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Wire is 40 years old/young!!

Just a brief one today, but this could be much longer, given the vicissitudes that the Wire/The Wire has gone through over it’s 40-year existence. I have considered cancelling my 30+ years subscriptions on several occasion (and still do) but somehow it continues to provide me with enough valuable information about off-the-radar music to still make it a “must-do tomorrow” event horizon.

Nowadays, for me, the magazine consists, in the main, of articles about artists that remain definitely above my radar: this month’s (August 2022) edition’s cover features concerns Saul Williams (never heard of). Most of the sub-features cover people who I’ve never come across, but this is hardly the point. Wire has always pushed me to explore new horizons, and I continue to enjoy the mainstays of the mag’s contents, the editorial, the letters section (to which I still regularly contribute), the Invisible Jukebox, and, of course, the extensive Reviews. This month’s article on Alan Skidmore alone was worth the price of admission.

My very first copy of The Wire (bought for my 30th. birthday by my future sister-in-law) was issue 17 (July 1985) and featured Ray Charles on the cover, with articles on “Miles and Duke on record”, John Gilmore and Herbie Nichols. The latter two were hardly known then (the ‘hard bop revival’ being all the thing at that point), and I have always henceforth thought of this publication as being 'a niche for the less lauded".

It still is, and all the better for it.

trevorbarre:

Prototypical Americana

Part Two

This is my list of ’ Some Americana before the term was invented’. They are off the top of my head, and I’m sure that readers would want to add other groups and single artists that I have left out

Bob Dylan It is almost inevitable that Dylan is at the head of this list. The ‘basement tapes’, recorded when psychedelia was at its colourful height in the 1967 Summer of Love, contained a slew of parched oddities that began to woke musicians up from their day-glo reveries. (Several went on to have hits with songs from the Little White Wonder bootleg, 'Quinn the Eskimo’, 'Million Dollar Bash’, This Wheel’s on Fire’, 'Tears of Rage’, 'I Shall Be Released’, 'You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, by acts as varied as The Byrds, The Band, Brian Auger & the Trinity, Manfred Mann and Fairport Convention.) CBS took until 1975 to officially release the vinyl double album The Basement Tapes, from the sessions, by which time Dylan has produced several other recordings that had cemented his latest 'new direction’: John Wesley Harding (the real game-changer, from 1968), Nashville Skyline (with that other white wonder, Johnny Cash), Self Portrait and New Morning. Mercilessly panned at the time, their undoubted influence began to be slowly acknowledged by younger musicians.

The Band Dylan’s backing band on the momentous world tour of 1966, The Band made The Basement Tapes with him, before recording two epochal albums in 1968 and 1969, Music From Big Pink and The Band. Both of these were to prove immensely influential for British and American musicians of the time (the inclusion of 'The Weight’ on the Easy Rider soundtrack didn’t hurt either). If there is one group that laid the tracks down for the Americana juggernaut, that group has to be The Band?

The Byrds and their offshoot, The Flying Burrito Brothers, both featured Gram Parsons for a time, another visionary who had dug deep into the American musical palimpsest, going back, as Dylan had, to Victorian forebears. The Byrds also featured David Crosby, a Hollywood brat who was kicked out of the band (for being a pain in the ***, basically) and went on to join Crosby, Stills and Nash, a move that was certainly to prove immensely successful, even if just judged in financial terms (much of the money went up Crosby’s nose, however). The cover of their sophomore album Deja Vu, a sepia-tinted exercise in deep nostalgia, featured the band (by now also featuring Neil Young) in frontier drag, in a pose that echoed both The Band and Workingman’s Dead by the Grateful Dead.

Both Workingman’s Dead (1969) and American Beauty (1970) marked a screeching change of direction for the Grateful Dead, and their folk and country influences emerged in a set of songs that celebrated, most clearly and famously in 'Truckin’ ’, their love of travelling through the American landscape, and a freedom of movement, both of the body and in the mind. Their particular offshoot, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, were another band enamoured of cowboy chic, most obviously on the cover of their third record Gypsy Cowboy, a relatively late 1972 release that could have been designed with John Ford in mind.

1967-1970 saw the birth pangs of a sort of anti-modernism in American rock, and a (re)discovery of the American past and landscape. (We had out own version over here with the 'getting it together in the country’ shtick, most famously captured by Traffic on their first album Dear Mr. Fantasy, with the group moving to Berkshire to 'get their heads together’.) But the past is always 'another country’, and 'nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’, and it took artists of the stature of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen to produce bodies of work that celebrated the past without reinventing it. Johnny Cash too, miraculously created a late series of 'American music’ that owed much to the past (and his own), while keeping his feet firmly on modern ground.

Prototypical Americana

Part Two

This is my list of ’ Some Americana before the term was invented’. They are off the top of my head, and I’m sure that readers would want to add other groups and single artists that I have left out

Bob Dylan It is almost inevitable that Dylan is at the head of this list. The ‘basement tapes’, recorded when psychedelia was at its colourful height in the 1967 Summer of Love, contained a slew of parched oddities that began to woke musicians up from their day-glo reveries. (Several went on to have hits with songs from the Little White Wonder bootleg, 'Quinn the Eskimo’, 'Million Dollar Bash’, This Wheel’s on Fire’, 'Tears of Rage’, 'I Shall Be Released’, 'You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, by acts as varied as The Byrds, The Band, Brian Auger & the Trinity, Manfred Mann and Fairport Convention.) CBS took until 1975 to officially release the vinyl double album The Basement Tapes, from the sessions, by which time Dylan has produced several other recordings that had cemented his latest 'new direction’: John Wesley Harding (the real game-changer, from 1968), Nashville Skyline (with that other white wonder, Johnny Cash), Self Portrait and New Morning. Mercilessly panned at the time, their undoubted influence began to be slowly acknowledged by younger musicians.

The Band Dylan’s backing band on the momentous world tour of 1966, The Band made The Basement Tapes with him, before recording two epochal albums in 1968 and 1969, Music From Big Pink and The Band. Both of these were to prove immensely influential for British and American musicians of the time (the inclusion of 'The Weight’ on the Easy Rider soundtrack didn’t hurt either). If there is one group that laid the tracks down for the Americana juggernaut, that group has to be The Band?

The Byrds and their offshoot, The Flying Burrito Brothers, both featured Gram Parsons for a time, another visionary who had dug deep into the American musical palimpsest, going back, as Dylan had, to Victorian forebears. The Byrds also featured David Crosby, a Hollywood brat who was kicked out of the band (for being a pain in the ***, basically) and went on to join Crosby, Stills and Nash, a move that was certainly to prove immensely successful, even if just judged in financial terms (much of the money went up Crosby’s nose, however). The cover of their sophomore album Deja Vu, a sepia-tinted exercise in deep nostalgia, featured the band (by now also featuring Neil Young) in frontier drag, in a pose that echoed both The Band and Workingman’s Dead by the Grateful Dead.

Both Workingman’s Dead (1969) and American Beauty (1970) marked a screeching change of direction for the Grateful Dead, and their folk and country influences emerged in a set of songs that celebrated, most clearly and famously in 'Truckin’ ’, their love of travelling through the American landscape, and a freedom of movement, both of the body and in the mind. Their particular offshoot, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, were another band enamoured of cowboy chic, most obviously on the cover of their third record Gypsy Cowboy, a relatively late 1972 release that could have been designed with John Ford in mind.

1967-1970 saw the birth pangs of a sort of anti-modernism in American rock, and a (re)discovery of the American past and landscape. (We had out own version over here with the 'getting it together in the country’ shtick, most famously captured by Traffic on their first album Dear Mr. Fantasy, with the group moving to Berkshire to 'get their heads together’.) But the past is always 'another country’, and 'nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’, and it took artists of the stature of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen to produce bodies of work that celebrated the past without reinventing it. Johnny Cash too, miraculously created a late series of 'American music’ that owed much to the past (and his own), while keeping his feet firmly on modern ground.

trevorbarre:

Americana: Some Prototypes

Part One

I’m currently digesting Luke Meddings’ meditation on the interconnectivity of The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys What They Heard, which mainly covers the years of 1963-8. Thinking about those years, my mind wandered tangentially onto the topic of so-called Americana, a word that wasn’t really used in rock/pop music until, I estimate, around 2000, with the emergence of such artists as Ryan Adams. The late Gram Parsons was fishing around in the same synergistic pond some thirty years earlier, when he came up with his idea of ‘cosmic American music’, a combination of country music, R & B, soul, folk and rock, and 'Americana’ is a similarly rather ill-defined stylistic and descriptive grab-bag. I should then, with this caveat in mind, make a few descriptive pointers before we go on to discuss a few of the groups and individuals who were producing examples of this slippery genre well before it gained a name that appears to have stuck. (Before Americana, we had 'country rock’ and 'folk rock’, two examples of the sort of nominative welding that became popular in the early 70s.)

Americana is, to state the obvious, a description of music that is essentially American in both form and content. So, remembering this, one word and concept that is inescapable is freedom, but, when we look at the current political landscape in the USA, we can see how ambiguous this core idea is, when it is applied to the various groups of American society - some groups seem to be more 'free’ to think and act than others. One of the most important of these freedoms is that of freedom of movement, a principle that was once completely denied to one immigrant group, until it took a civil war to restore it to this very group. Free Movement became a secular cause and effect for the Beats in the 1950s, and this is reflected in the sheer amount of place names cited throughout the works of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, to take just two examples of Beat-influenced artists. Sadly, the other core freedom principle that I have extrapolated is that of the God-given right of Americans to bear arms, i.e. GUNS.

Now, you’d have thought that the 'progressive’ nature of, in particular, 'west coast psychedelia’, would have made the toting of guns an anathema to the Beats’ successors, the hippies, but in many ways the latter were as gun-obsessed as rappers are today. Look at The Charlatans, for example (the American version), posing as Wild West gunslingers in Nevada’s Red Dog Saloon. (Dan Hicks went on to form one Americana prototype with his Hot Licks, a band that melded jazz onto folk and country.) San Francisco’s premier two-guitar phenomenon Quicksilver Messenger Service didn’t appear to be being ironical when, on the back cover of their second album Happy Trails, both Gary Duncan and Greg Elmore are pictured with in-yer-face rifle-toting poses. When the Grateful Dead upped sticks and moved to Marin County in 1968, leaving the meth - and smack - riddled streets of the Haight Ashbury, they were soon riding horses and mutating into farm hands, all tooled up to deal with horse rustling/rustlers. Dead offshoots, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, on the back cover of their third album Gypsy Cowboy (the title so says it all) present a complement to that of Happy Trails, even if the gun motif is played down (only one of 'em is tooled up, with a literal 'pistol in his pocket’) - like so many of their hippie contemporaries, the New Riders’ 'look’ had one boot in the present and the other in a re-imagined Wild West, with some effective nostalgia ('Whiskey’ and 'Sutter’s Mill’) and some regrettably back-to-basics attitudes ('Groupie’ and 'She’s No Angel’ being the best/worse examples). Like a lot of the sixties/seventies 'counterculture’, the freedoms it supposedly enabled were, on refection, exploited by those who were already free in everything but mind. Atavistic misogyny was just one countercultural feature that still deserves attention, as it was so little recognised and called out at the time.


To be continued…

Americana: Some Prototypes

Part One

I’m currently digesting Luke Meddings’ meditation on the interconnectivity of The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys What They Heard, which mainly covers the years of 1963-8. Thinking about those years, my mind wandered tangentially onto the topic of so-called Americana, a word that wasn’t really used in rock/pop music until, I estimate, around 2000, with the emergence of such artists as Ryan Adams. The late Gram Parsons was fishing around in the same synergistic pond some thirty years earlier, when he came up with his idea of ‘cosmic American music’, a combination of country music, R & B, soul, folk and rock, and 'Americana’ is a similarly rather ill-defined stylistic and descriptive grab-bag. I should then, with this caveat in mind, make a few descriptive pointers before we go on to discuss a few of the groups and individuals who were producing examples of this slippery genre well before it gained a name that appears to have stuck. (Before Americana, we had 'country rock’ and 'folk rock’, two examples of the sort of nominative welding that became popular in the early 70s.)

Americana is, to state the obvious, a description of music that is essentially American in both form and content. So, remembering this, one word and concept that is inescapable is freedom, but, when we look at the current political landscape in the USA, we can see how ambiguous this core idea is, when it is applied to the various groups of American society - some groups seem to be more 'free’ to think and act than others. One of the most important of these freedoms is that of freedom of movement, a principle that was once completely denied to one immigrant group, until it took a civil war to restore it to this very group. Free Movement became a secular cause and effect for the Beats in the 1950s, and this is reflected in the sheer amount of place names cited throughout the works of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, to take just two examples of Beat-influenced artists. Sadly, the other core freedom principle that I have extrapolated is that of the God-given right of Americans to bear arms, i.e. GUNS.

Now, you’d have thought that the 'progressive’ nature of, in particular, 'west coast psychedelia’, would have made the toting of guns an anathema to the Beats’ successors, the hippies, but in many ways the latter were as gun-obsessed as rappers are today. Look at The Charlatans, for example (the American version), posing as Wild West gunslingers in Nevada’s Red Dog Saloon. (Dan Hicks went on to form one Americana prototype with his Hot Licks, a band that melded jazz onto folk and country.) San Francisco’s premier two-guitar phenomenon Quicksilver Messenger Service didn’t appear to be being ironical when, on the back cover of their second album Happy Trails, both Gary Duncan and Greg Elmore are pictured with in-yer-face rifle-toting poses. When the Grateful Dead upped sticks and moved to Marin County in 1968, leaving the meth - and smack - riddled streets of the Haight Ashbury, they were soon riding horses and mutating into farm hands, all tooled up to deal with horse rustling/rustlers. Dead offshoots, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, on the back cover of their third album Gypsy Cowboy (the title so says it all) present a complement to that of Happy Trails, even if the gun motif is played down (only one of 'em is tooled up, with a literal 'pistol in his pocket’) - like so many of their hippie contemporaries, the New Riders’ 'look’ had one boot in the present and the other in a re-imagined Wild West, with some effective nostalgia ('Whiskey’ and 'Sutter’s Mill’) and some regrettably back-to-basics attitudes ('Groupie’ and 'She’s No Angel’ being the best/worse examples). Like a lot of the sixties/seventies 'counterculture’, the freedoms it supposedly enabled were, on refection, exploited by those who were already free in everything but mind. Atavistic misogyny was just one countercultural feature that still deserves attention, as it was so little recognised and called out at the time.


To be continued…

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The banner picture is by the late Mal Dean (1941-1974), which featured on the cover of the 1972 Incus Records vinyl release, Live Performances at Verity's Place, by two free improvisation pioneers, the English guitarist Derek Bailey and Dutch percussionist Han Bennink.