The second, and last, part of my 20-plus years of locale-specific bass musics travelogue. Last time I dealt with my years living in the American south. This time we head to parts north...
Chicago, 1993-4: What's That Sound?
At the time, I had no idea of what it was I was kept hearing -- something I occasionally hear booming from jeeps as they passed through the block. Hilariously uptempo, threaded on very tight loops of sped-up, stuttering vocal phrases, extremely minimal with only incremental shifts and modulations. At one point, I happened across it on local public access TV, some talent-show program with a bunch of southside high-school kids dancing to it -- slow, rolling bodily undulations passing from head to toe and back again, from limb to limb. I didn’t hear the music all that frequently, when I did it was only from a distance, and it seemed to have come and gone within a season of two. In retrospect, I thought maybe I was hearing an example of Baltimore's "dew doo" beat making an inland incursion, but years later (see last entry below) would realize that what I'd been hearing were local "ghetto house" tracks.*
Chicago, 1993-4, Pt. II: Jungle and Drum'n'Bass
U.K. import tangent, number two. Simon's already weighed in on jungle in a pair of posts, so I’ll gladly defer to authority on the matter.
The first time I heard jungle, via a mixtape I'd picked up, I had no idea what I was hearing -- was startled and bemused by the rush and clatter of the accelerated BPMs.** By the third spin, the music had not only clicked with me, but I had decided it was among the most immersively gorgeous music I’d ever come across. The undertow of the bass was what pulled me in, the way it moved at a fraction of the pace of the drums, provoking the sensation of being pulled into a temporal flux.
At which point Simon delves into early hip-hop. Truth be told, I was planning on passing on that one. But since I spent most of the music’s “mid-school” years totally immerse in the stuff, I naturally have a few things to contribute on the topic...
(Caveat: Since you're listening to this on a computer, a decent set of headphones are recommended.)
What, no mention of Run DMC? The Tougher Than Leather album sported a number of tunes where the Run DMC took a turn away from the stark minimalism of much of their prior material, going with a sound that much fuller and more spacious. I recall a critic at the time saying these two tracks in particular sounded had taken up residency in outer orbit, rapping and mixing while springing off the the space-station walls in zero gravity. An image that has stuck with me over the years (particular when the reverb on the punctuating snare shot darts through the mix of "Run's House). Jam Master Jay was the man, but apparently the bass on the above can be partly attributed to co-producer Davy D..
Simon cites the Beasties. From License to Ill, I remember "Paul Revere" being the cut that dudes used to use to give their woofers a workout. Personally, I had a love/hate relationship with the Beastie Boys in those years, which had taken a dissenting tilt toward the latter by the time Paul's Boutique came out. A friend loaned me his copy, I gave it few spins, and my feeling was that if someone could somehow release an all-instrumental version of the thing, I'd probably be all over it. Thankfully, the production duo that was the Dust Brothers partially obliged me via a couple of 12-inch remixes. The bass bits on their overhaul of "Shake Your Rump" were particularly satisfying.
And as far as live-group era Beasties are concerned: "Jimmie James" was a tune that rode its smoked-out bass line mighty nicely.
A favorite block-rocker from what could be considered the golden era’s swansong summer that was the summer of '93, when the version that appeared on the b-side of the Masta Ace Inc.'s "Slaughtahouse" 12" became the definitive jeep beats of the season. An ode to the "quad"-pumping lifestyle and incivic disturbance coming from the most unlikely of locales -- the (previously) bass-anemic upper East Coast. Sure, the bass on the thing was dope, but I‘ve always found it deeply funny at the same time -- maybe because it sounds kinda "sick" in both senses of the word.
And the conclusion of my contributions to the extramural Blissblog bass poll/topic, intro...
This brief article, which turned up in an early post from Simon's polling, touches on some transmusical fundamentals. Because -- yes -- as the title of an old Smith & Mighty albums once had it, “Bass is Maternal.” Which may all seem a bit intuitive, a bit too physio-/psychoacoustics 101. Because pulse component aside, those low frequencies (espec when majorly boosted via car stereos or massive club PAs) are also deeply corporeal. They envelope and penetrate; making viscera quake, thick stone walls shake, and I don’t doubt it that it's also the ammo for recent sonic weaponry tech.
All of which also partly explains why -- yes -- there are such a things as deaf raves.
I was a little predisposed to bottom-heavy music. My hearing was always a little “hyper-acute” with high-frequencies. Maybe this had something to do with why I avoided whole genres of music that were too tilted to activity in the high-end registers, and more prone responding to tilted toward the opposite end of the spectrum.* Over the years I’ve found myself exposed to a number of varieties of “bass music” -- the sorts that could be considered as constituting some kind of (to borrow one of Simon’s terms) a ‘nuum. But aside from being bass-heavy, the peculiar thing about them is that they each seemed to be specific to certain places/cities/regions. If not being the product of some homegrown locals-only restlessness.
The following is more or less a "doof-doof" travelogue, playing out over the course of 25 years of happening to be in certain places at certain times...
I: 1980s: SOUTHERN/MIAMI BASS
Being a teen in the Deep South of the U.S. after hiphop broke was a dicey affair, especially if you were wanting to hear more and more of it. Throughout the first half of the 1980s, most hiphop from the upper east coast didn’t filter down south. I guess much of it proved too “urban” in its perspective to appeal to places that were at best only semi-urban. But electro-funk took in a big way early in the ‘80s, and had a lasting influence in the southeast. Kraftwerk’s “Numbers” and “Tour de France” got a lot airplay on the non-white radio stations. Stuff like Twilight 22’s “Electric Kingdom” and Egyptian Lover went over massively in clubs and on boom boxes. Some of it brought “that boom” that was popular with a certain demographic. But not enough of it. As Dave Tomkins wrote in his “Primer to Miami Bass” piece in The Wire many years ago, the sub-Mason-Dixon response to much of what was coming from up North was that it involved too many guys in spacesuits and not enough boom.
So the locals started making it for themselves, tweaking the music to their own tastes. And sure, originally the southern booty-bass sound did hail from Miami and parts thereabouts at first; but within a few years it was also coming out of Atlanta and Houston and elsewhere in the SE region. I can remember numerous nights of driving around on a Friday or Saturday night, punching across the radio dial until I found a program where a DJ was playing a weekend party set. Track after track of punchy bass that had my ass careening in the driver’s seat while I steered down thinly-travelled roads in the darkness. At some point me figuring I was listening to the 181st (then 182nd, & etc.) remake of “Planet Rock”, which I was just fine with.**
It was so prevalent, that one could be excused for thinking that that was what most of the hip-hop universe consisted of. So many years later I was a bit thrown when James Lavelle put together a compilation of early tracks by DJ Magic Mike, and I read reviewers writing things to the effect of: “Arrrrgh!! Why am I only now hearing this stuff?” Considering that it was so inescapable to me once-upon-a, I couldn't help being befuddled by finding out that the music was such a marginal & provincial thing.
EARLY '90s, PT. 1 - BLEEP & BASS:
Still a victim of geography at this point. A lot of early U.K. House/early Rave music didn’t make it my part of the country. College kids were I was at the time were in the thrall of lots of northern European “industrial dance”drek. What little early rave fare trickled my way seemed alright enough, because I welcomed the energy. Functional for the dance floor, but didn’t strike me as the sort of stuff I’d want to much time with outside of a club setting. Until a number of tracks popped up that really caught my attention, seemed to be going in a direction that really appealed to me. More bass, and a distinctive use thereof. And, just generally, electronic music starting to move in the direction of kicking its made-upcsounds every which way around inside the listeners head. Years later I would learn that all of these records had something in common; that being that they hailed from city of Sheffield and its surrounding area, and could be filed under the category of the “Bleeps and Bass” subgenre.
EARLY '90s, PT. 2 - HIT THE BREAKS
Around the same time, I was moslty immersing myself in what's not looked backed on as "midskool" hiphop. I also stumbled across a few tunes that excited me tremendously, because they signaled the entry of breakbeats into the rave-culture mix. But at the tim had no idea about “‘ardkore” being a thing, let alone a very divisive, scene-splitting thing across the water. Only that it sounded like something I’d been eagerly waiting for.
But we need to talk about a couple of Atlanta joints. First off...
True, Rob Base & E-Z Rock had had a big big hit using the Lyn Collins "Think" break on their mega-hit "It Takes Two" in 1988; and over the next several years a number of tunes by high-profile acts milked further hits with the same break. But this Atlanta act pitch-shifted it into higher, more punchier bpm territory in a way that must've given a lot of people ideas. The title of the track is sampled from a 2 Live Crew number, and shortly thereafter Luther Campbell & crew in down in Miami responded to 2 Hyped Bros's jawn by doing their own version of the above, speeding it up even more and adding heaps of club-flattening bass.
And then there's this...
B-side wins again, by way of Mantronix-style editing being flipped into full warpspeed. This time via a reissue of Atlanta's Success-N-Effect debut track "Roll It Up N___a", this time with a instrumental remix that had been outsourced to Miami DJs Charlie Solana and Felix Sama, who gave in a Mantronix-in-warpdrive overhaul, using a chopped-up sample of the Winstons' "Amen" break for the benefit of maximum punchiness. If Frankie's Bones's account is to be taken as vaguely factual, then he heard it at the time and started playing it in NYC, and from the audience reaction decided it was worth flipping to Carl Cox, who then took it to overseas connections, where it helped inspire the beginnings of UK breakbeat 'ardkore. Perhaps partly true, or maybe total bullshit, but most likely doesn't matter (except for those that might be looking to get all chauvanistically "nativist" about such stuff).
And admittedly, here's where things get tricky. Because it's the point at which the the symbiosis of bass and kick drum comes in, which could argue consists slippage or cheating on my part. But since the 808 was what got this particular nuum rolling, ittotallycounts by my (and plenty others') reckoning.
Whatever the case, both the "dew doo" [sic] and "amen" breaks will factor heavily in second (more Northern) part of this thing. But for now, that's the end of Part I.
*This is not bullshit. My wife thought it was, until she became an audiologist and put me into a testing booth. Not to gloat or brag, but -- even after years of my abusing my eardrums night after night spent blasting music through headphones, or a fair number of nights spent in clubs with the shittiest acoustics -- in the end my claims were fully vindicated by the test results. ** NOT ENTIRELY TRUE. Lyrics were another matter. Here there are some problems. Not the least of which was the annoying habit of the vocals consistently being placed far too high/frontally in the mix.
If I had to pin it down to a single jazz piece, I’d have to go with John Coltrane’s “Africa.” Large ensemble, including two bassists, one of whom -- whether Reggie Workman or Art Davis -- lays down the pulse on top of which everyone else builds.
Simon told me he expected me to weigh in with a some candidates from the jazz canon, like I did during the drummage shootout. Far be it from me to disoblidge.
But as I said at the outset, I more often than not tend to hear the bass in relation to interplay with the rhythm section as a whole. This is especially the case with jazz. There's plenty of great jazz bassists I could cite -- the obvious list that'd include Charles Mingus, Paul Chambers, Reggie Workman, Jimmy Garrison, Charlie Haden, Ron Carter, Richard Davis, Cecil McBee, etc. & etc. And I’d taxed to identify exceptional work (as evidenced by this-versus-that short solo) by any of the above that’d work for yootubage purposes.
So I think I’ll try this another way. That being: the role of bass in different ensembles hailing from different phases of a particular artist's career/evolution. The artist in question being Herbie Hancock.
Yeahyeah, maybe a bit of a cumbersome conceit, I know. Be that as it may, here goes...
After doing a brief live stint playing in Mongo Santamaria’s band, Hancock decided to do a "Latin" joint for his third LP as a frontman, a quartet outing that also included bassist Paul Chambers and percussionists Willie Bobo and Osvaldo "Chihuahua" Martinez. With the exception of one composition, Hancock completely ditches his usual heavily melodic style of playing; instead playing in an almost wholly percussive manner as he improvises and navigates his way in and around whatever the other three are cooking up (e.g., after the 4:20 mark in the clip above). As polyrhythmic patterns proliferate, shifting this way and that, the duty goes to Chambers to provide the pulse that threads everything together. In effect: Centering the isht.
One of Hancock’s contributions to the Blow-Up soundtrack. Supposedly the bassman this time around was Ron Carter, but this one sounds like it may’ve instead been handled by the sessions' guitarist Jim Hall. Whichever the case, chances are you’ll recognize it right away, seeing it was borrowed some years later Booty Collins when he provided the bass line for a certain very Huge International Dance Hit.
Early on Hancock had proven himself exceptionaly sharp in a couple of departments. Foremost was his ability to pen slick melodic hooks, the sort that put tunes like “Watermelon Man”, "Cantaloupe Island" and “Maiden Voyage” over with audiences and peers in a big way, scoring him a handful of very popular crossover hits. Second was the fact that he -- at the advice of his mentor, trumpter Donald Byrd -- got his publishing right in order from the outset; thus allowing him to collect all due royalties on the aforementioned hits. That money would serve him well by the early 1970s, when Hancock went into full plugged-in/dashiki-and-afro/Zen Buddhist mode with what became known as his so-called Mwandishi Sextet.
Comparisons to Miles’s electric material of these years are common, but there are major differences. Whereas Miles’s electro-fusion material was often cluttered, dense, and heavily scripted; Hancock & crew took a more open, organic, and spacious approach that made for a lot more breathing room between the musicians’ interplay and improvising. It was also a lot more “cosmic” (in a pysch-era/Sun Ra-ish sense) than much of Miles’s work. Aside from Hancock, the personnel for this period included Benny Maupin on reeds, trumpeter Eddie Henderson, trombonist Julian Priester, drummer Billy Hart, and Buster Williams on bass (with the later addition of one Dr. Pat Gleeson on synths). By the time they got around to recording their third and final album, Sextant, Hancock had all but fully ditched his acoustic piano, and Buster Williams’s bass pushed forward in the mix, weighting in with a buzzing, almost stoner-rock type heaviness. If that weren't enough, the bass parts are often multi-layered, usually with Hancock doubling it on the keyboard, and sometimes additionally fleshed with Maupin going low on the bass clarinet or Priester’s bass trombone.
As a musical experiment, the Mwandishi venture didn’t prove commercially viable. Audiences were reportedly enthusiastic, but limited; and the three albums the group recorded netted only modest sales. At which point all of Hancock’s royalties came in handy, him covering the losses and keeping the outfit going by paying band members and traveling expenses out of his own pocket before finally calling an end to the project.
With 1973’s Head Hunters, Hancock backed the whole electro-fusion enterprise up and tried it again -- this time with a more pop-minded approach in mind. And hey, did it ever prove lucrative. The funky New Orleans-style strut of the tune "Chameleon" became a massive hit, as well as a common staple in the repertoires of school marching bands across the country.
By this point he was working with bassist Paul Jackson, percussionists Bill Summers and Harvey Mason, and (once again) outre reedman Bennie Maupin. "Chameleon" is most often known in its abridged 7-inch version -- a version that shaves off a full 13 minutes of the original, largely paring the thing back to the tunes opening theme and vamps, in which Hancock carries the punchy tuba-like bass portions on an ARP Odyssey. It’s only in the song’s full version that you get the expansive middle section (roughly 7:32 - 13:00+ in the clip above), at which point Jackson takes over and helps open the groove up into more broad-vista terrain.
Hancock would record several more albums with the group in the years that followed. Jackson, Maupin and crew would record their own jazz-funk LP without Hancock, adding guitarist DeWayne "Blackbyrd" McKnight for 1975’s Survival of the Fittest; which would provide hiphop producers with a treasure trove of sample-worthy grooves in later decades.
Memphis versus New Orleans edition, rock-steady style....
And hey, check the oh-so helpful annotation from an online (non-bass) guitar tabs for the Meters track:
As far as the regional preferences go in the classic soul department, I've always been shamelessly biased/provincial But to be geographically charitable, I'll throw this one out as easily being among the top five (if not top three) Most Icon Bass Lines of All Time:
Go back and compare the original Undisputed Truth version that had been done just months earlier. Whitfield & company definitely improved it the second time around, starting with scripting something catchier for the bass player.
Thanks to Tina Weymouth, there were a number of early Talking Heads songs that were anchored in strong, prominent bass lines -- “Psycho Killer” and “Take Me to the River” being the first that come to mind. It looks like Simon concurs, since he's singled her out for attention. Yes, Fear of Music sports its fair share of tunes where Weymouth delivers. But “I Zimbra” in particular has never failed to amuse me over the years, mainly because of how the bass pattern alternately accents and punctuates the rhythm engine of the ensemble with an eccentric logic all its own.
And then there's this obscure items from the Chicago soul-jazz scene of the late 1960s...
Melvin Jackson had spent the previous several years playing with Eddie Harris (in fact, a few tunes on Funky Skull are reversionings of tracks he’d cut with Harris a year or two beforehand). Jackson had electrified his upright bass by hooking it up to a series of amps and effects boxes, much the same way that Harris had done with his own tenor saxophone. And to achieve a trippier effect, a number of songs on the album feature Jackson’s bass soaked down with liberal amounts of reverb and delay. The LP also features a lot of session players drawn from the ranks of Chicago's jazz scene of the late '60a (particularly those affiliated with the AACM) -- with the likes Lester and Byron Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Leo Smith, Jodie Christian, Phil Upchurch, Pete Cosey, and drummer Billy Hart helping put the whole thing over.
(Bass & Infrastructure, Installment the Second - Mirrorball Edition)
I suppose it goes without saying that a strong bass line was central in the funk & disco eras, and there's a lot of tunes that make the cut. Far too many to include from the funk canon, so here's a few favorites of my own from the disco...
As 1978-9 rolled around, a lot of disco was becoming more and more generic, more pro-forma, part of which may've contributed to the inevitable backlash. Still, in those years there were still a few songs that featured hooky, poppin' bass lines. Here's a couple of other favorites, featuring (as above) another tune notable for being sampled by TCQ, and another jawn from the P&P label...
And then of course this big hit, in which the bass pretty much takes center stage:
In his first post on this topic, Simon mentions the Larry Graham-derived style of "slap" bass, which become so pervasive and overused by various post-punk and dance acts in the early 1980s. A Certain Ratio used it to good effect before things tipped past the point of maximum saturation:
Always deeply liked the way the bass glides over the surface of that latter tune. And of roughly the same vintage:
Another favorite bass line was from “Regiment”, from Byrne and Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Not complex, but it had a smoldering darkness to it. The duties are attributed to one session musician going by the name of (ugh) Michael “Busta Cherry” Jones, who -- if dodgey search-engine results are to be believed -- had around the time had brief stints playing with Parliament and Gang of Four. I suppose I wasn't the only one, judging from the number of times (like the above) it was sampled a decade or so later.
(or, Bass & Infrastructure, Installment the First)
And speaking of the Decades blogs, it looks like the time has come again; the time when one of the old inter-bloggal musical rifferama/shootout things gets underway. We’ve done riffs, intros, geetar solos, and drummige. And now it looks like Simon Reynolds has chosen this season’s topic -- bass!
Quite frankly, I had been waiting on this one some time ago. My own listening affinities have always tilted toward the low end. But still I think I might this one a bit challenging, given the fact that I a difficult time separating the bass out from its interlocking role in a given rhythm section as a whole.
To get the ball rolling, one of the first things that leaps to mind was prompted by my having recently seen the documentary The Wrecking Crew, which I deeply enjoyed. The thing was an endless parade of pop tunes I knew from my childhood in the early 1970s, lots of songs that were -- well before the advent of "Oldies” or "Classic Rock" radio formats -- still fairly ubiquitous at the time. What’s more, I was struck by the number of times I learned that specific parts of these tunes -- the instrumental hooks or portions that had first grabbed my ear, that had been my favorite part due to the way it made the tune exceptional or snappy, the parts that stood out and stuck with me -- were those parts executed by one or another of a network of (seldomly credited) studio musicians who played on countless West Coast sessions throughout the 1960s. Sometimes it was a guitar riff or what had been laid down by the drummer, but more frequently these tended to the bass parts. Once instance would be when Joe Osborn’s bass gallops ahead of the rest of the backing on the Fifth Dimension's version of "Let the Sunshine In." But most often it was the work of bassist Carol Kaye...
Soon as the film was over, I found myself picking through my record shelves, checking to see if any of the musicians in question turned up on certain favorite records. Sure enough, the first two I reached for featured Carol Kaye and "Wrecking Crew" drummer Earl Palmer, serving as the elegantly-played rhythmic backbone for the arrangements on David Axelrod's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience LPs...
Serge Gainsbourg and arranger Jean-Claude Vannier cooked up a similar type atmosphere a few years later on Gainsbourg’s album Historie de Melody Nelson, complete with a similarly laid-back, funky grooves from the sessions’ bassist and drummer...
So a friend got me the Numero Group Purple Snow anthology for Christmas, which put me in mind of other Minneapolis items. Particularly...
In which the band, playing at a watering hole in Oklahoma City in 1984, decides to bail on its regular set and (for the full duration of the cassette's second side) default to standard bar-band mode, playing a cross-section of Big Hits from the classic and collegiate canons. But being so supremely hammered that they never manage to get very far into any given tune. Check out that playlist from tracks 9-24.
Maybe not so much intros, but a roster of sloppy and inebriated false starts. In the case of "I Will Follow," it definitely qualifies as nothing more than an intro, because the opening riff is all Bob Stinson could manage. X's "The New World" seems to be about the only one they know the better part of. And for the most part, Westerberg's just shoveling in whatever sounds right for approximated lyrics.
Had copies of this and Pussy Galore's Exile on Main St. back then. But I'm sure you know what inevitably happens to tapes if you play them over ten dozen times.
And I've already wearied of the Best Intro topic. On to other things. Started typing this yesterday, and see today -- via BLCKDGRD -- that today is Paul Westerberg's birthday. Pure serendipity, that.
But while we're at it, one last one. One of the most whiplash-inducing kick-offs I know, an old favorite...
Probably more a candidate for riffage than intro. But whatever.
This time, a pair of groovers, both of which happen to date from 1970...
Nice one, with a rewind-worthy intro that gathers momentum and eases into things proper. As a whole, I always found El Chicano's version of the tune infinitely preferable to the Gerald Wilson original. And wudduya know, there's now a vintage live clip of it up now.
Not that the song is a disappointment, but the intro -- by my reckoning -- definitely promises bigger things. Love the intertwining of bass, percussion and scratchy wah-wah guitar in its opening moment.
Elephant's Memory were a weird one. As I recall, back in the day they had the reputation in some circles as being the worst band in existence. Maybe that was partly on account on their Plastic Ono Band affiliation, and maybe it was was also because they actually weren't that good. But their second LP, 1970's Take It To The Streets, definitely had its highlights. Much of the credit being due to their winding up with R&B producer Ted Cooper for the sessions, who was responsible for giving them something of a Motor City sound for the album. ("Mongoose" being the disc's opener.) The LP had a cheap, flat, and fairly cruddy mix to it, however. Plus it was on a small label, with a comparatively low number of copies having been pressed. So when Cypress Hill sampled the opening bass line to "Mongoose," it quickly made the thing an expensive collectors' item among beatdiggers.
More on the Best Intros jawn, Phil puts forth Joy Division's "Dead Souls" as an example of an "all-intro" arrangement. I believe I've had a few tunes cross my mind which'd also fit that description. But a couple of other favorites...
1) Maybe there's a point when a person decides it's time to put away the air guitar, that it's too juvenille a pursuit to carry on with in adulthood. But then maybe there are songs that make you wanna pick the damn thing back up again many years later, despite your advancing age. There's a number of early Ubu tunes that still have that effect on me. This is one of them, partly thanks to its wind-up of an intro. The cycled high-end tone preparing the listener for some of the more "avant" leanings that will follow over the course of the album, the bass fumblings that almost threaten something "jazzy" to come, followed by a wind-up before the whole thing turns into a full-fledged rustbelt garage-burner.
2) Perhaps one of the best introductory salvos by an hotly anticipated new act ever committed to record. Natch, Levene's riffage is enough to place the song firmly in the category of Best Guitar Something-or-other. But before that there's the matter of what happens before that. Everything lines up smartly, entering the room in single file -- first bass, then drums, followed by the vocalist who doles out handshakes all around, then the six-string payoff. Lyrically of course it's all about the frontman putting his former Rotten self out to pasture; but musically I've always found it to be a guaranteed mood-lifter.
And I suppose I'll hold off on any others until Simon's finally able to jump in and play his part. So for now, I'll instead close with a favorite outro...
...complete with the sputtering exit of that coughing fit, which tops everything off perfectly.
It's that time of year again, the sort that brings seasonal jollies. By that I mean the yearly musical shoot-outs that take place -- at the instigation of Simon Reynolds -- among the community of contributors (at al) associated with the Decades Blogs; in which we all put forth our nominees for best geetar riff, geetar solo, bit of drummige, or whathaveyouse. But the call hadn't gone out this year on its usual schedule, perhaps because a number of the prior participants (e.g. Carl, Herr Kasper) have in the past year drifted away from blogging altogether. Simon and I discussed whether or not it was worth bother with. It was decided to maybe push it back, since Simon's trying (I gather) to get a vacation in this Holidays, and I'm going to be busy with the task of packing and relocating to another city as soon as I return home from Christmas. Tentatively, perhaps one devoted to bass (haha!).
But nothing doing, because Phil took the unprompted initiative of declaring the opening of this year's shoot-out, declaring that the subject would be Best Song Intros. And at the same time threw forth a nominee that sets the bar really, really high. Intimidatingly epic, that one -- has me a bit flummoxed about how to proceed. My first inclination is to start thinking in "Suite" terms, which immediately has me thinking of certain jazz tunes, but I'm trying to stay away from jazz this year since I defaulted to it a little too often with last year's drummige thing.
So: Somewhat connected to the clip above (which is there for heraldry, not meant as a contender), let's try this...
Maybe not epic, mind you. And I'm not sure how well these meet Phil's criteria for "Intros." But I have to admit that Gang of Four had a knack for frequently kicking things off in a way that immediately grabbing my attention (and held it) back when I first heard them -- i.e., instant excitement as soon as it struck my ears.
(And I suppose the above could've qualified for the Bass category, as well. Perhaps.)
Back about 12 years or so ago, I had a job in publishing, and for a while I was working alongside a guy who had previously been the original drummer for an alt-rock band of the early '90s. The band had been one of those up-and-coming hopefuls whose career never quite panned out, but got a lot of buzz in their early days because Chicago was then being hyped as "the next Seattle."1 Like a number of drummers I've known over the years, he was intrigued by some of the stuff I listened to – especially of the jungle and breakcore variety – because the pronounced percussive element naturally grabbed his interest. This lead us to talking about his instrument of choice, the nature of recording said instrument, and the various rhythmic fads that had that had come and gone on the years. At one point we started talking about the brief fashionability of electronic drumkits back in the 1980s – how they appeared the music world as a whole, were briefly everywhere, and then began to disappear a few years later. "Yeah, everyone bought a kit. Even Def Leppard's drummer had them for a while," he said, grinning and rolling his eyes. "And it seemed like, with certain makes, no matter how you hit 'em, they always had that same shallow sound." He punched the air to illustrate,"'Doof!'"
Relatedly, I only recently got around the checking out the Onion AV Club's "Hatesong" series, beginning with Robyn Hitchcock's dismantling of Christopher Cross's "Arthur’s Theme." Naturally, the most popular installment of the series was with Steve Albini, who in the course of addressing Cher's "Believe," discusses how fads catch on and sweep the music industry:
"So [as a producer] I'm kind of sensitive to that stuff happening in recordings, and it happens a lot with recordings when there’s a technological advance, like in the '80s, when drum machines became really prominent in production. A lot of albums were made where, even if it was a band that had a drummer, the drummer didn’t appear on the record, because the drum machine was just so much more reliable in the mind of the producer or the engineer or whatever. You had all these bands whose drummer was just surreptitiously or even openly replaced by a drum machine. That sort of standardized the production aesthetic for a few years there. Everybody from Pat Benatar to Martha And The Muffins to Frankie Goes To Hollywood — there was a period when their drummers weren’t allowed to appear on records. Even hard-rock bands. I don't want to name any examples, because I'll probably be wrong in the specifics, but in the hair-metal era, you'd hear a lot of heavily produced synthetic drum sounds.
"Those things are kind of grating if you're aware of the area behind the curtain in Oz, and you see this happen. Whoever has that done to their record, you just know that they are marking that record for obsolescence. They're gluing the record's feet to the floor of a certain era and making it so it will eventually be considered stupid."
The irony of course being that Albini's first band, Big Black, sported a Three Johns-ish line-up of three guitarists and a drum machine, the album credits including the attribution "...And Roland just being Roland." I recall some time around 1986 a friend of mine telling me about an interview he’d read in some fanzine where Albini had said he preferred having a beatbox because most drummers he’d met or auditioned where "guys who just like hitting things."2
Back in the late 1990s, when the post-rave "electronica" trend was at it's peak, I remember seeing a bumpersticker turn up on a few vehicles, declaring: "DRUM AIN'T MACHINES GOT NO SOUL." An arguable assertion, and I guessed that the vehicle in question were probably driven by a musician. Drum machines (the 808, the digital "clap trap," et al.) had of course been a staple of 80s hip hop, a holdover from its electro-funk days that finally yielded to sampled breakbeats in the latter years of the decade. Certain beats -- from "It's a New Day" or "Funky Drummer" -- were sampled repeatedly, threaded uncountable number of tracks during those years. Perhaps one of my favorite oft-sampled breakbeat tracks from the era was the Five Stairsteps' "Don't Change Your Love," as produced by Curtis Mayfield; which sported a drum track that was absurdly frontal in the mix during the tune's opening seconds, and remarkably industrial in its almost robotic heaviness and consistency...
Changes are you know that beat, that you've heard it. Jeezus, that sound.
I believe that in one of my contributions to the "drummige" throwdown back around the new year, I lobbed in one of my lifelong gripes about the music of the '80s; about how -- in some respects -- it was a rhythmically dismal decade as far as mainstream trends were concerned. Felt like it at time, and I have no nostalgia for much of the music of that time whatsoever. My main complaint was the post-disco tendency toward simplifying the beat -- stripping the funk back to a cold, stark (sometimes almost oppressively severe) metronomic minimum. But this was also augmented by the craze for Simmons-style electronic drums, which -- no matter how loudly they were mixed in any given tune -- always sounded a bit anemic and inhumanly uninflected to my ear. And was happy to see them fall from favor, as they were bound to.3
But at the time, they had the status that any such technological novelty or gadget receives -- being adopted and widely bandied about the sound of Now, if not (the pretense goes) the sound of The Future. Which is the irony undergirding Albini's remark about "gluing the record's feet to the floor of a certain era."4 A lot of musicians hated synthesizers and drum machines. Musicians unions hated them most of all. The argument being that studios were using them as cost-cutting measures, using synths and drum machines in such a way that it was putting some session musicians out of work. In one respect, one could argue that they effectively were the sound of the time -- a sort of musical equivalent of the post-Fordist economy.
1. That didn’t quite pan out, either. 2. Ironic too because a hallmark of many of the records Albini recorded early in his production career was a very distinct drum sound – quite heavy and prominently placed in the mix. Dunno if this was his choice or he was simply enabling the musicians' aesthetic preference, if there was some predilection for that sort of sound among a certain type of post-pigfuck, grunge-era American alt outfits. You can hear it to some degree on In Utero, but I remember it being a bit overdone on the first Jesus Lizard EP. 3. I also thought they looked kinda retarded, as well. 4. For instance, the Simmons electronic drumkit was widely adopted by veteran pop-jazz outifts at the time (e.g., your Herb Alberts and Ramsey Lewises) as one of many ways they sought to update their act and sound more "contemporary."
And given the Chi-centric nature of that last mixtape, I probably should've used this as the graphic. But then agian, had I fully gone with my own inclinations toward a period-specif Chi comp, it'd stack up to little more than "A Beginner's Guide to Charles Stepney." Which I would assume is already knowd territory (or should already be, at least).
Anyway: Peavey. Seems like from various magazines back the day -- everything from Hit Parader to Musician -- used to regularly feature the Peavey celebrity-endorsement ad. Quite the aggressive marketing campaign, they had. Rudy Sarzo of Quiet Riot uses Peavey. Gary Richrath of REO Speedwagon uses Peavey. Carmine Appice used some Peavey product or another. Sure they do. Because talk to any musician you knew, and chances were very high that the scoffing unanimous consensus was that Peavey absolutely sucked. Maybe get one of their low-end guitars if you're teaching yourself how to play, they'd shrug, but from thereonout -- nuh uh.
As I recall, Golden Earring reputedly used an all-Peavey PA system when touring stateside. Which I can believe. Because the consensus from the same quarters would have it that the two deserved each other.
Headspillage, tangents, fragments & ruminative riffing. Guaranteed to sustain a low level of interest, intelligibility, or lucidity for most outside parties.
