‘I like music made with proper musical instruments played by proper musicians’

Am I the only one tired of hearing that phrase?  It’s usually uttered by people who feel that their taste in music is far superior to everybody else’s, thus unassailable.  These people usually have two things in common; they hate anything to do with Hip Hop and Dance music, and they usually worship at the altar of ‘authenticity’.

Ewan MacColl – A man and his ‘rules’

For the uninitiated, ‘authenticity’ can actually also be applied to some forms of Hip Hop, but in the case of that genre the terminology is to ‘keep it real’, use straightforward language and/or strip the arrangement down to the traditional ‘two turntables and a microphone’ set-up.  In rock music authenticity is an even more  anal concept and it was possibly brought into play during the merging of folk/blues with rock ‘n’ roll during the mid-60s, a time when an artist was expected to write his/her own songs, henceforth reveal their own emotions in their songwriting and performance.  Since then, the parameters have shifted and arguably tightened.

 

The Yardbirds – Blues Revivalists bring the brth of the ‘guitar hero’

Artists like The Beatles – at least in the early days – were unashamedly commercial, and played pop, but their more middle-class counterparts like The Yardbirds made it their role to play ‘authentic’ blues (in reality it was not in the least authentic).  Guitarists of the time, like Eric Clapton, have since revealed that they would even mimic what they perceived to be the lifestyles of their favourite blues musicians; drink gallons of bourbon, and so on.  Of course, Clapton and his contemporaries didn’t want to emulate the poverty of the original bluesmen and were more than happy to reap the rewards of their record sales.  The blues revivalists considered what they were playing to be automatically better than popular music, because they thought it was more emotional and ‘real’ than the popular music of the day.  This also had another component; they felt blues to was better because it was the music of Afro-Americans and therefore it enabled the blues revivalists to feel morally superior to their more populist contemporaries.

Ironically, what actually escaped the attention of blues revivalists is that the original bluesmen were often encouraged to play blues by their record labels, because it was considered to be the most commercial part of their repertoire. Many country blues artists like Charlie Patton played as much and country, folk and ragtime in their live performances as blues, but since most of this didn’t make its way onto recordings it was largely forgotten about.  Blues revivalists also didn’t seem to notice that some of the best popular music of the time was being made by Tamla Motown, a label owned and entirely made up of Afro-Americans – how could the music being made by these artists be less ‘authentic’ than the output of some middle-class, white, British kids trying to mimic old bluesmen?

Nevertheless, arguably the authenticity-badge was imported into rock via folk.  Everybody knows about the story about when Bob Dylan plugged in an electric guitar, the folk fraternity went crazy and began calling him ‘Judas’ and so on.  The biggest culprit for causing folk music’s obsession with authenticity was the UK’s own Ewan MacColl – an admirable man in many ways, but not renowned for his tolerance of other people’s opinions.  MacColl insisted that folk singers should only sing songs from their own place of birth, and this was curious since MacColl himself sang Scottish songs, despite being born in Manchester (his parents were both Scots but even with that being considered, he was still bending his own rules somewhat).  He was also known to sing Joe Hill, which is an American folk song – so it was certainly a case of ‘don’t do what I do, do what I say’ with our Ewan.  It was not only MacColl who caused folk music’s rather insular attitude, but this may be one of the reasons why it has fallen out of favour as a genre.  Folk music had a lasting effect on rock though, ever since Dylan went electric.

One of the most damning charges that can be made against an artist nowadays is that they don’t write their own material, being a great interpreter of other people’s songs is no longer enough.  Being an Elvis fan, I have constantly heard people dismiss him for this reason, despite the fact that when Elvis came up in the music industry no-one was expected to write their own songs; Sinatra never wrote a song in his life!   For this reason it is now common for artists to be described as singer-songwriters, but if one investigates further the facts are rather different (this was true of Katie Melua and James Blunt – both of whom I can’t abide for different reasons, but that’s beside the point).

Scratch DJing – Not as easy as it looks…

So what is real musical instrument?  It wasn’t too long ago that people considered the guitar to be ‘not a serious instrument’, and considering that it is now the most macho and phallic of all rock instruments, it used to be more often played by women.  Rock guitarists will instantly claim that DJs certainly aren’t musicians because ‘all they do is play records’.  If, like me, you have ever tried to ‘scratch DJ’ and been rather embarrassed by the results, then you’ll know there’s a lot more to it than that.  I can play the guitar reasonably well, but when I attempt to scratch DJ it sounds like a washing machine falling down the stairs while remaining switched on.  The same people dismiss rapping, but that is another skill that requires as much hard-work and discipline as singing – and it is certainly more creative than most of what I hear in mainstream rock.

It is however unfair of me to blame just rock musicians for all of this backward thinking.  The worst offenders at the moment are Indie musicians.  They will dismiss DJs, rappers and anybody who uses any musical instrument that wasn’t around in the 1960s – apart from when it suits them (this is why I have spent most of this particular blog discussing what went on during that period).  They will use basic dance beats, for instance, but will at the same time complain about ‘music made with computers’ and ‘sampling’.

Oasis – Don’t use many samples but they did get ‘inspiration’ from other people’s songs.

Yes, sampling.  I’m hardly the first person to write about the ethics of sampling.  However, many artists who have been sampled have had their careers revitalised as a result, rather like the blues musicians who benefitted from renewed interest in their music during the 1960s.  It was a result of sampling that I first heard great funk bands like The Meters, for example, and for that I am grateful.  Another point is that at least artists who such recording techniques now clear and give credit to the samples they use (most of the time); Indie musicians don’t credit The Velvet Underground when they rewrite Pale Blue Eyes for the millionth time (they will talk at great length about the band during interviews though), and how many times did Oasis get sued for infringing copyright?  All of that seems to be far more dishonest than sampling, to be honest.

Indie musicians believe that they are more authentic than pop musicians, that what they do is more intellectual, and nowadays they even seem to think that they are more ‘ethical’.  Indie musicians may write their own songs, but does that make them better songs?  Does that make their performance of them more real?  Anybody who knows anything about the music industry knows that that is nonsense; Indie bands are under as much pressure to create hit records as any pop singer, the criteria is just different.  This is why there are record labels for Indie bands (very few are actually independent any more) and record labels for pop-stars – there are also record producers who specialise in every genre that one hears.

Indie musicians may not use computers to create their music, but it will probably be digitally recorded, and they will probably use digital effects during their live performances.  Their producers will often edit and quantise their performance of their music before it is even considered for release.  This is the final irony – most music we now hear was doctored on a computer, just like the films we see, the TV programmes we watch and so on.  This is not even a recent development – even in the theatre, actors have a director, a producer, a script; composers would write to order; artists would be commissioned; authors write to be published and so on.

To return to that old blues music I discussed earlier it is important to remember that when John and Alan Lomax recorded those old blues and hillbilly musicians, they were looking for a specific type of sound that conformed to their own prerequisite view of authenticity, and this was music at its most basic and ‘primal’.  There were plenty of Afro-Americans and hillbilly musicians at the time who were playing far more complex music, but this didn’t fit in with their criteria.  Authenticity is in the ear of the beholder.

At which point did rock and pop become separate genres? And why?

This is a question I asked on my Facebook account recently and received a number of very intelligent responses from a wide cross-section of people. This in turn is my own opinion.

Some Beatles fans. Note home-made Beatles jumper in the middle.

One person indicated that they felt that in some respects it may have started with the rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and their respective fans.  In some ways I would agree with that, but only partially.  If we look at the difference between the two bands in the early days one thing becomes clear.  The Beatles’ hits were all self-penned songs with an undeniable pop slant.  Any analysis of those songs would perhaps reveal that they reveal that they were largely influenced by the pop hits of the day; the songwriting of Carole King and Jerry Goffin, girl groups in general, Roy Orbison, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and so on.  This would seemingly put The Beatles firmly in the pop category then.

The Rolling Stones when they were still blues purists.

The Rolling Stones are another matter.  The Stones’ roots were self-consciously more rhythm and blues based since many of the bands members came from the Alexis Korner stable.  Brian Jones had even written letters to the music magazines of the day, some of which were printed, extolling the virtues of the blues and advocated that the genre should be given more coverage.  The Rolling Stones early records were largely cover versions of some blues staples and featuring very bluesy instrumentation; blues harp, slide guitar, open tunings.  However, purists of the time argued that The Rolling Stones were more of rock ‘n’ roll band, mainly because they played a lot of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley numbers.  Neither of those artists were considered blues because their songs were primarily aimed at the dance-floor and – in the case of Chuck Berry – had lyrics that enshrined youth culture.

A further problem arises when we look at what musical academics call authenticity.  The Beatles were in many ways a far more authentic band than The Rolling Stones in those early days.  The Beatles had served an apprenticeship in a dangerous German red-light district and had honed their craft there.  By the time they returned to the UK they were a self-contained unit, functioning with almost military precision and knew the ins and outs of songwriting intimately, having played hundreds of songs for months on end to keep up with an aggressive audience’s demands.  The Rolling Stones hadn’t been playing for anything like as long before they were signed.  Furthermore, all of The Beatles hits were written by members of the band, while The Rolling Stones were initially reliant on cover-versions, which caused them to struggle for a while.  In fact, it was only at the instigation of their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, that they began writing songs at all.

The intimidating presence Ewan MacColl

So where did this issue about authenticity come from?  Did audiences really care whether artists wrote their own songs or not, or even what genre they were in.  Perhaps a minority did.  In the early sixties the UK still had a jazz scene and some young people were into ‘trad’ and others preferred the more up to date, sharper dressed ‘modern’ jazz.  That is what the original ‘mods’ were; fans of modern jazz, and even in the early sixties, the jazz genre had a lot of snobs in it, who would argue about which artist was ‘authentic’ jazz and who wasn’t.  There were people arguing that 1962 hit ‘Take Five’ by The Dave Brubeck Quartet wasn’t proper jazz because it was played in the wrong time-signature (5/8).

There were other snobs among the music-buying public too; those who listened to or even played folk.  The ultimate folk snob was the late, great Ewan MacColl, who reportedly ran folk clubs with an iron hand and forbade folk singers to sing a song from a culture other than their own, and even banned acoustic guitars .  The latter may have taken place because of the influence of Bob Dylan, who MacColl distrusted and felt had taken folk music in the wrong direction.

A young and already iconic Bob Dylan.

The Yardbirds featuring the melancholic Eric Clapton on lead guitar.

Bob Dylan began his recording career as a folk artist, of course. He was one of most influential figures in popular music industry and in the mid-60s his songwriting was at its most popular.  Both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were caught up in his spell and one only has to listen to their records of 1965/66 to hear evidence of it (John Lennon was showing signs of a Dylan influence as early as 1964).  It was Dylan who proved that lyrics could be used to convey something important rather than just throwaway clichés about teen-romance.  Of course, Dylan wasn’t the first person to do this – Jerry Goffin’s lyrics were never throwaway – but he was the first young, fashionable person of any prominence to do so and the effect it had on popular music was staggering.

Therefore, as we have seen, there were purists among blues fans, the folk community and those following jazz.  An example of a purist working in the 1960s popular music scene was Eric Clapton.  In 1965, Clapton decided that to leave The Yardbirds after recording their breakthrough single ‘For Your Love’ (a surefire hit composed by Graham Gouldman).  His reason leaving was that he felt that the band had moved too far away from their blues-based material.  He then joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, who were totally immersed in electric blues and he took part in recording arguably their best album, before leaving to form Cream – the first super-group.

Personally, I’m not a fan of Clapton, but he was perhaps the first pop musician to be afforded ‘god-like’ status for his prowess on the guitar and for what was considered to be his musical integrity.  He was considered to be a serious artist because he had forgone the hit-making Yardbirds to join a serious blues band at the height of his talent.

The music press of the early to mid-sixties was far different to what it became.  Music magazines were strictly for fans, there was little or no real serious criticism in them, just news about pop-stars.  In fact, it was quite common for some of them to just print the lyrics of chart-topping singles, to enable teenagers to sing along with the radio.  The heavyweight music magazines didn’t come along until serious ‘rock-bands’ arrived.  Remember, this was a time when bands were more commonly described as ‘groups’.

It was people like Clapton and Dylan who began to change this.  Both demanded to be taken seriously.  It was impossible to write about a record like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in the same way that you’d approach ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’.  This doesn’t mean one is necessarily better than the other – each has its own merits – but Dylan’s lyrics were complicated and almost invited analysis, and writers wanted to do precisely that.

This is the point where pop and rock divide, I think.  However, on the face of it The Beatles’ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ is unashamedly a pop song, but it is just as authentic as the Dylan song.  The Beatles were a self-contained band performing just as original material, whereas Dylan’s had only been put together to record.  However, the Dylan record has certainly been afforded more value than The Beatles’.  One is considered art, whereas the other is merely ‘popular’.

There is another interesting component to all of this.  It was male rock critics who decided what the distinctions between rock and pop were.  One of the most noticeable things about The Beatles’ career is the way critics talk about ‘early Beatles’ and ‘late Beatles’ almost as if they are different entities entirely; the former being ‘a group’ and the latter being ‘a band’ (that is, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club ‘Band’).  The early Beatles – the clean cut ‘pretty’ version – are forever associated with screaming female fans, whilst the latter, drug-taking bearded version are preferred by chin-stroking male intellectuals.

As mentioned earlier The Beatles’ early hits were very influenced by the music of girl groups.  Those early Beatles hits will be forever in the rock music canon, whereas only a handful of the girl groups singles that inspired them have joined them there.  This again is an example of male rock critics placing more value on one than the other.  Rock is a very masculine construct, which is afforded far more importance than ‘pop’, which male rock writers associate with female listeners.  The facts are far more complex than that, however, but that seems to be how rock history has been written.

‘When fact becomes legend, print the legend’ – The Rolling Stones’ pivotal album, Beggar’s Banquet.

Unlike their closest rivals, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones hadn’t served an apprenticeship in a red-light district in Germany before becoming famous, although doing so would have probably suited Keith Richards at least.  It happened for The Stones relatively quickly and painlessly but they had to do their growing up in an unsympathetic spotlight.

Although their manager, the flash and brash Andrew Loog Oldham, was still young, he had learned his trade at the sharp end of the music industry and understood marketing.  He intuited what Brian Epstein was doing for The Beatles by presenting them in a way that would be acceptable to the British media establishment and realised that doing similar was not going to work for The Rolling Stones.  Everybody was trying to copy the Epstein method anyway, and nobody was going to overthrow The Beatles – not on their own turf anyway.  Oldham recognised an opportunity when he saw it:  Why not present The Stones as the anti-Beatles?  This famously worked ended up like a dream, of course, but it also wreaked havoc upon on the psyche of the musicians involved and had other disastrous results.  Although the public thought The Beatles were all sweetness and light, this was of course nonsense, and The Rolling Stones weren’t the uncouth thugs they were made out to be either.

However, when caricatures are what people want they often get them and The Rolling Stones sometimes obliged.  No more so than in the case of Brian Jones, who unfortunately possessed the most fragile psyche of the band and had never been comfortable with the Stones-as-thugs assignation.  Despite not being a songwriter like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Brian Jones was the original driving force of The Stones and the most creative in terms of musicianship.  Many of the band’s most famous early singles were distinguished by Jones’ ability to play virtually any musical instrument he came across.  His insatiable desire to explore different musical styles helped the band to weave its way through the rapidly evolving musical landscape of the 1960s.  By 1968, however, Jones was virtually unrecognisable as the great musician he had been and would never recover.  He died in 1969 shortly after being fired from the band he had not only founded, but named too.

One can only speculate on what Brian Jones’ true problems were.  He was the most middle-class and cultured of The Stones but had a nasty habit of impregnating a succession of girlfriends before abandoning them (he had even done this while still at school) and seemed to delight in testing people’s friendships to the limits.  Nevertheless, people who knew him sometimes describe him as sensitive and ultimately ‘a nice guy’.  It certainly sounds as if there were warring personality traits within him and these could only have been compounded by the fact that Jones – again testing things to their limits – insisted on consuming more alcohol than any other Stone and drinking more too.  Nowadays his addictive personality might be seen as symptomatic of bi-polarity but back then he was left to continue self-medicating in an ultimately self-destructive fashion.

The Stones’ 1967 output had been pretty much Brian Jones’ last hurrah, remarkable considering the events of the year.

‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ was his tour-de-force, featuring more examples of his diverse musicianship than any other Stones album to date, but it had been poorly received by the critics and dismissed as a Pepper rip-off.  Opinions on the album have been revised over the ensuing decades and it has come to be highly regarded and even paid tribute to by later musicians (The Brian Jonestown Massacre regarded it so highly they even recorded a whole album as a homage), but back then the short shrift it was given was yet another blow to Jones’ already battered ego.

Jones had been particularly damaged by 1967’s drug-busts but he wasn’t the only one.  Mick Jagger was presented as Public Enemy Number One and Keith Richards even faced a severe jail-sentence for a short time and the photos of him outside the courts reveal how distraught he really was, despite his celebrated and brave ‘petty morals’ quote.  Let’s not forget how young The Rolling Stones still were and how under siege they must have felt, and for what…  really?  They were only too aware of how hypocritical the establishment were being, since they had often encountered them in less formal and stage-mannered environments.  It was inevitable perhaps then that The Rolling Stones’ music would take on an altogether darker hue and that – what had once been a mostly manufactured image – would start to become more of a reality, even if Brian Jones would eventually disappear completely.

‘Beggar’s Banquet’ was the first album to establish The Rolling Stones formula and where the legend overtook reality.  There is a very real chance that this couldn’t happen with Brian Jones still a functioning member of the band, since his talent was too mercurial.  ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ is very much a Keith Richards album, despite the remarkable tracks Mick Jagger also wrote for it.  This was the first album Richards used his famous open-tunings on and in doing this he revitalised and energised the whole Stones sound.  ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ brought them back to their earthy rhythm and blues roots but with far more oomph and chutzpah.  Despite some occasional forays into the blues, ‘Beggar’s’ is very much a rock album, there is no psychedelia on it, no perceptible nods to hippiedom at all.  This is a band that has finally found its own home turf and is about to settle on it.  In many ways, ‘Beggar’s’ is The Stones’ blueprint for the rest of their career and they have rarely deviated from it; they may have occasionally added funk, disco and reggae but always as a flirtation, never a full-blown affair.

The album kicks off with one of the best-known songs The Stones ever recorded, ‘Sympathy For The Devil’.  The recording of it was documented by Jean Luc Godard in his film, ‘One Plus One’ and this reveals that Jagger presented it to the band as a folk song.  If it had remained as such it might not have had the impact that it did, despite the sinister lyrics.  It’s hard not to read the song as the ultimate Fuck You to the British Establishment, with their ‘petty morals’ and self-righteous hypocrisy.  How Keith Richards came to suggest setting the song to a samba beat has never been fully explained but it was a remarkable idea and gave the song its hypnotic, menacing effect.   The band would never do anything like this again. The lead guitar’s vicious, spit-venom tone is also remarkable and impossible to replicate.  It stand out among Richards’ guitar solos since the phrasing on it seems off kilter and thoroughly nasty.  Rumours have abounded ever since that this was a Jimmy Page guitar-solo (he probably started it) but – at least as I’m concerned – this is a Keith Richards solo through-and-through.  ‘Sympathy’ is the Stones at their most imaginative, it is laden with percussion, doo-wop gone-mad backing vocals, a magnificent Nicky Hopkins piano and one of Jaggers’ best vocal performances.  Nobody could ever sing this song as well as Jagger and make it so believable.

I should point out here that this was the first album with their ideal producer, Jimmy Miller.  Most of the band’s previous albums had been marred by the frankly awful production supplied by Oldham, who for some reason imagined himself as Britain’s answer to Phil Spector (he wasn’t).  A undeniably brilliant publicist but a terrible record producer.

The next track, ‘No Expectations’, features one of the last contributions Brian Jones ever made and, unusually for him by this point, it was on slide-guitar (dobro?).  This is also an unforgettable track, it has a liquidity to the sound that conjures up images of water-lilies.  Nicky Hopkins minimal, tasteful piano is another bonus and Jagger’s vocal is one of his finest.

Dear Doctor is an entertaining example of The Stones’ comical country songs.  Although the band had always had a definite appreciation for the genre (High and Dry on Aftermath for example) they didn’t really start to take it seriously until Gram Parsons began his friendly brainwashing of Keith.  ‘Dear Doctor’ certainly isn’t in the same league as ‘Wild Horses’, for instance – it was more likely to have been inspired by watching an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies’ than George Jones.

I’ve always liked ‘Parachute Woman’ even though it often remains overlooked when discussing ‘Beggar’s’.  Its bluesy stomp is combined with the blurry echo of the vocal is darkly atmospheric and rhythmically it anticipates glam.  It also highlights another one of the features of ‘Beggar’s’; it is largely acoustic guitar driven apart from a pretty minimalistic electric guitar solo, which later in the track shares the spotlight with Jagger’s moaning harmonica.  But never before was an acoustic guitar used to greater rock ‘n’ roll effect than on ‘Beggar’s Banquet’; the power in it is unequalled.  My almost life-long fascination with the guitar sound on this album lead me to purchasing my most expensive guitar; a Gibson Hummingbird, but nobody makes that guitar sound like Keith Richards did on this album.

Jigsaw Puzzle is Jagger at his Dylanesque and like most Stones songs of this period begins at a relative funky crawl but picks up speed as it goes on.  The bass is magnificent on this track, as are the drums but the most prominent feature of it is Keith Richards’ layered guitars; one acoustic strum, a simple but effective slide guitar riff and an overdriven Les Paul feeding back in the distance (or is that Brian Jones doing something odd with a mellotron?).  Mick snarls away throughout the song and the overwhelming feeling one gets is that this is a band who imagine they are fighting for their lives against the world and after 1967’s events it hard not to sympathise.  The song here may be relatively slight, but the performance is beyond reproach.

1968 was a difficult year for everybody though; lots of civil unrest, riots, Robert Kennedy’s assassination coming close of the heels of Martin Luther King’s and the Vietnam war at its hottest.  The Rolling Stones couldn’t let this go without comment and so ‘Street Fighting Man’ enters the fray.  ‘Sympathy’ could also be perceived as contemporary social comment but on this track it is far more literal.  Musically it is an echo of their latest hot single, ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ and like that song it is acoustic guitar driven.  This is meanest sounding acoustic guitar ever heard though; it explodes like a Molotov cocktail.  According to legend, Keith achieved this unique sound by placing a microphone in the sound hole of his Gibson Hummingbird overloading a cassette recorder.  Charlie Watt’s drums were recorded at the same time and they are utterly magnificent as usual, his snare drum cracking like a whip.  Both were overdubbed in a more conventional way later, but that raw, fuzzy original cassette version remains in the mix.  Melodically Keith designed the song to sound reminiscent of a police siren but it also owes a huge debt to Martha Reeves & The Vandella’s hit ‘Dancing In The Street’ (which is even quoted in the lyrics).  The effect of this is that it is one the first songs to acknowledge that popular music’s age of innocence was now over, at least as far as The Rolling Stones were concerned.

The Beatles had also recorded a song inspired by what was happening in the world in 1968, ‘Revolution’.  That also featured a guitar that was saturated in tape distortion, but in their case it was the electric variety (John Lennon’s  Epiphone Casino plugged directly into a channel on the mixing-desk).  Both songs chickened out of any form of personal involvement though; John Lennon’s was seemingly critical of those engaged in civil unrest, witheringly addressing people who carry ‘pictures of Chairman Mao’ and ‘have minds that hate’.  Lennon, by this time of course, was advocating peace and love and his chosen method of protest was the arts.  Lennon even recorded the vocal while lying down in the studio – how passive can you get?  The Rolling Stones, however, were far too cynical to ever engage in political debate, although unlike Lennon Jagger had actually attended a rally (with Tariq Ali).  Nevertheless, the only advice ‘Street Fighting Man’ offers is that poor boys should sing for rock ‘n’ roll bands and that rioting ‘can’t provide solutions’.  It’s the music that does the most talking though and ‘Street Fighting Man’ sounds and feels incendiary.  It is also the last Rolling Stones track to feature Brian Jones playing Eastern instruments (the sitar and tamboura) both of which breath fire onto the track.  The shehnai (an Indian double-reeded oboe) at the end of track was played by Traffic’s Dave Mason and here it erupts from the speakers like an air-raid siren.  Nothing is out of place on this track.

The next track on ‘Beggar’s’ is much more low-key and a folk-blues cover.  It’s probably the least remarkable effort on the album but the biblical imagery suits its dark palate.  Jagger’s vocal is quite mannered, however and this is quite off-putting.  The harmonica sounds like it was played by Brian Jones but I’m not sure about that – it might have been performed by Jagger (Jones had after all taught him how to play the instrument).  Once again, this track features a fine Keith Richards performance on acoustic guitar.  On any other album this track would stand out but here it comes across as filler.

‘Stray Cat Blues’ is the Stones at their least politically correct, featuring as it does Jagger’s boastful musings about sex with underage groupies.  On the ‘Beggar’s’ version of the song the girl in question is ‘15 years old’ but he often lowered the age to 13 during live performances to cause as much as much offence as possible – an example of this can be heard on the Stones’ live album released in 1970, ‘Get Yer Ya-Yas Out’.  Musically the Beggars’ is excellent and it features far more electric guitar than any other track on the album – a cranked up, ear-piercing Gibson Les Paul (which actually does sound reminiscent of a spiteful stray cat).  The vocal is again a sterling performance.  Jagger by 1968 was a fully formed and self-assured rock singer – he was more than that, he was archetypal rock star.  Every rock singer who followed him from this point owed him a huge debt, both vocally and stylistically.  This is Jagger at his wildest – even he wouldn’t have been capable of this kind of performance a year earlier.  ‘Stray Cat Blues’ ultimately becomes a jam at the end, but unlike other bands who were recording long-ass guitar solos and so on, The Stones were more about the groove and that is what this track becomes before it draws to a close.  It takes a pretty fascinating route though.

Mick Jagger has since been dismissive about ‘Factory Girl’ but I find the track interesting, although I didn’t used to like it.  It was inspired by Edie Sedgwick according to some critics, but they always say that.  The Stones brought in some outsiders to play on the track again, the most audible being Ric Grech from Family on fiddle and Rocky Dijon on congas.  Charlie Watts played some distinctive table on this while Richards stuck with his acoustic guitar.  The mandolin on ‘Factory Girl’ used to annoy me because it simply follows the vocal melody, the consequence of which makes the Jaggers’ voice sound peculiar and indistinct.  I’ve since got over that, however.  It’s just not one of his best vocals, again it sounds far too mannered.  Regarding the mandolin, most sources indicate that this was not actually one at all – in fact, it was the mandolin setting on a mellotron played by one of three possible people.  Personally though, I think it was a mandolin, mainly because I can hear some notes picked on it at the beginning of the track.  Furthermore, I think Jones played it, because it has his unorthodox stamp all over the performance – but what do I know?  He was in a bad state at the time.  The end result is one of the Stones’ weirdest and rootsiest tracks, but Jagger should have made more effort with the vocal.

Which leads us to the final track, ‘Salt Of The Earth’.  This song’s biggest inspiration seems to have been gospel and it even features The Watts Street Gospel Choir at the end of it.  This track notably features a Keith Richards vocal performance for one of the verses and it is a good example of how well he could sing when on form.  Jagger sings extremely well on this track too and the performance sounds heartfelt even if the lyrics are a trifle odd (more about that later). ‘Salt Of The Earth’ is again dominated by Richards’ acoustic track and he also overdubbed some simple electric slide playing.  Nicky Hopkins contributed some high octane piano (his playing is – to me – one of the key musical elements of Beggar’s, since it all over the album, thus makes up part of its appeal).  All of the band are on form of this track, Charlie Watts’ drums are typically elegant, pushing the dynamics of the song appropriately and Bill Wyman’s bass is tasteful.  The lyrics on ‘Salt Of The Earth’ are odd and need to put into context.

The Rolling Stones always had a strange attitude to what they perceived as the ‘straight’ world.  This is evidenced by their much documented term ‘Ernies’ for the men they encountered in London cafes when they were a struggling band.  ‘Ernies’ were the people who called them long-haired layabouts and worse, while lecturing them about getting a proper job and arguing for the virtues of hard work.  The Stones hated ‘Ernies’; it was a derogatory term.  Brian Jones didn’t even like Bill Wyman, referring to him as ‘a bit of an Ernie’ – he only accepted him into band because he had two amplifiers and transport.    So perhaps the sentiments of ‘Salt Of The Earth’ were designed to put this right, but if that was indeed the case, referring to a ‘faceless crowd’ and ‘they don’t look real to me’ seems a bit at odds with it.  The Stones may have discovered a grudging respect for working people to a fashion, but it didn’t go too far.  The overall feeling I get from the track is how alienated The Rolling Stones felt at this point.  The Stone may have found their authentic musical voice with ‘Beggar’s’ but they still seemed like people who were unsure about where they fitted in the world at large.  Being so notorious at such an early age was obviously difficult for them.

This is why I find ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ such a fascinating album.  It captures The Rolling Stones at a time that they felt most under siege, wounded, but at the height of their powers.

Jimi Hendrix was one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.

Jimi Hendrix was one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.  Few others have ever been as influential.

Now a lot of people are going to disagree with that statement, particularly since it appears to ignore a many other genres of music like classical and jazz, but in terms of cultural importance and sheer influence Hendrix takes a lot of beating, particularly since he achieved all that he did in the space of four, very turbulent years.

There had been great guitarists before Hendrix but none with the power and imagination to turn the guitar into such a versatile instrument.  Hendrix was able to conjure any kind of sound he wanted from a guitar, could do the work of two guitarists effortlessly and still be the most dynamic frontmen ever to set foot on a stage.  He was also an African American leading a British rock band with two white side-men and there was no doubt about who was in charge.  He even told them what they should play, on their own instruments.   Furthermore, this was not a man who would tone down his act for anybody.  He owned the stage, did whatever he wanted when he pleased and took the whole rock genre into uncharted territory.  Thanks to Hendrix rock became more sexual, more funky and unpredictable; he cross-pollinated rock with soul, jazz, raga, avant garde, country and everything else, without any regard for the established rules.

Hendrix could do this because, unlike most of his contemporaries in rock, he had learnt from some of the best.  The most famous and celebrated guitarist in the UK at the time was of course Eric Clapton but Clapton had picked up all he knew from blues records, copying the guitar licks and acquiring similar equipment to his heroes.  What Clapton lacked was any form of originality.  Jimi Hendrix had toured on the same circuit as Clapton’s heroes, he’d learned directly from them, played on a constant basis, became expert on blues (and other styles of) guitar and had already developed his own individual style.  Eric Clapton longed to be part of the blues tradition, whereas Jimi Hendrix found that same tradition too limiting.  Jimi Hendrix was all about breaking free of any form of confinement; it not only came in the lyrics of his songs, it also came out in his playing.

He had not only learnt from the best, he had also played with some of them too.  Hendrix’s famous showmanship was a product of having played in Little Richard’s band, along with The Isley Brothers, Wilson Pickett and numerous others.  Such performers had their stage act down to a fine art – they had to because the so-called chitlin’ circuit was notoriously tough, everything they did had been tried and tested with audience after audience.  The ‘gimmicks’ Hendrix became famous for; playing his guitar behind his back, with his teeth, etc, had been copped from watching other performers on the circuit and adapted into his own act.  Blues guitarists as early as Charlie Patton had been playing their guitars behind their backs but this was absolutely new to a rock audience.

Hendrix’s first album, ‘Are You Experienced’, was magical.  There was barely any precedent for it.  Previously electric guitars had simply been an amplified version of acoustic ancestors and treated as such, with few exceptions.  Hendrix changed all that.  Not only was his playing incredible, it quickly emerged that he was no slouch as a songwriter either, and despite his own doubts about his singing, the charisma and sensuality in his voice was undeniable.  He looked amazing as well, wearing the biggest afro ever seen (which even his band emulated – along with Clapton), wild cloths and a vintage military jacket.  This was an entirely new and quite different manner of rock star.

Hendrix had definite ideas about how his music should be recorded too.  The studio became another musical instrument with Hendrix, everything would be panned about wildly, tape echo would be manipulated during solos to create strange effects and tracks were faded in and out at odd moments.  Any manner of equipment that he came into contact with was exploited to its full potential and way beyond.

What is left out of discussions about Hendrix is the issue of his race.  Rock until Hendrix had been a practically all-white genre.  Although early rockers, such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley were among the original exponents of rock ‘n’ roll their music was often placed squarely in the genre of Rhythm & Blues, partly as a consequence of racism.  This wasn’t possible with Hendrix and furthermore, his performance style was overtly sexual, even masturbatory at times.  Previous African American performers had been obligated to tone down their performances for white audiences but since Hendrix had established his act in the UK under the tutelage of ex-Animal Chas Chandler, he was relatively free to do what he wanted.  This was enormously liberating to fellow African American performers.

Hendrix was also steeped in the American music tradition and was musical omnivore.  Although he played rock, he drew on pretty much every other form of music he came into contact with.  Therefore, he opened his white audience’s ears to lots of African American music they might never have heard before.  He also demonstrated to other African American musicians that they could play rock too and white audiences would listen.  The Isley Brothers had criticised Hendrix for his rock guitar when he had played with them but would begin featuring ‘Hendrix-style’ guitar solos on their records.

He turned the whole rock scene upside down and would be gone before the seventies even truly got started.  Every rock musician since has been influenced by him and more than a few in every other genre.

WHAT WAS PUNK ABOUT, REALLY? FURTHERMORE, WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM IT?

First of all I have to admit that when punk happened I was too young.  This meant that I could not really put the music itself into context and it was quite hard to hear much of it.  Of course, John Peel was playing it but at that point I had barely even heard of him; his show wasn’t on until pretty late and neither of my parents was keen on what they had heard about punk.

Despite this nothing has influenced my life as much as punk.  To me it was about far more than a genre of popular music, an attitude or a fashion-statement.  Punk was about freedom and the non-acceptance of established power-structures, it was about creativity and taking control of your own destiny – or at least try to.  For me, this led me to becoming a singer and a musician, with an ardent interest in art, literature and politics, for others it meant many other things.  The key is that, for the first time it didn’t matter what your background, gender, sexuality or race was.  Okay, others may claim that all this had already happened in the 1960s, but that decade had been still rife with misogyny, racism, homophobia and classism.  The punk scene itself may have had symptoms of those old prejudices, but for the entire culture of punk was so confrontational that people were made to question their attitudes head on.  This is the real reason that the authorities hated punk, they could sense that it was about ordinary people empowering themselves.  Despite their resistance to punk they couldn’t stop its pervasive influence, the long-term side-effects of it are enshrined in law; improvement in women’s rights, the repeal of Section 28, equal marriage, anti-racism legislation, and lots more.  Punk could not be stopped, the generations of people who came after it had all been changed.

One of the key elements of punk was the famous DIY aesthetic; ‘here’s 3 chords, now form a band’.  This didn’t stop at people forming bands, however, it also fed into fashion (and I’m not just talking about Vivienne Westwood here), record labels, literature, theatre, film-making…  The attitude became if you want to do something just do it.

It would be deluded to think that it was now suddenly a level playing-field however.  This was never more amply demonstrated than by the mainstream music of the 1980s.  After punk had shaken up the music scene for a few months, the old rock dinosaurs came back and remained the biggest sellers – in fact some were selling at a greater rate than ever before.  The new bands were not much better, The Police (hardly ever a grass-roots band) became every bit as pompous as the prog-rockers they had supposedly replaced and in some ways as pretentious.  The same is true of many of the people who infested the New Romantic scene; striking a pose while playing a synth gave me little to relate to as a working-class lad from Liverpool, particularly during Thatcherism.  The Sheffield Scene was better of course, some great pop and lots of DIY creativity there but the leading artists of the New Romantics were people like Spandau Ballet.  Awful, ugly music.  They came across as Thatcherite even at the time; flaunting their wealth in videos like‘Gold’ and ‘True’.  The same was also true with the (admittedly more tuneful) Duran Duran, who spent seemingly all their time ‘swanning on beaches’ as Liverpool’s bard Pete Wylie put it.  Duran Duran were also painfully misogynistic, as a quick look at their early video ‘Girls On Film’ will attest.

The real early legacy of punk was that it to an alternative culture in the 1980s.  Of course, there had been alternative scenes before, with underground bands and a culture that went with them, but in the 1980s it was all taken one step further.  As a consequence of the DIY aesthetic, new record labels had sprung up and not only that, fanzines, clothing designers, graphic artists, and writers.  There was far more breadth and scope to this than anything that had went before, partly because it was mass media.  The community that made up this movement were working at grass-roots level, they knew what the true scene was and where the truly exciting were really happening.  Occasionally some of this scene would cross over into the mainstream without being too mediated by it.  The Smiths are the most famous example of this.  Even The Fall managed to have a couple of hit records, which would be hard to imagine now.

Those who had grown up during punk had learnt many lessons from it.  Dance music was fundamentally punk in spirit; most of the early music was homemade and released on independent white labels; it involved the community; it took advantage of the new cheaper technology that was being developed, both to create the music and promote it.  The dance music scene involved musicians, artists who designed flyers and logos and writers to promote events.  Furthermore the dance music was even more multi-cultural than the original punk scene had been. Raves could spring up seemingly without prior notice with the use of the new cheaper mobile-phones.   The fact that these could be organised so quickly and with such impact was not lost on the government who responded with the Criminal Justice & Public Order Act 1994 with its laughable description of rave as ‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’.  The Act was immediately recognised as yet another encroachment upon civil liberties and it was widely protested.

Of course, the mass market quickly realised how lucrative dance music was and exploited it for its our ends.  The same had happened when the punk had first broken ten years before.  The years following dance music have seemingly been a mix of the retro and technology-led music, sometimes a combination of the two.  The contemporary music scene is so multi-stranded that it’s hard to track what is the prevailing trend.  It’s unlikely that a culture will emerge with the impact of punk or rave again.

Most of what we’ve heard about punk has been that it was a reaction against the boredom and staleness of the music scene at the time; West Coast country-rock, prog rock bands, serious musicians who had robbed popular music of its urgency and youth.  This only takes note of popular music, however and ignores other cultural trends.  The bulk of record sales are no longer to young people, they are now to the perhaps mythical £50 man/woman, who buys stuff from record companies back catalogue or new artists who seem modelled on the artists of his/her youth.  This audience would be unlikely to buy into a new burgeoning music scene, which may explain why record companies are now reluctant to invest in one.

So where will the new punk spirit emerge?  Has it now finally been forgotten or is still out there in the internet, but now manifesting itself as the Occupy Movement, ecofeminism, etc.  Has it now got bigger than a genre of popular music.  Rock ‘n’ roll has always been political in many ways but for somebody who loves popular music as much as me this is gratifying but also a shame if I’m being honest.  Music has always been a more serious matter than would first appear.

THE KING OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL – ELVIS PRESLEY

Elvis did not invent rock ‘n’ roll and would never have claimed to have done so but he certainly innovated the genre and was one of its most important early exponents.  Those who say that he was merely in the right place and at the right time are missing the point entirely.  Who else could have carried the mantel of The King Of Rock ‘N’ Roll without appearing ridiculous?  Elvis not only had the voice, he also had the look, the charisma, the energy and – what’s more – the sex.  Elvis may have sung the occasionally expurgated lyric (One Night, for example – but even it that case an unexpurgated version exists), but there was never any doubt about what how filthy his mind was and he did nothing to hide it.  Elvis did very little to clean up rock ‘n’ roll for the famous ‘white audience’ of the 1950s, even on television.

One of the first mistakes many make when analysing Elvis’s music is to approach it from the standard ‘rock’ critic’s point of view.  ‘Rock’ didn’t exist when Elvis began releasing records and so many ways one has to approach his work in a similar way to Mario Lanza, Sinatra, Dean Martin and other pre-rock artists.  Elvis himself was a ardent fan of some of these singers (particularly Dean Martin) and loved them just as much as he loved country music, gospel and rhythm and blues.  To him it was all simply music.  The whole ‘rock authenticity’ was inherited from folk music and jazz, it didn’t start getting applied popular music until the mid to late 60s and so we can’t really apply it to Elvis.

The first criticism rock fundamentalists level at Elvis is that he didn’t write his own songs but that wasn’t expected when he began his career.  Such artists were extremely rare and in many ways the music industry actively discouraged artists from writing their own songs.  He was a brilliant interpreter of other people’s songs, however and that was one of main facets of his genius.  He had an amazing facility to make his audience believe every word he was singing, even on the extremely trite material in his films.  Admittedly Elvis did record a great deal of silly songs, particularly during the 1960s but he never stopped making good records either.  Rock criticism is based on the analysis on ‘the album’ but when Elvis began his career the LP record was a relatively new development and very few were doing very much with it.  There were exceptions to this but very few.  Elvis’ first two LPs are two of these and vitally important examples of early rock.

Elvis Presley’s improved throughout his life despite his later health problems.  It became richer, widened in range and matured into one of the greatest instruments of the twentieth century.   It only began to flag during the very last months of his life.  Academics admit that they have a hard time classifying his voice because he was not only a baritone but also a tenor, depending on what he was singing. There have been remarkably few singers in popular music who could manage this.

Rock critics also like to remind us that despite Elvis’ wild behaviour onstage he was never really a rebel.  However, when Elvis was barely into his teens he had to work to support his penniless family and so he couldn’t afford to be a rebel, I suppose.  These early struggles haunted him for the rest of his life and stopped him from taking too many chances later in his career.

Elvis biggest sin – if it can be called that – was to be the first rock-star.  There was no blueprint for rock stardom when he came along and he paid dearly for it.  His sociopathic crook of a manager prevented him from socialising with people who may have helped his career develop and thrive, as well as coping with such a high level of fame.  Not that Elvis was ever the wimp that many have claimed he was; he fought back against his manager’s lack of vision many times.  The famous 1968 TV Special would never have happened without Elvis pushing for it every step of the way.

The final myth is that Elvis was a purely instinctual artist.  That is born out of snobbery.  Elvis may have been a poor, uneducated country-boy but he was smarter than most are willing to give him credit for.  If he hadn’t been his career would have hit the skids by the early 1960s – this happened to a great practically all of his contemporaries.  Elvis always wanted to be an all-round entertainer and knew that would help sustain his career.  His problems came from outside; the constant interference from his manager and his cheap-skate record label, which seemed determined to bury his legacy in a heap of dire compilation albums packaged in even more horrific artwork.  The legacy won out in the end though.

I’m thankful that his estate finally managed to gain control of work and give it back the respect it deserves.