The Beautiful One Has Come: Reflections From a Damaged Jukebox
As I'm preparing to write about Job, I thought I'd fill the temporary silence with the music that set me off. Almost a century of esemplastic revelations and belated recognitions.
Featuring: Jimmy Rogers, David Bowie, Slade, King Iwah and the Upsetters, The Sex Pistols, Throbbing Gristle, Faust, Nurse With Wound, John Coltrane, Funkadelic, Cecil Taylor Unit, Charley Patton, Frank Zappa, Iancu Dumitrescu, and my late dad.
It seems to me… that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliability in matters of human reason and dignity I would not exactly want to put my hand in the fire.
Thomas Mann, Dr Faustus
My Faustian friend, Raymond Ricker, asked me to write about the records that “greatly influenced my taste in music”.1 I’ve produced such lists before. I’m sure you have, too. As I’m resting between posts here at The Traveller in the Evening (up to my neck in texts about the biblical Job / Ayubb / Hiob / Jobab / “the man from Uz”, and Blake’s illustrations of his story, preparing something for the blog) I decided to set aside time to dig deeper into the music milled most deeply into me. It’s like trying to catch yourself in a mirror.
In the last years of my dad’s life he suffered from both dementia and, for a short while, a stomach hernia. He explained to me that what this meant was that all the music of his life had accumulated in his stomach, but due to the hernia it was now bleeding into his brain. He spent all day listening to the music that made him. If the same happens to me, it is the music listed here that will be doing the bleeding.
What strikes me above all about this list is how many items were on it that I ‘didn’t get’, but that I then ‘got’, in a kind of mini-apocalypse that turned my world around. I know those hipsters who hate Zappa, because I was one of them. To them I say, “you are an idiot”. I know this because I too was an idiot, tied up in knots by conformist impulses. Take a walk, relax, learn how to breathe.
Jimmie Rodgers: Waiting for a Train
1929 Victor Talking Machine Company
78″ B Side to Blue Yodel No.4
Can yodelling be mainstreamed? It can, it was, and it will. I wrote the notes about Bowie’s ‘John I’m Only Dancing’, below, before writing these notes to Jimmie Rodgers’ ‘Waiting for a Train’: “guitar distortion cutting itself loose from the track to take on a life of its own.” Funnily enough, that’s what Jimmy Rodgers’ voice does here when he yodels - it cuts loose. Anything could happen, even if it doesn’t... and that’s on top of the things that do happen This track represents what it was like listening to my real dad’s record collection when he was around as I was growing up. He liked Hank Williams. On the other hand, he also liked Jim Reeves, and I had to sing along to Bimbo. I like this song because it sits at the border of so many things, high and low, demotic and refined, black and white.
“doo du doo doo doh dee o-doh doh dee oh-doh dee o-doh…”
David Bowie: John, I’m Only Dancing
1972 RCA
David Bowie (vocal, guitar), Mick Ronson (guitar), Trevor Bolder (bass), Mick Woodmansey (drums)
Me and my two best friends at school (Diddy Phillips and Tony Blythe, if you are out there) were Bowie fans. What got me about this 1972 single is the section at the end, where the guitar feedback shrieks and whines like a pool of electricity prodding itself into life, guitar distortion cutting itself loose from the context to take on a life of its own. Bowie later said that ‘John, I'm Only Dancing’ was his "attempt to do a bisexual anthem". I liked that it made time stand still while contemplating other possibilities. This and the Jimmie Rodgers track, heard by me around the same time, call back and forth to each other over the years that separate their recording.
Slade: Born to be Wild
1972 Polydor
from Slade Alive
Noddy Holder (guitar, vocals), Dave Hill (guitar), Jim Lea (bass), Don Powell (drums)
Mutant teenage glam delivered by “hod-carriers in gold lamé”, such was the fashion at the time. Class defines everything, of course, and Slade were defined as proletarian-fare and therefore too dumb to matter. They were originally styled as skinheads, but got a glam makeover. This didn’t stop them from becoming a favourite with skins, football hooligans and sharpies everywhere. My mate Pete’s mum bought him a copy of the Theme From M.A.S.H. because, she told him, it was ‘classical music’. She also banned me from their house because, she said, when Slade came on the radio I “looked mental”. I saw Deep Purple around this time at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre, and the Slade Alive! album was heavier by a long chalk. On ‘Born to be Wild’ the dogs let slip and an air raid siren gets involved. The original black country rock, this type of thing could only have been made in a city full of car plants and steel presses.
King Iwah and the Upsetters: Give Me Power
1971 Upsetter Records
King Iwah (DJ), Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (producer), Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett (bass), Carlton Barrett (drums), Glen Adams (keyboards), Alva ‘Reggie’ Lewis (guitar)
1971 was the year Aston and Carlton Barrett left Lee Perry’s Upsetters to join The Wailers full-time. Perry’s productions of The Wailers gave Bob Marley the sound that made him famous, before he spaffed his talent away on MOR radio hits. In the meantime, he stole the greatest rhythm section outside jazz, in the form of the Barrett brothers. Having said that - is this the Barrett brothers? I’m still not sure but it sounds like it. I first heard this track on a Trojan compilation. “From pillar to post, they dig me the most…. they call me trinity, because I liquidate iniquity…. give me power, to devour….” Before The Sex Pistols and punk, King Iwah’s “ugggghhhhhhhhhhhh!” defined the secret, unofficial freezing point of cool.
The Sex Pistols: Liar
1977 B Side of God Save the Queen
from Spunk / No Future UK
Johnny Rotten (vocals), Steve Jones (guitar), Glen Matlock (bass), Paul Cook (drums)
You're in suspension… you're a liar.
I read a review of the SPOTS tour at the time (Sex Pistols on Tour): “If the person next to you isn’t moving, he or she is not bored…. they’re dead.” The Spunk bootleg mirrored the official Virgin album, Never Mind the Bollocks, but with rougher, dirtier recordings from demos produced by Chris Spedding and Dave Goodman. The Sex Pistols were Alex and his droogs as a glam rock band. Mott the Hoople had already foreseen all this in ‘Crash Street Kids’, then it happened and suddenly a lot of things made sense. Proletarian wit and cunning was in fashion for a while.
Many years later I would play this on the office jukebox when clients visited.
Throbbing Gristle: IBM
1977 Industrial Records
from D.o.A / Dead on Arrival
Genesis P Orridge (vocals, bass, effects, production), Cosey Fanni Tutti (guitar, effects, tapes, production), Peter Christopherson (tapes, electronics, production), Chris Carter (synthesizer, electronics, tapes, production)
The opening track is the only acceptable face of conceptual art as well as being mind-phasing industrial music. ‘I.B.M.’ features a computer data file played from a cassette through the Throbbing Gristle PA, reprocessed by Chris Carter’s Gristleizers and the Korg MS20 signal processing unit. On the cusp of the computer revolution, the machine age was turning nasty. A lot of people didn’t like Throbbing Gristle, but I loved their amateur brutalism. If only Genesis P. Orridge could have kept his mouth shut. This was actually the first LP by them I bought, based on an NME review which said that it was nothing but an outrageous assault on good taste. Game on.
Faust: Meadow Meal
1971 Polydor
from Faust / Clear
Rudolf Sosna (guitar), Jean-Herve Peron (bass), Zappi Diermaier (drums, percussion), Hans-Joachim Irmler (keyboards), Gunther Wusthoff (saxophone), Arnulf Meifert (percussion)
Legend has it that scene-maker Uwe Nettelbeck sold his proteges, Faust, to Polydor as the nascent ‘electronic Beatles’ and got them to invest heavily. A year later we got to hear the result of the band being locked up together all that time in the Wumme commune-studio Polydor’s money had paid for. Faust were the only German group with cojones big enough to get away with such blatant krautisms as the virtual oompah brass bands that swagger across their debut album, courtesy of Jean-Herve Peron. The other so-called ‘krautrock’ bands were desperate to leave Germany for outer space and would never dare do something like that. I discovered Faust later in the 70s – picking up a copy of the faust Party Tapes single in Rough Trade – but already in 1971 they encapsulated everything worthwhile that was to happen in that decade. I wrote a book about it.
Nurse With Wound: Strange Play of the Mouth
1982 Trench Musik Kore
from V/A: From a Trench
Steve Stapleton (tapes, production)
I first heard this on a Various Artists cassette on the Trench Musik Kore label. Stapleton takes a vocal sample for a walk. The singing breathes its way into your ear. It’s clearly on a literal tape loop, which then starts to wobble. The ‘music’ decomposes, the sound literally falls apart. There are little interjections of buzzing and crackling electronica, as if the amplifier circuits were failing as well as the tape motor. Civilization, in the form of a tape deck, breaks down in real-time. Stapleton dives deeper and deeper, and the semantics give way to body noises, interjections, overheard whispering. When the music falls apart the result is not noise but music. It turns out that when music falls apart, it is still music all the way down, like with the Greeks’ cosmic turtles.
Faust: Hurricane
1996 Live at The Garage, Islington, London.
Hans Joachim Irmler (keyboards), Jean-Herve Peron (bass), Zappi Diermaier (drums, percussion), Steve Lobdell (guitar)
Catherine Bunnyhausen: “cut grass and manure… a hay threshing machine… the venue was… draped… with… hessian cloth, dividing the room… farmyard machinery, arcwelding gear, cement mixer… a tree trunk and an enormous steel chest… bricks, concrete and wood… metal sheet.”
This was only the second UK gig by the reformed Faust, at The Garage, on Highbury corner, in 1996. I don’t know how I missed the first. I bought 10 tickets and handed them out to everyone I knew who promised to turn up. I thought it might be special. Paint flew everywhere, there were explosions, industrial flares and a leaf-blowing machine dumping wet foliage on the crowd. The vocalist got his kit off. At front-of-stage a woman built a sculpture using an arc welder in time to the music as sparks flew in my face planted in the front row. I thought I’d had a heart attack and the oxygen was leaving my brain, producing a feeling ecstacy. At the end of the set, my friend Jules described it as “a critique of Sonic Youth.” The band lit a flare that filled the building with smoke and summoned the Fire Brigade, while the audience were dumped outside on the pavement. A Young British Artist was overheard saying “This isn’t art!” Nobody knows if it really happened. i.m. Emyr Glyn.
John Coltrane: My Favourite Things
1963 Live in Berlin
from Live Trane: The European Tours
Elvin Jones (drums), McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass), John Coltrane (saxophone)
The band the Jimi Hendrix Experience could have been. If you want the unexpurgated deal, listen to Interstellar Space or Live in Japan. I came to Coltrane late in life. In fact, I came to jazz late in life. I didn’t even like Coltrane at first, but a friend told me I’d get there in the end. That happened when, around the same time, I heard the Live at The Village Vanguard box and then a collection of live recordings made in Europe in the early-60s. I cried listening to the versions of ‘My Favourite Things’ when I heard how he’d taken this slab of lovely musical candy, rolled it around his inner being and rolled it back out as a tribute and hommage to The One without making any concessions to Platonism and boring old ‘ideas’ and ‘concepts’ and ‘taste’. It took me years to realise that music was still possible in the wake of this.
Funkadelic: Cosmic Slop
1973 Westbound Records
from Cosmic Slop
Garry Shider (vocals, guitar), Ron Bykowski (guitar), Tyrone Lampkin (drums), Cordell Boogie Mosson (bass)
Then the devil sang
"Would you like to dance with me?
We're doin' the cosmic slop."
The Mothership replies to O.C. Smith’s Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp: playing Bill Burroughs to Smith’s H.G. Wells. The film was made in Central Park in the 1970s. The album smashed into the Billboard charts at #112, then smashed straight back out again, making this a cosmic flop, commercially speaking. The Pink Fairies of funk, this recording is wigged out, righteous and rough. The Mothership are as simultaneously very much ‘on it’ and ‘out of it’ as only they can be. It made a big difference to me when I realised that real artists are the ones who know what they are doing and keep delivering, like Funkadelic and Parliament. The only reason Funkadelic aren’t recognised up there with Hendrix is, oddly enough, racism. Long story.
Cecil Taylor Unit: Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come
1962 Live at The Cafe Montmartre, Copenhagen, Denmark
from Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come
Cecil Taylor (piano), Jimmy Lyons (alto sax), Sunny Murray (drums)
Once you step out of the margins of things, you increase your bandwidth. You can pack in more information, which is what Cecil does. This was such a big record for me, when I began to hear it as waves of molten music washing remorselessly over my ears, my body, pulling me simultaneously in different directions, throwing up criss-crossing lines of music that come at the listener like hail. I got why he called it what he did, and heard this as living art of a high order. After this, I thought of Cecil alongside Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Asger Jorn. If I could only take one piece of music with me it would be Cecil and The Feel Trio’s Two Ts for a Lovely T, (Cecil Taylor, William Parker, Tony Oxley) but this is the recording that brought me through the door.
Charley Patton: Spoonful Blues
1929
from Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton
These women goin’ crazy every day in their life about a... (guitar notes)
Would you kill a man dead? (spoken: yes, I will!) just about a... (guitar notes)
Oh babe, I'm a fool about my... (guitar notes)
I sometimes fancy myself as a time traveller, since Cecil, Ornette and Free jazz got me into the blues. When I first heard ‘Lonely Woman’ I thought it was a maybe the sax player from some graunchy late-40s early-50s R’n’B band, but filtered through a high modernist, cubist mentality. Worlds collide. Cecil Taylor had a similar feel early on. Once I made that connection I started listening to a lot more blues. I got the incredible Revenant box set of Charley Patton (and related) recordings, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, and the more I heard it, the stranger and more prophetic it seemed until it ended up sounding like the template for all the important (ie., black, American) music of the 20th century.
Frank Zappa: Yo’ Mama
1979 Zappa Family Trust / Universal Music Enterprises
from Sheik Yerbouti
Frank Zappa (vocals, guitar), Adrian Belew (guitar), Tommy Mars (keyboards), Patrick O'Hearn (bass), Terry Bozzio (drums), Ed Mann (percussion)
‘cause if you play the game, you will get beat
I can’t remember when it was that I got so sick of listening to Zappa, trying to see what Ben Watson was so loudly enamoured with - I rated his book, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play as the best thing I ever read about rock music even while Zappa was a mystery to me, which takes some doing. Then I read his review of ‘Yo’ Mama’, in one of those knock-off, CD-sized guides: "The playing bursts out of linear sanity into a torrid warzone of distortion and sonic event." (Ben Watson / Out to Lunch, ‘Yo’ Mama’, Frank Zappa: The Complete Guide to His Music, London: Omnibus Press, 2005.) I decided that this would be a crunch test, I’d had enough of Watson’s grandstanding, and I put the track on to play, humming along to the verse chorus, then, there it was…. Zappa’s torrid warzone of sonic event. After that, everything by Zappa sounded pertinent, relevant, alive and snappy.
Iancu Dumitrescu: Pierres Sacrees
1991 Edition Modern EDMN / Ideologic Organ
Iancu Dumitrescu (composer, prepared piano, metallic plates, objects)
Sometime toward the end of the 60s my younger brother had a dentist’s appointment approaching and was scared stiff. In those days they gave you gas, which left you unconscious, before drilling at your teeth. My mother says I reassured him by telling him that, once you are unconscious, they beam beautiful music into your head. I didn’t realise that I was just parsing in my sleeping mind the grinding of the drill. But it did seem beautiful.
Twenty years later, I thought I heard this beautiful music again on a late-night radio channel playing ‘modern music’ as I drove at night across the moors – but I didn’t catch the name of the artist or the music and was left epically frustrated. Twenty years after that, I finally heard it, the music I was born to hear.
I had published a pamphlet by Ben Watson on the theme of noise in music. He told me that “the Romanians, Dumitrescu and Avram” had translated and shared the article. I nodded as if I knew who they were. Later I tracked down some records of theirs to try. I got this and a version of Soleil Explosant.
Dumitrescu is the only true master at work in my lifetime, heir to Stockhausen and Orpheus. His pursuit of sound right down to the atomic details of its inner structure keeps everything suspended in motion, nothing is allowed to rest because everything is animated, self-actualised and self-moving, at all scales. His silences contain more drama than other people’s music: a pox on tonalism and market-oriented order, which claims to give the people what they want and keep them nodding in line. I’ve seen Dumitresciu’s Hyperion Ensemble play to rock audiences (I helped get them to play at the Faust festival), and a rock audience gets it because it is the culmination of a century of electronic music and development that took place, not in the conservatories but in blues, rock, jazz and improv music. Enjoy your Cosmic Orgasm.
Dick Wilson / The Dick James Band: Okie From Muscogee
L-R: Uncle Jack, my dad, Dick Wilson (vocals) and family friend.
Andy Wilson
London, 2024-02
I know Raymond from the Faust List - a mailing list for fans of the group Faust that I set up over a quarter of a century ago now, which led me to write the book FaUSt: Stretch Out Time 1970-1975.