Super Friday - 12 tracks of glory...

Jerry Lee Lewis... Ray Charles... The Swans... Angels of Light... Bardo Pond... Velvet Underground... Lee Ranaldo...Akron Family and Angels of Light...Dion and the Belmonts...Steve Earle... Pussy Galore... more Ray...



Here we are. Super friday. 12 tracks. Not as much noise as originally threatened – the list changed during its compilation. No jazz as such today – although the spirit and much of the improvisational ethic can be found in a lot of the music on display here. I realised just now as I checked the track list that there is a neat theme running through most of – that of my old hobby horse, the American Sublime – which I take as SPACE, to rip off Olson (again). In the twentieth century, composers and musicians in the U.S., at the highest level of creativity, have, I would submit, been involved in spatial exploration. An artistic process that mirrors the size of the country and is also concerned with forging an American identity in art – from Duke Ellington to Charles Ives, Ornette Coleman to ... Michael Gira. But to start with – a couple of tracks that burst out in the fifties, widening the musical field – the Killer's 'Great balls of fire,' which was the first record I ever bought (although I had been listening to rock and roll previously via my cousin's collection). I can remember seeing Jerry Lee on some early Brit television show – I think it was 'Henry Hall's Guest Night' but wouldn't swear to it . He was like nothing I had ever seen – a demonic raging presence that crashed into the sleepy, dull post war fifties. Screw Elvis – I was always a Jerry Lee man. White Dada Nihilismus... backed by boogie woogie piano slammed into gospel...

And he leads neatly into the next track – if Jerry Lee was always involved via his baptist roots in a violent conflict between his God and the Devil's music... Brother Ray symbolises the (often uneasy and unstable) melding of the two traditions in black music – Gospel and Blues – to produce the testifying raw wahoo that became known as – SOUL...

Ray Charles came some years later than Jerry Lee – but he was just as electric a presence in my life. I got to see him live a couple of times with his big band, Margie Hendryx and the Raelettes, the whole bag of chips. Up in the top five best live concerts I have ever seen... Charles was a rugged individualist who battled disability and later addiction (although it never seemed to debilitate his performances) to become a big wheel in the business – and black at that. He was one of the first to acquire control of his own music through shrewd deals and also massively expanded the horizons of 'pop' music – not just with his bringing together of the sacred and profane – against a lot of resistance from his own people who were uneasy with gospel hollering being used to frame the carnalities of rhythm and blues – but in his later cross-genre experiments with country music – and beyond.

I would hazard that what gives a lot of this music its edge – from rock and roll across to soul and beyond – is the religious dimension of America – not easily understood in Europe.

'What'd I say' is just one of those songs that if you do not move to – you are probably clinically dead. That insistent riff on the electric piano, the blues structure, the gospel call and response – almost a potted history of black music. When I came back from New York last year, I saw the movie 'Ray' on the plane – and the section that deals with the genesis of this song as an improvised performance that wows the club audience it was delivered to is great. I don't know how accurate it was – but who cares? The film also points up the religious conflicts surrounding the birth of Soul. (Not a new conflict in black culture, admittedly). Rock and roll and soul music created a new space in popular culture - one we are still dealing with... 'What'd I say' was also the record that crashed Charles out of the r and b charts into the mainstream top ten...

I came across the Swans in the eighties when I was buying a lot of American hardcore (music – Cynthia...) - bands such as Husker Du (umlauts anyone?) were an especial favourite. But the Swans were different – playing crushingly slow songs obsessed with various transgressional activities – the perfect mirror in some ways for the plague years in New York when HIV burst like a fragmentation bomb on the city. Sex and death – thanatos and eros writ large. And the operative word here - large. This was BIG music, grinding against your ears. Physical stuff... This is taken from their last recording, the live set 'Swans are Dead.' A stop/start riff as Gira's deep baritone declaims, the song builds and builds – a prime example of the power of the band. The swirling section that evokes (in my mind) the blowing of a dark, ominous wind is especially atmospheric. But this is a wind blowing through a cityscape, not some remote prairie. Concrete canyons. Whistles screechingly sound near the end and suddenly die off into a single drum beat that smacks out a final ominous tattoo. Something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones?

Gira disbanded the Swans because he felt he had taken that particular conception of his music as far as it would go. He played solo gigs with just an acoustic guitar and formed 'The Angels of Light' – an interesting phrase, given the darkness of the preceding years. Maybe he felt that (most of) the demons in his life had been exorcised. The album that the next song is taken from (one of my favourite in recent years) is lighter in texture – though often not in existential turmoil. The instrumentation is more varied, giving a more acoustic sound – mandolins, banjos, and anything to hand up to and including lap steel and children's choir(!). This is the first track: 'Palisades.' Majestic in its sweep, it takes you out of the relentless dark heart of New York as envisaged by the Swans into – an equally dark place by the sea. Gira's dynamic sense is still operating well – this song is another one that – just builds and builds, from the lightly-textured opening to the full-blown bust-out ending.

The title of the Bardo Pond album gives the game away – 'Amanita.' So does the band's name – a resonation of the lysergic sixties. They build up long guitar-driven improvisations that attempt to emulate and mirror expanded states of mind. 'RM' starts with a fragment of flute, followed by strummed guitar, and goes – onwards and outwards. Turn on, tune in...

To the fountainhead of modern white rock... the Velvet Underground. This is 'Foggy Notion' from the 68/69 period – a two guitar driven attack over rock solid (no pun intended) bass and drums. This could not be any other band – something about the sound they had, coupled to Lou Reed's voice (on this track), a sound that changed a lot, from the earlier electric viola overdrive of John Cale, through the crazed organ on 'White Light/White Heat' to the more guitarry later stuff, but was always intrinsically Velvets. Probably the rhythm, that insistent 8/8... This track moves, but lightly. Love this band. I got my calomine lotion, baby, do it again...

I jump around in this selection – thematically, The Akron Family should come after the Angels of Light as Gira invited them to come and play and record with his band. I wrote about their gig the other week here... just to reiterate, I think they are a great live act, with improvisations that flow and take in many streams of American music from folk, country, to blues and jazz and whatever... Here you can experience them with the Angels of Light, 'Future myth,' a track that fades in over distant voices and prominent drums – guitars chiming added as the space expands. The vocals come in – soppy lyric about counting shadows in the sun. And SPACE is what this music demands – it needs it as so much musical history seems to need to be incorporated. This is why a lot of bands now are playing such long sets – to get it all in...

To jump back onto the New York track... here is Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth, doing 'Scripture of the Golden Eternity,' from a live performance. Art rock/improv/ramblings and side reference to Jack Kerouac's text in the title (which I have a copy of somewhere in the hovel, buried under piles of books)... Renaldo going on about Superman or something over a long track, almost Swans-ish in places with a particular repeated glitchy loop. Sonic Youth are the carriers of the flame from the VU, taking their musics further and outwards everywhere, spawning a mass of side projects by individual band members. Thurston Moore and recently Kim Gordon were the more prominent but Ranaldo is worth a listen. This is interesting stuff, just solo guitar, loops and effects and spoken voice, recorded at the Knitting Factory in the late eighties.

From the downtown art rockers to more innocent days – 'I wonder why' by Dion and the Belmonts. Teen romance delivered superbly. Dun dun du du du du ba ah ah ah – all together now.

Older angst – Steve Earle singing the white country blues. The neat finger-picking rings out on what sounds like National Steel guitar with an occasional dollop of slide. The archetypal good old boy night out with jail as the inevitable finale, Stagolee appropriated maybe – or a shared low-life archetype. Guns and booze and women. A bit like the Artists' Quarter on a good night... The Devil lives on Lewis Street, I swear...

Pussy Galore present more fucked up punk noise with a song that could have the best punk title of all – 'Fuck you, man.' Gabba gabba hey. A glorious noise. 35 seconds of compressed clenched fist fury. Jon Spencer, of course, went on to form the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – and Neil Heggerty, who also passed through the band, headed up Royal Trux with Jennifer Herrema to play junky rock harmolodics for the cognoscenti. Maybe I'll put some of their stuff up soon...

To end – Ray Charles, testifying on 'You are my sunshine.' Replete with ironies – 'You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.' Sung by a blind man. It is also one of two state songs of Louisiana, written by the former governor Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell in about 1940. For Georgia-born Charles, who escaped the poverty and racism of the South, I wonder how much amusement there was in recording this title. And making a large wad of dollars. He omits the verse about

White fields of cotton
-- green fields clover,
the best fishing
and long tall corn;

giving a dark, brooding bluesy take on the stripped-down shitkicker lyrics. Maybe there was no irony – Charles heard the soul in country music and crossed over to appropriate it for his own with his smash hit album 'New Directions in Country and Western.' This track is taken from volume two and gives a snapshot of his stage show that I remember so well - the jazzy big band, that kicks out for a brassy chorus between the vocals, the sublime Raelettes – and the raw-voiced answering voice of Margie Hendrix. When I first bought this record I literally wore it out...



The downloads are split into two zip files...


Download
Part one


Part Two