Buffy St Marie
Buffy was a full Blooded American Native Indian and it showed in her uncompromising stance. She took up the plight of the American Native Indians in no uncertain terms with numbers like ‘Soldier Blue’, ‘Now that the Buffalo’s gone’ and ‘My Country it is of thy people You’re Dying’. For me that angry lament is one of the best songs ever written. It is a heart-felt entreaty concerning the genocide and cynical policies carried out against the Native American Indians. Everyone should be forced to sit and listen to it. I have never heard another heart-felt paean to match it.
Buffy also did her ant-war songs like ‘Universal Soldier’ but had her softer gentler side with the beautiful ‘Until it’s time for you to go.
She is a singer-songwriter who it is impossible to categorise there were so many facets to her talents.
I heard the message though.
Buzzcocks
The genius of the Buzzcocks was the cleverness of Pete Shelley’s words and the way they married Pop and Punk into a high energy hybrid that was both explicit and melodic. Pete Shelley’s high pitched voice was also very different to the usual Punk offering. It took the aggression out of it without reducing the energy level.
The Buzzcocks were equally as controversial as any of the other Punk outfits with numbers like ‘Orgasm Addict’ and ‘Oh Shit’ being banned by the Beeb. Their biggest hit was ‘Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?)
A very British group.
Byrds
The Byrds started up in Los Angeles in the wake of the Beatles. They married the style of the British Beat Group to Folk Music. This was not quite as radical as it might appear. They had all been Folk musicians. When the Beatles stormed America they were instantly smitten and wanted to form a Rock Band with the same instrumentation as the Beatles. The Folk and Beat elements came together naturally.
The band got hold of a demo of Bob Dylan’s ‘Tambourine Man’ and produced a Rock version of the song. The jangley sound of Roger McGuinn’s 12 string Rickenbacker and the close harmonies of the group gave it a distinctive style. They had created something different that went on to be described at Folk-Rock.
They invited Dylan along to hear what they had produced and he was impressed. He even joined them on stage at Ciros’ on the Sunset Strip where they had a residency pulling in all the hip dudes from Hollywood. It was the start of a long and fruitful two-way relationship. Dylan, who had started out in Rock before going down the Folk route, was turned back on to doing Rock by the Byrds, Manfred Mann and Animals, who had successfully converted his or other Folk songs into Rock idiom. The Byrds got the endorsement of Bob Dylan who was riding high as one of the hippest dudes around. It gave them the propulsion they needed.
The single and album took off and established the Byrds as a major force. They followed it up with other Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger Folk songs as well as a number of their own compositions.
When they arrived in England they were served with a writ by the British Birds, a Beat group featuring Ronnie Wood, who were doing a publicity stunt based around the American Byrds stealing their name.
As the sixties went on the Byrds moved with the times into a more psychedelic direction and got themselves in trouble with the media for what was perceived as drug references in their lyrics. They made the cross-over into being viewed as serious members of the alternative counter-culture and also have been cited as major influences on the Acid Rock scene in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Their songs were spacey with extended psychedelic phases though the relationship with Dylan material and Bob himself continued.
They suffered a series of personnel changes and their best album by far was the wonderful ‘Notorious Byrd Brothers’. The singing, song-writing and musicianship all reached a peak. Unfortunately things inside the band were not so hunky dory. Crosby was acrimoniously ousted and instead of building on this perfection they got Gram Parsons in, went down a Country route with Christian overtones and petered out into mediocrity.
It was a sad end to what was an outstanding band, a true original sound and a great force on the scene. They left a legacy that was immense.
Canned Heat
Canned Heat formed in the mid-sixties in Topanga Canyon California. Their initial form was a blues/jug band created by a group of Blues fanatics and record collectors. The two major players were the large and exceedingly hairy Bob Hite who for some obscure reason was called ‘The Bear’ and the rather scholarly looking Alan ‘Blind Owl’ Wilson who was so near-sighted that he could not see a thing. Both of these guys had extensive collections of blues records amounting to thousands. Alan was a brilliant slide guitarist who was instrumental in teaching Son House to relearn his songs for his legendary sixties album following his rediscovery. Alan also played on that record.
The band took its name from an old Tommy Johnson number about Canned Heat. Canned Heat was an alcohol gel that was sold as Sterno and used as fuel on old cooking stoves in Mississippi. Shoe polish was another substance that was an alcohol substitute. Both of these were heavily abused by a section of the Black community living in rural parts of Mississippi. The shoe polish was allegedly heated up to release the intoxicating fumes. I’m sure it did neither you your body nor brain much good.
Canned Heat developed a good Boogie style that became very popular. Unlike in Britain the Blues did not take off in America to the same extent. The old rediscovered Blues Singers found a better audience in England and Europe and there were few authentic American Blues Bands. Canned Heat were probably the most successful.
They got taken up by the sixties counter-culture and featured at a number of the big festivals, their psychedelicised boogie going down well. They also released some seminal singles and albums. ‘On the road again’ and ‘Going up country’ were typical of this period. They were blues based but with a big nod to the Acid Rock and alternative culture of the day.
Their album ‘Boogie with Canned Heat’ was released in 1968 and was a bit of a departure from their first album in that it featured a number of self-penned songs and moved away from being a pure covers, blues-boogie album. Songs like ‘Amphetamine Annie’ endeared them to the hippie culture.
They never lost that Blues authenticity though and took every opportunity to play and record with the blues greats around. This resulted in collaborations with John Lee Hooker, Sunnyland Slim, Clarence ‘Gatemouth Brown’, Albert Collins and Memphis Slim. The album ‘Hooker ‘n’ Heat’ was probably the best.
Alan Wilson tragically died from a barbiturate overdose in 1970. It was probably suicide. He’d attempted that before. Bob Hite died of a heart attack in 1980. The band is still going though.
They were a great American Blues-boogie band.
Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band
I’ve see most of the world’s greatest bands from Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones to Stiff Little Fingers and Ian Dury & the Blockheads but right up there with Jimi for excitement and brilliance is Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.
Don Van Vliet came out of the desert with his acid drenched blues poetry in 1967. I saw them play at Middle Earth and it blew me away. I’d never heard anything like it. The beat was incredible, complex and heavy. The guitars weaved in and out of each other, swapping riffs, spiky and jagged and that voice growled and boomed over the top of it all with such range and intensity. Then we get to the lyrics. You can talk about poetry but there is nobody who plays with words and sounds like Don Van Vliet. He makes the sounds jump with alliterating cool.
At first hearing the sound is so different to anything you’ve ever heard that it appears discordant. That soon passes when you get into it. The power drives you forward and what appears at first to be clashing guitars rapidly clarifies into complex mesmerising brilliance. There is nothing subtle of simple about it and that is what makes it so interesting. I never grow tired of listening to the music or lyrics because the complexity yields more and more pleasure and insight. This is the classical music of Rock. This is when it all came of age. There is an emotional and intellectual depth to it.
I think one of the problems people sometimes have with Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band is that it is so opaque at first that it is difficult to find a way in. I was fortunate because that first album was less complex and so more accessible and I also got to see them perform live at the very beginning. When you experience the band in a live situation in a small club you cannot help getting sucked into their spell. It is so pulsatingly powerful that it overwhelms you. It is loud, aggressive, raw and yet sophisticated at the same time.
I’d bombarded all my kids with my music and particularly Beefheart. They hated it. Then I persuaded my youngest to go to a Magic Band concert and he was as blown away as me. He came out saying that it was the best thing he’d ever heard. It is. It was as exciting as Hendrix!
One of my best concerts ever was seeing Beefheart at the Rainbow around 1973 with Zoot Horn Rollo, Rockette Morton, Drumbo and Alex St Clare. The band was steamin’ at the peak of their form. Nobody else could get near them. They were the most proficient and original band in the world.
There were lots of stories surrounding Don Van Vliet and the band. It’s all part of the mythology. He supposedly took on a bunch of people who couldn’t play instruments and taught them from scratch. That wasn’t true. He didn’t teach them to play but he certainly taught them to play differently to anyone else. He could neither read nor play music and hummed and sang his stuff so that Drumbo (John French) could interpret it, write it down and teach it to the band. That is as maybe. You might think that John French was the force behind it all – and there’s no denying the man played a major part – if it wasn’t for the fact that (with the exception of the mediocre Tragic Band of 1974) it was the Captain who took on a series of musicians and got them all to perform in the same extraordinary manner. Don was a genius on many fronts. I even love his saxophone playing which wails and screeches perfectly with the music. He might be an untutored musician but he had an ear for perfection.
While the band did not achieve the commercial recognition it should have done it did gain a huge reputation and has had an influence well beyond their financial success. Many great artists cite Don as a major influence.
Don became ill and stopped producing music in 1981. That was a tragedy. But he left us with a string of outstanding albums, incredible poetry and stupendous sounds. He went on to produce equally impressive art. Fortunately for us John French went and put the Magic Band together with Rockette Morton, Denny Walley and Eric Klerks and it is brilliant. It keeps the music alive.
Chris Barber
Chris Barber is the unsung Grandfather of British Blues and Rock. He is still regarded as a Trad Jazz performer, and did stay true to that style of music throughout, but he was so much more important than that. Single-handedly he did three incredible things that transformed the music scene in Britain.
Firstly he encouraged and facilitated the introduction of a scaled-down unit in his act that focussed on simple versions of American Folk-Blues. The sub-group was led by Lonnie Donnegan and they went from having a short set in the interval at the middle of Chris Barber’s act to becoming an over-night sensation and starting the whole Skiffle Boom of the fifties. The Beatles and every other Beat group in the country started off in a band because of that. Just think if Chris had not given them a place in the performance and had not gone on to record them in one of his sessions all that might not have happened. Without ‘Rock Island Line’ there might not have been any Beatles.
Secondly he provided a platform for Black American Blues artists to visit, play and record. By doing that he exposed future British musicians to the real thing and got a sizeable group of the British public interested in Blues so that the British bands had an audience when they got going. The Blues guys were bemused by the enthusiastic responses they got from White British audiences. They did not receive that reception in their native America.
Thirdly he brought Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies back together to work on a Blues album he was recording in 1961. Out of that came Blues Incorporated, the first, seminal R&B band in Britain.
I reckon those three things are sufficient to give him legendary status in anybody’s book. In my eyes he was responsible for the Beatles, Stones and the whole British Rock Scene. Without Chris Barber we’d still be on a par musically with Sweden and I can’t stand Abba.
Christy Moore
Christy was a founding member of Planxty but it was a solo artist that he shone most. He was a hard drinking, hard living man who spoke his mind on everything. He supported the Irish Republican cause and produced such outspoken songs such as ‘Minds Locked Shut ‘, and ‘On the Blanket’ that he got himself raided by the police and even shaken down at the border by the anti-terrorist squad.
Not that Christy restricted himself to the Irish troubles; he roved far and wide where-ever he saw injustice. He turned his attention to South America with songs like ‘Allende’, ‘El Salvador’ and ‘The Disappeared’. He spoke out against the inhuman brutality handed out to Steve Biko whose murder by the apartheid government of South Africa shocked the world.
Christy also took up the cause of the old religion where the brutality of Christian religious fanatics culminated in an estimated eight million ‘witches’ being horrendously murdered; many callously burnt to death. His song ‘Burning Times’ is chilling. It also was used to reaffirm a respect for nature and highlight the pollution, destruction and war we are inflicting on the world through our violence and greed.
His hard drinking life has taken its toll on his health but if you want to hear the music of an uncompromising man then Christy Moore is the one.
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