No There There: The Sweet: "The Ballroom Blitz"

There is a point to all the recent questions of direction and what on earth is going on that have appeared here; amid all the impending eerie conditions, all hell is breaking loose and yes, even - especially even - in Glam can this be felt.  It's not quite what the song does (it rocks, obviously, with one of the best introductions ever, the beat solid and danceable, Brian Connolly asking everyone if they are ready - of course they are) as how it does it that makes this a Friendly Forebear of a single, a song that is about a Sweet gig which turned chaotic (in Kilmarnock, where they were bottled off the stage), what with deadly winking girls, men with red eyes (so much of this song is about seeing and looking) - the whole thing is a passionate hoedown of a song, pausing and jumping and swinging... 

That it has two sides isn't something I realized until now; the loud, camp "OOHHH YEAAAHHH" exclamations and "she thinks SHE's the passionate one" side, and the quieter one.  The loud side is the addictive one, the vamping up of basic rock 'n' roll, but the quiet side has been hard for me to hear - or I should say, understand, until now*.  This is a rave up, sure, but what to make of lines like "It's been getting so hard living with the things you do to me" or "Reaching out for something - touching nothing's all I ever do"?  Or the last Connolly near-mumbled line, "I softly call you over - when you appear there's nothing left of you." With these lyrics The Sweet (or rather Chinn/Chapman) are jumping right into the nothingness, only to find that there's no safety net and that something - more scarily, someone - is disappearing.  The Sweet know darn well The Fog is coming, they've reached out to find...nothing and something is breaking down, beyond just a bad show in Scotland.  There is no gloom or terror in this song; just an acknowledgement that things are getting bad - you have to listen close to hear how bad, though.   The Glam Slam era isn't quite over yet, but there is a sense here that while The Sweet are trying their best to make the best of a bad situation, that bad situation is going to remain and stagnate, the whoo-hoo good times becoming harder to find. 

And how important is this, that it is about the audience?  The relationship of those onstage and those in the audience is always a fraught one, at the best of times - and in the combative 70s the audience, I sense, wants a different relationship to those onstage.  The gig this song talks about sounds like a punk one, where there is little sense of division between the band and the audience - only this isn't the punk era, and that ethos of doing something just to break the tedium/cause a scene is not that common.  (Or was it?  I have no idea if this kind of thing was regular back then, to be distilled into the punk attitude, which was yet to happen.)  The Sweet get the last word here, which makes up for their misery, but in the future one of the key songs out of punk will be about being in an audience and not really knowing why you are there, and sensing that in the greater scheme of things, there's no "roots rock rebellion" happening anywhere - that The Clash are reaching for that rebellion and also grasping nothing shows that The Sweet, though not as political, obviously, are describing something that is happening and will continue throughout The Fog - a strong sense that what is really important isn't heard or seen, that entertainment in and of itself is going to have to change.  And it's not going to happen in the wink of an eye....

Next up: Trick or Treat?

*The mumbling coming from Elvis, as Connolly sings these lines in a kind of half-suggestive way, though once you find out what he's saying, you've got to wonder about what he's suggesting.

           

The Real Rebels: Don Fardon: "Indian Reservation"

If you haven’t noticed already, this year is a rather uneasy one, one where the accumulated angst of a whole decade seems to be seeping out, one song at a time.  Liberation was the cry of the 70s, as the idealism of the 60s hardened from flowers and psychedelics – an altering of perception in order to conceive of that better world – to the less glamourous but necessary hard looks at what has been happening and how it can be changed in a practical way.  The personal was becoming the political, whether ordinary folks liked it or not. 

This is laudable, though it could (and as we know, did) lapse into narcissism and solipsistic thinking; the surest way to actually appreciate what you have is to think of others, particularly their history.  And here is a song of what happened to the Cherokee Nation, a century and a half before.  Migration was common back then, especially as (as taught to me in almost all my history classes) Europe was getting crowded and there was a whole new continent out there, sans monarchy and religious repression, waiting to be populated by anyone who showed up.  And as this had been happening since the 1770s or so, by the 1830s things were already starting to get crowded in the Atlantic states, and farmers were itching for new pastures, literally and figuratively.  The US government (who had been, shall we say, "kindly instructing" the Cherokee in how they should live – i.e. in the American way – for decades) basically kicked the Cherokee out of their homelands and drove them out, by force if necessary.  Manifest Destiny was the claim of the US; this act was one of many justified by it.  The fact that the Cherokee had been there for a very long time didn’t matter; from the American perspective they were in charge now, and that was pretty much that.  The Cherokee Nation continued the best it could, and even wanted their own state; a perfectly reasonable request, all things considered, that got nowhere in Washington D.C.  By the 1900s the Cherokee were segregated against just like African Americans, and by the time Don Fardon recorded this in 1968, they too benefitted from the civil rights movement and various laws passed just years before. 

Just what a freakbeat singer was doing recording this is less clear; it had been written by John D. Loudermilk in the 50s and recorded by Marvin Rainwater – himself ¼ Cherokee – but that recording (“The Pale Faced Indian”) in 1959 didn’t really get anywhere.  Perhaps he had heard about the Red Power movement; maybe he just liked the song.  Why it only got into the charts at this point is also a mystery, but it fits the general sense of unrest and injustice of 1970 better, I think, than the rather lachrymose charts of ’68, in general.  Fardon makes this a tough record; there is a freakbeat stompiness and menace in the horns at the start; the intensity that made his old band The Sorrows just a bit too much for the public is certainly here, his voice quiet, the song building up and building up to “War” like levels of disquiet.  A whole way of life is wiped out before the song ends, but the people stand strong, ready to return.  A guitar stings and “will return…will return….” comes back with horns loud and a lone drum skiddering off, as if to say, we will indeed return, and for that matter, we’re still here, dammit.  If rock 'n' roll is all about rebelling against The Man, well, there's nothing like a song where The Man's actions against not just one person but a whole people is catalogued.  That Fardon had no Native American roots to speak of may make some uneasy, but then neither (that I know of) did the song's writer, and rock always roots for the underdog, in any case.  Fardon sounds sincere, angry even; and the song was a big enough hit for Paul Revere and The Raiders to cover it and take it to #1 in the US in '71 (lead singer Mark Lindsay was part Cherokee himself; thus his interest). 

Historical perspective is a way of comprehending where we are now by looking at what happened then; the US was about to go through a turbulent decade wherein wrongs would be recognized and righted - through politics, through cultural shifts, through art itself. You cannot change things for the better if you don't know how they got messed up in the first place; that a UK singer brought this song back to the public's acclaim (it was an NME #2) and thence via a similar version to the US's attention is a good thing, almost a public declaration. Rock has grown up a lot here, able to make this a hit and become that public art that helps, if only in a small way, to give some perspective to what is really worth rebelling about, what is really at stake in life.

Next up:  who needs a loaf of bread or a thou?

Blue Teardrops of Pride: Elvis Presley: "A Mess of Blues"

It is quite appropriate, on this day of days, to leisurely (I hope all readers had a fine holiday!) continue with...Elvis, who was born 75 years ago today, and is in some ways just as alive as ever. (For a fine book on his immediate afterlife, Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus is essential reading, though sadly I don't have a copy.) Hearing this song - which happens to be his last entry here for some time - makes me understand what makes him valuable and interesting, to say the least. "A Mess of Blues" is a song of sorrow - he can't eat, he can't sleep, he's missing his baby so much that "Every day is just blue Monday" (Elvis predicts New Order?!?!) and yet he will not be ashamed: "If you cry when you're in love/It sure ain't no disgrace" - Elvis the liberator again, this time telling men that yes, they can cry (years before Rosie Grier says the same in Free To Be You And Me.) "Whoops there goes a teardrop" he even sings in defiance, as if he knows damn well that this is going to end and not a minute too soon, but dammit he's a man and can do whatever the hell he wants - for a sorrowful song there's an awful of swagger in here, the Jordanaires even sound as if they are in it, 'wooo-wooo'ing like they really are his posse. In the end he catches a train (presumably to be with her, who sent him the letter of misery in the first place) and will kick his own troubles to the curb. He's in a mess, his room is blue blue electric blue, but he is getting out of there and into the world, and we will not be seeing him again, dear readers, for some time. Wish him well...