So, to The Scala last Thursday to see Lightning Bolt, supported by the archly-named Sly & The Family Drone. The latter were neither especially droney or indeed funky, but I enjoyed their multivalent shtick: three drummers, a baritone sax, two keyboards and a guy mostly shouting and making moves. For some strange reason, they called the late 90s band, Add N to (X) to my mind. All good, noisy fun, and it reminded me that I haven’t attended a ‘rock’ event since (I think) Swans at Brixton circa 2014/15. Or Maybe Current 93 also around that time. Whatever, it made me feel my age: rather than the mixed age range of your average free improv event (including many of my contemporaries), we must have been 30 years older than any of the rest of the audience. Oh well, carpe diem and all that, I suppose.

The Scala was, of course, the site of the infamous Iggy/Stooges gig of exactly 50 years ago. It’s far less scuzzy now (I haven’t been there since a 29th Saxophone performance sometime in the late 80s) and the sound was good, and the audience vibe pretty chilled, given the music on offer. There were mild attempts at crowd surfing, easily curtailed by security, but it was all very good-humoured (having seen Woodstock '99 recently, I was very pleased by this). Lightning Bolt were awesome. Brian Appledale (his’ gimp mask’ triggering a colossal amount of samples) must have shed a stone or two in weight in just one hour, given the temperature both inside and out, and Brian 2.0, born Gibson, nailed down Appleyard’s excesses with a Bill Wyman-type froideur.

I’ve only seen LB once before, supporting the rather tedious Om, but their performance the other night easily topped that one. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any band being happy to follow these two, so immersive is their act. Album’s don’t and can’t really give a true representation of their live sound, which is perhaps why there are relatively few of them, for a band that has been in existence for more than 20 years.

It’s also great to see an American band over here, by the way, in our 'hostile environment’.

One thing that I noticed, beyond the bag searches and pat-downs by a professionally friendly security team (maybe we were given a 'senior citizen’ exception?), was that ALL of them, and all of the bar staff, seemed to be black. I’m not going to extrapolate especially much from this snap shot, but all I can say is that “it wasn’t like that in my day”. (Please don’t misread this, it’s an observation, not a judgement.) Cafe Oto, in comparison, is replete with young white staff, mostly volunteers. I was reminded of just how skilled bar and security work is in these situations (not especially at Cafe Oto), but I’m sure that, in Priti Patel’s mind, they would come under the 'unskilled’ banner.

I missed this one until now. Apparently, it came out a few months ago, but I haven’t seen it reviewed in Wire, for example. Maybe I need to expand my infotainment, but a copy of Current 93’s newie was delivered today, and I’ve already got some thoughts about it, even after only three hearings (few recordings excite me immediately nowadays).

Firstly, it’s nothing really new. The usual Tibet obsessions are present and correct (including, as ever, cats, stags, witches and children), and If a City Is Set Upon a Hill is very much a companion piece to 2018’s The Light Is Leaving Us All. Which is a good thing. I discussed the latter at the time, and most of the group of that recording are still here, including, miraculously, the ever-wonderful Alasdair Roberts. It seems that, finally (after a woeful time using heavy metal guitarists) David Tibet has found a satisfactory replacement for Michael Cashmore, who was a vital contributor, along with Steve Stapleton, to Current 93’s epic series of recordings throughout the nineties. It certainly, on initial hearing, seems to be of a similar quality to that canon, the best albums by this band seeming to stand out almost instantaneously. Cashmore and Stapleton are long gone, but Roberts seems to have stepped in, and propelled Tibet to produce two albums that stand with any of the other key albums that the group has recorded since 1982. It’s oddly reminiscent in mood to Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre, probably my favourite C93 record of all. (Tibet constantly sounds close to tears, which is oddly affecting rather than merely annoying.)

In addition, the whole album lasts a very satisfactory 37 minutes in all. (9 minutes shorter than The Light Is Leaving Us All.) Both films and recordings still seem hypertrophied, so some discipline and brevity are always welcomed, for this viewer and listener at least. So, it’s good news all round for Current 93 fans. They, for me, are one of the oddest bands I have ever encountered - they should be terribly embarrassing, but somehow achieve, at their best, some of the most resonant emotional experiences that David Keenan’s 'hidden reverse’ can provide.

In 1986, twenty years on, Billy Bragg released ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’, a depressing-but-vital song about domestic abuse, and the woman-in-question’s recourse to The Four Tops’ music to help her cope. What I didn’t fully appreciate when I bought this 45, was just how much the lyrics of Holland/Dozier/Holland also hinted at emotional abuse, possessiveness and potential violence. Berry Gordy didn’t allow such subject matter in his artist’s work at the time, but this began to change by the end of the sixties (The Temptations’ 'Cloud Nine’, for example), when Stevie Wonder (no longer 'little’ by this time), Marvin Gaye and The Temps began to demand the expansion of what they were allowed to say about the more unpalatable aspect of inner city Amerika.

This summer’s Love Island, mostly unfurling/unravelling across July (this month again!), has gained some notoriety, mostly through the antics of Luca and Gemma, with the former displaying (and being 'outed’ by the public, culminating, in it’s most extreme form, in several death threats towards him) controlling and over-possessive behaviour towards and around Gemma. (Some have suggested that clips of Luca’s behaviour would make a good video to show school children, especially girls, about the forms that indirect 'controlling behaviour’ can take.) I’d suggest listening to The Four Tops’ work, for a further glimpse into the mindset of 'a man possessed’, i.e. Levi Stubbs’ persona of a man driven half-mad by his rantings and ravings about his 'love object’. They can be read as mere 'love songs’, but, given a close listen, they demonstrate controlling and passive-aggressive signals, with emotional blackmail and veiled threats of either harm to self or even, potentially, to 'the loved one’.

1966 and 1967, in particular, contained a plethora of these songs. Look at the following titles - 'Standing In the Shadow of Love’, 'Without the One You Love (Life Is Not Worth Living’, 'I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)’, 'You Keep Running Away’, 'If You Don’t Want My Love’, 'I’ll Turn To Stone’, and 'Sad Souvenirs’ - just to get a flavour of the hectoring tones that Stubbs’ uses on the women that he is obsessed with. The listener will make up their own mind, but I will leave you with a sample of the lyrics of 'Bernadette’ (probably the most chilling) and 'You Keep Running Away’. I’m sure that Luca would approve of their sentiments:

“And when I speak to you, I see you in other men’s eyes, and I’m well aware of what’s on their minds. They pretend to be my friend, while all the time they try to persuade you from my side. They’d give the world and all they own for just one moment of what we have known…I want you in order to live. And while I live only to hold you, other men they long to control you. But how can they control you, Bernadette, when they cannot control themselves?…But, darling, you belong to me, you’re the soul of me, you’re part of me…” ('Bernadette’)

One would be hard pressed to find a better example anywhere of projective identification. Stubbs sound deranged.

“All I want to do is to take care of you, this soul of mine has been possessed by you. Darling, my heart has been obsessed with you…Just look at me, I’m not the man I used to be” ('You Keep Running Away")

And little wonder she keeps running, one might remark. Self - pity and blame-syndrome seem to be driving this iteration of Stubbs’ volatile and injured man-child. “It’s not my fault, look what you’ve done to me”, etc., etc. The emotional depths of the early Tamla pantheon has not always been acknowledged, with the focus often of it’s 'later’ album-length products. The Four Top’s canon forms one of the label’s most profound creations.

All the songs referred to can be found on The Ultimate Collection compilation. However, it sadly excludes The Tops’ masterful rendition of Tim Hardin’s 'If I Was A Carpenter’.

I haven’t been doing much else in the writing department than trying to finish the first draft of my psychogeography-informed (says he) book about Crouch End (‘niche’ topics being definitely my thing). But reading the great Richard Williams’ blog (“The last of AMM”) about the final gig of the equally great AMM (30th. July) got me thinking about the improvising ensemble’s very first album, AMMusic1966, a year that also arguably marked the apogee of the career of a group that I have been listening a lot to recently, Tamla Motown’s The Four Tops. I realise that this is something of a “commodius vicus of recirculation”, as Joyce puts it in the opening of Finnegans Wake, but there you go, it was a famous year for many different forms of music.

At Saturday 30th. July (coincidently the 56th, anniversary of England winning the Jules Rimet trophy) at Cafe Oto, a duo of Eddie Prevost and Keith Rowe played what was purportedly their last ever gig as AMM. In the same July as the World Cup triumph (not repeated in any way until the Lionesses triumph just a week ago, also in the seventh month), a five member AMM recorded their first vinyl outing, on the 8th. and the 27th. I’ve talked a lot about AMM in my books, so don’t intend to dwell on them here, except to acknowledge the importance of this final performance, as the group was the last one standing, after 57 years, of the first generation of free improvisers, with AMMusic1966 being the first recorded release of genuine free improv in Britain. The group’s retirement thus represents a definite fin de siecle moment for this 'movement’.

At another remove, 1966 was a defining year for The Four Tops’ unique take on pop psychodrama. I became eleven years of age in July (a theme seems to be developing here?) 1966, and I clearly remember 'Reach Out, I’ll Be There’ There’ being number 1 in that summer, along with so many immortal pop songs, but I was too callow to appreciate both the emotional intensity of Levi Stubbs’ lead vocals or the sheer power they lent to the frequently rather subtly dark lyrics of Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier.

To be continued.

Just a brief one today, but this could be much longer, given the vicissitudes that the Wire/The Wire has gone through over it’s 40-year existence. I have considered cancelling my 30+ years subscriptions on several occasion (and still do) but somehow it continues to provide me with enough valuable information about off-the-radar music to still make it a “must-do tomorrow” event horizon.

Nowadays, for me, the magazine consists, in the main, of articles about artists that remain definitely above my radar: this month’s (August 2022) edition’s cover features concerns Saul Williams (never heard of). Most of the sub-features cover people who I’ve never come across, but this is hardly the point. Wire has always pushed me to explore new horizons, and I continue to enjoy the mainstays of the mag’s contents, the editorial, the letters section (to which I still regularly contribute), the Invisible Jukebox, and, of course, the extensive Reviews. This month’s article on Alan Skidmore alone was worth the price of admission.

My very first copy of The Wire (bought for my 30th. birthday by my future sister-in-law) was issue 17 (July 1985) and featured Ray Charles on the cover, with articles on “Miles and Duke on record”, John Gilmore and Herbie Nichols. The latter two were hardly known then (the ‘hard bop revival’ being all the thing at that point), and I have always henceforth thought of this publication as being 'a niche for the less lauded".

It still is, and all the better for it.

Part Two

This is my list of ’ Some Americana before the term was invented’. They are off the top of my head, and I’m sure that readers would want to add other groups and single artists that I have left out

Bob Dylan It is almost inevitable that Dylan is at the head of this list. The ‘basement tapes’, recorded when psychedelia was at its colourful height in the 1967 Summer of Love, contained a slew of parched oddities that began to woke musicians up from their day-glo reveries. (Several went on to have hits with songs from the Little White Wonder bootleg, 'Quinn the Eskimo’, 'Million Dollar Bash’, This Wheel’s on Fire’, 'Tears of Rage’, 'I Shall Be Released’, 'You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, by acts as varied as The Byrds, The Band, Brian Auger & the Trinity, Manfred Mann and Fairport Convention.) CBS took until 1975 to officially release the vinyl double album The Basement Tapes, from the sessions, by which time Dylan has produced several other recordings that had cemented his latest 'new direction’: John Wesley Harding (the real game-changer, from 1968), Nashville Skyline (with that other white wonder, Johnny Cash), Self Portrait and New Morning. Mercilessly panned at the time, their undoubted influence began to be slowly acknowledged by younger musicians.

The Band Dylan’s backing band on the momentous world tour of 1966, The Band made The Basement Tapes with him, before recording two epochal albums in 1968 and 1969, Music From Big Pink and The Band. Both of these were to prove immensely influential for British and American musicians of the time (the inclusion of 'The Weight’ on the Easy Rider soundtrack didn’t hurt either). If there is one group that laid the tracks down for the Americana juggernaut, that group has to be The Band?

The Byrds and their offshoot, The Flying Burrito Brothers, both featured Gram Parsons for a time, another visionary who had dug deep into the American musical palimpsest, going back, as Dylan had, to Victorian forebears. The Byrds also featured David Crosby, a Hollywood brat who was kicked out of the band (for being a pain in the ***, basically) and went on to join Crosby, Stills and Nash, a move that was certainly to prove immensely successful, even if just judged in financial terms (much of the money went up Crosby’s nose, however). The cover of their sophomore album Deja Vu, a sepia-tinted exercise in deep nostalgia, featured the band (by now also featuring Neil Young) in frontier drag, in a pose that echoed both The Band and Workingman’s Dead by the Grateful Dead.

Both Workingman’s Dead (1969) and American Beauty (1970) marked a screeching change of direction for the Grateful Dead, and their folk and country influences emerged in a set of songs that celebrated, most clearly and famously in 'Truckin’ ’, their love of travelling through the American landscape, and a freedom of movement, both of the body and in the mind. Their particular offshoot, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, were another band enamoured of cowboy chic, most obviously on the cover of their third record Gypsy Cowboy, a relatively late 1972 release that could have been designed with John Ford in mind.

1967-1970 saw the birth pangs of a sort of anti-modernism in American rock, and a (re)discovery of the American past and landscape. (We had out own version over here with the 'getting it together in the country’ shtick, most famously captured by Traffic on their first album Dear Mr. Fantasy, with the group moving to Berkshire to 'get their heads together’.) But the past is always 'another country’, and 'nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’, and it took artists of the stature of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen to produce bodies of work that celebrated the past without reinventing it. Johnny Cash too, miraculously created a late series of 'American music’ that owed much to the past (and his own), while keeping his feet firmly on modern ground.

Part One

I’m currently digesting Luke Meddings’ meditation on the interconnectivity of The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys What They Heard, which mainly covers the years of 1963-8. Thinking about those years, my mind wandered tangentially onto the topic of so-called Americana, a word that wasn’t really used in rock/pop music until, I estimate, around 2000, with the emergence of such artists as Ryan Adams. The late Gram Parsons was fishing around in the same synergistic pond some thirty years earlier, when he came up with his idea of ‘cosmic American music’, a combination of country music, R & B, soul, folk and rock, and 'Americana’ is a similarly rather ill-defined stylistic and descriptive grab-bag. I should then, with this caveat in mind, make a few descriptive pointers before we go on to discuss a few of the groups and individuals who were producing examples of this slippery genre well before it gained a name that appears to have stuck. (Before Americana, we had 'country rock’ and 'folk rock’, two examples of the sort of nominative welding that became popular in the early 70s.)

Americana is, to state the obvious, a description of music that is essentially American in both form and content. So, remembering this, one word and concept that is inescapable is freedom, but, when we look at the current political landscape in the USA, we can see how ambiguous this core idea is, when it is applied to the various groups of American society - some groups seem to be more 'free’ to think and act than others. One of the most important of these freedoms is that of freedom of movement, a principle that was once completely denied to one immigrant group, until it took a civil war to restore it to this very group. Free Movement became a secular cause and effect for the Beats in the 1950s, and this is reflected in the sheer amount of place names cited throughout the works of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, to take just two examples of Beat-influenced artists. Sadly, the other core freedom principle that I have extrapolated is that of the God-given right of Americans to bear arms, i.e. GUNS.

Now, you’d have thought that the 'progressive’ nature of, in particular, 'west coast psychedelia’, would have made the toting of guns an anathema to the Beats’ successors, the hippies, but in many ways the latter were as gun-obsessed as rappers are today. Look at The Charlatans, for example (the American version), posing as Wild West gunslingers in Nevada’s Red Dog Saloon. (Dan Hicks went on to form one Americana prototype with his Hot Licks, a band that melded jazz onto folk and country.) San Francisco’s premier two-guitar phenomenon Quicksilver Messenger Service didn’t appear to be being ironical when, on the back cover of their second album Happy Trails, both Gary Duncan and Greg Elmore are pictured with in-yer-face rifle-toting poses. When the Grateful Dead upped sticks and moved to Marin County in 1968, leaving the meth - and smack - riddled streets of the Haight Ashbury, they were soon riding horses and mutating into farm hands, all tooled up to deal with horse rustling/rustlers. Dead offshoots, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, on the back cover of their third album Gypsy Cowboy (the title so says it all) present a complement to that of Happy Trails, even if the gun motif is played down (only one of 'em is tooled up, with a literal 'pistol in his pocket’) - like so many of their hippie contemporaries, the New Riders’ 'look’ had one boot in the present and the other in a re-imagined Wild West, with some effective nostalgia ('Whiskey’ and 'Sutter’s Mill’) and some regrettably back-to-basics attitudes ('Groupie’ and 'She’s No Angel’ being the best/worse examples). Like a lot of the sixties/seventies 'counterculture’, the freedoms it supposedly enabled were, on refection, exploited by those who were already free in everything but mind. Atavistic misogyny was just one countercultural feature that still deserves attention, as it was so little recognised and called out at the time.

To be continued…