Monthly Archives: April 2015

“Records are raw. Emotional rawness. In fact, there’s something wrong to me about listening to a clean, new vinyl record. Maybe because all my memories of LP indulgence include the necessary pops, hisses, a skip or two rendering some pretty amazing lyrical malfunctions, and most definitely reaching for the needle to switch from A to B—a big hairy fur ball at the end. I could have made cat #3 out of those in college.”

“Clearly I was not super involved in taking care of my albums in the early years. What I was more interested in was diving deep into the beautiful angst winding its way out at 33 rpm. By the time I was buying records of my own and seriously listening to music of my choice, my family was equally seriously on the rocks. My parents’ marriage was in lethal trouble. And me, who at 10 was already crying at Coca Cola commercials, I was a wreck even before teenagehood kicked in. So, record spinning for me was almost something like therapy.

I have to out myself that it kinda all began with some serious So Cal pop rock. Nothing fringy or edgy. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours pulled me in with Christine McVie’s mellow throatiness and Stevie’s weird warbly white-girl croon. I remember hours staring at the black and ivory cover wondering what the fuck adult men were doing dressed in tights dangling things over wanton ladies. And how perfectly it reflected my feeling of also being on the outside of understanding the kick ass lyrical syllables that wound their way through the electric melodies. How did they DO that? What where they SAYING? How did they know it would sound so AWESOME?

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Deep and wide are the realms of self-produced obscurities; just when it seems every attic, garage and barn has received inspection for test pressings, acetates, and undistributed editions, another doozy turns up. In this context, the self-titled ’77 effort of Michael Angelo isn’t amongst the rarest, as 500 were pressed. But originals can go for four figures, indicating it’s not an ordinary rediscovery. Those lacking four figures worth of spending money should, if not rejoice, than at least smile with satisfaction over Michael Angelo’s legit reissue by Anthology Recordings. A bonus 3-song 7-inch is icing on the cake.

The neighborhood of the unearthed obscurity is populated by more than a few fringe characters, especially on the private press side of the tracks. However, Michael Angelo Nigro comes off as a pretty well-adjusted dude, and if his lyrics can get a tad spacey, that’s indicative of ambition and not an inability to curb excessive errors of taste.

Michael Angelo is a retrieval possessing not only restraint but palpable perceptiveness into how to craft an album, though none of that would really matter much if the guy lacked songwriting talent. It helps greatly that Angelo’s Influences, noticeably derived from the second half of the ‘60s, were as attentive to melodicism as self-indulgence.

Another huge factor is Angelo’s instrumental skill; except for the drumming of Frank Gautieri all the sounds came from his hands and throat. Indeed, Angelo was sharp enough to work as a full-time session musician, and in Kansas City, MO no less (how times have changed), his LP crafted in the off-hours at employer Liberty Recording in 1976.

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I rarely write about overtly political rock bands, primarily because I find politics morally lowering but also because, as Bob Geldof once said, “Music can’t change the world.” Political rock bands tend to preach to the choir, which is a complete waste of breath. If you really want to change the world—and I personally believe it can’t be changed, not really—quit said rock band and start a revolution. Form your own Weather Underground. Bomb stuff and shit.

But if political rock is useless, I still have a soft spot for Dicks, the Texas/San Francisco hardcore band fronted by the great Gary Floyd. He’s written reams of protest songs, but I can relate to them because they so frequently come down to wanting to off the pigs or the KKK or rich bourgeois bastards. It’s never going to happen, although the police have become more of a threat to public safety than ever, but I find listening to Floyd singing about hating the police rejuvenating. He’s all rage and vitriol, as anybody who’s been paying attention to the homicidal antics of police forces around the nation should be. Throw in a great band, and catchy melodies, and it’s no wonder Dicks are the considered one of history’s great hardcore bands.

I wish Floyd were a bit funnier, but he obviously takes his subject matter seriously, which is generally an aesthetic mistake in my Oscar Wilde-influenced world. But once again I’ll make Floyd and Dicks an exception, in part because Floyd was one of the first openly gay humans in the hardcore community and I can’t imagine that was a pleasant experience. As for his hatred of the police, it was a universally held notion in the early days of punk and hardcore, because the po-po treated your average punk rockers the same way they treated all defenseless minorities, namely like shit. So small wonder Floyd reached the boiling point, and his only means of expressing himself was through bile and more bile.

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He may not be well-known, but 20th century music would unwind somewhat differently minus multi-wind instrumentalist Jon Gibson. His membership in the defining ensembles of New York City Minimalism is without peer, but he’s also a composer spanning roughly 50 years. Gibson’s debut under his own name emerged in 1973; Visitations contains two side-long tracks establishing that he was trapped beneath nobody’s stylistic umbrella. It gets its first-time vinyl reissue this week through Superior Viaduct.

Born in 1940, saxophonist, clarinetist and flautist Jon Gibson studied at Sacramento State and received his BA from San Francisco State in 1964. By the end of the decade he’d secured placement in the history of New Music, but for an artist of such achievement his name is raised far too seldom. He started out in the improvisation-based New Music Ensemble, his most famous cohort in the group being its founder, the prolific composer Larry Austin.

Folks bonkers for experimentalism might recognize the Ensemble’s Richard Swift, Stanley Lunetta, and Arthur Woodbury; along with Austin, they were subsequently involved in the magazine Source: Music of the Avant-Garde. The New Music Ensemble cut what appears to be a self-released record in 1964, but it doesn’t seem to have been given a very large pressing and today looks to be utterly scarce. I’d love to hear it, almost as much as I would’ve treasured witnessing the November 4, 1964 premier of Terry Riley’s In C at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

Gibson was a participant in that performance as he helped to debut Steve Reich’s Drumming and a bit later Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, all this activity kinda making him minimalism’s Freddie Hubbard (look up the jazz trumpeter’s credits to understand); he also worked with La Monte Young, Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, Robert Ashley, Christian Wolff, Harold Budd, and others.

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