MUSIC THAT PARTS THE CLOUDS GENERALLY HAS A LITTLE BLOOD IN IT

“So, what kind of music do you like, then?” The question is often delivered with the accent firmly on the “do”, as though there’s no music left after insufficient enthusiasm has been shown for a selection of YouTube clips of rock guitarists strutting their stuff between about the time that the sixties became the seventies and more or less the time when ‘Brothers In Arms’ was a big deal or, perhaps even more likely, when the video shows the same bloke playing the same stuff, but just last week. Either that or you’ve failed to positively emoji a WhatsApp clip of some four-year-old prodigy playing Beethoven on the panpipes. I’m sure that investigative listeners of all generations will have their own version of this situation, but that’s mine.

I do love the historical stuff, possibly more than most, but, when the nostalgia gene was handed out, I seem to have been far enough back in the queue that there wasn’t as much to be divided up between those who had arrived late; and much of the stuff I love best comes from a much earlier time than I do anyway. Nor does it matter whether or not the music in question struck a chord with the wider public. I really don’t care what your next-door neighbour thinks about music, although, in my own case, my next-door neighbour was once the singer and guitarist in a major South African rock band, so that’s not really true of him, but with any luck you’ll get my drift.

In 1989, ITV’s South Bank Show aired a programme which they called ‘Put Blood In The Music’. In those pre-Britbox days you had to know someone who had access to someone in the UK who would be prepared to record interesting music shows on television and send the VHS tapes out to South Africa via a postal service that worked. I did. The show itself, watchable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D22mR8pBZek, is still worth a look, focusing as it does on John Zorn, the almost impossibly prolific downtown saxophonist and composer of avant-jazz, radical Jewish music, noise and several points even further afield, and New York rock band Sonic Youth, who were not shy about experimenting with sound and noise themselves and who had recently released ‘Daydream Nation’, which might still be my favourite album from that decade.

However, it was the name of the programme that stuck with me. Heart, soul and edge are a good start, but an injection of blood to distinguish the host from the perniciously anaemic huge majority of released music will always get my attention.

Books about music are a particular passion, though the prospect that I will ever get round to the biographies of Elton or Sir Keef is pretty slim, and a slew of excellent books about musicians who did put blood in their music, in one case quite literally and with unimaginably tragic consequences, have passed through my reading quite recently, including Sonic Life by Thurston Moore of the self-same Sonic Youth.

 

Joel Selvin – Drums And Demons: The Tragic Journey Of Jim Gordon

Jim Gordon was once widely considered by those in the know to have been the greatest rock and pop drummer of them all until the voices in his head took control, especially that of his own mother whom he ultimately murdered after first telephoning her to say that he would. The great Jim Keltner has said that all the LA session drummers learned to play like him, if only to avoid copying him. Yet, when Keltner sent his teenage son to photograph Gordon for a magazine article, Gordon, who had once played constantly in an effort to silence the voices, no longer knew how to assemble his kit.

You’ve heard Jim Gordon. He was the drummer in Derek & the Dominos, Traffic and the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band and for the Everly Brothers and Frank Zappa; he was also for several years, and from a young age, one of LA’s busiest session players, appearing on Good Vibrations, Heroes and Villains, My Sweet Lord, After Midnight, Marrakesh Express, River Deep Mountain High, Classical Gas and dozens more hits by a range of artists from Nancy Sinatra to Sonny & Cher and Tiny Tim, and on critically acclaimed albums by Randy Newman, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Steely Dan, Tom Waits, Dr John and others. He was incarcerated for 39 years till his death last year and in a psychiatric prison when his fellow inmates watched on TV as he was awarded (in absentia) a 1993 Grammy for co-writing Layla, although whether he did or not is another story. Those voices had ordered him to get rid of his multiple gold records years before and he did, several times a day, constantly changing his mind and fetching them from the dumpster only to be told to throw them out again.

 

Eddie Hinton – Very Extremely Dangerous

Bruce Schurman – Everybody Needs Love: The Life And Music Of Eddie Hinton

Then there’s Eddie Hinton, another prolific session player, a guitarist featured mainly on great soul music recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama by black singers backed by the town’s renowned coterie of white studio musicians. He actually plays the guitar part when Mavis Staples calls on her father, the wonderful soul and blues player Pops Staples, in the Staple Singers’ US No 1 hit, I’ll Take You There. On their limited release, ‘Live At Third Man Records’, the mighty Drive-By Truckers introduce their cover of the Hinton song after which the biography was named by calling Eddie “one our favourite musicians in the whole world, maybe our very favourite in the whole world”. Hinton, who embodied the triple threat of fine songwriter, outstanding singer and brilliant guitarist, was another highly troubled soul and it’s something of a miracle that so much of his own music has been available on album, largely due to the good graces of a friend who started his own record company to release it. Before that there was ‘Very Extremely Dangerous’, the debut, released in 1978 by Capricorn Records. It attracted some excellent reviews but, in the way of much of the Hinton story, the label, which had once been the face of the Southern rock sub-genre, couldn’t afford to promote it and went bankrupt soon afterwards.

Far more people had heard Hinton, on records by Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, the Staples, Boz Scaggs, Tony Joe White and many others, than knew his name. He had once turned down a job in the Allman Brothers Band and written one of Dusty Springfield’s best songs (much later a hit for UB40) yet, due largely to a drink and drugs-influenced downward spiral that often makes for a hard, if compelling read, was apparently working as a janitor at Capricorn Studios when he did what few believed could be done in 1978 … he made an undeniably great soul record. When Sam Phillips, according to the Peter Guralnick biography The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll, said that, if he could find a white man who could sing like a black man, he could make a million dollars, the guy he found – Elvis Presley, for those who have just bussed in from outer space – was actually a white man who sang black music, but like a white man. Eddie Hinton, who based his wracked and ultimately ruined vocal style on those of his heroes Otis Redding and Joe Tex and his friend Bobby Womack, and smoked, drank and screamed it into shape, was a white man who sang black music closer than any white person to the way a black man sang it, yet he made hardly any money at all. The terrific Memphis writer Robert Gordon once remarked that, if frayed rope could sing, it would sound like Eddie Hinton.

 

Steve Albini and hundreds of albums worth investigating

In an industry where the producer was often treated by the record company as someone whose job it was to interfere with the artist’s vision, often but by no means always necessary, Steve Albini, who died a couple of months ago, just before the release of the new album by his band Shellac, was most decidedly a non-interventionist producer, so much so that he always insisted on being credited in liner notes as the engineer only. His trick, and what attracted so many of the most interesting acts from the late ’80s onwards to his studio – acts who included Nirvana, Pixies, Superchunk, Guided By Voices, the Sadies, Will Oldham’s various guises and disguises, the Breeders, Jason Molina’s bands Songs: Ohia and the Magnolia Electric Co, Nina Nastasia, PJ Harvey, Joanna Newsom, Tortoise, Nine Inch Nails, Low and even such veterans as Cheap Trick, the Stooges and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant – was that he was a recording engineer who left the blood in the music when most others might have removed most if not all of it. While you’re trawling Spotify for the unfeasibly large number of albums sporting an Albini credit, be sure to seek out his 1993 essay The Problem With Music, about the accounting practices of the music business and note, in particular, his conclusion. I’m pretty sure that, while the musical environment might have altered radically since then, not much has changed for a new band trying to navigate its way through treacherous waters for which no amount of practice will prepare it. The essay can be found here: https://genius.com/Steve-albini-the-problem-with-music-annotated.

 

Jim Ruland – Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise And Fall Of SST Records

Thurston Moore – Sonic Life

All of which brings me, finally, to what I had actually intended to talk about, namely the blood in the music of the SST record label. The company manifesto is the title of Jim Ruland’s incredibly detailed and constantly fascinating book. It changed a bit later, at about the time when a few of its more successful bands were being signed by the majors, to “Corporate Rock Still Sucks”, and the label advised that “Friends Don’t Let Friends Listen To Corporate Rock”.

Founded in California by guitarist Greg Ginn, the initials stood for solid state transmitters after the label’s predecessor, an electronics company Ginn had begun running as an amateur radio enthusiast in his very early teens. Ginn played guitar in Black Flag, a band whose music, like that of most of its similarly minded contemporaries, was a gut reaction to the dull, formulaic rock that reflected the insipid culture birthed by Reagan’s morning in America. He started his record label to get this abrasively loud, fiercely independent and increasingly influential music – about as far from the boring riffing, technoflash playing and ludicrous posturing of hair and much other metal as it was possible to go – to a growing audience around the country that was largely being overlooked by the mainstream business. Part of the success of the endeavour can be measured by the 393 records listed in the book’s discography, nearly all of which are albums or, for the truly obsessed, the astonishing yet still incomplete 2485-song Spotify SST playlist to be found here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1mPc7NixFPLSLRjoRQzmCe. Not all of it is great, of course, and the label seems, over time, to have lost both its way and a little – some would argue much – of its soul, but there is a considerable amount of fantastic and in many cases uncompromising rock music on show there. What you miss, as usual, is the album artwork, some of which was designed by Ginn’s brother, acclaimed artist Raymond Pettibon. He designed Black Flag’s four bars logo for example though, ironically, perhaps his best-known cover art was for Sonic Youth’s ‘Goo’, which was that band’s first album for a major.

Indeed, two of maybe my own half a dozen favourite ’80s bands, Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü, recorded for SST before decamping to major labels, without, in their case at least, any significant reduction of quality or increase in compromise, and certainly not any immediately obvious blood loss. Each of the albums listed in this article comes with a gold-seal recommendation. The bands involved are quite different from each other.

One has to be careful when making broad generalisations about the inconceivably numerous and preciously guarded subgenres of rock music, but it’s probably fair to say that, though a certain amount of cross-pollination existed, American punk sounded essentially different from British punk and spawned a different set of tributaries, one of which, known as hardcore, was audibly different from the Californian punk scene of bands like X, the Germs and the Dead Kennedys where it found its roots; and that scene had in turn been different from the one that sprung up around New York’s CBGB club where acts like the Ramones and the Dead Boys had held sway in the mid to late ’70s along with attitudinally similar but sonically distinct, and distinctive, acts such as Patti Smith, Television, Blondie, Suicide and Talking Heads. It’s clear from the Thurston Moore memoir, though, despite what the punk police believe, that all of these dots can be connected.

 

Black Flag – Damaged

Black Flag straddled the hardcore and punk worlds. They were loud, fast and aggressive, where punk met metal before grunge. They toured incessantly, playing in dives, sleeping rough and living worse, but connecting like-minded communities across the USA. They had, in Ginn, the apparent successor to Johnny Thunders on guitar and, picking up the seemingly constantly enraged Henry Rollins along the way, acquired themselves a most compelling frontman. ‘Damaged’, their debut album following a few pre-Rollins EPs, set the standard and remains a lo-fi rock classic.

 

The Minutemen – Double Nickels On The Dime

The songs on ‘Damaged’ – 15 of them in 35 minutes – seemed positively epic in comparison with the Minutemen’s. It was once rumoured that the San Pedro trio got their name from the length of their songs. ‘Double Nickels On The Dime’, whose title referred to the speed limit on American roads and, obliquely if sarcastically, to rock’s tradition of car songs, was a double album, its 75-minute sprawl containing 43 often politically-inspired songs delivered via a mixture of angular guitar riffs and runs, jazzy chord structures and often funky if always spiky beats instead of punk’s more generally expected three-chord thrash. Titles include Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Truth and Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing.

 

Sonic Youth – Sister

Perhaps looking for a way to match Patti Smith’s description of Tom Verlaine’s guitar playing as a thousand bluebirds screaming, New York contemporary Lydia Lunch once said that Sonic Youth were sculpturing a hurricane of sound. Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote that, when they were at full steam, they sounded like a subway. With their unconventionally tuned guitars, often clawed at and beaten up as much as played, they strove, from one album to the next, to push the sonic envelope a bit further each time yet remain a great rock band. Hugely broadminded and relentlessly experimental, they covered Madonna and the Carpenters as well as John Cage and Steve Reich, referencing pop, noise and the avant-garde with nearly equal aplomb. When Neil Young was looking to get louder he hired the band as his tour support and the feedback-drenched Arc/Weld was the result. The brilliant ‘Sister’, released in 1987, revealed them to be a great song band without sacrificing their exploratory nature and led directly to the even more brilliant ‘Daydream Nation’, by which time they had left SST, though not yet joined the Geffen stable.

 

The Meat Puppets – Meat Puppets II / Up On The Sun

Kurt Cobain, who never shied away from the proselytization of lesser-known artists he believed in, once claimed that Nirvana, about to become, briefly, the biggest band in the world, had signed to Geffen because Sonic Youth were there. Beneficiaries of his endorsements included the Raincoats, the Vaselines and Daniel Johnston and, when Nirvana came to record their ‘MTV Unplugged In New York’ album, they included two songs by Arizonan band the Meat Puppets, led by the Kirkwood brothers, Curt and Cris. The songs, Plateau and Lake Of Fire, came from that band’s second album and, as compelling as Nirvana’s versions may be, the Puppets’ originals are better; and they’re by no means the only great songs on these two fabulous albums of a mixture of punkish yet psychedelic country-rock and the ever-fading remnants of their origins as a somewhat desert-fried hardcore band. The band apparently lasted longer on SST than anybody except Greg Ginn and Curt Kirkwood then joined Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic in the short-lived Eyes Adrift.

 

Hüsker Dü – Zen Arcade / New Day Rising / Flip Your Wig

The staggeringly productive Minnesota trio Hüsker Dü – five albums, two of which were doubles, between 1984 and 1987 as the songs just poured out of them – ended up with Warner Bros after ‘Flip Your Wig’ became SST’s most successful record up to that point, but their classic albums were the previous two. Frontman Bob Mould’s autobiography was subtitled The Trail Of Rage And Melody and seldom can a title have better encapsulated a band’s sound, ethos and career arc. The double album ‘Zen Arcade’, loosely a concept album one of whose sides was almost entirely made up of a long instrumental track, flies in the face of all received wisdom about punk and burns with an intensity that cannot be turned down by using the volume control, but it still sounds slightly thin compared with what came after. On ‘New Day Rising’ the guitar can sound like a cross between a buzzsaw and an incensed swarm of bees and yet the melodies written by Mould and Grant Hart, whose drums seem to hiss along some imaginary freeway through the cathartic roar of the band, are all the more blissful for their emergence from the sonic maelstrom around them. Mould, who has had a long and impressive solo career, would emerge from the ruins of Hüsker Dü leading the hardly less noisy but even more tuneful Sugar through three UK Top Ten albums.

 

Dinosaur Jr – You’re Living All Over Me / Bug

The title of a compilation released after Massachusetts outfit Dinosaur Jr initially split described what the band did as ear-bleeding country. Well, it wasn’t country by any measure usually applied other than that it could carry a good tune, but ear-bleeding it surely was, and the pain could be exquisite. It came not only from the merciless volume at which J Mascis played his guitar, but the way he did so, scorching rather than pulverising, a firestorm of distortion and feedback that was as ecstatic as his ultra-laconic vocals seemed lethargic and even bored. In stark contrast is bassist Lou Barlow’s repeated, larynx-lacerating, post-hardcore howl of “Why don’t you like me?” on Don’t after which Mascis disbanded the group before reforming it without Barlow. There were decent and sometimes very good albums after that but no more great ones, suggesting that the tension between the two protagonists had been good for the music.

 

Bad Brains – Bad Brains / I Against I

‘I Against I’ was the third album by Washington DC’s Bad Brains but their first on SST. It’s a pretty good record whose tracks mix up elements of hard rock, funk, soul and reggae as the band gives up a little of its previous fiery intensity for enough classic rockitude for the album to be its best-selling release, though that is unquestionably a matter of comparison rather than commerciality. The guitars slice and slash rather than crash and burn the way they did before and the band were Rastafarians, which explained both the album’s title and the fact that their excursions into reggae were substantially more convincing than has been the norm in American rock. All of which is to explain that they had a hell of a lot to live up to by the time they got to SST. The first, self-titled, Bad Brains album may be the greatest punk album you’ve never heard.

Richard Haslop