“Total
assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and
roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.”
Of
course everyone reckons America to be the epicentre of the Sixties
Underground, while Britain just had designer hippies
prancing down Carnaby Street in variously off shades of paisley and
Germany not even in the picture. Totally wrong on both counts. (See
the supporting evidence here and here.) But there's no denying it was a
centre.
America
at that time was like a cultural Hadron Collider, all sorts of things
crashing together, the ensuing explosions creating new particles
which didn't even have names yet. Inevitably the particles collided
with each other as much as they did 'The Man', which we'll try to
convey too...
The
Velvet Underground
Of
course we have to start with the Velvets – it's just hard to figure
out where. They're so direct, so confrontational,
and yet simultaneously so elusive. After some head-scratching, I came
up with this...
Famously,
John Cale first worked with pioneering minimalists the Theatre of
Eternal Music, and brought his viola drones with him to the band. But
crucially, they didn't so much combine them with rock'n'roll drive as
convince you the two had belonged together all along. They were
savagely primitive and furiously intellectual, out-there and
street-level, at one and the same time. Their sound's like being set
on simultaneously, a knife blade to the gut while a thesaurus whacks
you round the head. A lucid frenzy if ever there was one.
I've
never liked the linear notions of the term 'avant garde' all that
much. But perhaps this is the one time it can be justifiably used.
They weren't kidding with that word 'underground'. And sometimes
notoriety does have greater currency than fame.
Their lack of commercial success really was counterposed by their
massive influence – it's no exaggeration to say they changed
everything. Suffice to say that the long-running alternative music
festival All Tomorrow's Parties is named after one of their tracks.
Despite
their involvement with the Factory and its multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable events there isn't much actual footage
of the band in full flight. You'll find with this clip of 'Venus
in Furs' the visuals don't synch with the music. But it's
still cool...
Frank
Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
Inhabiting
the contrary coasts to the existential New Yorkers and their
opposite in about every respect were their perennial arch-foes - the
Mothers of Invention. While the Velvets took up sunglasses and icy
cool, the Mothers donned frocks and mugged and gurned. While the
Velvet's universe was black-and-white, the Mothers erupted with
dayglo colour. While the Velvets were darkly realist and
from-the-streets, the Mothers couldn't have been more surreal.
Ructions were to ensue.
Lou
Reed described Frank Zappa as “the most untalented musician I've
ever heard. He can't play rock'n'roll because he's a loser.” The
only thing the could agree on was that they both hated hippies.
Which in the context of the times meant absolutely everybody else.
'King
Kong' kicks off with Zappa explaining the band's mission
statement. Which was basically “annoy people. For both personal
and political reasons.”
Captain Beefheart and the
Magic Band
But if the Mothers were the Velvets'
primary antagonists, the Magic Band were their opposite number.
Against the Velvets' crushing nihilism, the Magic Band's default
sound was a resounding joyousness. Instead of held drones, their
music bounded along like strangeness on springs. The band have a
reputation for befuddling difficulty, for setting listeners sonic
puzzles, appealing only to chin-strokers and ponderers. Nothing could
be further from the truth! The good Captain's maxim was “I play
music. Too many work it.”
Which makes it all the more bizarre
to hear about the scarily 'cult-like' way much of that music was
recorded. You hear some of it, and worry whether you can listen and
keep to the ban on slave produce.
But
anyway, just check 'em out! Running through 'Electricity'
on Cannes beach in 1968…
Like both Reed and Zappa, the good Captain has left the building. But the Magic Band
play on, and I even got to see them again not so long ago!
The
Jefferson Airplane
In the
punk era the two big Californian cities, San Francisco and Los
Angeles, competed to create great bands. The Dead Kennedys, for
example, were from SF while X hailed from LA. Which makes sense, of
course. Approximately the distance between London and Glasgow, the
cities are close enough to be aware of one another, but distant
enough to have their own identity.
Which
makes it passing strange that the same wasn't true
in the Sixties. LA produced Zappa, Beefheart, Love and the Doors.
SF... well, even if you take flower-wafting dippy hippies like Scott
Mckenzie out the equation, it's still pretty much the side of Sixties
music I don't like to listen to. It's heresy to some, but I've never
seen the appeal of the Grateful Dead. To me its just meander, music
to wave joss sticks around to.
Perhaps
at the time SF's focus was simply elsewhere. The city was such a
cultural and political hotspot that the music became (to coin a
phrase) instrumental to it all. It wasn't primary. There to be the
soundtrack to the love-in or the riot, but not the stuff calling the
kids out on the streets.
But
there's an exception to every rule. And the scene's other
major band, Jefferson Airplane, were as unlike the Dead as the Stones
were to the Beatles. Okay, their output was uneven. The Sixties were
uneven. And when it worked...
This
clip of them performing 'White Rabbit' and
'Somebody to Love' on American TV perhaps best
sums up the difference between them and the Dead. That crazy
psychedelic stuff worked best when stuffed inside actual songs. It's
the way it then fights to get out, makes the song strange, misshapen
and unpredictable. Like one of those giant bubbles which stop being
perfectly round but undulate weirdly and throw up loads of odd
reflections. Without the song for it to contend with it's like the
bubble's burst, and you're left with hippy noodlings all over the
floor. And unlike the Dead the Airplane could write great, massively
memorable songs, and had Grace (“what, me, not English?”) Slick
as a fantastic declamatory singer. Perhaps even as great as Amon
Duul's Renate Knaup.
And to
all those who still indulge those tired stereotypes about “mellow”
hippies, this was the band who sang lyrics like “all your private
property is target for your enemy!”
Oh,
and the videotape does warp at one point. That's
not the bananas kicking in...
MC5
The MC5 were of course associated with John Sinclair's White Panthers, a kind of rise to the dare of the Black Panthers, and source of the manifesto quoted up top.
They were a Detroit band when Detroit was on fire. And, as mentioned in the earlier Krautrock piece, that's not a metaphor. They're a reminder there was a time when rock'n'roll wasn't just something to wash a Coke down with, and as such they're another band whose massive influence well exceeded their reach. While The Velvets were punks before their time, the MC5 are the missing link which proves there was no fracture point between punk and hippie music at all.
Okay, this is strictly the start of the Seventies... who's counting? Welcome to 'Kick out the Jams', played to a home crowd at Wayne State University, Detroit. Apparently filmed for local TV, which is why the last word in the infamous title line is conspicuous by its absence. (Though all the annoying logo stuff scrawled across the screen has been added by some subsequent self-publicist.)
The term rough music fits the Fugs the best. By popular tradition, enemies of the community were subject to a barrage of song and noise, the sonic equivalent of throwing rotten vegetables. Raucous and free-form, they didn't sound so much like the MC5 - a band always up for playing after a protest rally - as the music you hear bashed out on bin lids during the rally.
They
took to this most literally by attempting to exorcise/levitate the
Pentagon as a protest against Vietnam. Then included it as a track
on their next album. The FBI was later found to have kept a file on them, listing their
songs which they found to be "vulgar
and repulsive and most suggestive”. (It was quite a long list.)
And,
despite those who stick to the lazy slur “the hippies sold out”,
they always stuck to their (metaphorical) guns. In the mid-Nineties,
learning that for the anniversary of the Woodstock festival someone
was planning a commercialised event, they countered by organising
the Real Woodstock Festival. Their activities were constrained by
the sad death of Tuli Kupferberg in 2010. (Though not ended, and I even got to see them live in London the next year.)
'CIA
Man' (unfortunately without visuals)...
David
Peel and the Lower East Side
David
Peel was either the last word in self-parody or above and beyond the
whole thing. I was never sure which, and I don't suppose he was. He's
seen here treating the David Frost show to 'Hippie From New
York City', with John and Yoko in tow. I always imagined he
made the words up on the spot, but here he gives every indication of
reading them. What he can have been up to, to screw with his
short-term memory like that, I simply can't imagine. Is it any good?
I'm really not sure. But what it is, is great...
...and
to play us out…
Iggy and the Stooges
This is the celebrated “with added peanut butter” clip from the Cincinnati pop festival. Perhaps more of a demonstration of what an out-there performer Iggy was than the Stooges as a band. (In the unlikely event you've never heard the Stooges before, go here.)
Perhaps what really makes it is
the slightly clueless commentary, “well, the kids really seem to
go for this stuff... whatever it is.”
Iggy and the Stooges
This is the celebrated “with added peanut butter” clip from the Cincinnati pop festival. Perhaps more of a demonstration of what an out-there performer Iggy was than the Stooges as a band. (In the unlikely event you've never heard the Stooges before, go here.)
Coming
soon! We're not done with that Sixties business yet...
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