that's just wounded regional pride lashing back. But the next verse is dangerously ambiguous: it refers to George Wallace, Alabama's pro-segregation governor, in a way that could easily be read as an endorsement and definitely falls well short of condemnation. Finally, "Sweet Home" pivots to a celebration of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and its resident rhythm squad the Swampers. "Lord, they get me off so much / They pick me up when I'm feeling blue" exults Ronnie Van Sant. But in a further fold in the pretzel that is Southern Rock, while the Muscle Shoals team played on records by countless black artists (Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, The Staple Singers, et al) all four of the Swampers were white. 

Whenever I hear "Sweet Home" on the radio, I start out trying to decode what the song is saying, then give up and surrender to the mighty groove.  There's plenty more groove action to be found on Delta Swamp. Like Area Code 615's "Stone Fox Chase": even if the name and title don't click, you'll probably recognise it as the smoky harmonica-riffing theme to The Old Grey Whistle Test.  Hearing the full instrumental for the first time made me realise how near it is to a contemporaneous funk combo like War. Then it goes into an eerie plinky-percussive section that for all the world sounds like something by polyrhythmic postpunks The Raincoats. A decade after its original release, "Stone Fox Chase" became the source of a prized hip hop breakbeat.  Yet Area Code 615 were actually a bunch of Nashville session musicians who mostly backed up country artists.

Another revelation on this double CD is Bobby Gentry's "Mississippi Delta": with its bullfrog horns, rasped vocals and grinding funk, it belongs to the R&B realm of Lee Dorsey and Inez Foxx far more than the pop country world of Glenn Campbell and Tammy Wynette. But Delta Swamp's detailed booklet reveals just how tangled up black music and white music could get in the late Sixties/early Seventies South.  Phil Walden, the man who founded leading Southern Rock label Capricorn (home to Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker Band, Wet Willie, Grinderswitch, and more) had originally been Otis Redding's manager. Funding for Capricorn came from Atlantic Records via Walden's friendship with Jerry Wexler, the journalist-turned-A&R who reputedly originally coined the term "rhythm and blues".

If Delta Swamp has a flaw, it's that there's a bit too much soul and not nearly enough jazz. The hippie-fusion freak side of Southern Rock that involved 20 to 40 minutes-long live jams (Allmans being the pioneers and prime perpetrators) is not acknowledged.

 Generally, the anthology veers away from the hard rockin' end of things (populist arena-pleasers like Elvin Bishop, Charlie Daniels Band,  Molly Hatchet) towards stuff that has some kind of non-rock cred (Link Wray, Johnny Cash,  blue-eyed soul singers like Boz Scaggs and Billy Vera). I guess soul boys can only go so far into the hard 'n' heavy guitar zone. But does Big Star, a band who'd never dream of appearing onstage with a Confederate flag behind them, really need to be shoehorned into this context?  

Southern Rock overlaps with that broad strip of Seventies blues-tinged rock called boogie, which ranges from ZZ Top to Brit combos such as Humble Pie who toiled on the US arena circuit and became vastly more popular in America than in their homeland. Boogie has a technical definition: a musician friend explains that it has to do with 4/4 being subdivided by 12 rather than 16 notes, with syncopations on the third subdivision of each beat. But the best way of conveying it is to just point at examples: "Get It On" by T.Rex (Bolan's 1972 T.Rextasy-exploitation flick was titled  Born To Boogie), "Slow Ride" by Foghat, "Whatever You Want" by those dependable boys in blue denim Status Quo (who then got parodied by Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias on "Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie").




"Boogie" originally comes from "boogie-woogie", a piano-oriented style of blues designed for dancing, which emerged in the 1930s and filtered into numerous corners of American popular and roots music.  

A strange, mobile word indeed to be appearing in all these different contexts:

By the time it filtered into rock, boogie signifies a black-and-bluesy swing, a funky shuffle feel.  What's odd is that boogie today has a third, completely different meaning: it is used by DJs and collectors to refer to an early Eighties postdisco style whose slick, synthetic funk couldn't be further from the low-down earthiness of Southern rock.

The origins of this other boogie go back to the late Seventies when the word started cropping up in the titles of disco-funk tunes like Taste of Honey's "Boogie Oogie Oogie", Earth Wind and Fire's "Boogie Wonderland", The Jacksons's "Blame It On the Boogie" and Heatwave's "Boogie Nights". 

The week before Delta Swamp Rock arrived in the mail, I received a boogie CD-mix from a deejay friend, Paul Kennedy, which he'd titled Juicy Nights and crammed with postdisco gems by outfits like Change and BB & Q Band.  A few of the names were familiar to me from the Eighties, when another deejay pal of mine used to buy U.S import 12 inches, an outlandish concept to someone on a student grant.

What defines this  boogie is that it's disco but slower and funkier: 110 to 116 beats-per-minute is the prime range, says Paul, with a strong accent on the second and fourth beats rather than disco's straight stomping four-to-the-floor. It's mostly played by bands, as opposed to being the creation of a producer, but synth-bass, electronic keyboards and drum machines get more prominent the deeper you get into the Eighties. Some of the most famous examples of the style are hits like D-Train's "You're the One For Me", Peech Boys "Don’t Make Me Wait", and Yarborough & People's "Don’t Stop the Music", while pioneers and exemplars include Kleer and Leroy Burgess  (of Black Ivory and Aleem).

Thing is, I don't recall anybody calling this stuff "boogie" back then; they'd just have talked about "club tracks" or  "discofunk".  In deejay Greg Wilson's exhaustiveetymological history of the genre,  the word "boogie" crops up as  a vague reference in the occasional club flyer or record shop section, or as a verb equivalent to "get on down" . But boogie only really becomes a genre tag retrospectively, to describe a kind of music no longer made, and even then only by a small number of London-based soul cognoscenti.  It's really only in the last decade that the term has achieved serious currency as a record dealer and collector buzz-word.

Boogie is a prime example of the creative remapping of the musical past that is rife today, with DJs and compilers retroactively inventing genres that had only the most tenuous existence in their original heyday (see "acid folk, "junkshop glam", etc). 

One of the prime movers behind the emergence of boogie as a collector-prized zone is Joey Negro, the deejay/producer behind the Destination Boogie compilations. Although the primary impetus is enthusiasm for the sound, there's an economic aspect to this syndrome: it reminds me of the way that real estate agents transform hitherto unprepossessing urban zones-- often nameless hinterlands between the established neighbourhoods-- into up-and-coming areas with twee names like, oh, Chisholm Village.  

The ploy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because once the urban pioneers move in, soon shops and restaurants start to spring up. Similarly, once you start looking for "boogie" or some other semi-fictitious genre, you'll find more and more obscure vintage tracks that fit the parameters. 

No harm in that if it unearths some lost gold and reshapes the pop past into entertaining new patterns. I just think they should have fastened on another name besides boogie, which does rather bring to mind long-haired, pot-bellied guitarists from Jackonsville, Florida trading solos for 18 minutes. It could lead to confusion.

BAD BRAINS / BAMBI SLAM / THE STUPIDS

Clarendon, Hammersmith, London

Melody Maker, May 16th 1987

by Simon Reynolds 

Live the Stupids are never quite as monstrous as on record. Tonight, hampered by the nonappearance of guitarist Marty Tuff, their frantic thrashing stirred up a strangely immobile cloud of noise that loomed in the distance rather than sweeping over to engulf us. Hard core should drown.

Bambi Slam songs are Pebbles tantrums. Sixties punk with tweaks of feedback and a beat like a little brat stamping its feet on the spot, or the Glitter Band at 78rpm. Interesting, but unfortunately made to seem puny and flat-footed by the noise and majesty of what followed.

Bad Brains double-stun with a tidal wave of their sound and the shock of their incongruity — imagine Burning Spear playing Anthrax. But the link-up of Rasta and speed core is totally appropriate; both sub-cultures have a total vision of the world, as unremitting tribulation and slavery, both imagine liberation in the form of apocalypse. Bad Brains' music similarly seems to consist in absolutes — of gravity, velocity, heat, cold. Blacks invented rock 'n' roll in the first place, so it's fitting that they're here at its outer limits, presiding over its ultimate super-nova, its whitest white-out. Their singer slashes out the beat with an outstretched arm, and it's like he's conducting the orbit of planets.

The shows are slick, as tautly rehearsed, as the Temptations or Zapp, right down to glib inter-song chat. An intensely glamorous bunch — the singer lashes the air with his dreadlocks, the guitarist wears a permanent gape of joy at his own brilliance, the bassist's bug eyes and Clinton eyebrows say "I can't believe we're doing this!" In a way, there's nothing of themselves in the music, it's anti-authentic: Bad Brains take the form of hardcore and perfect (exaggerate) it to the point where it's abstract art.

Such a fastidious assault, so exact, so exacting. Bad Brains are about astounding musicianship crammed within rigid parameters and so blazing all the more brightly. (The singer brings an almost scat feel to the straight-ahead melodies, throws in all manner of swerves and dips.) Similarly the emotional intensity of Bad Brains, of hard core in general, comes from when energy is caged, ricochets off the walls.

Bad Brains were like a visitation, a bolt from the heavens, and the vast sexless apocalypse of their music left even the grubbiest, most lumpen members of their congregation cleansed, elevated, re-born.