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By Max Conroy
This past week has been one of the most eventful/busy of my entire life. In seven days I saw Jandek, wrote about it, interviewed Donita Sparks, saw Blind Mellon in Flint, crashing that night in East Lansing, saw Solomon Burke in Detroit and motored immediately after to Grand Rapids to hang out with Uncle Fucker. I got back to Ann Arbor last night around midnight. I had a real good time, but I’m glad to be convalescing here on this beautiful Memorial Day. In my travels to East Lansing and Grand Rapids, I picked up some great records at some great shops. If you’re anywhere even close to Grand Rapids and like records at all, you have to go to the Corner Record Shop, just outside of GR. It rivals Encore and is about to become an entirely analog recording studio and venue as well! Another surprise is that Uncle Fucker dusted off the Telecaster this weekend in a moment of clarity, and I recorded some of it for you. I have also edited some of what I recorded at the Solomon Burke show. Featured here are Lay My Burdon Down, performed by the choir before he went on, and Diamond in Your Mind, the song that Tom Waites wrote for him on his first comeback album. The choir provides an accurate representation of the enthusiasm of the crowd, along with a healthy dose of ecstatic joy in loving Jesus. Diamonds is just a great song and was recorded by Burke recently, so it captures his sound now. The third track is Uncle Fucker shredding All Down the Line, the Stones song.
Lay My Burdon Down:
Diamond in Your Mind:
All Down the Line:
Stay tuned for the Donita Sparks and the Stellar Moments review and interview.
By Max Conroy:
The night prior to the Sharon Jones show, Cousin Justin and I made it to the Magic Bag to check out Scott Morgan’s Powertrane and Blue Cheer. I’d never been to the Bag, which apparently hosts a brew and view, along with live music. From what we saw, there doesn’t appear to be a bad seat in the house, which is actually filled with seats, and a tiny pit in front of the stage. The beer was reasonable: under $5 for a Bells.
Scott Morgan opened the show. His band consisted of himself on vocals and guitar, Bobby Gillespie on lead guitar (apparently a Detroit rock scene vet who played with Rob Tyner post-5) and a dramatically younger rhythm section in comparison to Gillespie and Morgan. The Sonic Rendezvous Band is a band that you either absolutely love or you just don’t get it. I’m part of the former crowd. When I got the Sweet Nothing album (recorded in ‘78 at Second Chance in Ann Arbor and released in ‘98) when it was released, my freshman year of college, I could hardly believe what I heard. While playing it for the first time, I saw a buddy on my floor walk by and I grabbed him and forced him to listen to a track at high volume. He likes cool music and is still a good friend, but he’s definitely a person who doesn’t get it. He politely found a reason to get the hell out of my dorm room quickly and I learned that people don’t have to dig your tunes to be cool. SRB never released an album, only a single, which the cousins have shamefully unloaded twice. That’s part of the mystery behind the band, that they could be so fucking sweet and never actually be a proper band. Scott Morgan was just as important as Fred Smith was to SRB, writing and singing approximately half of their material, so naturally I was very excited to have the opportunity to see some of this stuff live. Surprisingly, Scott Morgan still sounds great. He has to be over sixty and sings from the gut. They did two SRB songs, Love and Learn and Highjackin’ Love, which were great. His voice doesn’t quite have the force it did back in the day, but that was 30 years ago. They also did a Rob Tyner song, which Mr. Gillespie wrote and several songs that appear on the new Powertrane album. The highlight of their set was a blazing rendition of Respect, which was the song that put Scott Morgan on the map with the Rationals back in the sixties. There was one flub, where the drummer wasn’t able to hit a cymbal at the right time, but that seemed to piss off Scott Morgan more than the crowd, which is what we should expect from a professional.
Now for Blue Cheer. As I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t really know a whole lot about the band or what they’d sound like after all this time. The most recent Cheer song I’d heard up till the show was recorded in 1968. Walking up to the doors Justin and I were talking about the Grande and how we were certain that they played there and that we’d have been on acid if we were walking up to the doors of the Grande to see them. After the first song, Dickie Peterson reminisced that his first time playing Detroit was at the Grande in ‘68 with the Stooges and the MC5, which he called the first power rock concert. As Dickie recanted the days of yore my heart started to regain its natural rhythm and my brain stopped boiling for a second. Dickie is the rock star of the band and the bassist, so the bass is cranked to the point of affecting the body’s internal chemistry: eyes cross, synapses misfire. Then, wham! They’re into the next song. They played virtually all Vincebus Eruptum, excluding BB King’s Rock Me, and several more recent numbers, more recent being ‘85 to the present. The band is made up of original members, Dickie and drummer Paul Whaley, and Andrew McDonald on guitar who has been with them for the past 23 or so years and wails with the classic uncontrollable guitar-face. Whaley looked to be in poor health, but could still pound those skins. Peterson even mentioned in between songs that there’d been rumors about Whaley, presumably that he wasn’t with us anymore. He also mentioned that he’d seen Whaley do unspeakable things with Janis Joplin, which was kind of cool. Justin asked me if I saw that guy walking down the street would I believe that he’d been with Joplin…no. They sounded great, played well and rank up there with Slayer and Motorhead as one of the loudest, heaviest shows I’ve ever seen. Immediately after the music stopped, I looked around and noticed that every last person was wearing ear plugs. I should have brought ear plugs.
jsREVIEW:
I can only imagine how weird it would have been to be an avant garde band in Hamburg, Michigan during the early ’80s. I suspect, first of all, that the Inserts were not just an avant garde band, but rather THE avant garde band of 1983.
Sounding heavily influenced by the No Pussyfooting collaboration between Eno and Fripp, this quartet plays mostly guitar synthesizers (and note explicitly that there aren’t any keyboard synthesizers on the album), with a Rhodes for a touch of jazz fusion.
From tracking down Marc Taras, who is thanked in the credits and now works at local shop PJ’s Records, the main halmark of the band was its spontaneous and improvisational nature. They’d roar into the studio, start the tapes and jam, splicing anything that worked back together post hoc. Rather than ending up disjointed, the album feels spacious and anxious with broad washes of taut guitar tones playing over jittery post-punk bass work.
Clean and “modern” sounding, there’s a fairly dystopic sci-fi sound to the ordeal, like Vangelis’s Blade Runner without the plot. Still, for fans of bands like Cluster, Eno & Fripp, or even Psychic TV, there’s a lot to love about The Inserts, and you’ll never see this disc for sale again.
(Having learned that one of the members of the band, then going by birth name Mark Murrell, is now WCBN DJ Ed Special, look to this space once Cousins Vinyl can get him to talk about the album!)
jsREVIEW:
“These previously unissued sounds from the drag strip represent a selection of the finest recoding ever done on those fantastic machines which emanate from the back yards and garages all over the country. Perhaps the builders of these machines are never put to so severe a test (or at least, so concentrated a test) as they are on this record. For here, the results of their tuning and designing are clearly and openly heard, without the benefit of a flashy pain job, or a snazzy crash helmet festooned with red, white and blue foxtails— or anything else that might distract attention.
That most of these builders and designers are successful is obvious in listening; and the ones who fail to do so, we hope, in good spirits and share our laughter at the peculiar sounds made by their goofs.
At any rate, here are the unabridged noises of a fantastic collection of automotive machinery. They deserve some careful listening.”
— From the back of the LP jacket, Riverside Records 5517.
There’s no date on this album, though my guess (based on the rest of the dates for the Riverside label) is that it came out in the late ’50s, when hot-rodding was a growing concern. The album promises “Hot new sounds from the drag strip,” and that’s what it delivers, in beautiful hi-fi mono.
In its most literal sense, this is a “noise” album. There are no songs there, no real intended sounds as such. Nothing that can really be recognized as intended as music. This was, first and foremost, an epistle to America as low media, a record for kids and gearheads to listen to as they dreamed of their own hotrods. The liner notes make it seem like there’s some way for me to tell which of these are the gallant and which the gufus based on the tunings, but I grew up too late for that. This is essentially sounds of machines.
There are three types of noise albums, and I tend to think of this as the third. The first would be those albums that sometimes get called “noise rock.” Merzbow or Nurse With Wound or Throbbing Gristle. They tend to have discrete tracks and show the evidence of being listened to as music, even when they attack the traditional signposts of music. Sounds are often layered and distorted in unnatural ways in the first type of noise album.
For the second type, there’s the sound effects put out for commercial and educational use. Think those blings and boings of a radio ad, or the Wilhelm scream. I could see an argument being made to place Rods ‘N Rails in with these, as it would be handy if I ever had to convince someone that I was at a drag strip over the phone. But for the most part, the engines rev for too long and there isn’t necessarily a good cut point between the cars. Certainly, this would be a pain to cue from.
The third type is the field recording. This isn’t that either, strictly, but it falls closer than any of the other categories. Like a birdsong guide for the freeways of the late ’50s, it reminds me more of sleeping in my grandmother’s house on First Ave., North Riverside, Il., than anything else. The surge then disintigration of cars passing a single mic, then dopplering out, is strangely soothing. It’s a lullaby imagined by Depero.
A beautiful burst of nostolgia for futures past, Rods ‘N Rails is worth listening to both as a document and as an album.
-js
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