Author Archives: Joseph Neff

In 1991, California punk heavies Claw Hammer decided to pay tribute to one of their influences, and not with a mere cover or two, but by tacking an entire album from the band that helped shape part of their ragged musical vision. The record just happened to be Devo’s rather magnificent first LP, a choice that certainly befuddled more than a few at the time, but after inspection made perfect if truly twisted sense. For Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Not Devo! isn’t a tame and ultimately forgettable exercise in slavish devotion, but instead stands as a prime example of the rewards to be found at the intersection of (Claw Hammer’s) inspiration and (the Spud-Boys’) invention.

By the dawn of the ‘90s, Devo was in need of a serious reconstruction project in terms of both general image and more importantly the substantial musical worth of their early work. While they were never a band to inspire widespread levels of acceptance, in the late-‘70s/ early-‘80s Devo did find themselves with a rather fervent fan-base that cherished them as a real alternative to some of the more knuckle-dragging tendencies of the lingering Dinosaur Rock-era.

Thusly, they became quite popular as part of the New Wave, even if the group’s intense conceptual strategies were probably lost on the majority of the folks who bought “Whip It” and “Working in a Coal Mine.” Devo ended up playing such a major role in the whole Wavy scheme of things, getting on national-TV numerous times as late-night performers and even appearing as characters in the doomed New Wave-themed youth sitcom Square Pegs, that an eventual backlash was inevitable.

Many of the folks that dug them when they first emerged surely continued to recognize Devo’s worth and valued the ambitiousness of their prime stuff, but many younger listeners considered them to be little more than a flash in the pan and even more curiously as an MTV-relic, this assessment either ignorant to or ignoring the fact that the group’s integration of sonic and visual stimuli pre-dated the music channel’s debut on cable-TV by several years.

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On the subject of The Turtles, the first thing to cross many people’s minds will be “Happy Together,” their huge hit from 1967. They scored other hit singles, some bigger than others, but they also had some LPs, and the initial four all portray a distinct point in the group’s development. Their 1965 debut It Ain’t Me Babe, which has just received a 180gm vinyl repress, features a young band striving to find an individual voice while attempting to capitalize on their first hit. It’s a situation that often spells disaster, but in this case it results in a record that while small of scale and not without faults, nonetheless remains a highly pleasurable listen.

I’m unsure if there’s ever been any real consensus over which of The Turtles’ string of original, non-comp albums is their greatest. Indeed, the group doesn’t really get discussed all that often in LP terms, at least in my experience. Instead, they seem to remain in the cultural discourse mainly as an exponent of the mid-‘60s folk-rock boom, one that was able to break free of the substantial Dylan-isms of their early work to score a handful of pop hits that successfully straddled the fence betwixt the youth market and the era’s more “adult” record-buying audience.

Underscoring this is the fact that the only Turtles LP to enter the top twenty of the Billboard Album Chart was a compilation, 1967’s Golden Hits. But release full-length records they did, and the personal favorite of this writer is probably 1968’s ambitious yet refreshingly level-headed concept offering The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands. That album found them dishing out 12 songs in a diverse range of musical genres and all of it under the guise of different fictitious and humorously-named groups.

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Savages are a London band that’s currently getting hyped to the high heavens. Post-punk is the style they flaunt and with nary a sign of hesitation. In keeping with their influences the group is also invested with a rather prickly attitude, and many will surely find this off-putting. However, the bottom-line concerns whether or not Savages’ first full-length record holds the musical goods. The verdict is yes; Silence Yourself is one of the stronger debuts to appear in quite some time.

The very cover of Silence Yourself portends an intriguing experience. Those words in the lower left corner aren’t lyrics, but instead comprise what has been described as a manifesto, one that expresses a deep dissatisfaction with the intense chatter and distracting noise of modernity, positing it as a controlling mechanism of the powerful (described in the text only as “they”) and inevitably presenting an alternative to all the madness; if the world would just stifle this overstimulation and ceaseless racket for just a little while, we might actually get back in touch with the better side of our nature.

Of course, many will read these lines and simply decry it as pretension. In pinpointing and proposing an answer to contemporary ills, the words certainly do possess a quality that might be called intellectually-inclined arrogance, but that’s sorta in keeping with the big whopping tradition of the manifesto. To get down to brass tacks, the passage that adorns Silence Yourself is just the latest example in a very long history of rebelliousness over the perceived manacles of complacency and stagnation.

Rebellion often ain’t very pretty, and it’s even less frequently polite, and Savages’ decision to title their LP with a phrase that solicits the audience to basically be quiet (and naturally give them the floor for approximately forty minutes) makes this very plain. And yet it’s the sort of blatant (and again, more than a bit haughty) defiance that isn’t exactly being offered up with regularity these days.

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Wild Billy Childish is such a prolific figure in a wide range of artistic fields that it’s well nigh impossible for one mortal to assess the entirety of his output. And this statement applies to his musical activities as well, for he’s been the impetus for the manufacture of so many records that it’s a safe bet no one human being owns a copy of them all. One of his best bands was Thee Mighty Caesars, a trio that combined Childish’s love of hard-edged UK Freakbeat, no-nonsense garage-rock, and the back to basics oomph of ’77-punk, and one of that trio’s best showings was the 1990 7-inch “Cowboys Are Square” b/w “Ain’t Got None.”

Writer, painter, musician, filmmaker, publisher; Billy Childish has worked in a variety of forms for so long now that to focus on his recorded output is to short shrift him in a huge fashion. Childish (born Steven John Hamper, December 1, 1959) isn’t a rocker who dabbles in other forms; he’s a multi-media force of nature. In fact, a very sound argument can be made that his paintings, poems, and novels have had a bigger impact on the culture than has his role as singer, guitarist, and general instigator of no-nonsense mania in the bands Pop Rivets, Thee Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, Thee Headcoats, Buff Medways, and most recently Spartan Dreggs.

The reason mainly comes down to Childish’s categorization as a garage rocker. It’s a tag that’s certainly true, but it also misses a big part of the point regarding how he uses that platform. For starters, where nearly all of the ‘80s garage bands, a bunch that so often got erroneously assessed as being his peer group, were attempting to replicate the look and capture a sound that’s best summed up as deriving from the Nuggets compilation series, a definite retro-minded impulse on the whole, Childish instead targeted a UK-based ‘60s sound; a little early Mod, a whole lot of tough Freakbeat, a touch of upstart white-boy blues rocking, all with the intention of extending it into an ‘80s milieu that was drenched with an upswing of professionalism.

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The appearance of female blues guitarists didn’t begin with Bonnie Raitt, as she’d be the first one to tell you. There were surely a few gender trailblazers in the genre, and the most successful was Memphis Minnie. But she was no mere curiosity, possessing great ability both as a singer and string-bender, recording in four decades as a solo performer and in fine collaboration. The Arhoolie Records subsidiary Blues Classics was the first label to give her work serious attention after the end of her commercial heyday, and it’s an effort that’s still worthy of commemoration.

It can be difficult to adequately express just how crucial the Arhoolie label of Chris Strachwitz was in exploring the sheer depth of the American Music of last century, particularly the ins and outs of the blues, a form that in its raw state had become a tough sell for more commercially minded companies, especially after the innovation of the long-playing record really got its hooks in.

Strachwitz’s now celebrated imprint combined the no-nonsense DIY spirit that’s commonly associated with the contemporary “indie” experience with the urge for documentation of styles of music with essences so pure and intense that they’ve always resided on the margins. That is, they were limited in their potential for widespread “pop” success, but absolutely crucial in providing insight into how creativity could flourish and give meaning to everyday life when concerns of monetary gain weren’t a central and often overriding issue.

For instance, Arhoolie was essentially founded to annotate the discovery of a then obscure Texas musician Mance Lipscomb, a singer and guitarist that had never previously recorded. Lipscomb’s Texas Sharecropper and Songster, the first in a series of enlightening volumes of his repertoire that retain their potency to this very day, set the course for the general vibe of a massive hunk of the subsequent Arhoolie discography.

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The Melvins’ latest release Everybody Loves Sausages is an all-covers album that’s loaded with guest spots, but it thankfully lacks the self-congratulatory aura of similarly-themed veteran projects. Instead, it’s a fun, modestly scaled ride that also provides an enlightening look into the group’s outsized personality.

The Melvins have just announced a 30th anniversary tour, and that’s a fitting endeavor for a band I’m guessing few people thought were likely to survive for this long. And even if a handful of folks might’ve went out on a limb and predicted they’d still be in the game after three decades of doing it their own way, it would’ve been much harder to convincingly prognosticate that the Melvins would still be possessive of so much relevance at such a late date.

And the fact that the group have proven so influential upon the nexus of Sludge, Doom, and Stoner metal can perhaps cloud the reality of just how unusual of a band the Melvins once were. While their initial forays into recording could be traced back to the precedent of early Black Sabbath and later-period Black Flag, it’s important to note just how different a record like 1992’s Melvins (aka Lysol) sounded at the time of its release.

Reliably mentioned as a major antecedent for the Grunge explosion, the Melvins’ music never really fit in with that style, though it’s always been pretty clear how the band’s extension of hard-rock sensibilities did influence that movement.

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If you were hoping that Iggy and the Stooges’ new record Ready to Die, which features the unlikely return of James Williamson on guitar, would somehow match the heights of Raw Power, you’re in for a little bit of disappointment. But taken on its own, the LP does include a few nice moments. It also has its share of problems. Maybe the best thing about Ready to Die is that it holds a few surprises that actually expose the limitations of its intentions.

In rock ‘n’ roll, it’s particularly hard to escape being dogged by past success, and this is especially true when those achievements happen to be amongst the most important in rock’s history. And when some cornerstone performer or legendary group returns to the studio after a lengthy hiatus, the chances that the results will somehow escape being judged against those previous breakthroughs are basically nil.

With their 1969 self-titled debut and its follow-up, 1970’s Fun House, The Stooges recorded two of the greatest albums ever. Few people saw it that way at the time. Aggressively unfashionable in the midst of feel-good hippie-era vibes, they sold hardly any records and imploded in a haze of heroin abuse, subsequently finding themselves dropped from the roster of their label Elektra

Resurrected through the efforts of David Bowie and with guitarist James Williamson in the lineup (Ron Asheton having switched to bass) they became Iggy and the Stooges and produced Raw Power with Bowie in the producer’s seat for new label Columbia in 1973. It also flopped commercially and the group disbanded in 1974, with the monkey still very much on Iggy’s back. Two years later Metallic K.O., a live document of their final shows, was issued semi-officially by the Skydog label and just in time for the reevaluation of The Stooges as punk rock reared its spiky, pissed-off head.

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Apparently Lawrence Hayward’s whole plan was to release ten LPs and ten singles in ten years. Through growth and perseverance he pulled it off in the ‘80s via the band Felt. Their later albums are the ones most talked about these days, but that doesn’t mean the discerning post-punk/indie pop fan should neglect the early stuff. If interested in hearing the whole story, than Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty is the place to start.

Back in the day the proto-punk club was a pretty exclusive joint. A person could count the most important members on the fingers of one hand, even; there was The Stooges and the MC5 from Detroit, The Modern Lovers from Boston, and The New York Dolls and The Velvet Underground from New York.

Of course the list could be expanded a bit, with the digits on the opposing paw including Bowie and T. Rex from England and Rocket from the Tombs and Electric Eels from Cleveland, which leaves one solitary wiggler left to represent the ‘60s garage wave detailed on the original Lenny Kaye compiled Nuggets volume.

But the march of time has uncovered a smattering of once ultra-obscure names and unearthed new discoveries that have expanded the proto-punk sphere quite a bit, with bands like Ontario CA’s Simply Saucer, Detroit’s Death, Minneapolis’ Michael Yonkers, and others deepening the field considerably. Plus, Nuggets bands like The Monks, The Sonics, and ? Mark and the Mysterians, once primarily known for a song or two on comps, have been given a much larger role in the proto-punk universe through reissues and even reunion shows. Throw in an expanded role for Krautrock, UK pub-rock, and glam, and the proto-punk arena could theoretically take up its own section in a well stocked record shack.

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