Gavin B.

The Decline of Western Civilization


Darby Crash on a promotional poster for the 1981 film documentary of L.A. punk bands, The Decline of Western Civilization.

I was browsing the Punk Music forum and came across a thread which more or less restored my faith in the judgement of a few MB forum members, who refused to deify Germs singer Darby Crash as an icon of punk music. I started to write a reply but when it got overly long, I decided to post it in my music journal instead.

In her 1981 documentary on Los Angeles punk rock, The Decline of Western Civilization, director Penelope Spheeris devotes a significant portion of screen time covering Darby Crash & the Germs. It's significant that Darby Crash, committed suicide on December 7, 1980, when Spheeris was still editing footage for the unreleased film. For that reason, The Decline of Western Civilization provides a rare and candid glimpse into the final days in the life of Darby Crash.

Spheeris' documentary is required viewing for anyone interested in the evolution of the American hard core punk scene in the early Eighties.

Spheeris' footage of Crash's final days presents a disturbing portrait of 21 year old man who was a total mess. He still lived at home with his mother who acted as a sort of co-dependent caretaker for Darby who was unable to care for himself because his constant state of intoxication. She was hardly a role model for Darby and she had her own extensive history of substance abuse and mental health problems.

Darby Crash seemed hellbent on achieving immortality by following Sid Vicious' road map to success and going out in a blaze of glory before he got old. Darby got his wish by intentionally overdosing himself on heroin at age 22, but he failed to achieve immortality because media coverage of his death was completely overshadowed by John Lennon's murder at the Dakota on the day before Darby decided to check out by committing suicide.

The Germs's musical skills weren't even in the same class as the Sex Pistols in their prime. For all their incendiary stage theatrics, the Sex Pistols original lineup (without Sid Vicious) played with a ferocity and passion that was truly revolutionary. I think Sex Pistol guitarist Steve Jones was one of the most under appreciated musicians of the era. When Sid Vicious joined the band, Steve Jones ended up doubling as bass player in the Sex Pistols' recording sessions because Vicious lacked the musical skills to play a simple three chord progression on the bass.

Sphreeris' documentary features footage of characteristically hectic and sloppy Germs live show in which Crash, heavily intoxicated and under the influence of drugs, calls to the audience for beer, stumbles and crawls on the stage and slurs lyrics while members of the audience write on him with permanent markers. Spheeris' live footage of another L.A. band, X, simply blows away the Germs' amateurish performance.

I'm among those punk music fans who refuse to elevate self-hating misanthropic drunks like Darby Crash & Sid Vicious to the status of legendary hero. Both men hated their fans and the music they played as much as they hated everything else in their pathetic lives.

The Germs' only studio album is a remarkable contrast to the band's sloppy live performances. Joan Jett's crisp production quality captures a band in a far more refined form than their chaotic live shows. The real star of the album is guitarist Pat Smear who sets the frenetic pace with his monster guitar riffs, and from my perspective Darby is huffing and puffing out his vocals to keep up with Smear's playing.


Guitarist Pat Smear, alive, well and playing, three decades after the Germs' dissolution.

As it turns out, Darby Crash's best friend and Germs co-founder Pat Smear has achieved the punk icon notoriety that eluded Darby Crash. Following the collapse of the Germs, Pat Smear eked out a living as an actor in a few television and film roles. Smear also periodically gigged with Mike Watt, the co-founder of the short another short lived L.A. hard core band, the Minutemen. In 1988, Smear was asked by the Red Hot Chili Peppers to replace guitarist John Frusciante; however, he turned them down. Instead, Smear toured as a member of Nirvana, establishing a close friendship with frontman Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love. After Cobain died, Smear replaced Cobain in a short lived edition of Nirvana. Smear played on and off for the Foo Fighters following the dissolution of Nirvana, and is listed as a fully chartered member of the Foo Fighters on their well received 2011 album, Wasting Light.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Book Review



Title: Stone Free
Author: Andrew Loog Oldlam
Publisher: Escargot Books
Publication Date: January 1, 2013
Book Length: 487 pages
Retail Price: $16.99 (USD) paperback edition; $9.99 (USD) electronic edition

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For those unacquainted with the history of the first British Invasion (1964-1966), Andrew Loog Oldham was a pop music impresario most notable for being the Rolling Stones first manager. Oldam is a talented raconteur with a self-effacing charm of a man who is willing to own up to his own failings. His book, Stone Free is an unflinching look at early years of the British Invasion which transformed handful of British pop bands and their managers into overnight tycoons and the closest thing to God for a generation of post-WWII young people in the UK and the United States.

As a teenager, Oldham was a self-proclaimed hustler who spent summers swindling tourists in French towns. Oldham's interest in the pop culture of the 1960s and the Soho coffeehouse scene led to working for Carnaby Street mod designer John Stephen and later as an assistant to then emerging fashion designer Mary Quant. Mary Quant became the toast of mod Carnaby Street fashion and the earliest Mary Quant fashion models like Jane Birkin, Twiggy, Marianne Faithfull, Jean Shrimpton, Jane Asher, all went on to become international supermodels on the basis of their work with Quant. Birkin, Twiggy and Faithfull parlayed their fashion modeling careers into enduring careers as actresses and pop music singers.


Fashion icon Mary Quant who developed the Mod fashion style

Oldlam's apprenticeship with Mary Quant allowed him to reinvent himself from a working class juvenile delinquent with a history of petty theft into self assured hustler and icon of England's emerging mod youth culture. To her credit Quant has maintained a life long friendship with Oldlam, even after he left the employment of the Rolling Stones and every other A-list scene-maker in London stopped taking his phone calls.

At age 18, the precocious young Oldlam boldly approached Beatles manager Brian Epstein with the offer to manage London booking dates for the Beatles, when the Beatles were still a Liverpool based band on the verge of breaking out in the UK. As overly ambitious as he was, Oldlam was shocked when Epstein accepted his offer and for a year Epstein schooled his young protegee in the art of band management. Oldham turned out to be a fast study.


Photo: The Rolling Stones 1963

In April 1963 Oldham first heard the Rolling Stones playing in a London club, the Blues Cellar and immediately offered his services as a manager. Andrew's sense of fashion style and youthful exuberance was a striking contrast to the mostly middle aged businessmen who didn't even like the music of the young bands they managed. Oldlam was the first manager who was a peer of the bands he managed. The Stones liked Oldlam because he spoke their language and dressed like a band member, not a band manager. Being a teenage music impresario had it's setbacks for Oldham. For the first two years of his tenure with the Stones, Oldham was too young to sign legally binding contracts on behalf of his clients.

Oldlam has written two other autobiographies but Stone Free is his best effort. Stone Free is a series of autobiographical essays in which Oldlam comments on various music business people (mostly band management impresarios) who he came to know over the years, including Brian Epstein, Albert Grossman (Dylan's manager), Kit Lambert (the Who's manager), Phil Specter, Malcom McLaren (Sex Pistol's manager) and the controversial Allen Klein, the New York based promoter who replaced Oldham as the Stones' manager and went on to manage the British Invasion triumvirate of musical cash cows, the Beatles, the Stones and the Who.

There is no chronological order to the essays, so you can pick and choose the essays in any order you want to read them.


Photo: 20 year old Andrew Loog Oldham as mod insurgent in 1964

Oldlam shrewdly presented the Rolling Stones as a sort of "bad boy" alternative to the cuddly and lovable Beatles. Oldlam's marketing campaign was picked up by the British press and the Stones cultivated a rougher and edgier audience of fans than the Beatles.

Most importantly Oldlam transformed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards into a songwriting team that was almost as successful as the gold standard team of Lennon and McCartney. Prior to their involvement with Oldlam, Jagger and Richards showed no inclination toward songwriting and were content to do cover versions of their favorite blues, R&B and rock and roll songs. Oldlam noticed that performing artists only received 2-3% of the royalty payments on the gross sales of albums, while songwriters frequently commanded 12 to 15% of the royalty revenues. The Beatles wrote and performed most of their songs and received royalties in the amount of $450,000 for every million album units they sold. By contrast, the Rolling Stones did all cover songs on their first four album releases and only received royalties in the amount of $80,000 for every million album units they sold.

Oldlam did the math and forced Jagger and Richards to become songwriters, often locking them up in the same room until they composed a decent song. Oldham's harsh task making turned Jagger and Richards into a first rate songwriting team. With the exception of the Lennon/McCartney catalog, the Jagger/Richards songbook is still the most valuable property in pop music.

Oldlam's essay on Allen Klein is a riveting portrait of a former account who acquired rock bands like a Wall Street equities trader. Klein frequently gained the trust of an artist by offering immediate financial gain, free of charge. Bobby Darin and Sam Cooke each received immediate payment of $200,000 in unpaid royalties, following Klein's audit of their royalty accounts with their respective record companies.


Photo: Allen Klein, the predatory American promoter who made a fortune siphoning off the future wealth of the British Invasion bands.

Klein used his accounting skills to force the labels to pay out royalties that were often hidden on a second set of books. Darin & Cooke were so impressed they signed management contracts with Klein, unaware that they were also signing away their rights to future royalty claims to Allen Klein.

Both Darin and Cooke fired Klein when they discovered he had stolen away their royalty rights but Klein still maintained ownership of their most valuable asset, their right to all future royalty claims. Klein's practice was perfectly legal and the artists can blame themselves for not hiring adequate financial counsel to represent them in the contract negotiations with Klein. Indeed, Klein's ruthless exploitation of the artists he represented was an arguably an unethical business practice. Unfortunately, businessmen have never had a code of ethics or a professional organization the governs the ethical practices of the business profession.

Klein's royalty scam had the most devastating effect on Sam Cooke's surviving wife and children. 11 months after Cooke unknowingly signed away his royalty rights to Klein, Cooke was murdered in a Los Angeles hotel. Cooke's wife and children were shocked to discover that Cooke had signed off his royalty payments and they were forced into a life of poverty. Oldlam believed that Klein began courting British Invasion bands after his reputation in the United States soured when his unethical management practices with Cooke and Darin came to light.

Oldlam points out that the UK pop music scene in the early Sixties was a pale imitation of American pop. Prior to the Beatles, there wasn't a single British pop singer who had built an American audience. Cliff Richard was the "British Elvis" but he was a mediocre singer and a tepid performer who failed repeatedly to find success in America. It was only after the Beatles succeeded that American promoters like Klein saw Great Britain as the source of a brand new stream of revenue for their personal enrichment. Word of Allen Klein's seedy reputation had yet to reach the shores of the insular and provincial UK music scene, so Allen Klein was able to prey upon the first generation of British pop stars to strike in rich in America.

Klein first approached Brian Epstein offering to buy out his management contract with the Beatles. Epstein saw Klein for the grifter he was and sent him packing after a 15 minute face-to-face meeting. Epstein believed that entertainment management was a gentleman's profession and was wary of American promoters who generally didn't conform to code of ethical behavior. In general, the more genteel British business class did a far better job policing unethical behavior within it's ranks and often banished rogue operators from management careers. There were incompetent clowns managing music artists in the UK back then, but none of those managers were robbing their clients blind, as Klein and other American promoters did as matter of routine in the United States.

Epstein also had an uncanny talent for spotting rogue promoters who would prey upon his the financial resources of his beloved Beatles. Oldham admired Epstein's ethical behavior and tried to manage the Stones in the same manner but Oldlam simply lacked the experience to deal with a seasoned con artist like Allen Klein.

The Rolling Stones became the first UK group to sign on with Klein, mostly at the urging of Mick Jagger who fell under the spell of Klein's promise of untold riches. Oldham always thought that money was the prime motivator for Jagger while the other Stones were in the music game for the love of the music, the women and the drugs.

Oldlam admits it was his own shortcomings as a manager that allowed Klein an opening. Oldham was 15 years younger than Klein, stoned on high grade marijuana most of the time and cared little for managing the financial affairs of the Rolling Stones. He was an easy target for a buy-out of his management contract by Klein. Oldlam continued on as the Stones' de facto manager until the end of 1967. But Oldham finally left when Klein's overbearing management style left him with little to do in the way of work on behalf of the Stones.

Oldham's departure frayed relations between himself and the Rolling Stones for many years. He still doesn't speak with Mick Jagger who has installed himself as C.E.O. of the Rolling Stones Inc. since Klein's departure and eventual death in 2009. He gets on well with Keith Richards who shares Oldham's view that the Rolling Stones have no purpose other than a corporate entity that feeds Mick Jagger's boundless appetite for acquiring wealth.

For all practical purposes the Rolling Stones were a dead rock band by the early '80s. Jagger and Richards don't talk, don't compose music as a team and record their parts to songs in separate recording sessions. Their only contact is on the stage during Rolling Stones tours, but they travel on separate flights to gigs, stay in separate hotels, and even avoid acknowledging each other with any sort of eye contact when the Stones are performing live. It's the epitome of a loveless marriage where both spouses survive on cruise control for lack of a better way of relating to each other.

Oldham's book is a wealth of gossipy anecdotes about British rock stars. Oldham recalls that after becoming bona fide rock stars, the Rolling Stones began to frequent the posh and trendy Soho cafes favored by the jet-setters and European royalty, while the Beatles continued to eat and drink at the same sort of low-rent, blue collar pubs they favored while growing up in Liverpool. Oldham thought it was remarkable how the Beatles remained four unspoiled blokes from Liverpool even after their unprecedented musical success.

Oldlam made and eventually lost a fortune in the music business but he seems to bear no ill will toward his former rivals. But Oldham isn't afraid to criticize the shortcomings of his former associates in a even handed and often humorous fashion. The sad story of the music business is former big-time players remain lurking in the wings awaiting a second chance to get back in the game, when only handful of the most talented (both artists & music businessmen) get a second chance to swim with the sharks. Fame and fortune are as addictive as heroin.


Photo: Andrew Loog Oldham- 2012 photo portrait

Oldlam is a survivor who got out of the music business when it stopped being fun. He moved to Bogota Columbia in the Seventies and works as a successful fee-lance journalist. Oldham lives a far less flamboyant lifestyle and earns fraction of the income he made at age 20 as a rock and roll impresario. To his credit, Oldlam never looked back and it's his own unique status as one time music business insider turned music business outsider that makes him a fearless chronicler of the dark side of the British Invasion era.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

History of Soul Music Part III

The Mowtown Story 1959-1964

Motown Records was founded in Detroit Michigan in 1959 by Barry Gordy an aspiring songwriter. Prior to founding Motown Records, Gordy was best known for writting the music and lyrics to Lonely Teardrops, the first hit single for the legendary R&B singer Jackie Wilson. Early on, Gordy was an aspiring prize fighter and a formidable competitor in the middle weight class.


(Picture above) For Motown's glory years (1962-1968), the duplex on West Grand Blvd. in Detroit with the "Hitsville USA" sign was the world headquarters of Motown Records. The Clash paid tribute to the Motown offices with the song Hitsville U.K. on their 1980 album, Sadinista.

The former headquarters in now a museum which I visited in 1998. It's a remarkably modest & spartan facility. The downstairs rooms had a single recording studio (Studio A) connected to a small control room, a large room containing a library of the label's master tapes, and the fourth downstairs room was the home of Motown's administrative office. From 1959 until the mid 60's Barry Gordy used the upstairs rooms as a living quarters. After Gordy moved into sprawling "Motown Mansion" in the posh Boston-Edison Historical District of Detroit, Barry's upstairs apartment at Hitsville USA was used as a guest quarters for visiting artists or an a sleep-over apartment for artists working late in recording sessions in Studio A. As Motown expanded, Gordy purchased additional houses near the Hitsville office to use as office space, but he never built or leased a large central office facility to put all of Motown's Detroit operation under a single roof.

Motown was a completely different operation from Atlantic or Stax Records. All of the artists at Atlantic & Stax were performing musicians who paid their dues and played their countless live gigs prior to signing a recording contract. Performers like Rufus Thomas, Booker T. and Otis Redding were seasoned performers who were able to protect themselves from the con-artists and hucksters who operated on the fringes of the music industry.

Atlantic and Stax had both developed reputations as honorable and ethical operations. Many seasoned soul music artists sought out recording contracts with Atlantic and Stax because of their reputation for treating their recording artists in a ethical manner. Atlantic and Stax treated their artists, producers and studio musicians & engineers with respect. In an age when recording companies swindled artists out of royalty payments, Atlantic & Stax made fair royalty payments to their performing artists and supporting musicians. The corporate leadership of Atlantic and Stax stayed out of the music making end of the business and allowed each artist the space to pursue their own unique artistic vision.


(Picture Above)Stevie Wonder makes his debut at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem at age 12. Barry Gordy billed Stevie Wonder as the "12 Year Old Genius."

Barry Gordy handled his stable of talent & business affairs differently. He created artists in the same manner that television producer Bob Rafelson created the Monkees or later on, music producer Lou Pearlman who created '90s era boy bands like the Backstreet Boys & 'N Sync.

To create his stable of prefab recording artists, Gordy scouted out talented young singers with little or no performing or recording experience, mostly in the black community of Detroit. Most of the early Motown performers were still in their teens when Gordy recruited them. Smokey Robinson was 17 years old when he first signed with Motown; Diana Ross was 16 years; Stevie Wonder was 11 years old. and Michael Jackson was only 9 years old when he and his brothers signed on with Motown. Barry Gordy may have been robbing the cradle to obtain talent but from a business perspective he was a genius. He knew that younger artists were malleable talents who could easily be shaped into his protegees.

Gordy placed his young protegees under his control obsessed command and he shaped every detail of their career, including their performing costumes, their synchronized dance steps, the songs selected for their albums, the touring & television appearances, right down to creating rehearsed stage banter that his performers used over and over at every gig. Gordy had a strict code of moral behavior for his artists but he exempted two older performers, Junior Walker & Marvin Gaye from code sanctions.

Gordy didn't provide any space for creative development for his artists because he shaped the image of every artist at Motown and dressed them up in an assembly line fashion: dinner jackets or stylish European suits for the boys; and designer evening gowns for the girls. The Motown template for success was nicely dressed Negro performers, all doing the same dance steps and maintaining a wholesome image that didn't offend white folks.

Motown's rivals, Atlantic & Stax Records developed recording artists regardless of their white audience crossover potential while Barry Gordon developed recording artists for the sole purpose of becoming crossover artists with a sizable audience of white fans.

Gordy took a dim view of artists like the explosive wild man James Brown singing about black power; or Curtis Mayfield who wrote heartfelt anthems of black oppression & redemption, or even the affable Otis Redding who sang with the fury of a black Mandingo from the backwoods of rural Georgia. Gordy instinctively understood that to gain a white audience he had to create a stable of non-threatening artists who conformed to the rigid standards of conduct that white audiences imposed upon black entertainers.

Sam Cooke was the first black artist to achieve white crossover success. Cooke appealed to white audiences because he was the opposite of rock and roll wild men like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Cooke was an impeccably dressed, light skinned black performer who crooned innocent love songs in a sweet melancholy voice. What Cooke's white fans didn't know was that Cooke was also a down home soul singer when he appeared before all black audiences at the Apollo Theater or the Harlem Square Club.

There were two Sam Cookes: One who lip synced the lyrics to his latest crossover hit before an audience of white kids on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, while the other Sam Cooke brought down the house as a headline artist on "chittlin' circuit" of all black clubs in the era of racial segregation. Before black audiences Sam Cooke was an entirely different performer who sang in the same raw soulful manner of other black headliners like Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett, and other "hard" soul artists who were confined to playing uptown venues in the black community during the era of segregation. In the era of racial segregation, it was unprecedented for a black singer like Sam Cooke to appear before white television audiences on the Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand.

Barry Gordy's top priority was grooming his artists to become American Bandstand successes in the manner of Sam Cooke. If an artist was "too black", Barry Gordy didn't sign him to Motown.

It's ironic that his first big crossover success was the Supremes, a trio girl of singers who were spectacularly unsuccessful at selling records among both black and white audiences prior to 1964. The Supremes' lack of a best selling single became a joke around Motown Hitsville USA offices. After releasing 8 straight singles that went nowhere between 1961 and 1963 the Surpremes earned the derisive nickname of the "no selling Supremes" at Hitsville USA. The Supremes earned their keep by doing clerical work in the Motown offices and providing background vocals and hand-claps on the tracks of songs of those Motown stars who actually sold a lot of records. Gordy made sure that every Motown artist earned their keep, even if they ended up answering the phone or sending out promotional mailings at the Motown administrative offices.


(Picture Above) Barry Gordy at a 1964 press conference announcing that the Supremes song Where Did Our Love Go was the first million selling single for Motown Records.

All of Barry Gordy's efforts to sell to a white audience finally paid off when Motown became the first R&B label to reach a large crossover audience of white music fans. For years the two leading Motown artists Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells routinely recorded singles that placed them in the Billboard Top 40. Gaye's 1962 single Pride & Joy reached #10 on the Billboard Pop chart and sold 450,000 copies. But it was the singers formerly known as the "no selling Supremes" who became Motown's best selling superstars, when their single Where Did Our Love Go reached the #1 spot on the pop charts and it was certified as Motown's first million selling single in the spring of 1964. In 1964 the Supremes had a rivalry with the Beatles for the coveted #1 spot on the Billboard pop music chart. In 1964 and 1965, the Supremes had 10 straight million selling singles on the Billboard charts, while the Beatles had 12.

Barry Gordy was a tyrant who mistreated his artists and used contracts to keep his artists under his control. Gordy often created internal conflict by playing one artist off the other. Gordy's efforts to drive a wedge through the Supremes turned the young Diana Ross into a self absorbed monster whom studio musicians, producers and tour promoters dreaded any contact with. Prior to the Supremes' international success, co-members Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson shared lead singing duties with Ross. Gordy decided to enrich himself but cutting Ballard and Wilson out of any and all royalty payments as performers.

In 1965, Gordy announced that Diana Ross was the lead singer of the Supremes. Gordy then offered new contracts to the girl group that cut the other two Supremes out of their all their royalty rights, while maintaining the royalty payments for Ross. Gordy's new contract designated Supreme members Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson as "supporting performers" who were to be paid the at the same hourly union scale wages as studio musicians and members of the supporting band while on tour.

This Draconian move by Gordy enraged Supremes member Florence Ballard who was the actual founder the Supremes. And indeed, Ballard was the acknowledged creative leader of the Supremes and she recruited Diana Ross into the group, two years prior to their first encounter with Barry Gordy. Barry Gordy didn't like rivals for creative leadership of any of his bands and Florence's creative hold over the Supremes was a threat to Gordy's absolute control of the group. Florence bowed out of the Supremes following Gordy's edict.

Gordy followed a similar process of cutting the Miracles out of royalty payments by designating Smokey Robinson as the performer and relegating the rest of the Miracles to positions as salaried side players. Gordy frequently added his name to the song writing credits for a song to collect a cut of the song writing royalties, even if he had nothing to do with writing the song.

Motown Records became Barry Gordy's personal cash cow and only a handful of top tier artists like Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross were allowed to share some measure of Motown's financial success. As far as Barry Gordy was concerned, the 2nd tier artists at Motown were expendable and he treated them accordingly. Gordy had a similar attitude to Motown's stable of gifted producers, recording engineers. and songwriters.

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Coming tomorrow: The Motown Story (1965-1962) Barry Gordy does battle with Norman Whitfield, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder over censorship. The downfall of Barry Gordy's Motown empire.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

History of Soul Music Part IV

The Motown Story (1964-1980)

Barry Gordy was notorious for using creative bookeeping to shortchange his less successful artists out of royalty payments. But he also lavished his superstars like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, & Michael Jackson with generous royalty cuts on their album sales. Gordy understood that bigger stars have better lawyers & financial consultants who regularly demanded audits of royalty payments, so he didn't push his luck. Barry Gordy's 1st tier of superstars were the only Motown employees that didn't complain about Gordy's management style because they benefited from his special treatment and lavish royalty agreements.

The first signs of a rebellion began when Gordy's most talented songwriting team walked off and filed a lawsuit against Gordy for his unsavory business practices. Motown's premier songwriting team Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland (known in the trade as Holland–Dozier–Holland) left Motown in 1967 accusing Gordy of taking songwriting credits for songs they wrote and shorting them on royalty payments for the songs they got credit for writing. The natives were getting restless.

The Norman Whitfield Rebellion


Norman Whitfield- Brilliant producer who crafted the trademark Motown sound

Norman Whitfield began hanging around the Motown offices as a 19 year old kid. He wasn't on the payroll but he become the office mascot who'd run errands and fetch coffee for tips. Gordy noticed the ambitious kid and hired him to fill an entry level position in the quality control department. Marvin Gaye discovered Whitfield's songwriting talents and they collaborated on a few songs on Gaye's early albums.

Smokey Robinson, who was the Temptations producer in the early 60's noticed Whitfield's skills on the soundboard and trained him as a sound engineer. When touring commitments kept Robinson from completing the production of the Temptations' 1966 album, Gettin' Ready, Smokey asked Whitfield to produce the six remaining songs on the album. Those six cuts sounded better than any of the songs Robinson ever produced for the Temptations and one of the songs was Ain't Too Proud to Beg which became the Temptations first million selling single.

Robinson and Whitfield developed an ingenious method of quality control for Motown's single releases. In early Sixties, a listener's first encounter with a new single release was usually hearing the song on a car radio. Whitfield & Robinson would finish the studio mix of a single release and tweak the mix by playing it through a standard issue speaker for a car radio. Every Motown single was produced for optimal sound quality on a cheap $5 dollar car radio speaker.

In the fall of 1968, Whitfield walked into a Temptations recording session and made the announcement that he was going to "shake things up." Whitfield proceeded to lay down three tracks in rapid sucession: Cloud Nine, Runaway Child Running Wild, a fresh take on an early Marvin Gaye hit, I Heard It Through the Grapevine. The outcome was a radical departure from the Barry Gordy classic Motown factory production sound.

Earlier that year, Sly & the Family Stone had their first top 10 song Dance To the Music. The churning funk sound and the psychedelic guitar of the Family Stone's first single caught the ear of Norman Whitfield, who thought it was high time for Motown to modernize their sound.

Whitfield became an admirer and friend of Sly Stone. Sly began his career as a San Francisco soul music deejay. He had a degree in music theory and composition and played trumpet, guitar, and keyboards in several bands in the early garage/psychedelic era. This lead to a job as a producer at Autumn Records where Sly produced the earliest albums by folk rockers, the Beau Brummels and the San Francisco based psychedelic garage band the Mojo Men. Sly Stone also produced the debut release of the Haight Ashbury hippie band, the Great Society lead by Grace Slick, who later became an icon of the psychedelic generation as vocalist for the Jefferson Airplane. Sly was impressed by the creativity of the earliest psychedelic bands and wanted to created a band that was a fusion of psychedelic music with funky drum & bass sound of the James Brown band.

In early 1967, Sly Stone formed his own group, the Family Stone. The Family Stone was influenced as much by the psychedelic music of the Haight Ashbury hippie culture, as contemporary soul music. The All Music guide wrote,"Sly & the Family Stone treated soul as a psychedelic sun splash, filled with bright melodies, kaleidoscopic arrangements, inextricably intertwined interplay, and deft, fast rhythms.

Whitfield's vision was to refurbish the Motown production methodology to sound more like Sly Stone and less like Barry Gordy's trademark uptown soul music sound. Gordy was opposed to any music that made social commentary at Motown and was no fan of psychedelic music but he reluctantly approved Whitfield's proposal for the Tempation's Cloud Nine album, fearing that his best producer would walk away to another label. The end result was a radical leap into the future for the Motown sound. Motown's legendary session guitarist Dennis Coffey's use of distortion, the wah-wah peddle and an Echoplex tape delay was soon imitated by most psychedelic guitarists including Jimi Hendrix.

With Whitfield at the soundboard, the churning bass and funk rhythms of the Motown house band The Funk Brothers became the template for '70s funk sound. Even though Gordy disliked Whitfield's psychedelic freakout, he couldn't complain because Cloud Nine sold a lot of units and won a Grammy for best album by an R&B group. As much as he disapproved of Whitfield's psychedelic soul, his stable of superstar performers were selling fewer and fewer units and by 1968 Gordy knew the classic Motown sound was in dire need of a face lift.

The Temptations felt a bit out of the loop the debate over the psychedelic controversy, but it was hard for group members to protest Whitfield's radical reinvention of their musical direction, given the critical and commercial success of Cloud Nine. Temptation lead singer Eddie Kendricks was alienated by Whitfield's makeover and left the group shortly after the sessions for Psychedelic Shack, the 1970 Whitfield produced follow up to Cloud Nine. The long time lead singer of the Temptations David Ruffin had departed to pursue a solo career in early 1968, just prior to the Cloud Nine session, and now Eddie Kendricks was leaving over creative differences with Whitfield. The Temptations had a few minor hits in the Seventies but the departure of Kendricks was the beginning of the end for the Temptations.

The Marvin Gaye Rebellion



The Temptation's controversy was a sideshow for Barry Gordy. Gordy had bigger fish to fry at the time. Marvin Gaye faced his first career crisis at age 30 and began a protracted fight with Gordy to release a collection of songs that touched on taboo topics like urban decay, environmental woes, the Vietnam War, police brutality, unemployment, and poverty. When Gordy refused to underwrite the production of his proposed album "What's Going On" Gaye retaliated by refusing to record or tour. Because of his loss of royalty and touring revenues, Marvin Gaye was close to personal bankruptcy and spent his most of his idle time using drugs and chasing women.

Gordy vetoed the songs in Gaye's What's Going On album project as noncommercial but he also worried that all this rabble rousing by Motown artists would scare away the lucrative white crossover audience he worked so hard to nurture. Gaye issued an ultimatum to Gordy: He wouldn't record any more new material until Gordy released What's Going On. Gaye was engaged in a dangerous stand-off with Gordy that could end his career as a performer. But Gaye appeared to be ready and willing to throw away his career to the cause of artistic integrity. Gordy began to feel pressure from both music industry insiders and Marvin Gaye's fans to resolve the matter by releasing the controversial album.

Barry Gordy finally relented and released What's Going On album in May of 1971, Marvin Gaye proved Gordy to be wrong, the album was a tremendous commercial and critcal success and hailed as the greatest musical masterpiece of Gaye's long career.


33 year old Marvin Gaye at the peak of his creative powers, during a 1972 recording session for Let's Get It On.

During his 23 year recording career at Motown, Marvin Gaye made and lost 3 different multi-million dollar fortunes. Gaye had a remarkable talent for reinventing himself every time he was written off by his critics as a "has-been." Marvin was an electrifying live performer and his female fans often swooned and keeled over into arms of security guards who were stationed at the apron of the stage to cart off the fainting girls to a medical station. Now some 50 years after his recording first single and 30 years after his tragic death, Marvin Gaye has supplanted Motown's golden boy, Stevie Wonder as the most widely admired Motown artist.

The Stevie Wonder Rebellion


Stevie and Sly pose together during 1975 tour

Barry Gordy's authority was also being questioned by Motown's most consistent hit maker, Stevie Wonder. The label's golden boy who signed on at age 11 in 1961 was now a young adult in his early 20s. Wonder's spiritual transformation began when he ditched the designer suits mandated as proper stage-wear by Gordy. Instead, Wonder began wearing colorful African dashiki robes with tribal jewelry. After Wonder braided his hair in the style of a Massai tribal warrior, Wonder's exotic corn row braids became the latest hairdo fad among black youth. To Gordy's distress, Wonder was also becoming active in the Civil Rights movement and talking about black consciousness. Just as the Norman Whitfield/Cloud Nine & Marvin Gaye/What's Going On controversies were settled, Barry Gordy began to get nervous about Stevie Wonder's black pride freakout.

To make matters worse for Gordy, Stevie Wonder was touring with a pair non-Motown artists who were leaders of the Seventies musical insurgency. Sly Stone had developed an "uppity" attitude and his critics thought some of his songs had menacing anti-white messages. Wonder's other touring partner was Rastafarian rebel, Bob Marley who was also mislabeled by many American critics as as a militant proponent of black power. But Wonder's association with the rebel faction of black music made him a credible voice for change and won him an even larger audience. Oddly enough, Wonder continued to have spectacular crossover sales success.

In 1972 Wonder successfully fought Gordy to have the song Big Brother included in his album Talking Book. Big Brother was a harsh blanket indictment of government for surveillance of black citizens and illegal searches of black homes by the local police and the F.B.I. The song goes on to accuse politicians of only visiting the black community "around election time" and the final verse Wonder accuses the big brother government of killing "all our leaders." To Barry Gordy's ears, Stevie Wonder was beginning to sound like Malcom X.

The following year Gordy attempted to waylay the release of Wonder's album Innervisions which covered many of the same controversial social topics covered by Marvin Gaye on What's Going On. Gordy relented with less of a fight this time around. The 23 year old Stevie Wonder was world's biggest Soul music star and the future of the Motown label... Gordy couldn't afford to lose his rainmaking artist to a rival label.

It was a smart business decision by Barry Gordon. As '70s era unfolded the top tier Motown performers like Mary Wells, the Supremes, the Four Tops & the Temptations stopped turning out the hits, and only two first generation Motown artists, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, kept selling enough records to keep Motown financially solvent.

But Barry Gordy's luck was beginning to run out. His decision to relocate Motown to Los Angeles was the first in a series of management mistakes that would place the Motown label in financial peril over the next decade.

Gordy Moves Motown Out of the Motor City

In 1972, Barry Gordy abruptly closed the funky Motown "Hitsville USA" Detroit headquarters to and moved the entire Motown operation into posh a Los Angeles office building. Gordy was burning all of his bridges and his relocation of Motown Records to Los Angeles obliterated Motown's historic past as a regional soul music label with strong ties to Detroit's black community.

Gordy's decision to move Motown out of Detroit had dire economic consequences for a city that was already reeling from job losses in the automobile manufacturing industry. Neighborhoods in the black community of Detroit were beginning to look like ghost towns at the end of the gold rush era. During the next two decades the population of Detroit dropped from 1,800,000 residents to 950,000. The days of Motor City and Motown prosperity were over for the City of Detroit.

Motown's move to L.A. transformed Motown into just another West Coast record label on the make. And the aspiring artists who flocked to the Los Angeles music scene in the early '70s were overly ambitious musical neophytes who measured success by big money and big bling. The experimental mood of the Sixties L.A. music scene was ancient history and by the early Seventies every musician, producer and record company executive was "only in it for the money" as Frank Zappa once put it. Most of the visionary artists and music producers who put Los Angeles on map as a haven for musical creativity were no longer in the game.

In the '70s, the L.A. music scene was hijacked by the corporate boardroom and bottom line oriented music executives like David Geffen and Irving Azoff installed themselves as the purveyors of good musical taste on the L.A. music scene. The music began sound like the non-offensive, middle of the road, country rock, jazz fusion and mellow soul that yuppie management types used as the soundtrack to their pathetic money grubbing lives. It was the kind of music that American psycho Patrick Bateman listened to while rolling out the plastic sheeting for his next murder victim.

The West Coast move signaled the beginning of a slow decline for Motown Records. Motown's visionary producer Norman Whitfield left the label and it was increasingly clear that Gordy was out of touch with the times. By the early 80's Motown was an over-extended and under-capitalized money pit awash in red ink, under Gordy's leadership. Facing imminent bankruptcy proceedings, Barry Gordy sold off his interest in Motown Records to MCA in 1988. The current MCA subsidiary label bearing the Motown brand is a shell of Motown's Hitsville USA glory in Sixties.

By the end of the Eighties, 75% of the all music sales in the United States were controlled four L.A. based corporate entities. When Barry Gordy sold off Motown to the MCA entertainment consortium, he also sold off Motown's rich legacy as an independent soul music powerhouse label. Motown became just another spread-sheet property in MCA's growing portfolio of record company acquisitions.

There will always be a controversy about Gordy's high-handed treatment of some of his recording artists, but Motown's most successful artists like Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye remained loyal to Gordy, possibly because of the preferential treatment he accorded them.

Barry Gordy remains an enigma, he was the first black owner of a soul music label that achieved stellar success but he also treated many of his black artists like field hands on a plantation to accomplish this success.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Robert Ashley: Performance Artist & Pioneer of Electronic Music


Photo: Robert Ashley

Robert Ashley holds a degree in liberal arts from the University of Michigan and was PhD. candidate in music theory at the Manhattan School of Music in the late 50s. While working as a research assistant in the Speech Research Laboratories at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ashley organized the ONCE Festival. ONCE was the first festival dedicated to avant garde music and performance art. The festival was a huge success and it was an annual event in Ann Arbor from 1961 to 1969. The festival ended when Ashley moved to Oakland California in 1969 to serve as the director of the Center For Contemporary Music at Mills College.

Robert Ashley was never the staid academic type and he spent most of his time in the academy writing and staging his performance art and electronic music projects. One is tempted to call Ashley's work ambient music but the theatrical nature of his music is outside the realm of ambient music.

Ashley's musical works are ambitious "operas" that combine elements of electronic music, performance art, video footage, spoken language and surrealist poetry. Ashley is a musical minimalist in the tradition of classical composers like Eric Satie and John Cage and a few people mislabel him a classical music performer when in fact he's a post modernist composer of experimental music.

In the late Seventies, during a three month run his opera, Perfect Lives, in New York City, Ashley became a cult hero in Manhattan's downtown music scene. Ashley's performance art had a big impact on musicians like Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay and other artists in the No-Wave movement which was at the peak of it's short lived run as the musical trend of the moment in NYC.


Photo: Laurie Anderson

Ashley's biggest impact was upon Laurie Anderson, a 30 year old art history professor at City College who was a aspiring performance artist on the downtown art scene. Anderson's performance art combined elements of music, film, visual projections, dance theater, and most importantly spoken and written language. In a sense, Laurie Anderson was the female incarnation of Robert Ashley.

Laurie Anderson became the first (and only) performance artist to develop a cult following of rock music fans when she released the album Big Science in 1982. Big Science rose the 128th position on the Billboard charts, which was an unprecedented success by performance art standards. In 2008, Laurie Anderson married Lou Reed, the former founder of the Velvet Underground, who has been her collaborator on several projects since the 1990s.

Unlike Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley has never achieved the sort of high profile success that led to a crossover audience among rock music fans. But Ashley did have cult of followers among a group highly regarded New York City musicians who were profoundly influenced by his performance art.

I stumbled into Ashley's eccentric and brilliant performance art as a college student working at the M.I.T. media lab in Cambridge in 1981. I was also avid fan of the post-punk club scene in Boston.

Besides being the college of choice for the nation's best and brightest future engineers, M.I.T. was a haven for electronic and experimental music in the early Eighties. WMBR, M.I.T.'s radio station played a solid format of nothing but fringe electronic music and esoteric experimental rock. I don't think I would have ever heard any of Ashley's music, had not been for WMBR music shows, which were piped into the media lab as ambient music for the lab employees.

I first heard Robert Ashley's album Private Parts on WMBR and Ashley's music hit me like a bolt of lighting. To my ears, Ashley sounded like the missing like between the Beat Generation's jazz driven poetry recitals and present day post punk music scene being spearheaded by groups like Public Image Ltd., The Gang of Four and other groups who were combining performance art with rock music. That same year I saw Laurie Anderson in concert for the first time. Big Science had yet to be released but her performance art show at MOMA in Boston previewed most of the songs on that album.

Most of the performance art and electronic music of early pioneers like Robert Ashley and Laurie Anderson have been co-opted by the mainstream pop music and ambitious pop star wannabes like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga who have transformed their stage shows into banal imitations of performance art.


Photo: Cover of Robert Ashley's avant garde opus, Private Parts

There are only two songs on Private Parts. Side I is a 22 minute song called The Park and Side II is a 24 minute song titled The Back Yard. Ashley recites the words of his surreal and often dissociated prose with the sparse background accompaniment of tinkling cocktail lounge piano, along with the insistent drumbeat of an Far Eastern tabla drum and the impressionistic tonal washes of a synthesizer keyboard. Ashley's intones his prose/poetry in a soft spoken, world weary voice. His use of non sequiturs and surreal imagery creates an element of dramatic tension in his music. You keep asking yourself "where is this guy going with this thing?" Ashley's method of writing was influenced by the "automatic writing" of surrealist Andre Breton and the random "cut and paste" writing techniques of Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs.

For three decades, Private Parts still remains the best album to listen to while under the influence of cannabis of all the albums in my music collection.

Since YouTube doesn't allow videos longer than 20 minutes, I'm sharing an edited 15 minute version of The Park from the 1978 album release of Private Parts by Robert Ashley. The song may sound boring at first, but it has the mesmerizing effect of a mantra. It takes about 8 or 10 minutes to fully appreciate where Ashley is going with his strange narrative.

I apologize for the editing cut at the end. That's YouTube's cut, not mine. Private Parts has out of issue for around 15 years, but I'll email a zip file of the entire album to anyone who's interested in Ashley's music.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Early Videos of Future Rock Stars

Jimmy Page makes his first television appearance in 1957 with his skiffle band. Page is the dark haired guitarist on the left. In the interview, Page tells the host he wants to be research biologist. The host seems like a sex offender on the prowl when he's interviewing the boys.



Jimi Hendrix's first television appearance in 1965. Jimi is in background to the center, next the sax player. He looks like he's having a case of stage fright. The two singers are as gay as the Village People. Maybe that's what Jimi's scared of.



Jim Morrison acting in a television commercial for Florida State University while in high school.



Earliest known video of Bob Dylan singing North Country Blues at a Newport Folk Festival workshop in 1963.

Sitting to Dylan's right is the legendary guitarist, Doc Watson. You can see him in the close up shots. The female sitting behind Dylan is the beautiful Carolyn Hester who was a popular New York folk singer in the early Sixties. The guy with the banjo is the master of the claw hammer banjo style, Doc Boggs. I think the guitarist seated behind Dylan who hands him a pick before the song is bluegrass is Lester Flatt, but I'm not sure.

The video was filmed 50 years ago, which is enough to make me feel old.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Movie Review

Brassed Off Revisited


Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor on movie poster for Brassed Off

One of my favorite films of the Nineties was Brassed Off (1996) a small independent movie about the struggles of a colliery brass band in a Yorkshire village in the waning years of the Thatcher administration. It was billed as a romantic comedy in the United States but it is also deadly serious political film that criticizes the human suffering caused Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. As a bonus to music fans, Brassed Off has a great soundtrack of traditional brass band music by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band.

With the recent passing of Margaret Thatcher, I decided watch my DVD of Brassed Off to see how well it's political message has held up in the sixteen years since it's theatrical release. The story line is a thinly disguised fictional account of the impact of the closure of a colliery (coal mining pit) in the South Yorkshire village of Grimethrope. Following the closure of the colliery, Grimethorpe was named the poorest village in Great Britain by the European Union.

Writer/Director Mark Herman changes the name of the village to Grimley in the film but most the script of Brassed Off is faithful to the real live events surrounding the closing of the Grimethorpe colliery. The film is short on location in Grimethorpe and except for a few screen actors, the Grimley brass band is made up entirely of real life members of the Grimethorpe Brass Band who are the actual players on the movie soundtrack.


Pete Postlewaite as band conductor Danny in Brassed Off

At the center of the film's story is Danny, the long suffering and stern conductor of the Grimley Brass Band. Danny is portrayed by the late Pete Postlewaite one of the finest stage and screen actors of his generation. Steven Spielberg called Postlethwaite "the best actor in the world" after working with him on The Lost World: Jurassic Park. I think Brassed Off is the best screen acting performance Postlewaite's long and distinguished career even topping his 1993 Oscar nominated performance in In The Name of the Father.

The Grimley Brass Band was sponsored by the local coal mining colliery and most of the players were employees of the company. The band has a long and ignoble history of losing national competitions but Danny has never lost sight of his goal to turn the band around and win the finals of the national brass band competition at Royal Albert Hall in London.

For those readers who don't live in the UK, there's a long history of community brass bands in England that dates back to the late 19th Century. The costs of maintaining these community brass bands are underwritten by the local businesses who sponsor the bands.

When a talented young flugelhorn player named Gloria (played by Tara Fitzgerald) auditions for the band, Danny sees Gloria as the sort of talented musician who could turn around the band and restore it to it's former competitive greatness. As it turns out Gloria grew up in Grimley then moved to London to pursue a higher education and a professional career.

Gloria's deceased father was somewhat of local legend as the most talented flugelhorn player to ever play in the Grimley Brass Band. With Gloria's father in the band, Grimley actually made the finals of the national brass band completion but never won the national trophy. Gloria plays the antique flugehorn once played by her father in the band. Gloria becomes a symbolic link to the Grimley Brass Band's glory days for Danny who once played in the band with Gloria's father.

The addition of the lovely Gloria on the flugelhorn to the all male Grimley brass band adds an element of sexual tension to the story. We learn that Andy (played by Ewan McGregor) once had a schoolboy crush on Gloria but he was too shy to pursue her in his younger years.

The future of Grimley Brass Band is placed in jeopardy when the local coal mining company announces it's plans to evaluate a plan to close the Grimley colliery. Since the mining company is the sole sponsor of the brass band it's likely that the brass band would be dissolved if the mining company closes down the operation.

The events of the movie mirror the real life events in Great Britain in the early Nineties. The conservative Thatcher government made a decision some years earlier to replace coal with nuclear power as a source of fuel, and as a result some 140 pits, representing more than 200,000 miners' jobs, were declared redundant. The closure of a pit means the death of a town, because a village like Grimley depends entirely on the wages of the miners, whose families for generations have gone down in the mines--and played in the band.

Despite his own failing health from black lung disease, band conductor Danny sees a final opportunity for the Grimley Brass Band to march to glory in the national competition. At first the band members are too preoccupied with the loss of their jobs to perform well. In one hilarious scene, the band drowns it's sorrows by spending the afternoon getting drunk on ale which results in a comically off-key performance in the competition.

Note to reader: If you want to avoid any spoilers that give away the ending of the movie, stop reading the review now!

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It all changes when Danny collapses and falls into a coma and is hospitalized. The band members decide to pull it together and win the competition for their director.Meanwhile Danny wakes up from his comatose state, escapes the custody of his nurses and travels to Royal Albert Hall to watch the performance of his band offstage. The YouTube video is their performance of the William Tell Overture in the finals of the national brass band competition at Royal Albert Hall. Except the fake horn playing of actors Ewan McGregor, Tara Fitzgerald and Stephen Tompkinson, the scene is a real performance of the Grimethorpe Brass Band, filmed at the Royal Albert Hall. They're all first rate musicians.



The Grimley Brass band wins the national competition, but conductor Danny emerges from the back stage curtain to reject the award with a stirring speech against the conservative policies of Margaret Thatcher. None of the cast members knew what Pete Postelwaite was going to do or say in the final acceptance speech scene because the director Mark Herman wanted a completely spontaneous reaction by the cast members to Danny's speech. Below is a YouTube clip of Danny's non-acceptance speech.



Brassed Off is a rare film that has the guts to make a fearless political statement about the lives of ordinary real world people. Director Mark Herman avoids the usual comic stereotypes of working class Brits but also he also refuses to glorify his characters as noble working class heroes. The characters in Brassed Off are flawed human beings who rise to a moment of short lived greatness when an economic crisis threatens their livelihood and their identity as a community. As Roger Ebert said in his 1997 review of Brassed Off, "There is not a moment in "Brassed Off'' when I did not believe Postlethwaite was a brass band leader--and a bloody good one."

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Lost Album Classics- Volume I

Lost Album Classics will be a periodical feature of my journal in which I trawl my extensive music collection and feature a handful of under-appreciated albums that never found a large audience when they were released.

My aim isn't to feature the most obscure and non-commercial albums I can possibly find, rather Lost Album Classics are the albums in my music collection that should be heard by more people. I'm sure many Music Banter forum members will be familiar with some of the albums I choose because many the artists have cult followings among fans who follow a particular genre of music.

Only one rule governs the selection of an album choice: Any album that ever charted on the Billboard Top 200 sales list is automatically disqualified from consideration, since my purpose is to feature worthwhile albums that had poor sales in the marketplace.


Title: So Alone
Artist: Johnny Thunders
Release Date: 1978

Johnny Thunders made his biggest impact as guitarist for the glam/proto-punk group the New York Dolls but fans of the New York punk scene are familiar Thunders from his work with the Heartbreakers and as a solo artist. During the Eighties, Thunders began to sink into the depths of heroin addiction which resulted in his death from a methadone overdose in New Orleans in 1991.

So Alone is the last truly great album from Thunders, although he continued record compelling music for the next thirteen years until his death. On the albums he recorded after So Alone, Thunders unwittingly documented his own implosion from drug addiction.

You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory is the second cut on So Alone.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Zer0

The Decline of Western Civilization is an excellent documentary. Darby Crash was a character not built to last, seeing the live footage of The Germs in the documentary he seems absolutely wasted and completely all over the place. God only knows what he was like just before he died.



My favourite part of the film is FEAR taunting the crowd before their set, hilarious.

__________________

Gavin B.

Fear was the first hardcore punk band in the United States. They formed in 1977 but didn't issue an album until 1982. Fear was too busy raising hell to make a record.

Fear was also the most confrontational punk band, even more inflammatory than the Sex Pistols in their heyday. Fear's front man Lee Ving has since recanted his negative remarks about gays and said his remarks were aimed at homophobic meat-head jocks in the audience, to (unsurprisingly) rile them up. In the footage from the documentary, Ving appears to be doing just that. The people angered by Ving's gay baiting are a group of jocks who were dumb enough to be personally insulted by Ving's outlandish remarks about their sexuality.

In 1981 Fear appeared on Saturday Night Live and was the first and only unrecorded band to ever appear on the show. Lee Ving brought in a group of skinhead slam dancers who tore up the set and nearly incited an audience riot. The bands behavior resulted in a ban any more appearances by Fear on Saturday Night Live or any other NBC show.

When Fear finally released their first album in 1982, they surprised a lot people by playing a set of songs with daunting skill and brutal intensity.

My favorite performance from Decline of Western Civ was X. In the video below X rips through a version of Nausea while everyone in the audience is slam dancing, fighting and drinking to the point of acute alcohol poisoning... It makes me yearn for good old days of 1979, when I'd awake the next morning in a trash dumpster in Kenmore Square.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt