British Invasion

When that really bad 'Star Wars' prequel came out a few years ago... the one with Jar Jar Binks and all that horribleness... it caused people that weren't besotted completely with the brand nostalgia of George Lucas to hate not only the new piece of crap on the screen, but also to question whether their 'Star Wars' love of youth had really been because of some greatness inherent in the movies, as we had always assumed, or whether it was naive buying into hype in a more innocent time. Like LenBarker said in his musings on Macca, the later product inevitably went back and tarnished the long ago loved object of love and hope and excitement.

So the inevitable question is: were the Beatles great because of hype or because of their own genius? An examination of this question is done best when looking at their early material, when they burst on the scene.

What was it about the Beatles and this time - 1963/4 - when they took over the American imagination and launched themselves as icons of an era? Instead of looking at the Kennedy assassination and the needs of America for hope and all that nonsense, let's just look at what the Beatles offered in more musical/cultural terms.

First off, as has been noted, 'With the Beatles' and 'Meet the Beatles' are quite different: the former was the earlier UK release to a public already Beatle-crazy, featuring a lot more RnB covers, etc. 'Meet the Beatles' was a later release (Jan. 64) to the US market just getting its first real taste of the group, with more original songs. The titles are enough to tell you of the first major factor in the Beatles' stateside, rather than English, success. The English were already 'With the Beatles' but the Americans were meeting them for the first (real) time. This is important, a conscious part of their stateside marketing: the thing that the Fab 4 did so well was take that American love of personality and increase it by an order of 4. US rockstars had mostly been individuals, these great powerful figures that captured the imagination like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis and such. Sure, there were groups like Phil Spector's groups and the Coasters and stuff, but they did not peddle the same cult of personality that the Elvi of the world did. The Beatles, in the public appearances and on the record itself, were 4 distinct personalities, and the Americans loved it, talking about who was the cutest, etc. Whereas before these rockstar comets of personality, like Elvis, represented an undeniably cool hoodlum renegade, the bad kid in the back of the classroom throwing spitballs they could be contained, extinguished by their own dangerous desires like James Dean, locked up for bullshit like Chuck Berry, tragically killed like Buddy Holly, sent off to the Army like Elvis, and so on. Here were 4 of them - not an isolate-able hoodlum presence but, in their number, a veritable movement, un-containable. 4 individuals, coming together as one. This was the lesson of the English, who always excelled, quite logically, in the group dynamic of rock n' roll. They always have the better groups and we have the better individual stars (exceptions, like Bowie, exist of course). This was the first element of the British Invasion, and they KEY to the British Invasion if you ask me, that would continue even up until Led Zeppelin stomped around the stage like rock gods... gosh, only 6 years after this album. The social, lads-quality of the Beatles a path for a communal merging of egos, a first 1960's lesson.

As I said, this is not only reflected in their public appearances full of joshing and cheekiness, but also in their songs. John sang John songs; Paul sang Paul songs, and they already have that different feel. Both are exuberant, exciting young singers, but Paul has that sweetness, John that edge, already.

Then there is the other thing about their image. People have commented in the past about how the 1963-4 Beatles offered this watered-down, innocent version of rock n' roll sexuality, with the tepid covers (yeah, that's right) of Chuck Berry and others on the 'With the Beatles' and their originals saying stuff like 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' and shit like that, much more innocent than the clear-and-present danger of Elvis and Chuck Berry and Little Richard (for god's sake not him!) to the little girls and wannabe hoodlum boys of America. And, sure, that's there, these Beatles were a bit soft, palatable for the moms and pops watching Ed Sullivan. But at the same time you gotta remember that the seat cushions at a Beatles concert would be wet - such that they had to wiped off - from the adolescent pussy juice from the teenage girls screaming (and creaming) and bouncing in their seats as the boys sang about hand holding. "She was just 17... if you know what I mean..." Yeah, we know Paul, and so did the 17-year olds you were singing to. So the sexual power of rock music was there, in a different form, and the kids knew all about it even if their moms smiled and quietly thanked God Elvis and his hips weren't up there anymore. The sexual language of rock music had become so ingrained that the Beatles could send 2 messages at once: the innocent one to the world at large, and the sexual one to the kids craving it. This sort of double-voice message would be a feature of their music forever (Paul is a Gemini remember), they invited interpretation of their minds, their messages, there's always something going on. Paul's sweetness next to John's bullishness created a well-rounded artistic vision, making each of them much cooler than they would have been alone. How could they be so corny and yet so lovably sincere at the same time? How did it work?

And another key thing, more overlooked in the RnB-to-rock evolutionary history of rock n' roll that is over-emphasized. The Beatles took a lot of their energy not just from Elvis and Chuck Berry, but also from a different place. Look at that cover: 4 brooding, turtleneck-wearing beatniks! And that hair! If the Beatles were bringing a white-boy cultural quality to RnB, they weren't bringing a Ricky Nelson suburban thing, but a European-ish poet vibe as well. The Beats and the folk revivalists were also doing this, but hadn't plunged into the mainstream like the Beatles would with ease. This represented a new force in popular music, the voices of individual poets, subjectivities telling their piece to the listeners. Of course, previous rock music had had great, poetic lyrics (Chuck Berry was a master sound-smith), but this was different. This element would add a whole new dimension to rock music in the coming years, and the Beatles are making the world (relatively) safe for Beatniks and Freaks.

The Beatles, then, were particularly interesting because they plugged effortlessly into a marketing formula that worked. Safe, English, cult-of-personality rock for celebrity-consuming culture, but with enough integrity and real edge to pull it off without flaming out quickly. The hype was real, it came from a real sense of novelty and personality that the boys represented, and what was really interesting is that they didn't get crushed under the hype machine and the powerful brand identity that they knew they had cornered, they actually built off of it and got better as the years went on. Too bad George Lucas couldn't figure that one out. click here to
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End of the Innocence...

Dad rock.

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Bowie Kills the 60's

Just before my older sister got into DC Hardcore (this was the '80's, when Georgetown was cool), she listened to rock music, but rock music that sounded more dangerous and mature than the stuff on the radio like the Thompson Twins or "Karma Chameleon." This was when I was 10 or 11, on the cusp of adolescence but still basically a kid. In this phase, my sister had the holy triumvirate of the 1970's represented on her wall. (No, RS reader, this is not Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles.) I didn't know who any of them were, but I was fascinated by them because they seemed so cool, exotic, and older sister.

There was a poster of Lou Reed, although I didn't know the name, blurred out (it was the "Rock n' Roll Animal" album cover), and a weird poem about "smack" and "jim-jims" and "politicians making crazy sounds and dead bodies piled up in mounds." I didn't know what any of it meant, but I loved reading it because of the way it sounded (the opportunity to discuss this one will come later in the blog's life). Iggy Pop did not have a poster, but was instead represented by some lyrics my sister had scrawled on the wall in ball-point pen next to the phone where she exchanged dark secrets with her cool older friends.

And the king of them all was Ziggy Stardust, in a huge black-and-white poster, gazing down on the room like an alien space God pharaoh, with that disk of make-up on his forehead, glowering. He seemed so weird, I didn't know if it was a boy or a girl, and I didn't even associate that poster with the David Bowie that my sister always prattled on about. I didn't know who this creature was, but I knew he was better than me, knew everything, had to have seen it all, and certainly was able to be cool in a room full of cool older people, and probably wasn't "such a fucking spazz," like me.

I also remember from this period the song "Starman" playing on my sister's tapedeck. I didn't associate the song with the poster or with David Bowie, but I loved it. It sort of seemed like a children's story, but with an extra dose of sadness that I always liked, like "The Little Prince." It was about an alien who knows all this stuff, but he's afraid to come let us know about it because it will "blow our minds." I wanted him to come anyway - I thought that I understood him, and that I could withstand what others who didn't get him couldn't. The song made me feel like I was an insider, and that there were squares out there keeping the world from cool guys like the Starman. But I could handle it, I knew it.

I did not pursue Bowie, and my sister moved on to DC hardcore, as I said, (but, to her credit, never took down the Ziggy Stardust poster), and then she went to college. I started listening to music like Led Zeppelin, the Who, Beatles, Dylan, all those guys, music I loved then and love today. And so when I rediscovered Bowie in high school, it was sort of coming at him through my blossoming interest in 1960's rock music.

Which is very appropriate. Bowie started off as a flower child, admiring Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd at the UFO Club. His grossly underrated first album, Space Oddity, trafficked in the mystical psychedelia of his peers, although it was already showing signs of something different, with the legendary title track's evocation of outer space travel not so much a Pink Floyd-ian freakout as it was an opportunity to meditate existentially on loneliness and insanity. Paralleling Marc Bolan's evolution from Hobbit-rocker Tyrannosaurus Rex to glam-god T-Rex, Bowie went in a new direction as the 1960's, at least on the calendar, came to a close.

Ziggy Stardust is the culmination of Bowie's metamorphosis. Gone was the flower child singing of free festivals and laughing gnomes, and here was this freak celebrity rock star, delivering a new message to the waiting masses from on high. This reinvention was total, requiring a new persona, that of the alien Ziggy with a new message for the kids. What was this message? In a lot of ways, Bowie's still the '60's kid, singing about space aliens, dreams, and freaking out, testing the limits. But things have changed, babies. The alien is not singing about a tribal, communal experience of mind expansion: this exploration is a personal trip. It is a coming-of-age story, telling the young ones, those at the feet of the knowing alien, that the new territory is sexual awakening. I mean, look at the video.



Look at these young girls being flattened, communing with something they had not yet experienced, sex with a superior being, the knowing one, the better one, watch them undulate at the 2-minute mark, watch the girl in post-coital extasy after Mick Ronson's guitar solo has taken her "out... far out..." This is a new message of rock n' roll, purely Dionysian, the rock god celebrity spectacle rather than the tribal communion. It is the moment when the Moon/Teenage Daydream, the devotion to the rock idol, finds its communion in the performance on the stage. It is a return of music to its nature as an ecstatic, sexual rite, away from the everybody politics of the 1960's. Listen Suffragette, leave your feminist trip behind if you want to really go places that are REALLY out there. You can't afford the ticket to my show, you've got too much baggage for the good time. Are you a real freak? Well, no more kid stuff.

This sounds cold, and it can be, this brutal reality. But your rock n' roll momma/poppa, he's been where you are, he understands. "Just turn on with me, and you're not alone." The trip we're taking, the one in which he leave the kid stuff behind, it's a suicide, in a way, the death of your old self so that the new one, a freak alien, but an aware one, unlike those perma-children who never test their boundaries and remain squares with their childish hangups their whole lives, can be born. Bowie was performing a rock n' roll suicide on all of the naive things he cherished - everyone cherished - in the 1960's, signaling that that ego ideology of exploration was reaching its inevitable and logical conclusion. Bowie was killing the 1960's; against the deeper, more basic power that he was representing, that era would seem quaint, nostalgic, too easy ("cuz it ain't easy.")

That's why, as exhilarating as the posters and their promise of coolness and dark secrets in my sister's room were, I also knew there was something scary about them, about what I was going to go through as I said goodbye to my childhood years. At least I would have Bowie to help me. click here to
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Rising from the Sh!t

Amazing what a guitar solo can do for a record's reputation. I mean, when your friends ask you for the prototypical face-melting guitar solo, just put on Maggot Brain's title track. It's all set up by Clinton providing the necessary philosophical context, about rising from the sh!t of the earth. That's what rock can be, finding something celestial in the mundane. And Eddie Hazel's solo takes you on that trip: it starts off sad, despondent, a lamentation, and then, still in the same seam, about halfway through it elevates and becomes triumphant. It's a real spiritual thing, bringing tears to the stoned for decades, I'm sure.

I can talk about the solo for days. It's in the pantheon, Eddie Hazel the black Jimmy Page. The rest of the record... not so much. I mean, the second track is a funk hippie gospel rave-up structured around acoustic guitars (FUNKY acoustic guitars) and a rising girl chorus, and after tracks #1 and #2 you think this is going to be one of the best records of all time. Then things slow down. I mean, it stays funky and loose and far from uptight, but it is just a bit scattered, and it doesn't work quite as well.

So I guess we should talk about whether this deserves to be on a greatest list, and historical significance and whatnot. I mean, what makes Funkadelic so exciting? On this album, they seem like hippies to me. This is a committed, fried, acid-head psychedelic record, really, but with an exciting black twist. "Wars of Armageddon," the sound collage freak-out that ends the record, is really like a lot of other efforts, and not as good as those of the Beatles or the Deviants (not on this list... a tragedy) or others. I personally think that they're still finding their sound here, and that the later records really display Funkadelic at their Funkadelic-est. As an announcement of purpose, this must have been exciting, rawer and rock-bandier than Sly and the Family Stone, less ego-y than Hendrix, looser and funkier than Led Zeppelin, more blue collar than the Pink Floyd, more American than Black Sabbath. But they would get better...

... except for the guitar solo. Nothing would get better than that. In fact, when people talk about this record, they inevitably talk about the guitar solo, the story behind it (Clinton told Hazel to "play like your mother just died.") It's sort of like people always talk about tilting at windmills when they talk about Don Quixote - that happens in like the first 50 pages, which I suspect is all that people read. I think people listen to the first 2 tracks, and then they are just so blown away that the rest doesn't matter. Maybe that's the right reaction, really, but I want a little more for a rock canon. click here to
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