The Beat Goes On: Cozy Powell: "Dance With The Devil"

And so Music Sounds Better With Two returns, to an insistent drumbeat; and with that rocking start the mid-70s begins as well...

Cozy Powell - a drummer from the Midlands who ordinarily played with various groups as a drummer - at this point he'd been with Jeff Beck and his own band Bedlam - was striking out on his own with this tribute (a #2 hit on Radio Luxembourg), on RAK records (meaning - that's probably Suzi Quatro in the back on vocals and bass).  This song is overtly a tribute to Jimi Hendrix, however; and with "Third Stone From The Sun" being the melody to the insistent beat*, the 70s once again remind the listening public of what has been and how the beating of drums can somehow summon them back again, drumming as a medium's way of bringing the dead back to life...

...and what a life!  Trying to even sum up Jimi Hendrix's importance to those who don't know him (astonishingly I tried to do this once and was frustrated even then with how indescribable his music is, how dangerous and ecstatic and in-your-face it is all at the same time - frustrated with myself, I should hasten, not Jimi).  The Olympian heights he reached inspired so many people, some of whom were copyists, others more their own innovators in their own areas (Freddie Mercury's vocals were deeply influenced by Hendrix's bravado guitar solos).  I am not, as a rule, one to sit around going "whoa dude" at guitarists in general, being more into the groove and feel of things, but Hendrix is someone I have a lot of time for; listening to a certain BBC station in the morning and hearing yet more news about Led Zeppelin is enough to make me shake my head at the bagel I am slicing, but somehow anything Hendrix grabs my attention.  He is still ahead, still the way forward, still actual news.  And it is no good wondering where the next Hendrix is (as Chrissie Hynde did back in the 90s, esp. wondering where the female Hendrix was) as one was quite enough and is still very much here, with no need for a "next."

As for Powell, he continued to work at RAK for a while as well as forming his own band, and then joined Rainbow in 1975; he continued to drum in various bands until his death in 1998.  He took his nickname (his actual name was Colin Flooks; you'd change it too) from the US jazz drummer Cozy Cole, who'd had huge hits with "Topsy" and "Topsy Part 2" - both songs that were mainly drum solos, a rare thing at any time.  And so jazz makes a sideways wink into this song as well, as if to say - to Hendrix and to Powell - that it is the umbrella underneath which all other musics stand.  Let the music play, and we can all beat the devil.      

Next up:  The kids, the kids, and possibly some more roots of punk?

*The beat on the original was far more laid back, as befits 1967, man.

One Side vs. the Other: Slade: "Look Wot You Dun"

There are certain times when the transatlantic chasm, so to speak, makes itself known; the other night I was listening to a UK chart countdown show that culminated with Slade, and was looking online at the equivalent American chart – where the top spot was held by Al Green.  That chasm – which I have mentioned already in previous posts – could not be more glaringly clear, though just how to explain it isn’t as easy.  Current events and sociological trends can only take us so far.  There is something of a fundamental difference here, one of aesthetics, not to mention who is buying singles in the first place.  What Al Green was doing was understandable to the US public, admired, and needed.  The warmth and laid-backness and quietly astonishing aura suit a time when so many young people (read:  baby boomers) were falling in love, wanting to stay in love, and so on.  They heard Green and knew instantly that he knew what he was talking about. 

Slade, though, in the US?  Apart from fans like Lester Bangs, they remained a cult band at best, the kind I imagine a young Joan Jett heard hanging out in L.A., the kind other young kids would have heard while waiting for, say, Aerosmith to hit the stage.  Singles were released, but didn’t really get anywhere, and in part that is because the raucous, recorded-in-a-meat-locker last-day-of-school scene (cornered by Alice Cooper anyway) was hobbled by Noddy Holder’s holler of a voice.  Never mind the spelling – what is he singing?  Why does he have to be so loud, why do the band have to be so stompy and strange at the same time?  What’s the big deal here?   

Slade were thus politely ignored in the US, a nation that needed a cuddle far more than a rebellious howl.  That they were the voice of the working class in the UK, from the Midlands, and deliberately spelt words incorrectly to upset those who thought rock ‘n’ roll was about looking up words in dictionaries (as if) didn’t matter much.  If you can’t understand the singer, even in a basic way, the song isn’t going to get very far.  (I have heard more than one Slade album and confess that there are a lot of lyrics I don’t understand, and even when I do understand them, I don’t always get them.)  This song  (an NME #2) is putatively a love song, but notice how menacing it is; how the guitar snarls, the piano pounds, the ooof-ooof borrowed from Mungo Jerry turns from a happy-go-lucky exhale into something a bit darker and complicated.  This is positively intimidating and disturbing to an American ear, and even though the song’s lyrics are decipherable, in this case, the rough chips ‘n’ malt vinegar tone to Holder’s voice sounds (again, to an American ear) unromantic, his gruff amiability and the band’s glam silliness are lost in the mix. Slade were a band best understood live, but who would go see them based on this in the US, when Grand Funk Railroad and Three Dog Night were the party bands of choice? 

Fans like Bangs would have appreciated their no-nonsense qualities and essential rocking-out vibes, but for the most part Slade were home country heroes, on every teenager’s imaginary rebellious jukebox, representing so many things which were against the Establishment, from their clothes onwards.  This was the sheer stomp and attitude that didn’t have to have vulnerability or finesse, because none were needed nor expected.  Rock ‘n’ roll was most definitely alive in the UK, still loud and threatening, still able to represent those who don’t fit in and don’t really need to, let alone want to.  This is like opening a door to a whole world that is the opposite of Green’s; a world where noise rules, where having fun is #1.  It’s far from the peaceable groove that Americans wanted, but in the UK, where things were tough, it was the new thing – Glam.  (And yes, glitter. For those of you wondering if I’m going to; the answer is yes.) And where Slade charmingly intimidate, others will follow*.  Yes, British rock lives, and sticks out its tongue at The Man.  But elsewhere...

 

Next up:  the long time that isn’t actually all that long ago, if it ever was at all.

*Slade were originally called Ambrose Slade and made music that was a bit less scary than this; in some way this scariness/silliness is intrinsically British, unlike, oh, say, KISS (who clearly heard them and other glam bands of the time) were never truly scary the way Slade were, despite all their stagecraft.  Ridiculous and lovable for it in some way, sure; scary, no.

 

 

The Heroic Kludge: The Moody Blues: "Question"

As 1970 unfolds, the various odd strands that make up music are showing up, some more prominent than others. This song stands not just for The Moody Blues themselves but the whole progressive rock movement, which produced, to quote from I Wanna Be Sedated by Phil Dellio and Scott Woods on Yes, “true seventies classics, exhibiting a musical sophistication and intellectual prowess that left Three Dog Night and Bobby Sherman fans dumbfounded.”

Some may have questioned rock’s need to progress, but as the 60s wound down it emerged, and The Moody Blues were right there in ’67 to stupefy the world with Days of Future Passed, a far cry from their piano-pounding days when the Brumbeat sound was rumbling and rolling as loud as it could. Once Denny Laine left – he who sang on the band’s only #1 their cover of “Go Now” – Lonnie Donegan and Marty Wilde protégé Justin Hayward stepped in, to keen and croon and cry along with the symphonic folk melodies and pastoral romps on that album. (I’m not sure if there wasn’t something in the Birmingham water that made Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood want to get classical instruments into their music, but they proceeded to put them together in a different way, making cellos rock out, etc.) By this time they were the most popular prog rock group in part because they could do songs like this one and actually make them work.

Kludging – the art of sticking two things together and making them function – is accepted in prog rock and indeed almost necessary, as tempos and moods and so on shift as the songs/movements/ideas alter and build up. The Beatles kludged, and so everyone did, when needed; and “Question” is obviously two songs stuck together to become one. The song starts at a Richie Havens-strumming-acoustically intense pace, and there’s the band, and Justin, crying about injustice and why the "thousand million" questions of “hate and death and war” (lest we forget Vietnam is ongoing) are never answered. The knocked-upon door never opens, and the world burns in its greed, as quickly as the song – which sounds like a horse bounding along at top speed* - goes. And then love is mentioned, and the song slows down…

…and the “we” of the first part becomes a confessional, “I’m looking for a miracle in my life” – and clearly the narrator has suffered, but has he found someone? Who is doing “those things” (ah, vagueness) to him? Will she be the one to change his life? Because he cannot just live life like anyone else; he is ambitious – all that door-knocking and idealism is exhausting – and needs someone to change his life, to touch his very soul. That’s a big order, but prog rock is never about mundane life and regular needs. It’s BIG and extravagant and symphonic, as the sudden explosion takes us back to the beginning, the knight off again on his self-appointed mission to get an answer, mellotrons as his sidekicks. The kludging works as in the middle he is in a way asking a question as well, asking this Other of his to become that miracle (once something like that is said it’s hard to ignore), to make his life better. It is slightly absurd that the song is all about the seeking and not finding, but then most of The Moodies’ music is about seeking (or learning to see) and then becoming enlightened, or at least reaching a higher state of understanding, if only for now.

Justin Hayward’s voice is warm and terribly noble – it’s impossible to think of him ever being sly or ironic – and this goes with the folk/rock/orchestral sweep of their music, which has none of the weirdness found elsewhere in prog rock (at this point King Crimson were their main rivals, though Yes were about to take center stage and do what Dellio and Woods mentioned). The Moodies themselves wore themselves out with recording and touring (there are only so many ways you can implore others to “open your eyes, look up to the skies and see” as Queen will eventually put it) but returned chipper and idealistic as ever in 1981, and got yet another US #1 album from the faithful who needed their warmth and optimism in the cold reality of the dawning of the Reagan era. (To put it another way, there were a lot of Baby Boomers who turned to their college-days heroes in their time of need.)

As dumbfounding as prog rock – popping up here as a single, but usually sold by the (double or triple sometimes) album – could be, The Moody Blues bring an urgency and eloquence that may sound silly to some but to a lot at the time made perfect sense. A new decade is taking shape and while some are going to cast off the 60s like so many unfashionable garments, there are those who are going to keep dreaming and questioning and longing for something more; as naïve as this song can be (hate and death and war are not new things, after all) it is a protest song, a song that can barely keep still, pushing the limits of what a single can be. The Moody Blues are making rebellious music for the suburbs, and later in the 70s the suburbs will produce rebellion that is just as heartfelt, if lacking in acoustic guitars and mellotrons.


*The Moodies' popularity in the US was due to their constant touring and the Romantic aspects of their work; there's a lot of Anglophiles who like to think the UK is full of such chivalrous and heroic figures, or at least want music that sounds like what they presume the UK used to be like. That, and they can understand Justin Hayward's voice a lot better than future bands like Slade, who sounded fine on the rocking-out level but speaking as an American I still can't make heads or tails of half of what he sings.

Backyard Trip: Traffic: "Hole In My Shoe"

As many a group found out in the late 60s, the key to success in a group was having a stable and happy group dynamic. This doesn't sound very sexy, but when you consider the groups that kept on going as opposed to those that didn't, those that did were able to continue because everyone was - more or less - content with what their role in the band was. If you have three people in a band who work together on songs and a third who comes in with a song in hand, expecting the others to play it just so then there's going to be problems.

Traffic were such a group; Jim Capaldi, Steve Winwood and Chris Wood wrote songs together (the first two wrote the previously mentioned "Paper Sun") and Dave Mason tended to write songs on his own, like this one. The other three didn't like it but recorded it anyway; I can guess it was a bit too whimsical for them. (Traffic were made up of musicians who had gone out to the countryside, away from the industrial Midlands, to, as they said back then, "get their heads together.") It has all the hallmarks of something almost too typical of the time - sitar (played by Mason), flute, lyrics that once again focus on water (is water the most psychedelic of the elements?), a young girl's narration straight out of a fairytale. The "elephant's eye" harks back to Oklahoma!, the unreal fields (strawberry?) full of tin soldiers, the passive voice wherein everything seems to be happening to him - the only thing he is sure of is that pesky hole that is letting in water...

...this does seem a bit cliched, but then being on a trip at this time was likely the same as having a mystical experience way back when; there are similar experiences and vocabularies you use to explain what is otherwise hard to describe to anyone else. But there is a fine line between using language others can understand and using language everyone has heard before. The psychedelic experience here is fantastical ("bubblegum tree" Mason sings, as if foreseeing the bubblegum pop explosion to come) and disconcerting, and it is only the literal hole in his shoe that is grounding him, perhaps keeping him from floating off to this other world altogether.

So this is not a song about complete absorption, but that tingling sensation that can be an anchor through an otherwise strange experience - and he ends up on his back, his coat getting wet, waking up much like the narrator of "Flowers in the Rain" in that he's outside and communing with nature, not airborne like the child narrator on the albatross, off to a place where the music plays loud.

This is psychedelia as genteel escapism, as opposed to psychedelia that has something to say, per se: it is always awkward when something that seems meaningful to you personally has to be explained to the masses, so Mason must have been gratified (though it irked the others) that this was their biggest hit. They wanted something a bit tougher lyrically and musically, I'd expect; but in the late hazy days of '67 the single-buying public wanted to digest psychedelia as a pastoral thing that didn't threaten their lives but gave them a window to a world where having wet feet was the biggest problem.

What was startling in the winter of '67 was by the fall an accepted commonplace. Dave Mason came and went in Traffic as they themselves ebbed and waned (Winwood formed Blind Faith with Eric Clapton for a while when the ever-embattled Cream broke up in late '68). As the music indeed got louder, bands found themselves in a dilemma - whether to make light "pop" music like this song or go into more complex and tougher territory, leaving behind anyone who just wanted a nice tune to hum on the way to work. '67 was a year when bands could have it all, but many had problems being all things to all single & album fans, and they had to make their choices. (Some had theirs made for them, such as Pink Floyd, whose most "pop" member was Syd Barrett, who was sidelined in the band and then formally left in '68.) The pop scene was changing and rock was the new thing - pop being left for The Housewives of Valium Court and kids who were young enough to enjoy psychedelic pop without asking too much of it.

Yes, the dreaded-by-some 'classic rock era' has by now begun, leaving the singles charts open to almost anything, as we shall see.

BOO!: The Move: "Night of Fear"

And appropriately, we have left the warm, hazy sunshine and stumbled into what seems to be its opposite - it's dark, it's windy, something - who knows what - is causing chills and hallucinations. What on earth has happened?

The Move came out of the tough Birmingham scene (whence previous MSBWT subject The Fortunes ["You've Got Your Troubles"] also came) and they wore their freak flags high. If you sense that these men - Roy Wood, Carl Wayne and later Jeff Lynne - were interested in bringing classical music into rock, you'd be absolutely right. In this case it's nothing less than Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, in specific the culminating part (best known to Americans as when the fireworks happen at Independence Day concerts). The Move had originally been a covers group (doing The Byrds, Motown, 50s rock 'n' roll - whatever appealed to them and their audience) and were already known for being outrageous onstage and off, with various things getting the literal axe, including a television, a Cadillac and a bust of Hitler. Their manager encouraged Roy Wood to write songs, and then they started to have hits, including this one.

What is happening here, clearly, is a bad trip. Paranoia is one of the natural side effects of mind-altering drugs, and with good reason. If you can't perceive what is going on around you accurately, then anything can become...anything, with possibly more than just scary consequences. Green and purple lights, cold blood and howling winds would make any ordinary night a night of fear, but there is nevertheless a jauntiness here that comes as a kind of security blanket, as if the band are saying that yes, some trips are going to be bad but you will survive them. How many heard the warning and understood it I am not sure; it could also serve as a general come-down song after the explosion of energies from '64-'66, that the past (represented by Tchaikovsky) can either be a hindrance or a comforting reminder, depending on how you hear it. Musicians are now listening to others and bringing their work in, and here we have a past master being dropped into the present, helping to jolly along a song about sheer terror.

Already the crossroads are present, confusing and misleading those who try to read the signs too quickly. Whimsy mixed with menace: the sinuous "Sunshine Superman" turns into the night when hobgoblins all too easily become apparent, Halloween happening way too soon. Psychedelia was starting to open up and reveal all kinds of things, good and bad. But could this fear be better than something else?