The Return of the Forgotten Blogger

I've no doubt lost my huge readership, having taken a nine month sabbatical. I'm back again but have put the bulk of the record collection in storage (part of the reason I stopped blogging). The revised format is basically writing about whatever the hell I'm listening to at the moment. So expect massive, unsightly mounds of wordage extolling the wit and wisdom of Steely Dan (I'll kill the next person who refers to Steely Dan as an individual entity! It's Becker and Fagen, two major dudes, not one dude), forays into the astounding Ethiopiques CD series, rambling ruminations on obscure Hungarian folk and gypsy music and a slow burning, schoolgirl crush on Bruce Springsteen.

Hungarian Roots

You can live your whole life without ever realising the truth and beauty of your very own heritage.

For twenty years I've listened to all manner of music. In my youth I was into punk and alternative and, as with any curious kid who starts out listening to that sort of stuff, I got bored and moved on to Steely Dan.

Ears get bored quickly. It's a constant search for a novel sound, a new take, something faster, louder, softer, more melancholy, angrier, stranger, melodic, heavier, slower, whatever. You could make do with Tom Waits until you heard Captain Beefheart, Pavement till you heard The Fall, Kraftwerk until you heard Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder.

Recently I travelled to Hungary, where my family comes from. When I was growing up my Mum used to play Hungarian music, mainly the gypsy stuff. She heard one of my Dead Kennedys records once and thought they sounded like a village gypsy band! As a teen, I thought her stuff was schmaltzy and the violin always sounded screechy - like nails on a chalkboard.

Fast forward twenty years or so and I'm starting to really appreciate the beauty of Hungarian music - especially the rootsy pleasures of Muzsikas and Marta Sebestyen is a world music star in her own right, best known in the West as the voice on the soundtrack of The English Patient - never seen the film, never heard the soundtrack.

One of the first things I did in Budapest was walk into a decent looking record shop, no better way to find out what's worth your tourist time and bucks than asking a record store worker. Szilvi, Zita and Attila at Galeon Cd Bolt soon steered me down the path to my Hungarian music education.

They recommended I start with the album "Szep, hajnali csillag" which translates to "Beautiful, Morning Star." Muzsikas are the pre-eminent band from the Hungarian neo-folk movement of the 1970s. The Hungarian movement paralleled similar ones in the West like the British folk turn of the late 1960s, best represented by bands like Fairport Convention and Pentangle and performers like Martin Carthy and Richard Thompson.

The Hungarian neo-folk movement was also a reaction against Soviet repression of authentic folk art and so it had an element of nationalist pride to it. Muzsikas have avoided undue nationalist tendencies by embracing the multicultural nature of Hungary's traditional folk musics, whether it is Jewish, Gypsy or Romanian. Their dedication has been to preserving and reviving these weird and wonderful sounds, not in a slavish fashion but in a way that connects with modern audiences.

The album concentrates on the music of the Transylvanian region; an area that borders Hungary, Moldavia and Romania and probably best known to Westerners as the home of Vlad Tepes (Dracula). The region is central to the claims of national identity and heritage by all three nations and was part of Hungary until the Trianon Treaty at the end of WW1 gave the bulk of Transylvania to Romania. Many Hungarians are still aggrieved at what they believe to be the injustice of the Trianon Treaty ruling: But enough of the politics.

The album starts with a village wedding tune that kicks off with a spritely rhythm and the violins prominently upfront and then a couple of minutes in Sebestyen's plaintive vocals begin and the rhythm changes to a wonderful dirge. The song ends with what sounds like village choir joining Sebestyen on the last four verses. This is the point at which I fell in love with this album. This is the point at which I understood my parents' deep attachment to this music. The song finishes by once again kicking into a higher tempo. The lyrics perfectly reflect the heavy sadness that not just Hungarian but also other Eastern European cultures carry: "They are watching for my death, just to take my beloved away, aj la, la, la, this is why I shall not die, just to break their hearts, to break their hearts."

Track 3 is "Round dance of Gyimes" and is Muzsikas's rendering of a traditional Csango dance tune. The Csango are communities of Hungarian people in three separate pockets of Romanian Transylvania who preserve a cultural heritage that goes back at least 800 years. The Csango lay claim to being the direct descendants of Attila the Hun and many Hungarians believe the archaic Csango dialect is the purest expression of the Magyar language, untouched by foreign influence. The track consists of two instruments: violin and a gardon, a sort of 4-stringed instrument that resembles a cello. The central Asian origins of Hungarian music can really be heard in this track.

The eastern roots of Hungarian music are further in evidence on "If I were a rose" which is musically based on the relationship between a Bashkir and Hungarian melody and also features the throat singing of Berecz Andras. The Bashkir people come from the Ural Mountains in central Siberia and speak a Turkic language related (somewhat distantly) to the Magyar language.

"Szep, hajnali csillag" is an album that has all the fundamentals of great folk music: dark lyrical subject matter, heartfelt playing and a palpable coonection to centuries old traditions. As someone with a Hungarian background, this music speaks to me like the blues.

"Szep, hajnali csillag" provides a beautiful glimpse into the Magyar soul.

R.I.P Arthur Lee

Just a few words about one of rock'n'roll's greatest. I saw Arthur Lee and his new version of Love a couple of years ago at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne and it was a truly spiritual and revelatory event.

To hear 'Forever Changes' in its entirety (but for one Brian Maclean track, I think) was akin to the Brian Wilson 'Pet Sounds' live experience - that good. Seeing and hearing Arthur up close was like being in the presence of history: you just had that sense of being in the presence of someone special.

Getting older often means getting cynical; part of the reason you don't see many old-timers at gigs. If you've seen plenty of shows in your youth, shows begin to blur into a mess of noise, sweat and beer. Truly great shows become few and far between. Arthur Lee and Love was a truly great show.

After getting his shit together in the last few years, it was upsetting to hear about Arthur Lee's illness. I kept hoping he would tour Australia again at some point. As it is, I only saw him once. I just remember after the gig being in an absolute daze, unable to quite believe what I had heard, that anyone could sing so sweet, that music could be so intoxicating.

My girlfriend and I were ready to pack up and join an Arthur Lee led cult - as long as we got a weekly performance, we would become willing slaves.

There will never be another Arthur Lee.

We Are Family.

The 13th Floor Elevators, 'Live', International Artists, 1968, Vinyl.

"We're all gathered together here for a psychedelic music, we all are a family."
So says the MC at the start of this dodgy "live" recording by the Elevators.

The saying goes you can pick your friends but you can't pick your family. Rock'n'roll in the late 60s opened up the possibility of picking your own family. Instead of DNA and family photos, rock'n'roll gave you the chance to create a family on the far more logical basis of music and drugs.

So rather than that L7 square fighter pilot brother who's always bumming your trip with his bogus speeches about GOD and COUNTRY, you can get yourself new brothers, new sisters (and you can have sex with these sisters), in a new family, bonded by the power of psychedelics and rock'n'roll, hallelujah, hallelujah.

Find yourself a messianic Big Daddy figure, a wise man, a shaman, to lead you to a new life away from all that hypocritical shit they feed you in the straight world, man. Because there's a war brewin', helter skelter, scoobie doobie, and we're off to the Hollywood Hills to kill some oink-fucking-oink, if you be trailing my vapour correctly, getting my drift, sailing on course for a big collision.

So sign up here, brothers and sisters, we're all a family, forged in the mind-altered goodness of a beautiful vision that only those with an open third eye can see. I'll know you're my brother, I'll know you're my sister, because I can see your third eye winking back at me.

Oh, and next time, when your trip has taken you on a detour through hell, be sure and say hello to Charlie, poke him in the eye with a rusty harpoon for me. That's the spirit. THAT'S THE SPIRIT.

20 Country Chartstoppers!

20 Country Chartstoppers! Vinyl.

An excerpt from the liner notes to 20 Country Chartstoppers!:

"Don't just look, but LISTEN TO COUNTRY like you've never heard before. Don't be surprised at what you hear. It's clear! COUNTRY OR POPS Chartstoppers is tops. STARS are our business. You've proven it by buying CHARTSTOPPERS Volumes 1 and 2. See them on TV, buy them in your record store and you're assured that when we say TWENTY ORIGINAL STARS . . . TWENTY ORIGINAL HITS . . . we mean it. That's our business . . . to give to you the greatest and the latest. So don't just look but LISTEN to TWENTY COUNTRY CHARTSTOPPERS. You'll find you're LISTENING TO COUNTRY . . . and that's what this exclusive record is all about."

All those caps are in the original liner notes, I didn't add them. More than wanting to LISTEN TO COUNTRY, I felt like I had been hypnotised into buying a sea monkey village or shares in an alpaca farm. The claim about TWENTY ORIGINAL STARS isn't even true. Twenty songs, but Johnny Cash sings three, Bill Anderson and Lee Conway sing two each: that's actually 16 ORIGINAL STARS singing 20 COUNTRY CHARTSTOPPERS!

This is a pretty stock standard late 60s K-TEL style compilation. Solid Nashville sound: none of that Haggard, Jennings outlaw malarkey. That said, this compilation does encompass a reasonable range of late 60s country styles. There was a lot of room for maneuver in the country and western genres judging by the representations on this disc. All of it is recognisably country, a unifying factor is the folksy storytelling nature of the lyrics. The strangest track on here is Dave Dudley's 'Fly away again'. This is a jet age update of the old standard 'on-the-road-again' story. Instead of mounting the horse or hitching up the wagon or getting a ride on a boxcar, the protagonist in this song seems to be waiting around for his flight in an airport lounge with his long-suffering lady friend.

What makes this updating of an archetypal country song strange is the synthesized strings, great slatherings phasing from one speaker to the other in tandem with the harmonica. Of course, the harmonica instantly evokes the great travelling hobo boxcar song tradition that modern country acquired from its dustbowl depression era roots. The combination of the synthesized (ARP?) strings and the harmonica works in creating a slightly queasy, compressed, flat sound. It's a sound that in its way conjures the empty feeling of hanging around airports waiting for loved ones to depart.

It's true son, I played jug in a rock'n'roll band.

The 13th Floor Elevators, 'His Eye Is On The Pyramid', Snapper Music, 1999, 2xCD Compilation.

The Sixties. If you remember being there you weren't really there. Or something. Sounds like what a super paranoid sub-Mansonite creep would say in an accusatory manner to an innocent schlep talking about something innocuous like going to his sister-in-law's graduation ceremony in 1967.

Innocent Schlep: That's right, of course, we went to Aunty Deniece's graduation, it would've been 1967. Here we go, I've got a photo right here.

Innocent Schlep points at a photo in photo album.

IS: You know Aunty Deniece was one of the first women in Australia to graduate with a degree in nuclear cybernetic biomechanics.
Sub-Mansonite Creep: It was the Sixties, man. If you remember being there you weren't really there, man! You're lying.
IS: But of course I was there, here's the photo and plus I remember being there.
SMC: Photos lie, man, they're a fabrication and your head, man, is filled with malignant genies. Haven't you ever read Descartes? Genies and hobgoblins, not brain cells and neutrons, man. When you ever gonna learn not to trust the man, man.

The Sixties. A time when a dude, with enough knowledge of Gurdijeff and cosmic philosophy, could get away with ruining perfectly good rock'n'roll by making cooing pigeon noises with an "electric jug". I'm referring here to the esteemed spiritual leader of The 13th Floor Elevators, Tommy Hall.

Tary Owen, a bandmate of Hall's in a pre-Elevators outfit called St.John and the Conquer Roots, explained Hall's use of the jug as instrument. "He would hold the microphone next to the jug and blow into the microphone with a real high pitch. He could have done it without the jug. The jug was a prop but it looked more like an instrument on stage," Owen says in the liner notes to His Eye Is On The Pyramid, a two-CD compilation of the 13th Floor Elevators.

The best known member of the Elevators is Roky Erickson. Roky is so well-known that he managed to make it into Richie Unterberger's Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll: Psychedelic Unknowns, Mad Geniuses, Punk Pioneers, Lo-Fi Mavericks & More. Roky is now so well-known and loved that the likes of Henry Rollins, the Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth have helped set up a foundation to look after Roky's royalties, releases and what-not. There's even a doco coming out about Roky.

But how about this other guy? Some chutzpah. Imagine walking into a rehearsal room with a bunch of musos and wailing away on your "electrified jug"?
"What are you doing, man?"
"I'm taking the sound of this band to a higher place. I'm blowing your mystical third eye with the sub-audible hum of my oracular jug."
"Yeah. Yeah! You're in the band. This is what we've been missing all along. A guy who cooes like a pigeon into a microphone."

And thus, with a jug player in their line-up, Coldplay could finally achieve corporate rock dominance.

Hall's jug playing sham is not that different to the blighted 90s phenomenon of 'heavy' bands suddenly acquiring a turntablist. Remember Mucky Pup? Urban Dance Squad? Frankston's very own 28 Days? Yeah, neither do I. Turntablists had a cultural tidal wave washing them into 90s 'metal' bands. Kids abandoned guitar playing in droves to learn the art of mixing smooth beats and fat rhythms. It was all about appropriating the discarded sounds of a decayed urban culture and remaking sounds anew in a decontextualised recontextualising mode. Just ask the French, I'm sure they can tell you all about it.

And in a certain way, Hall was doing the same with his "electrified jug". As the turntablist traced roots to 70s block parties, the jug player could trace roots to rudimentary dance musics from across the racial divide in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The jug can be seen as related to the fife, another basic wind instrument evident in early blues and old-timey music. So, in this regard, Hall's appropriation and bogus "electrification" of the jug was just another way for white rock bands to bend back and say hello to their black and white histories.

Though psychedelics have a slightly quaint connotation these days, in the late 60s they were still positively regarded as a possible means by which to improve the human mind - another step on the path to enlightenment. In the liner notes, Hall is quoted as saying: "I started taking psychedelics during this time because we thought they would take us somewhere, another stage beyond what we knew. We would perceive a new range of events that would help mankind."

The combination of psychedelic optimism in a song like 'Levitation' (co-written, incidentally, by Hall) with Hall's rhythmic pigeon cooes and the twangy, swampy guitars of Erickson and Stacy Sutherland creates something unique. It signals a time when rock'n'roll was still stretching its canvas; not always successfully but you could hear the excitement in what the players were trying to create. I don't hear much of that sort of excitement in rock'n'roll these days (grumpy old shit).

I've largely ignored Roky Erickson here because I'll get to him eventually with his solo stuff. Needless to say some of the greatest 13th Floor Elevators moments come from his weird Buddy Holly approximations, James Brown howls and Van Morrison growls. And 'You're Gonna Miss Me' remains one of the all-time great garage rock songs. Roky is also one of the saddest singers you'll ever hear, and that sadness and vulnerability is made all the greater by the hiccuping happiness of his Buddy Holly inspired high note skips.

The 13th Floor Elevators are one of the flag-bearers of the Texan acid rock tradition that takes in the likes of Janis Joplin, The Moving Sidewalks, The Red Crayola all the way up to the Butthole Surfers. Listening to a song like 'Barnyard Blues' you can also hear the greasy R'nB, early funk of Texans like Archie Bell & The Drells - though in a more loping, looser manner than most self-respecting funk bands would perform.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go practice my jug blowing. Anyone out there with a band that needs to be taken to a higher place?

For some it is a spoon . . .

'10 More Years', Shangri-La Records, Various Artists Compilation, 1998, CD.

For others, like me, a record or CD. I bought this as a sonic souvenir, one of several, of my trip to Memphis. Don't worry, I also bought some mindless Elvis paraphernalia and am very proud of the souvenir tourist photo, still on our fridge, of me and my girlfriend, Cass, standing in front of a fake Graceland backdrop.

10 More Years: Shangri-La Records 1989-98 is a compilation of highlights from Memphis indie rock label Shangri-La's first ten years. As indie rock comps go, it's not too bad. Listening to it, however, reminds me of my troubled relationship with indie rock. So much of it sounds the same - is it the most utilitarian of genres? I guess it is the sprawling American heartland offspring of the punk rock ideal.

Memphis is a small town with an incredibly huge music history. Sort of like Uruguay in the World Cup. W.C. Handy, Sun Records, Al Green, Big Star to name but a few who have contributed to the great legacy Memphis provides to contemporary music. So where to fit indie rock in the scheme of this town's capital M, capital H, Music History. Well, of course, there is no need to fit it in anywhere.

Being a relatively small city with a small music scene, it is perhaps understandable that a lot of these bands - The Grifters, the Hot Monkey, Simple Ones - sound alike. I actually really like The Grifters and "Radio City Suicide" (not found on this comp) from their 'Ain't My Lookout' album is a phenomenal example of detuned guitar, loud-soft dynamic, grunge pop from the mid-90s. Up there with Superchunk's "Slack Motherfucker" in my books. But there is a sameness to this stuff that turned me off indie rock awhile back when. A couple of tracks on here have a bluesier bent in keeping with the rich Memphis blues tradition.

What you do consistently hear, loud and fuzzy (not too clear), is the Alex Chilton influence. Not so much the pristine first two Big Star albums but the fucked-upedness of '3rd' or 'Sister Lovers' or whatever it's called and his subsequent solo albums. It's a willful sloppiness that marks so much of the enervated output of American indie rock: it's a marker gene in the slacker DNA. It makes you wear work boots even though the most work you ever do is go to the fridge to get another beer. It gives you just enough philosophy to sit around and realise life's screwed up, but not enough to get up and do anything about it.

Ok, calm down, enough of the Christian bootcamp rhetoric. Just put those Rollins Band records away.

That's better.

I'm glad I bought this Shangri-La compilation though. It's a little piece of a town I really loved, along with the cheesy Elvis souvenirs and the printed postcard from Al Green thanking me for turning up to church (even though he was in NY at the time - major bummer) and the Sun Records t-shirt that has faded from black to bottle green.

At least I can listen to a CD: what the hell do you do with a souvenir spoon?