Curse of Beatlemania

LewRockwell.com ^ | 1/12/2002 | Joseph Sobran

[BluesDuke]

He was THE drummer in my opinion for speed and timing.

A friend of mine says no way, Neil Peart of Rush. They're both good, though I think Neil sort of followed Moon's style a bit.

But I still like John Bonham the best. His drumming is what gave Zeppelin their unique sound.

And none of the above, good as they were (and Keith Moon was better than as good as it gets; he did, after all, make it possible for a rock drummer to be a lead instrument, if you listen again to early Who singles like "I Can't Explain" and "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere") could have carried Ginger Baker's jock strap in Baker's prime (predominantly with Cream, of course).

John Bonham was the right drummer for Led Zeppelin, but Led Zeppelin assuredly was the sum (the multiplication? considering their fetish for overdubbing and up to quadruple-tracking parts) of their parts, aside from which Bonham was only a more polished and controlled version of Carmine Appice, who really brought the bottom-heavy pound-and-club style and miking to hard rock via the early Vanilla Fudge recordings a couple of years before Led Zeppelin's premiere. (My own call: Bonham's best drumming comes on Physical Graffiti, which may actually be Led Zeppelin's most underrated album...)

[BluesDuke]

From what I understand, Clapton has quite a temper. Did he sack the ole' boy?

Eric Clapton does know how to blow when you prick him hard enough - but Robert Stigwood actually remained Clapton's manager after Cream's split-up, and stayed with Clapton until the mid-1970s. To his credit, Stigwood stood by Clapton through his wrenching heroin addiction and withdrawal, and was wise enough to shepherd his client carefully enough when Clapton was ready at last to go back to work again in 1974. Apparently, Cream didn't learn until well after the fact that Stigwood hadn't told them about Monterey, but Stigwood's alternative plan, to crisscross the band across the U.S. and let them pick up word-of-mouth that was bound to spread fast enough, once enough audiences got a taste of their distinctive style of group improvisation (for a band who got together in the first place as a blues group, Cream ended up giving the rock audience a gander at something approaching free jazz, though their blues sensibilities surely prevented them from going as far off the deep end as the actual free jazzmen often went) and fiery-cool music style, ended up being an even better payoff for Cream than Monterey might have been. Cream was that big as a concert attraction in their short life: the benefit of their Monterey skip was that, just by being their own selves, they guaranteed they'd be taken on their own terms rather than as a byproduct of someone else's bigger idea...

[UnBlinkingEye]

I forgot the most important point of the post. The Who had quit, as far as we knew, smashing their instruments at the end of the show.

I don't know if it was the crash of the equipment truck or the delay of the concert, but... At the end of the Tommy set Pete tossed his guitar up into the air, whirling ten feet above his head, caught it coming down, resumed playing, then whipped it over his shoulder, like an axe, and smashed it into the stage. Then he, Keith and Roger kicked, smashed and generally destroyed the rest of the instruments and equipment onstage. I had always thought that was the stupid part of the Who, but when I saw it live it was great!

[weegee]

Not for nothing was Hendrix the final scheduled performer for Woodstock a couple of years later, by which time the Who - who also appeared at Yasgur's Farm - had retired the bust-up routine from their concerts.

I recall that Pete Townsend has called that the worst concert they ever had to play. Pete also got a little bit of the bust-up in the act when Abbie Hoffman tried to get onstage during the Who's set.

Jimi had daylight which gave us a great filmed recording of what he did that day but he may have chosen unwisely for the crowd as it had diminished to something like 40,000 (still a great size audience but a pale shadow of the numbers at the event). He gets the history, glory, and posterity of closing that event though.

[willyboyishere]

Possibly the wackiest post/reply I've ever read on FR. Theodor Adorno wrote lyrics for the likes of Freddy and the Dreamers, etc.? The Tavistock (Institute)which you cite but don't give background for, was a place R. D. Laing was affiliated with, a pretty obscure (but, yes, radical) scientific study institution. Or was that all intended as humor?

[Revolting cat!]

Let me throw out there an idea I've had for a while.

There have been two distinct traditions in Anglo-American (and others as well) popular music: a folkloristic tradition with roots in mostly rural English and American folk music and the theatrical tradition, for lack of a better term, with roots in city commercial popular music, vaudeville, musical theater, and so on. The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Pretty Things, the Yardbirds were basing their sounds and getting inspiration from the former, the Liverpool bands were getting their inspiration from the latter. Leiber, Stoller, Goffin and King were all Jewish, but the first two were essentially blues songwriters, while the last two were pop, Broadway songwriters. The clear evidence of this distinction is on the Rolling Stones and the Beatles mature 1966 albums Between the Buttons (the British release, please!) and the Beatles Sgt Pepper. The former, still to a large degree a blues or rhythm and blues album, the latter entirely a pop album with clear nods toward vaudeville.

This explains (to me) the staying power of the Rolling Stones and the sorry post Beatle careers of the other guys. This is why the Pretty Things could make a terrific come back album a year or two ago, while no one would expect a silmilar effort from say Gerry and the Pacemakers. Roots rules, folks!

[weegee]

That pretty much was one of Berry's last classics. But if you want to catch his best late 1960s work, hunt down that live album he did (originally on Mercury) with the original, five-piece (including Boz Scaggs) Steve Miller Band, at the Fillmore West. Like blues giant (and I do mean giant, at 6'4" and about 280 pounds) Albert King, Chuck Berry and the Fillmore crowd - that part of it who weren't totally under the spell of the Grating Jefferson Dead Tuna Messenger Starship, that is - were made for each other.

I've had this album on CD for about 15 years. I don't know if it is in print but it carries the Mercury logo (and a Polygram copyright). The recoding is ADD. The UPC code is 422-836072-2 and the release is tagged 836 072-2, title: Chuck Berry - Live At Fillmore Auditorium.

[UnBlinkingEye]

On the topic of Irving Berlin, I believe:

My favorite, and a gem of harmonic and melodic sophistication, "How Deep is the Ocean".

I'm not familiar with the composition, but Mr. Berlin was one of the great composers. If you note it as one of your favorites, we should all listen.

[BluesDuke]

Pete also got a little bit of the bust-up in the act when Abbie Hoffman tried to get onstage during the Who's set.

At Woodstock, what Townshend did was smack Hoffman with the butt end of his guitar. I would have done the same thing, and I never thought of smashing my guitar onstage.

It could also have been that a prime reason Townshend called Woodstock one of the worst shows they had to play was a) because the Who, who were initially advertised as one of the five key acts to the whole festival in the first place, ended up getting screwed out of their promised appearance fee, and b) they almost didn't play at all, because they'd been touring heavily that year (on Tommy) while Townshend was suffering severe back trouble that made it difficult for him to play. I had seen, with my summer camp on a special trip, a concert at Tanglewood, Mass., three weeks before Woodstock, which amounted to all but a Woodstock warmup: the Who and Jefferson Airplane shared top billing, with B.B. King as the show opener (and that was the night he made an irrevocable blues person of me, not to mention making me want to get home and begin trying to play a guitar seriously, he was that beautiful that night), and the Who cranked out a two-hour show, later reports of which indicated Townshend was close enough to having to be hospitalised, until his doctor from England could be flown over to treat him and get them through Woodstock...

[wonderboys]

Joe Sobran is a square...and as wrong about the Beatles as he is about the Civil War...

[Reaganwuzthebest]

Thanx for the comments BluesDuke. I'll respond tomorrow, I've got to get some sleep. Cheers.

[weegee]

This is why the Pretty Things could make a terrific come back album a year or two ago, while no one would expect a silmilar effort from say Gerry and the Pacemakers.

I've read that the Pretty Things album is supposed to be good but haven't found a copy yet. It is still in iffy proposition for any band to go back to the studio (or stage) after many a year absence and pick up where they left off.

On a thread related note, George Harrison wanted to contribute to the Pretty Things album but they wanted him to record in the studio with the band (as that is the way that they work) and he wanted to work in his home and send in some tape.

If you can get to NYC, the Cavestomp is a yearly festival where old bands reunite (sometimes for the first performance in 30 years). They have also started doing a monthly concert series. I just wish I could see a few on these acts on the road!

Past acts have included:
The Creation
The Standells
The Monks
The Pretty Things
The Chocolate Watchband
? And The Mysterians
The Music Machine
The Electric Prunes
The Mighty Hannibal
Rudy Ray Moore did his 1950s R&B material in NYC too but I don't know if it was associated with this outfit.

I've been to a similar festival (the Las Vegas Grind) in Las Vegas but it's undetermined if the event will be held again (it was in 1999 and 2000).

[BluesDuke]

As essential as EC was to Cream, they doubtless would've been just an historical footnote had it not been for the classically trained (and jazz infused) Jack Bruce and polyrhythmic monster that was/is Baker. To my ears, Ginger is like a combination of Elvin Jones and native African elements.

What you had with Cream was three musicians who were at once so diffuse and yet, when they knitted, it came forth as the most proper of wholes - the concept that became Cream could not possibly have worked if even one of the players had been different (and Bruce and Baker recently tried a kind of power trio format with, I think it was Gary Moore, but it sounded very forced, and very un-fluid; the same thing, I think, might have happened had Clapton and Bruce recruited another drummer, even Elvin Jones himself, or if Baker and Clapton had recruited another bassist).

You had Baker, who was indeed the polyrhythmic monster but his least appreciated quality is the one which Eric Clapton to this day says he spotted in a heartbeat through every one of Baker's patterns and embellishments: the man could flat swing. (Baker was very adept at translating ancient rural blues into modernistic percussive patterns; listen to his unusual way of swinging Clapton's re-arrangement of Robert Johnson's "From Four Until Late" - there are a few places in which it's Baker's tom-toms, without cymbals, as much as Clapton's rhythm guitar that evoke the kind of bass-string attack Johnson liked to use for a basic blues walker, and the effect is chilling.) You had Bruce, who took a classical training and veered between the pure blues and a few different jazz strands, plus he had perhaps the most acute pop experience of the three (he'd actually spent a short time replacing Paul Jones as the lead singer, while also playing bass, for Manfred Mann, prior to helping form Cream). And you had Clapton, who was thoroughly blues, still, yet itching to stretch without being overstretched and had found, first separately and then together (he had actually been working with Bruce a bit before Baker approached him to think on forming a new group, at which point Clapton suggested Bruce as the bassist), two musicians who would and could give him that, neither overpowering nor undersupporting each other.

Such was Cream in live performances; in the studio, of course, they were almost a different band entirely, bent as much on almost avant-garde pop experimentation as on the blues, and while their overall songwriting ability wasn't always consistent, they had a number of intriguing ideas - and all but a fourth member, with producer Felix Pappalardi picking up practically any instrument they wanted and figuring out just enough to give them the additive they wanted. Plus, out of their own heads, they produced some of the most vibrant blues of their brief period - specifically, Clapton's "Strange Brew" (which Felix Pappalardi had helped him knock into a more accessible thing; it derived from an arrangement Clapton worked up for an ancient blues, "Lawdy Mama"), Bruce's "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Sleepy Time Time," not to mention Clapton's arrangement of "Spoonful" (the studio version, on Fresh Cream) which practically defined the manner in which power-trio-oriented and "heavy" rockers (as they were called in 1967-69; the "metal" part came a shard later) would tend to attack the blues with not even half of Cream's dynamics or subtleties (Clapton, wisely, rested the whole thing over Bruce's rich bass sound and bound it all with the bassist's harmonica line, giving him and Baker room aplenty to make a colouristic take of the Howlin' Wolf chestnut).

And though only too many bands who followed picked up on their huge popularity and went further and further past the edge into long, winding, endless improvisations of little more than bombast, it wasn't exactly Cream's faults that the students saw the reactions the teacher got without quite listening to the lessons. Rolling Stone had it about right: the bottom line was that, for all that and their own occasional flaws, Cream really did have rock's best interest at heart.

[MarkWar]

>"L.A. Woman" and "Riders on the Storm" do it for me every time. ...

Yeah, I don't know if it's just that I heard the Doors when I was young and getting to know girls and all that, so now the songs are part of my whole mind, or if the songs are just that good. Either way, they do it for me, too.

And, until I went to get the lyric link to "The End," I had forgotten that "The Crystal Ship" had one of my favorite couplets of all time, poetry or music:

Before you slip into unconsciousness
I'd like to have another kiss
Another flashing chance at bliss
Another kiss, another kiss
..."The Crystal Ship"

[laughs] There aren't many people who would rhyme "kiss" with "unconsciousness" and actually get it to sound romantic, but the Doors did it...

Mark W.

[dennisw]

My favorite Cream is that first version of "Crossroads" done live on the double album. That is one heck of a cut and I wonder how many kids learned to do EC's guitar solo note for note!

[dennisw]

I liked the Oliver Stone Doors movie too.

[Revolting cat!]

It is still in iffy proposition for any band to go back to the studio (or stage) after many a year absence and pick up where they left off.

Agreed, except that the Pretties haven't been exactly absent, just invisible to most of us. They've been putting out albums throughout the years. (I haven't been an avid follower, so I can't telly you much more. But I might check out their back catalog now.) Anyway, I bought Rage Before Beauty, their latest, not too long after it came out for something like $7, at my record store which often sells DJ and promo copies, and later saw it there for even less. If you like the old Stones, you'll absolutely love it, it's that good, plus you might end up wishing the Stones had developed along similar lines. Oh, well...

[UnBlinkingEye]

Before you slip into unconsciousness
I'd like to have another kiss
Another flashing chance at bliss
Another kiss, another kiss

Jim Morrison, was a genius (according to reports of scholastic tests) some excellent lyrics. Just curious, how old were you when this song was released? Wasn't it on 'The Doors' their first album?

[UnBlinkingEye]

On Cream:

And though only too many bands who followed picked up on their huge popularity and went further and further past the edge into long, winding, endless improvisations

Bringing to mind The Greatful Dead. May they rest in peace. The only way to be a happy fan, just a guess, was to be totally whacked on acid.