Category Archives: Rock

John Halsey

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I remember meeting drummer John Halsey, of Patto and the Rutles, at the world famous Rutles secret three song reunion concert at the Pig and Whistle in Hollywood. Told him a pal had given me a one of a kind Patto tee shirt. Which is true, the first album cover emblazoned on a tee shirt about five sizes too small. John looked at me, sighed, and said why? One of my favorite rock’n’roll memories.

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John Halsey, Rikki Fataar, Neil Innes and Eric Idle not long before I told John Halsey about the tee shirt.

Mike Kellie

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Just saw that Mike Kellie died. He was the drummer for Spooky Tooth and then transitioned to the Only Ones like it was the most natural thing in the world, which I guess it was. Listen to him here, so loose limbed and swinging, fills flying and an almost shambolic explosion of freedom on the drum kit. Don’t be fooled, though, he nails it. His playing just drives this thing ecstatically, and Peter Perrett’s vocals glide over and around it, and when John Perry launches into probably the best guitar solo that the whole scene came up with in 1978, Kellie is urging it on, almost a Jim Gordon thing, and if that ain’t a compliment nothing is.

Here ’tis, all three minutes worth. I’ve only listened to this a thousand times in my life this past 39 years, bopping and air drumming and twitching, never thinking that anybody would ever die.

Woodstock

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Watched Woodstock last night on TCM. Hadn’t realized it’d been so long since I’d last seen it…I hadn’t even seen this Director’s cut yet. All those crazy 18 years old running through the mud are 65 now. Anyway, forgot how beautifully shot that flick was, amazed they pulled it off. You wonder what became of all the interviewees. And if everyone hawking their wares in the drug super market scene wound up in prison. If the Porto-San man’s kid got back from the DMZ ok. Or who wound up with Pete Townshend’s guitar. Just what that glop was the Hog Farm was feeding everybody? And whatever happened to those intricately beautiful hash pipes all the serious freaks seemed to have back then. It’s a long flick, endless, and you have time to wonder about these things. And about how everyone got home. And the psychedelics no one talks about anymore, like DMT, and how mesc was short for mescaline. And how fit everyone was back then. Trim and beautiful. I can’t imagine camera crews spending so much time on skinny dippers at a festival today. There’s a lot of beautifully shot scenes in the flick. There’s one night time scene and someone is on stage, a folkie, alone–maybe Joan Baez–and the shadows through behind on the stage are gorgeous and one of the camera men, no doubt stoned, focused on it for a luxurious several seconds, and it still fills my mind’s eye 24 hours later.

Amazing how different the mood is from Gimme Shelter–another extraordinary concert film–which was only four or five months later. Or from the Isle of Wight flick, less than a year later. Or from Monterey Pop, a mere two years before. Or from the contemporaneous Wattstax, which seemed a world away. And how vastly different it was from Jazz on a Summer’s Day, shot eleven years earlier, or The Decline of Western Civilization, ten years away. That’s a twenty year span, packed full of cultural revolution. Things seemed to move so fast then. They seem so slow now. If not slow, perhaps it’s just that the old never really goes away anymore. It always hangs around. Digitalization makes the dead seem completely alive. Long dead movie stars seem to walk and talk still. People love the Beatles like they never went away, or Miles Davis like he walks among us. Old releases are repackaged and released as if brand new. The long dead comment on new events–I just saw Kurt Cobain predicting Donald Trump; a lie, but that seemed not to matter–and we seem to live our lives shifting between eras as if we were there for all of them. But we weren’t. We only are where we are, and once were where we once were. And I can’t figure out it it’s good or bad that we can conceptually shift between eras like that–imagine how the tripping freaks at Woodstock would have loved the idea–but I do think the long dead should remain dead, the long broken up remain broken up, and we should live in the now, but that’s just me. I mean I love Hendrix and Coltrane and Monk and the Jefferson Airplane, but not they are still here. Meanwhile I’m watching hippies cavort half a century ago, and Jimi Hendrix frozen forever at 27 and the YouTube I’ve been listening to in the background flits through the jazz decades as if time itself was completely irrelevant. Time free like whatever that Albert Ayler thing just was, before this ancient Louis Armstrong thing or the brand new Ben Wendel thing I heard before. A hundred years of music randomly thrown together. Each video sets a mood, each brings out a feeling. Each make me feel like I am elsewhere, and this computer is a pad a paper and these letters my cramped, impenetrable scrawl that no one will ever see.

Leon Russell

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Leon Russell…I remember his moment of superstardom, maybe for a year or two, where he was all over the radio. There was a live record, mostly forgotten now, that sold a zillion copies and an endless, loose, all over the place Jumping Jack Flash, or was that from Mad Dogs and Englishmen? My early seventies is beginning to blur. His spell in the spotlight faded and he retreated back to the studio where he was quietly omnipresent, and his hits disappeared from the classic rock format (as did 90% of everything we used to hear on the FM in the free form days) and he became yet another forgotten superstar. Those were loose and wanton days, musically, a description my wife used once and I have never topped, and Leon Russell was as loose and wanton as it got, hippie Texas R&B rock and roll, piano driven, screaming back up singers, musicians and children and dogs and some of the best session cats in the business getting down, getting bad, getting fucked up. Leon does a lanky strut, picking bluesy hippie rock’n’roll notes from an electric guitar, a John Brown beard and John Brown eyes beneath prematurely gray locks tucked into a demented Uncle Sam chapeau. Then back on piano, and Leon is telling a story about his woman, a crazy Oklahoma hillbilly hepcat voice curling around the words, punctuating with piano, followed by the choir, the band poised, the crowd waiting, Jim Keltner (or Jim Gordon, or both) hinting on the high hat. Leon leaves it hanging. Seconds tick by in four. Rock’n’roll is in the air. We wait, audience, players, listeners, for the damn tune to resolve itself, it’s been endless. Leon lets us dangle, on a tight rope, waiting to see how he finishes this. It goes something like this here, he says, and out comes Jumping Jack Flash again on the piano, one two, one two three, one two three….

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Leon Russell, Joe Cocker. Mad Dogs and Englishmen at the Fillmore East in 1969. A Michael Ochs photo.

Stoneground A.D. 1972

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Stoneground opening up Dracula A.D. 1972 (the sixth and last of Christopher Lee’s Dracula run for Hammer Films, with Peter Cushing back as Van Helsing’s grandson) with Alligator Man. That’s Sal Valentino (of the Beau Brummels) on lead vocal. It’s an old cajun tune by Jimmy Newman, and their arrangement is groovy shuffling stuff, with solid ensemble playing (and back up vocals) in that San Fransciso style, always more about the band than about any specific player, and Sal’s rock’n’roll vocalizing was pretty unique, as were his dazed LSD expressions. Laugh, Laugh it ain’t. More like Magic Hollow on Exile on Main Street. I always liked this band, and love this song, and it’s a shame Stoneground never really took off, though Bay Area hippies that they were, I don’t know if they worried about it much. They recorded a couple albums, and Family Album, their second, is their best, one of those vast double LPs, like Sons of Champlain’s Loosen Up Naturally or the second Moby Grape album–that came out of San Francisco (or thereabouts) and went  nowhere. Who knows why.

Alas, this opening party scene with Stoneground is much more fun than most of the rest of the flick, late period Hammer not being what it had been. But hell, it’s Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the 20th century. Hippies and mini-skirts abound. Peter Cushing’s (i.e., Van Helsing’s) way hot granddaughter just told him she is neither dropping acid nor shooting up nor balling anybody. He looks at her, bemused, like why the fuck not? But he says nothing and smiles. I’m an alligator man. Or he was, in another movie. Or was that George Macready?

Robert Plant

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Watched Robert Plant on Austin City Limits tonite. Pipes sound great, he looks good, and he has a killer band. Love the old Led Zep covers done anew, love the new stuff, love the roots and stuff that goes over big at WOMAD. Nothing too mellow, either, no pop crap or power ballads. This is probably the best band he’s had since Houses of the Holy. Fuck rock star reunions anyway, you should always do something new. If people want old bands playing old tunes the old way let them buy the CDs. The past is done, it’s dead, it was already, and life is far too short to waste on nostalgia.

 

Cobraside

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(sometime in 2016)

Began yesterday at the hippest place in town, known only to the cognoscenti, anti-hipsters (or maybe they just have issues) and beautiful European women with no names and security details.  Cobraside Records in on that new Melrose, San Fernando Blvd, where LA becomes Glendale and the street signs change color. It’s a wholesale distributor packed full of vinyl and CD, and occasionally live bands out back, and it’s free, and a party, and I sit at my brother’s desk–he’s shipping manager–and move everything around. The Rubber Snake Charmers opened, a jam band with Mario Lalli and whoever else has an ax, and Mario–aka Boomer–began this grooving kraut rock bass line that the drummer line up behind and Vince Meghrouni began a beautifully searching solo on the tenor. This went on for maybe an hour, too briefly, Vince switching to alto, to flute, back to tenor, and the whole thing was never less than  what musicologists call groovy when they are really stoned. Remarkable even. Jam bands can fall flat on their faces, or stumble about, or just bore everybody, but these cats were beyond all that and made something that would get airplay on hip underground stations worldwide had it been recorded. Which it was not.

Classic rock

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(2014)

You get to a certain age and your friends stop pretending they never liked Stevie Nicks. I wish I’d never brought it up. It was bad enough hearing how great Heart was. The radio was on some classic rock station in the kitchen as I washed a zillion Thanksgiving dishes a couple nights ago. Eddie Money came on. No. Absolutely not. I reached up with a sudsy hand and switched it off, thinking that in a room full of my old punk rock and jazz buddies, half the punks would confess to always liking that song, and half the jazzers would have been on the session. He seemed like a cool cat, they’d say. I’d relent and let the punk rockers sing Two Tickets to Paradise. Air guitar. Oh god.

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Stasis

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Bands never break up anymore. Eventually every band ever will still be around. Their fans will bring their grandchildren to see them, and they will all sing the same old songs together until the band members wither and die and tribute bands replace them, playing all the songs exactly like on the album. That way rock’n’roll will never die, and people can stay young forever, even when they’re dead.

Mother's little helper.

Mother’s little helper.

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Jon Wahl & the Amadans and Beethoven and Nick Drake and Moby Grape and e e cummings

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My bro Jon’s over at the pad now, listening to the test pressing of his new record. It’s an EP, five songs, on some very nice vinyl. Calls it The Angst Blues of Jon Wahl & the Amadans.  I think it’s the best he’s ever done. Certainly knocked me out. Magnificent stuff, state of the art, lots of improv but never just a rock band fucking around. It’s a three piece recorded like a classic Blue Note session (with a bit of overdubbed guitar). That’s Jon’s long time drummer Bob Lee (of Claw Hammer) and Bill Tutton (of the legendary Geraldine Fibbers) on bass. Loud beautiful edgy swinging rocking strange righteous grooving walloping stuff. And dig that crazy Telecaster. Jon’s still a killer songwriter as well as player, with an ear for melody but never simpering powerpop shit or hokey rock’n’roll will never die crap. Not my brother. Can’t wait till it comes out.

And if that is a Nick Drake cover–“Pink Moon”–Nick Drake would  never recognize it. He’d probably love it, though. And Jon swears that the intro to “Her Eyes Are Like Perhaps a Gem” is Beethoven’s string quartet Grosse Fugue, Opus 133. I couldn’t tell. But he says people do, live. People are so smart anymore. I did pick up on the Moby Grape licks, though. But then I turned him onto that album a zillion years ago. Older brothers, you know. But I didn’t know that “Her Eyes Are Like Perhaps a Gem” is an e e cummings reference. Little brothers are so smart anymore.

Anyway, this will be coming out on Elastic Records and will be vinyl only and the initial run is 500 copies so when it hits the stores the middle of March be there. You are gonna play this one to death.

Jon Wahl

Jon Wahl

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